Ash Write

To Silicon Valley

Fri, 18 May 2012 04:03:15 -0400

Silicon Valley doesn’t know what to do with people like us. They call us graphic designers, visual designers, marketing designers—as if we are stylists who trim the windows and top the cakes.

No. We are makers, pixel poets, paper-molesting war mongers, stitching the standards of international revolutions. We play in a universe where everyone is a genius, everyone is a hacker, everyone has the tools to take dominion over their own fate. We prime the masses for the better world ahead.

The ink, shapes, type, color and copy—it’s all a vessel for crackling ideas and so are we. We are not deceivers. We are not charlatans who sell cardboard cutouts. Our gift is dangerous if abused and so we are serious in our work. We help Peter Parkers ache to become superheroes. And let me tell you, we all have a Peter Parker growling within us.

So, sound the bugles. Build the ramparts of a product and start the whispers, the low hum of a beautiful cause. We will paint it on the walls. We will tell the story. And with a strong story, a narrative to perk their senses, they will start to believe. You will start to believe. We can all occupy the same town square, the same inch of grass. It might be for an instant, but it will change us all. They, with excitement on your app’s load screen and you, benevolent and economical with a blueprint in your hand.

Call us communication designers. Call us to the fight with you.

This time without my address… (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:54:59 -0400

This time without my address… (Taken with instagram)

Sunday. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:31:38 -0400

Sunday. (Taken with instagram)

24/F/SF

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:41:48 -0400

I’m twenty-four. I live in a city. I buy real furniture. I can keep plants and animals alive. I vacuum. I scrub the toilet. I frame my artwork.

I travel. I don’t worry about all the places I’ll never see.

Poverty concerns me. I don’t know what to do about it. I may understand the basics of politics. I doubt I really do. I vote anyway.

I use words like frenemy. I apologize for being late. I go out to brunch. I eat dinner at 10pm. I dance all night—occasionally. On weekends I sleep til 11. I go to concerts. I take disco naps. I check myself out in window reflections. I wear skyscraper tall high heels. I laugh loudly. I work out. I get manicures. I try to watch what I eat. I go back for seconds. I can host a dinner party.

My parents are mortal. I worry about their health. I get along with my siblings. I don’t call as often as I should.

I’ve fallen in love. I’ve fallen out of love. My older friends are tying the knot and having babies. The thought of a child makes me nauseous. The thought of love does not.

I cry for silly reasons. I have a streak of arrogance. I still believe in justice and meritocracy. I go on rants with other arrogant young people. They are my best friends. I make things with them. I want to change the world. I believe someday I will.

I’d rather learn from the internet than from a person. I try to do it myself before I ask for help. I pull out my phone to settle debates and confirm wild stories. I digitally catalog my life. I photograph everything. I overshare. I live by metrics.

I learn fast. I can’t sit still. I’m not concerned with balance. I want to work. I’ll stay up all night. I can do anything. I can’t do everything. I understand my limits. I’m realizing my potential.

I’m almost twenty-five. I’m ready.

We’re here to work (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:07:00 -0400

We’re here to work (Taken with instagram)

Run from your problems

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:28:23 -0500

All good things come to an end. Or, they would if we ever stopped evolving.

There are two kinds of reinvention. A company that’s settled into a comfortable and wan pattern will shake up its brand to fly under a steadier standard. Take the Current TV redesign, which does this quite literally:

(image from Brand New)

The idea of an army-sized movement, of the immutable power of the tide, of a billowing flag in the dark—that’s got a lot more heft than techy crowds wielding pixels. And, it’s what Current has always been about.

There’s a different genius in the second kind of reinvention, the reinvention of conviction.

Sunglasses are built to shield us. They block out the sun, they anonymize movie stars to the flash of the paparazzi. I have always loved Ray-ban for its complete opposition of this idea. Let the other sunglasses keep out the world. Never Hide in Ray-bans.

