Thank you so much for having me here
I just got in this morning, and I think somebody asked us yesterday
But I just got a sense of who actually lives here in LA
all right great I
Actually used to I went to art school here. I want to Otis so I lived here for four years
It's an amazing city. I'm really happy to be back. I actually used to live right by MacArthur Park
Which at the time?
you never went further east MacArthur Park is two miles west and at the time you never went further east and
He certainly didn't get further east two miles further east to hang out with a bunch of designer
So this is really kind of amazing to be here, so thank you for having me
As we said before I
work in Adobe my title is principal designer I
I work with designers. Who are our customers folks like you guys who are on the front lines of today's creative problems?
I also work with the designers back at Adobe who are evolving Photoshop and illustrator the apps that you know and also you know
I'm focused on Adobe XD which is our new and in UX UI design tool
I'm not gonna spend any time on that I'm here to talk to you today about two things first
Careers and also I'm going to talk about design writing
And I'm actually gonna cover some of the same territory that amelie covered in terms of talking about
critique or criticism
Actually she and I just met even though we both live in New York were both designers
and
she works, New York Times
I used to working our times, and we actually showed up with decks that actually cover the same territory
But completely coincidental, and hopefully I will
Add to what she had to say rather than boring you with the stuff that she had to say so eloquently
Some of you may know that I have been writing a blog at subtraction calm about design and technology
For a long long time almost embarrassingly long. I've written thousands of posts there, and it's actually been a great
Platform for me. It's been a great way to get my ideas out there to meet other people too get new opportunities
I'm really thankful for the blog and for the audience at some point
The like the I wanted to take the the original
Inspiration for the blog which was in my love of writing and actually turned that into a book and in 2010 I wrote this book
called
Ordering disorder a grid principles for web design in which I tried to take what I had learned as a print designer the rules of
of
Typography and layouts and grids and try to translate them to the web in a in a native way in a forward-looking way
And the thing about writing
books is that they're really hard and
even though I had written these thousands of blog posts I
Really froze up when it came time to write the book and my ambition was to write this
This book that might be you know kind of a timeless classic that would really talk about great design principles
not just what was on the web and
ultimately
I think I really missed the mark for a lot of reasons because I think I'm just maybe not a great book writer also because
It's genuinely hard to write a book. That's that's interesting and substance 'iv about design, and there are a lot of reasons for
That if one is design is really not very well understood
And it's hard to to grow the audience for design
I actually think that's what writing about any art form should be about it should be about
Growing that audience and getting more people to understand what that art form is about
Yeah, but I did I didn't really give up on that idea of writing a really sort of timeless book a couple of years ago
I wrote this book called how they got their
interviews with digital designers about their careers and the inspiration for this book was
One it was kind of the book that I wanted to have
Or I wish I'd have had when I was just starting out in my career a book all about
How people got started how they got their first big breaks how they got
Over there their you know their biggest challenges how they dealt with failures how they turned their passions into
sustainable careers and ultimately really successful careers and so I
Talked to you 14
designers folks from
Kind of all over the spectrum folks in the first decade of their careers folks who had been doing digital design for longer
folks from startups late stage tech companies agencies
Independent studios, I also talked to this guy who you may remember from yesterday
and
He had a lot of really interesting things to say and I hope I don't embarrass him when I quote him a little bit later
so
the act of writing this book
Was interesting to me because I'd had so much trouble writing the first book and so I said hey
I'm just gonna talk to 14 people. You know I'll talk to them on skype
I'll record what they have to say and then I'll upload it to the service
I used called rib comm which which charges like a dollar a sentence or something like that to transcribe it and
Then and then I'll have a book what could be easier than that right?
But as soon as I got the transcripts back
I realized that like the missing step was you really have to edit it every anytime you engage in
Writing about design or writing about anything. I mean and even
Transcribing interviews and turning them into a readable form is a form of writing you have to apply
Like a kind of critical analysis you have to put on an author's hat and try to
Make all these interviews work together in a way. That's enjoyable and readable and
and valuable to the user and
Just transcribing what they had to say was just not working out because like what you have to say
Conversationally doesn't doesn't translate to the page in a very elegant way
So I'm gonna spend a little bit of time talking about what these 14 designers told me
And I'm gonna get back to this idea of writing whoops
so
The first lesson that I want to share with you is
That there's really no straight path in design careers
And this is maybe the most obvious
lesson and
also
It was something that really underscored for me the idea that a lot of what we want to know about
Careers is already obvious to us, but we only understand it academically, and we don't yet understand it
emotionally or
Really truly have been able to internalize the lessons because we haven't experienced it for ourselves
And we can get a little bit of a jumpstart on that by hearing stories from others because it human these abstract lessons
so this lesson is
Really about the fact that
Everybody has misfires everybody has meandering paths. They hit dead ends, but ultimately they they get over it
This is a quote from erica hall
Who co-founded mule design in san francisco?
