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I’m one of the “straddle generation” of designers who have felt the full impact of Steve Jobs in our work and life because we launched our careers during the pre-Macintosh era. I entered the profession of design in 1988 when the tools of my trade included X-acto blades, waxers, and spray mount. In order to do my work in that era, I had to be sitting at a drafting table in a fully equipped design studio. Now I do my work on an iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro, and I do it wherever I please. Oh, and I listen to my music, watch movies, and stay in touch with the world around me using all of those devices too. Steve Jobs engineered this work and life style transformation. It’s increasingly rare that a single person can have this type of effect in our fragmented modern culture, and it’s a poignant moment to reflect on a figure whose vision, drive and influence has fundamentally shaped my professional life.
Jobs’ influence stretches far beyond the “doing” of design—the devices and tools that help us do our job. His elevation of design as a central strategic component of business has opened a seat at the corporate table for designers of all disciplines. While we still face a tall challenge in making the case for the value of design in the business setting, Apple—led by Jobs—has become the case study that we’ve always lacked. Now the C-suite demands to “be like Apple,” and they know that designers are the ones to make that happen.
I must admit, my heart skipped a beat when I clicked on the AIGA board of directors web page this morning and saw my name and pic next to the word “President.” Despite this minor cardiac episode, I am thrilled and humbled beyond belief to be assuming the position of National President of AIGA, the professional association for design. After years of involvement with AIGA at the local and national levels, this is an organization that has meant a tremendous amount to me personally and professionally, and I am fully aware of the central place it occupies in the design community. While I struggled at first with the decision to accept this position, it was the experience I’ve had writing this blog and exploring the new ways designers are (and should be) working that illuminated for me the immense opportunity present with AIGA. With more than 22,000 members in 66 local chapters, AIGA is the largest design organization in the country (and growing), and as it approaches its centennial in 2014 with a solid fiscal foundation, it is also the oldest and strongest.
Despite these undeniable assets, AIGA as an institution is a macrocosm of the professional experience many designers are currently facing. Filled with creativity, energy, intelligence, and potential, AIGA must find a way to adapt to an environment that is evolving before our very eyes. Unless it remains relevant to designers and to the broader community AIGA will fizzle and fade. It is this challenge—and massive opportunity—that fuels me as I look ahead over the next two years.
I want to pay special respect to the outgoing AIGA board members during this transition, your leadership has been exemplary. To outgoing president Debbie Millman, I am in awe of your energy and passion—you are a gift to our community. To the incoming and returning board, chapter leadership, and national office staff, I am eager to collaborate with you as we seize this amazing opportunity!
Below is an excerpt from the comments I made at the AIGA Leadership Retreat in Minneapolis last month.
“This is an amazing time to be a designer. The pace of change in business, and culture is blinding, but for people with the right skills and creativity and vision, that wild change can mean an awesome opportunity to change the world around us. Designers have that skill, creativity and vision. But we cannot assume that we can seize this opportunity by working in the same way we have always worked. This is true as we build our individual careers and design practices but it’s also true as we build AIGA as an organization. With AIGA approaching its 100th anniversary we have a rare opportunity—actually I’m going to rephrase that—we have an imperative to rethink what AIGA can be in this new and exciting time. To reconnect with our traditional audiences, but also to envision what new audiences we can attract. And to reposition AIGA to be a relevant, essential, and central player in this amazing time.
The work we’ve done in the last few days has been incredible but this…is the easy part. The challenge comes Monday morning when we start making these ideas happen on the ground in our communities. I am so psyched to take on that challenge with you all. Let’s have a blast together tonight, and then let’s get to work and make this thing happen.”
I’ve had the pleasure over the last year to contribute to the excellent Parse blog published by F&W. My posts on Parse tend to be a bit different than here on Merge—more instructional and journalistic, less personal and opinionated. I’ve covered a lot of rich territory on these posts from business planning to licensing, to intellectual property. My latest post examines strong business categories for startup businesses.
Here are the slides from my presentation at AIGA Minnesota Luncheons: Solopreneurs on June 24.
