Been Wandering

I’ve spent the last four months wandering…

After a brief hiatus, I’m back. The lapse in posting has not been for lack of work to share but rather for lack of time. I’ve been working furiously for the past few months and it’s time to pull back the curtain a bit and share.

All Was Well…

Several months ago I decided to make a pretty drastic career change. I had spent my career to that point working in agencies — I’d even done a stint in-house at a large corporation.

A short list of some things I was completely sure of just a year ago:

Design is a universal skill, and developing my skills as a high level thinker would translate to any challenge.
For that reason, I would not concern myself too much with craft, but focus on concept.
Real value comes from this conceptual thinking. The further the creative work was from the execution, the greater the value. Look at firms like IDEO who do creative work that is technically and conceptually beyond the contemporary user. These projects typically end in “insights” and prototypes, but hardly ever yield a tangible result. (I have an article queued up on this idea that I’ll post later — let’s just say the nature of value creation is fundamentally changing.)
My future would be a career of client-services working within agencies until I was ready to start an agency of my own.

Suddenly Everything Changed…

Then opportunities began to present themselves. I was following the story of some people I greatly admired, some of them in-house designers, some working in or running agencies. I watched several of them as they made the transition from art direction or branding design to founders and product designers. I recognized that this field might scratch an itch I had had for a long time. And with some mentoring and encouragement I decided to make a change. A short list of what I learned over the following months:

I realized that in this world of web product designers, creatives are creators. High-level thinking is only valuable if it can be translated into something understandable by users and then executed on.
For that reason, I needed to up my craft game. Things I had ignored before — granular understanding of UI design, at least some level of proficiency with code, mastery of a broader range of tools, efficient and collaborative process — were now huge barriers to my ability to contribute anything of real value.
You are only as good as what you have made. I had learned tons working on conceptual prototype projects, and it was nice to have a wide open creative space to work in on behalf of a forward thinking client. But this new community values what you were putting out into the world. The measure of success when your work was at the mercy of very real users was a much more real and exacting standard, and street cred wasn’t given out merely for beautiful work.
My future in the creative field couldn’t be an extrapolation of the agency work I had been doing for the past few years. If I wasn’t fully satisfied then, I would never be.

A career change was in order. I put a lot of time in this summer soaking in all I could about this industry. There was plenty of thoughtful work and writing going on — a good place to start is the Brooklyn Beta crowd. I found myself closely following smart designers and entrepreneurs who were unknowingly contributing to what would become my own personal canon as I dug through backlogs of blog posts and flooded my Instapaper with their experiences and advice. Guys like Ben Pieratt, Camron Koczon, Wilson Miner, Craig Mod, Jon Troutman, Trent Walton, Liz Danzico, Naz Hamid, Mike Karnjanaprakorn, Daniel Howells, Khoi Vinh, Jessica Hische, Eli Rousso, Allan Yu, the Hyperakt Crew, Chris Dixon, Andy McMillan (The Manual), David Cole, Rob Giampietro, Mike Matas, Charles Adler, Simon Collison, Josh Brewer (52 Weeks of UX), Frank Chimero, Russ Maschmeyer, the List Apart Crew, Dan Cederholm, Jack Cheng, and tons of others that aren’t immediately coming to mind this late at night. (All of which are invited to my birthday party.)

There is much more to be said about this experience, but I’ll sum it all up by saying that it has been unquestionably rewarding. In August (amid a long and sometimes painful search for my next project) I wrote an ~~anonymous~~ article about why I want to work at a start up. Things had been going well in my agency career; I was on a promising trajectory. But I knew it wasn’t for me. With a combination of tireless hustle and some pure serendipity, I found the right project to invest my talents in.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

In October of last year, I joined Jeremy Fisher to build Wander, which will be a wonderfully beautiful and human way to experience and explore the world around you (and far beyond). (Below is a screenshot of the Leaderboard, a nice little diversion we created to to keep you busy while you anxiously await Wander’s launch.)

In the last few months, I’ve had to learn (almost) from scratch a number of new skills. I’ve built a brand and a product from the ground up with a small and amazing team; I’ve wire-framed a massive site, developed features and an experience that makes this product a very immerse and different experiencve from what is out there; I’ve designed the UI and UX for a deep web product, as well as the companion iOS app; I’ve jumped wholeheartedly into learning front end development and even got to write a tiny bit of code for the product itself. (Although it was graciously rewritten by our amazing front-end dev.)

I’ve struggled to hold back details of what I have been doing, but the payoff for the product and the users will all be worth the effort. I still can’t say much more than that about what Wander will be, but know that it is coming soon and it will be worth watching and waiting for. I’ve poured myself into this over these few months and we have an amazing road map that I will happily continue to pour myself into as we launch and build a community of Wanderers.

You can sign up now and reserve your user name. And follow our progress on Twitter or Facebook to watch this thing unfold.

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Amazing forest photo by William Hereford.