#dwphq

[miniaturela]

The beautiful DWP building was dedicated on this day in 1965. Architectural model courtesy of USC Libraries: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll44/id/60842/rec/6

[designweekportland]

Headquarters: Pop-up Shops

If you want to walk away from Design Week Portland with something tangible to remind yourself of the week, you’ll want to check out the pop-up shops! These shops offer a little bit of everything Portland makers have to offer, including bicycles, notebooks, jewelry, fashion, home decor, and more. All of the pop-up shops listed below will be held at Design Week Headquarters from 4:00pm to 9:00pm, Monday through Friday.

Location The Redd, 831 SE Salmon St

Cycle Shop Monday, April 24, 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Curated by: Rebecca Gates

River City Bicycles and Nutcase Helmets will be on site at The Redd showcasing bicycles and any accessories you might require to ride safely and in style. Members of their knowledgeable, charismatic, and enthusiastic crews will be on hand to offer guidance on gear.

Visit the event page to add this to your DWP schedule

Lady Maker Shop Tuesday, April 25, 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Organized by: Portland Made

In solidarity with all the ladies in the house, Portland Made is presenting five lady makers from their network for their pop-up shop at HQ: Cottonflower Press, Mirus Toys, L & R Design Lab, Portland Apron Company, and Kayla Burke Design.

Visit the event page for more information or to add this to your DWP schedule

Made Here Shop Wednesday, April 26, 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Organized by: MadeHere PDX

It’s no secret that Portland is a hotbed of creative culture, and is home to hundreds of industrious folks who design, roast, stitch, bake, weld, brew and build some of the coolest stuff in the world. Founded by a team of proud Portlanders, MadeHere PDX is a shop dedicated to showcasing the talents of Portland-based designers, artists, and makers. They'll be bringing a cross-section of their designers to HQ for a sampling of local greatness.

Visit the event page to add this to your DWP schedule

Scout Books Shop Thursday, April 27, 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Organized by: Scout Books

To celebrate the launch of We The People Are Powerful!, a pocket guide to understanding your rights, Scout Books is bringing a cross section of their best little books for a special HQ Pop Up. From notebooks to limited editions to classic faves, come stuff your pockets with as many as you can carry!

Visit the event page to add this to your DWP schedule

Fashion Shop Friday, April 28, 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Curated by: Eden Dawn

Eden Dawn, Portland Monthly Fashion Editor, is the curator of this unique fashion pop-up shop where three unique Portland brands offer their wares: Ginew, REIFhaus, and Barrow.

Visit the event page for more information or to add this to your DWP schedule

[designweekportland]

Headquarters: Late Night Trio

Night owls will appreciate this trio of fun and relaxed events. Visit HQ to finish a fun day of Design Week events with old and new friends, before starting all over again the next day! All of the events listed below are free, and will be held at Design Week Headquarters. Links to register for each of the events are listed below the description.

Location The Redd, 831 SE Salmon St

Happy Place Wednesday, April 26, 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM

Organizer: Leopold Ketel

Happy Place is a group drawing event that includes DJ curated music to help folks get in the groove. Participate in Exquisite Corpse style drawing exchanges on long tables set out for large communal drawings. This will be a fun event that includes meeting people and drawing for the sheer joy of it, and hopefully create stimulating art together!

Visit the event page to register

The Pressure Is Good For You, A Talk Show Thursday, April 27, 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM

Organizer: The Pressure

How cool would it be to see a talk show with some of your favorite Portland makers, talking not only about creativish things but also dropping mad knowledge on your heads and making your laugh muscles sore? Perhaps you'll even be a part. Join host Adam Garcia for a late night talk show, and be ready for surprises, inspiration and awkwardness.

Visit the event page to register

Powerpoint Karaoke Friday, April 28, 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM

In something a little special for our closing night at HQ, join us for Design Week Portland Powerpoint Karaoke, and cringe along as our presenters attempt to confidently and coherently present from slides they've never seen before.

Visit the event page to register

[designweekportland]

Headquarters: Change Making Trio

If you have an interest in creating change through design, this trio of events is for you. Explore ethics in design through a discussion about oaths and manifestos, learn more about your rights and grassroots organizing, and get inspired to use innovative design work to design for political campaigns. All of the events listed below are free, and will be held at Design Week Headquarters. Links to register for each of the events are listed below.

Location The Redd, 831 SE Salmon St

Defining Boundaries Tuesday, April 25, 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM

Organizer: To Be Determined (discussion group led by Nicolas Meier and Nimi Einstein)

In this edition of To Be Determined, the attention is turned to manifestos and oaths in art, design, and other professional practices. What is the function of a manifesto? Why must architects, doctors, and many professionals swear to an oath, but not graphic designers? Perhaps through this exploration, we can work towards an ethics of design, whether universal or personal. Join To Be Determined for a discussion and zine-making workshop where these questions are put to the test.

Visit the event page to register

Guide Launch—We The People Are Powerful! Thursday, April 27, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Organizer: Scout Books and Business for a Better Portland

Scout Books in partnership with Business For A Better Portland present the launch of We The People Are Powerful!, a pocket guide to understanding your rights. It covers grassroots organizing, Oregon's legislature and election cycles, along with contact information for your local representatives. The guide was written by the Scout Books Equity Alliance, and features illustrations from Sarah Mirk, Sarah Day, Jillian Barthold and Samantha Cohen.

