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Poster design by @DavidAirey
Once again the Twitter-sphere is crackling over a controversial spec work story—this time originating from a somewhat surprising source: the Obama election campaign. The campaign posted a call for “poster submissions from artists across the country illustrating why we support President Obama’s plan to create jobs now, and why we’ll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years.” The irony here is rich.
Clearly this is an ethical misstep by the Obama campaign, but one that seems borne from ignorance rather than malice. As with other recent examples like the Huffington Post logo competition, I tend to favor the rhetoric of opportunity rather than the rhetoric of shame. I would encourage the campaign to view this moment as an opportunity to connect with an important constituency—the community of professional designers—and engage in a healthy dialogue about the value of design and the importance of strong, mutually beneficial professional relationships (not to mention paying jobs). Likewise, designers should seize the opportunity to sharpen our articulation of the value of what we do and to reconnect with our own networks using this as a living case study.
AIGA has a clear position on the issue of spec work that states that professional designers should be compensated fairly for their work. However, I also believe that designers must be careful to focus on the value of design rather than getting distracted by a debate about the evils of crowdsourcing and social media. These forces are here to stay, and this is a battle we will never win.
The Alabama Design Summit in Birmingham last week brought together designers and local community leaders for a three day workshop to explore the power of design to address complex social problems. The designers each represented local AIGA chapters from around the country and were attending the Summit as part of a new AIGA program called Design for Good which will officially launch in October at the AIGA Pivot conference in Phoenix. Design for Good will activate the members of AIGA as catalysts for social change by linking them to a national network of tools and resources.
Thanks to my friends Wendy Ruyle and Diana Lillicrap at 5by5 Design for inviting me to guest-blog on their site—check out my post here for more on Birmingham and Design for Good. And for more from Birmingham, here’s a link to the Flickr site for the Summit.
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.”
Nobody stages a design conference like AIGA, and the recent Gain Conference on Design and Business in New York City was no exception. With the mesmerizing MoMA design curator, Paola Antonelli as moderator and an A-list of talent parading across the stage, the design cred of this event was as towering as the nearby Empire State Building—a fitting capstone to a week that was bursting with design events in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions the same cannot be said about the business side of this dual-themed, bi-annual gathering. With the tagline “Design (Re)Invents,” my hope was that designers would tell their transformational business tales with a level of detail, depth, and openness that would begin to illuminate the path forward for their peers. Instead, the content and dialogue focused mostly on creative inspiration and outcomes.
Larry Keeley of the consultancy Doblin, was a refreshing exception when he uttered the most essential line of the conference for me, “clients always disappoint,” during his engaging talk entitled Design That Matters: Finding Fresh Frontiers. “The highest, best use of design is not design products per se but embedding (design) into a bigger challenge,” Keeley continued. But this explicit connection between design inspiration and business goals was rare at Gain. While Antonelli’s fluency with the language of design was breathtaking (especially in her awesome Italian accent), the same cannot be said for her understanding of the business world; at one point having to ask Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi to clarify the meaning of the term “ROI.” Several speakers seemed eager to push their post-presentation Q&A with Antonelli in a substantive business direction, but she was either unable or uninterested in taking the bait.
For me, the highlight of the conference came during the fast-paced “(Re)Invention Ten,” during which ten designers were given two minutes each to tell their story of transforming their design business. Half of the ten actually delivered on the premise with stories that struck the balance between inspiration and content that I wish would have been present throughout the conference. Here’s a highlight reel of those entrepreneurial “(Re)Invention Five.”
Bill Grant, The Store at Grant Design Collaborative
I wrote about The Store at Grant Design Collaborative in a Merge post in August of 2009. The Store, which was the result of a series of business set-backs (a lost tenant, and sluggish client work), continues to thrive and grow in surprising and impressive ways. Most interesting to me is the effect this visionary project appears to be having on the traditional GDC business.
Julie Hirschfeld, Adeline Adeline
A New York based designer with an impressive history working with top brands like VH1, Nike, and Conde Nast, Julie Hirschfeld noticed a hole in the market for bike shops: a retail experience that appeals to women (and those of us not interested in the off-putting blend of macho-hipster-arrogance that is so common in that category). The result: Adeline Adeline, a bicycle sales, service, and accessories boutique in TriBeCa. Here’s a link to a Well+GoodNYC post about the shop.
Zia Khan, Kenari
Founder and principal of Atlanta-based creative agency, Lucid Partners, Zia Khan has ventured into unknown, but extremely relevant, territory with the Kenari Neighborhood Food System. The Kenari vision combines small farms based in suburban neighborhoods, with a support network that includes retail locations and commercial community kitchens. The pilot program for Kenari is underway in Roswell, Georgia.