Jeans are built for hard, gritty work. But, in Levi’s, there’s work to be undone. In the nostalgia for our forefathers, we don’t find factory drudgery. We find the love of careful craft and the freedom of razing the past to start anew.

When your brand’s heart runs dry, find a new north. Run in the opposite direction. Free yourself from the metropolis we’ve built and head for the frontier. Breathe the country air. At the very least you will come home changed.

There's Process and there's process

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:57:39 -0500

Let’s shoo the clients, bosses and managers out of the room for a second and talk about process.

Process is the bugle call of our design generation. It propagated with the IDEOs, frogs, Zurbs and Smarts of our industry and infiltrated every company. Finally, the heady coven of creation, distilled into phases and checkpoints—this was something the most empirical CEO’s could understand and salespeople could sell.

That’s wonderful. My parents don’t call me every night worrying I’m dumpster diving, and human beings have access to better designed objects as a whole.

Backstage, though, I pray to the design gods that we ourselves aren’t drinking this simplistic koolaid. Problem-solving and brainstorms are vital, but simply following the process we outline for non-designers would yield (and has yielded) unremarkable work.

Ouch! But, really, the ‘design process’ is bland, mechanical and easy. A problem comes in. You arrive at solutions, pick the winner and push that baby out into the world. It isn’t the interesting part of design at all. What really makes a brilliant designer is the white space between the outlined gospel. What creates the visual metaphors, the right questions to ask or the right shade of pink? That designer’s particular experience, whether it be school, work or play. There are hidden wells inside of us that don’t surface in explicit ways.

For example:

Even if you’ve known me for years, you might not know I watched nature documentaries every day for five or six years. Mental space for reminders and algorithms is filled up instead by seemingly useless animal facts. Besides helping me remember the names of conference rooms at Twitter, this experience gave me respect for systems and symbiosis, a sense of scale, and an eye for movement and detail, among other things. I didn’t know it then, but this antisocial TV habit was inherent to my personal design development, and vital to my career.

We create in the context of ourselves, and that’s not something easily quantified. I could never tell a client, here’s a charge for the hour I spent watching that Discovery documentary about salmon migration fifteen years ago. I couldn’t have found this solution without it. There’s no proof and no deliverables for that time. To the rest of the world, that’s nerve-wracking, but to us, it should be comfort that the best method of interesting work is to seek out experiences and learn how to let them change you.

Sell, and sell well. But never forget—each day is part of your process, and that you’re preparing for a project that may be years in your future.

My movie tastes.

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 03:34:58 -0400

My movie tastes.

Recent trip to Ocracoke, NC, armed with 6yr expired slide film,...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:29:00 -0400

Recent trip to Ocracoke, NC, armed with 6yr expired slide film, b/w with too high of an iso and a Nikon EM.

You should go to school

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:47:00 -0400

Stewart and I chatted about design education recently. Plenty of people succeed without a degree, but plenty of people don’t.

You should go to school, but you should go to a good school. However, there are definitely things you don’t learn until you’re out hustling with the best of ‘em.

Some things I learned in school:
(or, things that I picked up in the pressure cooker of CMU):

It’s possible to live on 3 hours of sleep for up to a week and not lose all functionality (but you will become socially inept).

You can cook a feast for under $10.

Kill your darlings and your real darlings will shine.

If people look at your work and have nothing to say, it means it’s unremarkable. Start over.

The pain of the push is forgotten after the glory.

Failure is forgiven.

People have the power to fulfill your karma.

Look at your process work. It will make you want to keep going.

Things take time.

Good design looks inversely effortless to the toil put into it.

Contrast is king.

Don’t put lipstick on pigs.

There’s a metaphor for everything.

Be brave.

How to kern.

How to pair typefaces.

Sometimes the only way to know is to try it.

Authorities are sometimes wrong.

The computer’s a tool, not a magic box. Don’t rely on it.

Constraints are good.

Don’t date people in your studio.

