Art (as) Therapy
I gave a talk at the AIGA national conference this year in Las Vegas, and with all short form talks I feel compelled to write out my thoughts in advance in the form of an essay (and then improvise quite a bit when I’m on stage). Here’s a transcript of the talk (minus my ice breaker jokes) for those that couldn’t attend or for those who did and want to relive it for some reason.
I live in the Bay Area and am surrounded by tech culture. Ben Barry, when working at Facebook in The Analog Research Lab he helped create, made a poster that stated what was a pretty common belief in tech: “Move Fast and Break Things”. Workers in tech don’t usually feel like they have the ability to focus on craft—especially when it comes to visual design. When you're constantly iterating, constantly pushing new versions out, you can’t invest time in seemingly unnecessary details that will be lost in tomorrow’s update. I think the biggest fear is that, while agonizing about a single leaf on an individual tree in the gigantic forest, you might lose sight of what’s important—the experience of using the product. Ben eventually made a new poster in the same series that said “Stay focused and keep Shipping”, which better reflects the views of a “grown up” start-up: There’s a difference between being bold and tenacious and being reckless.
Communication design takes a second seat to product design in tech—as it should. Communication design and branding are important but without the product the company doesn’t exist. I have a few personal rules about working on logos for companies and startups:
- I won’t do a logo if the product itself isn’t designed yet
- The logo shouldn’t guide the direction of the company and product The product / audience / culture informs the logo. That said, branding can help re-invigorate a company whose culture / product is atrophying (which is the whole purpose of rebrands and refreshes).
- I don’t make logos for companies that have no one in place to handle brand execution. I don’t love doing brand extension work myself, and those who do usually prefer not to inherit someone else’s core designs. It can make it difficult to hire very talented branding and communication design people if they feel like the job involves more production than creation.
Doug McGray, the founder of The California Sunday Magazine, initially asked me to create a logo for them when the magazine was in the very early stages of development. They had a vision of what it would be but no visuals. I insisted that he first find the person he wanted to work with to flesh out the design of the magazine, the style of the photography, etc. and then the newly hired creative director and I could work together to create the logo. Everything would feel more cohesive and whoever he hired wouldn’t feel creatively pigeonholed by the work I had already done. He hired Carl DeTorres and the three of us worked together on the mark. Soon after that Leo Jung took over as creative director and we worked together to make more headlines and refine the logo further.
Generally when I work on logos I like to focus on brand refreshes, which allow me to really max out all of my nerdy crafty skills and don’t involve me stepping in as a company’s temporary brand director overseeing the vision of the company. I feel like I’m moving mountains even though I’m only nudging vectors. It’s satisfying for so many reasons, partly because I can spend so much time in a work flow state. There is so much craft involved, and I don’t have to prove its value to anyone—by the time someone feels compelled to hire me they already understand the value of what small changes and attention to detail can bring to the logo.
We live in a culture where “scale” is really important—and craft doesn’t scale. If I wanted to scale my business, I’d be stepping away from my craft. There is a definite cap on what you’re capable of achieving with your own two hands. If you work for an agency or at a company, the more “successful” you are (the higher up the corporate ladder you travel) the further removed you are from the physical process of making. You can focus on the fact that as a high level decision maker you have a huge hand in what ultimately gets made, but it still doesn’t change the fact that your day to day life is a lot of phone calls and meetings...not a lot of making. Even as a freelancer, it’s easy (as your career advances) to focus on bigger projects, bigger budgets, sexier clients, etc. but it’s very important to not lose sight of what you actually love about what you do. If you don’t like the actual day to day process, when a project gets killed (or fucked up) it destroys you. Just as you can’t spend your life working hard at a job you barely like because of the retirement benefits, the end result can’t be the only thing keeping you going, or it will all feel like a massive waste of time when things don’t go your way.
Usually when I’m working on a bigger campaign, I’m creating part of what the final art becomes, not handling every aspect of the production. This is the only way craft scales—many people work together to bring their specific skill to the table to ultimately make something bigger and better than what one person could have made on their own.
