Category Archives: Design

On making

Want to make art but don’t know where to start? Check out Good Life Project’s interview with Lisa Congdon about her career as an illustrator, artist, and author. In telling the story about how she became an artist, Lisa touches on the importance of being open and not letting low moments stifle creativity:

I don’t want to be blocked, I want to be open. And part of that is being in a place where you just let yourself be whatever you are that day. […] Being in a place where you’re feeling good about your work and confident about your ability to execute your next idea is important, especially if you’re in the business of making art for a living. We need to draw from all these different parts of ourselves to make what we make every day.

The interview is 45 minutes long, but it’s definitely worth watching (or listening to — GLP offers an mp3 as well).

To check out some of Lisa’s work, I recommend starting with her most recently completed Daily Project, 365 Days of Lettering, which is being published in a collection in 2014. Also, keep an eye out for this year’s project, The Reconstructionists. It’s a collaboration with Maria Popov of Brain Pickings that combines illustrated portraits of trailblazing women with hand-lettered quotes and micro-essays.

The necessity of risk

The Great Discontent recently interviewed design great Debbie Millman, who shared her experiences from 30 years in the business. Here is one passage that particularly resonated with me:

I don’t think you can achieve anything remarkable without some risk. Risk is actually a rather tricky word because humans aren’t wired to tolerate it very much. The reptilian part of our brains wants to keep us safe. Anytime you try something that doesn’t have any certainty associated with it, you’re risking something, but what other way is there to live?

The first ten years of my career were very much organized around avoiding failure, but my inadequacies were completely self-constructed. Nobody told me that I couldn’t do something; nobody told me that I couldn’t succeed; I had convinced myself and lived in that self-imposed reality. I think a lot of people do this. They self-sabotage and create all sorts of reasons for not doing things under the misguided assumption that, at some point, they might feel better about themselves and that will finally allow them to take that risk. I don’t think that ever happens. You have to push through it and do it as if you have no other choice—because you don’t. You just don’t.

Debbie talks a lot in the interview about dealing with rejection, fear, and failure — things we all have to deal with, but don’t like to talk about. And yet in sharing her own moments of self-doubt, Debbie shows that great things come from taking risks — a valuable lesson for creatives at all stages of their career.

For more on the necessity of risk in creative work, check out iA’s Story of a Beautiful Failure and Seth Godin’s Risk, fear, and worry.

Things I wish I’d understood when I was in design school

School is a bubble, a safe haven from the real world. Cultivate curiosity. Stay up all night X-actoing. Try to understand that right now you don’t really have to worry about dental bills, insurance, rush deadlines, press checks, expense reports, and pitches. Retirement benefits are important (unless you want to work until the age of 80), and compound interest is worth learning about. One day you’ll be responsible for all that, and you won’t ever be able to find the time for anything.

Write down your goals, draw a map of things you’d like to do. Once the seasonal structure of school is gone, life can start to feel like a never-ending free fall or a stagnant pool of sameness if you don’t draft your own direction. You will learn more at your first real job than you did in school.

A job is a job, so don’t take it too personally. Work can sometimes bog you down and make you forget that you’re alive. You can make your life anything you want it to be, but you’ll have to be the one to take the actions to get you there. This may seem obvious and sound easy; it is not.

If you’ve never had a crappy job, get one, at least for a little while. Later in your career, when you’re a manager, you need to remember what it felt like to make minimum wage and do menial work.

Learn how to almost always say yes, even when your initial reaction may be no. Use social media strategically. Create on a regular basis, not just for your job, but for yourself. Then put your work out there for everyone to see. Be flexible. Details matter. Use grids most of the time and kern thoughtfully. Read. Look. See. Remove the price sticker from your portfolio case before going to your first job interview.

Seek and foster relationships with mentors you respect. Jump into chaos, fix the problems later. Sit beneath a very old tree and look up. Know design history. Designing non-functional typography á la David Carson won’t work for most paying clients. Hoefler & Frere-Jones is not a fancy French winery. Know your type foundries and understand that at some point you will have to pay money for a font.

Have strong opinions. Share them, but don’t push them. There are no absolutes.

Travel, near and far. Embrace empathy; it is the key to all successful relationships. Purposely leave your comfort zone; familiarity and habit can make you stagnant. Accumulate stories. Understand that as a problem solver, you’re obligated to explore and be open to all experiences. This is how you will make new connections and arrive at surprising solutions. This is also how you’ll come to feel super alive.

We’re all in this crazy world together, and don’t ever become so selfish that you forget it. The government isn’t always right, and corporations are not people, no matter what legislation says. Some misguided people will try to pay you a lot of money to design something that is unethical. Go to a quiet place and really think about if it’s worth it. Use your problem solving and visual communication skills for good; give back to the world that helped you get to where you are today. As a designer especially, you have an obligation to a greater good; don’t leave a legacy that ruins the future of others.