Visit the event page to register

Designing a Political Campaign Friday, April 28, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Join a conversation with Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, designer Jen Wick, and artist Joe Sacco about the power of visual communication in political campaigns. Outspent 6 to 1, Commissioner Eudaly's campaign leveraged innovative creative work to break down the issues, communicate vision, and ultimately enlist enough support to win a seat on City Council. Learn about design's role in political engagement and the opportunities for design in the ongoing political process.

Visit the event page to register

[designweekportland]

In October 2014, Design Week Portland invited Namita Gupta Wiggers, a curator and writer, to host 5 conversations in the geodesic domes we installed as our headquarters at Pioneer Courthouse Square. In the middle of downtown, surrounded by the energy of the city, Namita spoke with 5 different design minds who were involved with events during the festival. These were meant to be the kinds of conversations that don’t happen on a main stage, but rather in an intimate setting where tangents and meanderings are encouraged. 

The second of these conversations was with Eric Karjaluoto, a founding partner at smashLAB.

With thanks to Andy Carlson for recording, Ray Brigleb for recording and editing, and Nina Berry for transcribing.

NAMITA: So, Eric, I’m gonna start us off—

ERIC: It feels so hard-hitting.

NAMITA: Yeah, I know! Get ready, here we go. —with a question that I asked you. I asked you about something that you wonder why people don’t ask you about. That led us down this really great conversation about publishing. To get into that question about publishing, I was thinking that we could start thinking about The Design Method, which is a book that you wrote. Maybe fill people in on what it is and what your intent was with it?

ERIC: Yeah, sure. The_ Design Method_ is a book on design process. It largely started just because I wanted to write something. I tossed out a thing on Facebook and Twitter saying “Should I talk to a publisher? Does anybody know of someone cool I should chat with?” About a day later, we kind of had a deal roughly in the works. It was a topic I knew I could write but it makes no sense at all because it’s a book within which we tell all the stories about how we run our process. It’s kind of weird to say we work so hard to get to this point, and then to say, okay, we’re gonna give this book away. But at least there are huge riches in it. Book publishing is just cash all over, so at least that softens the blow a little bit.

NAMITA: [laughing] So, do you use this book then to garner new clients or is it something for introductions? How is it functioning for you now that you’ve given away everything, so to speak? Which you really haven’t.

ERIC: Not really, no. Even in writing, I just tried to pack as much useful information as I could into it. And as we’re doing that, you’ll clearly see that these aren’t our ideas. They’re maybe our viewpoint on things that a lot of people do. Your initial question though, was a matter of “What do we get out of it?” And I’m not entirely sure. Like, I get to come here and I get to hang out with people? Eric Hillerns has taken me out for a lot of good cocktails and that’s great. It’s a dumb business move, and I’m really good at dumb business moves. I get interested in something, and I don’t think through if I will ever make money from it. There have been a couple of spots where we have inadvertently found people who want to talk to us a little bit about how we might be able to work together, but it’s not the kind of book you would write if you want to build your business up. It’s more, I write because I’m interested in writing, not necessarily from what we can get out of it.

NAMITA: Let’s talk about that. You say you write because you’re interested in writing. What interests you most in terms of writing? Why write?

ERIC: I think it’s the way that I can think through things. When they’re in my head, they are sort of cloudy floaty sorts of things. The moment that I have to put them into words, I have to structure them. I’ve only done a tiny little bit of teaching, but it’s funny how when you have to teach something, you really have to know what you think you intuitively feel already. You have to validate it. You have to strengthen your convictions around that. That’s what happens when I’m writing things. I’m forced to look at it from more angles and put it into a more solid form. Then I can kind of, this is a nice way of putting it, effectively poop it out. Then it’s out there, and I don’t have to think about it anymore and I can move on to the next thing.

NAMITA: It’s done, and it has a life of its own.

ERIC: Yeah.

NAMITA: Okay, but writing — you do lots of different kinds of writing. Maybe for everyone here and everyone who is listening, what are the different kinds of writing that you do? And then, I’m curious, how do you approach each of these different kinds of writing? Are they all the same, for you, in terms of process, and how you work through them? Because you blog, and in our previous conversation you were talking about how a blog is a shorter kind of writing and books are a different kind of writing. Then there’s writing you do for clients, what am I missing in there?

ERIC: Email.

NAMITA: Email! [laughing]

ERIC: Lots and lots of email. But yeah, they’re different formats. I like blog posts the best because they’re so brief and they don’t need the level of rigor and structure that a larger piece does. The math that I had when I wrote my first book was one of: my average blog post is two thousand words, what’s a good length of book? A hundred thousand words, that’s fifty blog articles. That’s no big deal. That’s fifty days. But in actuality, what you realize is that you don’t contradict yourself as easily in a blog post as easily as you will in a book. You need to stitch all of those sections together. That becomes much more complicated. The Design Method took probably about five months of really intensive work to put out. And when I say intensive, I mean at the worst stages I would get into the office at seven in the morning and leave the next day at three in the morning. I’d repeat through holiday weekends and stuff just to get it out because any time I’m working on that I’m not billing for client work. So yeah, they’re different formats. I think running is a good metaphor or a good comparison. Like, a 5K run is really different than a marathon. You don’t need to train for a 5K, it’s not gonna beat the crap out of you. Books, you can feel good about afterwards but they really beat the crap out of you. That’s my experience at least.

NAMITA: So, thinking about the time commitment and what you’re speaking to with the book and with stitching everything together and the time it took, the blog posts, on the other hand, are two thousand words and, if I’m not mistaken, you write those on your phone? On your way in, sometimes, to the office?