The books I suggested during my presentation were:
The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
(Guy is also a great Twitter follow)
Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky
Some additional links from the talk:
University of St. Thomas Small Business development Center
SCORE
WomenVenture
On June 19 I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion and/or open critique of web-based typography at FontConf, the unconference for web fonts and @fontface. I was joined by designers Nick Zdon, Wendy Ruyle, Maria Besonen, and David Molanphy to discuss current trends, opportunities and challenges with designing type for the web. I asked each panelist to submit a list of links for us to view and discuss during in a variety of categories:
- Feature type (logos, headlines, titles, or any case where type is used as the signature visual element),
- Motion/movement/animation
- Mobile devices (what are the unique challenges and opportunities here…and who is doing a good job of tackling them?)
- Social media (this is an environment where a lot of content needs to come together on the fly…who is succeeding? Can we look beyond the “mainstream” networks and examine some emerging or fringe networks?)
- Information Graphics (with the tidal wave of information on the web, who is doing a great job of graphically presenting raw info? GOOD magazine is a starting point…who else?)
- Blog-ware (WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, etc. all offer built-in templates with a variety of visual themes…most of them suck, but who is rising above?)
- Sites and blogs that discuss typography
- Foundries that are doing great work
Here are the links they sent in, as well as more info about each of the panelists: Read the rest of this entry »
I met designer Keenan Cummings recently at the SVA MFA Interaction Design Dot Dot Dot event and we’ve carried on an email dialogue since then. We both have a connection to the Johnson & Johnson Global Strategic Design Office, but our conversation has quickly jumped beyond that common ground and into some really intriguing ideas about how and why designers work the way we do. The conversation began with a post Keenan published on his Field Study blog entitled “Maintaining Inexperience” in which he writes “some work environments have become expert at learning and repeating unoriginal, decontextualized solutions called precedent (‘This is the way it’s always been done…’).” In his post Keenan ponders how designers can stay fresh despite the relentless pressure to crank out solutions in an efficient manner. I found his thinking to be in parallel with my own thoughts about how we as designers run our businesses—that too often we find ourselves on “autopilot,” not really understanding why we are working within a certain model.
You can find Keenan’s “Maintaining Inexperience” post on Field Study by clicking here. And below is an extension of our dialogue on the topic. Read the rest of this entry »
“Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those?”
I tend to write mostly about the “micro” of the entrepreneurial experience here on Merge, but Tom Friedman has that amazing ability to sum up the “macro” in such an engaging and concise way that he frequently entices me to take a few steps back and try to see the big picture. Such was the case with his column from Sunday, April 3 in which he calls for a loosening of immigration policies as a way to attract the “high-IQ risk-takers” who have fueled American innovation in the past. Friedman—who preaches eloquently that the U.S. should stop swimming against the current of globalization—points out that a unique combination of factors, including “our vibrant and meritocratic university system,” has historically drawn many of the best and brightest to the U.S. Now, he suggests, we are losing that “differentiated edge in attracting and enabling the world’s biggest mass of smart, creative risk-takers.” Read the rest of this entry »
What a year it has been! With a historically rotten economy, the design industry has taken a serious beating, leaving us all looking around to see who is still standing. The main theme of Merge is the idea that, in order to survive and thrive, designers must begin to look beyond the “client service” business model and explore ways to market their creative ideas in a more direct way. 2009 has certainly underscored the relevance of this point of view.
In reflecting on the year, five stories have emerged as central to the design and entrepreneurship convergence, for a variety of reasons. Some are simply emblematic of the unique time we are in, while others may offer a glimpse into the future for designers and creative professionals. Here they are (in no particular order):
1. iPhone App Development and the iTunes App Store
According to the website GigaOm, roughly $2.4 billion were spent on iPhone Apps in 2009. That’s a staggering number for a tech category that basically did not even exist a couple years ago. The good news is that this has emerged as an area in which a wide range of designers, web developers and creative professionals have been able to bring their product ideas directly to the consumer—I’ve written frequently about this phenomenon on Merge and profiled a couple of App developers with roots in the design world.