There is so much more you don’t know. Realize it, and let that knowledge humble you and inspire you to keep seeking. Don’t waste your time always searching for advice from other people. If you take time to listen to the quiet of your heart, you will come to understand that you already know the answer.

A lot of other people have advice to give. Here are some of my favorites:

David Foster Wallace – Kenyan commencement speech

Stefan Sagmeister – Things I have learned in my life so far

Frank Chimero – The Particle

Ira Glass – on being an artist

First Things First Manifesto 2000 – on ethics and the responsibility of being a designer

About the Author

Jessica Yurasek is a Creative Strategist at Innovation Protocol, a strategic brand consulting firm. She also works with socially conscious non-profits such as The Tiziano Project and Counterspill.org to promote truth through storytelling using design along with new media platforms. Find her on Twitter @missjessrose.

World Usability Day 2011

Whether designing a website, a document, or an application, professional writers have to think about who will use the final product and how they will use it. Is the website easy to navigate? Is an instruction manual readable? Is the interface intuitive? Usability is a key part of the design process, and it is honored each year during World Usability Day.

World Usability Day (WUD) was started in 2005 to ensure that services and products important to life are easy to access and simple to use. This year’s event takes place on November 10 and the theme is Education: Designing for Social Change. Events will focus on how Design Education will help develop products and services that will impact social change.

Programs will examine all products and services used for teaching how usable design impacts the world, whether it’s close at hand (organizations), surrounding us (particular cultures/communities) or from a global view. . . how does something designed in China, Scotland, India or the United States, for example, have impact on other nations around the world? WUD will explore and celebrate Design Education – designing with an intentional outcome of sparking change in how people behave, communicate, and do things in the world; and examining the concept of cultures and how culture impacts usability.

Last year, more than 40,000 people in 44 countries participated in World Usability Day. Here are some ways you can get involved this year:

How do you make things easier through usability and user-centered design?

In the Workplace: Spring 2011 Edition Round-Up

We recently showcased the talent of professional writers, editors, and designers in the Spring 2011 edition of our In the Workplace series. Today we’ll take a look back at their answers to the question:

Do you have any tips to share with other professional writers, editors, and designers?

“Never, ever, ever take a job for the money. Just when I think I’ve learned this lesson, I fall back in the hole and end up hating myself, the publication, the world. Only pick the jobs and assignments that are going to make you proud.” — Alissa Walker, Freelance writer

“I’m sure you’ve heard this one before — write regularly. Or if you design, design regularly. It’s the only way to keep your skills sharp and your audience engaged. Also, expose yourself to a lot of newness. New news, new people, new places, new ideas. It spurs creativity and gives you interesting content and perspective. Newness can also mean variety. I’ve noticed that some of the best writers and designers I’ve met have built up experience in many sizes, formats, and mediums.” — Tim Gasper, Keepstream co-founder / The Appconomy contributor

“Be a student of your industry. Read/look at as much work from others in your industry as you can to see how the pros are doing it. Start some kind of “inspiration spot” where you save photos or links or samples of things that inspire you so you can reference them later. But probably the most important thing is to just get out there and create something. Write a blog, take photos, redesign ads or publications you like, just practice your craft and set it free for others to see. You’ll learn the most when you have to stand behind content you’re creating.” — Becky Johns, Account Executive, Agency Communications at Cramer-Krasselt / Freelance Photographer

“Be true to yourself, your skills, and your internal motivations. Be confident in yourself in order to take steps to be doing exactly what you want to be doing. If it were easy, everyone would be doing fine art or publishing a magazine. Having faith in yourself, finding the benefit in what you’re doing, and staying optimistic are the most important things.” — Chad Kouri, Maker and Doer

Thank you to all our featured professionals who gave us a glimpse into the work they do, from how they create and communicate in their job to how they define professional writing. For more inspiration, be sure to check out all our interviews with young professionals.

In the Workplace with Chad Kouri

Name: Chad Kouri
Title: Maker and Doer
Website/Blog: www.longliveanalog.com
Location: Chicago, IL


Photo by Andy Schwegler of Letterform

Tell us about your educational/professional background.
I came to Chicago for school in 2003 to study graphic design. Before I moved here to study, I knew I didn’t have enough money to finish a four-year program, so I took all the design classes I could at Columbia and then jumped out and got an internship, which turned into a job at a marketing firm. I was there 4-5 years on and off and progressed my way up to a Junior Art Director for a very small company. Overall, my experience was that I really liked the people I was working with and the family atmosphere, but the work I was doing wasn’t very rewarding. So I started pursuing some of the things I was doing in my free time like custom typography and collage work to see if that was something I could pursue that would pay the bills and not just occupy the space in between doing the work I paid my bills with.

