Emily Pilloton

I’ve seen some designs come out of the poorest villages in Africa that trump anything coming out of any design firm in the US. — Emily Pilloton

Recent Colbert Report guest and Bay Area native and designer Emily Pilloton was underwhelmed with the home product decision-making that made up much of her working life when she started Project H, an organization of volunteer designers who work to connect design with communities most in need. Her work encouraging local Project H chapters to bring better products to schools, hospitals and shelters led to the book “Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower
People.”

In February she’ll kick off the Design Revolution Road Show, a traveling exhibition and lecture series that will visit 25 high schools and university design programs nationwide across the nation via an Airstream trailer that highlights 40 humanitarian design solutions highlighted in the book. You can follow the cross-country tour, which will take Pilloton and partner Matthew Miller to schools from Austin to Baltimore, on the site’s itinerary and @DesRevRoadShow. Emily Pilliton is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

Notes On Design: What your initial motivation for starting Project H?

Emily Pilloton: I started Project H mostly out of frustration, but the kind of frustration that is laced with optimism: where you wake up one day and realize that you don’t like the way things are, but you think you know how to fix it.

I’m trained as an architect and a product designer, and grew up always taking things apart and putting things together, and came to design believing that it would be a great skill set for solving problems in a physical, creative, and critical manner.

A few years out of graduate school, when I found myself working as the store architect for a retail clothing company, where design was synonymous with choosing doorknobs and other such minutiae, I had had enough. Design had, in my own career (mostly because I had huge student loan bills), become so far removed from why I originally became a designer: to solve problems. I quit the doorknob job the next day, started writing and making up my own rules, and eventually started Project H as an avenue to apply design to the things that mattered.

The Design Revolution Roadshow Airstream

NoD: How did the idea for such a non-traditional book tour come about?

Emily Pilloton: As a natural contrarian, I tend to find the expected and the usual very boring. This was particularly true when I wrote “Design Revolution” and the time came to think about what kind of book tour I would embark on. The usual book signings and library talks seemed valuable, but not in keeping with the tone of the book, which is so much about a grassroots, bottom-up, “just do it” approach to design that really belongs at the doorsteps of designers who care, not in Barnes & Nobles. I wanted people to be able to see all these great products featured in the book, to pick them up, use them, and to be inspired by them. More importantly, I wanted the book tour to be an educational tool–a way to distribute a toolkit for designers and creatives to not just start designing for the greater good, but to do it in the best, most engaged way possible, with a critical eye and with real impact.

The Design Revolution Road Show was the result: 25 high schools and colleges in 75 days, 6300 miles across the country, in a vintage Airstream that my partner and I custom-built out (while living in) as an exhibition of all these great design solutions.

Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People

NoD: Beyond size, how did you select which 40 products made it into the Airstream?

Emily Pilloton: There are 115 products and projects in the book. I would have loved to have fit all of them, but some are too abstract or big or just unrealistic (like the BikeDispenser bicycle vending machines in the Netherlands). We selected the 40 based on a few factors—logistically, it depended a lot on what we could get our hands on, either by purchasing, having them donated, or from the designers themselves. Size was obviously an issue, as was the need to curate the 40 products in the same way we approached the curating of the book: there needed to be a range, from retail products like OneTouch blood glucose monitors down to feats of ingenuity from the developing world like the Paraguas Project- a bottle shredding device that turns plastic bottles into long strands suitable for craft weavers to make into baskets. There are also 8 categories in the book: Water, Well-Being, Energy, Education, Play, Food, Mobility, and Enterprise, and we wanted each one to
be well-represented.

NoD: Do you have a favorite category, or some favorite products?

Emily Pilloton: As for my favorite category, by far the Enterprise category that combines ingenuity with awesome business models. As for my favorite products of the ones in the exhibition, I love the SpiderBoot, the Adaptive Eyecare glasses, and the DIY Soccer Ball Tape!”

Spider Boot, Adaptive Eyecare glasses, and DIY Soccer Ball Tape

NoD: What is an area/industry that a Project H chapter hasn’t yet explored but that you’d like to see smart volunteers take on?

Emily Pilloton: Project H is oddly structured–in a good way, I think. We run on volunteer passion, but we function like a design firm. We aren’t Habitat for Humanity where the entry level for volunteers is relatively easy. If you volunteer for Project H, you’re a designer, and you’re going to be around for a while, and you’re going to work your butt off.

What that means is that our volunteer design teams embark on projects that go on for months if not years, and really dig their heels in to build single case studies into models that could work on a wider scale. Public education (K-12, not college level design education) is becoming one of our key strengths, and something I’ve tried to lead by example by leading and working directly on some of our key educational projects like the Learning Landscape math playground. We’ve delved deeply into systems-level design for education projects through a partnership with the Bertie County School District in North Carolina–the state’s poorest county–where I’m actually in the process of getting certified as a high school shop teacher to teach Studio H starting Fall 2010, a design/vocation/community program.

So as far as issues we haven’t yet explored, I am actually much more interested in investing deeply in what we’ve just started- a hard look at how design can improve environments, systems, services, products, and experiences for youth and public education students and institutions in the US. We’re working in our own back yards a lot more, and every single project is local. You will never see a Project H Design team in Chicago working on a project in Africa.

NoD: How important do you think a formal design background is to making better products?

Emily Pilloton: I’d like to say yes, but I think in most cases, no. If you’re going for form, and for things that sell, then a formal design background matters immensely. If you’re going for things that are appropriate, things that work, and things that are the result of ingenuity, then no. I’ve seen some designs come out of the poorest villages in Africa that trump anything coming out of any design firm in the US.

NoD: Can you share one of these designs of ingenuity that you’ve come across?

Tire Shoes, Kisizi Hospital, Uganda

Emily Pilloton: Definitely. One in particular. This child who was being treated at the children’s ward at the local “hospital” had very weak limbs and 2 broken ankles. His mother fashioned some shoes for him out of motorbike tires so that he could walk on the rigid casts. This photo was taken by my partner Matthew Miller at the Kisiizi Hospital in Kisiizi, southwestern Uganda.

That being said, what a formal design background does offer is a process, which to me is the most valuable component of design. As designers, we learn “how to see,” how to problem find, and how to go through a process that engages users and ultimately results in something that does both: that sells AND that works. The problem with so much design training these days is that it is not process-focused, it is form-focus. If all our design programs really focused on developing a process instead of teaching aesthetics, we would be much better off and have much more to offer.

NoD: How did you select the schools participating in the roadshow? What are your main goals for it?

Emily Pilloton: At first, we had chosen colleges off-the-beaten-path that usually don’t pull the high profile design speakers (not that we’re high profile by any means, but we wanted to bring something really cool to places that are sort of forgotten by the usual circuit). We targeted places like Auburn and NC State and colleges that have multiple design programs- product, graphic, architecture, etc., and that ideally also had IDSA chapters to support the promotion. About halfway through the planning, however, I was in North Carolina working with students at Bertie High School, where we’ve done a bunch of design work, and realized that this was our audience– not college students who had already been convinced of design’s value, but 16-year-olds in rural locations who have never thought of design as a career, but for whom creative capital would be the ultimate catalyst.

At that point we cut down our 25 potential colleges to about half that, and added about ten high schools, in locations that had a good link between the colleges and the high schools, or in places we knew would be interested, like my own high school in Larkspur, California, where the tour kicks off.

NoD: What project that you’ve been involved in in the past year have you been the most excited about?

