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Volume 01 I Issue 01 I May 2020 howdesignlive.com
Let’s be real: In times of crisis, inspiration can be hard to come by.
Read Now
Get to know the work of five HOWies before the show with these awesome projects.
From The Show Director
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the business world—and HOW Design Live keynote speaker Stephen Gates is here with a compass to help us navigate the new era of leadership.
Table of Contents
© Emerald X, LLC
Let ’s be real: In times of crisis, inspiration can be hard to come by.
In Great Company
Exist Loudly
Q&A: Debbie Millman, Lisa Congdon
At the
of
Visualizing a Movement
HDL takes a look
Cey Adams.
brilliant
output
Distortion and opinion in the massive, mind-bending maps of former HDL keynote Paula Scher.
The Unexpected Cartographer
b
R
I
L
A
N
T
U
O
P
legendary
design
maestro
COVER
FEATURE
We’ve been on the hunt for silver linings where we can find them. So when we had to postpone until Oct. 26–29 in Atlanta, we found ourselves with an opportunity to take on a backburner project that we’ve long been daydreaming about: a .
Brilliant by your fellow creatives.
Ultimately, in these digital pages we hope you find inspiration. Motivation. Creativity. And a reminder that there’s a community out there that has your back, no matter what. I'd like to give a special shout out to Creative Director, , the creative force behind HOW Design, Redefined, and freelance journalist and author , the editorial genius and HOW brand veteran. This publication has been a dream of mine for years, but these two definitely brought it to life! Stay tuned for more. We can’t wait to catch up in person in October.
HOW Design
HOW Design Live e-zine
projects
Debbie Millman Lisa Congdon
and .
Cey Adams
Continue Reading
A wide-ranging exploration of creativity, voice and creative action between
A feature about the legendary , who will soon be speaking to you himself from the keynote stage in Atlanta.
Let’s be real: In times of crisis, inspiration can be hard to come by. Motivation can be hard to come by. Creativity can be hard to come by.
Moreover, isolation can be hard to manage—and if there’s one thing we want you to take away from this publication, it’s this: You are not alone. We’re feeling what you’re feeling. And when we say “we’re all going to get through this together,” it’s not just marketing speak in times of crisis. We know what our community is made of, we’ve seen what they’re capable of, and we’ve seen how they band together. And we’d wager that any HOWie would have your back at this moment should you need them, and they will rally like never before after this passes.
In this installment, you’ll find:
HDL takes a look at the brilliant output of legendary design maestro Cey Adams.
Amy Conover HOW Design Live Show Director
Live
Lisa Congdon
Stay tuned for more. We can’t wait to catch up in person in October.
John Genzo
Zachary Petit
Adams will be hitting the HOW Design Live mainstage in Atlanta in October to talk about these projects and so much more. As we wait patiently (or not!) to hear from him, here is an overview of his output, curated by the master himself.
You’ve been looking at Cey Adams’ work for decades.
graffiti scene and became pals with the likes
Adams emerged from the New York City
of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
FROM THE SHOW DIRECTOR
These are but the smallest fraction of the many albums Adams has designed—and what a fraction.
Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411?
The Notorious BIG’s Ready to Die.
Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt.
Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty.
Cey Adams essentially branded the
emerging hip hop movement.
As creative director of Def Jam Recordings,
Adams’ bright, playful murals today combine his graffiti roots with decades of design experience.
Adams draws inspiration from pop art, comic books and pop culture at large. This 1997 Def Jam comic book by Michael Bair and Buzz Parker celebrated the label’s artists and their upcoming albums.
explores our cultural fascination with brand
loyalty, for better or worse.
innovate as an artist. “Trusted Brands,”
Adams has continued to create and
Following his departure from the label, Adams has continued to create and innovate as an artist—though sometimes, that involves looking backward, such as his brilliant recent body of work “Trusted Brands,” which explores our cultural fascination with brand loyalty, for better or worse.
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graffiti scene and
became pals with the
likes of Jean-Michel
As creative director of
Cey Adams essentially
Adams has continu ed
to create and innovate
IN GREAT COMPANY
Feature
EXIST LOUDLY
If you’ve ever been to HOW Design Live or any other major conference for creatives, you’ve probably found yourself at home afterward with a healthy stack of business cards and your web browser of choice, putting a design to each face and name.
So this year we decided to mix things up: What if you could start to get to know the work of your fellow attendees before the show even starts?
We put out a call for attendees and speakers to submit their design work, and were absolutely floored by all the amazing responses we received. Here are five projects by your future fellow conference-goers that show the range of our community, not to mention the sheer talent within it. In every issue of HOW Design, Redefined, we’ll feature more. Stay tuned. (And if you’d like to submit your work for consideration, click here!)
Oscar Aldana Interactive Designer, Hambly & Woolley Toronto
“I have been thinking a lot about these three word: and . The last month has been a bit crazy for everyone as we adjust to new routines. For this poster series, I decided to experiment with geometry to depict the idea of isolation and to emphasize these words as a reminder for myself.”
home, patience
distance
Justin Ahrens Principal, Rule29 Creative
“Wheels4Water has imagined and executed new ways in which anyone can make a tangible difference in the fight against the global water crisis using only bicycles, a passionate community, storytelling, and heart for doing good. The platform we have created allows people to learn, share, donate and participate in the experience. We use content from statistics to make it personal. We use videos we shoot on the ride and in countries we serve to activate, educate and motivate our community. … Due to previous years of experience and insight from partners such as Lifewater International, Wheels4Water was able to surpass its goal and change the lives of tens of thousands of Africans.
Erin Agnoli Designer, DesignScout
“Voted Chicago’s best pizzeria, Nonna’s needed a top-notch brand identity to match its decade of pizza-making perfection. Nonna’s was ready for a brand evolution, including an updated name, identity rebrand and across-the-brand collateral. ... Our winning approach was a modern-day nod to nostalgic Italian Americana. … Our team has also had a hand in delivering new brand creative, including pizza boxes, apparel, menu systems, interior and exterior art pack elements, signage, neon designs and social media.”
(Naming and brand strategy by Total Dish.)
Dave Narcizo Owner/Designer, Lakuna Design
“[This is the] visual branding for a new Neapolitan pizza and handcrafted gelato truck in Newport, RI. The name A Mano translates in chef Simone Ferrara’s native Italian to ‘by hand.’ In the spirit of this, all initial sketches were performed with pencil, pen and paper. The results were fine-tuned digitally and a comprehensive suite of identity styles was added. The palette is taken from the Bisazza-tiled pizza oven, which is displayed prominently through this unique container truck’s glass front.”
Melissa Pierce Art Director, Brunet-García
“The commemorative Commedia dell’Arte spirit box set is a collaboration between STAGE Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to improving compensation for theater actors and staff, and Manifest Distillery. Our agency developed the theme and concept behind the box set, with each unique liquor manifested as an archetype from Commedia dell’Arte, a renaissance theater style known for use of allegory, metaphor and social commentary through masked characters. We collaborated with five diverse artists (Elena Ohlander, Searing Limb, Hiromi Moneyhun, Chris Clark and Cody William Wicker) to personify our illustrative interpretations of each archetype while retaining their signature style. The front of the bottles were printed with a mask and the back with the face of the character, so when viewed head-on, each character appears to be wearing the mask.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the business world—and HOW Design Live keynote speaker Stephen Gates is here with a compass to help us navigate the new era of leadership
before
A Mano
THE UNEXPECTED CARTOGRAPHER
Our creative community needs leadership now more than ever. Our quest for real leadership started long before this pandemic, but COVID-19 has created some new problems. It has mainly and painfully exposed your company’s sins and failing leadership models that have been lurking under the surface for a long time—such as when leaders are really just managers who care more about deadlines than people; when leaders lack trust, which used to short circuit creativity but now has your calendar filled with meetings as they try to figure out if you’re really working or not; and so much more. Leadership should come from anywhere, not just from the people who sit atop an org chart. But so many of us have felt powerless or unsure of where to start on the path. Let’s look at how we can break down some of the barriers that may be keeping you from having an impact and stepping up to make a difference.
AGILE IS THE NEW SMART Every company will use words like design, innovation or collaboration when what they really want more of is creativity. But creativity needs certain conditions to be successful in a corporate structure, and those are rarely met because of how the company approaches its work, often killing the hope of any real creativity or innovation before any work even begins. At many companies, they assemble their best people to work on a roadmap of the projects and journeys they’re going to focus on, rolling it out and then diligently spending the rest of the year following that roadmap. The problem is that time has shown us that the only thing we can count on with that approach is that shortly, that roadmap will be torn up and rethought as new priorities are added thanks to the dynamic nature of business. Instead of continuing to work like this, we need to embrace a simple idea: Agile is the new smart. I don’t mean to start using agile methodologies but rather that we need to evolve the very nature of how we work to be more agile and responsive to problems as they arise. We are used to working this way as we brainstorm an idea, prototype it, evolve it and repeat the cycle.
Yet so many companies have been crippled by the COVID-19 crisis because of their inability to adopt this simple approach to deal with these sudden challenges. Here again, this was an issue long before the pandemic, but we were able to keep it under control because of the slow pace of business, and as a result, those companies were only slowly becoming irrelevant and starting to struggle. Instead of creating endless contingency plans for how we will go back to “normal,” we must accept that rapid change is the new normal. This again is where we come in because we need to understand that one of the biggest things we need to champion is a new mindset that can make all the difference. It is a mindset that we use all the time when we are creative because there is no set answer when we start the process and we are open to the possibilities and respond to the insights we find along the way. How companies and teams respond to this new normal where agility will determine success is going to make all the difference. But that agility will also require one simple but incredibly elusive thing: trust.
Editor’s Note: We’ve added a medley of Gates’ work throughout this piece to show how his creativity and leadership have taken shape over the years.
possibilities in how we work and build our careers. Employees feeling like they’re not valued by their companies—a problem that has long simmered under the surface—has emerged as a crisis of trust. You can see it in trends like the gig economy, where people are rejecting full-time positions in favor of independent contractor and freelancer positions so they can take control of their careers. They want to do this because they no longer trust that these companies and their leaders have their best interests in mind. For those who remain in corporate life, we have also started to react to this crisis of trust by pushing our companies to create new ways of working, to be more collaborative and more creative. But we’ve found that all that corporate structure and those old ways of leading are short-circuiting the progress we want to create. We have started to get more involved and are challenging our leadership to also work in new ways, and as a result, the intimidation that used to impact the workers has migrated to the C-suite. This is happening because employees want a new style of leadership, where hierarchy and management skills alone are not enough. They want leaders who are creative, insightful, business-savvy, inspirational, trusting and, more than anything, human. The problem is, these are not skills that have been historically prioritized at most companies as they groomed leaders, so the leaders are unsure of what to do and often react by layering on more process. This is our opportunity to step up and help everyone understand how to work in new ways. The best way for us to overcome these problems is not with more processes or new tools but rather to remind everyone how to be creative. But that’s not as simple as having more brainstorms, buying more Post-It notes or creating more prototypes. Our work has often been stifled and minced by the thinking that sits around it, so that’s what we need to start to change.
- Stephen Gates
TRUST IS THE KEY TO EVERYTHING Trust is the biggest—yet often the most misunderstood—thing that defines great teams, leaders and creative work. Leaders need to create trust not only in personal relationships but by pushing the power traditionally only held by them down through their companies by actually trusting their employees to make decisions. I’ve talked with numerous CEOs and their leadership teams, and the first question—which so clearly illustrates the problem—has consistently been, “How do I know my people are working if I can’t see them?” I always respond, “What type of company culture have you been building where there is so little trust and empowerment, and why do you take no responsibility for that problem?” That is understandably met with a lot of blank stares and uncomfortable looks as this new reality dawns on them that the old ways of working are crumbling, and they are unsure of what to do. We need to start by understanding that there are two types of trust: practical trust and emotional trust. Practical trust is the basic form where you trust people to do the basic things like show up on time, turn in work when it’s due, show up to meetings, etc. Emotional trust is where you trust people to do work that is good for them and the team by thinking about themselves and other people, sharing information or ideas that are not fully formed or could even be controversial. The problem is that most teams only recognize and promote practical trust behaviors, yet they expect the kind of results that you would get from teams with emotional trust behaviors.
have had them all along. This is complicated by the fact that since there is no real leadership development, companies just throw people at leadership positions, assuming that past success will be an indication of future leadership. Time after time, you see that someone who was a fantastic designer suddenly struggles or fails as a new leader because they were unprepared for the challenges. In some cases, it becomes even worse because they treat leadership as an executional task, becoming a manager instead of a leader. I’ve found that there is no perfect time or amount of experience that will make you feel comfortable stepping up to become a leader. That is even more true lately when it can be easy to let all this change, imposter syndrome and uncertainty win. But hidden in all of that is a silver lining because there has never been a time when we need leadership more, and people have been empowered to work in new ways. I’m reminded of a simple phrase that is the best advice I’ve ever gotten when it comes to leadership: “Leadership is your ability to become the most confident uncertain person.” For creatives to get more respect, get a seat at the leadership table and create the type of impact we all know we can have, we need to step into being uncomfortable. We need to reawaken the creativity that has gone dormant in too many of the people we work with and nurture it into something that will change our companies. It will not be easy or simple, but it will be worth it, and I know you are the ones who can make it happen. I ended my keynote at HOW Design Live 2019 with these words, and they seem more relevant than ever: Exist loudly.
Stephen Gates is Head Design Evangelist at InVision, host of The Crazy One podcast and an international keynote speaker. As a leader, he has 15+ years of experience creating multiple agency and client-side purpose-driven, idea-led, world-class teams with cultures that foster innovation and leadership.
REVERSAL OF THE INTIMIDATED To understand the root of the problem, we need to go back in time to company cultures where everyone was intimidated to talk to their boss or the corporate executives. This mindset came out of the industrialized processes that prioritized an assembly line–style hierarchy in which the chain of command was everything. As the world evolved, this mindset did as well, but it only got more entrenched into new leaders. They found ways of creating executive floors, private elevators, executive entrances and cafeterias that insulated them and protected the hierarchy by keeping them away from the rest of the company. This cycle has continued, but like any antiquated system, it has started to break down as technology and other factors give us new
FINDING THE LEADER IN THE MIRROR Knowing that there are these organizational and environmental challenges gives us the foundation to understand how we can make more of an impact and step into more of a leadership role, no matter the title or seniority. There is one final significant barrier that we all also need to overcome: realizing that leadership at any level requires a different set of skills than those we usually think about. In the early parts of your career, you have to be good at producing work, which is not the same set of skills you need to be a good leader. It is a hard transition because the early stages of your career are about executional skills, like coming up with creative solutions to problems and meeting deadlines. But when you want to become a leader, you find out that requires an arsenal of skills, from understanding psychology to having the political savvy to navigate complex corporate politics, and the personal confidence to trust other people. The first problem is that many teams and companies do not help you develop any of those skills, so you have a growing sense of insecurity about how to approach any form of leadership. The second problem is we often think we need to develop skills alone or, worse, that we should
FINDING THE LEADER IN THE MIRROR
TRUST IS THE KEY TO EVERYTHING
AGILE IS THE NEW SMART
REVERSAL OF THE INTIMIDATED
A tempest of hand-painted words swirls, tumbles and writhes across a 7-foot-tall canvas, forming a map of the United States. A far cry, perhaps, from Pentagram Partner Paula Scher’s sleek, ubiquitous identity designs, but cartographic paintings have been the tailside of her creative coin for nearly 20 years.
The design legend’s fascination with maps began in the 1950s, informed by her father Marvin Scher’s work as a civil engineer for the U.S. Geological Survey.
“He was obsessed with accuracy,” she recalls. “He was the one who told me how inaccurate maps were. He said the earth is curved, and photography is flat, so what you see isn’t really what’s there.” Specializing in photogrammetric engineering (the science of the camera and how it captures imagery), Scher’s father invented stereo templates, a measuring device that made camera lenses capable of correcting distortions that occur when aerial photography is enlarged. If not for that invention, precise mapping software such as Google Maps would not exist today.
In a playful perversion of this accuracy, Scher’s map paintings allude to distortion in the presentation of data on the web and in the media. Today, people look at charts, maps and infographics as if they are always completely accurate. That’s a mistake, she says, and a dangerous one.
She painted her first large-scale map in 1998 in her home, without considering that it would appear in a gallery or show.
“It was around the time I was designing the Citibank logo in 1998; we had become completely computerized, and I never touched anything as a designer anymore,” she says. “Everything was made on a computer. There were no art supplies anymore. I felt completely odd, like I didn’t make anything. Even though I made a lot of things, I felt like nothing was happening. I realized I missed working with my hands. So we have this big house, and I thought it would be interesting to see one of those maps I painted really big. I thought it would be better.”
She worked on her in-home map for nearly three years before, during a visit to her home, filmmaker and painter Jeff Scher (no relation) saw the painting and recommended Paula to his gallery. Scher starts the process of creating her maps with little planning—a look at several maps of a given region and any relevant data sets.
The words that appear in her map paintings describe the historical context in which she creates them as much as they comment on the geography and population of the region. None of the maps she has created are simple, but perhaps the most intricate of her recent paintings is “U.S. Counties and Zip Codes, 2016,” featuring a tangled background of postal codes and county names that extends into the oceans where Scher ran out of space.
“After I finished it, I looked at it and I decided I was probably really crazy, and I was annoyed at myself [while painting it],” Scher says. “All of my maps, if you take them down, are usually population maps. They’re about place names, and you see them become dense or more sparse, and that’s all about population.”
Scher’s cartography speaks to the importance of place in her life and work. The chaotic style of her paintings—as well as her design work—is influenced in part by her life in New York City.
“The loudness of my work as a graphic designer is a result of New York,” she says. “Things are packed in, they’re noisy, they’re irritating. And then on the other side, I think that the painting is all about being bombarded with media and how you see and hear things.”
New York City’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery showcased a new collection of Scher’s maps in an exhibition entitled “U.S.A.” It was the first release of 10 maps of the United States she painted between 2014 and 2016, taking an interpretive and chaotic look at various data sets including climate zones, zip codes and transportation flow—complete with cultural and political commentary. The pieces in the exhibition were, in Scher’s words, “all the same and all different.”
“I did it largely because [it was] an election year, and I’m fascinated by statistics and the way people vote and the way people think and why they think that way,” Scher says. “I began looking at the country and population centers and what’s near something else. Where’s the North, and where’s the South, and where do they meet, and what do people really think about when they’re in the middle? When you look at things like that, you gain a sensibility about why things exist and how they happen and why we are the way we are. It’s right there on the surface of the map.”
For those who remain in corporate life, we have also started to react to this crisis of trust by pushing our companies to create new ways of working, to be more collaborative and more creative. But we’ve found that all that corporate structure and those old ways of leading are short-circuiting the progress we want to create. We have started to get more involved and are challenging our leadership to also work in new ways, and as a result, the intimidation that used to impact the workers has migrated to the C-suite. This is happening because employees want a new style of leadership, where hierarchy and management skills alone are not enough. They want leaders who are creative, insightful, business-savvy, inspirational, trusting and, more than anything, human. The problem is, these are not skills that have been historically prioritized at most companies as they groomed leaders, so the leaders are unsure of what to do and often react by layering on more process.
Carousel
Trust is the biggest—yet often the most misunderstood—thing that defines great teams, leaders and creative work. Leaders need to create trust not only in personal relationships but by pushing the power traditionally only held by them down through their companies by actually trusting their employees to make decisions.
Knowing that there are these organizational and environmental challenges gives us the foundation to understand how we can make more of an impact and step into more of a leadership role, no matter the title or seniority.
There is one final significant barrier that we all also need to overcome: realizing that leadership at any level requires a different set of skills than those we usually think about. In the early parts of your career, you have to be good at producing work, which is not the same set of skills you need to be a good leader. It is a hard transition because the early stages of your career are about executional skills, like coming up with creative solutions to problems and meeting deadlines. But when you want to become a leader, you find out that requires an arsenal of skills, from understanding psychology to having the political savvy to navigate complex corporate politics, and the personal confidence to trust other people.
- Paula Sher
The first problem is that many teams and companies do not help you develop any of those skills, so you have a growing sense of insecurity about how to approach any form of leadership. The second problem is we often think we need to develop skills alone or, worse, that we should
have had them all along. This is complicated by the fact that since there is no real leadership development, companies just throw people at leadership positions, assuming that past success will be an indication of future leadership. Time after time, you see that someone who was a fantastic designer suddenly struggles or fails as a new leader because they were unprepared for the challenges. In some cases, it becomes even worse because they treat leadership as an executional task, becoming a manager instead of a leader.
I’ve found that there is no perfect time or amount of experience that will make you feel comfortable stepping up to become a leader. That is even more true lately when it can be easy to let all this change, imposter syndrome and uncertainty win. But hidden in all of that is a silver lining because there has never been a time when we need leadership more, and people have been empowered to work in new ways. I’m reminded of a simple phrase that is the best advice I’ve ever gotten when it comes to leadership: “Leadership is your ability to become the most confident uncertain person.”
For creatives to get more respect, get a seat at the leadership table and create the type of impact we all know we can have, we need to step into being uncomfortable. We need to reawaken the creativity that has gone dormant in too many of the people we work with and nurture it into something that will change our companies. It will not be easy or simple, but it will be worth it, and I know you are the ones who can make it happen.
human.
or
design, innovation
collaboration
creativity.
is not
The Crazy One
Every company will use words like design, innovation or collaboration when what they really want more of is creativity. But creativity needs certain conditions to be successful in a corporate structure, and those are rarely met because of how the company approaches its work, often killing the hope of any real creativity or innovation before any work even begins.
Our creative community needs leadership now more than ever.
The COVID-19
pandemic has shaken
up the business
world—and HOW
Design Live keynote
speaker Stephen Gates
is here with a compass
to help us navigate the
A tempest of hand-painted words swirls, tumbles and writhes across a 7-foot-tall canvas, forming a map of the United States. A far cry, perhaps, from Pentagram Partner Paula Scher’s sleek, ubiquitous identity designs, but cartographic paintings have been the tailside of her creative coin for nearly 20 years. The design legend’s fascination with maps began in the 1950s, informed by her father Marvin Scher’s work as a civil engineer for the U.S. Geological Survey. “He was obsessed with accuracy,” she recalls. “He was the one who told me how inaccurate maps were. He said the earth is curved, and photography is flat, so what you see isn’t really what’s there.” Specializing in photogrammetric engineering (the science of the camera and how it captures imagery), Scher’s father invented stereo templates, a measuring device that made camera lenses capable of correcting distortions that occur when aerial photography is enlarged. If not for that invention, precise mapping software such as Google Maps would not exist today. In a playful perversion of this accuracy, Scher’s map paintings allude to distortion in the presentation of data on the web and in the media. Today, people look at charts, maps and infographics as if they are always completely accurate. That’s a mistake, she says, and a dangerous one. “Data isn’t neutral,” Scher says. “It’s gathered, which means someone is editing it. Someone will make a chart, and it might be right, but it’s not literal fact. You don’t know what factors are included or not included. My map paintings are nothing but opinion. I’m controlling the data any way I want and I’m blatantly open about it. I’m using it to create an impression.”
She painted her first large-scale map in 1998 in her home, without considering that it would appear in a gallery or show. “It was around the time I was designing the Citibank logo in 1998; we had become completely computerized, and I never touched anything as a designer anymore,” she says. “Everything was made on a computer. There were no art supplies anymore. I felt completely odd, like I didn’t make anything. Even though I made a lot of things, I felt like nothing was happening. I realized I missed working with my hands. So we have this big house, and I thought it would be interesting to see one of those maps I painted really big. I thought it would be better.” She worked on her in-home map for nearly three years before, during a visit to her home, filmmaker and painter Jeff Scher (no relation) saw the painting and recommended Paula to his gallery. Scher starts the process of creating her maps with little planning—a look at several maps of a given region and any relevant data sets. “It’s aesthetic, and also emotional,” she says. “I describe it as abstract expressionist information—that you are taking information and manipulating it to create a sensibility.”
The words that appear in her map paintings describe the historical context in which she creates them as much as they comment on the geography and population of the region. None of the maps she has created are simple, but perhaps the most intricate of her recent paintings is “U.S. Counties and Zip Codes, 2016,” featuring a tangled background of postal codes and county names that extends into the oceans where Scher ran out of space. “After I finished it, I looked at it and I decided I was probably really crazy, and I was annoyed at myself [while painting it],” Scher says. “All of my maps, if you take them down, are usually population maps. They’re about place names, and you see them become dense or more sparse, and that’s all about population.” Scher has reinterpreted the entire world again and again—continents, countries, cities, even political landscapes and timelines of media coverage. In 2011, she also published a book featuring dozens of her maps, installation pieces, drawings and prints, appropriately titled Paula Scher: MAPS.
Q&A: Debbi Millman, Lisa Congdon
This article by Jess Zafarris is brought to you by our friends at PRINT magazine.
“My map paintings are nothing but opinion. I’m controlling the data any way I want and I’m blatantly open about it. I’m using it to create an impression.”
“All of my maps are usually population maps. They’re about place names, and you see them become dense or more sparse, and that’s all about population.”
New York City’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery showcased a new collection of Scher’s maps in an exhibition entitled “U.S.A.” It was the first release of 10 maps of the United States she painted between 2014 and 2016, taking an interpretive and chaotic look at various data sets including climate zones, zip codes and transportation flow—complete with cultural and political commentary. The pieces in the exhibition were, in Scher’s words, “all the same and all different.” “I did it largely because [it was] an election year, and I’m fascinated by statistics and the way people vote and the way people think and why they think that way,” Scher says. “I began looking at the country and population centers and what’s near something else. Where’s the North, and where’s the South, and where do they meet, and what do people really think about when they’re in the middle? When you look at things like that, you gain a sensibility about why things exist and how they happen and why we are the way we are. It’s right there on the surface of the map.” Although she has created at least 55 wall-sized maps featured in galleries across the U.S., Scher’s adventures in opinionated cartography began on a smaller scale. Her earliest hand-drawn maps and word-dense visualizations of quotes in the media were more personal creative projects that documented the way she saw and felt about the world. One of Scher’s first projects in the same vein was a hand-drawn illustration of the United States for a 1989 AIGA cover. After that, demand for her illustrations swelled. But when potential clients sought to control the copy that comprised each intricate creation, Scher lost interest.
Scher’s cartography speaks to the importance of place in her life and work. The chaotic style of her paintings—as well as her design work—is influenced in part by her life in New York City. “The loudness of my work as a graphic designer is a result of New York,” she says. “Things are packed in, they’re noisy, they’re irritating. And then on the other side, I think that the painting is all about being bombarded with media and how you see and hear things.” Scher’s maps may be impressionistic, but the narrative she constructs reflects the distorted, complex state of the world today—and encourages the rest of us to do the same.
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If you’ve ever been to HOW Design Live, you’ve no doubt seen Debbie Millman deliver a keynote, moderate a panel or even work a letterpress on the exhibit hall floor. The branding guru has long been a fixture of HOW Design Live—and you also likely know her show Design Matters, the world’s first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture. Here, exclusively for HOWies, is a transcript of an episode of Design Matters with former HOW Design Live keynote speaker Lisa Congdon—a creative sherpa who might just give you the shot of inspiration you need right now.
This is a transcript of an episode of Design Matters with former HOW Design Live keynote speaker Lisa Congdon
Debbie Millman
Design Matters
DEBBIE MILMAN It isn’t easy to become or to survive as an artist. No one knows this better than Lisa Congdon, who didn’t become a professional artist and illustrator until she was in her late 30s. But when she did, she made it big. She’s also published numerous bestselling books: and She’s most recently published another how-to book for creative people. This one is titled . Lisa Congdon, welcome back to Design Matters.
DEBBIE MILMAN:
A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives.
Art, Inc.: The Essential Guide for Building Your Career as an Artist; Fortune Favors the Brave;
Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic
DEBBIE MILMANThank you, Debbie. It's so good to be here.
LISA CONGDON:
DM: Today, mostly I want to talk to you about your new book, which is absolutely wonderful. At the start of the book, you describe how growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in suburban Northern California, you wanted nothing more than to fit in. Can you take us back to those days?
DM:
LC: Yeah. I feel like growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in suburban Northern California was sort of perfect for that. Right? I lived in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter tract homes. Our house looked exactly the same as five others on the street. I was really all about being accepted and fitting in and looking the same as everyone else. That changed years later, but when I was a kid that was really my goal.
LC:
LC: Yes. In fact, I graduated from high school in 1986, which was sort of the height of preppy as a trend. I grew up in a very upper-middle-class community in Northern California, and my high school replaced “Best Dressed” with “Most Preppy.”
DM: Given the brilliant creative voice that you’ve become, some might also find it surprising to learn that you studied the Official Preppy Handbook, which you now dub in retrospect, “the ultimate handbook for conforming.” Were you really a preppy?
LC: So on May 20th or 22nd in 1990, I graduated from this Catholic college where I continued to be very preppy. I moved to San Francisco and my entire interior world exploded. I went from somebody who had lived in this very sheltered environment to moving to this place where I was exposed to a spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations and books and film and fashion. For me, it was like walking into this place that opened me up in a way, almost instantly. I came out as a lesbian a few years later, and so instantly I went from somebody who wanted to be like everyone else to somebody who began to see the importance or the comfort in being different. I began to sort of view life differently immediately when I was about 22.
DM: Tell us about the moment you stopped conforming.
LC: Well, I think in mainstream culture, in sort of the world that I grew up in or that a lot of people occupy, idiosyncrasies or differences are seen as a flaw. In our world, in the world of creative people, idiosyncrasies are actually your strength. I think before I even identified as an artist, I began to see myself as a creative person or somebody who wanted to express herself creatively in my 20s and I began to see the sort of the power in that—in being different. I ever-so-slowly allowed myself to shed all of my skin. By 27 I was like, “I’m going to get my first tattoo.” Now I’m covered in them, but that was a huge deal for me. Or dying my hair purple and dressing differently and getting into fashion. Those were my first expressions before I started making visual art, and that was a really important part of my world.
DM: You’ve said that art taught you about the power of nonconformity. How so?
LC: I started making art in my early 30s. A few years later, the internet was becoming a space for artists to share their work and there were, you know, blogs and Flickr. I sort of joined all of those with abandon. … My first [professional] opportunity was with a woman who I’m still friends with today. She had this shop in Seattle. She said, “Would you like to have a show here?” I was at my job at the nonprofit where I worked and I sat down at my desk and my heart was racing and I thought, This is it. I am an artist. I just remember feeling this sense of euphoria. And that was really the beginning for me, that opportunity. Eventually, I sort of left my job and started to cull together projects and I really started to identify as this person who wanted to live a creative life.
DM: Talk about the moment when you felt you could lean into your artistic voice, that you could be an artist.
LC: You know, it’s funny, a lot of times at events and book signings, people will come up to me and say, “I love your work and I’m so glad you’re here,” and they’ll buy a book. A couple of my books are for artists. Some of them are not, but I often ask, “Oh, are you an artist?” Or I’ll say, “What kind of work do you do?” And they say, “Oh, no, no, no. I’m just ... I’m a mom, but you know, I make things on the side,” or, “I have a full-time job and some day I’d like to be an artist.” It’s interesting because we have all these preconceived notions about what it means to be an artist, that somehow it means you’re a professional or you make money from it. But, really, being an artist is just anyone who wakes up and intentionally makes things. Because that’s basically how I started and I had to own that in order to get to the place where I am today.
DM: A lot of people are hesitant or downright afraid to call themselves artists. What are your thoughts on that? When do you feel that someone can or is allowed to call themselves an artist?
LC: I think pretty early on, I started asking these questions like, “Who do I want to be as an artist?” Or, “Do I want to be part of a particular genre or movement in art?” Or, “What do I want to say through my work and how does that relate to what other people are saying?” When I first started making work and posting it, I was also diving into the work of other artists and began to understand that there were movements, and that there were genres of art, and that there were things I was attracted to, and that I was part of something bigger than myself. Part of finding your voice or standing out as an artist is saying something different, or saying it in a different way, whether that’s visually or through words. Then part of it is being part of something, right? I feel like we’re always sort of straddling, “Where do I belong and how do I stand out within that?”—even when you’ve been working for a really long time, but especially in the beginning because you’re trying to find yourself and you’re trying to find your audience and your community. For me, I began to understand that once I started building an audience and once people started comparing my work to other people, sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably.
DM: In Find Your Artistic Voice, I think people might be relieved to hear that it’s normal to not know what your artistic voice is at first. You state this: “When we’re in the process of finding our artistic voice, we are almost always constantly straddling the plains of belonging and independence, of being part of a movement and having our own unique form of expression, of emulating artists we admire and breaking away from them.” When did you first realize this?
Find Your Artistic Voice
LC: I mean, like anybody else, I’m a human being with feelings and I’m very sensitive. So when my work is criticized or when somebody accuses me of something—it doesn’t happen very often, but when it happens, I take it very seriously. You know, Brené Brown always talks about fielding feedback: “Is that person in the arena?” And so the first question I always ask myself is, “Is this feedback I need to listen to because this person is in the arena?”
DM: How do you get used to criticism? I have not and I’m a lot older than you. I have yet to.
LC: Right. Or, “Is this a person who is remaining anonymous or is purposefully being critical for who knows what reason?”
DM: And “in the arena” means [that person is in the profession too]?
LC: Attention, whatever.
DM: Attention.
LC: Yeah. That helps me to kind of work through it for sure. And I feel like there are things to be learned always from feedback, but sometimes you just have to reject it out of hand. It’s just not fair.
DM: Jealousy.
LC: I found my creative voice through all of the things you just described. I was pretty lucky early on—I signed with an illustration agent just as I was sort of emerging into this world of illustration. I stayed with her for six years because she really was instrumental in helping me understand what I needed to develop more of to be a successful illustrator. And I feel lucky because I entered the profession when I was in my 30s, so I already had this very stable work ethic and I had come from this career where I had learned the importance of showing up and getting stuff done. And so that was sort of a baseline for me. I’m also a Capricorn, so that’s kind of how I’m wired. And you would think that when you’re in your 30s and your parents sort of disapprove of your choice, that you could be like, “Well, who cares? I don’t care. I’m 30. I’m 35, whatever. I’m going to do what I want.” But I cared a lot about what they thought. So my whole thing was like, I’m going to prove them wrong. And so I took this very seriously.
DM: It isn’t. You’ve described how finding your voice is one of the most important experiences that one will ever have, and the process can’t be rushed. You state, “It isn’t just something that magically happens. Instead, it’s both an exercise in discipline and a process of discovery that allows for and requires a lot of experimentation and failure. Most of the time, finding your voice takes years of practice and repetition, frustration, agony, humiliation and self-doubt.” And so I’m curious: How did you find your creative voice, and how would you describe it?
LC: I still think it’s really important to do self-generated projects. I feel like creating projects that are sort of structured around time and have a particular focus is one of the best possible ways to develop your voice. Whether it’s using a constraint, drawing something in under 10 minutes every day for a period of time. People always say to me, “Oh, I get bored after 15 days,” and I’m like, “That’s why it’s called a challenge.” You know what I mean? If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge. So there’s a certain amount of grit and determination that you have to have, and a sort of way that you have to get comfortable with being bored.
DM: A lot of your reputation initially came from self-generated projects, which at the time were rather unique. There weren’t that many people putting things up on the internet quite in the way that you were, such as your “Collection a Day” that really introduced you to a global marketplace. What do you tell people now who are looking to develop an artistic voice online with their own self-generated projects? Because now there are so many.
LC: I think the two most important factors in finding your voice are, number one, the sense of discipline around deciding what you want to do, and what you want to get better at, and what it is you want to learn, and what you want to explore. Figuring that out, making a decision. Because a lot of people will say, “Well, I want to do a million things. I want to be good at a million things.” Choose a couple and work at them.
DM: If somebody were looking to find their artistic voice, aside, obviously, from reading your book, what would be the first step that you would encourage them to take?
LC: Saying, “Every day for 100 days I’m going to work on this thing and I’m going to hold myself accountable for it in some way.” It might be on Instagram, it might be with the group of people that I meet with once a week for my art group or whatever. You have to build some kind of accountability structure for yourself if you’re not somebody who’s self-motivated. And then you’ve got to track your progress and see where that leads you. One of the greatest predictors of creative achievement is actually openness to experience. And so if you are somebody who is sort of a naysayer, or negative, or constantly telling yourself that things won’t work, your potential for creative explosion is so much more limited. And so openness is incredibly important. If there’s a Venn diagram with “voice” in the middle, those are the two circles, “discipline” and “openness.” Openness is the harder one. Maybe you need to go back to therapy, but it’s the harder one to sort of self-monitor, for sure.
DM: Give me an example of what that would be.
LC: If you ask any audience of people, “what is your voice?” The one word they’ll come up with is style. That’s the thing that is the most synonymous with voice. And while style is a very important part of your voice and ultimately it’s probably the best synonym, it’s not everything. Your voice is so much more than that. And that’s one of the things that I think is so important for people to understand: Your voice is ultimately your story, which is your subject matter. … Your voice really also encompasses what you make work about, like the choices you make, which are ultimately based on who you are as a person, what you value, what your life experiences are, the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, the privilege or lack of you’ve had in your life. All of those things matter, and all of those things weigh into the choices you make about the work you make. Ultimately, your voice is a reflection of your own personal truth. And some of that is really simple banal things and some of those things are actually deep and complex. And most of the time it’s a combination of the two.
DM: Talk about the difference between voice and style.
LC: Yeah. So, traditionally, we think of skill as your ability to render something realistically. And in very traditional art training programs, that’s even today still part of the curriculum. And in the last century, we’ve been so blessed because all of these artists who might’ve had that traditional training have come up and said, “No, not interested. I’m more interested in abstraction. I’m more interested in stylizing something.” … And sometimes the weirder it is or the less realistic it is, the more it speaks to us. I always like to teach my students to embrace the wonkiness; the slight of your hand or the way you make things is what makes it yours.
DM: You make a pointed differentiation in the book between skill and the old outmoded definition of what it meant to be a skilled artist.
I have had the most incredible opportunities, things that I could not have ever imagined in my career. And I have both been trying to corral them but also say yes to as many as possible. And they’ve all been really amazing. This year I’ve been working on four books, including this one that just came out. I was finishing it at the beginning of the year. But I realized if I’m going to do all of this, I have to bookend it with some spaciousness because often how busy-ness translates is feeling a little bit like you’re in a sardine can. Deadlines make you feel that way, a busy travel schedule makes you feel that way. And I realized that I could handle all of that and take advantage of everything that’s happened in the last couple of years if I could also afford myself this opportunity to just do what I want to do for a year. And so I’ve been saving a lot of money. I’m really excited to start painting again. I have an idea for a sewn project, so my sewing machine is already out. I bought a kiln last year.
DM: Lisa, my last question for you is about your upcoming sabbatical. Tell us about that. When does it start? What are you going to be doing? And how did you arrive at the decision to do it?
LC: Thank you. And so I’m just diving into more 3D stuff and thinking about all of that and I’m just excited to see what happens next. What am I going to do? What am I going to make? I don’t know. And I’m really excited to see where that goes. And so, yeah, it’s going to be a lot of studio time and exploration and experimentation.
DM: Your ceramics. You can see what you’re doing on Instagram. It’s magnificent.
DM: I cannot wait to see what you come up with. Lisa, thank you so much for sharing so much about your wonderful new book and what you’re doing in your glorious life.
“I think in mainstream culture, idiosyncrasies or differences are seen as a flaw. In our world, in the world of creative people, idiosyncrasies are actually your strength”.
- LISA CONGDON
“Finding your voice takes years of practice and repetition, frustration, agony, humiliation and self-doubt.”
From finding your artistic voice to staying
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If you’ve ever been to HOW Design Live, you’ve no doubt seen Debbie Millman deliver a keynote, moderate a panel or even work a letterpress on the exhibit hall floor. The branding guru has long been a fixture of HOW Design Live—and you also likely know her show Design Matters, the world’s first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture.
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LC: I think pretty early on, I started asking these questions like, “Who do
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Q&A: Debbi Millman, LisaCongdon
“All of my maps, are usually population maps. They’re about place names, and you see them become dense or more sparse, and that’s all about population.”
New York City’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery showcased a new collection of Scher’s maps in an exhibition entitled “U.S.A.” It was the first release of 10 maps of the United States she painted between 2014 and 2016, taking an interpretive and chaotic look at various data sets including climate zones, zip codes and transportation flow—complete with cultural and political commentary. The pieces in the exhibition are, in Scher’s words, “all the same and all different.” “I did it largely because [it was] an election year, and I’m fascinated by statistics and the way people vote and the way people think and why they think that way,” Scher says. “I began looking at the country and population centers and what’s near something else. Where’s the North, and where’s the South, and where do they meet, and what do people really think about when they’re in the middle? When you look at things like that, you gain a sensibility about why things exist and how they happen and why we are the way we are. It’s right there on the surface of the map.” Although she has created at least 55 wall-sized maps featured in galleries across the U.S., Scher’s adventures in opinionated cartography began on a smaller scale. Her earliest hand-drawn maps and word-dense visualizations of quotes in the media were more personal creative projects that documented the way she saw and felt about the world. One of Scher’s first projects in the same vein was a hand-drawn illustration of the United States for a 1989 AIGA cover. After that, demand for her illustrations swelled. But when potential clients sought to control the copy that comprised each intricate creation, Scher lost interest.
