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Gary
Tim, you’re a User Experience Designer, or at least, that’s your title, which I feel is a lot different than a Print Designer. So, from somebody who actually does both, is that an accurate assessment, or am I way off base?
Tim
No, I really do think it’s quite different than what a typical Print Designer is. When I think about the user experience design process, to me it’s a discovery process based around the user in every part. If you think about the process, it’s kind of like a spiral, where you start off with some basic information about the user that you’ve been informed of and then you take this information, you design something and then you test it and so you start to move into this spiral and you repeat this process and as you get towards the center, your design becomes more coherent, concrete and it becomes more focused on the user’s need. I think that’s a perfect example but that example does have its flaws; one flaw I can say is, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the 2004 TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell where he talks about Howard Moskowitz and the reinvention of spaghetti sauce where Campbell, who makes Prego, came to him and it was like, behind when it comes to spaghetti sauce; we have this thin and we have thick, but at that time, no one knew that they wanted thick and chunky and so he basically did user experience design there where he plotted all this stuff and he found out that they didn’t have any thick and chunky, so he told them to make thick and chunky spaghetti sauce and to this day, thick and chunky spaghetti sauce is the number one selling sauce and I say that because with the user experience process, that spiral sometimes doesn’t allow you to see what the users don’t know what they want. If you think about it, before the iPhone came out, if you asked them what type of phone they wanted, they were talking about razor phone and a flip-phone. No one was talking about a smart-phone. So yes, I really do see the user experience design process being quite different than the print design process; there are things that are similar but to me it’s more of a scientific-type method thing.
Gary
Based on your education, the courses you’ve taken, projects you’ve done, exercises, whatever, what from that translates really well between User Experience, Interactive and Print Design? What would be the common thread between them all?
Tim
Repetition. And asking the question, why am I doing this? What’s your reason behind it? That’s something that you basically ask in every design process, whether you’re thinking about putting something on print or on paper, why are you putting this background color there? Are you trying to add depth to the composition? Why is this here? At work, literally, we have to write detailed information on why we are putting every object where we are putting and in some cases we have to show that this is where the industry has gone, or this is something that will increase the users’ participation in whatever the application that we’re creating, so those few things are the same thing throughout: everyone is asking questions and then, on a basic level, I’m a drawer, so I use sketchbooks and tracing paper. Even that in all of these design processes, starting from the beginning, it’s a really good tool and that once again uses repetition, because I will start with drawing something out. After drawing it out, I’d take some tracing paper and re-draw it until I get it to a point where I like it and then I’ll take it on a computer and start to create it there on the computer and then I will print it out, throw some tracing paper back on it; it’s that repetition and as you continue to refine it, you continue to get to a design you find that’s more pleasing to you, so yeah, I think that is the process that all three of these different design avenues use.
Gary
Let me see; so, even if the chasm between User Experience, Interactive and Print Design isn’t as big as I perceive it to be, there are differences. So, what skills are unique to UX and unique to Interactive Design that need to be instructed more to better prepare emerging Graphic Designers that’s currently missing from current design programs?
Tim
Emerging designers should get used to first defining the problem. And after they’ve defined the problem, you define the solution, or what you think the solution is and from there you should start to show how you got to that solution, so you want to show personas and tell why your personas are better than the other; you want to show wireframes and storyboards and prototypes and even within that, these things are really complicated and they’re really unique, expressly to the UX process. Wireframes need to convey messages about hierarchy and structure of information without creating subjective opinions about aesthetics. When that is laid out in black and white it allows you to come and literally see that, OK, this is the flow of the page, this is the flow of the information on the page and you can test for that. You can take this and you can cut it all up and you can tell your users to put this in a flow that you think would be appropriate. What would you do in this particular situation? How would you lay this page out? And that also can be done with Interaction Design. You can go and take something, create it, cut it up into different pieces to see how someone else would lay it out to see if that’s the way users are thinking. If you can have ninety-some people land it out the same way then you know, this is a good flow for the user, especially if it ends up being different than what you created but those basic things, especially as a UX Designer, that’s what employers look for. They look to see if you are defining the problem; they look for that in portfolios.
Actually, I had the opportunity to interview at Google and Google actually sends you to a Medium article and in that article, it literally breaks down the difference between just a regular design and a designer that really knows…a skilled designer that really knows what they’re doing and it talks about it’s the designer defining the problem. If the designer’s showing and talking about the work and the different methods they’re using, why these methods were better, or they’re showing their prototypes and showing how this prototype scaled down to the solution that they came up with, all these things are very important and they should be talking about it and actually in a classroom setting, I think we should start to teach students, from the beginning, to talk about these things. We should start from the beginning to say, what’s the problem? Why are you doing that and what are you thinking about a solution and then have them start going into that and start making them explain why they’ve made these choices and why is this the best choice and then within critique, having them to defend that because when I’m sitting there with that cross-functional team and I’ve got the owner of the product there, I’ve got somebody from budget define it and I have someone sitting there who’s from IT and I have a UX Researcher and me being a UX Designer: It can say easily that, OK, well this is not going to work; how you create it’s going to work within our platform.