Laura Shore, Mohawk Fine Paper’s Pinhole Press
What does a business do when their product becomes optional? With the traditional market for fine papers evaporating (who actually prints their annual report any more?), Mohawk has been forced to encounter this daunting reality. With the launch of Pinhole Press, their new online service for upscale, design-sensitive, on-demand photo books and postcards, Mohawk is now a player in this new booming category.
Cliff Sloan, Phil & Co
After a successful career leading creative agencies, Cliff Sloan found himself craving the meaning and passion that can be so evasive for mid-career designers. Founded in 2008, Phil & Co specializes in bringing together non-profits in need of visibility and support, with businesses looking to fulfill their mission to give back to the community.
Later this week I’ll have the pleasure of participating in the Aspen Design Summit, an interdisciplinary workshop which aspires to utilize the power of design to help solve large social problems. The unique format of this conference will split the 70 attendees—with backgrounds ranging from design to healthcare to public policy—into five “studios,” each of which will be asked to develop innovative solutions around a specific social problem.
The Summit, sponsored by AIGA and Winterhouse Institute with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, is the offspring of the original International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). IDCA was founded in 1951 by many of America’s rising stars on the graphic design scene, and sought to provide a forum for discussion on design. In 2005, AIGA took over the programming of the event and has transformed it into the current form.
The five “problems” being addressed at this year’s Summit are:
National Design Center for Rural Poverty Programs
UNICEF Education Programs
CDC Public Health Programs for Older Adults
Mayo Clinic Rural Health Program
Sustainable Food Innovation
Click here to read more about these initiatives.
I see the Summit as an innovative approach to service design, a topic that has been featured frequently here on Merge (including this September 1 post). I’ve written extensively about the business benefits that designers can find by exploring this new—and intensely collaborative—way of working, but I’m also hearing from many designers who talk about their personal drive to find a more meaningful way to use their skills.
I will be blogging and tweeting frequently from Aspen—most likely eschewing my typical format for a more immediate and off-the-cuff approach. If you’re not following my tweets, you can do so by clicking here.
I had the pleasure of presenting a series of workshops on design and entrepreneurship last weekend at AIGA Minnesota’s Design Camp. Held on the shores of Gull Lake in central Minnesota, Design Camp is a hidden gem among design conferences featuring internationally known speakers and a wide range of breakout content. Special thanks to AIGA MN for the invitation and the hospitality.
I always begin my workshop sessions by asking attendees what their reasons are for not pursuing a great business idea, and inevitably the top three are: money, time, and know-how. Essentially what I’m hearing is that the process is simply too daunting and complicated. So, I was intrigued and excited when Laura Shore, Senior VP of Communications and Innovation Strategy at Mohawk Fine Paper sent me an email announcing the launch of a new Mohawk project called the Felt & Wire Shop. Felt & Wire is a curated online marketplace showcasing products designed mostly by communication designers.
Moonbeam Clock by Pie Bird Press
The products on Felt & Wire all have a paper connection of some sort (not surprisingly), but the range is impressive. Stationery and gift cards, invitations, wrapping paper, posters, prints, and calendars by some of the top names in communication design: AdamsMorioka, Chen Design, and Grant Design Collaborative among many others. Some of my favorite pieces are from Pie Bird Press in Albany, CA, which features bold, graphic imagery with a blend of pop art sass and retro silkscreen charm.
Importantly, the submission and review process is streamlined and user-friendly. A simple online upload of jpegs and/or video and some background info and designers are one big step closer to bringing their ideas to market.
While curated online marketplaces for gift items are not a new phenomenon (Etsy, which launched in 2005, is one of the most prominent), Felt & Wire is unique in its clear focus on communication designers. I see a strong correlation between the Felt & Wire Shop and the machine that Apple has developed for the iPhone app development process. In both cases, the part of business development that intimidates most designers becomes so simple that it’s almost a non-issue. This highlights a big need—and opportunity—in the area of designer-driven entrepreneurship: I would love to see more venues like Felt & Wire that would allow designers working in other media to have this same speedy route to market. Along this line, I hope Mohawk will recognize how wide open this space is right now and expand the vision for Felt & Wire (nudge, nudge, Laura).
For those of you heading to Memphis this weekend for the AIGA Make/Think conference, check out the Felt & Wire booth. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from an email exchange Laura Shore and I had discussing the launch of Felt & Wire.