She said I love looking back at the things I tried that totally didn't work out things go horribly
But somewhere down the line that thing that went horribly is going to totally help you do something really
Fantastic and that really underscores the idea that success is really the latest iteration of a series of failures
Self-taught skills can matter as much as formal education. I'm gonna
Talk a little bit about formal education later, but this is actually something that Alex said, but Alex. I'm really sorry
He said that
The act of consuming design looking really closely at designing and trying to understand what it is and teaching teaching him
Through that that learning act was really valuable to him at a certain point if you look at enough good design over and over again
You can't help but try to consciously or subconsciously replicate what you see
The next lesson is self-doubt is a frequent companion and actually hearing this
Was a bit of a relief to me because throughout my career
I've often felt like you know like I really didn't belong there. You know they call it impostor syndrome
it's actually quite well known now but
It's really worth hearing it from folks. Who who you really admire, and I really admired and cedar home
co-founder of dribble he actually has
Convened this amazing community of people who are all pushing the craft forward
And he says he still feels like a fraud frequently he says even though. It's a cliche. He says. It's true. I
Think it's that it's also healthy and that it keeps you on your toes. It keeps you wanting to learn more so basically this idea
of
Not always feeling like you deserve the success you had is very common
But it's really powerful to be able to use it as fuel to get you further in your career
At some point you have to take a leap of faith
What I heard from a lot of these designers was they had achieved certain levels of success, but that level didn't really
Comprise the totality of their vision their ambitions and so they they decide to just go and push themselves off
To another to another level and take a big big risk. This is a quote from ignition against Barska, who?
Went to Cooper Union in New York
And then got a job at funny garbage which at the time is one of the best places to work
Anywhere where the best design studios?
She said there's just came a point when I felt like I had grown as much as I could grow in that particular environment
It was a five year job
I started out of school, so I just said okay, what else is there, and she had no idea
What was next and she went exploring and it led her to form her own studio?
It's called kiss me on polish, and they've done incredible work, and they're still going strong
It's the last one
I'll share is the idea that there's really no getting around being a business person
And I think this is something that a lot of us struggle with especially early in our career Jim Reagan
Gore is a co-founder of a startup called branch they did really well. They were acquired by Facebook
He said throughout that whole experience the toughest thing about being a designer co-founder is
Not managing a team or contending with the co-founders
but there's a tension between being a maker and a businessperson, and we've all experienced that we go into this into this field because
We are passionate about design
We think we can just if we can just design all day long everything else is going to take care of itself
but at some point we recognize that in order to
Do the design that we really want to do we have to engage with?
the rest of the world with the business side with the marketing side with everything else so
Looking at the 14 designers that I interviewed I
Tried to step back and try to understand some of the bigger patterns
They're trying to understand where they came from and this process actually helped me
get a little bit of a more nuanced understanding of this this sort of
truism in the field that
digital designers can come from everywhere
and I think this started because our field is still relatively new and
Especially in the first decade when nobody had really built a website nobody had really built an app
That works on your phone or or is a surface that spans multiple platforms before
People really did come from everywhere to to figure out how this stuff would work
But what I found is it's maybe not as true as it's been repeated over and over
I mean if you look at these 14 people and what they recently started out doing it at first glance you might?
Believe that you know they really didn't come from traditional design backgrounds they came from
computer science or
architecture or film or philosophy
And then of these people only about five of them really had quote-unquote proper design education
but if you look more closely a
Lot of what they studied you would you could say is sort of adjacent to design or put another way?