Budgeting can say, this is not within the scope of what we are budgeted out and the Research Designer can say, we can’t even test this and you literally have to go and defend these different things and so if you have that primary method laid out, moving on to a career within Interaction Design or UX Design, it should be very easy from that point on. So I think if students start developing their portfolios in this structural way, they would be very successful from the jump. Expressly, that would put them ahead of the current students because in my opinion, the only teachers who are telling their students to do this are UX Professors and I say that because I actually studied up under a UX Professor, that was Patrick McNeil, at the University of Missouri St Louis.
Gary
OK. I have two follow-up questions to that. The shallow one, I’ll start there, is the idea of wireframes. I get this…when I’m having my students do wireframes, it’s really, really hard and I’m probably just doing it wrong, but it’s really hard to get students to look at wireframes as organizing content. They kinda treat them almost as thumbnails of what the website should look like. Maybe that’s just because they’re used to doing that. So, do you have any kind of suggestions how to maybe help make wireframes more design agnostic so they’re more…does my question make sense?
Tim
Yes, I definitely understand what you’re saying. So, you’re asking, how can we get students to start laying out or creating wireframes in a hierarchical structure? So, if it was me, what I would literally do is create a whole bunch of different information and I would tell them to lay this out in an order that makes sense and I would come around and I would re-organize it in a different order and have them to explain why theirs is better than mine. What are you doing here that makes sense? I put the title of my paragraph up under the actual information of the paragraph, so how are you telling me that’s not right? That’s what I would do. I would really challenge their thinking so that they can get out of the idea of…because we’re all taught how things should look. We think, we have a headline, it could be a sub-headline then we have information up under that. There could be a picture. So if we start to challenge the way that they think about that and start to think outside of that bubble, then you start to get creative layouts and so I would just do that black and white on paper, even to the point where I’ve got chunks of information cut out on a piece of paper and your task today here is to come and organize this in sixteen different ways that make logical sense.
Gary
OK. That’s a good one, I think, because I experimented this semester with Post-It Notes and that helped, because they looked at it like the path of information as opposed to a thumbnail of what it’s going to look like but I didn’t go into detail of headline…my wireframes were more like actual page flow, with the exercise that I was doing, because we haven’t done wireframes yet, but I think I’m going to have them approach the wireframe the way you just expressed it. So, the other question, based on how you’re describing UX, I guess, maybe, I don’t know how to frame the question but when I’m teaching my students…back when I did Print; all I do is Interactive and User Experience now, but when I was doing Print, if I was having them design, let’s say, a catalog, I actually used that same process; I had them wireframe out the flow; does this information need to go in this direction and so forth. I made the sketch out and then I was also like, OK, why are we doing this? What’s the theme, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve. So I’m kind of curious, maybe that’s just my approach, the way I did it, or what’s missing?
Tim
So, what is missing from the process is the user. So, that approach was good, but what happens when you add a persona? So, what if we say, we have Laura and Laura is 62. She has poor vision, so she needs things to be a little bit larger. How would Laura view this information? How will she flip through this page? What type of capitals could this be in? That’s a completely different way of framing it because now you have to think about the user who’s using it versus your own opinion about it, then your own thoughts about it. If you start throwing in personas and then have them, the story-board off those personas and think about the user, then you start getting completely different things. So yeah, we created a catalog but now, is this an AARP catalog where the target audience is older. If you start thinking about accessibility and individuals who have these different problems, how about a person who’s color-blind? How does that work? How are you going to lay colors in, across different pages, and make sure when they print out and look at them, and everything isn’t the same color or you have a big, huge saturated red on top of a saturated blue and you can’t read it.
Or if the user’s using a magnifying glass to see it, how is that laid out? And then let’s think about people who are dyslexic because individuals who are dyslexic, what normally happens, if they were creating something, they’re going to put a lot of leading in between the synthesis there and they do that because that helps them follow along, so it has nothing to do with the font: that’s totally how they would read it because they have problems jumping from sentence to sentence, so what happens is, by the time they get to the end of the row, they’d be on a different sentence altogether, so more leading in between there allows that user to actually read that paragraph better. And then if you think about dyslexic individuals, smaller chunks of information, so that would totally make your magazine look completely different than having very long articles.