How did the idea for the Felt & Wire Shop come about?
Two years ago, I visited the New York Stationery Show for the first time and was blown away by the smaller, more creative booths. First of all, the work was fantastic. Second, as we spoke with exhibitors it was clear that many were using our paper for their products. How could we find a way to capture that energy and recommunicate it back out to the world? How could we help promote these micro-enterprises through our network of connections? As the idea percolated down, I started thinking of all the cool things I’ve received over the years from designers we’ve worked with. Every graphic designer I know is a closet product designer. They just don’t have a means of distributing their products. The retail market for someone in manufacturing and communications design seems byzantine. Quantities are tiny. I’ve never figured out how anyone could make money at it!
About that time I got an e-mail from Josh Chen, a great designer in San Francisco, who was selling product on a marketplace site. I discovered Etsy and started thinking about ways to connect the dots.
Were there models out there that you were emulating?
There are a number of marketplace sites out there that we took hints from.
How are products chosen to be in the shop?
The site is curated by a panel who manage the balance of content and also ensure that all the work meets our high standards. You sign up on the site and submit your candidates. It’s very straightforward and intuitive. We want this to be a place where the press comes to see what’s best in paper-based design. And where the best designers will feel comfortable showing their work.
What about the type of products you’ll accept—is it just paper-driven?
We’ll consider anything that’s paper driven—or services that support paper-driven design. I’m still looking for lampshades, wallpaper!
Are there any sales trends you’ve been able to spot so far?
Still way too soon to tell but if my credit card is any indication, I think it will do very well.
What are the long term goals for the site?
Every day we have new ideas. We’re working on ways to support AIGA chapters and other non-profit design-driven organizations. We’d also like to find ways to connect designers to digital printers so that they don’t have to inventory everything they sell. I would like see posters and prints from my design heroes (and heroines). And if designers are true to form, I will be continually amazed by what product ideas come forward as candidates.
It seems like Mohawk may be positioning itself as a leader in designer-driven entrepreneurship, am I right?
We want to be a leader in a number of areas. I agree with you, there’s a huge void here!
I had the pleasure of speaking at the launch of the AIGA Minnesota MNtor Program on Monday night, where roughly 40 designer mentors and mentees began (at least) a 4-month process of sharing experiences and helping each other make sense out of the design profession. I had participated as a mentor in two previous incarnations of this program, and have built lasting relationships with the mentees I met then.
I have always seen the design profession as having a particularly strong and unique culture of mentorship—even without the structure of an excellent program like this one. There is an unspoken understanding among designers that we work in a young, growing profession and that giving entry-level designers the best possible chance at a successful career will ultimately make our profession stronger—benefiting us all in the long run.
But the mentoring relationship is not just a “top down” contract—the best relationships will have an equal exchange in both directions, and benefit both parties. Now more than ever, we all—regardless of where we are in our career—need to be expanding our networks. Indeed, with the rapid pace of technological evolution, including new opportunities/challenges in social media, one could make the case that the mentor has as much to learn from the mentee as the other way around.
So how does mentorship relate to entrepreneurship? The same principals I describe above apply to designers becoming entrepreneurs. We need to seek out key people who have skills and knowledge that we don’t yet have—in finances, strategy, operations—in order to build truly viable businesses (that’s what Merge is all about).
Incidentally, AIGA—if you’re not aware of it—is the largest association of design professionals in the country, with more than 20,000 members in more than 50 local chapters, including AIGA Minnesota, one of the largest and most active chapters. I’ve found AIGA to be a remarkable vehicle for building my professional network and for growing as a designer. Special thanks to Seth Johnson and the MNtor committee for including me in this great event!
Two summers ago I attended the AIGA/Harvard Business School program, Business Perspectives for Design Leaders (which has since relocated to Yale and, sadly, was canceled this year; all indications are that it will return in 2010). One of the great takeaways from this wildly enriching experience was the insight we were given into those “other” aspects of running a business. Beyond branding, marketing, and possibly product development, most of us in attendance had only the vaguest idea what it took to run a large business. We designers tend to have an inflated view of how important our contribution is to the overall success of a business, but at HBS we were exposed to areas like operations (ie: the efficiency of a factory), finances, and even corporate ethics in an illuminating—and sometimes humbling—way.
So I was pleased to read Enric Gili Fort’s blog post on the Context Response blog entitled, And the award goes to… the supply chain guy. Enric, a design strategist based in Silicon Valley, uses Apple, one of our favorite case studies for the value of design, as Exhibit A for a strong supply chain. He makes the case that Apple’s COO Tim Cook has been as instrumental to their recent success as the much-heralded design team.