Emily Pilloton: Definitely our partnership with the Bertie County School District in North Carolina. We’ve set up shop in Windsor with huge support from the superintendent to transform the district through smart design. We’ve completed the construction of four Learning Landscape math playgrounds for their elementary schools, just finished two new computer lab spaces at their high school, and did a countywide graphic campaign called Connect Bertie that will provide free broadband to the district’s families in order to promote networked learning outside of the school walls.

This partnership will continue with our high school design/build program Studio H, which starts Fall 2010, for which my partner and I are moving there and getting certified as shop teachers. The ability to work deep rather than wide, to invest in one community at a variety of levels, is hugely gratifying. I don’t ever want to skim the surface, and our projects in Bertie County are really allowing us to make the case and provide the proof that design makes a difference.

I’ve written about using LinkedIn to find design jobs here and here, but I’ve yet to suggest ways to use Twitter or Facebook as part of a design career search.

Needless to say, it is an obligation today that during the application process for a new job you take a moment to see if the company offering a position to which you might apply maintains a Facebook page or Twitter account. If so, Fan and Follow them, read some of their social media content, and then tailor your application / cover letter based upon the insights you have gained by doing this little bit of homework on the company. I know all seems obvious, but it is still worth illustrating because each experience using social media for this purpose is different.

For example, I’ll go look at Coroflot’s Twitter feed right now and check the most recent job announcement to see if this whole application process using social media works…

OK, here is the latest job posted on Coroflot’s Twitter feed:
CI Creative Director: Landor Associates New York, NY http://bit.ly/6H9LnM

(Note: if you are not following Coroflot’s Twitter feed then you can do so here.)

After reviewing the ad, I’ll visit the Landor Associates site and familiarize myself with them, and then search Twitter to see it they have a Twitter account, which they do, and here it is:

http://twitter.com/landor_dot_com

So in addition to what I know of Landor from their website, and from the ad, I now know from their Twitter feed that their CMO has published a short video about branding for non-profits: http://ow.ly/Q2dg

Why would they publish a video about branding for non-profits? Very likely because it is a target market of interest for them. I, personally, have worked for non-profits so have that to mention in my cover letter for the job. If you have worked for non-profits in the past then you too have that context to work into your cover letter. If you have not, fine, make reference to something else you find on their Twitter feed that matches a skill or interest that you have. And make sure they know you learned of it by reading their Twitter feed.

So with this one example of using Twitter as part of your job search process several things have been accomplished, and it took you all of 3 minutes to find and read through the prospective employer’s Twitter feed.

First: If you do a little homework using social media then when you apply for a job you’ll come across as someone that does everything you do with a little extra effort.

Two: You have shown business savvy and you are coming across as someone who “gets” the value of social media.

Three: In the example I provided above, you will have mentioned the CMO by name in your cover letter and, therefore, flattered a C-level executive in the company by commenting on some of their work.

Four: You are showning that you not only have a portfolio of work, but that you have expertise in a market that they are interested in pursuing which, in this case, is the non-profit market.

The list goes on.

I’ve not really touched on Facebook but you can apply the same priciples. Find the comapany on Facebook, fan them, and find something that you can work into your application/cover letter.

So add Twitter and Facebook to your job search strategy and you’ll not only find jobs, but also be able to tailor your cover letters to prospective employers and get an edge over other applicants.

BNE Was Here sticker -- Photo taken in Sukhumvit, Bangkok by Nat Wein

Thanks to Mother I recently interviewed, via email, a graffiti artist known as BNE.

Mother is big ad agency with big clients (like Coca-Cola and Stella Artois), that does interesting and creative work. They are opening a huge New York office (36,250 sq. ft.) at 11th avenue and 44th street in Hell’s Kitchen and across the street from Ogilvy. I was there last Thursday to attend a party they threw in celebration of their new office that was also promoted / co-sponsored by New York culture magazine ANIMAL. The guest of honor was BNE, but he/she/they was not present…as far as I know.

BNE has a secret identity and is prolific in the sense that the stickers and painted stencils that say “BNE” are in major cities all over the world. Enough to get print, tv, and web media coverage by major and minor outlets including a recent New York Times article. Coverage garnered, I suspect, thanks to a little help from trend / cool hunters representing agencies that tell the media what is cool and news worthy. There is no other logical explanation, because prolific tagging is not new.

BNE at Mother -- Photo courtesy of Mother, New York

The party was also billed as BNE’s first art show. The art at the opening included the big BNE initials/acronym that have provided the attention to date, and then some pieces where the BNE acronym were placed on top of brand icons like Bart Simpson and Spiderman obscuring the iconic characters as though the brand of BNE is so large, and aggressive, that it is stealing the exposure, the real estate, the consumers’ attention from the long established brands that play by the old rules of branding.

The party seemed to be Mother illustrating a point on branding, and the point was to blur the lines between branding and art, between commerce and art, between life and commerce, between life and art, between old established brands and “brand you.”

Mother and I actually have a lot in common, they build brands and advertise which is pretty much what I do. The only difference is that I do it illegally and my product is art. – BNE

There were same graffiti writers at the party that tagged up a wall in the basement of Mother New York’s new headquarters. For the most part the attendees were people like me — mostly younger — drinking the Stella ( a Mother ad account ). Nothing wrong with that!

BNE, if he / she / they do exist, is/are a tagger, that has been co-oped by a brand, and the brand is an ad agency out for some media coverage but perhaps more importantly an agency with a ton of money to burn in order to have a more impressive reel to help sell *their* brand to more clients. And the way they sell their brand, and get new clients, is to provide examples of the new branding strategy that is hard to explain but much easier to illustrate.

DJ Johnny Santos, Gui Borchert, CD of Syrup (New York) and Paul Malmstrom, ECD of Mother (New York) -- Photo courtesy of Mother, New York

The branding strategy on display at the BNE opening at Mother is that a brand has to create associations with or even actually create new micro-brands to be successful. In other words, you have to buy credibility. A brand has to appear to be new by moving away from the consumer so the new brand or co-oped brand association is foregrounded using very big budgets to help saturate the market. If you are Budweiser you can make your money through microbrews. If you are Disney you can make your money through smaller production companies. You can then sell to an increasingly cynical and jaded but, importantly, broader target audience because that target audience does not have to buy Bud anymore but can instead buy the sub-brand that feels more unique, more “outsider”. Like outsider / street art, for example.

BNE is similar in terms of market saturation. Where the money comes from I don’t know, but the strategy of market saturation is the same. And, probably as a result of this truth, the majority of people I talked to at the party, including several of Mother’s own staff, seemed cynical about the sincerity of both BNE and Mother.

BNE Was Here work at the Mother opening -- Photo courtesy of Mother, New York

It is interesting to explore the evolution of what branding means and to create a dialogue about commerce vs. art. This BNE art opening by Mother was an effort to do so and to stay near the leading edge of that dialogue. But there was no moment where Mother moved the dialogue forward. Sure, as the stickers say, “BNE was here”. But Kilroy was as well, over 60 years ago.

Kilroy Was Here graffiti -- Source Unknown, Wiki Creative Commons

Here is my interview with BNE. Facilitated by the PR director of Mother. I’ve not had any direct communication with BNE.

–
NoD: I’ve heard you are Benet (San Francisco-based graffiti artist) and a Sydney-based hip hop band called Bliss N Eso. Can we proceed with the questions assuming both of these identities are true?

BNE: Benet was a graffiti writer from the 90s who is not around anymore. And no, I am definitely not part of an Australian hip-hop group.