Gary
That kinda gives me chills because literally today, I was flipping…I don’t remember, one of those listservs or whatever, one of those aggregate websites that put articles. There’s an article literally somebody just file a lawsuit against…in the State of Illinois, against three companies and the lawsuit was based on, I think it was the lawsuit was filed against Ace, KMart and I can’t remember the other on, but it was on behalf of blind people and so they were suing the…ADA, that these websites weren’t ADA compliant. And so that’s just something that we’re going to have to be cognizant of; I tell my students about it but I don’t beat it home because I say hey, this website’s worldwide. You can’t just ignore people with different types of usability disability issues, I love that, but the leading itself too, I didn’t know that the leading was one of the big contributors to somebody who’s dyslexic being able to more easily read…
Tim
You see, I’m a little bit dyslexic. I always remember in High School, taking tests and then the teacher was like, ten of these numbers are backwards, completely backwards. I remember working at Wendy’s and someone would come and their change would be three, twenty-five and I would give them two dollars and fifty three cents, or something like that, and I remember reading paragraphs and I’d literally have to have a piece of paper to hide the lines up under it because I would always end up on the next line or just completely lost, and so as I learned these things it was like, wow, I didn’t know doing these things I was either a little dyslexic and I did that, just out of behavior, because I need to get this information, I need it to read and I wanted to make sure that I had things right so it was a very profound moment for me and I really learned a lot here at my current job at Wells Fargo where we have people on staff and that is their job, to make sure that what we create is accessible to a larger audience.
Gary
Wow, that could be an entire episode! So, you have a compliance department for accessibility or whatever. Do they interact with…do they come in at the Design phase? Do they come at the Development phase? Are the Developers and Designers and the Accessibility experts all in the same room at the same time?
Tim
So, they normally try to touch every Designer before they actually touch a project and go through a little bit of accessibility training to explain the different things that you should and should not do and why and even have a small test, like which one of these is better, this or this? And after you choose it, if you were wrong or right, explaining why it is but in the process, they normally come in after it, so we’ve created the prototype, we’ve had it tested and now they come in to look at it and they have their test sheet and so with that they look through it and we have a pass or fail on different things, so we have a pass or fail with the colors and the way that we use them, a pass or fail with chunks of paragraphs and how they’re laid out and sometimes it’s explained which group of people wouldn’t be able to do this. If the screen is reversed out and the colors are changed because some people can’t see certain colors so we’ve literally seen screens where the individual had the background white and then…no, he had it yellow and then the text was this purple-like color, so that they could see it and it was magnifying;
you think about screen-readers and there are different types of screen-readers especially when you think about Braille and someone reading back from Braille, it’s for blind people; all those need to be accessible too and that becomes a completely different problem because when things are hidden on a page versus not hidden on a page, you run into huge issues and then if you think about individuals that can’t use their limbs so they use a breath, mouth-type deal and so they’re moving around on the screen with their tongue and their mouth; they’re using their lips to move this piece up and down and around and then they want to double-click on something, they blow into it, they click the button. And then blind people who can hear, they’re saying, read the screen and so it goes down and just start from the top of the screen and it’d be like “TimonthyHykes.com” and then it would read the menu: “Home, About, Thank You, Sign Up” and it’d read everything but also it reads the code information on the back of the photos and everything too, so you don’t have the alternative information there, it won’t say anything and then one thing that people don’t think about, if you think about links, if you have “click here for more", so, imagine reading that fifty million times on a page, “click here for more” so we have to be very thoughtful about the different links and how we word them. And have to be real thoughtful about them and in the finance industry, people love to sue for small things, so that’s the reason why they have these large teams and these departments here, available to help with individuals that have accessibility issues.
Gary
Well…and that’s the analogy I actually give to my students, except I use Capital One but same difference: you’re a global company. There are a lot of disabled people, when you go on a global scale, so you can’t ignore that customer base, you just can’t, because they are paying customers just as much as everybody else and you don’t want to lose out on that market share. Whether you do it for philanthropic reasons, because it’s the right thing to do, is almost irrelevant. You just can’t miss out on that market segment. One other thing that I wanted to ask about, that’s unscripted question: you mentioned…and I struggle with this and it comes with…it’s the portfolio. For example, in class I had them make the personas, I had them go do observations and analysis, come back and they gathered all this data and they found the problem and then they created a persona and let’s apply this problem to that persona and that became the basis for what they designed. But every single student, and I told them at the beginning of the course, I said, the pretty little static mock-ups that you make are actually almost kind of irrelevant. What the employer wants to see is how you got to that pretty little mock-up. But they ignored the whole…they ignored all the research that they did; they ignored all the personas, they ignored all of that and they don’t put it in their portfolios. So, I don’t know quite how to drive it home that that’s what is expected, because they look at other people, they look at Dribbble and they look at Behance and all of that, that case study is what I’m calling it, is missing. So, do you have any advice on that one, on the psyche of how do you make somebody…I’ve led them to the water but I also need to actually make them drink too!
