Shows That Could Have Been

You are listening to Working File, a podcast about design practice and its relationship with the world. My name is Andy Mangold.

And I'm Matt McInerney.

This is our final episode, at least for a little while, and we're joined by Linda and Maurice to run down all the topics we didn't get to.

It's a lightning round.

Pew-pew-pew-pew.

And you guys can hear me, right?

We can hear you. You're here, Linda.

Okay. Alright, good. I'm just so nervous now.

Why are you nervous?

Because I have had so many technical difficulties, but I think we're...

Are you having problems with the robots in your life?

Yeah. They're bad.

What are they up to?

The robots in my life, I just got a new Apple watch.

Ooh, wrist robot.

This is my first wrist robot, and I just had a friend give me a really hard time and call... Like, "Oh, yeah. You're an astronaut." Really?

I also make fun of anyone I know that has an Apple watch. I think you should make fun of people with Apple watches, right?

But this is my first one. I feel like I waited the proper amount of time to blindly follow, and so far it's added value. It's added value to my life.

What do you do with it?

I'm not super into notifications, so I don't do that, but I've been training for a half marathon and have found that everything else that I've used to track my progress and control my music, and it's just like... It was too many things, I had two or three different things to deal with. And so now I just have the one and it's actually kinda nice.

I don't think anyone should make fun of you or anybody else. I think you're being a jerk, Matt.

Ooh.

I'm still gonna make fun of you if you get an Apple watch, Andy.

That's not really my style, it won't happen to me. But why would you make fun of people? They're just out there doing their own thing, they want a little wrist robot to tell 'em what their heartbeat is, tell 'em to stand up every once in a while. Just a little wrist-borne trainer.

I do hate the "stand up" thing. It's so funny, it comes at the worst times. Yesterday I was just talking about how... I was having a really deep conversation with somebody and talking about how emotional I've been lately, [chuckle] and then my watch is like, "Hey, stand up." [chuckle] "You're really... "

"Move your body around."

Yeah, "You're really close."

"You're talking too much about feelings. Stop it."

Yeah.

Just move.

The thing is the robots don't understand feeling, so they wouldn't get that.

I know, and in that moment I actually said, "This is a great... This is a great machine learning exercise." In the future that would not happen, the iPhone would hear me say all these really sad things and it would be like, "Now is not the time."

I like the idea of machine learning is your watch tells you to stand up and you just go, "Machine, learn that I don't wanna stand up right now. Stop it."

Yeah.

Oh, Linda, thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. On relatively short notice, we put out the call for anybody that wanted to join the last episode, at least last episode for now, and here you are. So thank you.

Yeah, no problem. I'm really happy to be here.

And Maurice, this is basically your podcast in a lot of ways. I'm really glad you could make this last recording...

Because of how much you kinda participated in the production of the show. This is I think your sixth or seventh episode you've been on, so it wouldn't be the last show for now if not for you being here. So thank you, Maurice.

Well, thank you for having me.

I also realize I said that wrong. [chuckle] What I should say is it wouldn't be the last show without you, not it wouldn't be the last show if not for you being here. That implies that you being here is why it's the last show. Which is not the case.

It's all your fault.

How you doing down there in Georgia?

Pretty good. It's still very warm down here. We haven't really had fall just yet, it's been like in the... I don't know, upper 70's mostly, so it's still pretty warm here.

Are you all enjoying our it's dark at 5:30, lovely new world we live in post-daylight savings?

Absolutely not.

It's horrific.

I think it's...

It's a horror show. It really should be illegal.

I think it's kind of romantic. I like it.

Really? You think so? You like it?

Yeah. It's kinda nice.

Like in the way where you get really sad at 5:00, that kinda romantic?

Yeah.

Like a deep crushing depression. Is that what you mean?

Well I just like it because it's just like no matter what you do, when you leave work it's gonna be dark outside. There's no rush. It's just like, "Whatever."

You just throw in the towel. You're resigned. It's gonna be nighttime when you leave.

Yeah.

