An Industry Inside of Every Industry

This is Working File. A podcast about design practice and its relationship to the world. I'm Andy Mangold.

And I'm Matt McInerney.

On this episode, which has been a long time coming, we're joined by Chappell Ellison and Maurice Cherry to discuss the state of design journalism, and the design community.

So should we continue to expect that graphic design criticism is a garbage fire or could we do better?

The world may never know.

Or we could just do better.

So it's a panel show, and this first week we are very lucky to be joined by two massively talented and great people. The first person is Maurice Cherry. Maurice is the principal of Lunch, which is a design studio in Atlanta. He's also a podcaster behind the podcast, Revision Path, and he has a million other projects. I can't possibly list them all, but Maurice, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

We're excited to have you on this first show. I think you'll be an excellent member of the panel. And the other person joining us is Chappell Ellison. Chappell is a writer, a design writer specifically, an editor, a critic. She's got an excellent Twitter game. I've been admiring those Tweets for a long time. [chuckle] Chappell, thank you for being here as well.

Thanks guys. It's a big treat to be invited and also an honor to share some audio space with Maurice, who's work I also follow.

Oh, thank you.

Yes, we're all very lucky to be in Maurice's presence. He's the greatest, and I don't know where he finds the time to do all the things he does. Can you maybe shed some light on that?

Didn't we find out you don't sleep? Wasn't that the trick?

Yeah. It's like a I do a polyphasic sleep schedule.

Ah, there's it is. You're like... Is that Thomas Edison or Ben Franklin who did that first? Well, not first but...

They probably... I'm pretty sure they both did it.

You're like a modern Ben Franklin. [chuckle]

Yeah, let's say that. [laughter] Let's go with that. [chuckle]

Yeah, you also... You have the podcast all about tea, so maybe you're just really high on caffeine. You're just hitting that caffeine all day, everyday.

I've actually had no tea today.

Oh boy!

It's interesting. After I did the podcast, The Year of Tea, where I reviewed a different tea everyday, I sorta scaled back a bit. I mean, I scaled back my collection of course, but I don't drink as much as I used to, but at least the tea that I am drinking is really, really good.

Did you kinda ruin it for yourself by drinking so much tea for a whole year?

No, I don't think I ruined it. I think it was more so... It's any kind of over exposure or immersion into a subject where you feel like you probably know a lot about it, so it makes you a lot pickier about what you do end up drinking. But I was always kinda picky in the first place so, I don't think it really hurt anything.

That's your secret. Live more like Maurice. Just be more picky about your tea and sleep like a [chuckle] 20 minutes every four hours and that's how you get as much done as Maurice Cherry. Well, I'm very glad you're both here, because this first topic we have picked out, I think, is the perfect topic for the first episode of this show, of this podcast to be. I think you're two good people to have here talking about it. And what I wanna talk about is just the state of the design community: Design criticism, design journalism. All of the orbiting worlds around graphic design and where they're at. Because one of the reasons that I'm excited about making this show, is that I feel like there's a missing piece in the design world. When I look around at design publications, at prominent designers on Twitter and other social networks, at the communities we have for graphic design, things like Dribbble and another places are exclusively for graphic designers, and designers, I have this wanting. I have this sense of a part of the conversation that's lacking. This depth of conversation and this depth of criticism that I just don't see.

And what it comes down to is I've been a professional graphic designer now for five years. And I've been studying it for nine or 10 years more or less, full time. And I love design. I love thinking about it. I love doing it and yet when it comes to actually reading about it, or listening to podcasts about it, or talking about it, I just am constantly let down by all of the things that are out there for designers to consume. And I'm kinda wondering if this is just me or if other people also feel this way about the design community and just why is all this stuff so bad, is the question I really have.

Andy, maybe you're just really hard to please here.

That's entirely possible. [chuckle] There's a very good chance everything is fine and I just am a very difficult person to please, but more specifically, when I look at the blogs that pop up first to mind that exemplify this type of design journalism and community that I'm referencing are like the Fast Companies of the world, where design is minimized to this weird, trivial thing. But also it can change the world but in a vague way. And the way they talk about it and reference it, is very glorified and raised up. And it doesn't feel real to me. I've never like... I very rarely read something online, or I'm part of a group of designers, socially, on the internet talking about something where I feel like the conversation is anywhere near as interesting as it is in my work place, or it was in my education when I was going through school. All the conversations I've had about design in the real world, have always been so much more rich and fulfilling than ones that I see happening online. So maybe it is just me. I mean, Matt, you and I have talked about this before. Do you know what I'm feeling?

