Lately I’ve been reading Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, founder of Behance Network and The 99 Percent. In the book, Belsky talked about the idea of the backward clock. We’ve all heard of this before — If your life would end next minute/month/year, what will you change today? Now that the end of world may await around the corner, it seemed appropriate to seriously consider this question.
A while ago, I wrote a post on saying no to something I love and the idea of doing as in “Demos, not memos.” While those two are high on my list about things I want to change and improve, I recently came across a short talk by designer, illustrator, author and thinker Frank Chimero, given at Do Lectures. Think our work as a gift, he said.
What differentiates a gift from something one buys for him or herself is the extra layer of caring that is given. Chimero argues that everything we craft, whether it’s a piece of design, drawing or writing, has a separate value apart from commerce. Whether it’s history, legacy, knowledge or memory, the separate value is a gift. And when I begin to think of my work as a gift, so much love and caring has naturally added into the recipe already.
But can all creative work be gifts? Potentially so. In my opinion, the extra layer of caring is usually received when a piece of creative work solves problems. Michael Bierut, in one of his most watched videos on The 99 Percent, talked about how being a graphic designer is like a doctor. Bierut said that he hardly comes up with personal projects; instead, he focuses on solving his clients, a.k.a the patients’ problems. Instead of inventing fictional projects, the opportunities of solving real problems are to make design truly as a gift to others.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly is to learn to appreciate more. Belsky pointed out in the book that we as creatives are customized to constructive feedbacks — we wanted to know what went wrong so that we could be better next time. At a storytelling workshop, however, master storyteller Jay O’Callahan taught Belsky the technique of appreciation: commenting on the strengths rather than pointing out weaknesses. Not only does this technique avoid demoralizing consequences, it favors the “natural recalibration” that weaknesses lessen as strengths are emphasized¹. O’Callaham nicely explains the technique:
If our eyes are always looking for weakness, we begin to lose the intuition to notice the beauty. … Appreciations are not about being polite. They are about point out what is alive. The recipient must take it in, incorporate it.
The recipient can be ourselves as well. Instead of frowning at the our own weaknesses, perhaps we can celebrate our strengths — the part of us that make our friends and family proud and cherish. What’s alive is within.
Happy holidays, everyone! See you in 2012, make it count.
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¹ Belsky, Scott. Make Ideas Happen. Page 198
Since I finished college and the News21 fellowship in August, the real world has tenderly embraced me into her arms. I’m among the luckiest to find an paid internship at a studio I love, live in the City full of inspirations and most importantly, have time to read. Read for homework? No longer. The liberty to read for pleasure is a bliss.
So far, three months in, I have finished more than a dozen books and numerous articles, ranging from cultural critique to true crime, most of which I finished cover to cover on my daily subway commute. To squeeze more time to read, I changed my reading patterns from continuously devoting a big chunk of time to books to my current “reading sprints,” I set a goal to read a few chapters and only allow for 45-to-60-minute total reading time every day. To my surprise, looking back at my experiment so far, my initial fear of losing the thread of thought by splitting reading time never came to exist. The secret ingredient, in my recipe, is the notion of preciousness.
The Notion of Preciousness and How to Read Wisely
Writer, designer and editor Mandy Brown, the woman behind A Work Library and the fantastic A Book Apart series, recently observed that people read online more than ever.
They even read long articles, and straight to the end. They read one article after the other. They crave reading in the quiet moments of the day—waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus, enjoying a glass of wine before their date arrives at the bar. They read while walking down the street; they read at their desk in between tasks; they buy devices that permit them to carry more words than they ever could before—and with those devices in hand they read more and more. –Mandy Brown, “A Web Designed for Reading“
Facing the overwhelming flow of twitter updates and news feed, many of us grow the appetite for information. We constantly want more, but puzzle over how to magically add more hours to what already seems to be a crazy schedule. Instead of stressing out about how little time I have for the amount of information, I try to select. Select the best piece of information to read for the hour/day/week/month, and know that the next selection will always be not only more timely, but also better, as knowledge builds on. By selecting, the time I spend on reading the article, book or whatever is so much loved and focused. Consequently, I am more engaged in the content and more critical to the author’s thinking – I underline, annotate more often and always remember where I leave off.
Imagine condense a year worth of time you’ll have with your beloved to a month, and how would you spend that time? You don’t need my answer to the that question.
Say no if you love something
I’m not crazy by saying that, either is Liz Danzico.