NoD: What I take from your stickers, and the sheer volume of them, is that there is a tension being built that is about to explode. Perhaps you have something on your mind and you are going to share that with us…or you don’t and you are more of a Forrest Gump character that will one day simply say, “I thank I’ll stop now.” (< --- Read like Forrest Gump.)   So which will it be -- (a) the big message / meaning of life (my fingers are crossed) or (b) a romantic Forrest Gump moment / Art for Art's Sake / "I thank I'll stop now"?

BNE: This is something that I  have been doing for about 15 years and have no plans to ever stop. My work in the street is very repetitive and is meant to be that way. There IS  meaning and a message in my work, I just don’t feel the need to spell it out. 

NoD: The media coverage you have received surprises me.  Not that you are undeserving of some attention, but it is still somewhat surprising at the level of coverage from major outlets and it is interesting how polarized people get over what you do.  Are you surprised by the coverage? Why do you think you have received so much attention.

BNE: I am  not really surprised by the coverage. I get a lot of media attention because people are curious and there is a story behind the mystery.

NoD: You are having your first art opening with an advertising agency.  Does that contradict what many find inspirational about graffiti / street art? The attitude of taking back public space vs. selling it?  Or perhaps the opposite it true, that Mother New York is giving the streets back. Hmmm…what’s the relationship between you and Mother? (That sounds like a really personal question!)

BNE: I don’t think that I’m contradicting myself at all. I’m not anti-advertising. I do take public space and always will. Nothing has changed. Mother understands and likes my art. They provided me with a space to do what I wanted to do. Mother and I actually have a lot in common, they build brands and advertise which is pretty much what I do. The only difference is that I do it illegally and my product is art.
 
NoD: Are you a fan of any street artists?

BNE: I don’t like the term “street artist,” but as far as the streets go, I like and respect people who put in work consistently for a long time. Running around for 6 months or a year doesn’t make you somebody in the streets. An ice skater or pianist will spend their whole life perfecting what they do with decades of hard work behind them. Graffiti is no different. MQ DMS and TIE ONE ( Rest In Peace) are artists who I respect.        

NoD: What commercial art do you like? Films, books, websites, etc?

BNE: Do you think someone as narcissistic as me actually pays attention to what other people do!? I’m just kidding. I like a lot of stuff. Too many to mention.

NoD: Do you do other street art other than your stickering?  Do you work alone? Are you a “you” or a “them”?

BNE: Stickers are just one of the tools I use. And when it comes to the labels, I work alone.

NoD: What do you do to make money?

BNE: From now on….art.

NoD: How old are you?

BNE: BNE

NoD: Where are you from?

BNE: BNE

NoD: What is your name?

BNE: BNE

NoD: Did I get you to confess!?

BNE: BNE BNE BNE BNE BNE BNE BNE BNE

Have you ever seen a beautiful design and been curious who created it? Would you like to not only learn who the designer is but also interview them? Me too. And so, I thought I’d try something new and invite NoD readers to site beautiful designs that they have seen, past or present. And then NoD editors (or perhaps other NoD readers) will help us find the designers behind the designs we love. A great ad, an amazing animation, a beautiful package design, a perfect font…anything goes.

So, post a comment to this entry below and we’ll start investigating. When we find out who the designer is we’ll share their name with you and may even try to get a Q&A published with them, and YOU can be the interviewer. Also, feel free to suggest designers whose names you know and whom you would like to interview.

Scott

Christine Nguyen

You’ve not seen work like that of Christine Nguyen. Much of her current body of work involves combining original photography, items from nature, and a salt crystalizing process that makes each piece organic and delivers unexpected and otherworldy results. She is a busy artist and solo exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Hammer Museum (Project), Michael Kohn Gallery, Andrewshire Gallery, and Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Laguna Beach Art Museum, Laguna Beach; 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles, PH Gallery, New York; San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Sprueth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany; and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Christine currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She received her B.F.A from California State University, Long Beach and M.F.A from University of California, Irvine.

Here, professional photographer and curator Laina Karavani interviews Christine in a series of emails, Internet chats, and phone calls.

NoD: Hi Christine. Where are you from?

Christine Nguyen: California. I grew up in Northern California and currently reside in Los Angeles.

Work by Christine Nguyen

“My work draws upon the imagery of science, but it is not limited to technologies of the present. It imagines that the depths of the ocean reach into outer space, that through an organic prism, vision can fluctuate between the micro- and macroscopic.” – Christine Nguyen

NoD: Oh. Where north?

Christine Nguyen: I was born in Mountain View and then grew up in San Jose. My dad was a commercial fisherman. He fished mostly in the bay area during my childhood and then in Southern California in my late teens. I realized about 3 years ago a lot of my work is partially inspired by the ocean due to the things my dad would bring home and spending a lot time on his boat as a kid. I’ve always been fascinated in nature, the sciences, geology, the macro/ micro, and outer space. Lately, I’ve been into growing salt crystals and collecting minerals and crystals.

NoD: Do you have photographs from your childhood of you and your father near water?

Christine Nguyen: I’m not sure. That’s a good question. I don’t recall any off hand, but should look into it. I always wanted to go out fishing with him when I was a kid on his boat, but he wasn’t allowed to since it was a commercial fishing boat. He did take me out once to see a light house when I was in high school in San Pedro, CA. I was sooo excited. The sad part was that I ended up getting really seasick. It’s pretty ironic how I love the ocean!

NoD: You were recently selected as one of the Visions from the New California artist’s fellowship by the Alliance of Artists Communities. This involved a residency, yes?

Christine Nguyen: I received the fellowship last year. The residency was in the Marin Headlands which is located a few miles across the Golden Gate Bridge at the Headlands Center for the Arts for the month of October. It was amazing out there. The art center buildings are historic military buildings that have been converted and restored.

NoD: oh wow, Sausalito is really nice.

Christine Nguyen: Yes, it’s amazing. I had a huge studio to work in with natural lighting all to myself. The beach was 10 minutes away walking distance. The beaches in that area are gorgeous….sea mounds, multi-colored pebbles, shells, and beautiful cliff sides. There were hiking trails everywhere filled with wildlife and nature. The dears and owls were my favorite creatures to encounter. I was in paradise.

NoD: What did you create?

Christine Nguyen: During my residency, I salt crystallized various vegetation and collected things in the area while on my walks. To salt crystallize something I submerge the object in a super saturated saltwater solution to which the salt crystals form and grow on. I also made drawings on Mylar and took photographs of the surrounding landscapes.

Work by Christine Nguyen

NoD: In your artwork the sea & space really come together, it’s angelic.

Christine Nguyen: Thank you. I do see the two different environments very similar.

NoD: I’m looking at this photo-based piece of yours I really like… it has many layers…
These salt crystallize things are really pretty too. How do you present this work?

Work by Christine Nguyen - Humming of a Symphony

Christine Nguyen: The piece you are talking about is called “Humming of a Symphony”. It’s a photo-based piece that was actually partially inspired by my experience at the Headlands such as the multicolored background landscape.

In the past, I have put the salt crystallized stuff on multiple shelves. I think for my next project I am going to just have one long shelf. In fact, I need to make more for an up coming show in January.

NoD: What are you showing in January?

Christine Nguyen: I’ll be showing some crystallized plant stuff on a long shelf and a large photo-based piece. The exhibition is a group show in Kiel, Germany called “Doppler Effect” at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel.

In the summer of 2010, I will be having a solo show at the Huntington Beach Art Center. I will be salt crystallizing a row boat. I had an installation idea where the room is filled with crystallized things, sea shells, coral, and such and have the row boat in the middle of it. The working title for the installation is, “What the Ocean Left Behind”.