I know exactly what you're talking about. I've had this feeling too where you just, everytime you see a design article that it's linked to from Fast Company, or from WIRED design, or some other medium, or literally Medium. It's just this, everything falls into these few categories of allowable design articles and it just seems like the deep thoughtful thinking and the conversations that we might have, or the conversations that you might have with coworkers who are really thinking deeply about the thing that they do just don't seem to be happening or they're happening in one or two places. And the majority of what you're seeing is just like, "Check it out! We 3D-printed a bracelet. Isn't that cool? Design."

The future.

Most industries that are creative, they have critics and writers. Stuff like art, food, theater, these all have critics. But in comparison to design, all those industries are so much older, and design honestly, you really didn't start seeing published design criticism until the mid-century, until the 50s. And even then, it's mostly architecture that's probably the most well established design criticism game. So you have have these... Design by comparison is so young, and so it's unfortunate that it feels like design is just coming into it's own in a time where we have this garbage fire that is the media landscape right now.

And so we also can't... We can't back away from the fact that design, particularly graphic design, is an industry that only really exists to sell things. That's kind of the history of it. There's some other nuances of why that this industry is more than just selling, I know that. But anyways, it was created to sell things, so you have things like the Fast Companies, and these sites where there is a lot of writing on there that is the result of a press release landing in someone's inbox. And that's just because again this garbage fire we're in, the media landscape, we still unfortunately have sites where people are pressured to write and publish a dozen articles a day. And I've been a part of that world, I know what it's like, so I get it. Some days you have to make the article based on that press release because you're under the gun.

It hits your quota.

It hits your quota. And it's a bummer, because I think a lot of people see this stuff, and it's like, "Oh, this is what design is. It's about 3D printing a t-shirt," which is cool, but also, it gives this really weird impression of what design is when, as you're saying, we have much deeper nuanced conversations just with each other.

I've wondered that too, first, how long the industry's been around. The fact that it's still maturing. It definitely hasn't been around as long as architecture. Whenever I think of design criticism, I definitely think of architecture first, because at least it has a history to it, and there are established figures that have been around for more than my lifetime. I also wonder if it's just that this is our industry, this is the thing we're focused on, like if I were an architect and I was reading architectural blogs I'd feel exactly the same way. I don't need to read another article about a building that's going up, the next tallest building or something, that's their version of this or I don't know.

Well, yeah, it's weird for any industry. It's weird to talk about whether or not people are talking about their own industry. It's, do plumbers sit around and say, "Man, no one's reading about plumbing?" I really don't know, but it does seem to be something in design that we do obsess about a lot.

And I think you touched on something really important there, which is the comparison to other creative industries. Because design is differentiated from most plumbing. I'm not gonna say all plumbing's not creative. There probably is some very creative plumbing going on. But I think your average plumber doesn't think of it as much a creative task as your average designer does. And the movie comparison specifically is interesting to me, because when I think about movie critics, I don't think about them in the context of critiquing movies to better the medium, to talk to other filmmakers, to continue a conversation that's for an industry internally. I think of them mainly for, to feed the financial machine, which is Hollywood. And write which summer blockbuster you're gonna go see and which got the most thumbs up, or the most Rotten Tomatoes scores. It's all consumer facing as far as I can tell, or at least most of it. But I'm not really part of that world. Chappell, do you have a sense of the other... You're much closer to the world of criticism, which is why you're here, frankly, than I feel like I am, or Matt is. Maurice, I'm not sure about you. But do you have a sense of, if there is a distinction between criticism for consumers of something, versus criticism for the makers of something?

I don't know, that's a really good question. And I think that line is kept intentionally blurry so that again, the media, the garbage fire we keep discussing, so that it can spread to the widest audience possible. And I know I personally, when I do write about design which isn't as often these days but when I do, I tend to want to write for everyone which maybe is a pipe dream, but design is so, so, so pervasive now in everyone's lives that I feel like everyone should have the chance to be a critic of design. Which I guess is probably a whole other conversation about democratization and all that. But I think it does bring up, you said something earlier that I think is a good thing to question. And I really wonder, what do you guys... What do all of you... What for you is the best case scenario of design criticism? What do you want to gain from reading a piece of design criticism?

I can answer for me. What I'm interested in is hearing about the complexity behind the problem being solved, and if relevant hearing about the creative or interesting ways in which some of those complexities were handled in the execution of something. Most of the design I do is in software. The company I work for does apps and websites, as is the fashion these days. And so oftentimes the things that I'm most proud of in my work are like, "Oh, we had this technical limitation and this kind of data coming from the database. And this particular context we had to solve for and so we did this thing which if you look at it for 30 seconds, it looks completely unremarkable. But if I were to write a short case study and explain to you all the things that went into it behind it, you would come to appreciate what it's actually doing in that system more than if you just looked at it briefly, which is how everyone looks at everything in garbage fire world."