Co-founder and Chair of MFA Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, she noted:
What we choose to leave out create the story. – Liz Danzico, “Lesson,” published in The Manual Issue One
If one truly loves something, say no to other choices that present themselves. It’s tough, to be sure, to turn down opportunities, especially when they knock on your door. But if it’s the evolving relationship you’ve had with books that you love, or let it be the absence of it, you have to choose to protect the ingenuity.
In doing so, something else wonderful happens. It’s called thinking.
Let’s use our body as an example. After we eat, our stomach needs a few hours to digest the food, absorb the nutrition and clear out the waste. You can’t rush through the process. (If you figure out a way to go around that, do share. Let’s be billionaires.) When the content isn’t thought through, I lost it in the matter of time. Even if there is an output of attaining the information, the output will be superficial, shallow and worth no further investigation. Meanwhile we acknowledge that good design/writing/art, as our stomach processing food, takes time, we seem to undervalue the thinking, which is the part of absorbing the nutrition in our stomach analogy.
So read more selectively and think more critically. And then, it comes the output.
Screenprinted motto on Fabric at Etsy Workshop with Jessi Arrington
Demos not Memos
The steps of input, process and output are shared between human and technology (More thinking on technology will be the topic of my next blog post, stay tuned). The only difference is that human output isn’t an pre-programed one-way behavior, but an integrated pathway, like an merged traffic lane or a mouth of streams, resulted from multiple past experiences. Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson, UK-based designers and speakers, a.k.a. The Standardistas, quoted cultural theorist John Berger in their essay “Designing the Mind” for The Manual: “Today the discredit of words is very great.” They therefore reflected:
In a world of 140-character missives and ill-considered blog comments, words rarely seem to be used to dig deep anymore or applied to the search for profound truths. Everything is surface, sometimes depressingly so.
To grow, we must act on our thinking, whether it is singing, writing, designing or photographing, with a vision that whatever we do, we leave a trace of knowledge behind that we’re forever responsible for.
—
Notes: Many articles and books have shaped the way I think, and therefore this essay. Here is a short list of what I’ve read:
The Manual: A beautifully crafted journal that takes a fresh look, in print, at the maturing of the discipline and profession of web design
Design with Emotion: Demonstrating accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design
The UX Driven Startup: A web presentation by Alexa Andrzejewski, co-founder of Foodspotting
The Myths of Innovation: by Scoot Berkun
What Technology Wants: by founder of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly
A Working Library: Website of Mandy Brown where she writes on reading and reads on writing
Almost two months have passed since the launch of Syracuse News21‘s project El Nuevo Normal. And here I am, opening files and notes that had been kept in the folder at the corner of my desktop. For those who don’t know, during the summer, I was the graphic designer for Syracuse News21, a chapter of the national journalism initiative, on a multimedia project focusing on the growing hispanic population in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania.
El Nuevo Normal homepage
I’m always very curious of the process other designers take to finish their projects, so I decided to share my thinking behind the finished product and also things I’ve learned along the way.
The Identity
First round of computer drafts
(No, our project does not have an abbreviation ENN, no matter how cool and professional that sounds.) When the title was finally voted upon, I was very intrigued by the double N as well as the fact that “Normal” can be read as in either English or Spanish. Since “El Nuevo Normal” is a title that doesn’t require translation, neither should the logo. I experimented with different forms of the capital letter N to try to use shadows to imply a double N, and tried different typefaces to find a upright, modern and strong voice for the project.
Project logo round 2
I also tried to conceptualize the logo a little bit, while I was stuck with the wordmark. I thought of the the symbol “~” that is native to Spanish, and how it almost looks like a shortened “N” in certain typefaces. Realizing it too subtle and too hard to read in small sizes, I was back to ground zero.
Project logo round 3
Round three. I noticed the environment where I was, the color, texture, history and architecture in the Valley. All of those made Bethlehem, Allentown and Reading unique places for stories on the Hispanic community. Utilizing some of the environmental elements in the logo brought me closer to create an appropriate, telling identity.
Project identity final round
Instead of using photographic imagery, I traced/illustrated the most iconic architecture in the Valley – Bethlehem Steel, Allentown bridge and the Reading pagoda, and the hilly, green environment they’re in. Hoefler & Frere-Jones‘s type family Tungsten is the winning choice for the identity because of its industrial, modern, upright and smart feeling.
Alternative logo
The logo, in my very biased opinion, succeed in giving away a sense of place, and it serves well in applications such as websites, banners and motion graphics because of its bumper-sticker look.
The Website
Screen grab of GOOD's homepage
Before I started designing the website, I referred to GOOD, Thinking for a Living and the portfolio sites of my favorite graphic designers (Jessica Walsh is one of them) for inspirations. GOOD does a wonderful job of creating visually intriguing interface, while maintaining the volume of information on the homepage. Thinking for a Living not only is a beautiful to the eyes, but to the mind. I strongly recommended reading Frank Chimero‘s piece on horizontal readability, which led me to design the stories in horizontal format.