I will say I think it's nice 'cause it makes it easier to just like... In the summertime, I feel like when it gets dark that's when I'm like... I settle in for the night, "Alright, I'm just gonna be in my house now."

Yeah.

Being lazy. Now I feel like I have permission to just be lazy all the time 'cause of how horrible everything is. 'Cause we don't get any sun, and the sun is important.

Yeah.

But this is not a podcast about daylight savings or the weather, this is a podcast about design. And for this last episode, I'm not sure where this is gonna go. This could be weird. I'm open to any of the three of you taking us any direction you want, but I thought it might be interesting just to run down some of the things we had discussed either very briefly or more in-depth for possible topics for the show and just see if we have things to say about them, maybe try and get through the whole list of things we had kinda kept running, seeing as this will be the last show for a bit.

Okay.

Does that sound alright?

Yeah, that sounds great.

Yeah, sure.

Lightning round.

Oh yeah, lightning round, let's call it that. This is the Working File Lightning Round, so everybody gets to say thumbs up or thumbs down and we move on.

Andy's gonna say a topic and you just scream "yes" or "no" and move on. [chuckle]

Exactly. Alright, so one of the things we have listed here was the idea of open source design, and specifically this references Google's Material Design handbook or even something like Twitter Bootstrap. I think the sort of episode here was gonna kinda be about this idea that more and more of these kind of libraries basically for just making a site or a... Basically Google's design... Material Design style guide is more or less like a style guide you would have for a brand, but they're saying, "Make all web apps and products like this and follow these sort of standards." And I've noticed that I see a lot of people that are either... They're developers, maybe, by trade and they don't consider themselves designers, maybe it's a company that can't afford to hire a designer, but just adopt this style across the board. I didn't know if other people had similar experiences and seen lots of Google Material Design-ey things popping up or if they had seen Twitter Bootstrap all over the place and felt like it was having an effect on the design world and how we perceive product design these days. Maurice, why don't you start. Have you had any... What are your thoughts on the idea of, "Here's a free design for someone who wants to apply it to their product kind of blindly."

I generally don't have an issue with that, at least it gives some clients somewhere to start with if they just have no idea where to start, in terms of a design aesthetic. It's funny, you're talking about open source design and the first thing I thought about was WordPress because it is technically pretty open source and it's something where certainly I feel like it's influenced how websites are built. It certainly has influenced what clients expect from websites, they figure every website is a WordPress website and that it should have the same kind of functionality and all that sort of stuff. I generally don't have a problem with that. As long as it gives you, I think, a starting point, it's good. I don't know if it should be the finishing line, though.

I don't really have... I feel like I would have approached this a couple years ago as like some sort of... In some ways it must be wrong, or in some ways it should have to justify itself, but more recently I've just found it as a shortcut for people understanding things more than probably the way I might have taken it previously, which is, "This is replacing the work of designers and doing a bad job of it." Specifically in the Material Design sense, where it's like, "Oh, everyone understands what a tab bar is now, and they all know how to use it the same." And I don't just mean designers know how to use it the same, I mean users know how to use it the same. Maybe this is actually a really good thing, it can be like a jumping point for making decisions if you're not... If you're not making something wild and new and some totally new interaction, lean on something that people understand and don't be... You don't have to spend a million years trying to come up with a totally new way to do the exact same thing that everybody else is doing if you are doing what everybody else is doing.

Yeah.

Which almost everybody is in different combinations for the most part, right?

Yeah.

My experience was like sets of rules in general, or that... It's very difficult to get a non-designer, non-product-thinking person on board with the fact that, "Okay, here are your list of rules. By the way, these rules are gonna change. We're not gonna know when or why, but they will. And [chuckle] so here. Learn them very, very well and then be expected for everything to be pulled out from underneath you at any moment." I think that any design language or any brand or identity system, it needs to be this set of rules that everybody follows and everybody agrees, "Yes, this the word," until it's not anymore and until it needs to change slightly. And I think that that's one of the issues that I have with this, is that it's not the most nimble way to work, with especially such large systems 'cause if you're trying to get the whole world on board with the idea that this thing's gonna change, that's tricky.