Tim
Mm-hm. My advice is to let them hear from the people who are doing the hiring. Like I said earlier; Google had a Medium article that they sent individuals to, to read and in that article it talks about how to tell the difference between a seasoned designer, a UX designer and a designer that’s just telling the fluff and I really think if they start reading these articles and seeing, oh, this is a designer that was at Google and he hired people at Google, or this is the Head of Design at Medium. When they start seeing that this person was…then I think that will start to change the way they think about it and then if you have them write about it and the significant stuff that’s in there I think yeah, that would hit home. And the name of the article that I’m talking about is, it’s by Chad Thornton and he’s the Head of Design at Medium and he was at Google before he went to Medium and it’s called Hiring a Product Designer: How to Review Portfolios and from the beginning, it just blows you away. I think this should be standard class material for anybody that’s getting read to create a portfolio and they should read through this and basically highlight or take notes on what they say and then design your portfolio as set. If they follow this word for word as the truth as a Bible, trust me: employers will be hiring these students left and right because I know they’re not doing it but it just blew my mind and literally, this is the article that I was given and told, here: read this article because we use this article as the basis when we hire people.
Gary
Oh good, I’ll definitely check that out and make my students do it too. I can’t speak for every single Faculty out there: I know I stress it all the time that you gotta do case studies and by case studies I mean, who cares what it looks like: anybody can make it look pretty. What was the process behind it and the other thing, from an education standpoint, what’s missing for me is that when I’m telling my students this, I can’t find a lot of good examples, so I’m really struggling to actually find examples because that helps a lot when they see somebody else, they can at least emulate it.
Tim
Yeah, but you know the best thing that you could do is Google UX Designer and you can Google UX Designer at Google, UX Designer at Pinterest, UX Designer at Twitter, and all of their portfolios, they’re communicating their understanding of the problem and how they solved it; they’re talking about UCD, User Centered Design and how they came up with it and going through all these different techniques and they’re showing it so if you give them these portfolio links of people who are there at these places in these current jobs, I think that might also hit home.
Gary
Moving onto my next question, I still think predominantly most Graphic Design programs are Print programs really and if they do have Interactive or User Experience Design in them, it’s really one class, maybe two classes that are kind of siloed off from the rest of them and that’s a generalization: there’s obviously…you were learning under an Interactive User Experience Designer, so there are obviously exceptions to that but what would you suggest to…what kind of projects or courses would you suggest adding to those traditional type of programs?
Tim
You can always just add a basic UC course to the program where you hit the fundamentals and basically practice rationale and why you did things. I would also suggest if there’s some way to add a course that’s just based on you creating things and having students to be able to explain why they created it: that would go a long way. And actually I have in my mind a side-project, based around critiques where people would submit their information and have educated and very methodical individuals to explain why this was successful but any way to get students or any type of course that would get students to communicate why they made the decision, why the decision they made was the best decision and why it works and if they’re able to show that, that would be a very good route and that would help them way more than anything else in the future, just being able to articulate why you did something.
Gary
Yeah, and I think that I can just picture the argument from Design Educators: “We already do critiques and we make them talk about their work” and they do, but again, a lot of those design programs are housed within the Fine Arts Department and so a lot of those students will take their foundational courses from artists so from their infancy, they learn how to talk about work from an artistic perspective and they lose sight of the fact that it is a business and how does X help my key performance indicator or how does it help on my return, how does it help these different business metrics and so…yeah…
Tim
Yeah, and I totally understand what you’re saying: they need to be explaining the work from the point of a problem-solving technique and I can actually jump into that….yeah, we had critiques: we would come and we would design stuff and we would put it on the wall and we would just ask questions. Why did you do this? What type of type-face is that? Why did you use these different colors? But that’s completely different than asking…what is the problem that you were trying to solve here? And did you solve it? Now, how did you go about solving that problem and what type of techniques did you use to solve that problem? And how did those techniques bring you to this end solution? And did you test this end solution and is it actually solving the problem? This is completely different than a typical art critique and that’s what we were doing in my UX class and we were like hard-core students running out the classroom crying because it was serious. Plus also, I love critiques and I love talking about artwork so I was also part of the problem; I had to be taken outside plenty of times, like “Mr Hykes, that was a little too much”.