Screen grab of Jessica Walsh's homepage
I love the dramatic impact of full-screen images, and Jessica Walsh‘s site is an iconic showcase of such usage. On top of that, I want to borrow the keyboard shortcut to our News21 site to create a mouse-less browsing experience.
News21 story landing page mockup
As a result, the above is the mockup for a story landing page. The full-screen background takes advantage of the aerial shots of the valley by Bob Miller and Raymond Thompson during a hot air balloon ride, to give a sense of place to the project. The arrow control enables the viewer to go between pages as well as stories.
Inside story page mockup
Running into problems during a project is nothing surprising. Our team had trouble figuring out how to display photos within the story (how the page will look with photos on top of a background photo), how many columns can a photo take without breaking the code, etc. Logistic issues, such as timing and budget, also limited to what degree could this design be executed and done well. In the end, there were certainly holes for improvements, as one of them being that the up/down keyboard control isn’t working and readers have to go back to the homepage to read another story.
Although saying something like “I’m glad we tried” sounds like an excuse, the truth is that News21 was a learning process of all of us involved, and I would much rather make mistakes than playing safe. Reflecting on my experience as a graphic designer working on a student journalistic project, I’ve learned many things; and since we don’t have much time to waste in our lives to make the same mistakes, I hope the following highlights can be somehow helpful to you:
Lesson 1. Have a fallback plan on Day 1.
I failed to have a backup design plan for the site, which resulted in many last-minute changes to the design that were inconsistent to the existing style.
Lesson 2. Good design is to bring the good content forward.
Many people have said that, but I think this is particularly important for journalism projects. It is the stories we tell that matter, and I partially failed to make the content easily accessible or cross-referenced (the only cross-reference function we have is the “related posts” link at the end of a story page).
Lesson 3. Innovation is a heavy word. Set a realistic goal instead, and make it happen.
What a catchy word. Nowadays, innovation is what student journalists and designers are going after. But innovation takes time and efforts, as writer and speaker Scott Berkun notes in his influential book on the subject The Myths of Innovation. (It’s an easy, fast read with many great insights into the creative process, I strongly recommend it.) I failed to admit to myself that no true innovation would happen in a period of mere 10 weeks. Having too big of an ambition and too little time led to an semi-finished product by the end, which none of us could really take pride in.
Lesson 4. You own your project.
Take full control of it, or try the best you can to take full control of it. The project can be as good as you want it to be, so if you’re serious about it, be so.
Conclusion
The best part of working on a student project is that it gives you an opportunity to fail and not to be ashamed of it. We were students once, and are students for life. I’ve learned so much by working with the wonderful team and by making those mistakes. They are to make me better after all, and I’m very thankful for all the help and advice I’ve received throughout the process.
Cheers, El Nuevo Normal!
Poster for Musée d'Orsay in 1986 by Bruno Monguzzi
“Swiss design is as perfect as any spider web. But it’s a useless perfection. The spider web is useful only when broken by the entangled fly.”
The quote was told by Bruno Monguzzi, the infamous Swiss graphic designer, typographer, teacher and design philosopher, at AIGA/NY‘s event tonight. It was the single most important lesson, Monguzzi said, he learned from Antonio Boggeri, founder of one of the most important Italian design firm Studio Boggeri.
Much of Monguzzi’s talk tonight was centered around this idea of “useless perfection.” Or, in other words, form. As words are substitutes of meaning, work of graphic design are substitutes of messages.
Sounds abstract, but sort of getting it? Here is an example:
Audi Zero concept
Vintage car. Photo from http://www.fegovi.com/
One is a concept, the other a vintage. Two unmistakably different styles, but one object — car. The fashion in which those two vehicles dress does not alter the nature of the product, only the perception of it. ”The how defines the what,” as Monguzzi puts. Similarly, we as graphic designers can’t alter the nature of a message, but how our audience respond to it.
That puts tremendous pressure on us, as you could imagine, since any form of communication is merely the communicator’s subjective understanding of the matter. There is certainly no single style of doing it right, but a method — putting content over form. (Remember the entangled fly?)
Monguzzi told the audience to “disobey to trends” and “to add pages to the dictionary of visual communication, instead of tearing ones out.” And perhaps more importantly, “new design comes from new problem.”
His answer to the request for a book recommendation from one audience member.
Problems arise from life, so live like a human being first, he said in the closing marks, then you can become a designer.