So what I'm interested in is, there are few things that I have gone... The things that worked on I've gone deep enough into those worlds to understand the complexities and the trade offs in the things that we're actually doing. I don't understand that about all of the millions of worlds and industries I haven't had a chance to work in. And that's what I'd be interested in being exposed to through design criticism. It's like, "Here is a solution to something. Here's the design piece and here is what it's actually doing and why it's doing it this way and not a different way."

And what I don't see is that, what I see is, "Gosh! Isn't this beautiful? This is so interesting. It's a callback to whatever." This kind of very shallow... It feels to me like the consumer-facing criticism. Right? "You are a person. You care that your Instagram app icon changed. Here is a trivial article about the Instagram app icon that you yourself can look at and either laugh or nod your head and then move on." What I'm curious about is what do the actual people that designed the Instagram app... Because we know that there are incredibly enormous team of extremely talented people that work at that company. What is it that they actually thought and did when they made that icon? And so, I think the role of a good critic is somebody who is supposed to try and get to the root of that without having to have it explained to them by the person that made it, is kind of maybe my vision for a really good critic. Someone that understands that context and is willing to really dig deeply. I guess that's what I'm looking for... I don't know. Is that asking too much?

I don't think so. I think similar to what Andy was saying, I really want to know about the process behind it. Similar to what Andy's saying a lot of what we see as design criticism tends to be very much knee-jerk reactions. I saw it, I don't like it. It's ugly or whatever. You've also got the ones that I guess their form of criticism is to try to redesign it themselves or to try to change it themselves after what a team that has spent probably weeks and months and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to change and redesign. Some student probably thinks they could do better in 20 minutes. And posting it on Dribbble or something. But I want to hear more about, one, that process, and two, whether or not that redesign really hit the business goals that that company wanted. Because a lot of these... When we talk about design criticisms, and we're looking at it from that consumer standpoint, it's really... I think it might be obfuscated by what is best for the business, because if the business is doing a redesign for whatever reasons, whether it's a new logo to try to attract a younger crowd or something like that. They've got their reasons that are probably completely different from what a consumer's reasons might be.

Yeah. That's a good point. I think that the impact of the actual design is also something I'm very interested in. I'll go a step bigger and say that business impact if it is a business that's redesigning something, but I'm more interested in knowing what were the actual goals of the redesign and I think in... Or design in the first place. To your point, Maurice, I think in a lot of cases of the goal is something financial-business related, right? We want to sell this app so the app icon needs to look a certain way. Or we want to market something in some way. And to Chappell's point, design is really about selling, the DNA of this entire industry is about selling stuff. But when you look at let's say, a university rebranding. I don't think the university is like, "Our main goal is to get more admissions, therefore, more money. We're trying to get more students enrolled. So we think the best way to do that is to change the logo."

I think the goals are probably different in those situations. So what I'm interested in knowing are, what are those goals and then, did you actually meet them with the thing that you did? That to me seems like the base level of a criticism, right? Here is the goal. Did you meet it or not? Knowing those goals already is one level that is almost always completely absent from all of this "criticism". The actual goal, right?

People talk about... The Instagram icon change is convenient 'cause it just happened last week. And 'cause it's such a stupid thing. Everyone is complaining about in weird ways. But that's a perfect example, right? People presume what Instagram's goal was in changing that icon. They have no idea with the actual goal was necessarily, right?

It does strike me that the things we're saying, the things you're saying, specifically Maurice, what you mentioned about wanting to know what the goals were. And then what that leads me to is what the effects were. I'm more interested in the article about whatever redesign like five years later. Which is in direct conflict with what the media landscape wants right now, which is, "The icon is out. Let's talk about it. Let's address whether it's a failure right now. And then we'll never talk about it again." I'm way more interested to know if that... If the Instagram icon makes a difference in one year, in two years, in five years, or if it's totally different then. But that's kind of when you judge it. Right now, we don't know anything, right?

I don't think it's gonna make a difference in three months. Are we still talking about Uber's redesign?

Well, that's the thing though. At that point, that's when it has time to permeate and actually maybe has actually affected your life or not? And that's when we don't care anymore. So nobody's gonna address it at that point. But isn't that when it's really most interesting?

It's like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. I think that at some point in time, we just accept it for what it is. At first there's denial, there's anger. There's bargaining.

No, that's very true.

It goes through those stages though. So certainly in a few months, I don't think there'll be this hubbub about the Instagram icon, or anything like that.

No, there won't be at all, because all it is is a knee-jerk reaction, it's not an actual criticism which could come in looking at the effects of what happened here, you know?

And I think... Twitter's done this funny thing where there's that immediacy to judge quickly that we've been talking about. But people kind of confused Twitter as criticism, as people offering up criticism, but it's really, it's not, it's just reaction. And there's a big difference. And reaction can be interesting in its own realm, but it's not necessarily meaningful. And so the Instagram thing is a perfect example of that. It was just reactions.

