Field Study

Stop Stealing My Style, Bro.

I’m guilty of quickly clicking when someone calls design theft. It’s the closest thing to soap-opera-esque drama that an industry full of type and color obsessed kern-wads will ever get to. When we see the fight, we come running like it’s a schoolyard brawl where we’re all secretly hoping for things to get really crazy.

But much of the time these brawls have little substance. If no one has ever told you this, learn it now: YOU CAN’T OWN STYLE. Your job is not to develop a signature style. Your job is to match appropriate solutions to problems. 

The decision to apply a specific style to address a specific problem is unique and ownable. Downloading free fonts from (the amazing) Lost Type Coop for a retro rebrand is a lot of fun, and you may be able to make some money in the process, but you don’t own the style. You own the decision that you made when you said “hey, this hardware store brand would look great in a post-war era retro style.” And you weren’t the first to fit those pieces of the puzzle together (and from the look of things, you won’t be the last).

The more we try to mark off a little territory, to claim a little bit of the creative process as our own, the more we limit others — especially those young ones who are newly exploring all kinds of wild territory. Encourage creation, share freely, and add enough value in your process that you don’t have to piss all over some tiny little spot in a world of possibilities just so you can claim it as your own. 

Design is slowly developing a community of open source minded folks who freely share those useful but non distinct little bits. To be comfortable passing along your files, sharing your secret layer styles, and revealing how the sausage is made takes confidence that you add value at a higher level than the execution layer of a project. Execution is technical, it can be learned, shared, and repeated. The product level decision coming into that execution are where the real value lies.

You can’t own style. Style is commodity. Own an intelligent process for making decisions and you’ll have a defensible and competitive advantage.

* I wrote this a month ago but thought it was timely in light of the Layervault thing. Layervault has been beautifully executed, but Kelly and Allan are also brilliant product guys and that is where they are creating real value. Hopefully this fight doesn’t distract them too much from continuing to create something really valuable. 

** Sadly, real design theft does happen, and community support in those cases is awesome to see: Aesthetic Apparatus, Varsity Donuts, The Fox is Black.

Sweet Textures, Bro!

I have no connection to Dribbble outside the fact that happily pay $20 a year to get much more that twenty bucks worth of value out of the experience. Dribbble is amazing. But it’s also a bit awkward. And like most awkward things, you can miss the goodness inside if you focus on the idiosyncrasies. 

First off, Dribbble is a real and very direct channel for independent designers to get work. It is delivering on a promise that professional organizations have been making for years: join up, get involved, grow your career. That value proposition is proven on Dribbble. With any other professional organization you join, that promise is dubious at best.

And this is important because (real talk here) things are looking kinda scary for designers. No one likes to talk about it. And it’s comforting to see that design budgets are growing and it’s becoming a focus for more and more companies. But supply is outpacing demand. I don’t have numbers on this. Just a bunch of friends struggling quietly, staying afloat, but worried about how long they can last, and I’ve been there many times before. Dribbble might be one channel to bootstrap an early design career. It might be a viable alternative to the agency salary-and-benefits route, especially at a time when those jobs are not as secure as they once were. 

The second point is much easier to miss. Dribbble’s pitch is that it’s a “show and tell for designers”, a place to share work and get feedback. But we all know that people are so damn nice on Dribbble that it’s hard to get anything but comments like “your graphic designs are literally blowing my mind” or “sweet texture bro”. As the world’s best feedback tool, Dribbble fails. 

But what the whole thing is really about is community. As more designers cut their agency ties and take up the cross of freelance work, Dribbble is stepping in as the place for workplace water-cooler chat. But instead of five fellow coworkers to chat with by the water-cooler, Dribbble is a freakin’ cafeteria packed with hundreds of fellow freelancers to chat with, share with, maybe even collaborate with. Dribbble isn’t just a better professional organization, it’s a better office space. If we stack it up next to the benefits a IRL office provides, it does a pretty great job. Getting design feedback is just one function of the office and it is probably the least interesting. No one develops loyalty to an office based on the groups technical feedback skills. An office is where you share news, commiserate, joke around, celebrate victories (personal and communal). 

If you’re not into it, don’t sign up, don’t pay, don’t share. But don’t underestimate this simple little service.

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For some interesting further reading check out Clayton Christensen’s idea that we hire products for a job to be done. 

We often misunderstand what job we are really hiring a product for. I don’t think Dan Cederholm intended provide this breadth of services (community, career, social, etc) when he built Dribbble, but often the winners in a space fill in service gaps in new an unexpected ways. 

Interfaces aren’t a descriptions; they’re stories.

From George Plimpton’s interview with Ernest Hemingway, 1954:

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Interviewer:

Do you make a distinction between “flat” and “round” characters?

Hemingway:

If you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know, there should be all the dimensions.

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This is why this conversation goes on, why it is worth having. The desire for more honest  (or at least more interesting) interfaces and a certain aesthetic have been lumped together and called “flat design”. I’m concerned with the deeper drive for mor pure interaction design, and there is more to it than altering your style or changing your habits in Photoshop. There is a fundamentally different process, something genuinely unique from print design. That difference goes much deeper than tools, and even defies directly translatable principles. “What’s good for print is good for digital” doesn’t hold up as a mantra of ‘flat’ design.

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Case Study: What I Want Out of Facebook

Note: This experiment is in no way affiliated with Facebook, Apple, Wes Anderson, or the Tenenbaum Family. 

Another Note: This experiment is not about user interface, or touch gestures, or mobile apps. It’s about an experience and a product. It’s about relationships to people. The interactions that I’ve visualized below are far from final. I was mostly playing with how an interface could make me feel about the people it represented.

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I’m a failure when it comes to Facebook. My friend count is below average. No one ‘likes’ my stuff. And I never quite finished filling out that section of my bio where I list all the bands I like and movies I’ve seen.

Or maybe Facebook has failed me. It’s not because the ads the serve up are irrelevant — sometimes they get close. They’ve done a great job reminding me of birthdays. And I’ve never questioned where to put squishy pictures of my cute baby. I know how to use Facebook, but I don’t. And when nearly everyone in my home country under 50 is on this thing, I have to ask what I am missing.

But there is a fundamental promise that has gone unfulfilled. It’s the promise that playing around with this awkwardly named website will make your relationships with the people you care about better (yes, I know the history of the name, but just think about it — Face? Book?). 

I know Facebook has grander ambitions. It wants to be the clearing house of the internet, the home page, the portal, the town square, the identity infrastructure for the planet, all Facebook all the time. But something about the content and interactions on Facebook screams at this fundamental core: connect with the people you care about. And yet there is so much that pulls me away from and prevents me doing just that.

I guess what I want out of Facebook is clarity. I want that promise of better relationships front and center, and I want the activity that they are putting in front of me to clearly reflect that goal. 

And I know this sounds like a humble vision for the Facebook empire. But as a product, Facebook as a tool for better relationships is probably one of the most desired and universal value propositions out there, next to Foodbook, Shelterbook, and PhysicalSafetyBook.

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Introducing Knitt

So I started playing around with something I am calling Knitt. Knitt is not a reduction of the entire Facebook platform. It is one simple tool that could live alongside many others. Knitt works like a to do list of kindness, a reminder to be mindful. It’s job is to learn who you are closest to and help you stay close or get closer. 

Knitt could even be super smart. Imagine you have been out of touch with a friend for a long time. One day, that friend comes to town and calls you up. You hang out, and suddenly, you’re good friends again. Knitt picks up on the increase in interactions, and instead of a bi-annual reminder to send a shout-out to that friend, Knitt increases the frequency of interactions for that rekindled relationship. 

Knitt would work both ways, helping you forgo frequent interaction with more distant acquaintances without forgetting them, and also helping you interact more often with the people that matter most. Knitt wants you to spend less time with Knitt and more time communicating and being with your own kind and kin.

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What excites me about Facebook, and about ideas like Knitt that could build on top of it, is that the connections are there, the relationships largely defined. There is a ton of potential to make peoples’ lives better, and when Facebook can deliver on that promise, I’ll be glad I signed up. 

The Internet’s Mind-Shrinking Powers

I recently listened to this debate from the NPR Intelligence Squared (US Edition) Podcast. They put forth the question “Does the internet close our minds politically?”

I repond with an emphatic “no”. But aside from all the good vibes I get from the future potential of the internet, it comes down to some simple (albeit difficult to measure) science. 

Humans have this wonderful and beautiful tendency to form lil’ clubs and cliques — what Seth Godin refers to as tribes. That tendancy yields some cosmic radness: the Beautiful Losers, lunatic Football fandom, Buddhist monk ninjas, and yes, even graphic designers.

Because of this, we self select. We pick and chose people and media that tend to reinforce our views of the world. The best measure of the internet’s mind-closing (or expanding), world-view-narrowing (or widening) powers is not in the search algorithms and social networks that promise content that is topically and socially relevant. Those interactions just mirror our real-life natural tendancies. The important measure is whether we have a greater or lesser chance of encountering differing world views online than we do in real life. That difference is what defines the internet as either a view-expanding or view-narrowing medium. 

Someone smarter than I might be able to work this into an equation of sorts. My guess is that by sheer chance and convenience, we have more opportunity online to encounter unfamiliar views than we do in real life. I have little interest in death meta,l and the cost in energy, time, and awkwardness of attending a session of the Denver Heavy Metal Society Meetup is too great a risk. However, I have stumbled across chiptune death metal on youtube, and browsed a page of hand drawn death metal band logos (and pop band logos in death metal style). By degrees I am exposed to something new. And by degrees, my view is broadened.

Sure, we self select. And why would we build an internet that doesn’t behave as we do ourselves? But overall the internet has a tendency to randomly throw us into a room with a bunch of people we don’t know and even though we might often chose to run back to our comfortable corner, we are the better for the experience. 

Why We Do

“Building things for the internet is a righteous endeavor.” 

~ Ben Pieratt

It’s embarrassing. But then maybe embarrassing isn’t quite the right word. It’s sensitive? That sounds a bit wimpy. Maybe it’s precious. Nah — too Golem. It’s just damn deep. It’s the stuff at the root. Root — that’s a good word. That works. It’s the core. It’s something you pull up or dig down to. It’s rarely seen and hard to get at. And when you do, it can be delicate and fall apart right there in your hands.

It’s the *why* we do what we do. There is nothing that nourishes me more than talking about why I do what I do, and hearing other people do the same. It’s soul bearing, nerve shaking work. It really takes work to dig that deep-down raw stuff up from your gut and show it off.

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Now, the Near Future, & The Long Future

I was interviewed by the good folks at The Industry. Here is an excerpt. Read the full interview here.

Hey Keenan, thanks so much for joining us on The Industry. Tell us a bit about yourself and the work you’re doing.

I’m the creative director and co-founder of a startup called Wander. My role covers everything from product design, UX, UI (web + mobile), and branding. And then I pitch in on content strategy and copywriting as well. It is intense, and the most compressed and rewarding learning experience I’ve had in my career.

…

If you could change one thing about your career to date, what would it be?

Early on I put a lot of faith in a system that would take care of the dutiful worker. Put in the time, do good work, wait for the promotions and opportunities. I thought talent was everything, and a better career was continent on better work. I quickly realized that talent is merely a prerequisite. If you work in an industry where everyone is good, everyone cares, everyone works long hours, you can’t expect extraordinary results if your hard work is the ordinary. It was only when I started to build an entire body of work and reputation outside of my 9-5 that thing really started happening. It is almost like having two careers simultaneously, but it really is late nights and weekend projects that define you. Now I pour myself into Wander, but I make sure I make time to write, and am even working on a project to benefit the interactive design community. All of that stuff feeds into itself and makes everything better.

My advice to my freshly graduated self would be to not expect anything from the industry. Everything and anything is available, but it will not come to you. Go get it!

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Where do you see yourself, and the industry, in, say, 5 or 10 years?

Our industry is ahead of the curve. People are starting to ascend Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. When food and shelter, safety, community, and self-confidence are a baseline condition we can provide to everyone*, the only thing left is self actualization and creation. More and more people will become creators and makers. We will button our shirts, tie our ties, and hop in self-driving cars on our way to the office to write poetry, play games, draw and paint and shape and build.

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Read the full interview

Leaps & Steps

Not sure I have mental capacity to write tonight. Been feeling short on mental capacity all day. It is, as we say, one of those days. Like a metronome I find myself regularly revisiting creative fatigue, mental exhaustion, psychological dead-endery. And these rhythms are mismatched — in fact, almost the inverse of — my physical rhythms. The bursts of energy and insight come late, early, when I am far away from a desk, a pen, or a convenient place to write, record, and act. And when I finally get all set up and ready to receive a wave of inspiration, my pulse slows, my chair cradles me, my sweater warms my body and dulls my wits, and I drift away from productivity. It’s not quite that predictable, but there is always the battle between churn (grinding through painful inefficiency) and flow (feasting from an endless wellspring of inspiration while hours melt away). 

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Don’t Be Wise. Be Relentless.

This article has been floating around under the guise of “wisdom”. It attempts to answer the question “should I start my own studio right out of design school.” 

“First of all let me just say how much I admire the gumption and the confidence of wanting to start your own studio right out of the gate. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.

Now here comes the hammer: this is a terrible idea. There’s only one idea that would be worse, by the way. And that would be going to work at a startup right out of school.”

First off, I should provide some context. I’m a creative director at a start up, but spent 4 years working in reputable agencies before that. I credit that time I spent there to affording me the opportunities I have now. I don’t regret a minute of it. Okay — got that out of the way.

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Build Brands, Not Apps : SXSW Interactive / ‘13

The medium is disappearing.

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I wasn’t around for the invention of the book, the newspaper, radio, television, or film, but grew up watching the internet take shape. The story of a new medium starts with the technology, and moves to the content. We no longer talk about what is inside our TVs, but what is being played on them.

The internet is at that moment. We’ve been long fascinated by the technology layer behind all the liking, linking, streaming, and sharing. But a wave of new users is taking the tech for granted and interacting with pure content and communities.

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I promised a daily post this week. Here it is, moments before midnight.

Nine months ago I abruptly walked off the edge of a familiar landscape and into a new one. 

My career so far has spanned several landscapes: I started doing advertising design work out of a two man shop; then moved in-house to join a massive corporate creative team; then strategy and design work for a brand consultancy; and now product, UX, and UI work for a company I co-founded.

Each landscape brings with it a new set of tools for navigation. When we first enter, the path is covered in a fog of war. But over time we master the tools, and it opens up new territory. We no longer stick to the comfortable and known paths. We take courage, explore, follow tangents, uncover unseen opportunities. We are free to chase the rabbit into the woods.

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