ERIC: Quite often, yeah. I use Writer on the iPhone, and quite often an entire blog post is written by thumb, so it’s kind of funny. A surprising number of them are written on the toilet in the morning before I head to the office. [laughing] Gonna have a hemorrhoid problem at some point there.

NAMITA: Is that a life/work balance issue with kids and family?

ERIC: You know, I think a lot of people do this, like you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is check what happened overnight. And if I’ve got an idea, I’ll write a few things. The nicest kind of writing, I find, for blogging, is the stuff that goes out and isn’t that much effort. The editing I find tends to be more time consuming. Sometimes I’ll sit down and write a headline or what have you, and a few points, and all the sudden I think, you better write that down before you forget. And all of the sudden, it’s kind of writing itself. I don’t want to break that, if there’s that moment to get that out. The beauty of the bus or toilet writing which is like a book on its own: Write Your Way to Blog Success With Toilet Writing, is that that fixed screen is surprisingly good for limiting your distractions. When you’re in a small window like that, you tend to be very focused on what’s in front of you. I find that’s much more effective even though my actual typing speed is not that great.

NAMITA: And this is the program where it highlights just the sentence you’re working on, is that right?

ERIC: Yeah, it’s effectively just a white screen with black type. Even the OSX version is a blank screen with words on it, which is perfect.

NAMITA: And you’ve tried other kinds of programs, is that right?

ERIC: Yeah, I also use some editing programs like Hemingway app and ProWritingAid is another one, which are really great for spotting passive sentences and overuse of adjectives and repeat words, because you don’t spot those things at the outset. The problem is, if you follow those apps too closely is that you end up with really choppy, sterile feeling writing. It’s kind of nice to use it as a means of cutting out some of the crap, but not getting too rigid about using that software.

NAMITA: So you’re not using an outside editor, or sharing your blog posts with someone else before you put them up?

ERIC: I do. For the book, I had an editor assigned to me by the publisher so that was great. With the book I self-published before, I just went and found an editor. Tom Biederbeck, who used to be at STEP, helped with that. With my blog posts, I run them by my business partner who is great at spotting areas where I’m trying to say something but it’s not actually clear or when I’ve said something that’s… The question that’s often asked is, “Do I sound like an asshole?” and he quite often goes, “Well in that part, you do actually.” And I don’t know. I really don’t know when I’m sounding like a jerk. I find it funny because I’m just trying to get out what’s in my head but somehow, when I’m joking or trying to be really cheeky, I think it comes out really poorly. And then, when I think I’m being abrasive, no one seems upset. Like I have no way of interpreting response to that stuff. It’s quite baffling. A friend of mine commented that I had a little post, about two or three months ago, and it was a comment that was intended for Facebook or chat or something and it became so long that I thought, “This is a blog post. I'll just post it out on my blog.” And he said, "That is the best thing you've ever written!" And it was funny because it kind of seemed like it was a toss-away comment, not that good. So I am perpetually kind of amazed by what resonates with people. I haven't quite worked that one out.

NAMITA: Why did he say it was the best thing you've ever written? What was it about it? Did he ever clarify?

ERIC: No, no it wasn't that clear. I think sometimes there's that Louis C.K. effect. I mean, I'm not saying I'm like Louis C.K., like I'm bald and self-deprecating and my life is sad like Louie's. No, seriously, the brilliance to me of his comedy is that it's not that he just has brilliant delivery and all these great insights; it's that his insights are so close to what we've already experienced. You know, the 'Why' bit: where his kid is asking "Why? Why, Daddy, why?" And at the end, he's just going bonkers. I think that we've been at those moments and when we see that, we're not so much saying it’s funny, as much as we're saying "I know that moment, and someone else knows that moment." I think that's what this fellow who had read the post responded to. He shared that feeling. I don't think it was about the quality of writing as much as it was about a connection, perhaps. That's just what I think.

NAMITA: What do you think is the best piece you've ever written so far? And why?

ERIC: I don't know.

NAMITA: The last one?

ERIC: Yeah, I have this thing where I'm really self-conscious about everything I do. There's a moment with almost everything I've done, where, right before releasing it, I think it's the greatest thing ever done, quite often. Less so as I get older, but that like "Wow, this is great. This is going to change everything." And then, the moment after releasing it, I realize it's not what I thought it was, and I continue to think it's worse and worse and worse. And then, three years later, I go back and read something and go, "Actually, that doesn't stink." Like, when I read my stuff later, I think "That was actually not terrible. I'm pretty happy about it." So, the last book, I think the amount of content that's in it, even if it’s not directly applicable to all readers, is the best book I could make, in terms of the amount of stuff I believe is in there. I think a lot of the blog posts are more fun to read, though. That book is pretty dry.

NAMITA: So, how does that second book compare to the first book that you did?