And I was talking with Kristy Tillman on Twitter, who is a wonderful human. Everyone listening should go follow her. And we were talking about this thing where people were just trying so hard to be clever in their tweets about this Instagram logo, and people are more concerned with being clever than really wanting to see if something can be better. And it's this funny thing that happens on Twitter where people just say like, "Oh, I'm so glad they spent so much time on this," really sarcastically. And it's this idea that if a new design looks as if... It is too simple, so therefore not much time was spent on it, it's this idea that that means it must be bad.

I love how that won't die, that fallacy. [laughter]

It's very odd, and I'm just like, "How do I design something to make it look like I spent years on it?"

Also, when was that ever true? It's not like in the beginning of design it was like everything took forever. You could draw the Nike swoosh or the whatever logo from the mid-century in 30 seconds in Illustrator today, and I don't see people levying those criticisms against those things. It's weird people keep doing that.

Well, it's...

I do think it has its... It has its origins in fine art where it's like, "Well, I want to see a photorealistic rendering of a thing that proves that I can't do it and only a person with great talent can do it." I think it comes from that. It's the same criticism you'd see of modern art, where it's like, "Oh, it resembles something I might be able to do if I remove any thought that was put into it, therefore it's bad because I could then do it." That's like the number one criticism you'd see of any modern art that is in any way abstract, right? I think it's just the same thing put on a logo.

But it's also, there's this idea too that if something looks too basic or simple that the viewer is maybe missing something, and so they get actually a bit fearful, and that's when they start throwing jabs a little bit. And it's this idea that it has to look very... So much time has gone into it. I had a design history teacher who talked about the way that the housewives used to go shop for alarm clocks in the 1950s. They would actually pick up alarm clocks and hold them, and judge them by how they weighed. So the one that felt the heaviest, that's the one they would want to buy.

That's how I still shop today.

Exactly!

I had no idea that I was so closely resembling a housewife from the 50s.

Exactly. So it's like there is this funny idea that we have in our heads about how something should look complex, or maybe beyond us, 'cause otherwise why are we in this stinkin' world? It's this very weird old school mindset, in a way.

I wanna come back to something you said earlier about how when this icon hit, everyone on Twitter was just trying to make their cleverest joke about it and attach the funniest GIF they could find to their commentary about the icon. And you're right, that's definitely what people do because that's what Twitter rewards, right? The system gives you the likes and retweets for something short and clever that makes sense now, and won't make sense in 20 minutes, because who's looking at 20-minute old tweets? Nothing but losers, right? So that to me is a perfect mirror of the garbage fire media landscape, right? The having to get a certain number of articles out, and having so many web publications measuring success in terms of views as opposed to some other editorial metric.

It's the same thing, right? An article that gets a bunch of views or a bunch of retweets is the exact... Is the equivalent of that clever tweet that's just reactionary and not at all critical. So my question is, at what point does people just being human and reacting to an icon because they're doing their human thing and trying to get the internet points... When does that become the DNA of a community, right? When you have all of the graphic designers on Twitter, and they're all doing that, at what point does that stop just being a cute thing that just happens and start being a lack of a critical conversation in the community, because everyone's willing to respond and react, but nobody's willing to actually think about it?

I don't know, when was Designer News started?

I gotta write that on my list of things to talk about.

No, it's a thing right? Designer News and Dribbble to me are like the formal codification of this behavior. Right so, here is your reactionary tweet, let's instead take that reactionary tweet and let's put it in a imaginary unsolicited redesign on Dribbble, or let's go to Designer News and read all of the comments on all of the posts, which are basically everyone's tweets all in one place, so you don't have to bother searching for them. You can just hit over and over again with stupid thought after stupid thought that people think are cute. Both of these places... I wrote a little blog post a while ago about how Dribbble is designed as a media outlet, it's designed as a place that values those internet points over any kind of depth of explanation behind the design and how no part of that system actually encourages criticism at all, really.

Just having a comment thread doesn't mean you're encouraging critical discourse, and I think the same is true of Designer News; the system is designed like a Reddit style. Upvote things so stuff is on the front page for a short period of time and then it falls away. It's very kind of fickle with whatever happens to be trending at the moment and, yeah, everyone's trying to get their points and make their little clever comments so they can be part of this moment in the spotlight. How much of it is just these systems that are just not served by... Am I being too ambitious with my goals for [chuckle] what I want the design community to be? Is this just humans and this is just what happens in every industry when you get deep enough?