Some things I learned after school:
(or, things education did not help me with)

Never use pure black (#000) as body text in digital media.

Talent matters, but less than network at first.

Fake it and there’s a good chance you’ll make it.

Success is slow.

401ks, stocks, RSUs, PPO, HSA.

How to work with engineers.

How to work with clients.

Try not to put yourself in a position where you have to please too many people.

Chain of people to please: User > You > Art Director > Client

Things take a long time.

It’s normal to take a few hours a day for your own enjoyment.

It’s hard to do good work when you’re worrying about money.

People will hate you for being brave.

People will love you for being brave.

Assume everyone around you is doing the best they can and you’ll be happier.

In-house designers aren’t designers who gave up—they’re designers who believe in a cause.

Your friends are still your best asset, even professionally.

Photoshop layer effects: drop shadow: set to 90 degrees.

Have other interests besides design.

Famous designers are accessible.

Your Friends Aren’t Dead Parrots

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:28:00 -0400

Smithsonian NMNH bird collection, photo by Chip Clark

There’s a beautiful yet unpalatable quality to this photo. The human mind craves vast and organized displays, yet the idea of dead animals sorted into boxes unsettles the heart.

For scientific categorization, a room like this is perfect—I want to see a macaw, and I want to see it right now. In fact, show me ten macaws, show me any bird I want to see. However, the cold sort of birds by species isn’t a great way to sort everything—relationships with people, for example.

Defining relationships is difficult, but not impossible: Friend, foe, family. The problem is that relationships themselves aren’t easy categorical buckets.

One facet of this issue is that relationships change over time (see Kevin’s great post on this issue). A macaw isn’t going to morph into a canary, but a friend may turn into a girlfriend.

However, the other large failure of such an organization schema: it’s not a natural compartmentalization of the people in our lives.

If there’s one human behavior social networks feed off of, it’s our obsessive need to share. We revel in each others’ success, fall with each others’ failures and get to know each other through common interests. We ultimately love Facebook, Twitter and Google+ because they help us connect with the people we want to have a relationship with.

When you have a relationship with another human, sure, you can put labels on it. My mom, sister, brother and cousin are my family. My boyfriend is my boyfriend. My professor, manager and coworker are my professional network. However, when I come to a nugget of content I want to share, I simply don’t stop to think of people in that way.

I don’t know if this is an effect of our fractured age, but we have different kinds of friends. There is that friend you ask for recipes, that friend you go to bars with, and that very special friend you’d tell if you got cancer. I’d never want my entire family to know I cheated on a test, but I might tell my sister and my roommate—just like if I discovered Trololo Man, I might want to share mostly with my cousin and a couple buddies from my old a cappella group.

We don’t generally find content expressly to cater to a group. We typically find gold in our travels and then want to share. So isn’t it artificial to lump people into categories rather than sort by the content itself?

Show me a social network that easily differentiates between “people I’d tell my address to” and “people who care I met Paula Scher”. That will be the rub.

Designers Just Make Pretty Pictures: Demeaning Critique

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 03:30:22 -0400

(As a pre-emptive disclaimer, this has nothing to do with my first two weeks at Twitter. I have an in-depth update coming up about my job and my coworkers, who are wonderful human beings. I believe with all my heart that they would never say such a bile-inducing phrase).

There are many bad terms for people we don’t like. Here are a few. Hussy. Dick. Douche.

What do all these insults have in common? In a single word, they not only tell you that the person they are referring to is a jerk, but also illuminates gender.

The glory of artful language is that if you pick the right word, you can efficiently describe a situation. Instead of, “male jerk who likes to sleep with anything with legs,” you can say, “manwhore.” When you tell a story, this effect can be powerful. Crassness and judgments aside, it replaces the slashes of verbal parrying with a Zorro-esque Z.

Let me run another word by you. Pretty.