That was about three years ago. Another thing that motivated me to make a change was the inception of The Post Family a year previous to that. The Post Family is a group of seven creative, like-minded people, mostly from design backgrounds, that wanted to kind of get away from being on our computers for 14-16 hours a day and have a studio space where we can get together and come up with concepts and ideas to fuel our creativity on our “passion projects”, things we do in our own pursuit of general happiness. We had just gotten a space and everyone was pushing hard in our networks to make people aware of what we were doing. There’s a pretty large community of support around the idea of pursuing these kinds of goals—making things because you want to and expressing yourself through creativity in place where it’s not being forced upon you. It was fairly easy for me to really kick it into high gear and utilize some of the network I had developed over the past couple of years and jump out of the job. For a year I basically did a week of work a month at a design company to pay the bills, and the rest of the time was spent on screen printing, doing collage work, and donating time and working with Proximity Magazine, which is a very impressive, thorough quarterly contemporary art magazine in the city here.

That went on for a little while and then Edelman PR contacted me and said they really liked what I was doing within the design and art community, my illustration work, and my mindset on creativity. They said they would like for me to work for them, but they didn’t really know what I would be doing. That was about a year ago. It took us a little time to figure out exactly what the position would entail, but now I’m their Artist in Residence.

Tell us about your current job.
I work mostly from home, typically 20-30 hours a week for Edelman on everything from new business pitches to helping curate artwork throughout the office. They bring me in for general creation of ideas and to figure out how to not only have people feel like they’re in a creative atmosphere within the workplace, but also to reinvigorate some of their business pitches with different, more interactive ways of presenting to potential clients rather than just projecting a screen on a wall.

With The Post Family guys, our space has evolved to a gallery and studio space. I help coordinate events and do general promotion for the group. I also do studio tours of different artists’ space that I photograph and interview for the website just to add another layer of transparency to what everyone’s doing. That’s what we’re all about, and I think it’s a midwest/Chicago mentality of “all for one”. Everyone is willing to share skills and knowledge for the greater good of the community. I’ve been participating a lot in the art happenings around here as well. I’m trying to focus a lot more on developing a larger body of fine art work so I can start showing more often with different people. I’m finding out that generally I try to make things as difficult as possible for myself and see if I can get out of it. Fine art is the next wall to climb, which I’ve been enjoying.

What does a typical day look like for you?
I try to have a “No meetings before 10:30″ rule. Sometimes that doesn’t work, but I know I’m much better in the later part of the morning because I typically work until 1 or 2am when I can get the most work accomplished. So I usually get up around 10—hopefully not to an alarm—and then go to my home studio to organize things. I usually spend most of the morning doing correspondence—keeping up with people, making sure email is answered. The second half of the day is more focused on either commissioned work as an individual illustrator or work for Edelman. That’s about 60% of the day, and the other 40% is general exploring and ideation time. I typically have a notebook open all day as I’m thinking about different ideas and concepts. If I have something that comes to mind, I try to facilitate the time to at least get it down so I can come back to it. I also try to leave little bits of free time throughout the day to just let my mind wander and see what happens. I tend to doodle a lot too, though I’m finding out more and more that doodling is working.

Overall, it’s more of an organic work schedule where if I’m having a hard time working on something, I step away from it for a while and don’t try to pound it out. You’re not always going to have that opportunity, but keeping it a bit looser has been really beneficial for my process. That seems to help ideas happen a little bit quicker rather than sweating it out for a week.

What kinds of documents do you produce?
At Edelman I’ve done everything from redesigning new business pitches (PowerPoint templates) to interoffice communication stuff that is a little bit more fun and loose, such as illustrations for the employee recognition boards. I also do some concepting for problem-solving initiatives. If we have a big problem that comes in from a client, I figure out different scenarios so people can get together and brainstorm in a quick fashion. There’s everything from highly conceptual ideas to very bare bones at Edelman.

As for myself, most of what I’m creating right now is a lot of collage work, a lot of fine art work. I’m developing concepts and ideas into a body of work. I also do typography work for individuals, lately for music people who are looking for custom lettering for their website or promotions. But mostly I’m just trying to create collaboratively and set up scenarios to meet with other people and have free-form experiment in creating stuff. I’m doing a little traveling this summer to do video work with some friends in LA, and hopefully I’ll be in New York at the end of September with some other friends doing the same thing. So not so much individual documents, but more of a free-form body of work.

What communication skills are needed for your job?
I really enjoy the problem solving at Edelman. You not only have to figure out a solution to a problem, but you also have to figure out how to communicate that solution to an array of different people who have different ways of communicating. It makes for an interesting back and forth, and it takes a lot more work to push through a big idea. You have to make sure that not only is the idea good, but that you are willing to put forth the time to fight for it to come to fruition. That’s been really interesting for me, to develop my communication skills with talking and selling ideas to different people. It’s also helped in the gallery sense because if I have some kind of situation, I’m more on my toes about figuring out how to solve that problem and communicating with that person to make them feel more comfortable.