Well, I do think part of the whole life cycle of criticism... You have to do your part too, you have to do the work. And part of the work you have to do is to determine what criticism is meaningful, and what criticism is meaningless, and also stupid. So again, the Internet today is, it's a fire hose. It's a fire hose of information and it's very difficult to try to avoid some of that fire hose when you know it's terrible, but I don't even consider Designer News; it's not even on my radar and design criticism is my thing, and that's just because you take one look at it and you're like, "Oh I get it. This is not meaningful." It might be fun to blow off some steam but it's a different kind of thing. It's not design criticism; it's just kind of people talking on a subject and it's part of... Honestly, it's a symptom of a larger thing for me which is that I honestly don't know if the Internet is a good place for criticism. Because to me, criticism is... It's a bit of a social contract, and so it takes two people and both people have to feel equally empowered, and on the Internet people most often do not feel equally empowered.

And that's a perceived struggle 'cause if someone tells me my work sucks I'm gonna automatically assume that their mother's stupid, that they're... You know, it's kind of a... It's a bigger life cycle issue to me. And there's nothing wrong with Designer News if you just want to go be pithy. It's the same thing, I love jokes, you guys see my Twitter feed. I'm all about it, but I'm not gonna kid myself into believing that that's all meaningful stuff and that it's actually good for me. It's basically like going to the cabinet, opening it, and pulling out Cheetos.

Yeah.

Actually, well one thing Andy, when you started this episode you kind of said... I mean, you kinda made the assumption that the Internet should have a place for criticism and you followed up by saying, "I have great conversations about design criticism all the time with my friends." Why should it be on the Internet and not just amongst you and your friends?

Well, there's a couple of things I'm interested in here and one of them is criticism, and to me, yeah, I definitely agree Designer News is not a place for critical discourse nor is Dribbble. I don't think either of them ever were. I think there are places for community though. I do see them as, if you are a graphic designer and you're really interested in getting involved in the community here's a place you can go for it. And that's why, Matt, I really feel like there should be a place on the Internet for the kinds of conversations that I think we should be having, because some people don't get the opportunity to go to a fancy art school where they get to have these conversations or work for a company where they're surrounded by people that are interested in the same things and willing to discuss something in depth. Or they just don't live in a place where they can go to some Tweet-Up and meet a bunch of people that have the same kind of thoughts and feelings as them. And I feel like if that's not what the Internet can do for us then that's what the Internet should be, right? It should be this way that worlds that are otherwise sectioned off and keeping people out are now opened up to people that otherwise didn't have access to them. I've learned a lot from the Internet.

To clarify, I agree with it, I also want that thing to exist. It's just that was kind of an assumption you made that definitely the Internet should be for this. Right? And that's my dream of it too, but you just imagine it could be that but then you see the result of everything and it's just the opposite of what you want. But I think it's more that we make systems that reward this kind of behavior. Making a Twitter, making a Dribbble, making a thing that rewards a short bit of information in a fast period of time and a like button is the end result. That's always gonna end that way so it's just about creating a different system. I don't know how you make that system popular though.

Well, it's funny 'cause until Chappell mentioned it I hadn't considered that the problem was really just media and not graphic designers. I tend to think the problem is just shallow, egotistical graphic designers that don't want or care about anything deeper, at least on the surface. But I think you have a good point, Chappell, that maybe it's just: This is what media is right now, and nobody in any other industry is finding any deep, critical, interesting conversation about something, which I am tempted to believe. But then I've also... There are things I have learned. I've learned tons about other things from the Internet. I've found these communities in other places that are not graphic design when I've been trying to learn about something or insert myself into some kind of world. And so I feel like it's not impossible, but I'm getting more skeptical. [chuckle] I don't know. So how about this; Maurice, I wanna start with you. What are the things that you, in your 20 hour day, when you're only sleeping 20 minutes a day every four hours. What are the things that you will actually spend time to read or listen to or participate in? What are the design related things that you will seek out online?

Ooh, the design related things, that's a good question.

I'm putting you on the spot a little bit. I didn't tell you I was going to ask this question 'cause I didn't think about it. But I had a phase in my life where I was really deep in the graphic design Internet, like hundreds of new items on Google Reader every morning, following all the blogs that you're supposed to follow, and following all the famous graphic designers on Twitter because I felt like I should be involved in that world, and I wanted exposure to it, and I was young and hungry. Now I'm jaded and old and I don't do any of those things anymore. And so I'm wondering what is your... What are the things you actually will read and seek out, or listen to, or do whatever it is related to design specifically? Do you have any off the top of your head that are like, that's the thing that I think is good and I seek it out?

Oh, wow. I mean I don't want to give a shameless plug for Revision Path 'cause I feel like...

Well, that's what I was going to say, Maurice.

Too on the nose. [chuckle] But no, when I think of other design related things, I will say that I actually do frequent Designer News on a fairly regular basis, but I'm not looking at Designer News as a source for really good design critiques or anything like that. I look at Designer News kind of as like, those tickers that run across the bottom of your screen and have a few stories, I just look to see, "Okay, what are people talking about? What's something that might be... "

Sounds like a stock ticker, and it's like Instagram is down and Uber's up, or whatever.