While the media has focused on the relative handful of “kitchen table” developers who hit the jackpot with app releases in the early months of the “app bubble,” I think the real story here is the iPhone Developer Program—the back-end machine that Apple has built to facilitate the process of development, sales, and distribution of these products. Without fail, when I ask would-be entrepreneurs what holds them back from pursuing a business idea, the complications—and expenses—related to the supply chain are cited as primary reasons. With the iPhone Developer Program, which feeds into the iTunes App Store, this complication has been greatly simplified.
Ironically, I see synergy between the Apple case study and other design-friendly online marketplaces, like Etsy or Mohawk Paper’s Felt & Wire Shop. My hope is that the success of these programs will inspire similar marketplace opportunities in other categories, hence making it easier for more designers to bring their ideas directly to the consumer.
Here are links to some of the posts I’ve written on this topic in 2009:
Discussing iPhone Apps with Terry Anderson
HartungKemp Gets Wasted
iPhone App Development Primer from The Nerdery
2. Necessity Entrepreneurs
Not all entrepreneurs are the same. While the classic entrepreneur is struck with that brilliant “aha” idea, and methodically develops it into a thriving business, many people starting new businesses today are doing so because they lost their job and have slim prospects for finding a new one. With the creative and design industries being particularly hard hit in this recession, one of the lasting stories from 2009 will undoubtedly be the high number of creative professionals who have opted to pursue an entrepreneurial venture rather than competing for the few remaining job openings.
While many of these new ventures will be built on the tried and true client service model, my hope is that we will see more products and services brought directly to the consumer by people with backgrounds in design, hence bringing the design sensibility and methodology to the process of building a new business.
Here’s a link to a post I wrote earlier this year about this topic:
The New Breed of Necessity Entrepreneurs
3. Service Design (or whatever you call it)
“Suddenly there is a whole population of designers trying to use their skills to have an impact on the world around them.” This is how Bill Drenttel of Winterhouse Institute and Design/Change Observer introduced the Aspen Design Summit in November. I would only argue with the “suddenly” part—in fact, I think designers have a deep heritage of working to make the world around them a better place dating back to the Bauhaus, so perhaps after decades of immersing in a relatively one-dimensional way of working, we are rediscovering how to apply our skills for a greater good.
The distinct practice of Service Design is more established in Europe than in the U.S., a result, in part, of the support and funding given to the design professions by many European governments. In fact, the term itself is not very common here—we might call it “design thinking,” “social impact design,” or even “new design.” While a single definition of Service Design is difficult to pin down, a common principle is that inter-disciplinary teams of professionals are using the methodology of design to engage in complex social problems like healthcare, poverty, and hunger.
2009 was filled with promising examples of designers putting their skills to work on such issues, as well as commenting and writing about it. Bookshelves were filled with new volumes by design gurus like Tim Brown of IDEO and Nathan Shedroff of CCA. INDEX presented their prestigious design award to Kiva, an institution that, seemingly, has nothing to do with design, provoking us all to rethink the parameters of our practice. And the Aspen Design Summit itself brought designers, policy makers, educators, and institutional leaders together for a vigorous exercise in design with a social impact emphasis.
My hope is quite simply that this trend continues, and that these exercises begin to spawn some meaningful success stories.
Here are links to some of the posts I’ve written on this topic in 2009:
Hillary Cottam and Participle
INDEX Announces a Surprising Winner
Continuing the Conversation About Service Design
4. Alternative Funding for New Business Ventures
Access to a relatively small amount of seed money can completely change the complexion of a startup business plan. As little as a few thousand dollars can allow a designer/entrepreneur to produce a run of prototypes or conduct valuable user testing. But not everyone can reach into their pockets and find that kind of cash, and traditional sources of funding like small business loans are much more difficult to come by than they were in better economic times.
That’s why the emergence of alternative sources of startup funding is such an important story right now. I’ve written several times about this in 2009 and I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities it offers. Microfinancing (also known as peer-to-peer lending), a model similar to the one used by Kiva where individual donors connect with individual entrepreneurs in an online venue, offers one way that designers can get that initial boost for their startup idea.
My hope is that alternative funding sources like microfinancing will continue to mature into a viable and stable option in the year ahead—and that more designers will take advantage of it.
Here are links to a couple of the posts I’ve written on this topic in 2009:
Microfinancing: A Model that can Work for Designers?