It's there were fields where it was almost inevitable that they would run into design encounter or the world of design and actually
At least dip their toe into it, and then if you think
about what people did after they discovered design a lot of these folks went off and got proper design education so
What I the conclusion that I came to is that it's true that successful designers can come from any schooling
But design schooling is most common. It's still probably the most valuable education that you can get to to make it in this field
The thing that really links all these careers together though is
Adaptability and curiosity and these are traits that are incredibly valuable
When you're digital designer because you're effectively working in tech you're dealing with the volatility of
An industry that is constantly changing
Generally every five to seven years the whole new platform comes along we have to readjust our
Thinking of what design is and it's worth taking a look at that that macro pattern for a moment in the beginning
when you worked in digital design you pretty much had the modus operandi of a
An analog designer in that you said you know I'm going to design how this looks how its organized and how its presented and
The software that you use and even the mode that you worked in was fairly single user you might go with a team
To a meeting and capture the requirements, but then you would come back
And you would work individually on software that wasn't really optimized for workflows or for sharing and the work that you that you delivered was
Mock-ups or static output it was not
Like multifaceted, but over time as the people that we work with
As the people that we work with in the design process
Engineers and marketing folks and and clients and stakeholders as they became more
Savvy about design and as design became more important to them
our processes got a lot more collaborative
Also the design problems got more complex. We started thinking more multi-dimensionally we started thinking about
responsive design and working across screens
And then you know it was it's no longer good enough to just present a static mock-up. You have to really
Prototype in some form so that you can give a sense of the behavior or the motion of what you're doing
And so we went from I design how it looks to really saying we together design
How it works, and that's a really fundamental shift over a fairly short span of time
And and it's this
change that has
imposed upon designers work in this field
This need to be adaptable to be flexible and you think about what's coming
You know Josh was talking about about AR VR all that stuff is is also a whole nother paradigm shift
Some of you have echoes and Google homes and who knows what Apple's gonna announce with a series speaker
These are interfaces that really have nothing to do with
Typography with grid layouts with anything. I mean I actually happen to believe these will eventually integrate with screens
But even then you're gonna have to think about something you never had to think about before all you have to think about
conversational design about the personality of the app about the pacing about
About just entertaining people just just in the way that you asked for input
So change can be really frightening when you're thinking about your career arc
And so I'm sort of gonna close out this part of my talk
Quoting Karen McGrane who is co-founder of bond art and science?
And she said you she's been working 15 20 years, and she feels like she's got another 15 or 20 years to go
I've seen lots of change happen I feel very comfortable that some new change will roll along and then I'll be able to adapt to
it if I want to
That's a great feeling it actually lends a significant amount of confidence to my work to be able to look back on
Challenges that I've had rough spots in my career and say I got through that I'll get through the next one too
and
So actually this is where I sort confessed like there's 14 interviews each one was kind of like a little mini therapy session for me
Because I'm also in the middle of my career
And I was actually kind of astounded for her to say that she
Doesn't worry about this next generation of people coming in and mastering the latest technology like that because the fact that you said you
Persevere through these five to seven year changes over and over you're picking up an invaluable skill
In in learning how to adapt and to change and that's it's an advantage, and I think we should
should all
Take a moment to appreciate that
Unless you're brand new and you're better at everything than me in which case I have no advice for you
So I want to get back to to this idea about writing about design, so I put out this book in 2015 and
It got some some some nice reviews some kind notices
But then I actually got sideswiped by some really very real criticism that
Completely surprised me and kind of embarrassed me if you look at this cast of characters
Really only about a third of them are
Anything that you would you would say is close to you know being diverse?
there's a few women and and not to me is a
He's from Malaysia, so it doesn't do a great job in terms of underrepresented
minorities at all and I was I was really embarrassed by this because I
Fully believe that when we put stories of success out there
We're actually giving a model for other people to follow especially people who are thinking about their careers
And if you if if those people can't recognize themselves in these stories
Then it's a failure on the part of people who are telling these stories
So I thought about this a lot and in retrospect. I was really writing in a bubble
I had this ambition to write a book that was gonna grow the audience for design
And it didn't really do that because just under the surface
I was really just thinking about the designers that I knew and writing for them
and it's really hard to get context and perspective inside of a bubble and part of this is because
This is sort of the default posture of writing about design. You're basically writing for other
Designers and and the things that are important to us are important to other designers on the one hand that's good
But it's really an echo chamber
As a result I really do feel like the bar for writing about design is pretty low like most of what's out
There is not that great on the one hand
It's great that we're we're also
Willing to share our thoughts and our learnings and and write about them, and and and create a really collaborative community
But the other hand the fact that it's only designers. Who are writing for other designers is a real problem
It's not good enough like we need something more than this
To go a little bit back into history - when analog design was at its peak we had these fantastic
outlets for great writing about design and great writing
In the mode of design criticism actually have a slightly different take on the word criticism
Then Emily did I feel like criticism is actually a kind of an art form?