[chuckle] Right, I look at it as that because I think anyone that looks at the threads on there that actually have to deal with talking about other issues it can get really ugly, really fast. And so I don't look to that community for that sort of news. I look at it as just sort of a stock ticker. But other types of news, I look at Smashing Magazine. Every now and then, I look at some things that AIGA puts out. Other than that, wow, when I really think about design, well, design as we're talking about graphic design and web design, not much. I wanna say that's about it. I spend most of my time just kind of doing it and talking to people as opposed to kind of seeking out stuff online, but that's a good question.

Matt or Chappell, do you have things that are like your go-tos? I'll say for myself, I haven't read an article on any of the aforementioned design websites in forever. Sometimes, I'll get two sentences in, and I'll just... I can't, I just can't. And I close the window, and I go away, and live my life. But I don't really like... There's a lot of things in the design world that are interview based. Revision Path is a great example. There's also the Great Discontent and Debbie Millman's podcast, Design Matters. These are some of the things I would consider on the better side of the thoughtful spectrum, but they're always skewed towards the individual. Right? It's thoughtful about one particular person's perspective, but usually not a conversation with lots of people. And there's nothing in terms of community. The Twitter feed I've sculpted over the years is just people sarcastically reacting to all of the actual design news. I don't get the actual news. I get the sarcastic reactions to it [chuckle] which allows me to get there somehow. But yeah, I don't have anything I really seek out anymore just because I feel like I'm not... It's all shallow a little bit, and a little bit vapid, and I'm not getting much from it.

Yeah, I was gonna say since I'm kind of with you, Andy. Since Google Reader died, Twitter has become my version of an RSS feed, but it's usually reactions to articles, and rarely am I finding a fantastic design article. 'Cause I've also kind of narrowed the group of people I follow to maybe a 100 people that I will... I'll read probably anything. I'll start to read anything they post and see where it goes, but I never end up in one specific spot, right? Everything's a link to a Medium article. I will say the one place that I find myself on frequently, and I enjoy every time I get there is Model View Culture, which is not design specific, but they talk about design issues occasionally through a larger lens. But I don't have any... Even things I used to go to like Design Observer, I haven't gone to as frequently. And I never really wanted to go to a place like Fast Company or WIRED Design, or WIRED Design is a new one, but it's the same thing. Just not, not interesting stuff. I don't know. You know what we had... Andy, when we had the On the Grid subreddit, that was my source, just hoping other people would submit design news there.

Which happened all of 12 times.

And usually, it was pretty good. Yeah, why not. [chuckle]

So, I'm also... Where I kind of want to steer the conversation is into what conceivably this show could maybe be in this world, 'cause my interest in making this podcast is wanting to, as Chappell said, be the change you want to see in the world. So if I want more critical discourse with multiple people and different perspectives, we should try and make that thing. What are some pitfalls we could fall into that would make it bad, and what are some things that we could actually focus on to try and make this better, do we think? So I'll start off. Matt, you'd mentioned that you're really interested in following up on things years after they're released and seeing what their effectiveness is. Should we be doing an episode on like iOS 7 and flat design? Is that what you're looking for?

I mean, maybe not that specifically, but if that actually had some sort of positive or negative effect on the world I would be very interested in finding that out, 'cause wouldn't now be the time that we're gonna know? When it's actually had time to seep its way into the culture? I do think the idea that an operating system can change the entire style that people think design should look like. I think that's an interesting thing to look at, right? That's far more interesting than reacting to the fact that the operating system looks different on day one, right?

And I assume we should be avoiding this kind of reactionary just, gut response to something that happens in the world?

I'll get very bored if you make me do that.

I will toss out there that I recently finished a book with Scott Stowell, who runs Open, design studio here in New York City. And the book was an oral history style book, so basically we interviewed hundreds of people. And we would focus on one project that Open did, and we would interview the clients, everyone who was a part of it, the designers. And it was all really fun, really interesting, but by far the most interesting thing was that we interviewed just average people who were, what you would call, "end users". And that is honestly, where it got so good. And it's probably one of the hardest ways to report, and talk about design. But talking to the people whose lives are actually affected by this stuff is so good. Whether, you're a mom, or it's someone you meet on the street, that is where it gets fascinating.