How did you prepare for your job?
Everything about me, and The Post Family as well, is that we try to be organic in our processes: let things live, let things breathe, and see what happens. Being able to roll with the punches and not really having a specific plan means you can’t really fail. There aren’t any personal expectations to live up to and you have broader ideas of what’s best. Also, being an optimist—what’s the worst thing that can happen? Even if a job goes terribly, there’s absolutely something there and probably more to learn from than something that went perfectly well. So I’m always optimistic that things will turn around.

List three of your favorite professional resources/references/tools and tell us why they’re your favorite.
Google Image Search is pretty ridiculously awesome. I probably use it every single day on every project I do, just to get some visual stimulation. I can put in one word and there will be so many different images that may not even relate to that word that draw my attention to different places. I don’t typically use those images in what I’m creating, so for my collages and other work, the Library of Congress has a great digital archive that is mostly public domain or Creative Commons. Flickr Groups for vintage ads have also proven to be full of high-res old imagery that is public domain now.

My email—my email is chaos. I have four different email addresses for different jobs that I do and it’s great to be able to work on everything at once. Everyone can get a hold of me and I can be plugged in from anywhere, so that’s been super beneficial. Early on, email was something I was utilizing. I would go out to Borders and look in the credits of magazines for the email addresses of art directors and publishers and then just cold email. I was able to develop this really rough community of people whose work I really enjoyed, and maybe there was a possibility they would like mine. It’s proven to be a really good tool. I emailed a woman that I met in San Francisco last July at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. I met her there—she was the buyer for the gift shop—I introduced myself, wrote her an email when i got home from the business card she gave me, and told her it was nice to meet her, here is some of the work I do, hope to be in touch. She emailed me and The Post Family today about a potential project that we could do together.

When you send that email, just because someone doesn’t get back with you right away doesn’t mean they’re not paying attention to you. Keep in touch really does mean keep in touch. I have people I emailed four or five years ago who are just now reaching out to me to push forward on a project. You just never know what kind of contacts you can make with a simple thing like email.

How do you stay up to date in your field?
I used to do a lot of blog reading but ever since I started writing a blog, it’s worked its way out of my routine. But I do go through link sets from the blogs that I used to read or other artists that I know, who typically have a list of friends. I’ve developed ideas just through those links from random artists.

But in general, the easiest way to stay up to date is through the community. Just talk to people about what they’re doing, what they’ve seen. I’m lucky enough to have friends and a group of people around me who are into the same things and this is what we do, we nerd out and talk. I hold a lot of confidence in knowing what’s hip through the people I know and what they’re looking at.

How would you define professional writing?
When I think of professional writing, I really think of writing as an art form. If you’re able to explain your ideas or your concepts in a very concise way on paper, the possibilities are endless because you’re able to not only explain it in a way that is easy for people to understand, but then people can explain it easily to others. It’s much easier to spread an idea and a concept.

Everyone thinks, at some point, that they’re a writer or a designer or a photographer, but there’s a craft and a knowledge that you need in order to do this. I would say one of the most important pieces to any concept is to have professionally written content that can spread. A picture might say a million words, but if you can spread a story and a narrative to other people, an actual grounding and concept, that’s much more powerful.

Do you have any tips to share with other professional writers/editors/designers?
Be true to yourself, your skills, and your internal motivations. Be confident in yourself in order to take steps to be doing exactly what you want to be doing. If it were easy, everyone would be doing fine art or publishing a magazine. Having faith in yourself, finding the benefit in what you’re doing, and staying optimistic are the most important things.

Also, don’t get stagnant. Even if you’re enjoying something so much, you need to keep new ideas coming in. Always be thinking of the next step—it doesn’t always have to be the five-year step, it can be the tomorrow step. Always keep that momentum and be truthful with yourself. In general, try to have a good time while you’re doing it. It has made a world of difference for me in the past couple years.

Behance ProSite now available

Looking for an easy way to get your portfolio online? Behance, the world’s leading platform for creative professionals, just launched ProSite.

ProSite lets you create a customized personal portfolio site that syncs with your Behance Network projects. There’s no programming required, and you have unlimited hosting and project space. Take a tour and browse samples to see if the new platform is a good fit for your online portfolio needs.

In the Workplace, Spring 2011 Edition

Spring has finally arrived, and to celebrate, beyondwords will be showcasing the talent of professional writers, editors, and designers in the next edition of our “In the Workplace” series.

Our featured professionals will give us a glimpse into the work they do, from how they create and communicate in their job to how they define professional writing.

The Spring series will kick off tomorrow, April 27. Until then, get inspired by browsing our past features of young professionals.