Well, the way I see it is more... It's not that we need to get everybody on board with the rules. It's like there are probably some people who are totally happy thinking through these problems and solving them in their own way, and then there are some people who maybe just have no desire to do so or don't have time or maybe don't have... Don't see themselves as designers in a way that they can do this effectively, so there's a toolkit for them to do it as opposed to it just being a mess.

Yeah, and I'm... I do think it has made the world a prettier place and I'm grateful for it. [chuckle]

Yeah, I think in its most... The most optimistic take on it is the kind of perspective Matt is painting here, where, yes, if everybody is gonna be making groups of radio buttons and drop downs and date/time selects and tab bars, it's really nice to have some kind of centralized, and we can all generally agree like, "Yeah, this is pretty much how this should work, and there's good reasons for why they work that way." I do think there's some unintended knock-on effects, though. The best thing I can cite is that I can't tell you how many times I've had either a client or some other project we've been working on, I've seen some documentation for things and somebody has said, "Here's the color palette for our projects." And it's just they took the whole rainbow color palette from Google Design and just dropped it...

Oh, god.

Just dropped it in, like, "Here's the 48 colors we're gonna use," and it's just the full, saturated rainbow. I do feel like little things like that, I feel like the color palette of the web has taken this kind of very normie, saturated, bright and happy kind of bend since Material Design came out. I'm not sure if that's just me projecting or if there actually is some difference in the colors people are using, but little things like that, I do think... There's no reason for them to standardize colors, right? That's the kind of thing where... That's not broken. There's no meaningful purpose to have a kind of standard there the same there is for a date selector, a tab bar. [chuckle] That's just them saying like, "Hey, we picked some pretty colors for you 'cause we are gonna do your job for you." And the result is that, yeah, more people just use the bright blue and the nice green buttons, but it's interesting 'cause I feel like lots of people just don't think about the idea of the colors they use on their product being part of their identity anymore because this is just what we do now. We all have candy colors on our websites.

Yeah, you're right.

Again, in some ways... In some ways I can see that, in other ways like the... I don't know, there's the color coding to create in a more effective button, like bright red delete button or a big green save button. In some ways I can't get too mad at that 'cause you're like, "Well, I'm just trying to make it pretty easy to spot that in a sea of buttons and I don't really care what your brand colors are. That makes my life easier," is the guy trying to use it.

Sure, sure, sure.

Is that so bad?

No, no, no. That's fine. But at my... Let me look it up right now, I haven't looked at... I've never really looked at this documentation in depth, to be honest.

If only the web were just a black-and-white old-timey talkie. What if Material Design was just black and white, and if you want colors, you gotta make 'em yourself?

I try make every website black and white.

I'm always trying to make all websites black and white. Frere-Jones is the one company that let us talk 'em into doing it, and I'm very happy with that site. I think black and white is great, and you do need a third color sometimes for a little warning flash message pretty much. But yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. That's kinda my feeling about it. I agree with you, Matt, that I think maybe more like four or five years ago I would've been at least critical of this for, like you said, trying to do the job of design, but doing it badly. And now, for lack of a better word, I'm just much more practical and I understand that the people that are going to copy-and-paste the Google colors, the Google Material Design colors palette and just use that as the palette for their company and use this as the Bible for designing their product, they weren't hiring designers in the first place. They were just gonna have a really poorly designed product before because they didn't think about anything, and now at least they're gonna get some of that... Some of those easiest hurdles, they're gonna clear with a guide like this.

Yeah. It would be like getting mad at somebody for using 72-point Times New Roman. You're like, "Well, or a Sharpie. Which is it gonna be?"

Yeah. Sure. And I do think that there's something too, part of the conversation here is just about the fact that this stuff is actually open sourced. You can't steal Material Design. If you copy it, you're just doing what they intended for you to do. You're supposed to use it. And the same goes for Twitter Bootstrap. I assume the same goes for a lot of design stuff. With WordPress, I know that WordPress technology-wise is open source. I'm not sure how the themes work, depending on who made them, I'm sure it changes. But yeah, the fact that it's actually... People are distributing design as a commodity, like a literal physical commodity, is an interesting difference too that is really only possible now because of... We're starting to not only settle on a shared language in the abstract sense, where we're all working in the same space and we look at the same products and so we're starting to understand how things work and should look together.

