Chanpory Rith
May 29, 2008
Samantha asks:
I’m just finishing up 4 years at an ad agency and moving to a new a location and job. I am wondering, how do you stay up on trends? I feel like sometimes I’m so caught up in the day-to-day getting-it-done that I forget to look around. Any tips or sources that would be helpful?
First, the short answer
To keep up on what’s cool, check out these three resources:
Alltop: Design
Alltop’s design secetion aggregates posts from top design and trends blogs such as Cool Hunting and Design Observer. This is where to get your daily dose of cool.AIGA events
The AIGA holds a million events throughout the year. These include portfolio reviews, lectures, and conferences. Many of these events include free wine, cheese, and lots of black-rimmed glasses.Flavorpill
For art, fashion, music, and film events, Flavorpill’s got the latest. For now, the site only covers New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, and Miami.
Now, the long answer
Staying trendy is easy. The tougher question is: How do you keep growing as a designer?
This is much harder to do.
Why?
Because we like efficiency. Efficiency means less stress and less risk. It means optimizing what you already know to reduce the energy it takes to think and act.
It’s why old folks love the groundbreaking music of yesterday, and hate the inferior music of today. It’s why we go through the same routines every morning as we get ready for work. If we had to think about how to tie our shoes everyday, we’d go crazy. Efficiency just makes life easier.
But it makes learning harder.
New language, ideas, and knowledge add new “biocost” to our lives. They are inherently inefficient, because they require more energy to acquire. So we stick to our old habits.
But here’s the danger. Efficiency depends on your environment staying the same. If it changes dramatically, you’re screwed. You’ve become so efficient for one specific context, that you can’t adapt to a changing paradigm. Examples: Blockbuster, CompUSA, New Kids on the Block.
So what’s a designer to do? I don’t pretend to have one simple solution. But here are some ideas:
Seek a variety of friends
Don’t just stick to the same group of people you know and love. Instead, make friends from a variety of disciplines. Doctors, lawyers, painters, yoga gurus, jugglers. The more different, the better. This exposes you to tons of new ideas, enabling you to find new connections to your own discipline.Move
Are you still in your hometown living exactly the same way since you were born? Unstuck yourself, and move somewhere else. Even if it’s just for awile.Travel
If you can’t move, visit a far far away place. (You might like it so much, you won’t come back.)Read
More than just coffee-table design books. Try the fantastically accessible series, Very Short Introductions.Go back to school
And get a degree in a different field than your first one.Teach a class
It’s the best way to push your knowledge of a subject to a new level. It also exposes you to new and fresh ideas from your students. Learning is both ways.Research a favorite topic
Everyone should have something they’re passionate about and want to learn more about. Really smart businesses make sure everyone in the company has a research topic. Even cashiers can provide insights about customers. It’s a way for organizations to learn and for everyone to contribute at another level.Make sure your job involves learning
Part of your compensation is what your job teaches you, and how it prepares you for the next job. Good managers understand this instinctively and mentor. Well run companies have formal cross-training and job-rotation programs, so employees learn other parts of the business. Yahoo!, for example, holds regularly “Hack Days” where participants show off their work and learn from one another.
For more on efficiency, language, biocost, variety, learning, and growth, check out the wonderfully succinct and insightful, Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations. It’s written by Hugh Dubberly, Peter Esmonde, Michael C Geoghegan, and Paul Pangaro, produced for Sun Microsystems.
Special thanks to Hugh Dubberly for his advice and feedback on this post
How do you continue to grow as a designer? Add your advice and tips below.
9 Comments
Joel Falconer
8:04 am
As someone who write on productivity and efficiency for one of my regular gigs, I can’t help but feel that most people have the balance wrong, as you’ve said. Efficiency is sure important, but people aren’t stopping to learn new skills, get new perspectives and be more creative anymore.
Let’s balance the neat freak in us with the sloppy artist a bit more ;) Great post!
Max
4:28 pm
Great ideas you shared in this post. My suggestion for traveling is to just pack a few things and head straight to the next central station or airport and get on the next available train or plane wherever it goes.
Peter Urban
7:28 pm
My experience with building an design / advertising related agency over many years is that at the beginning your are happy about even the smallest job / client. As you get more established though, a large number of smaller clients keeping you busy with a thousand jobs at a time turn into a problem.