ERIC: The first book should have been four small books. Again, I do far too much on a whim. It's surprising that we plan things out quite thoroughly, but the work that tends to stick is often the stuff that happens on a whim. The entire reason for the first book is that I got a new iPhone, and it was sitting on the kitchen table, and my wife and kids were away, and it rang, so I jumped up to get it. The ring was really unfamiliar so I leapt up, and I ran to it, and I slipped on the hardwood floor on our place and my foot slammed into the wall and my toe went ninety degrees the wrong way. I felt pretty dumb about that, and I ended up in the hospital and they fixed that. It was a weird experience, because they x-ray it and go, "Yeah, it's broken. We'll fix it." It's funny because whether they x-ray it or not, they're gonna do the same thing, which is that they tape it. That's all they do; they can't do anything more or less than that. So, the next day, I was really immobile, and I decided to make my way to the coffee shop because even in states of immobility — which is weird, it's a tiny little bone but it's enough for me to be limited like that — even in states like that, I can still somehow find my way to a coffee shop. And I thought, well if I can't get to the office, maybe I'll start writing that book. And it just kind of kept going. It was a real mess along the way. I hacked fifty thousand words out of the first draft. Like, effectively half the book was thrown away. It's very meandering, but I think it's more fun to read. It's kind of like a conversation with this weird tangential guy. I think that's how my friends and my parents can read it and enjoy it. My dad told me that he found my second book really boring. He said, "Honestly, I couldn't get past the first chapter." And I said, "Well, you're not the audience so that's okay."

NAMITA: [laughing] Are you working on something right now?

ERIC: This feels very strange to keep a microphone going. I've debated it, but I'm unconvinced of a traditional publishing route.

NAMITA: How come?

ERIC: It sucks unless you're really famous. I think the profit margin in a book is very difficult on smaller books for publishers to put adequate effort behind. I think there's an illusion that because you give away the lion's share of the profits to the publishers, which I acknowledge are slim, that they're going to do something with marketing and really pushing it, but they don't really do that. Their take is that's kind of your job. The advantages of working through a publisher are really, really limited and I think that there are just smarter ways to get content to readers. I'm kind of thinking of doing another self-published thing, or maybe doing something annually self-published. Perhaps even more white papers and stuff, which I've seen a lot more traction on than actual printed books. I think folks are so busy, and a book is such a commitment for a lot of people, that it's easier to get these lighter documents out for people to read.

NAMITA: It's interesting, the self-publishing route. It is a challenge to work with a publishing company. I think that they are limited, and I totally agree with you on the marketing issue. I hear that from so many people. Really, you are giving away a lion's share. And in academic publishing, a lot of times you're soliciting commissions from writers and there's no fee being offered by the publishing house. You're doing it just for the prestige value. You certainly aren't making money off of it. But, the self-publishing route is an interesting route. So, if somebody was to come to you and say "I'm so-and-so, I'm interested in publishing," how would you suggest that they get started?

ERIC: I think blogging is the answer. The model that I see that seems to work is that you blog to build up a certain number of people who like what you're doing, who will then go and buy a book potentially. I think the ratio of people who read your stuff online who will then go through the Amazon checkout process is slim. If you can build up a fairly large group of people who are interested in what you are writing, I think there's a real opportunity in inexpensive books released on Amazon. I'm talking somewhere in the five dollar mark, the three dollar mark. If there's a pretty thumbnail, and the thumbnail has effectively become the new artwork — people are seeing it very small — there's a possibility of driving it that way. But yeah, I think there are a few different challenges. The first is getting into a regular enough writing pattern that the book doesn't stymie you. You need to go for a lot of 5K runs before you try a marathon. You know, starting with a marathon is tough. In the process, you're building up an audience. You can test what content seems to resonate with readers as well. So, I suppose that's an opportunity to build a group of people who support what you're doing and also what might be saleable in book format.

NAMITA: How did you go about building the audience itself? I mean there's social media, there's Twitter, there's Facebook, stuff like that. Can you share a little bit about your process for building up that audience?

ERIC: Yeah, I think it's different now. I started writing in 2005. I always really enjoyed writing, and it was about a year after blogging had taken hold that it seemed like there was a place to do that. But I really didn't feel like I had a right to write things. I always think I don't know enough stuff to go put stuff out there. I should have a doctorate in order to do that. I should know stuff before I write stuff. And it turns out, no, you don't need to know anything to write stuff. I'm living proof of that. So, what we decided was that a lot of the blog content we saw was very self-promotional and we decided we didn't want to use it as a device to sell the company, we just wanted to talk to our peers about things we were experiencing in our studio. The real benefit of this is that I'll meet a lot of people who have read our stuff, and I'm really surprised that they've ever even heard of us. It's kind of cool to meet people who know what you're up to, and share your opinions, and who will often even write an email and tell you that they like what you've written, which is really validating. It's great to get stuff like that. When you're writing in a blog format, it kind of just feels like you're tossing stuff out there. To have it hit something and come back to you is really wonderful. What we did at that time is that, after about three blog posts, we found all of these design blogs that we liked and we sent them emails saying, "This is what we've been writing. If you could take a look, that'd be great." And most people were really quite nice about it, and a few different people would link to posts and that brought some people in to read. From there, it just kind of happened slowly. We don't have a huge number of people who really follow what we're doing, but I'm sort of surprised by how many people will go in and read those posts. I would say almost all of it comes down to who picks it up. We'll seed things through QBN, which used to be News Today, often through Hacker News, Designer News on Layer Vault. All these different portals where they'll allow you to come and share your stories. That often will get people coming in. Headlines are still really important. Two years ago, we wrote a piece titled "How to Write the Shit Out of Something," which got about sixty thousands uniques in about the course of a day, which is a lot of traffic. And very quickly, I was told that the title was kind of crap. Some people thought that was not accurate and that it was a poorly written title, but the funny part with blogs is that sometimes not necessarily being perfect or accurate is sometimes beneficial. More casual seems to work well in a blog context. Working those titles and sometimes even retweeting it at different times. I'm surprised that certain content does really well on Facebook and poorly on Twitter, and vice versa. I can't identify which is which, so you just kind of put it out there and see what comes back. Some posts are just a surprise for what kind of attention they do get.