We talk a lot about how craft helps elevate work for clients but not how it affects us personally. As my business has grown and changed, I spend less time doing intense meditative craft-oriented projects. Any freelancer who has been working for five, ten (or more) years will relay a similar story—that they used to spend all their time making stuff and now they spend all their time managing the making of stuff: answering emails, sitting on unnecessary conference calls, etc. It felt exaggerated for me when I moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco. In San Francisco I don’t have the same network of freelance friends that I had in NYC. That’s not to say I don’t have friends who freelance or work independently, it’s just that the kind of work they tend to focus on is different. People aren’t taking the weekend to make a poster, an enamel pin, or a zine—they’re building a business, or “disrupting an industry” one hackathon at a time. It’s easy to feel like you’re getting it wrong if you’re not doing the same. I didn’t really want to scale my businesses because I didn’t want to step further away from the process of creation, but felt like if I didn’t scale I was shooting myself in the foot. It took a few years but I finally started understanding and believing that “failure to scale” wasn’t a failure at all. Staying small was a “feature not a bug”. I love working for myself and having the flexibility to maneuver my career to fit my life and choosing to not scale is a choice I have made for myself, my work, and my happiness.
Then two things came into my life that felt like creative wake up calls: my daughter, and my Vandercook #4. The first of these two made me question on a daily basis whether I should be doing this at all—not because I didn’t want to but because it’s really fucking hard to feel like you are doing anything right when you are trying to do everything. Every week is a challenge—trying to figure out how this little person fits into my life (or really how my work fits into hers). After a lot of introspection, what I found is that not only do I WANT to devote a large part of my life and time to my work (something I always knew or assumed), but that I NEED to—for my own sanity. When I stopped having the time to create (because of my daughter or because my schedule was dominated with “running your business” tasks), I lost my time to reflect, to meditate, to let my brain sink into that blissful flow state that all craft-focused people love and strive for. That time is essential to my health and happiness. I need to put on my oxygen mask before I assist others. I need to take care of myself so I’m capable of taking care of others.
When not nearly ruining your career, kids can be very inspirational. I have been secretly working on a kids book, which has been incredibly fun and has empowered me to work on more illustrative lettering again. The only issue is that the stakes feel really high. I find myself struggling to work on it because I want it to be GREAT. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be a gift to my daughter and I want it to reflect everything I’m capable of, to the highest level. But this kind of thinking and pressure is, of course, paralyzingly. I don’t need more high stakes jobs—I have enough of that with client work. I need a way to make low-stakes artwork again—to feel like every project I work on isn’t determining whether my career is staying on track or veering off into the abyss.
Then came the Vandercook. I have spent a lot of money trying to improve myself, my career, and my process over time (therapy, acupuncture, tons of design books I never read, etc.), but this thing really brought me out of a creative fog. I used to print a lot when I lived in NYC and had a relationship with The Arm Letterpress in Williamsburg. I didn’t realize that easy access to a press not only made me feel capable of making physical things, but it took the pressure off of making things that I knew would sell. When I would hire printers, I would think about how much cheaper each print would be if I made a huge edition—I could sell them for less or make a higher profit on every print. But the issue with huge editions is that you have to store all those prints, possibly for YEARS if they don’t sell. It made me make safe, sellable art. Or no art at all. I became entirely reliant on client work to control what I was creating because even making something as simple as a poster felt like too much of an investment. Suddenly, when I had immediate access to a press again, my creative gears started churning. I felt like it gave me permission to make art for fun again, and in doing so I rediscovered what I knew all along—that I need craft. I need to spend hours making and refining something, even if all it ended up being was a postcard I gave away. The process of making makes me feel whole.
What I hope that you take away from this is that you don’t have to defend your desire to focus on craft. Craft in design can elevate the perception of someone else’s company, improve user engagement, or even helps elect a president. But you don’t need to care about that. You can do it just because you know in your heart that it’s good for you. That it’s so hard to slow down, to take time to reflect, to feel peace. I always thought I was terrible at meditating until I realized I had been doing it all along.