We're also literally documenting that and making it available for free, open source to people that want it, which in the software world is always very appealing to me because it's like the formalization of your transparency and the formalization of this shared sense of where you are as a community. And we actually have it designed now too, which I think is kind of interesting. I do think the implementations of it thus far are a little bit sterile. Like, "Yeah, here's the color palette, here's the tab bar." To me, that's the most boring thing you can do, but it's a step down the right path of us actually thinking about the way we build things and make things in the world, on the web especially.

Yeah.

Communally, and trying to establish a shared language that we can actually literally share instead of just assume everyone's on the same page.

Don't worry. In five years, we'll come up with some sort of design movement that is the exact opposite 'cause we're very bored, and it'll be very hard to understand, but it'll look really cool and weird. Right Andy?

Ah, yes.

You mean it's not happening now?

"Things are all randomly rotated. Bright colors, squiggles, squiggles!"

"More squiggles."

It'll be even... It'll be like the outline, but even more so.

Alright. Anything else to say there? Does anybody have any other thoughts on that? We can keep moving down this list.

Well I was gonna say there is also the... There are starting to be open source design tools in a different sense, like if you play with Abstract at all or things like that that are actually trying to make design work, like GitHub. And use a flow that would encourage multiple contributors and versioning and sharing design.

Yeah. And...

Sharing design resources, in a way is different than just following a design guideline.

Yeah, I just worked with Abstract a little bit on a project at Us Too, and our design team ultimately just felt like it wasn't powerful enough to be where we needed it to be for our project, and then just switched back to our old way of working. But I think that there's something there. There are few people trying to solve this problem at the same time, and a lot of bigger companies even have their own internal teams building internal tools that do these things. I'm just excited to see what the next three-ish years holds. But just like with my Apple watch, I'm not gonna be the first one to jump on board. I'm gonna wait. [chuckle]

Yeah, you don't want Matt to make fun of you like he does.

Right. Exactly.

We're trying to do the same thing, so you can make fun of me, but I also... It feels like the same thing. Like, "Oh! This'll be cool soon." Maybe not yet. Maybe we're not there yet.

Yeah. I'm not a total skeptic, but I'm also not gonna put my team through the pain of adapting to this thing and... If it's not time.

Yeah.

But I am envious of all of the developers on our team that have much better tools and ways of working together. It just seems like designers are like, "Just throw a file in that folder and call it V2. No, V3. No, V4. V4-dot-my name. V4-dot-my name, the final dot."

"Email me your Photoshop file and... "

You do know you can just track your design files in Git if you want, Matt. That's totally fine.

Yeah, but it doesn't have all the same tools you would want.

It's just not visual. You just can't scrub through all your versions, but it's still tracking everything the same way. I do agree that version control in general is the technology that I feel like if we fast forward 20 years is gonna be ever present in everything. When I first learned about version control, it was like this beautiful... It was eight years ago or whatever, this sheet was lifted from my eyes and I was like, "Of course! Why would you ever just save files and lose all the old versions and every time you press command S, it's exactly equal to every other time you press command S. It just makes so much sense." So I have no doubt that there will be more robust, better version control for design files just as I think there's going to be for literally everything, because making this kind of technology intuitive and understandable to people, there's so much upside and it just makes so much sense when you're working with computers in any meaningful way. So yeah.

Then we won't have to use some sort of a dumb working file anymore.

Exactly. Aye.

Aye.

Aye. We got there.

Self-referential, aye.

What's next?

Alright. Next. Alright, so the next thing on this list that isn't totally dumb is we never have talked on the show at all about having your work stolen, copied, blatantly mimed in sort of an obvious way, and I thought it'd be interesting to have a little bit of a conversation just about... And this is actually relevant too, to what we were just talking about, this idea of open source design in a shared kind of language for how things should work.