I just want her to tell the truth. She sat up all night, she did this yesterday, but different story, probably different podcast, but yeah, those are two different things and we both could understand the value in one from a business sense and I was interviewing for a job and a guy told me that a good UX Designer is able to take a list of things that the employer wants and pull out the individual things that are very important and as you said, align those to the business goals and say, these are the things that we need to focus on because these will increase the product and also help you reach this goal for the next quarter or for the next year and all these other things are just nice to have, because if you’re ever a UX Designer in an organization where it’s just you, you do everything and then you have to literally figure out, these are all the different things, the features that they want and you’re going to be in charge of explaining why this certain feature is the one and so it’s always around…to me it’s an analytical process where basically you have to know how to talk the talk, walk the walk and prove you know what you’re talking about.
Gary
I think that’s where the educators really need to…I think the students are already doing it but on a subconscious level so they may just…why did you pick the colors and instead of just saying, well, because I like it…maybe they pick the…no, I really do think the students regardless are purposely picking their things; they’re not just doing it on personal taste, but they just don’t know how to articulate that, they don’t know how to tie it to a goal.
Tim
I think it might be a great exercise to have them type it out because then that allows you to think of it from a different standpoint and in a job, in some cases like at Wells Fargo, we will be required to type out exactly why what we did was successful, why it worked, the rationale behind it, other organizations who are also doing the same thing and the current industry standard and how it’s leading that way. All this information we would be required to write so that would only, in my opinion, give them practice for the real thing.
Gary
No, that…I actually did that with a colleague: we co-taught a course and literally it was all based on they had to write narratives before they designed any…before they even thumbnailed, they had to write a narrative and it was really fun and what made me stumble upon it was, I had a group of Graphic Design students taking a Motion Graphics class that I was taking and I had never taught Motion Graphics before and so I didn’t really know what I was doing and I approached it simply like…Motion Graphics…moving,..movie…they need a script and so then I made them write scripts but these are all Graphic Designers and I noticed in their writing, they were describing what it would look like and I was like…no, you need to write a script, you need to write the story and so then I took that and tried that on traditional Print Design and, oh my God, it really improved the quality of their ideas significantly. It’s amazing how much the writing actually breaks them away from focusing on what it looks like and more about what its purpose is.
Tim
And I also feel like, writing helps them to facilitate their own idea of what good design is because within education that’s always my argument is, are you teaching me your idea of what good design is, or are you teaching me the elements that make good design and allow me to develop myself as the artist to produce things that are designed well.
Gary
That’s a complicated one! It’s always nice and I actually like where I teach and my colleagues because we actually…I can’t play Art Director, I can’t tell them what it needs to look like so I’m more like, the process, if you go about this process, your solution will end up looking really good but I’ve got a couple of colleagues that are just crazy…they’re really good at that Art Direction…do this, do that, why do you do this? And breaking down the nuts and bolts of it where I look at the holistically, so I think it’s good when students get both of that, they get the micro-manage and see how that works versus just the total freedom but learning about the process. I want to follow…so, you’ve created a lot of YouTube videos; you’ve been talking about things like designers need to focus on such as craft, file organization; I actually started adding that to a class by the way! And life after school. Are these skills missing from Design Education or do you think students are just simply overlooking them? Because you obviously saw a problem and you’re trying to solve it.
Tim
They are, in my opinion, missing from Design Education. So, with me being part of AIGA St Louis and watching the student conference year after year and graduating, I saw these things were missing. Oh, I hope my Professors are not listening to this! They’re going to give me the side-eye once I say this, but if you’ve graduated from school twenty years ago, there’s no way you can be up in tune with what’s currently happening with individuals who are trying to get employed. When I graduated, my Professor was saying, oh, you don’t want to do any of those organizations where they’re finding their job for you because organizations are losing money because they have to pay for that…all these other little crazy things. I’m a designer trying to get a job, so the thing is, what’s going to help me get the opportunity that I want? I don’t hear people saying that, OK, while you are still going throughout school, it’s very important that you do have internships because that’s going to give you valuable experience, even if you don’t have anything to put in your portfolio after it, the fact that you worked at some place with a group of people that teaches you something: number one, you learn how to talk about projects, especially if you’re in an agency, the first thing they teach you is, don’t say I, me and my. You say we and us because even if it was just you designing the project, you’re letting the client think that it was a larger team that designed this project.