NAMITA: So one of the things that gets talked about a lot is that designers don't read. You're telling me something different than that.

ERIC: I think we're thinkers by trade, and the older we get, the more we’re interested in that; the more we face problems we don't have clear answers to. If you can find someone else who is grappling with the same challenges, it's nice to know that someone else is experiencing what you're experiencing and maybe has different mechanisms to get around that stuff. I don't really like visual design books. I don't find them that interesting. I'm much more inclined to find long articles about things that are absolutely unrelated to what I do very interesting.

NAMITA: So what do you read? When you pick up something, just to read? What kinds of things catch your interest?

ERIC: I'm reading_ The Power of Habit_ right now, which is really a very interesting read. I find a lot of things on Hacker News. If it's not a coder's kind of article, if it's about a new thing with node.js, I don't want to read that stuff. The article I read recently was called "The Next Ten Billion Years." That's a really cool article. I was reading that to my kid and he was a little freaked out by it. It's kind of a mind-blowing article think about; what happens post-humanity and what species could potentially become the next intelligent species on the planet. I find that really interesting. You know when Wired does their long feature? I tend to find that long Wired features are really good. I know Carl who was giving a talk here the other day was talking about “Mother Earth Motherboard,” and that sounded like an amazing article. He said seventy-two thousands words on laying pipe for fiber-optic cable. That one's on my reading list. When I find the stuff, I just use Instapaper to save it for later because the good stuff, you can't read while you're at your desk. You just don't have the time.

NAMITA: Yeah, yes right. Very cool. So then, if somebody younger, a student, is getting started... Let's back up and talk about how you would help somebody else get started in writing, because writing about design is different than writing about other things. But, everything is raw material. There isn't anything that doesn't have some applicability to design. You've got a twenty-something in school who says, "I want to write." How do you get them started thinking about writing and writing about design?

ERIC: I think it's kind of like any other creative process in that if you start out thinking about it too much, you might limit yourself before you even get rolling. I would have weekends at that age where I would look at a wall for an entire weekend and not know what to do with my life, just stare at a peach wall. It's an unpleasant color of wall to look at for an entire weekend.

NAMITA: So no peach walls?

ERIC: No peach walls. Anything you make is going to be crap the first time you do it anyways. So, if you can get over that fear, it really doesn't matter any longer. Just write anything. Get into a ritual around it. Perhaps every morning, you have to write one thing and put it out there. It's surprising because a lot of the stuff you put out that you don't think will actually resonate with people does. So, just putting things out and feeling out what comes back to you and continuing that process, you just naturally kind of improve what you're doing. I think the act of doing is the most important part. I think having a bit of a mandate isn't a terrible idea at some point. Saying, "I'm going to focus on UX design and I'm really going to think about this for the next year." I think that's the other part of writing… This is what I really struggle with on my blog is that when I put out emphatic opinions, I’m not actually saying that things are a certain way. I’m trying to test an idea out. I may very well change my mind the next week. These are all fluid kinds of things. I’m writing to try to figure things out. As a means of learning, the act of writing is really wonderful. Even if nobody reads it, who cares? At the end of a year of forcing yourself to write things and the research that comes out of that, you’re going to know things you didn’t know at the outset.

NAMITA: So you use it as kind of a public workspace, in a sense?

ERIC: Definitely, yeah. It really is a way to get stuff out of my head. I have more ideas than I have time to do anything with. And I think a lot of them are really not very good ideas, but until I get them out of my brain I can’t move on to the next thing. I have email folders just filled with blog ideas. I’ll often have just a hundred headlines with ideas for different articles I want to write, and there’s no way to write them so I’ll just archive them for later and then write whatever’s on my mind at that point. But I have to put it somewhere so it’s not floating in my brain.

NAMITA: So how does all this writing relate to all the work you do through the company?

ERIC: Being a better writer helps me be a better designer. I think this is one of the struggles for designers is that they have these great ideas and they have these great solutions but they are challenged when articulating those solutions. Or persuading a client to consider them, to give them a shot. If you can articulate yourself well verbally, or in an email, in a presentation, your ideas have a better chance of living. I think that’s probably the most important part of that. I think content is a huge part of design. It’s a weird thing because designers don’t talk about that a lot. We’ll build this thing and we’ll chuck the content in or someone else will build the content. What we’re finding with websites in particular is that you have to start with the content. Lately, we’ve even been building sites where we structure all the content before or even while we’re building wireframes, so that the content is shaping the design, not so the content needs to conform to the design. The better and more succinctly and more effectively you can communicate, the better your work is going to be and the better chance it has of surviving. I guess it’s kind of like, if we’re going back to sports metaphors, it’s like sit ups. If you do more of them, you’re going to have that strength. You can use that — it’s something you can leverage later. For me, just being able to communicate like that is really helpful.

NAMITA: It’s interesting, because you’re making me think about a comment you said last time we talked. You said that you thought it was better to do things verbally first, in your situation, than visually. Then, going back to what you said earlier about visual forms of display and displaying information and so forth, not being the way that you go, is that running counter to the way designers are taught in school?