Yeah, I designed this thing called Material Design and everyone is stealing it, bunch of jerks.

Yeah, exactly. This is something that happens to us at work somewhat regularly and it's happened to me personally a couple times where we make a site, usually it's some kind of product, and it just gets blatantly lifted. We've had apps blatantly lifted in the apps store, luckily Apple is pretty good about removing those when you point them out, but we had a site we designed and launched last year that, eight months later, some other competitor pretty much just... We went through the code and it wasn't like they just copied and pasted the style sheet. They rebuilt it themselves, but they did exactly the same thing.

Yeah.

This happens a lot, and when I was... Earlier in my career, I was kind of defensive about it, right? At the very least, you were going to get a salty email from me if I found out you stole my thing. And now these days I'm either resigned or I have just a totally different perspective on this kind of stuff in that I feel like it doesn't matter anywhere near as much as I thought it once did. Maurice, what's your experience with people stealing your work or your work being copied or... What's your relationship to this?

Well, it's funny you mention that. I actually have had one of my projects, which has been... I don't know if I want to say it's been stolen. Certainly there is a reasonable facsimile out there...

A little bit uncanny.

Yeah, and it was to the point where they not only have a very similar name, but also used the same colors, the exact same typeface, and it was pretty transparent that they were trying to do the exact same thing I was, to the point where I even mentioned it to them and they blocked me on Twitter. And this person has since been...

Not suspicious at all.

Oh, no, not at all. And this person has since been using that to further leverage their own design career, which I guess is some weird form of flattery in a way. But I just kinda, I don't even really pay it any mind because you may be able to take the concept, but the one thing that you won't be able to replicate is what I bring to the table, the unique thing that I bring to the project, my work ethic to the project, the way that I approach it. You may try to do something similar, but it's not the same kind of thing. So I just sit back and watch this person do what they do, and other people have brought it to their attention and he's done the exact same thing, blocked them on Twitter, talked about them disparagingly, etcetera. And the fact that this person has done this several times with other people moreso just shows their own immaturity, but personally I don't really think anything of it. I'm somewhat flattered by it, but not to the point where it's taking money out of my pocket so I don't really care.

Yeah.

I can't really think of a thing that I've designed recently that wouldn't either be super obvious to steal and just like kind of a joke...

Yeah, that's the ones I'm talking about. [chuckle]

Or just like, "Oh my God, they stole the idea of putting a shopping cart button on the top right and they used my icon."

Oh, it's pretty standard. Either like you're doing stuff that you consider ubiquitous, like maybe the work you did was you put these pieces together for this specific client, but each individual piece was not a brilliant, creative child of your brain that was totally unique...

Yeah, the solution makes sense together, but it'd be pretty hard to steal it as a whole. If you're gonna see it anywhere, you're gonna see individual pieces stolen and then it doesn't really translate. Or like, "Okay, what if he stole my company's website?" Well that'd be really weird and specific, and I just don't know how it would work for anybody else. You could steal the motel site right now and you'd take all of our colors and our shapes and whatever, and our people, maybe put your own people in there, but what would that do for you? Is that even gonna work? I just can't think of a situation where it's even gonna work that well for anybody.

Yeah, in general, I think if you're having... I'll say this, Maurice said he was a little bit flattered by it, I don't find it flattering at all.

I think it's just offensive, but I will say that if you're the person who's having your work stolen regularly, obviously that sucks, you should not have to deal with that, but it probably means that you're doing pretty good work and you're in a good place in your career and this person who is just jacking your work, probably not so much. And they probably don't have any good future prospects if this is how they're gonna go about producing creative things in the world. I do think that's a thing to remember in those moments when you're staring at that site that was blatantly lifted that you designed. But yeah, Linda, what's your experience with this? I'm sure you've had your work lifted before.