NoD: It’s very interesting how similar your photographic work and drawings are. Can you describe some of your processes?

Work by Christine Nguyen - Juxtapose

Christine Nguyen: The photo-based work is a combination of drawing and a photographic process. “Negatives” are drawn on layers of Mylar, which are projected onto light-sensitive paper. The paper is developed in a color processor, creating a camera-less, photographic image. What you are seeing is a negative of the drawing. I use paints, inks, pens, pencils, and also grow salt crystals on the Mylar to create my drawings. When I know I am just making a drawing I use the same techniques with drawing and salt crystals, but think about the layers more and what will show through.

NoD: Where is your favorite place to travel?

Christine Nguyen: Anywhere that is in the woods, by and in the ocean, crystal caverns, and such. There’s so much out there that I haven’t seen and would like to see it all someday within my lifetime.

Work by Christine Nguyen

NoD: How you have been involved in SO MANY shows over the years?

Christine Nguyen: I just keep busy and continued to make work to exhibit them. Those shows lead to other exhibitions and also through referrals. You just never know who is going to see the work and where it might lead you to next.

Earlier this year, I did a residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I worked with two master printers for two weeks. And they made editions of 10 -12 of the attached the two lithographs. http://tamarind.unm.edu/editions/nguyen_img.html This came about by the Gallery Director, Arif Khan, whom came across my work through the Armand Hammer Museum website. At the end of year, the Hammer Museum will be publishing a book titled: Hammer projects 1999-2009 that will include my work. I’m sure the book will bring more exposure to my work.

Also in 2010, I have a residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. I was nominated by John Souza, a Los Angeles based curator, to apply for this residency earlier in the year.

Christine Nguyen's home studio

NoD: Do you know what kind of work you will be producing during this residency?

Christine Nguyen: I plan to continue making drawings on Mylar and to continue to crystallize the local vegetation and materials in the area and incorporate them in my drawings perhaps. I also want to make large cyanotype prints (also known as sunprints). The cyanotype is an early 19th century photographic process. To make a cyanotype, you place objects on the coated sensitized paper and place it in the sun to be exposed and then you wash it under water to develop and fix the image. I have drawn and painted on the paper before coating it with the light sensitive cyanotype chemicals. I’ve included a sample image of it.

NoD: How did you begin working with this crystallization process?

Christine Nguyen: I’ve always been interested into crystals and minerals and looking at their formations. And then a friend of mine had sent me this Magical Forest kit that grew salt crystals on this cardboard cut outs of trees and mountains. I think it just got me thinking and such. I bought a crystal making kit which wasn’t what I was quite looking for. After doing research about growing crystals, I decided the salt crystal would work best for to experiment with since I think it relates to the ocean. The ocean being salty and all.

NoD: You are also a photographer for the Getty Research Institute in the Digital Services Department. What types of photos do you take?

Christine Nguyen: I take photographs of special collection materials that range from books, manuscripts, maps, engravings, and such that are for patrons and for in house projects that are archived in a database. I have also taken the Scholar portraits for a few years and have photographed events and lectures in the past.

–

You may review more of Christine Nguyen’s work here:
http://www.lephant.com/

You may view interviewer Laina Karavani’s site here:
http://www.lsk-photo.com/

Celeste Prevost

After a stint in Colorado where she earned recognition for a clean, often humorous body of work now detailed on her newly redesigned site Designisfine, designer/illustrator Celeste Prevost has landed her creative talents in Minneapolis. In addition to working in-house at marketing firm Zeus Jones she takes on freelance projects that inspire her creatively. Here Celeste describes her career path, shows us the mood boards she creates for inspiration, and let’s us have a look at her design space at Zeus Jones where she and husband (Rob Angermuller of www.lifterbaron.com and designer for ARTCRANK) spend their weekends being creative at their adjacent desks. Celeste is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

NoD: You sometimes make your designs available for little or no payment. What are your thoughts around arguments for creative and media work being shared for free online?

Celeste Prevost: A typeface I created and posted for free download, Hand of God, is kind of gimmicky and I made it to be used publicly. I’m not a professional typographer, but I was happy when a small Boulder company called Humanoid Wake approached me obout using it on one of their wakeboards soon. It will stay free for them.

Hand of God Typeface by Celeste Prevost.

I love to share my work and give back — sharing in our community is very important as long as it’s not abused. It’s empowering that people can use your work and I believe that having work out there is good for you. I’m a believer in Joy Engine’s mantra that “sharing is caring.”

NoD: Joy Engine is a Boulder-based online design magazine. You are from Colorado, yes?

Celeste Prevost: Yes, I grew up in Boulder and Denver and studied graphic design at the Art of Institute in Denver. I interned at an agency in Boulder, MoxieSozo, before freelancing at Sukle. Given the fact that Boulder doesn’t host major industries, freelancing there was tough, and good work and creative undertakings were often overlooked by the mountains. I worked on a few regional and national campaigns, and took on a lot of projects in the community, sometimes for pay, sometimes not.

NoD: What brought you to Minneapolis?

Celeste Prevost: My husband Rob and I were looking for a new city to land in, and Minneapolis seemed like a good place to be creatively. Large companies like Target and 3M have brought lots of smart people to the Twin Cities, and I was glad to find Zeus Jones,and keep doing my personal and freelance design projects.

NoD: What projects/clients are you currently working on at Zeus Jones?

Celeste Prevost: I’m currently working on a packaging for new home fragrance lines for Thymes. We just recently finished up a new site for Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, and are about to kick off a really exciting project with Nordstrom> (Can’t say what… but it involves some futuristic Internets!) :)

Thymes Packaging Design by Celeste Prevost / Zeus Jones.

NoD: You’ve worked at a lot of ad agencies. Is advertising your primary interest?

Celeste Prevost: No. I don’t mind doing advertising as one component to a project, but billboards just aren’t as effective now as a Twitter account and solid branding. I love doing logos for small and medium size businesses and for people who trust what I’m trying to do for them. I like helping people identify their role within their community and being involved from the start of strategy and concepting.

NoD: Have you seen agencies/design firms adjusting their approach to projects because of the effectiveness of Twitter and solid branding?

Celeste Prevost: I think Twitter can be a great tool to communicate and connect with others. I think lately agencies have been overlooking the fact that Twitter is just a tool and that any business can do great with or without twitter if they have a strong brand and are offering something of value. It’s not the end all be all and sometimes it’s just not appropriate. I think Twitter is most effective with companies that can provide something of real use and have the time to truly engage their market. They basically can’t be in it to make a buck or to interrupt the market with ad like rhetoric.

NoD: Given Designisfine’s emphasis on logos, do you get asked to do a lot of logo redesigns?

Celeste Prevost: Sometimes a logo redesign isn’t necessary. But I think that the best brand refreshes are those that are clean and have a modernizing effect.

FreshSimple Cafe (Brooklyn, NY) Identity Package by Celeste Prevost.

I really like interchangeable logos that have multiple icons that can function in a variety of ways. Being able to move the icons and change their colors can give people a more concise idea of what the brand is, and I think the City of Melbourne is a good example with their recent redesign.

City of Melbourne Logo by Landor. Before and After.

NoD: How did you approach the graphic look you just created for K.I.D. Collective?

Celeste Prevost: The creator, Casey Keasler, had seen my work in Boulder and asked for a header for her site. As I began to build a mood board and create visual icons that identified her recipes and designs, a pattern came together. I turned into a site skin and showed her how to make back-end changes in Wordpress—I want clients to feel empowered to run with their designs.