ERIC: I don’t know because I didn’t go to design school. I went to art school for painting, and I took one design class. I don’t actually know what curriculum is being taught in design schools. I think from an efficiency standpoint, from actually managing projects, words are a much more economical way of communicating. Visuals are tough because most people aren’t taught to communicate with visuals and aren’t taught to bridge the gap between what they see and what they can verbalize. I think a great example is when you go to a client and show them work and the best response they have is “I’ll know it when I see it.” [ambulance sirens in the background] It’s pretty exciting around here, eh? There’s shit going on.

NAMITA: I know. [laughing] It’s like a soundtrack to your words.

ERIC: There’s a turntable out there somewhere. [fire truck sirens approach] It’s getting more exciting.

NAMITA: Yes, it’s getting more exciting out there.

ERIC: In one of the domes, shit’s going on. Yeah, I think people who don’t work with visuals respond to them really emotionally. It’s very challenging for them to say, “The reason I don’t like the treatment you have here is that it feels too contemporary. I have a bad reaction to this color.” People tend to not be able to say that, and that inability to verbalize how they feel ends up being manifested in an “I don’t like it. Do more, and I’ll tell you if I like it then.” If you can get verbal agreement on what you’re doing, then you can go to the visual end of things and start to look at where things aren’t linking up. You can say, “The brief said this, and I thought I built that for you and you don’t like that so, if we’re going for contemporary and minimalist and stark, let’s say, is this not that?” And maybe they didn’t actually want contemporary and minimalist and stark, but they couldn’t articulate that earlier. But then you can investigate and find out where the problem is. I think words are just a fast way of directing that kind of work.

NAMITA: So, given this moment that we’re in where a lot of people have smartphones and people are taking pictures all the time and we’re inundated with visual images so much, we’re still not teaching people how to communicate or teaching people what they’re doing, we’re just giving them tools to do it? Is that fair?

ERIC: Definitely. Yeah, visual literacy is horribly underdeveloped for most people. I think we’re able to play one note over and over again. I’m struggling right now with a website where, right now I feel like I need to treat the images to have a certain aesthetic because there’s a popular aesthetic, that sort of VSCO Cam aesthetic, of emulating old film treatments and so on. In part I feel, well this is kind of neat because I get this semi-cinematic kind of feel. It feels otherworldly and that’s neat, but I think if you look to the far end of that ray of Instagram, it’s made everything feel like bubblegum almost. They’re either hypersaturated or… It’s not a particularly thoughtful way of using visuals. When I was in art school, I decided that I wanted to run glazes over my paintings and I don’t know why I called it that. My painting instructor said, “You keep talking about glazes. That’s not a word. We don’t do that. What are you talking about?” Effectively, what I meant is that if I kept putting varnish on top it’d look really shiny, and I liked that. I feel like we have a lot of varnish and everyone’s applying it and because we can get from a very banal image to a really, sort of, interesting looking one, we think that we’re using visual treatments, but that’s kind of like when I pick up my guitar and I plug it into a distortion pedal and I play three chords and I pretend to myself that I can play guitar, when in fact, I’m impressed by an effect. I have no skill on a guitar, my wife can attest to this. I’m awful. But for a moment, it’s like, “This rocks.” I think we have a lot of people who have an effect they can run. But they don’t understand where that effect is coming from or what it’s doing, or if they need to create a different emotion, how to go about doing that, which is evidenced by going to look at a menu in a restaurant. Often, there’s clearly an aesthetic they want to convey and they’re picking typography and treatments that simply are out of tune with that. And they can’t reconcile those things. I think that’s what good designers can do; they can isolate what part of this is not in tune and how do we get it to be, so that it all kind of reconciles.

NAMITA: Let’s switch gears for a second then and talk about how all of this transliteration, if you will, that you’re doing—

ERIC: That’s a big word.

NAMITA: Yeah, it is. It’s one of my favorites. —how it applies then to the client work that you’re doing and the choices you make about which clients you take on and for which reasons.

ERIC: I’m not sure how to parse that question. What clients for what reasons?

NAMITA: Well, specifically, I’ll be direct. One of the things that you and I talked about is how there are amazing people coming out of programs who are going into advertising, who are going into marketing, communication through design, and they have this way of thinking and looking at the world, and helping us see the world differently, and it’s being used to promote mints and burgers and soda and cigarettes and so forth. How do you reconcile choosing your clients that are gonna let you feel like you’re using these skills you have for good and not evil?

ERIC: It’s a really difficult challenge. It has a lot to do with how much work we have underway. Because we’re very project driven, when we’re very busy, it’s difficult for us to take on more work, but often projects overlap and when they come to a close, we might be left with a gap. I always have that fear that somehow all the work will dry up and we’ll get kicked out of our house. If I’m at that low point in the project cycle, I’ll take on anything. I’m a lot less discriminate at those times, whereas when there’s a lot of work, I can be far more principled. I think I’m getting to that point where I’m trying to let my fear control me less. But realistically, having started the company from where we did, and having gone through 2008 where all work stopped, there’s always the fear that it can end and there’s only two months left before we’re done. I think most design studios, regardless of how successful they seem, are running on limited time. Even at their strongest points, they don’t know what the next gig is. That said, I find it really sad or disappointing that so many of us are so wooed by work with big brands that often has no benefit, or is often of great detriment to humanity. It’s tough talking about this stuff without seeming like you’re being overly idealistic and so on.

NAMITA: Yeah, because you’ve got bills to pay.