That was one of the first things that I learned: my Professor didn’t teach me that. As a matter of fact, when we do talk about critiques, we are saying I, me and my and this is why I did this…chose those process. And then I went from a community college, so I graduated from St Louis Community College and then I went on to the University of Missouri, St Louis, and so I have my Associates. If you are talented, yes you can find a job directly out of a two-year program. But the problem that you’re going to run into is, eventually it’s going to hit you and you’re going to want to make some more money and there’s going to come a time where you’re going to be blocked because you don’t have that extra degree. People ask me, Tim, did you need it? I totally needed it, I definitely needed the extra four years. What you are creating at that level and tutor education, no matter how good you are, it’s going to quadruple once you go back to get that extra two years from a different institute. You look back at the work that you created and say, I cannot believe that I thought this was the end-all, be-all and really good. The experience is totally different: you learn more, you learn how to think about things in a different way so I thought it was very important to at least explain what I thought about it, expressly at that time when I created those reveals I was moreso of a recent graduate because I graduated in 2015 and I think it’s good to bring individuals who just graduated, who’ve landed jobs back, to talk about that process, how it went, how they ended up landing that job and how the current students can do that same thing.
Because I had a friend of mine that graduated before me: he granted actually two years before me and I had asked him, if there was one thing you could have known at this current point, or done at this current point, what was that one thing that you would have did or wished somebody would have told you and he said I wish I wouldn’t have been so hung up on school; I wish I had of been more hung up on creating things for myself because most of the stuff that you created in school, employers know I, they see it, it’s nothing special, but what they do start to value is the things that set you apart, so how are you using what you learned in school to now create stuff that you like, so if you’re doing illustrations, are you showing that depth that you learned in school and adding that to your illustrations? That becomes very valuable which is why I’m so big on side projects but I’m sure that’s a question later on but yeah, that’s why I’m really, really big on side projects!
Gary
And we’re going to jump on that but I do want to just follow up the videos that you created. I’ve come to terms with this myself if that I am a Design Educator: I’ve designed websites, I can write…I can do Front End Development; I can even do a little bit of Back End Development. But I’m still primarily an Educator so I don’t do these things day in and day out. So, just when it comes to, I ask my students to use Sketch for their interactive designs, but I’m not a power user and so…and I think that’s one thing that educators really need to kinda like…and this podcast has actually helped me there. The podcast is like, every single person I pretty much interviewed said, oh yeah, file management is just a train-rack, so that’s when I was like, uh-huh, all right, I’m going to go back and I’m going to teach them file organization because obviously they were organizing their stuff on a print-based thing where the internet works a lot differently than that; these are precise links to things and let’s go to file organization on that and so I think that’s one thing that I hope the educators take away from this is the realization that yes, we are educators; embrace that.
But you do need to go and realize that the profession has drastically changed and even though you’re not an everyday practitioner of that, you’re a practitioner of education, you still need to…I don’t know, learn about it! So you can bring that relevant stuff, because again, file organization, that’s a craft, that is just equally as important as back in the day, when you would use the Xacto Knife to cut your sixteen by twenty black museum board, precisely! It is the same thing, so I’m glad that you’re addressing that because I think that’ll help; when professionals start saying hey, guys; he, educators, you need to start thinking about these things, that would be great. But now, back onto the side-project. So like you said, you knew the upcoming question. So, you talk a lot about things like side projects. Attending AIGA events and meeting designers and you keep saying these things are always essential for emerging designers and I know personally I always stress to my students to do these things but they rarely listen. What advice would you give to help stress the importance of doing these types of things for students, or even if I have to incentivize them to do it.
Tim
The issue is I know that they will not learn it or understand it until it’s too late to realize; they graduated and it’s like, oh man, I wish I would’ve known about this while I was at school, while somebody was telling me or leading the way. The reason I push side projects and working on these because I think Timothy Goodman said it best: “You gotta make a lot of stuff before you can make stuff you like”. I think he said…“You’ve gotta make a lot of stuff before you can make stuff like yourself”. I always say, in order to become a really good designer, you have to have volumes and volumes of stuff that you created because that adds into your craft: the more you are illustrating or the more that you’re drawing, using the things that you work with, the better you get at them naturally. Some people are born naturally good illustrators; I am not a natural good illustrator: I definitely have to work at it and work hard at it, so if you want to be one of the best and on top, you have to do that.
And then secondly, a lot of these places, especially if you’re from smaller cities, you don’t have the connections to get into or you don’t have those opportunities, so your best deal to put yourself on the same level is to make connections with people from across the world. That’s why I am so active on Twitter and talking to people. Twitter allows m e to talk to anyone and all they have to do is respond back and it’s like up close, in your face and so with that, that’s how I ran into the people at Twitter; we’re talking about Twitter because I had the opportunity to interview at Twitter and actually the guy knew about me from my side projects and he really liked me, he knew at the current time I was in between jobs, which only lasted about a month and a half; he wanted to help facilitate me within the process and so with that, he brought me over to Twitter, they have recruiters that are trained to just do that and I was able to interview right there. And I guess if you want to show students the value of it or how important that is, I guess it would be best to bring in or maybe do like a Google Hangout session with someone who’s currently doing that or who can show, because I did X, now I am X or XYZ.