K.I.D. Collective Identity and Site Design by Celeste Prevost.

For freelance work I only take on topics that are of interest to me, which keeps me excited. My hobby and passion is design, and beyond art shows and lectures, my husband and I spend most weekends on laptops across from each other.

NoD: What is your mood board setup like? Any chance you might be able to provide an image of your work/studio setup?

Celeste Prevost: My moodboards are usually digital only. I rarely make a physical moodboard with cutouts, but when I do they usually end up on the wall next to my desk.

Celeste Prevost digital mood board.

NoD: Any chance you might be able to provide an image of your work/studio setup?

Celeste Prevost: So my desk is uber boring, but I attached images anyway.

Celeste Prevost Desk at Zeus Jones.

NoD: How do you select the people you want to work with, be they clients or collaborators?

Celeste Prevost: I like working with people who are naturally creative and can appreciate aesthetics. A sense of adventure helps, as well as being open to what will happen in the creative process.

People come to me because of what I’ve done in the past, and knowing that makes it important to live up to their expectations. As my work evolves, I try to grow those skills any my own creativity. Money is not always the priority—the work is.

Indigo Painting with a Stencil

Shallom Johnson is an urban artist, dancer, and fashion/arts writer currently based in Vancouver who has been painting under the alias Indigo since 2008. She paints beautiful, layered, and emotional pieces using meticulously cut stencils, spray paint and house paint. She’s moving fast, literally and figuratively, making her mark in the art world in just 1.5 years of professional painting. Consider that she just left a live painting event in Brooklyn, is now painting with C215 in Paris, then is off to Brittany to paint with artist Liliwenn and then more events and collaborations in Berlin, Moscow, Dresden, London, New York City again (in late November), LA, and then home to Vancouver. And despite this frenetic schedule, when you speak with her you sense the patience and quiet that is required to create the works that you can view below. I met her in Brooklyn, and we have since had an interesting email exchange over the past three days:

NoD: Where are you from?

Indigo: I’m currently based in Vancouver (have been living there for 10 years now) but I grew up in a log house in the middle of a forest in Northern BC.

NoD:You just painted at Mark Batty Publishing’s Urban Arts Festival in Brooklyn. How did that come about? How did it go for you?

Indigo: My involvement with MBP came about via facebook. I was going to be in NYC anyways, because it is so much cheaper to fly to Europe from there than it is if you go straight from Vancouver. I saw the event listing online, noticed that they hadn’t announced all the artists yet, and messaged Adri (one of the festival’s directors) to ask if they had space for me to get involved.

Indigo painting after the rain stopped (Photo by Vincent Cornelli.)

It went really well, on all fronts – but during the days leading up to it, it seemed like everything that could go wrong, went wrong! First the paint shipment from MTN never showed up, then they got a little bit of paint but it was the wrong kind for me to use with stencils…finally got to the venue the day before to get my background done, and the space I was given was up on a narrow ledge with no available ladder to reach the top…then someone ran over two gallons of my housepaint with his car and got very angry at me because he couldn’t be bothered to watch where he was driving…then on the day of, we almost got rained out, and I was extra worried because I was leaving the very next day for Paris and wouldnt have had time to come back and finish my piece…it happened to be a full moon the evening of the event, and we were feeling the effects of that crazy full moon energy…

Indigo at Urban Arts Fest in Brooklyn. (Photo by Indigo.)

However, it all worked out in the end as I kept saying it would – managed to pick up paint at Blick, got ahold of a cherrypicker lift to paint the top of the wall, angry dude with the car came back later to apologize, and after two hours of rain the sun finally came out and the wind died down and I got my piece finished before dark!

Indigo at Urban Arts Fest in Brooklyn. (Photo by Vincent Cornelli.)

I met so many amazing people over the course of the two days I spent painting, was really happy with the end product of Mania and my collaboration (he provided the background stencil, I did the foreground images), the canvas pieces that I painted ended up all going to Wal-Art gallery in LA for a group stencil show in November, I made a connection with Modern Multiples (also based in LA) and began talks about doing a series of art prints in the future, and I headed off to Paris exhausted but extremely satisfied.

NoD: You left the Urban Arts event in Brooklyn and went to Paris where you are now painting with c215. Tell me about that, how it came about, have you collaborated before, send me a photo of the two of you and your work together! Take it from your mobile phone now! Don’t hesitate.

Indigo: I also got in touch with C215 over facebook – which I guess is either a sign of the way the industry works these days or just a sign that I am a bit of a social media addict, haha. He put up a posting about some legal walls in his neighborhood available to foreign artists to paint, and I said I’d be interested in painting one of them…I think there will be about 20 artists involved in total. We have never worked together before, but I have been following his work ever since I got into stenciling and have always found him to be a source of inspiration, so I’m really excited to be a part of this project. I don’t have a picture of the two of us together but I do have some pictures of the wall that we painted here.

Indigo's Collaboration with C215 in Paris. (Photo by Indigo)

NoD: Where to from Paris?

Indigo: Well my plans are constantly changing as new opportunities come up and I try to find the time and money to work them into my schedule. From Paris I am going to Brittany to paint with Liliwenn, then from there I am going to participate in the Paint and Beer festival in Amsterdam. After that I am headed to Berlin, where I will meet up with a group of artists from Tacheles and travel to Moscow for a 3 week residency. Once I get back to Berlin from Russia, I am going to try and visit Koloni in Dresden for a couple of days before flying to London for a week or so of painting and visiting. On my way back home, I am going to be flying back in through New York and LA and hopefully staying for at least a few days in both places. Then home to Vancouver where I will be showing some of the new work I am creating in Moscow (details still TBC).

NoD: You have not always painted? What is your education background?

Indigo: I have always painted and drawn but have only been pursuing a career as a visual artist for about a year and a half. I have a BFA in contemporary dance and English. I have been dancing since I was 4 years old. After highschool I had planned to do a double major in visual art and dance but ended up having to choose one, for various reasons, and dance won out.

NoD: And after you received your degree…

Indigo: I graduated from university in 2004. For 4 years I was working as a professional contemporary dance artist – performer, choreographer, instructor – until I got frustrated with the opportunities available to me, and the way that the industry was structured…in summer of 2008 I decided to give myself a break from dance over the summer and start spending more of my time painting…I still very much consider myself a dancer, even though I am not currently dancing. The transition from dancer to visual artist has been at times very challenging and I have gone through several moments of creative identity crisis…

I started stenciling in March of 2008, took a break from it for about 6 months over the winter and worked with acrylics and collage and ink….got back into it in early 2009 and haven’t slowed down since.

I have been working in the fashion industry since 2005. I started out as a blogger and now in addition to being the editor of Stylefinds, one of Vancouver’s top independent fashion blogs, I also freelance as a fashion and arts writer for Spade Magazine and ION Magazine. In writing for print I have been able to expand my subject matter to covering art and fashion, which has been a rather refreshing and appropriate change that has happened over the past year or so. In the past year I have also started being more active as a stylist and event planner.

I am a workaholic and I really don’t ever stop working, or sleep more than a few hours a night. My life tends to go in phases where one of my interests – art, writing, dance – takes precedence over the others – I have had to make some concessions in my creative practice and admit to myself that I cannot do everything all at once if I am going to do anything to the best of my abilities. Right now, at this moment in time, art comes first. I’ve just made the leap into being a full time artist, having had to quit my day job in order to take this trip. Hopefully it is something I can sustain even after I get home.