This word makes me want to burn down the crit room. When you call something ‘beautiful,’ it’s overwhelmingly positive. There is never room to mistake ‘beautiful’ as a derisive comment. ‘Pretty,’ however, is a backhanded compliment that people feel obligated to counter. Some proof: here’s a comparison of the first four results for, “designers just make pretty pictures” and “designers just make beautiful pictures”.

None of the results for ‘beautiful’ are actually related to that statement, while all of the ‘pretty’ results are articles or comments appealing people to respect designers.

While ‘it’s pretty!’ is a synonym for ‘it’s beautiful’ to most innocent wielders, in critique it often has the efficiency of ‘manwhore.’ When someone says, ‘it’s pretty…’, they typically mean, ‘eh, it’s beautiful, but thoughtless.’

First off, let’s address the fact that snarkiness and cynicism don’t have a place in a productive critique. If our intent is to improve each other and do good work, veiling your feedback with sarcasm is harmful.

Secondly, why bring the issue of beauty into the matter at all? While beauty is subjective, one of the goals of design -is- ultimately to create beauty through evocative contrasts, gruesome or golden. No one approaches any interface saying, “I’m going to make this thing all busted and ugly,” and people don’t fault a good interface for being beautiful.

Should we really despise a work more so for being visually considered and thoughtless than for being ugly and thoughtless? Should we hate a physically beautiful person for owning a symmetrical face, or because they ask why poor people can’t keep their yards clean like the rest of us?

Perhaps the scornful ‘pretty’ is a disgust for deception. Perhaps the outward beauty leads us on, and that’s what we really hate when we say, ‘pretty’. The promise of a delightful experience, dashed by the reality of flippant thinking.

Regardless, to give specific and actionable critique, let’s be transparent. If a piece has a harmonious composition but inappropriate typefaces and colors, be specific and state both sides. It’s okay for a thoughtless design to get a couple things right. It’s still thoughtless regardless of good kerning, and would be thoughtless with bad kerning as well. Leave ‘manwhore’ and ‘douche’ for storytelling.

Thank you Typekit

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:38:59 -0400

For featuring the Metamarkets site!

Typekit Link

Treating real life lulls like dream space

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:00:19 -0400

Treating real life lulls like dream space:

I love Brian Eno’s idea of life as a whole as the creative process, that downtime is almost like sleeping and dreaming. While I commend the occasional 15 hour day, 15 hour days every day will result in insanity and bad ideas.

Didn’t even bother with a filter for this one. Fort Ross. ...

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:58:10 -0400

Didn’t even bother with a filter for this one. Fort Ross. (Taken with instagram)

Moodboard (Taken with instagram)

Mon, 23 May 2011 21:40:11 -0400

Moodboard (Taken with instagram)

Halflife by Meghan O'Rourke

Sun, 22 May 2011 17:50:00 -0400

on Amazon

One of the most beloved books in my collection. Whenever I feel like I’m losing my language, this is my first stop.

Mmmm handwritten (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 18 May 2011 20:19:11 -0400

Mmmm handwritten (Taken with instagram)

Status board in progress. Left hand pane will show projects and...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:23:43 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Status board in progress. Left hand pane will show projects and tasks, middle will show meetings and index prices, right hand shows muni/caltrain times and weather. Adding server status and who’s going to be out of the office. To be displayed on a big TV.

Excuse my shaky hands! Too much coffee…

Why people jump down your throat when you say discrimination doesn't exist

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:19:00 -0400

@Mike_FTW: Let this be a notice: you put together an all-male, all-white conference and I *WILL* go to war with you. And you will lose.

Reading Mike Monteiro’s tweet and subsequent debate made me realize I’ve become one of those people inflamed by the mere mention of racism and gender discrimination. I’m not sure I can be blamed after reading some of these responses, including such gems:

@MatthewDonnely: if there happen to be no good women speakers available then why higher a poor one over a good man? It works the same both ways

@genuinechris: and yet - they are poor negotiators. I have seen world class talent for pennies on the dollar from women.

