Interview: Proxart Magazine
This interview was done back in November ‘11 for Proxart Magazine. A few details have been updated.
Much buzz has surrounded Wander, a site which currently boasts a mysterious edge to what the full-site/network will actually be. Some have predicted that it is an inspiration or curation network where one represents themselves through places rather than material goods. Others signed up because they saw their favorite designers do the same. Only time will tell, however, what the site will be when it actually launches. For now, all we can do is imagine.
The creative director and co-founder of the operation is Keenan Cummings, an NYC-based product/UX/UI designer, illustrator, and aspiring front-end developer1.
Initially stumbling upon his then-anonymous blog entitled Log/Transition, he mapped out his thoughts about leaving his traditional design agency job for the exciting and fresh startup world. With pieces of writing that enthralled many with his outlook of present-day digital culture, he continues to write on his blog and actively teaches classes on Skillshare.
Upon revealing his identity, he simultaneously revealed a tip of the iceberg which is his project Wander. Cummings was merely an eager and interested student of the start-up world, and now is an active participant within the culture — there’s no doubt that he is quickly rising in the ranks of the prominent New York City design scene.
Really enjoyed sharing some thoughts with the community at last night’s Design + Tech event. Eric Jacobsen and I soap-boxed for twenty or so minutes about working as a designer/developer team. Most of our slides are represented above, but I thought I’d pull in some of the main points that resonated with the audience based on their tweets from the night.
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“Empathy is the most important thing a designer can learn:”
This is something I believe designers often mistakenly refer to as ‘taste’. Being able to synthesize the personal tastes of a large group of people and express that is an act of empathy. Example: Detecting a shaky sense of American identity amidst a growing global culture, mashing that up with a renewed American entrepreneurialism and self-made-man ethic due to a struggling and unsure economy, and expressing that in the form of a bespoke leather wallet or hand-crafted all-American axe has much more to due with empathy than an Urban-Outfittrian mystical sense of taste. Good taste is personal; empathy is universal.
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“Sci Fiction = Better design (if you want to work with developers, read sci-fi)”
In all seriousness, it is a baseline for every developer I know. Sci-fi writing is probably the first creative industry to successfully combine real imaginative creative work with rigorous engineering and logic. A lot to learn from that process alone. And the stuff is just plain cool. If you want to build things for the web, become obsessed with the near future you are building toward.
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“You have to decide what to unlearn and what to focus on. You only have so much brain space”
The language I use is “cull” and “edit”, pulled from and excellent article in issue 1 of The Manual. Asses what you are filling your mind with and make a conscious decision to perma-delete the knowledge that doesn’t absolutely drive you to create (Pantone? paper weights and textures? print techniques? Flash?). Replace it with the ancillary skills that will allow you to execute (code? info architecture? UX? UI? anthropology?).
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“It’s really about doing stuff”
Self explanatory. At the end of the day, just produce tons of work, and make sure some of it is interesting. Put your side project at the front of your portfolio. That work says more about you than anything else.
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“Everything matters”
Respect every part of your work and the work of the people you work with. We put time into the details because they matter to us and to the people you collaborate with. Give props, show respect, 4 lif.
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“Love + Hatred = Passion”
People who have an unnatural hatred of things they view as ‘wrong’, and clear and intense love of what they view as ‘right’ — those are passionate people that you want to work with. Avoid fence-sitters.
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“Stop Talking Start Making”
In the Spirit of General Assembly’s recent campaign, stop talking, start making. Again, it’s about doing stuff. Nothing matters more than execution.
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Thanks to Google + Photoshop for several of the above images. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Log / Transition
I am was an agency-trained, senior-level, print/branding designer & I want to left to work at a start up. Here’s why:
This article was written near the end of an extended and intense job search last summer. I decided to document this career shift on an anonymous blog called Log/Transition. I have since moved into a position as the Creative Director / Co-Founder of Wander and will continue to write about the learning process here on Field Study.