What happens is that you scramble from job to job so much that there is no time to come back to the surface and have a look on what’s out there, what has changed or which direction you should take next - there is just no time beyond finishing projects that pay the bills.
That is especially true if you grow your organization based on a large number of smaller(ish) clients. The growth means more overhead, means higher cost, bigger payroll etc - so you have to go and even do more to keep up.
To prevent this vicious circle I found it is absolutely vital to actively manage your client list.
Start with what you have but as your profile rises and your abilities expand and your confidence grows you need to start to peruse larger jobs and clients. We’ve found that larger gigs very often come with little to none more administrative overhead over small stuff but they give you much more time to work on the creative side to explore and experiment and they pay much better.
Finally the switching between jobs is what kills your efficiency and what wears you out. Having 5 smaller jobs going simultaneously is much more demanding then two really big ones because with less different jobs you don’t need to switch your focus as often.
So I recommend take the time and effort and keep pursuing the bigger jobs you really want, even if you’re at capacity with the smaller stuff and eventually start weeding out some smaller jobs in exchange for a bigger project.
That gives you the time to explore what’s going on, to grow as an artist and to be inspired and energetic to deliver even better work to your bigger clients. From there it’s and upward spiral.
All it takes is a little effort into your business development and a little sacrificing some smaller jobs for your goals. Of course it’s all about balance - you also don’t want to end up with just two big clients in case one goes belly up or fires you. In the end you want to have a good mix of clients in your portfolio. I bet with that approach you’ll be a better designer.
Peter
Anthony Armendariz
11:44 am
There are a couple of essential items I feel are missing:
Investment in and Embrace Failure: The best solutions are created this way. Ask Apple.
Try things you’ve never done before: Challenge and Involve yourself into projects in which you know little about so you can grow.
Thanks.
red
7:29 pm
Good work, and some thoughtful suggestions. Also, what about asking for new challenges at your current job? You might be just the person to head up a new initiative or explore possibilities the company hadn’t thought of before.
One criticism — this line bothered me: Even cashiers can provide insights about customers.
Many cashiers are actually educated people with college degrees. For one reason or another, they might find themselves needing a second job or a break between careers. Don’t assume that the person ringing your purchases hasn’t studied fine art or philosophy or world history. You’d be surprised.
Chanpory Rith
8:55 pm
Hey red, thanks for the feedback. The fact that many cashiers are educated—even though many assumed them not to be—is the exact reason why they can provide insight. The point is that managers should make sure everyone has an interest that can be cultivated, no matter their level in the organization.
kimberlee
11:41 am
Hey, I’m not a designer, but think that you have a lot of good ideas for anyone who wants to be creative. :) Thanks for the reminders!
Ian Halliday
4:54 am
“Even cashiers can provide insights about customers.”
Very true when you look at the hierarchy of a modern business. Far too often businesses ignore the insights of those at the lower echelons, and such mistakes can be costly. After all it’s those that are down at the ‘shop floor’ level, who are conducting the day to day business, that see problems at their root, and often come up with the best solutions to fix them.
This can also be applied on a personal level as a designer, and this ties in well with point #1. I often find that my greatest inspirations come from people I meet that don’t have the first clue about design. Outside of the pressures of being an active part of the design process, they can often make observations you would often miss completely. At university, the best critiques I received came from medical, law or english students, not my fellow design classmates.
Puharteago
12:34 am
“Because we like efficiency. Efficiency means less stress and less risk. It means optimizing what you already know to reduce the energy it takes to think and act.
It’s why old folks love the groundbreaking music of yesterday, and hate the inferior music of today.”
Let me say that there is groundbreaking music of yesterday TO discover and it takes risk and a level of I guess stress?…well maybe not stress, but discovering OLD groundbreaking music takes probably MORE energy and a thinking, listening process than what easily marketed today.
I found that with my venture into “old” Jazz Fusion. Not pretentious stuff, Im just saying that I personally discovered that there’s a wealth of unheard old music out there thats mind blowing and very fullfilling.
And it takes more effort because it requires one to seek it out. Its not given to you easily or even spoken of in social circles.
So thats not a valid statement.