NoD: Describe your work / painting? You create multiple layers / stencils using what material? Do you digitally manipulate the photos you use first? And where do the photos come from?

Indigo: I make multilayered photorealistic stencils, mainly pictures of people. I am drawn to images that are melancholy, sad and thoughtful. My work is quiet and contemplative. to me it feels like it is somewhere in between fine art and urban art, in terms of aesthetic and concept. I am interested in hinting at the stories of the people that I portray, while leaving the viewer to interpret a narrative or underlying meaning. I get my images from a variety of sources: photos I’ve taken myself, pictures taken by my photographer friends, or found images.

I cut my stencils from Duralar (a clear plastic film). I don’t use a computer at any stage in the creation process, other than to print out the original picture onto a transparency. From there, I project the image against a wall, tape up a sheet of duralar and trace each layer directly onto the plastic with a sharpie. After that it’s just a hell of a lot of cutting and more cutting. For quite some time I was using a pyrograph (a heated point tool meant for decorative wood burning) to cut my stencils, then I shorted out all my tips this summer after a few too many 10-hour burning sessions, and I’ve since gone back to cutting everything with a blade.

NoD: How did you begin calling yourself Indigo?

Indigo: I chose it because when I was a kid I had some peculiar unexplainable experiences consistent with how people describe Indigo children.  Last summer those peculiarities in perception started reasserting themselves, and now they seem to be here to stay.

NoD: OK…big philosophical kind of question. New artists, primary market artists today (more than ever) need to do more than make good art. Do you think this is true / becoming increasingly true? What I mean is, the artist has to be accessible. Like any other career, artists now have to maintain an online AND community-focused personality that their audience can get to know…and that personality needs to be interesting and sincere. I think there is sincerity in your work for sure, so I don’t intend to come across as cynical, but I also think you understand the need to package your work with a persona and that is ultimately what people want. I’m rambling. Do you find this line of questions interesting?

Indigo: Totally interesting, on a few levels. So many artists, myself included at times, have real problems handling both creation (creation of a body of work) and promotion (construction/dissemination of work.image.brand.press,etc). And I’ll admit it is exhausting to try and do both. One usually suffers and if I am going to choose one it will most definitely be creation because if you don’t make anything then what the hell are you going to spend your time promoting?

Audiences have always been interested in the artists’ personality just as much as the art itself. I think that with the prevalence of the internet, that interest has just found a new venue, and it is one with which audiences can easily find out more and have a more direct connection than ever to artists who they are interested in. I am a social media addict, I feel like a bit of a dork about it sometimes, but it’s true. I think that accessibility is important but it has to happen on the artists’ own terms, with a more fine tuned awareness about how public everything has the potential to be nowadays.

I think that with venues like Twitter and Facebook it’s really easy to just say whatever the fuck comes into our heads, no matter how random or personally revealing that might be…I know I am horrible at self-censorship and have had to make a conscious effort to become more aware of what I am putting out there and how it’s perceived by the rest of the world. I am not crafting a persona for myself, however. I am just being me – and luckily that seems to be interesting enough all on its own. I think that the most successful users of online social media are the ones that promote and engage the participants on some level of communication or collaboration offline as well. I wrote a bit about this a while back, as it related to a project that unfortunately never really got off the ground.

That said, persona aside – substance is key. If your work cannot speak for itself, if you have nothing to back up whatever face (or lack of face) you are putting out to the world, then you won’t be taken seriously by your peers, or by those people in the industry that know what they are talking about when it comes to art, and have the potential to impact your life and your career in a positive way. You need both – a way to engage with your audiences with more than just your artwork, and the commitment and motivation and creative energy to consistently be in creation mode, pushing your boundaries. Talk is cheap, and at some point people are going to expect you to stop talking and start doing, or find some way to do both at once.

blah blah now I am rambling I have been too long on airplanes today and it is time for sleep. more questions or points of discussion are welcome.

Agnieszka Gasparska at her KMIP storefront HQ
(Photo: Andrea Brizzi – www.andreabrizzi.com)

Agnieszka Gasparska is the Creative Director and founder of design firm Kiss Me I’m Polish. Her clients include GOOD, Thrillist, Refinery29, Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame and many others that you have heard of. She is speaking at AIGA’s MAKE / THINK conference in Memphis this October on the topic of Art Direction on the web.

I approached Agnieszka after seeing that she designed the Deitch site, a gallery of which I’m a fan. A few email exchanges and chats later and I’ve met a sincere, smart and accomplished designer with good ideas and the creativity and savvy to sell them. Out of her East Village storefront studio in New York she has built an impressive client list, but she is really just getting started as a firm so it is exciting to imagine what is still to come. Our exchanges follow:

NoD: What gig was a turning point for you as a professional designer?

Agnieszka Gasparska: Coming out of school [ at Cooper Union ] and starting out at a place like Funny Garbage (where I stayed for 5 years) taught me invaluable things about working as a designer in the real world. I could have never started my own business without that sort of professional experience. But at the same time, I feel that my career would never have taken the trajectory it has if it wasn’t for the freelance opportunities I had during that time, which were ultimately the reason I decided to strike out on my own. My collaborations with Fischerspooner for example, allowed me to experiment and explore my design sensibilities in ways that the responsibilities of my full-time job did not. That sort of openness and creativity is still something I strive for in the work we do at the studio today. Now that my own independent endeavors have matured into yet another full-time job, I really try to remember how it started.

NoD: You are speaking on the topic of Art Direction on the Web at the MAKE /THINK AIGA design conference in Memphis in October. How is Art Direction on the Web different than art direction off the web?

Agnieszka: In many ways, they are the same – I really believe that a smart designer should be able to jump across medium lines pretty comfortably, as long as the core differences between the design problems are part of the creative process. One of the key things that distinguishes art direction on the web from that in print, is that online you wind up with a lot of moving parts that you cannot fully control. It’s a living, breathing thing and most of the dynamically-published content cannot be fully art-directed every time it is released. So you wind up focusing most of the creative effort on designing a great container that carries this content. And while it is this container that embodies a lot of the design identity of the site itself, it is also important for it to not overpower the actual content, but compliment it. That balance is very important in web design.

Design something too generic and your website completely lacks a voice and personality and all of the content suffers from the side effects of that too. Design something too overbearing and pushy from a design perspective and you wind up bullying the message and the information aside.

NoD: You are originally from Poland and, as we discussed, you and your family moved to Queens, NYC two years before the Solidarity candidate won the election. In other words, you and your family fled Communist Poland. Having lived there until you were 11 years old, do you feel that life there has influenced your design aesthetic?

Agnieszka: What I always notice while I’m there is the striking juxtaposition between the rigid and the decorative. In so many instances you will see something very cold and structured not only co-existing but being complemented by something very warm and hand-made. I think that has had a strong impact on my aesthetic and is probably visible in most of my work.

NoD: Care to share any other details of your upbringing and family life? Did anyone in your family work in a creative field?

Agnieszka: I do think there is some sort of a creative vein in my family, but we also have had a lot of engineers and scientists as well. My mom is a structural engineer and my dad, while he really wanted to study art when he was young, ultimately went into architecture as it was deemed more practical by his parents. So in that sense I feel like the tendency for problem-solving – be it visual or mathematical – is a pretty strong element of my own personal foundation.

NoD: What design work are you most proud of?

Agnieszka: That’s like asking a parent who their favorite child is! The projects that stick out in my mind are those where I surprised myself. As a designer, you are constantly being asked to leave your comfort zone – which is especially true when you run your own studio. And that is where a lot of stress and anxiety comes from. So when you feel that you have not only met the challenge but that something magical happened in the process and you exceeded your own expectations, that’s the best feeling.