And we would interview people about some signage that my friend Scott and his group created. And they would learn all this stuff that was so fascinating. This feedback of their work that's now going to inform them going forward. And then it becomes this actual, interesting conversation and designers are no longer these weird, magician people who just come in and fix things. It's more a dialogue between designers and people and just wanting to make things better. And I think that, for me personally, is what's missing in pretty much all design writing and all criticism these days, is that idea that it really is about that little connection with people at a table, working together. And we so rarely see that. It's usually just like, "Here's the logo. What do you think, America?" [chuckle]

The other side of that too, is speaking to the people that are using it, but also getting real stories for people about what the process was actually like, would be very interesting to me. Exposing design is not magic, not magic at all; not even close. Just because I hate the way that it's presented, like you just said Chappell, "And here it is, it happened. Check it out." Drives me crazy because I know no one who actually works in design experiences anything that way, that's not how they work. In my mind, it just devalues everything about the work that was done to get there. The magic is not exciting at all. Everything that led up to it is.

And also I feel like we have this problem where... I feel like every young designer that looks at older designers is like, "Wow, they really just have every single thing figured it out." But when you actually see it happen, the same frustrations exist, it's humanizing, it's nice. I like to see that. When you've been on the inside of it, you see that people have done it for years, and years and years and you think are the greatest in the whole world might experience the same problems as you. They have to get over these things as well and solve for them. And that's the skill set. It's not just presenting the final thing and saying that it's done and then shipping it out to the world.

Yeah. In the average design project, you're probably almost fired like four times. [chuckle] It's definitely like a... It's a process. And to present it as a clean finished ending is, well, it's not an interesting story. And you have things like... Do you guys remember the University of California? I think they're rebranding...

I sure do.

Oh, yeah.

That whole thing, which basically... University of California has many, many campuses; like 16 or something, spread out all over the State of California, and they did this big rebranding and used their in-house creative team and it was just kind of like, "Here it is, Internet." And people went nuts, they were angry. And it was the time where reaction became incredibly dangerous, because many people wrote letters. You had professors, saying, "I'm gonna quit", over this new logo. It went to this whole thing when... I actually interviewed the woman who ran the in-house team at the time, and once you really hear the story and really hear the thought behind it, and hear everything; it's an incredible story. It's not just about design, it's about people trying to work together to actually improve something. And that's a story literally anyone can relate to. And that's the kind of stuff you wanna read about, you don't wanna read about people being like, "It looks like a turd in a toilet."

That's something that when I realized that what really set me apart as a designer as opposed to some other person in a different career, was just that I was gonna overthink everything and then go really into detail about something, as opposed to having this magic skill of just making things look pretty, or spitting out a nice color pallet. It was just that I was the one that was gonna be like, "But hold on, what happens when X?" And everyone would go, "Oh, interesting. We hadn't thought about X." And I would go, "Yes, X. Let's think about that." [chuckle] And it's not a thing... That's not like a cool thing you can put in your portfolio. That does not make for these fun re-tweetable things. It's just that is the process, that's what ends up happening. So yeah, more of that I guess, talk about process, it sounds like it's the thing that people would probably benefit from.

Well, yeah. And you know what, also, to kind of bring some positivity to our conversation and to this to this industry. We may not see as much criticism written, but I think it's really important to remember that not... Criticism isn't just words on paper. It's also action and as a... There's this design writer, Ralph Caplan, who's incredible. Get his books, please. He wrote about the greatest design of the 1960s wasn't a typewriter or a building, it was the sit-in. And he talked about the sit-in as a form of criticism, as a way to criticize your government. And that really stuck with me as you don't just have to write and some people aren't... Don't have the gift to write and don't want to write, some people don't want to read and that's cool, you do you, but I do see today in our industry, I see a lot of criticism in action.

I can't tell you the amount of emails I get from white male friends who are giving up their spot on a 100% white male design panel, and asking me if I'd like to take their place, or if I would like to nominate another woman or person of color. And that's the kind of stuff that to me that that's actual critique of your industry. And I even view, I don't of course know how Maurice feels about it, but his show Revision Path to me, I see that as a form of criticism of an industry. And maybe, Maurice, you could talk more about if you do see Revision Path as a form of criticism.

Oh, absolutely. I see it, I think as a, I don't know... I would wanna say a passive form of criticism, because what I've certainly seen a lot of people talk about as it relates to diversity and technology, and diversity and design. You get a lot of very angry and passioned tweets and articles and things of that nature, but that anger is good to get people riled up, but then it's not really helping the underlying problem in a way, it's just getting people angrier about it, which might spur them to action, but what about the people that are already in this industry that are working and that are doing these great, wonderful things that nobody is really looking at and talking about.

So, when I interview people for Revision Path, I'm always looking at what kind of... What can they bring to the table in terms of what they do just in general, but also what kind of story are they telling about who they are and sort of what brought them into this industry. And it's interesting from all the people I've talked to and not just people here in the US, but folks in Europe, folks in Africa, what brought each of them into this industry. And it's interesting to see how similar a lot, we all are about what makes us excited about design. What makes us want to be designers, what makes us want to dedicate our working lives for this profession.