Yeah, I actually have had some really funny stuff happen, that's maybe not funny. But one time we found a T-shirt in a T-shirt shop that was this poster that I had made for MailChimp, but they just changed the words on it. And the artwork was just so obviously my artwork and the same colors and layout, and it was just an illustration that was just... Yeah, that was my thing, but we just...

"This is Ron, the package delivery gorilla. Everyone's favorite T-shirt mascot."

Well, it was one of those non-branded things that we did. But we just laughed about it and shared pictures of it, and then sent that clothing company a cease and desist, because they're making a profit off of our intellectual property. I think that there's... Andy, I used to be exactly like you. I used to just get so pissed, and if I saw my friends' work getting ripped off, everyone's kind of... We would be direct messaging each other about it and just really hating on this person. And then I think it was just after doing enough of that that I realized that I personally was gaining nothing from doing that other than, "Now there's a new person in the world that I hate, that I've never actually met face-to-face, and I really don't know their story either." And so yeah, as I've grown up, I've just grown out of that mindset. And I still get stuff sent to me every now and then where somebody is like, "Hey, I just thought you should know," and then they show me a picture of something that was clearly inspired by something I had made at some point, but I just let it slide. I don't know, I don't have time to think about that kind of shit. There's so much else going on in the world right now that's like... Yeah. [chuckle] And also...

Yeah.

Yeah, it...

It does put some perspective on things.

I feel like you either have to let that go or you just turn it into your super villain origin story.

I don't know if there's... I don't know if there's a middle road. You're either gonna dwell on it and die of rage or just let it go, because it's gonna keep happening over and over and over again if you wanna keep working.

Yeah. There is... So there is... I wanna mention that there is a more malicious side to this which is prevalent. I think it's less happening with designers in the sense that we're talking about, it's some people lifting websites, but specifically with illustrators and artists, I know that big clothing brands are notorious for just straight up taking people's work and then dropping it on a T-shirt and then selling it in every Anthropologie across the nation or whatever. And that, I don't wanna say we should ignore. If you're an independent artist and you're getting...

You should take legal action if that's happening to you...

Yeah. Yeah, if you're getting your stuff ripped off by a giant company who's clearly making a bunch of money off of it, I do feel like there's a difference there between that and somebody who maybe isn't in as good of a career position as you trying desperately to get somewhere by perhaps taking a little bit too much inspiration.

But some people will track down the artist who works for that company and try to throw them over the coals, and I'm just... I just feel like you shouldn't go that far as to get personally accusatory and hating other people.

Let's hold the companies responsible in capitalism because chances are it's probably not the person's fault that was forced to do 20 T-shirt designs a day or whatever their horrible situation was in order to make ends meet.

Yeah, and I also just wanna build on what Maurice was saying in that if somebody rips you off, it's okay to feel a little upset about it, but let it go because that person does not have the brain inside your head that led them to an original thought. And I've worked with a lot of freelancers at this point where you hire somebody, you give them a prompt for something that they need to work on, and it's obvious right away if they're able to produce their own original ideas. And the people who do a really great job at that and very clearly have their own voice and their own illustration style, I hire them over and over and over again. And yeah, sometimes you hire somebody and it's just... It's clear that they can't really think on their own, and those people, you're just like, "Well thanks for your time." [chuckle] So it works itself out.

Yeah, I do think... I think one of the things that led me to want to be a creative person in any sense, originally, like a "artist" and then eventually a designer, was because I just really liked making stuff. I was kind of... I had this affection and warmth for the things I had made. I was proud of them and they felt dear to me, and I think that feeling that makes you so badly want to defend yourself and be so hurt when someone blatantly steals your thing because it sullies it, it was so special, this thing you made with your own brain and hands and heart, and now it's just... Someone just copied and pasted and put it on their tote bag or whatever, and that just feels bad. I think that's where that comes from, but yeah, I think that what everyone is saying is right, that when you really think about the position that you're in, you're probably doing alright if you're having your work stolen. And it's a bummer and if it's being stolen for profit, especially by a big company or even a medium sized company, hold them accountable if you can. But when it comes to just [chuckle] other more sad and desperate attempts at stealing work, I don't have as much of a heart in me to get mad about it anymore, I just kinda feel bad a little bit.