And I think there should be maybe some conversation around how do you reach out to other artists because I’ve seen plenty different artists post stuff on Twitter: oh, this student reached out to me, he liked my work, could I share my InDesign files or my Illustrator files. It should be a conversation, this is how you reach out to every artist or other artist because the fanboy-fangirl works well and I do it a lot, oh my God I’m like, I love your artwork, I love what you do, I’m such a fan and I would really like it if…sit down and view a couple of pieces of mine and tell me some areas of improvement where if I did this or if I did these few things, I would be better. One thing that I really do in my portfolio is I go in, I always ask, what’s the best piece and what’s the worst piece? And if you have forty people telling you that this piece is your best piece and another fifty people telling you that this piece is your worst piece, you know what piece to take out or re-do and you know what pieces to keep. So yeah, it’s very valuable.
Gary
I did that. I’m going to brag! That was my most proudest moment. I’m fresh out of Undergrad and I’m going to an AIGA Portfolio Review and I never got the same answer to that question, and so that was like, yes, nobody could pick one, so that means it’s all decent! Or it was all bad, you could take that either way! But I love that question because I did the same thing. You know what’s funny is…so I do this podcast and I’ve got some people…I’ve had really good guests on that…like I tell my students about it and some people are like, well how did you get that person? I just asked them! And that’s not a natural skill, is it? Just the ability to…I just thought, because I’d do it, I just assume, again, I should never assume, I just assumed that was obvious: just ask.
Tim
Uh-uh, no, not at all. Some people think these big name designers are too good to speak to them. A lot of people think AIGA are the Board Members are a bunch of people in black turtle-necks who talk very analytical about design and really critique things with a fine tooth but no, we’re not, we’re knuckle-heads like me! So the best thing to do is ask; I keep telling people all the time. The worst thing you could ever get is a no, and normally that’s not the worst thing.
Gary
No, and I’m just surprised it’s not a natural skill. Oh no, I remember what I wanted to ask you about, because you’ve mentioned it now a couple of times and this is something I’ve always had in the back of my head but I figured, since you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, it would be good to ask you. Drawing; illustration. Students don’t do it enough. But at the same time, I’m actually thinking, I’m wondering if that has to do with, OK, so you go onto a traditional Design program and you’re learning, you’re probably doing drawing where you’re drawing still-lifes in one class and then you’re doing life drawing. And so you’re doing those two types of drawing and those where you need the emphasis is on photorealism, in those type of classes but that’s not the kind of drawing that designers need to do. And I’m just wondering to myself, is that type of drawing really beneficial? Should there be something more like you do the gesture drawings, the really quick sketchy things, would something like that be more beneficial?
Tim
I mean, in a sense, maybe those type of drawings, drawing really quick, would be beneficial in a meeting where people are talking about ideas, how things will look around, but if the type of drawing that we do do for professional type work, I would say the best thing for them to do is to copy. Literally. Jessica Hische said it best: go out there and find something that you like and copy it. Word for word, dot for dot, shadow for shadow: copy it. Now, don’t put it in your portfolio like you created it, but copy it because you learn valuable skills on how they might have created that, most of the time we always think that they’ve had some type of short-cut to create something but normally it is a really hard and rigorous type of deal and I think that would be the best way to learn how to do anything. If you want to go on Dribbble and you see all these beautiful prototypes with all these very…really light shadows and pretty colors that glow: copy it, literally take it off there and hold it aside, if they said that they used Sketch and did it, you use Sketch and try to reproduce the same thing and what happens is, after that, you have that and I say after you copy that, then start from scratch and see if you can create your own that’s totally different.
Gary
And I actually had a colleague where I used to teach, his name was Ivan Brunetti; he’s a fantastic illustrator, comic artist; basically it seems like every other week he’s on the cover of the New Yorker and I was talking to him about this and he said yeah, the best thing would be for them to just pick up some really well-done zines or some comics and just sit there and try to copy it, just sit there and try to copy it over and over and over again and I just think that would be a better approach, a class doing that, would be better than doing a life drawing or doing a still-life drawing class, for designers, but I may be in the minority in that.
