What drew your interest first, design or writing? Design. Like most, I was drawn into design through a love of music—loving album covers, making posters and shirts for friends in bands, and so on. The writing came out of teaching design. Good students ask good questions, so I was forced to provide good answers. Since these thoughts were floating around the classroom, I thought it’d also be a good idea to get them down on paper and share them.
Has writing helped you as a designer? Writing is tremendously helpful, because it forces me to be specific. It provides a way to externalize my thoughts and make them visible, criticized and poked at. So much of good design is about aim. The problem must properly be stated, and the easiest way to do this framing is through writing. Along with listening, writing is my primary means for learning and understanding.
You design your own essays on your website. As you fuse these two crafts, design and writing, how does that process differ from simply doing one or the other? It’s all communication. If you’re armed with both written and visual ways of expressing ideas, you can choose the best option for each instance, and pace the experience of moving from one way of communicating to another. That pacing is one of the big benefits of designing the pieces I write: I can produce a cadence to the whole essay in a way I’d find difficult if I were writing with only words or over-relying on images.
You’ve freelanced your whole career. In what ways has that been an advantage to your design process and practice? How has it been a challenge? First, there’s the diversity of projects freelancers can produce. If you’re juggling a few projects at a time, you can scratch a lot of creative itches and connect different kinds of projects and workflows. You can import ideas from one place to the next. It is, however, difficult to adapt to a new work environment with its clients and projects, essentially learning and adapting to a foreign language of work several times a year.
Who have been your mentors along the way? In school, I took a lot of classes with Roman Duszek. He helped me understand design as a process of articulating problems and refining the responses to them.
Otherwise, I have a lot of supportive peers in my workspace and across the internet who continue to help and inspire me from day to day. And then there are folks outside of the design industry I observe from afar through their work, like Robert Irwin, James Burke and Lawrence Weschler, whose work inspires me to seek out new ways of connecting ideas and developing creative pursuits.
Who’s your ideal client? A decisive individual who is an active listener—someone who comes into the project with focus and clarity on the goals, but few expectations about the methods to achieve them.
What excites you most about the future of design? Simply that people know what it is, and consider it to be a worthwhile and useful pursuit. Hopefully in the future, we can define design more clearly as a method of thoughtful, generous and fair planning that’s available to anyone in any capacity, professional designer or not.
What advice would you give to a designer who wants to improve the way she writes and talks about her work (as you’ve done so well)? Writing about your work becomes easier if you have clear reasons for your design choices. It becomes more interesting if you have references outside of design.