@JohnONolan: @Mike_FTW Are you retarded? How many black swimmers do you know? How many white 100m sprint runners? How many female fighter pilots?

I believe in human beings. I think the majority of these men genuinely think they live in this bunny-rainbow world where everyone is given a fair shake and no one is judged by skin color, weight, or the ability to hold an erection.

However, being a young female interaction designer, and more freakishly, an Asian-American female interaction designer, I don’t. Let’s get it straight right off the bat that I have a really nice life, one that wouldn’t be possible even two decades ago. People are generally good to me, so this isn’t any kind of woe-is-me post. This is merely to give a curious man insight into why people get so angry when he says that he has never witnessed discrimination and that design hiring must be a strict meritocracy (ie, hiring a team of only men, because there are just more talented men than women).

I think we all can agree on the extreme acts of discrimination. Locking the car door when you see black people on the sidewalk, assuming Jews are trying to swindle you, not interviewing someone because he has a kid at home, yes?

So, here’s the bad news. There’s a whole other brand of discrimination, which is more passive and involves more than your individual choice of letting someone sit in the front of the bus. This is where the statement, “if there happen to be no good women speakers available then why higher a poor one over a good man?” comes in.

There are many great women who shape design. Jessica Hische, Debbie Millman, Kim Goodwin, etc, etc, etc. If one genuinely asked a bunch of women and some cosmic whirlwind made them all suddenly unavailable, fine. I think there are enough female designers that the gap between women and men wouldn’t be ‘poor’ and ‘good’, but maybe we are mincing words, here.

However, I’m betting that the lack of women is due to the fact that women were vastly underconsidered when coming up with a list of the very best designers. Making a conference that is supposed to be about the state of an entire industry all-male is like taking a census of a city and only marking the people who walk past your Starbucks window. It’s as if to say, those other people, they exist over there somewhere…but they’re not walking by the window so who gives?

Ok, so now I’m betting all my manfriends in the audience are pulling out their hair and saying, look at the data, Ash, there just aren’t that many women who do interaction design! It’s a numbers issue! We don’t discriminate!

Yes, my friends, it is a numbers issue. But, don’t you find it boggling that the interactive design industry, one that prides itself on helping people achieve their goals and communicates with normal human beings is dominated by white males? If we’re fighting for the user, why is the interaction design population not representative of the population at whole?

Either the honest answer of, “Ash, I could really give a rat’s ass,” or the more common, “I don’t know, most girls probably just don’t like interaction design if they’re not choosing to go into it.”

Ok, so let’s talk about why men become interactive designers. It’s a marriage between the left and right brains, it moves fast, it’s new and exciting, it’s available to many people, it can pay pretty damn well, it involves working on close teams of smart people…the list goes on.

So, what they’re saying is, because a girl lack a penis, these types of things don’t appeal to her. In which case, I’m calling shenanigans. That sounds like an awesome career. Why else are there so many amateur designers and self-taught who gravitated towards design after they found their other previous callings unsatisfying?

If the reason men went into interaction design was, it feels really good on my penis, I would understand. However, it seems like none of the great things about being an interaction designer touch upon anything gender related.

If not a lack of appeal, then the only other alternative is that women lack the natural ability to keep up with the challenges of being an interactive designer.

Uh oh. Getting into Third Reich territory up in this business.

I know. These men don’t intend to discriminate or hurt anyone, but they continue the tradition of assuming it’s the woman’s fault and the woman’s decision to languish in obscurity. And so, no one is villainizing the industry for hating women. People are villainizing it for being lazy and comfortable in a world where girls in even my young generation were told to sew trinkets and do laundry while boys play with saws and sandpaper.

Don’t hire a woman who is worse than a man strictly because she is a woman. Seek out talented women to add to your organization/conference/whatever as an active choice to try and shift this ridiculous and weird inequality. I promise that even if you seek her out and fail to find her, your initiative will punch a door into the boy’s club of interaction design by creating the prospect of a gender equal future.