ERIC: Totally, yeah. Where do you draw the line on this stuff? I don’t think it would matter how much McDonald’s would pay me, I don’t want to work for McDonald’s. I don’t want to lie to my kids about what they’re consuming and what that means to them. They’re awfully predatory. If you look at how they’ve structured their marketing to get kids at the earliest age and build those habits… I understand they’re a business and within that organization are probably some really wonderful people and so on, it still is a negative thing. It’s like Coca Cola. It doesn’t matter how much money Coke puts behind the Olympics, there’s no good reason for that corporation to exist. It’s not in the benefit of anyone. I think what happens is that agencies understand that creative people are desperate to do creative work, regardless of what’s the end product. It’s so exciting to just work on these interesting problems and to see your voice. I was thinking at Pentagram it must be neat to just walk around New York City and just see your work is everywhere, and that’s really exciting. You could almost forgetting, because of your love of craft, is that you’re selling, you know, Tic Tacs or Coca Cola or what have you. I just don’t want to do any of that anymore. I don’t want to work on projects that have no greater benefit. I think part of it is my age. I look at my kids who respond to advertising and believe it’s truth, and how hard I have to work to get them to think critically about advertising. I don’t want to be a part of that machine. I recognize there are ambiguous organizations as well, but there are better problems to solve.

NAMITA: So how do you reconcile that, going back to being a business person? It’s a challenge, and you are always hustling and trying to get that next project in the queue, so that you’re not worrying about whether you’ve got everything rolling and you’ve got employees to take care of and you’ve got families to take care of. Not taking a McDonald’s, for example, means that you have to take three smaller projects in order to get the work done. How does that work for you?

ERIC: I don’t drive a Mercedes. I don’t have a particularly extravagant lifestyle. We live in Vancouver, a very expensive city to live in. We live frugally, which I actually kind of like most of the time. I don’t need a lot of stuff. I’m happier when I get to work on self-directed projects. Those are the most enjoyable projects. I know that I could make more money working in an agency working on large client projects; I don’t think I’d be very happy doing that. So, I’ve made a work decision that impacts my lifestyle and I’m okay with that tradeoff, most of the time.

NAMITA: So, the last question I have for you is one that I think women get asked a lot, but I’m curious, as a father, as a husband, how do you balance life and work?

ERIC: I suck at it. I’m really bad at it. When we first started the company, which was a long time ago — we’ve been at it for about fifteen years — I had no work/life balance, and I thought that was great. Number one, I felt like I needed to put that time in to not be an imposter because, not being trained as a designer, I felt like I needed to put in that much more work to get good at it. And I did, not having any of the tools I would have had from a formal education. But I also had this macho idea that if I worked more hours then I was, sort of, a better person. I think it’s not an uncommon belief that if I work better then I’m invincible. Since having kids, I’ve been disappointed by my own life decisions a lot more. I’ve had spots where… I had one client who called upset about a video project on my day off with my son, and this individual was freaking out so I had to run to the office and plop my kid in front of Netflix in our meeting room for, I think, five hours while I tried to resolve the problem. He was three at the time, and I just thought I was a shitty parent for not saying to the client, “You’re gonna have to wait the weekend.” On that day, actually, we did the sound work — this is an interesting aside — to do placeholder audio for this, and we didn’t have the voice actor, so I went to the washer, which was the only silent room in the building, and did the voice work for the spot, which was an interesting moment. Tangental. I think it’s really hard in this work not to get really preoccupied with it, and really excited. I have an alarm that rings now at five o’clock, and I try to leave right at five. I try to be there to put my kids to bed at night. Most dinners with my kids I’ve missed. I’ve probably had dinner with them under five percent of their lives, and I think that’s really stupid. It’s just design. I love the work, but I have to get better at figuring that one out. Isn’t that a positive, uplifting note to end the conversation on?

NAMITA: You’re trying. You’re working at it.

ERIC: I am really trying.

NAMITA: You’re really trying. I don’t think I’ve met anybody who is in a creative profession who doesn’t struggle with this. It’s a problem. It’s because you can’t turn your head off. You’re going, constantly. It’s really challenging to step back and say, “Okay now I’m going to deal with dinner,” and things like that. It’s understandable. I just want to thank you so much for all the time and for talking with everybody, and good luck with everything.

ERIC: Thanks very much for having me out today.

[clapping]

NAMITA: So, we have time if anybody has questions.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Thanks a lot for coming down. This is the only thing I bought a ticket for because I was really busy, but I saw that you were coming to town and I follow your writing so I appreciate you coming. So, welcome to Portland. It’s your first time?

ERIC: Thank you, yes. It’s really great.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Good job. It’s only like a four hour drive.

ERIC: I know, it’s kind of depressing. My wife keeps wanting to come down and there’s always an excuse not to, but it’s great.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: So, a question on writing and blogging. We have a small agency too and I try to blog things that I think everybody should hear. I’m always curious, are more clients reading this or more peers? Because I have very different things to say to my clients and my peers. And some of that stuff I wouldn’t want clients to read. I’m just curious on your thoughts.