NoD: Problem-solving has been a recurring theme in our exchanges. In reference to both your upbringing and to your studies at Cooper Union you seem to note a passion for problem solving that is as strong as your passion for design. Any examples of those moments when your problem-solving urge was as satisfied as your design urge? Moment’s where it all seemed to come together.

Agnieszka: Well…two examples come to mind. While working on the GOOD.is website redesign, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to display the various blog posts in the main body of the content-heavy landing pages. We really wanted a way that one could scan down the page and be able to quickly distinguish between posts based on the amount of discussion they sparked or by the amount of votes they received. Over several sketches emerged the idea of the colorful tab stickers that sit atop each post module indicating the number of comments and/or GOOD marks a post has received.

Good.is color-coded “Good Marks” and comment tabs / stickers.

The concept for these was that they would also grow in width depending on the value so that posts with more response would have wider stickers than those with just a handful, hence making browsing down a page even easier. (Similarly for posts highlighting upcoming events, a green sticker would display the number of RSVP’d guests, and for posts touting a project with a call for entries, a yellow sticker would indicate the number of entries.) Unfortunately, this dynamic change in sticker size has not yet been implemented on the live site, but I hope that it still will be, cause it was one of my favorite details.

NoD: Love this. Nice visual solution to communicate the energy of the site. And the Goodmark concept is great. Similar to the Facebook thumbs-up “like”. Smart to allow people in social media the option to just raise their hand to share their opinion rather than make them metaphorically stand up in class and talk.

There was one other design solution you offered to share.

Agnieszka: Yes. When we were hired to design the interactive kiosks for the Nesuhi Ertegun Hall of Fame, the central attraction of the Hall of Fame space were these beautiful videos commemorating each of the Hall of Fame artists (created by OPEN). Each video was created to play on a custom screen – made up of 2 x 6 individual monitors. The grid these monitors established was something that OPEN used as a core design element and framework in their videos – they didn’t fight it or try and pretend it wasn’t there, instead, the individual panels are an integral part of each animation.

When we begun the design process of the kiosks, we wanted to create something that would truly complement the videos since the kiosks were meant to offer supplementary content to visitors to the space.

Ertegun Hall of Fame kiosk design.

Since the grid the monitors made in physical life was not something that was an issue on a computer screen, we initially explored a variety of options for how the screens could look and behave. The playing field was wide open. However, we kept coming back to that grid and ultimately wound up intentionally breaking up the screen into compartments reminiscent of the videos, which proved the ideal framework for the complex information each artist screen was going to display. Instead of treating it as an obstacle, the compartments gave us a natural way to not only compliment the look & feel of the videos but also architect a visual structure that could play a broad amount of visual elements.

The point? That setting up rules can be a good thing. Something that may seem like a hurdle can also be a great jumping-off point.

NoD: That’s very interesting. I think this is related to your comment regarding the objective in web design of “creating a great container.” That’s resonating with me. Have you ever designed a great container for a client and they did not share your vision. Or, phrased differently, any nightmare clients you can share. You can change the names of course.

Agnieszka: A nightmare client is someone who comes to you for your experience and expertise but cannot actually let go because they feel they can do it better themselves. But we’ve been pretty lucky to have avoided any major horror shows. Those client situations that have turned into less than ideal scenarios tend to be minor in the grand scheme of things – your typical woes like scope creep or poor communication skills or overbearing and unreasonable expectations are also true for anyone in any line of work. Those types of issues are problematic everywhere.

NoD: So true.
Conversely, who are your dream clients?

Agnieszka: The best experiences are ones that involve taking a chance and a leap of faith – on both sides. A client who sees your potential, believes in it and lets you run with it, leaving the playing field open for ideas. And you as the designer, being challenged – with the bar being set just high enough, so the experience will make you try new things and take your game to the next level. Having that sort of openness makes some great things happen, and inevitably the project may take on other forms that you were not even aware of when you started.

NoD: At Kiss Me I’m Polish, do you have full-time staff or do you assemble teams based upon the projects you land?

Agnieszka: It’s a little of both actually. We have a core staff of designers who work in the office, but we also build on our team for certain projects, be it due to the size of the job or because it requires some particular supporting expertise. Over the years, we’ve established many relationships with other small firms and freelancers so when we need more hands on deck, or hands with skills that our core team doesn’t have, we have a network of partners we can call on.

NoD: Can you tell me about the KMIP studio space? Can we show some photos?!

Kiss Me I’m Polish storefront studio in the East Village, New York City
(Photo: Andrea Brizzi – www.andreabrizzi.com)

Agnieszka: Our headquarters is located in an old storefront in the East Village. The space used to be a jewelry store and before that I believe that someone lived here. There was actually a shower in the back room under the sleeping loft (which we now use for storage).

I love being in a storefront. We get a lot of nice sunlight, and don’t have to take an elevator to get in and out. But we do keep the windows frosted so as to keep the walk-in traffic to a minimum or else we wouldn’t get any work done.

I guess if things ever do get tight, we can always sell Polish delicacies here without having to rebrand. ;-)

NoD: A lot of agencies specialize in some vertical or niche market. Other than your back-up plan for selling Polish delicacies, it appears that perhaps database driven content management sites that leave the client the ability to self-manage might be a trend for KMIP. So, hmmm, where is my question…ok…do you have a reputation of expertise that meets a specific type of client’s needs? OR, what are your ideal clients?

Agnieszka: A large part of our client work is in fact web-based, but a significant part of the reason I founded the studio is to be able to keep the definition of what we do pretty fluid. That’s still something that’s very important to me, hence we never shy away from new opportunities or jobs of the variety that may not already be in our portfolio. Having versatility not only keeps all of your muscles working but it also develops the strength of your team.

That said, yes, a large part of our current and recent projects has focused on the visual design of large, dynamic websites, but the reason we took these on was because the core problem to solve was a design problem.

NoD: Agreed. Technology follows the design, not the other way around, otherwise the inmates are running the asylum.

Where do you find design inspiration Agnieszka?

Agnieszka: Hmmm…. Honestly, anywhere and everywhere. It really depends what I’m looking for on a given day. Sometimes it will be some obscure candy wrapper or place mat I picked up somewhere. (I have boxes and boxes of crap I’ve gathered over the years). But sometimes it’s as simple as doing a Google image search for something pretty simple, and you get a wealth of images that get your wheels turning.

NoD: Do you have any personal creative projects that you’d like to share?

Agnieszka: Unfortunately at this particular moment a lot of my personal projects are made up of scribbled ideas and to-do lists in my sketchbook. But I am actually putting a yard sale together – that’s a project! I’ve never had one before and I’m very excited at the prospect of sorting through and de-cluttering all of my stuff. I have a lot of collections of silly things that I hope to make something more organized of someday, so it will be nice to do a little Fall weeding and have some more room.

NoD: What are some of your collections?

Agnieszka: Oh, I’ve got a slight case of pack-rat-itis actually.
It can be anything from vintage calculators or things with hearts on them, to security envelopes or chopstick wrappers. I also recently inherited my grandfather’s collection of old keys. I think the common thread is that all of those things inspire me visually in some way.

Timoni Grone is the senior visual designer at Scribd where she creates websites that blend responsible web practices with classic design & typographical philosophies. She also co-founded the monthly design MeetUp and work session Chromatic where Bay area designers meet to network share ideas and design challenges. It’s part of her effort to expand the reach of user-centric design and make your web experience just a little bit better. Timoni is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

Notes on Design: How did you get your start?