Tim
But those classes really tend to help entertainment designers. Because if you think about it, a lot of people don’t know that a script first comes with just words and there is a designer who draws each and every scene, before they put a camera to it and most bigger agencies, the photo-shoot is drawn out scene by scene or they mock it up exactly how they want the photographer to take his photo, so those photo-realistic things, they are useful. It’s just where in design are they using it or doing these things and normally it’s more in the hiring in for entertainment.
Gary
Yeah. And that makes sense, and that is not necessarily maybe the day to day…well that job is day to day but the day to day is more of that quick sketching in meetings and blasting out ideas. All right Tim, I just took a look at the time, so before I let you go, is there anything that you are working on personally that you want to promote or you want to share? Anything you want to talk about at all?
Tim
Oh my God, you let me promote something, oh my God! Now I’m kicking stuff because I got so excited! Oh yeah, what I’m currently working on now, so I did another project that was here together us, I thought that was so clever. Here: all of us are here, together and dot, us and basically that project was centered around the hate and people are saying that designers don’t have a voice, you just go and design a pretty picture, this that and the other, but we do. What people don’t understand is, you have different individuals who would like to get out there, who would like to protest, who would like to give their voices but they can’t because they have to think about…I have a wife and children and if I’m not here, my wife doesn’t eat, my kids doesn’t eat, so that project gave them the opportunity to somewhere, some way voice their opinions about the things that are going on, especially the hate that we saw with the different marches of these hate groups because that’s really scary. That really scared me and the current project that I’m working on again is the 28 Days of Black Designers Project for 2018.
This time, it’s not rushed at the last minute; I’m waking up in the middle of the night trying to put up another profile and keep track of designers; it started early and it’s going to be really nice. I took the time and opportunity to work with a few people and to do that and then lastly, I always want to talk about the Design Plus Diversity Conference and so the Design Plus Diversity Conference is a conference that focuses on the diversity issues within the design industry and so this year…last year, we had the first time it was about fifty something people that came. This year we had over a hundred and two individuals they came and shockingly it was people from larger organizations like Apple brought ten individuals from Apple; they flew all the way to St Louis to attend this conference. We had people there from Adidas which is really cool.
So next year, the conference is growing and we’re adding more tracks so now instead of just talking about diversity within Graphic Design we’re also talking about diversity within Architecture, which we did that a little bit this year with Brian Woods, but we’re also adding fashion in there too and I think it’s a movement now it’s starting to be, where people are starting to notice these things and talk more about it and what can we do? Because these things are taught, our society is designed to be like that and you start to have these design unconscious bias and if people are not aware of them in these different things that we deal with until someone else points them out, and I think this conference allows people to come together to voice these different things, bring awareness to them and for us to start to sit down and solve them, so these are the things that I’m doing, the things that I’m looking forward to next year and I hope everyone follows along.
Gary
Yeah, I personally love all the work you’re doing; that’s what attracted me to have you on as a guest, but the one that was really useful to me was the 29 Designers because I think we are all wrapped in our own little bubbles and I’m going to use this podcast as an example. I started off by just inviting the people I knew but then it became well, wait a minute, if I just do that, I could be very…very narrow in the group of people I talk to and so 29 Designers to me is like a resource: oh, these are people that I should be looking at, I should be reading about and then when I start reading about them, I start seeing who they’re following and who they’re into and it just opens up my world and it introduces me to people that I didn’t know, I would never have known because for whatever reason, they’re not getting the same level of broadcasting that the standards are, I guess, if you will?
Tim
Right. I’m still getting emails about that project today and a lot of people that were on that project are still getting calls and requests from people to be a part of things, to join things and to talk about it; even their stories are just inspirational to other people and they’re still getting emails from individuals saying, I’m sharing your story, especially Timothy Bardlavens: I call him The Other Tim, oh there’s too many of us Tims in Design, but I call him the other Tim. Gay, black designers, and of course there’s plenty of them within the design field but having someone to speak about the trials and tribulations and what they’re doing to be able to relate to it; I think that’s very powerful to see someone out there who’s doing the same thing that you’re doing, if not better, and you’re able to relate to it; that’s what the black community within the design industry needed. And then it just became totally aware to me when I found out that we only make up three per cent of the design industry anyway, so if we could connect and just talk about it and let other people know that hey, we’re out there, I think that would be a really good thing.
Gary
No, and it also really does help too because I’m in Baltimore and we do have a large black community and it’s just…now my students are not just seeing the standard canon of the same white folk that they always see: you’re giving me…no, these are…there’s more to it than just…it just makes it more accessible and so that one really was a tremendous resource for me; I should be doing it on my own anyway, I shouldn’t have to have somebody curate it for me because that just puts it all on you and you’ve already got enough on your plate. But I appreciate it nonetheless.