We had Emmy grey we had ID magazine we had a magazine called critique. Which was about looking at graphic design really
In really deep way. We still have ienaga zine. Thank goodness there
They are doing terrific work out of the UK, and I encourage everybody to read that magazine, but everybody else is gone
And what we have now is
Medium calm and there's some terrific stuff on medium
but for for better for worse if you're gonna write about design particularly product design or
Digital design or UX UI you're gonna put it on medium. This is where we've all decided that it should go
And if you look at what gets bubbled up as popular on medium
It's there's some good stuff. There's stuff about careers there
You know there's there stuff that is helpful to us, but it's not really great design writing, and it's ER
not good design criticism a lot of what you see are articles about techniques about how to
Get better performance in your app or how to learn to do better better animation that stuff is great
And I don't I don't take issue with it per se
But then there's also stuff. That's fairly superficial surveys of what's fashionable in design trends that don't really look closely
at the why of it
And there's also just just rants like people like with an axe to grind who are just you know just it's just out to
Let you know how strongly they feel about this or that which you know I mean take it or leave it
Same is true for designer news that don't get me wrong. I visit designer news every day
I end up reading a medium article almost every day as well, and there's some great stuff on there
this is a leaderboard of what we're all reading right and
Almost none of it is like good design writing almost all of it is about selling you on something
They're selling you on an idea here
I got this great new take on the way the way you should do motion or something or
Selling you on a product selling you on
An open position I'm trying to hire for
It's not about critical analysis. It's not about looking deeply at what we're doing and in the context
And this is because the people who are writing this stuff. You know God bless them. I mean it's its
Designers working designers and what we need is a class of knowledgeable professionals
whose job it is to think critically about design, but but who don't make a living by doing design and
I
Realized that may sound a bit unrealistic, but if you think about other art forms
That's exactly what they have and that's part of the reason
Design is sort of like this junior varsity art form compared to like the varsity players like architecture, New York Times has
for many years had
architecture critics writing columns really penetrating
Pieces about the the context of architecture the why of it and in the implications Michael
Kimmelman like nearly one appealed surprise for writing about architecture
Can you imagine somebody winning a Pulitzer Prize writing about the work that we do I mean?
It's it sounds outrageous, but it should be true because of how impactful our work is
You know more
Populace vain you know Siskel and Ebert
Like they basically turn us all into film lovers they came into our homes every week and told us
About the latest movies and about their ideas and and taught us the language of film criticism
So practicing design and our practicing and writing about the same heart form it's not inherently bad
But it is a conflict of interest because of all the relationships
We have as employees as people looking for new opportunities as as
As agencies looking for clients as somebody who might be looking to partner with somebody, and it doesn't allow us to
Talk independently and independence is
essential for worthwhile design and I mean worthwhile writing and criticism
So
I'm running out of time and I have so much left to tell you so I'm gonna try and speed through the rest
I'm just gonna try to answer this question first. Why is design writing important?
Why is criticism important if I think it's worth worth asking even though?
I've told I've told you all this and I think there's there's a lot of arguments that can be made for this
But I'm just going to talk about one today
And the the reason I would offer is it's because we asked for it to be
We as a profession have been fighting this battle for a long time to get a seat at the table
and we were always saying we're just as
Valuable as engineering
or we're just as valuable as marketing we want to be a part of the conversation we want to be there taking responsibility for
What for what gets done and and and setting the vision?
So we do that, but we talk mostly about the success of design we don't talk about
Failure we don't talk about designs roll when things go wrong. I mean I'm going to give you a few quick examples
Think about Twitter and its cultural impact it IPO at stratospheric rates and then over the course of several years
It just you know lost all that all this market cap
At the same time Twitter hired tons of designers produce tons of design. I don't know if that's just
Correlation or there's actual causation there, but I think given the impact of Twitter, I think that's worth asking
I'm sorry that my remote went out
Facebook you all there problems with fake news and with keeping people inside of their bubbles
These are design problems, but the way they're portrayed in the media
I mean literally this headline treats this problem as almost an algorithmic problem and almost as if it's not it hasn't been mathematically
Engineered right, but it's a really a user experience problem
This is a particularly painful example because I voted for Hillary I was a big supporter and a friend of mine Jennifer Kenan
was creative director for Hillary for America
She did amazing work. I couldn't imagine anybody else doing a better job than she did she and her team
but because of the how consequential that that election was I
Think it's really important to ask the design play any role in its failure
And I think it's fair to ask this question because in 2008 when Obama won
design was taking so much credit for that beautiful logo and that that wonderful corporate ID that wonderful identity system and all the
Communications and now like there's no question about about what role design played here
So you know design has ways this multi-decade campaign for for greater credibility
And to get to the next stage, I think we all need to embrace more rigor and more
accountability
And so my career advice for designers is really next to being good at design
Maybe the most valuable skill you can have is being a good writer and being a good critical thinker
So I'm just gonna skip ahead a few slides, sorry
Just to close with this thought
often
people say
when they hear
People actually trying to think critically about design that why is this person just trying to take down somebody else
Why don't they just go off and do some good design work and show the world by doing good design work?
I mean
There's this impression that if you think in a critical mode that you're basically a crank right you're singing around taking
Taking pleasure on other people's failures actually think
you know to some extent that might be true for some critics, but on the whole I think criticism is actually a
contribution to
Any art form and it can particularly benefit ours. I actually believe that
criticism and thoughtful writing these are inherently optimistic modes of thinking because they imagine a better world and
I
believe that if we all try to embrace this and and and ask for it and push for it that it's going to help get
us as a
Profession as a craft to another level of success and credibility, so thank you so much for having me
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