Timoni Grone: I was an English major in college but talked about art and design enough that a friend encouraged me to take an art class, and I’ve been making sites and designing for friends since 1999. I’m largely self-taught—I looked at course syllabi and taught myself design fundamentals.

My second job was as a web editor for the State Department creating mockups for sites to expand dialogue with the Arabic world. I didn’t expect that I’d ever work on security and public diplomacy, and it was eye-opening.

NoD: Wow! Not your typical design gig. Where did you go from there?

Timoni Grone: I ultimately left to work at a DC branding agency in the research sphere before moving to San Francisco, where I’d wanted to be since I was using early social media tools in Nebraska while still in college.

NoD: And in San Francisco you began working at Scribd where you are now the Senior Visual Designer and have been largely responsible for their redesign effort. What other sites that you frequent are you itching to redesign?

Timoni Grone: Twitter, no doubt about it, so that people wouldn’t have to use third party applications to have a good experience. I’d improve the leading on Facebook, but on Tumblr I wouldn’t change much beyond the implementation.

NoD: Can you expand on your comment regarding third party apps and how Twitter could improve if it did not require them? Isn’t Twitter improving because of third party apps..and is that built-in flexibility not what makes it, in part, so hugely popular?

Timoni Grone: I didn’t mean to say that Twitter could improve only if third-party apps didn’t exist. Twitter started as an SMS-based social site, and a web interface has never been their priority.

Having said that, twitter.com is currently #14 on Alexa’s top 500–so, like it or not, a lot of people are *seeing* the web interface. And it’s still a bad experience. There’s a lot of functionality that you can get in third party apps that you simply don’t have on the site, and so far as I know, there’s no reason to not include things like:

1. Searching for a particular user name within your followers/followees (useful for @-replies when you forget a user’s nickname)
2. Options to sort followers/followees
3. Showing reciprocal relationships (particularly in the initial notification emails)
4. Showing @-conversations as a thread
5. Direct messages in a threaded “conversation” view
6. Expanding shortened URLs
7. An easy way to view media embeds (like Twitter-based photo sharing services)
8. Allowing users to save favorite searches
9. Showing the number of favorites on one’s tweets

None of the things I’ve mentioned would, or should, fundamentally change the way the site looks or behaves now. Twitter.com has the capacity to do all these things; it simply needs to make them available in a user-friendly way.

As to whether Twitter is improving because of third-party apps, absolutely it is. The API makes it easy for developers to do great things, which is awesome for all Twitter users, because then you have really brilliant developers who want to make apps, but maybe not work at Twitter, contributing to the overall experience and raising the bar for the next generation of Twitter clients. I’m not sure that potential users come to Twitter solely because they really enjoy checking out Twitter desktop clients, but there’s no question that using Twitter is a much smoother, more enjoyable experience if you use a third-party client rather than twitter.com.

NoD: Beyond your full time role redesigning Scribd, how do you make time for your freelance and personal projects?

Timoni Grone: After work at Scribd, I work on freelance projects from about 9 PM to 2 AM. It’s really a question of how happy you are—if you take on projects you like, you’ll make it work. I generally do back end work and tease sites for startups, and I like to pick things I can make better than their current iteration.
I’m a big fan of taking a break from projects I’ve been wrapped up in. If I take two or three days off and am able to look at something I’ve been working on again, I immediately know if I like the way it works or not. I think that what bothers you day after day is what you most need to fix, and approaching it with fresh eyes can you help you recognize that.

NoD: Whose work has most influenced you?

My biggest old-design influences by far are Eric Gill and Josef Müller-Brockmann.

For new designs, my absolute favorite web design right now is Ray Glover’s Cynosura. That website is just phenomenal–the level of detail is completely incredible. I’ve also been digging on Mike Kus’s stuff. He has great use of type and color. Does It Float is a collective and a great experiment in design/type/space. Dave Emery’s type and layout experiments are also very fresh & exciting.

NoD: What’s your philosophy around worthwhile web design?

Timoni Grone: Personally, I want to make products that are a delight to use. I like to work with designers who focus on the end user more than those who are just interested in the fidelity of their own designs. I tend to work well with engineers because I know enough about their work to collaborate. Really, the most important thing is partnering with people who are also committed to creating products that people will love.

I think people who make good designers are those who are extremely observant. A natural inclination to know what works and what doesn’t in terms of influencing people helps too. The Internet has made this a more level playing field—now you can be a great designer and not have a lick of fine art talent, and that wasn’t always the case.

–

- View Timoni Grone’s personal site here: http://timoni.org/
- This interview was conducted by Emily Goligoski. View Emily’s Arts and Culture blog here.

As a follow to my post on Using LinkedIn to Find Design Jobs, here is a slightly different technique to go after the design business that you want.

If you decide that your ideal client type is a travel-oriented company because your aesthetic is a match or because you already have some experience in that space, then search for travel companies within LinkedIn. You search companies using the search feature in the upper right-hand corner of the page, pulling down the menu to change the search from “people” to “companies.” I just did a search for “travel” and got 4772 results. Now you have an idea of the volume of possible new client contacts on LinkedIn, but that’s a global and really broad search so let’s narrow it using better search techniques.

Follow this link:
http://www.linkedin.com/companies

The page at the link above also lets you browse by industries. Here I have started browsing “Philanthropies”:
http://www.linkedin.com/companyDir?results=&sik=1251911248496

…where I can then focus the results by country, zip, company size and even if they are hiring by using the search features on the right of the page. You can check the “hiring” box if you want on your first search to filter for the low hanging fruit of companies that actually have design positions available, but you are not really performing this search seeking open positions but rather companies to which you might sell your design services.

Ok, so now you can search on LinkedIn for companies and industries globally or in your part of the world. But why?

What you are doing is building your database of prospective clients, the ones you should mail with your profile and follow-up with a call if feasible. And many companies list a remarkable level of detail that you won’t find on their website — AND don’t forget that you would never have found their website anyway because LinkedIn is why you even know the company exists.

LinkedIn company profiles often list the principals and management names and links to their LinkedIn profiles. If you see a company that you think is a fit for your design skills then look at the management listed on the company’s linked-in profile. See someone that might be the right person to approach? You have a couple of options for reaching them. You can visit the company website and try to find their email address and then email them. Call the company and ask for them. (Cold calling is a drag, I know.) Or, look at their profile and see what groups they are a member of on LinkedIn. If one of the groups is a fit for you then join it. Then, once you are accepted into the group, you add the person you were trying to reach to your network on LinkedIn by selecting “Groups and Associations” when you are asked how you know them. In the little box where you can write a comment to the person during the connection process just be honest, say you are a designer specializing in industry X design work and you are building your network of professionals in that space. You are networking like anyone else, nothing wrong with it. It’s a soft sell. If they accept your connection then you’ve made a real connection with a decision-maker inside a company that is now a prospective client of yours. What next? I’ll save that for my next post.

Look at it this way, if you were a bigger company you would have sales people incented to find clients and those sales people would create a database of prospective clients and go after them with your portfolio of work. If you do have sales people then they can add LinkedIn to their methods for finding prospects. If you don’t have sales people then this is work that you should consider doing.

Yes, there are big sites that act as agents for designers and they may have value. But what is described above is a more proactive than reactive approach. You are finding work, not letting work find you. When was the last time you got a gig from a portal site for designers that puts clients and designers together? (Someone is going to yell at me for that last comment I’m sure.)

Good luck and have fun.