Peer-to-Peer Lending and Other Funding News
5. The Online Social Media Wave
Creative professionals have, for the most part, been early adopters to the online social media wave, and many of us have found ways to use it to enhance our business. This is a trend that has evolved at an explosive pace over the last few years—as evidenced by the recent story that Facebook overtook Google as the most-visited website in the U.S. on Christmas Day this year—and I don’t see it slowing down any time soon. While many of us have tired of the Facebook routine, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other online venues each provide distinct and unique ways to connect and interact.
One of the reasons I cite for designers not finding as much success as they should as entrepreneurs is that our professional networks are too narrow, and my view is that online social media provides a remarkable way to expand these networks and connect with the people who can help small businesses grow. My hope is that designers and creative professionals will continue to populate this online world (or to dive in right away if they haven’t already done so) and be involved in the continuing evolution of it.
Here’s a link to an earlier post on this topic:
Social Media 101
It’s always difficult to predict which topics will generate the most interest on Merge. I would have never guessed, for instance, that after roughly nine months online, the most popular post by a long shot would be one that I wrote shortly after launching this blog, entitled Microfinancing. A model that can work for designers?. Even more interesting to me is to follow which posts generate the most reader commentary. My post last week about Tom Friedman’s New York Times column from December 13 (Tom Friedman’s 12/13 NYTimes Column: Why it Matters to Designers) takes that prize. Friedman’s story about how market demands—and opportunities—have impacted his friend’s marketing business clearly resonated with the Merge audience.
Knowing that most readers don’t revisit blog posts to follow the commentary, and because many of the reader comments from this post expanded the theme I was writing about, I want to take a moment to recap some of what I’ve heard in the week since the Friedman post.
Carl Tully made a thoughtful contribution from the architecture world: “Interesting from the perspective of a large scale architectural design practice. The urgency to reinvent the way we work, design, communicate is upon us. Will high quality high value design survive? Current design practices cannot support a sustainable business model based on the fees that are currently winning the work.”
Michael Ratcliff echoed the themes of my post, “My practice as a designer is profoundly changing, and not for the better. Because of the tools we have available, the speed and ease I can create things is remarkable. The downside is that clients are not wanting to pay for services rendered, or they will but at a significantly lower rate.” He goes on, “The genie is out of the bottle and we will never be able to go back to the old [way of working]. Rather than being all gloom and doom, embrace the changes and move forward, or get out of the way.”
Jim Finnegan added some historical perspective with a comment posted to the Merge Facebook group, “It seems to be an ever evolving theme in the graphic design industry. I saw it in typesetting, photography, and now in creative services and design. Fear not. The real future of the creative mind is what you have been discussing in Merge.”
Ironically, a short article entitled Good Enough is the New Great in the NY Times’ Sunday Magazine “Year in Ideas” issue from 12/13, caught my attention as further evidence of the ripple effect of free and low-cost online tools on the industries they serve. The article examines how the nosediving of our quality standards as media consumers has paralleled the availability of these new tools. “High-definition televisions have turned every living room into a home cinema, yet millions of us choose to watch small, blurry videos on our computers and our mobile devices. Cameras capture images in a dozen megapixels, yet Flickr is filled with snapshots taken with phone cameras that we can neither focus nor zoom.” The article refers to research conducted by Jonathan Berger, a music professor at Stanford, who polled his college-aged students over a six year period on whether they preferred music played from a high-quality CD, or lower-quality digital MP3 files commonly used on iPods. Each year more students said they preferred the lower quality audio. “To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great.”
This story gives us a glimpse into what the next generation of consumers will respond to. One wonders if we are poised for a pendulum swing.
Well, best laid plans…
I had intended to have a steady stream of Tweets and posts from Aspen this week, but a request was made upon the opening of the Summit that attendees not broadcast the proceedings while they are happening. I’ve chosen to respect this request.
Suffice it to say, this has been an inspiring event—filled with amazing ideas, conversations, connections, and more than a little drama. There will be a great deal of reporting in the days and weeks to come and I will add my voice to that chorus, but for now I will leave it at that.
More to come.