ERIC: You know, I was fighting with that today. I really enjoy writing, but I’m not sure where I should write what. I think that we sometimes lose opportunities as a business because I’m writing independently of the business, but a lot of the things I say on my blog, I have the same fear. If I’m swearing too much, is that inappropriate on our corporate website? I’m trying to figure out a mandate for each of those settings. I’m thinking about treating my personal blog more like a column, where I can write on whatever I want but keep it under seven hundred words. Then, doing bigger white papers and things like that that would help from an SCO standpoint on our main corporate website. I’m really all over the place with this. It’s tough because there’s the stuff you want to write and then there’s the strategy behind it. That’s where I’m at right now. Part of it is how much you want to write. I think it’s determining, do you want to write because you really enjoy writing? Or do you want to write purely from a lead generation standpoint? One of the challenges from that lead generation standpoint is much of the writing like that… I think if you look on LinkedIn right now, where you get notifications on every time that someone has written a new blogpost, everybody’s trying to do this thought leadership stuff where so much of it is so boring that I never read any of it. Like, really, there’s a lot of bad. When you get to it, the headline is often so deceiving from what is actually in that content. Maybe you can merge it where you write personal stuff in a certain way, where it’s honest in your stuff, but it’s written through your studio but it answers some problems. I think whenever there’s good value in the writing, you can do well, but it’s not easy to get there. I know I’ve meandered. We can talk about this more after if you have specific questions, but I hope that’s somewhere close to a response.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: No, it’s good. Just hearing that you struggle with it is enough, and it makes me think, yeah, it’s good.

ERIC: We all struggle with everything. Like, don’t believe that because it looks good for a moment, I’m not self conscious about absolutely everything we do.

NAMITA: Anyone who says that writing is easy is a liar. They’re just lying. It’s not easy.

ERIC: [laughing] That’s not true; writing is really easy. Editing is difficult.

NAMITA: Yeah, writing is easy. Writing well and rewriting, editing, accepting editorial feedback is hard. Fair enough, fair enough.

ERIC: Yeah, definitely. [points to audience member] Yeah?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: So, first I want to say that I also have that I also have that timer on my phone. And I wanted to ask also about the blog writing. You talked kind of about getting over that initial fear, and I think that a lot of your ideas, to me, are very courageous. You know, it’s not… Design isn’t magic. I want to talk about getting over that fear, and also, have you ever put stuff on your blog and then been like, “Oh my god, what was I thinking? That’s totally wrong. I don’t really think that.” You kind of talked about working through your thoughts.

ERIC: Yeah, it’s tough. I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to be someone else, especially as an adolescent. The first memories of this are being around fifth grade and realizing I was real knob, and thinking that if I just tied a red bandana around my knee I’d look like Chachi from Happy Days and then girls would like me. But, I didn’t have a red bandana so I had some yellow tape or something. Every time I’ve tried to do something that isn’t my own stuff, it kind of backfires. So I just try to be as absolutely honest as I can be about what we’re putting out there, and that’s kind of the best I can do. Some stuff, my business partners have to be the filter, to tell me that I’m pushing it too far, that we’re gonna lose business over it and someone’s gonna be really mad with me. That was the first part of the question, which was a matter of being self-concious around that sort of thing. And the second part, sorry, was… Right, about the articles. I wrote one article that haunts me to this day. It was “Nine to Five Equals Average.” My argument was that I’d meet young people who told me how passionate they were about design, which seems stupid because, like, be passionate about your spouse or your kids or whatever. Design? It’s still work. But if you are passionate, you shouldn’t be looking at your watch at 4:45 going, “Damn, I gotta get home,” if you don’t have kids. Like, if you’re twenty-two and the first thing you can think about is getting out of the office, maybe you’re actually not passionate. And I thought that was a really rational kind of argument. Like, if you’re passionate, you’re not watching the clock. But, I think it was misread as “Why don’t people work harder?” And, my big response was, if you love your life out of work, that’s cool, but don’t confuse those things. If you want to be great at what you do, you’re probably going to have work really hard at it. I even got hate mail from that one. My favorite comment, that I actually ended up deleting -- normally I let them be, but this was so mean -- It was the weirdest thing, it was, “You’re a walking cliche. You have the same black glasses that everybody else has. You’re also a terrible father and your children suffer from having such a horrible influence in their lives.” I was really amazed. It was like, wow, what button did I press that made you hate me that much? Like, there are people to hate, but I didn’t think I was that bad. I just thought people would be like, “You’re a jerk.” Like, I could live with that. And I didn’t sleep that night. I take that stuff really personally. So yeah, definitely, I’ve done things like that. I wrote about how Twitter was going to die and I didn’t understand it and it wasn’t scaleable and it wasn’t gonna work. I was really accurate on that one. I debated going back and writing a post, like, “These are My Greatest Flops,” with all the articles where I was absolutely wrong and this is what I learned later. But I don’t know if those posts need more attention brought to them. I’m just trying to figure stuff out, and what’s the worst that happens? Someone might be a little bit mad with me. I’ve had posts where, on Hacker News people will skewer me for what a jerk I am and on then on a design forum people will say, “Yeah, exactly.” So, you realize too it’s very audience specific. You put it out there and if they can’t deal with it, fuck ‘em.

NAMITA: On that note, thank you so much. We appreciate it.

ERIC: [laughing] We’re not lettin’ him say any more!

[clapping]

NAMITA: No, that’s a perfect ending! Thank you.

ERIC: Thanks a lot.

[designweekportland]

Watch DWP's Headquarters come alive from the ground up.

Domes by Escape Collective, flag system by GUILD.

[designweekportland]

Curious about what's happening to the hundreds of flags that adorned our HQ during DWP? We have something special in store. Sneak peek in the video above, filmed by Peter Simon on location at Spooltown with Kate Bingaman-Burt.

[designweekportland]

Kelsey Snook and Melissa Mongiat of Daily tous les jours are the brains behind DWP's massive public engagement project. They recorded a podcast with Raymond Brigleb for The Job in the domes this week.

Listen here.