For me, this post connects to the primary question I am asking on Merge, “Why are there so few examples of successful ventures launched by designers and creative professionals?” There are many answers to this complex query, but one of them is certainly our ignorance about these “other” critical aspects of running a business. Through Enric’s post we see how important it can be for designers to collaborate with smart people in other areas of business in building complex businesses.
I just had lunch with my friend Mark Thomas, with whom I’ve been having an ongoing conversation about design, academia, backyard playground sets, and other important things. Mark is a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Minnesota, studying the biology of addiction—a field which, I’ve come to learn, is largely void of design as most of us understand it. Today we were discussing design education and Mark asked what exactly a student will study in a design program. I explained the various components of a foundational design program: 2D, 3D, color theory, typography, design systems, etc. (a list of words that apparently don’t find their way into Mark’s impressive vocabulary very often), and then I mentioned the significantly less tangible concept of empathy. The ability to identify with the audience or user of your design which is a critical skill for a designer, but is so hard to define, and even harder to teach and integrate into a curricula.
So, it was one of those freaky cases of synchronicity when I discovered later in the afternoon that AIGA.org was running that Ralph Caplan’s essay entitled, “The Empathetic Fallacy” as its lead item. Caplan is the great-uncle of design criticism, and I have fond memories of his lectures and articles over the years (for me, stretching back to the AIGA conference in San Antonio in 1989). “Empathy in design focuses on the user as a person, not just a consumer. And because it can be very difficult to imagine someone else’s needs, we try getting the necessary information directly,” Caplan explains.
I spend a lot of time (and pixels) on Merge explaining how many things designers DON’T know about entrepreneurship. But I also believe that one of the reasons great designers are also potentially great entrepreneurs is that we possess this mysterious ability to understand the needs of people who may be very different from ourselves. Moreso, we know how to connect with these people and deliver a message in a meaningful way. While there are a slew of mitigating factors involved, this happens to be an essential quality of being an entrepreneur as well: understanding a need and creating a solution.
Recently I was asked whether the focus of Merge is strictly on capitalistic entrepreneurship, or whether I view social entrepreneurship through the same lens. A look back at my posts on the work of Participle, The Better Project, Firebelly Design and others provide the answer to this question: I see very little distinction between these two categories. Both require designers to dramatically alter the way they do business, both require not just a brilliant idea but also careful planning, and both require money—whether the desired outcome is financial gain or purely social change.
On the “social change” side of things, Project M has popped up a few times in my Merge posts, and I have been meaning to contact M founder John Bielenberg to write a proper piece on this groundbreaking concept (Steven Heller interviewed John recently for AIGA Voice). I’ve had a fascination with Project M—the purpose of which is to inspire designers, film makers and artists to use their talent and creativity for the greater good of the world—since I first heard about it when John and I were on the AIGA board together five years ago. At that time Project M was just launching and I still remember the palpable sense of “holy shit, I can’t believe I’m really doing this…” in John’s voice as he talked about his vision. That quality of danger and even recklessness is integral to Project M and is borne out in the results of recent sessions: last year’s Iceland Design Blitz, and Buy A Meter from 2007.
Now I see that Project M will be partnering with Winterhouse this summer on a two-week program bringing twelve individuals together to create a design project of lasting value for a rural community (Project M has always had this intriguing element of reality television to it). Winterhouse is, of course, the design practice of Bill Drenttel and Jessica Helfand (who also serve as editors of a fairly well-known design blog, among various other endeavors). The Winterhouse Institute, established by the couple to focus on non-profit, self-initiated projects that support design education and social and political initiatives, recently received a $1.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to develop social impact programming across the design industry.
(Yes, you read that right…$1.5 million. More on that to come)
Despite having missions that seem to point in generally the same direction, I see a tension between the edgy, rebellious Project M and the stately, academic Winterhouse. I’m hopeful that this tension will make for exciting results this August. Regardless of the outcome, though, it’s undeniable that the partnership of Project M and Winterhouse brings together some of the truly progressive entrepreneurial thinkers in the design world.
Applications are due June 15 for the Project M/Winterhouse program, which will be held August 15-30 in Falls Village, Connecticut (do you think they’ll need an audition tape too, like Amazing Race?).
Here’s a clip of the Project M Iceland Design Blitz from 2008 in which participants express the double meaning of the Icelandic word ”ÓRÓI which has the double meaning of disturbance and wind chime or mobile:
