Log/Transition

Shifting Gears

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:06:27 -0500

→

Log/Transition has moved. I have since moved into a Creative Director / Co-Founder position at Wander, and will continue to write about the process of shifting my career from agency design work to product design.

You can follow the process at Field Study. Thanks for the support and looking forward to more good conversation!

— Our awesome team is looking for an awesome front-end dev! This...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:36:05 -0500

—

Our awesome team is looking for an awesome front-end dev!

This may come as a bit of news, but for the past six weeks I have been happily plugging away on an amazing project with a small but voracious team (more details to come on this). After an intense summer spent looking for the right fit, I finally joined a startup to help build a small piece of the future of the internet (no small task mind you).

Now we need a killer Front-End Developer to help us build and really refine our product. We are a small team, we work fast, and our standards of elegant functionality and beautiful experience are high. If your up to the task hit me up at hi@keenancummings.com. Look forward to talking!

"The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure..."

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:10:29 -0400

““The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.””

- ~ Steve Jobs on being fired from Apple.

It has been a few weeks since I left agency job. I will have details of the process and progress that I’ve made in the past few months: getting aquatinted with the field; applying and interviewing with about a dozen startups; figuring out how to budget for risk; and taking what I feel to be the optimal position for making this transition.

I feel light. I have nothing to do but work on this one incredibly interesting problem. No time sheets, no orientations, no meetings — just a lot of intense and interesting work. There is no clear career path before me, no next rung of the ladder than I am scraping to climb. And that means endless opportunity to just make something, hopefully something great. I am truly a beginner. This will be my first of many things. I trust my instincts, I lean on incredibly generous support, and I enjoy the rawness of it all.

"What is deceptive, especially in the West, is our assumption that repetitive and mindless jobs are..."

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:01:40 -0400

““What is deceptive, especially in the West, is our assumption that repetitive and mindless jobs are dehumanizing. On the other hand, the jobs that require us to use the abilities that are uniquely human, we assume to be humanizing. This is not necessarily true. The determining factor is not so much the nature of our jobs, but for whom they serve. ‘Burnout’ is a result of consuming yourself for something other than yourself. You could be burnt out for an abstract concept, ideal, or even nothing (predicament). You end up burning yourself as fuel for something or someone else. This is what feels dehumanizing. In repetitive physical jobs, you could burn out your body for something other than yourself. In creative jobs, you could burn out your soul. Either way, it would be dehumanizing. Completely mindless jobs and incessantly mindful jobs could both be harmful to us.””

- ~Dsyke Suematsu from his white paper discussed at Why Ad People Burn Out.

Our generation is looking for greater meaning in their work, and we’ve proven that we are willing to compromise deep savings accounts, home ownership, and clear work/life separation in favor of finding and doing something we love.

My decision to pursue a career in entrepreneurship was a difficult decision to make and is proving difficult to follow through on. I did however know that if I had continued on the path I was currently on (chasing a Creative Director position in the agency world) I would burn out long before I was able to create anything meaningful.

I’ve left the agency, and joined a small (team of 3!) start up. Designing for interaction and building platform for users to use and express themselves, it is exhausting. But burn-out is not a risk. Financing our vision, finding traction in a crowded market, designing a great experience — those are very real and heavy risks. But burn-out is not a risk.

I am building just a bit of what I believe will be a world changing project. I am laying track into a foggy future unknown. I am enjoying working with and associating with others building the internet and trying to understand how this thing is going to work. The internet is a massive project that is open for anyone to work on and I get to own it as much as anyone else does. I still get to make things, but now I get to make them for myself and for people. That opportunity is an exhausting, humanizing challenge.

Designers as Impact Entrepreneurs

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:32:12 -0400

Designers as Impact Entrepreneurs:

“You want to achieve fairness and a place of equality on earth, how would you do that? … A big part of it was impact entrepreneurs. And design thinking and designers. Designers being a different kind of person that have some special capabilities. And we thought if we can enable designers to realize: hey, you’re more than you might think in terms of someone who can make great posters, you’re actually a person you can design great companies.

… I hope [in the future] that the idea of making a company that doesn’t have a social impact aspect of it is just lame. It just doesn’t even make sense. Why would you do that?”

—Alex Bogusky and John Bielenberg on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters Interview, Sep. 30th.

"Not everyone is presented with the circumstances to walk away, and not everyone should. But, please,..."

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:00:06 -0400

“Not everyone is presented with the circumstances to walk away, and not everyone should. But, please, don’t be a critic. We’re not walking away because startups are sexy. We’re walking away because the alternative is not.”

- ~Josh Miller on why he dropped out of Princeton in his 4th year to join a startup.

It’s easy to get the sense that there is a wave a both right and left brained talents that are leaving behind promising career paths, taking on significant risk (although the real risk of joining a startup is overblown), and challenging themselves in ways that a corporate or agency position could not.

It’s not that agency work is entirely uninteresting. It’s that it isn’t what it once was. A friend asked if our design demi-gods of modernist graphic design — the Eames, Rand, Bass — were alive and working today, where would they be looking to apply their talents. His guess was that as creative minds who were always pushing outside the boundaries of the industry and looking for maximum influence, they would likely be fascinated in building out the internet.

What I’ve learned in the past several months: be honest about the risks, asses your passions be on “design”, and give some real thought to the opportunities that align with those passions.

Open Job: Coursekit / Design Director This person will be my ...

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:10:00 -0400

Open Job: Coursekit / Design Director

This person will be my partner in building a delightful product and a leading design team. Design is a central part of Coursekit: everyone here considers themselves a designer. All decisions are made with thought and purpose.

Apply: jobs+design@coursekit.com

Additional Info: Lead Design at Coursekit

Location: NYC

Designers vs Coding

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:34:00 -0400

““Do I need to know how to code?” is a question that comes up with sure-fire consistency in design circles. I’ve seen it asked by so many, from uncertain design students in classrooms worried about their chances of landing a job, to seasoned professionals at conferences seeing their pool of print projects slowly evaporate. The question is being asked with even greater frequency as of late, because Adobe has launched their product Muse, which promises designers the ability to “create unique websites without writing code.” So, if a designer wants to work on the web, should they take the time to learn this dastardly “code” or instead rely on software like Muse?

My short answer is “Learn code.” My long answer, I suppose, would be that one should learn to code, because it’s the language of the web… and the knowledge does nothing but benefit the designer. Design decisions are not only affected by the characteristics of the content being designed, but also the qualities of the format…”

Discuss> · (more at frank chimero)

Open Job: Everlane / Freelance UX/Product...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:17:00 -0400

Open Job: Everlane / Freelance UX/Product Designer

“We’re always looking for great graphic designers to help create the Everlane experience. We look for creative designers with a strong aesthetic and sense of typography.”

Apply: jobs@everlane.com

Additional Info: everlane.com/jobs

Location: San Francisco

"The NYC startup world needs more web product design talent. NYC has perhaps the best design..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:51:00 -0400

“The NYC startup world needs more web product design talent. NYC has perhaps the best design community in the world, but most of the designers are trained in non-web design fields (e.g. print design). Most of the good design schools don’t emphasize web product design.”

- Over the past few years, Web Design and Motion Design have emerged as full fledged sub-industries to the traditional Branding and Print Design industry. Product/Service Design is a nascent discipline, but the curricula are being created, programs are being built, and communities (this very blog) are starting to form. It’s a huge opportunity for designers to set a career path early.

quote: Chris Dixon

Qualifications / Part 2: The Empathy Advantage

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:20:00 -0400

The previous post in this series was prompted by a series of interview questions I’ve answered over the past few months. Those questions have been enough to strip me of my portfolio-clad confidence and prompt some serious soul-searching. But the hunger to make something real, that real people will use and potentially love has kept me determined. I’ve been through a handful of interviews and confidently claimed that this is something I could pull off. I know that my design background has given me an innate sense for what resonates with an audience. But without the product portfolio to prove it, it’s been difficult convincing anyone that I could be a valuable part of that process.

But before you give up and send your resume in to InterBrand, remember that your design skills are an extremely important *40% of your qualifications.

For a while I thought this was an issue of taste: so many companies seem to lack a taste level that would steer them away from building messy, mediocre, ad-laden services that die before they get out of Beta.

But it’s not about taste, it’s about empathy. You’ve spent your whole career trying to communicate as clearly as possible with as wide an audience as possible (the greatest good for the greatest number of people). Every client you have ever worked for wants to be understood and loved by their target market. They are coming to you for your ability to make things that people understand (to inform) and love (and delight).

“Market Opportunity” is biz-speak for “there are a ton of people who really want this thing to exist, because it doesn’t exist, or everything out there is junk, and a painful experience to use.” You have notebooks full of this stuff. If you’re like me, your ideas have typically been design-centric: a funny t-shirt idea (Freelance Ain’t Free), a great web catalogue of some design niche (NoLayout), a crowd-sourced directory of printers (InkerLinker). These are **great, and I am working on one of these kinds of projects myself.

These ideas come from your ability to perceive a need (probably something personal), and evaluate how many other people might need the same thing. When you start expanding your knowledge base, start looking at other industries, other problems, other pain points, you will start to have ideas that could potentially serve a much larger audience. And when you team up with people that have deep domain knowledge in other fields, technical experts that know how to make amazing things but have a ***harder time spotting the greater needs, that is a powerful combination.

*The rest of that make up: 40% your ability to make things (and you have to start making things on your own before someone will want to make something with you); 10% your relentless hustle (getting to know the people that will want to hire you when you’ve proven you have the skills); 10% being a nice person to everyone and showing genuine gratitude (by the way, just want to say thank you for reading this blog).

**Someone once explained that although design is Niche, it is a culturally influential niche that has the power to spread ideas and carry them beyond the design community. Pinterest is a great example of a niche product that has spread to anunexpected and wider audience.

***The Segway was technically a semi-miraculous innovation, but hardly empathetic. The wheelchair that Segway inventor Dean Kamen created using the same technology to enable disabled users to interact with others at eye level — that was a design insight born of pure empathy.

Open Job: Firespotter Labs / UI+UXDesigner “We are...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:10:00 -0400

Open Job: Firespotter Labs / UI+UXDesigner

“We are growing fast and one visually-minded pixel crusher is no longer enough. We are looking for another full-time interface designer. Our first app launched one month ago, but we have a couple other products in development that will need a lot of love.”

Apply: jobs@firespotter.com

Additional Info: blog.iso50.com

Location: San Francisco

Qualifications / Part 1: Who Do You Think You Are???

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:23:00 -0400

I’m starting this series with some of the intimidating questions that have been thrown at me over the course of this process:

Why do you, as a well-schooled graphic designer with primarily agency or in-house experience, think you can pull off starting a business out of nothing but an idea and a few executional skills?

Does your abstract design sense translate to building a product — a product that has just as many technical and business needs as design considerations?

Do you have the experience and the know how to take a product not from brief to deliverable, but from inception, to research, to development; through refining, iterating, and depressing setbacks; to launch, marketing, failure; and on to rebounding, rebuilding, and relaunching, with no guarantee of success?

Discuss>

Open Job: Eatmetrics / Lead Product & UX...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:48:00 -0400

Open Job: Eatmetrics / Lead Product & UX Designer

“Eat Metrics is seeking an experienced UX designer to join our team as the Lead Product and User Experience Designer. An ideal candidate will have experience with product and graphic design, and wants to join a company where they can steer the functional and visual direction of the product…”

Apply: jobs@eatmetrics.com

Additional Info: eatmetrics.com/jobs

Location: San Francisco

Dear Graphic & Web Designers, please understand that there are greater opportunities available to you.

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:30:05 -0400

Dear Graphic & Web Designers, please understand that there are greater opportunities available to you. :

pieratt:

You have an inherent need to solve problems, visually and conceptually. There is enormous value in this, but you may be misplacing your talents… The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time.

A 240 Minute Primer

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:55:00 -0400

I have a standby book that I recommend to any would be print designer. It’s not comprehensive. It doesn’t claim to be any kind of introductory text. It works litmus test of sorts because it is about typography, a core principle of design (typography is information is hierarchy is organization is communication is design is everything), and if you can’t get excited about the mundane fundamentals then perhaps design is not for you.

Chris Dixon’s blog-turned-book is that primer for newcomers to the start-up world. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive, but through a series of anecdotal posts about his experience building SiteAdvisor and Hunch, and some nuts-and-bolts advice, you can get a good sense of how the industry works (which is refreshingly merit based, and respects hustle over titles). It’s free, and you can breeze through in a few hours.

Also check out the blogs he recommends (links below). All of them are amazing. Chris has just packaged up a ‘best of’ collection of his writing that is easy to digest. If you can’t get through it, maybe the startup world is not for you. If you eat it up, this is just the gateway drug. More required reading:

You Are NOT a Visual Designer

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:12:00 -0400

“I don’t know a single good designer who would call themselves a visual designer… There is so much more going on that making something pink or blue, beveled or shiny… Design is not Visual Design… the look of something can’t be considered holistically without the feel of it, or the use of it.”

~Mark Boulton, Visual Design is not a Thing

As a newcomer to the start-up world, this term was foreign to me. “Visual Designer” is one of the more patronizing titles the has been assigned to the design discipline (I’ve been called worse — a biz school kid once referred to me as an “Adobe-Wan Kenobi”). In a world where engineers and product managers are generally trying to create economic value, design is easily seen as over-priced icing on the cake.

Communicating your value as a designer to the people you want to hire you requires that you meet them in the middle. The reality is that there is tons of effort that went into the work that I have done that didn’t solve any ‘real’ problem. I’m proud of some of the beautiful results, but this field is about solving big problems for the greatest amount of people possible. Your knowledge of custom printing techniques might not impress, but the process you went through to get to that solution might. This is what I mean about meeting your prospective employer in the middle. If you show up with a portfolio full of visuals, your going to be treated like a visual designer. You are worth much much more and you have to make the case for that.

I’ve gotten some solid advice on how to structure my portfolio and heeding it has paid off. The most important thing I can share is that anything you have built on your own, any passion project that you’ve taken on and seen through to completion, that is the most valuable representation of who you are that you have. It can be a niche publication, a Meetup group, a screen printed shirt company, whatever. There is a start-to-finish story in that one project that can tell someone everything impressive about yourself that they need to know. It’s the project, it’s the logistics, it’s the tenacity to get it done, it’s the ability to pull other people and to work on your idea — all of it says way more than any campaign or branding project you completed for any company no matter how huge.

The second bit of advice — start meeting with the people you want to work with and talk about your work. This is simply a matter of practice. See what they respond to, learn how to talk about those projects, and go do more of them. Meet with as many people as you can and start getting feedback. Give them feedback on what they are working on.

Third, everything you can say about your work is immediately trumped by what you have done. I’ve learned this the hard way. I know what I am capable of, but until I’ve done it, the talk is moot. Once you’ve done something worth talking about, knowing how to talk about it is essential, but (trust me on this) you are wasting time telling people what you will be able to do — they need to hear about what you have done.

Visual Design is indeed not a thing. Visual design is part of a designer’s job in the way that spread sheetin’ is part of an accountant’s job. Separating the designer’s role from the thought work that goes into their execution is ultimately detrimental to good work getting done. If you meet with someone that is looking for that Adobe-Wan Kenobi to “bring their vision to life,” punch them in the face and walk away. There are plenty of opportunities for designers to come in and play a key role in defining the course of a company. And if you can’t find the right fit, build something yourself.

I'm an agency-trained, senior-level, print/branding designer & I want to work at a start up. Here's why:

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:50:00 -0400

(First, I should say I don’t work at a start up, but I have worked with guys that do and I have been building some things of my own — I like the small taste I’ve gotten. If I’m going to spend the immense amount of energy it takes to make this transition, I thought it is something worth thinking through.)

—

1) I want my work to feel valuable.

It seems the higher up the institutional chain you climb, the more abstract the value you generate, and the more you are worth. The roles become so far removed from the end goals they are managing, and you have to wonder how long you can stay focused on what matters — making peoples lives better.

“The vast majority of the wealthiest people I’ve met are far more about building value for themselves than they are about creating value for anyone or anything beyond themselves.” (Are You a Role Model, HBR)

But this doesn’t add up in the start-up world, mostly because there is not time nor room in the equation for anyone that doesn’t directly affect the outcomes of pursuing whatever the goals may be.

In a start up, value is a concrete measure of your contribution. I enjoy the clarity and trepidation that brings to the work. Things can fail, and the onus is on the person or team that failed to solve the problem correctly. (No blaming ‘bad’ clients!) Likewise, the triumphs are deeply felt because of the intimate relationship you have with the possibility of failure.

2) I want to stop talking about good work and start making good work.

Start-ups are notoriously biased toward action — it’s a survival tactic in a competitive field.

I’ve spent a lot of time on research and development, writing pages of airy ‘positioning statements’ and the like. It often felt like intellectual glut that gummed up the process. “Research & Development” feels valuable, but I’ve found that it rarely delivers.

Start-ups trade R&D for insight and iteration: talk to users, find a solution, something elegant and surprising and useful, and try it out, not as a print out on the wall to be discussed and over-thought (and yes, over-thinking is symptomatic of many if not most stalled innovation processes), but something out in the real world with other people using it.

3) I want other people to find value in my work.

That value is directly tied to making people’s experiences — and *hopefully lives — better. You have to deliver on that if you expect any kind of real impact.

Client work can often be far removed from any real world positive affect. When your goals happen to align with a client’s, then sure, it’s great to help them achieve that. You’re lucky if you can build a roster of clients you deeply believe in.

More often you are operating under one major but overlooked assumption — that lending clarity and delight to any message makes the world a better place, regardless of the real value of the message you are helping to sell.

Working as part of the team that is defining not just how a product gets communicated and used, but what that product is and what it does for people — that’s an opportunity you rarely get with client work.

*Part of the reason I have a very specific idea of the type of start-up I want to work for. There are plenty of problems I don’t care to solve, and more power to the people out there tackling those.

4) I want my mom to understand what I spend my time doing.

You ever meet someone very successful and say to yourself “what the hell do they do?” You ever meet someone that can hardly answer that question themselves?

I’ve come to believe that “coordinating teams of interdisciplinary, strategic partnerships for generating long term sustainable growth” is code for makin’ spreadsheets and delegating real work (the spreadsheet has even become the symbol of faux productivity).

5) I want to design with empathy, and that means being close to the ground.

I want to get as close as possible to the people that will love, hate, use, abuse, praise and sh*t on my work.

There is power in making something for someone you know well, someone that you’ve taken the time to listen to.When you are designing for a real person with a real problem you exercise that designer’s empathy that you’ve been trying to squeeze out of yourself when you read vague marketing reports about a ‘target’ consumer or an archetypal customer.

You sit down for a casual cup of tea and a chat and they blow your mind with insights into what the problem is and how to make something that really works. You take that with you, synthesize and sift through it, and cone up with something that you are uniquely qualified to come up with. It is grueling, sweat-dripping-from-the-brow work — empathy exercise. Getting it right is intense and rewarding.

6) I want my stamp on the things I make.

I don’t want to contractually hand over credit for my work to any institution. Too many designers do great work that is absorbed by client’s contracts or even by the agency they work for.

The industry is changing. Designers are getting involved long before the brief is created. They are helping identify opportunities and build platforms and even products and in turn, generating an immense amount of value. The industry is demanding much more out of agencies but the rates aren’t changing. And we aren’t just talking learning new tools or building a web team or hiring film producers. Clients are demanding deeper domain knowledge, broader expertise, and bigger ROI.

I can go create this value somewhere else, for something I really believe in, and for a company that is moving quickly and iterating responsively.

—
I’m in the middle of this process now, and I’m going to continue to document it here, anonymously for now. I have a whole list of things I’ve already encountered and learned along the way and will record as much as I can. A few of the topics I want to talk about:

·Spec. work — trying to move into a whole new field means I gotta hustle to prove myself. It’s a sticky situation when someone wants to see what you can do and I have a lot of thoughts on the topic.

·Talking about your work outside the agency ecosystem — I’ve gotten some amazing feedback and completely revamped my portfolio. What used to be my marquee work has gone to the back of the deck and there are some clear winning strategies in putting together a convincing folio.

·How to finding opportunities that aren’t going to show up on design job boards — there’s so much here and I’ve done everything wrong before I’ve (hopefully) started to get this right.

·Getting in the know — my knowledge of Swiss design heroes and the history of type doesn’t carry much weight in these circles — I’ve collected and veraciously consumed a set of sources that has been invaluable.