Ethos
CRAFT RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME
These are a few guiding principles in work and in life that I have found to be true. It’s a helpful framework that brings me back to what is important. I am always revising because creativity is about always improvising as we go.
Create beauty—make people care
Saul Bass once said, “I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” I love Bass’s work and deeply respect this sentiment; some days, I feel the same and want to put beautiful things into the world if only for the sake of seeing them exist. But I also believe that beauty has the power to propel movement in people; to push ourselves to demand better out of everything around us. At its core, beauty displays an optimism for how things could be.
Beauty is hope. Passion and craft open our eyes to what’s possible. We can’t make things beautiful and better if we don’t believe it’s worth trying. This inspiration can (and should) shake us up, wake us up, and remind us to pursue more out of this wild and crazy life. I want to make beautiful things that make people care.
Say something
Form a point of view that is worth the airspace. Replicated stories will be lost in the noise. But boldness and bravery around a unique story that rings true can cut through the clutter.
Bold, brave storytelling doesn’t have to mean “loud,” though. Sometimes, the boldest voice is actually the still, steady, and quiet one. It’s not about volume; rather, when we reject convention and speak with intentionality, we find the right audience at the right time.
“The universe is made not of atoms but of stories.”
—Muriel Rukeyser
Create, consume, or critique
You can be someone who creates, consumes, or critiques. You get to choose which action you’re going to take.
Some people choose consume. This is inertia rather than intention.
Instead of consuming what is available, choosing to be someone who creates is choosing to take the seed of an idea and work to make it a reality.
Other people choose critique. They comment on and downplay the creative work of others. Rather than make something themselves, they pit themselves as the arbiters of what is good or bad.
Instead of being someone who critiques and focuses on what others are doing, choosing to be someone who creates is choosing to follow your own compass.
Creators look for the opening in the stanza of the universe’s song, and play their note to join in.
Craft chases taste
Aspire to a perpetual unrest. Cultivate a desire to make the next thing better than the one before it. When we hold up the ideal as the goal, our ability to craft it will often fall short of the initial vision. But if don’t start from the place of asking “What if we could…?”, then we can only make the things we’ve made before. If we dream bigger from the start, we push our craft to play catch up to our level of taste—sharpening our skill set constantly along the way.
We’re meant to learn new things
Curiosity fuels life; without it, we stagnate. Flourishing requires a hunger for new knowledge and experiences. In a society operating under the illusion that things will stay the same forever, the curious mind is the adaptive mind because it accepts that everything must change. Curiosity is the only real way to embrace whatever may come our way.
Quality over transience
Pursuing excellence in all that we create is a counter-cultural action in a time when everything is designed to become imminently obsolete.
So much of design work today is oriented around only attention: shock value, a flash in the pan, a “dubious bag of tricks” as Michael Rock once termed anything that is “pure style” without “deep content.” Many people make things only for the vapid moment, without further consideration for how it will live on after that. From a sustainability standpoint, this cheap and fast approach leaves us with a crisis; that’s well-known. But additionally, from a cultural and societal standpoint, it also leaves our minds warped to only want more — to only want new — rather than to be able to think critically about the world that we want to design and build for ourselves in the first place.
The world around us is being designed whether we like it or not — these systems and decisions are not arbitrary. They are deliberate choices made by someone. We get to ask ourselves the question: are we designing the world we want? I want more beauty; more intentionality; more joy; more delight; more thoughtfulness; more soul.
Measure twice. Cut once. Build to last.
What we say “yes” and “no” to defines us
The sooner that we embrace that all of our time is finite, the better we can make choices with what is left. If we act like it is all going to continue forever, then we get lost in the daily deluge of menial tasks because we trick ourselves that there remains more time for the “big stuff” in some theoretical future. The reality is: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Saying “no” doesn’t have to be personal or offensive; but, especially when being asked to create things for other people, someone else’s goals or objectives may not match our own and threaten to take us off course. Saying “yes” to everyone puts you at the whim of someone else’s mission, not your own. Your time is limited. What you say “no” to today may allow you the time and energy to say “yes” to the right things at the right time.
Our story is made by the associations we make along the way. Saying “yes” to one thing means that it is now a part of you. Saying “yes” to the wrong type of business or partnership will say volumes about who you are. The same can be true about bravely saying “no.” It can prove good stewardship over your story—and someone else’s.