Yeah, that's that's definitely kind of what I wanted to bring up is that we are kind of committing our own acts of criticism in other ways, I think. And I feel like it's kind of... It feels like a new way of going about it. And I'm pretty excited about that so we might have some disappointing outlets so far as design criticism goes, but I think we're still doing good things.

Andy, maybe you're just... You're looking at all the wrong places. You're looking for a very specific medium and it's happening all around you. It's just content creation is easier now, you don't just have to... Writing isn't your only form of expression. Get with it, Andy.

Well, that's the thing, that's what's so great about the internet, right? It's not everyone has to be a writer, there are so many other ways to communicate and that's... There are a few people on Twitter who's tweets are actually critical. They're not reactionary it's like, "Here's a tweet that is an actual, interesting, thought out thing that is not necessarily tailor-made to get a bunch of retweets." So people are using that medium for more than just what it's designed for and the same goes with podcasts and all the other things. So yeah, that's kind of the promise of the internet and may this podcast itself be both a passive and an active form of criticism as we move forward. [chuckle] That should be our goal because I do think we can have more of it, I think we can do better.

Maybe that's your slogan. Passive and active criticism.

There we go.

It's better than what we started with. [chuckle]

Basically. Alright, so let's go to the last word. This is a chance for everybody to kind of tie up the episode, mention the last thought you might have. Matt, I'm gonna put you on the spot first. What do you want to say to close this conversation?

I'm gonna say I feel more encouraged than when we started. I thought we were going to end with like, "Yeah, I guess the internet is just a garbage place and we can't have anything nice." But now I'm feeling pretty good about it. We're making our own criticism, everybody here is doing it, maybe we can make this someplace where at least a tiny good thing happens? I hope. And maybe we're just not looking in the right places for design criticism.

Maurice, final word.

Oh, final word, well, I think that design journalism certainly kind of suffers from, at least what we see right now, a bit of hero worship. What can end up happening is that you end up seeing the same six or seven dozen companies or people kind of regurgitated back into sort of the new cycle. And so I think part of what you're saying about how you feel that it's a little shallow, it's because you're kind of hearing the same things and the same people over and over and over again. And it's not really... You're not really hearing about fresh new ideas or fresh new things that are happening, but certainly I think that this show can be a breeding ground for some really deep critical thought about a number of different topics as it relates to design. One thing in particular I would love to see, and this is, I guess, kind of a future episode thing, is kind of the intersection of design with civic good.

There are people that I've interviewed for the show, Dori Tunstall for example... Dr. Dori Tunstall who was part of the US National Design Policy Initiative which, I'm not even sure if that's something most designers even know that the country has a Design Policy Initiative, how can they contribute to it and sort of what does that mean in terms of being able to take the skills that you have as a designer and use it towards civic good, like maybe it's redesigning ballots, maybe it's highway signs, maybe it's something even bigger than that. But it's using your skills and talents to kind of I guess advance the greater good.

Chappell, bring us home.

I think that we're really lucky, because we have this industry that actually exists inside of every other industry. In medicine, there are medical designers. Every industry has designers, and so that means that every industry also has design stories. We can find that stuff everywhere even if we don't have the one watering hole where we all go to talk about design, it's gonna be okay. And also the fact that it's, again, a super young industry. It's still like baby tots. It's barely walking. So I have hopes for it and it's because we're living through the Internet with writing and criticism right now, we always have to remember that the Internet is super transient. It's like we're nomads. We were all kicked out of Google Reader, we move on. We were all kicked out of Design Observer. Everything moves and changes and shifts and that's kind of nature. So, I believe that the next watering hole will pop up and maybe right now, it's Twitter but maybe tomorrow it's something else that's a little bit more substantial. But yeah, I feel pretty good, I hope you guys feel a little bit better.

I feel good. This was very optimistic. Did not go as dark as I thought it was gonna go. And Maurice and Chappell, thank you both for being here. It was truly a joy to have you on the first episode. It was a brave move to hop on for the first episode of something that has not prior existed that you didn't know what you were in for. Thank you both. Everybody, you can find both Maurice and Chappell on Twitter. You should follow both of them. Anything else you two wanna plug? Chappell, your book perhaps? Maurice, your podcast?

Well, yeah of course. Revision Path is at revisionpath.com. New episodes every Monday, 10:00 AM Eastern and depending on when this show is going to air, I'll also be speaking at How Design Live on May 20th, giving a presentation called "Where Are the Black Designers?" Hopefully I'll be giving that at a few other conferences this year, fingers crossed, but yeah, that's pretty much it right now.

Anything else Chappell?

My Twitter handle's @ChappellTracker, and I think you'll know what I'm up to if you go there.

There we go. Working File, active and passive criticism.

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