Category: living

Always be creating value – Or my evolving role as design director in a start-up.

        

I have the best, and scariest, job in the world. When I’m doing my job right, everyone else is busy and I have nothing to do. And this isn’t to say there’s nothing to be done, I just haven’t discovered the next design project yet. My job is to insure everyone else is productive & happy, before I worry about myself. My job is to put my self out of a job. And then repeat that process over and over again. As we approach the holiday season, there’s a lot of change in our office. Like physically: we’re moving furniture to accommodate another 60 friends. And […]

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Insourcing & leading a creative team

    

We’ve had a brief pause lately to focus back on our team & what our strategy for growth is. The “design team” at SPARC has been in existence over 3 years now, with me learning to lead while building the team from the ground up. It’s been the most rewarding experience of my professional career to be able to foster such a unique group of creatives and facilitate achieving results. As we’ve grown, there has always been a question of scale – how big do we let the team get? We’ve gone from three to as many as 14. During this process of growth we’ve […]

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Understanding the Financial Return of Design

   

I believe one of the hardest issues as a “designer” is proving that what you do has tangible value to a business. That the time and extra expense of designing a product or user-experience returns financially. Smart companies & consumers recognize this. Simple quality over cost result: as a business you want long-term results, as a consumer you want an experience or product that works beautifully. However in a cost-conscious, business driven mindset, it’s difficult to ascertain the short-term goals of design sometimes.  Especially in the era of software start-ups & tight timelines. This recent article in HBR has got me thinking […]

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Basecamp archeology

  

So we use basecamp A LOT or internal design communication, and cataloguing the random ideas that make life amazing. We use basecamp so much we’ve created around 212 projects in a little over 24 months. A few of the better basecamp projects include titles such as: Brad’s really bad Venture ideas Captains log DayCareForSmartPeople.com Sparc Skunkworks #EvenYourKidsThinkYourDumb Had a co-worker heading out to my old stomping ground of the South Bay of Los Angeles. Decided to make him a checklist in Basecamp of bars to visit. I give you “Where should Andrew drink in LA“. Hermosa Beach – best bet. […]

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Digging out of my own artistic mess!

  

There are few breaks in life as a parent, but i’m currently enjoying a short one as Heidi & Naish are up North in the wilds of Minnesota. Since’s Naish birth, my home office (studio?) has become a dumping ground of bills, broken electronics, unread magazines, and anything else that comes along. While it’s gathered a very nice “patina” of artistic clutter, it’s also just becoming an unworkable, disorganized craphole. So much so, that my 5AM wake-ups to “work” usually just involve trying to find space to put a cup of coffee down.

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The career of a modern designer.

      

Sitting in a kick-off meeting, little tedious, sometimes steals your energy. Simultaneously reading email, IMing, listening to the client, giving feedback. Occasionally thinking how lucky I am to be in this room, in this conversation, & what/who we’re designing the software we’re creating. Don Draper now builds software for a living. Clicking through the email subscriptions and discovering a conversation about why they’re doing software vs. advertising. nice. These are the small points of validation when you think your life/career works more like a series of winding rivers, and less like a decision. http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025950/why-i-left-advertising-to-become-a-software-designer There are some great gems in […]

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Balancing what’s important

  

Here’s to the big changes that fundamentally make you shift your life and try to balance what’s important. With the arrival of the little man and some down time for work, it’s been hard to focus on any one thing (besides sleep), but taking the writing in my head and trying to get it somewhere has always been therapeutic. Cheesy dad stuff, but looking at this little guy really does put everything quickly into perspective. Call it “the shit that matters vs. the noise”, but it’s finally time in life to be a little introspective about the last 6 years […]

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SPARC520 goes public TechCrunch (or deep thoughts on collaboration in design)

   

This last year at SPARC has been a pretty trans-formative experience for me. As someone who is use to designing everything, to a role now where I lead others and offer guidance towards how the design should work. It hasn’t been an easy transition – learning to delegate and learning how to improve communication to other designers. Not a new experience, but much more of it that I’d previously had. The other challenge is “what am I creating”. The emphasis on “I”; good designers have to be a little selfish and a little passionate. It’s in our nature and to […]

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Hound/Lab beer labels

    

Started brewing my own craft beer the past year – excellent wintertime habit. Some of it’s even pretty palatable. My favorite part of the process is creating the labels. First batch I ever did, my dog Tobey got ahold of & started chewing on the yeast packet… the last step in the brew day. Hence the beer was named Tobey Drool. I miss that part of my former life that allowed for creative freedom, so I’ve been entertaining myself with the labels and fictitious brand: Hound/Lab beer.  

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Design vs Organizing

   

New habit: try and read an interesting design article with lunch.  Site like Ted.com, fastcompany.com or Good.is have great conent, and are not always conventionally about design. Came across this interview with James Victore yesterday. Points such as work is work – get it done and get out, and using traditional sketching methods were interesting. But what really resonated was his argument of Design vs. Organizing. In his context, I’m a terific Organizer. It’s what I do 90% of my professional career as a “designer”. I take information and “organize” it into a layout, or a webpage, or a hierarchy […]

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