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I want my work to feel valuable.
It seems the higher up the institutional chain you climb, the more abstract the value you generate, and the more you are worth. The roles become so far removed from the end goals they are managing, and you have to wonder how long you can stay focused on what matters — making peoples lives better.
New Site, New Page
Check out my new personal site. It’s pretty basic, but everything on there was hand coded by yours truly. After a couple months of pretty intensive learning, I was able to put this thing together. The specs:
I started with very Basic HTML/CSS to get everything into place and looking right. The flags at the start of each sentence are also pure HTML/CSS — no images anywhere on the site (except the logo in mobile view). I then moved on to the load animation, using some simple JQuery methods (delay & animate) to control the opacity of a series of span elements. I hooked in to Twitter’s API to pull in my latest tweet and found an excellent script to calculate and display the time stamp and another to convert user names and websites into click-able HTML links (that regular expression stuff is way over my head … for now).
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.
Design is/as Humor
–This piece was written for Eight:48’s 6th issue, “That’s the Funny Thing About Design.”–
Sitting down to write 1500 hundred words about humor is awfully serious business. It took some careful arranging of my desk space, a quick bike ride around the park, and a light meal of bagel and juice that somehow seemed to stretch itself out into several courses. I put it off because we all put off work in favor of play, and writing — and humor alike — is great work.
Free Agents be Free
I’m teaching a class called Designing Your Design Career through Skillshare. These thoughts are part of a running series of thoughts on the topic. For the in-depth, in-person experience, check out the class.
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“The FreeDarko Manifesto eschews the tribalism of rooting for teams and instead celebrates the Primacy of the Individual… [based on] a three-point rationale: (1) What He Gives Us, (2) What He Stands For, and (3) Why We Care.”
~ FreeDarko on the “dissolution of the old league and the renewal of faith in the individual players.” Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac
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The nature of the studio/consultancy/agency is changing. As branding professionals studios have long applied their skills to telling their own story — developing a house style, and niche specialty, a name, a voice, a mark, an M.O.
But the future of the design field will be defined by individuals. The studio will truly be the sum of it’s parts. No more house style. No more standards manual. A willing collective of specialists will come together to share resources, expertise, communities, and reputation. A new hire will bring their name, their goals, and their agenda and continue to drive toward their own goals. The strongest teams will match individual ambition with collective opportunity.
Peerless
“We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”
~Clay Shirky
Very early in my career and even back into my first years of school, I developed a habit of sending short messages to artists (read: people) I admired. I’d peck out a short email in nervous haste. But once it was written, I would face down my fear and — with shaky, sweaty hands — fat-finger the ‘send’ button.
Some of those emails were never returned, but I gladly received several responses. I had no specific goal in the sending, but the transaction was (hopefully) mutually beneficial — the artist got a morale-boost with the unsolicited admiration, and I felt a small measure of legitimacy with the acknowledgement. The payoff was enough that I kept doing it — and still do. (More here about the new web culture of props and pats-on-the-back vs the old web culture of scathing a cynical critique.)
Erase Everything
Erase everything you’ve done to this point. OK, don’t erase it, but throw it on a hard-drive, back that drive up somewhere else, somewhere remote, hide it, out of sight, unburden your mind.
You’re not starting over, you’re starting something new. You’re building on everything you’ve done, and everything you’ve done to this point, everything that matters, is already out there, speaking for itself. You don’t need to the past to validate where you are now. Your portfolio is a record — it’s not your story. The only thing that matters is what you are are building today.
Every few years I come across a folder of old work or a project that sputtered and died (much of it deservedly so). And then some of it is good, and makes me proud. But other than some reassurance that I’ve been able to solve a problem in the past, those relics won’t solve what I’m working on today. And if I’m retrofitting an old solution to my current challenge, I’ve failed to move myself forward.
The only way I’ve been able to improve is to erase the memory of a successful solution; refuse to repeat, reuse, or recycle; forget the notion of a ‘forté’; make anew or move on. The past is dually a comfort and a burden. Today I’m freeing myself. Today I start from this point and only move forward.
(These thoughts are the process/byproduct of a course I am developing and will be teaching here in NYC in the coming months. Details to come.)
Too Legit To Quit
It’s easy to feel like a hack, a fraud, a sleight-of-hand hustler deceiving folks’ eyes with graphic trickery and swindlerism. A ping of enlightenment hit me when I stumbled on the idea of Impostor Syndrome — an inability to internalize ones accomplishment. We all feel it — perhaps it scares us, or even motivates us to set ourselves apart and do better work.
But it has never been easier to feel great about your work than now. The internet breeds cynicism and animosity in certain circles. But smart developers have figured out ways to build communities that demand some table manners. (Khoi Vinh wrote a post on this yesterday. I like to hear someone owning their digital space and telling guests that they can’t just come in, knock around, and spit on the floor — it shows that the internet is maturing beyond an anonymous free-for-all). There are several forums (Dribbble, Behance, Tumblr, to name a few) where props, pats-on-the-back, shout-outs and high fives are exchanged freely, along with respectful critique and discussion. And seeing our work thumbnailed among a page of inspirational design is validating. There is more chance than ever for your logo to end up sharing a page with Rand’s, or that CD sleeve being compared to a Peter Saville Factory Records piece (e.g. Pieratt holding his own next to Lubalin). Legitimacy is nice, and encouraging, but it is not the goal.
- - - - - Live mild, design wild - - - - -
PROJECT LAUNCH! Here it is! Inadvertent Haikus is a new blog project by the talented copy writer & editor, Koseli Cummings. Here is the description.
Turning the daily news into neatly packaged haikus. The blog sums up culture and current affairs in just 17 syllables. It is an ongoing collaboration between K&©· and a talented roster of illustrators.
Any illustrators out there interested in contributing, feel free to get in touch! Enjoy!
Chewing the Bone
I’ve heard somewhere that there are two types of dogs: those that go straight for the marrow, only satisfied when they get at it; and those that like to chew the bone.
I’m finding that my work is becoming an eternal bone that I am always chewing. Projects rarely adhere to a strict plan of deliverables. Things are always in flux. Projects grow or die. Scope expands, carries steadily on, or dwindles. This idea of forever changing projects can be exhausting to think about. But the traditional narrative arc that we retrospectively try to assign to our lives, that familiar plot that we try to force fit our reality into, doesn’t seem to be an effective way to work anymore.
This style of continuous beta, rapid iteration(“speed of iteration beats quality of iteration”), and agile process is becoming the norm. It used to be associated only with scrappy start-ups that had to win out with flexibility when they couldn’t compete with might. But this model has become standard for designers, developers, and entrepreneurs that need to shape ever-evolving products and hyper-responsive brands.
Fear & Loathing
“What a tremendous act of faith it was for a lot of people to start painting…just because they had to. Like who would taken Ed Templeton seriously when he started painting? Who would taken Chris Johanson seriously when he started painting?” (~Steven “Espo” Powers, Beautiful Losers)
Kos (my beautful wife and a talented copy writer) and I have spent the winter putting off our ambitions: her’s of becoming a full service freelance copy writer, and mine of exploring some client-free (and computer free) art projects. She is a skilled and confident editor, and I can manage my way through design work, but the process can sometimes be safe and somewhat routine. When it comes to those nagging ambitions to push ourselves creatively, we are both trembling neophytes avoiding the possibility of failure.
I can always find something that needs to be done before I sit down and try to paint, collage, or draw. And in turn, she waits on me to finish designing and building her site before she feels confident enough to reach out to potential clients. She’s done some great copy work in the past, and I’ve managed some decent art work, but excellence is never routine for either of us. And that seems to be a crippling opiate—’routine’. Routine is all comfy and warm inside, and never asks too much. Excellence is never routine!