I do wanna mention one more thing here, which I think is relevant, which is that I have a couple anecdotes in my creative life from... That point to just how difficult it really is to separate inspiration from mimicry, to know where that line is, especially early in your career. And the couple of examples that I can point to is that there is a company here in Baltimore, whose name I will not say. I'm actually not sure if they're still around, but they have been around on and off pretty much since we started Friends of the Web six years ago. They started maybe six or seven months after that and they've been around on and off. And three times now, three separate times, they have essentially, as far as I'm concerned, taken our website and made it their own website. Our actual friendsoftheweb.com, not a website we made, just our actual website, our colors, fonts, very similar graphic elements. And never copied and pasted, always different, but the influence was always so strong that every single time I had to shoot this person an email and be like, "Hey, look... "

The first time I was like, "Hey, here's the deal. We're two young companies starting in the same city. I feel like there's gonna be some confusion between our companies here because your name is similar, your website's very similar, everything about us is very similar. I think it's in our mutual best interest to find a way to deviate and make some clear separation between us." I'm fairly friendly. The second time, I was like "Hey, second time this has happened. This is... We've put out our new website, six months later you have a new website that looks pretty much the same." A little more frustrated. By the third time, I was just like, "Look, I don't know what to say anymore." And I feel like at this point I know this person, the person making the creative decisions for this company, and I know... I'm fairly confident they are not doing this either to troll us or to just be malicious.

And if I... And to put modesty aside for a second, I genuinely think that they just look at our company and it represents so much of what they want their company to be, that it's so deep-seated in their system that, "Oh yeah, these colors are cool and bright, and we like them." And oops, it happens to be exactly the same colors we were using...

Or within a few little hex codes or something, and it's just... I think it's really, really deep. And the one... The other example was even more visceral of this, is when I was a senior in school, studying graphic design, I was dating someone who was also a graphic designer and we had a mutual kind of admiration for each other's work and that was one of the things that brought us together, for lack of a better word. But there was this really interesting moment where I was gearing up for senior year, for getting my portfolio ready, apply for jobs or whatever, and I made a nice portfolio website for myself, put a lot of time into it and some personal branding. This is way back in the day when we did personal branding, and then some number of months later, she came to me and was like, "I finished designing my new website, I'm so excited about it," and just showed it to me and I was like, "This is exactly the same as my website."

What?

And it was really... That was the moment where I was really... 'Cause obviously this is a person I was dating, we were extremely close, we'd been dating for awhile. There's zero chance that she, A, intended to steal anything or, B, thought that she was being overly influenced. And it wasn't even like she was hiding it from me and then launched it and then I found it. She came to me and was like "Look how beautiful this is, I'm so excited about it." And we had to have a conversation where I was like, "Maybe not the exact same highlight color, maybe this kind of grid here," whatever the things that were very similar. But that to me, just really showed me that if you're in that space, especially if you're younger, earlier in your career, it's so, so hard sometimes to separate yourself from the work that you admire.

It so is.

And I'll throw myself under the bus too.

You're so right.

Yeah.

Yeah, I...

Let me...

Go ahead.

No, no. I'm sorry I keep blabbing on, but...

I do wanna to throw myself under the bus too, so I don't just sound like I'm talking about how great my work is and everyone is stealing it all the time. I have always really admired the work of Frank Chimero. He's an illustrator, designer. He started doing editorial illustrations, clever, colorful illustrations for various magazines, newspapers, and stuff. He's moved on to do all different kinds of design and now I think he's probably more of an author than he is a designer at this point. He's putting out design books. He's somebody I've admired for my entire career and I feel like his work became prominently visible in the public right around the time that I was looking at a lot of work and trying to find my voice, and so I've had to kinda check myself at points in my life to be like, "Am I doing this too much the Frank way, or at least attempting to do it too much the Frank way?"

And I had this one moment where we were trying to design a T-shirt for a Baltimore-based technology group, a meet-up or something, and someone asked me to design a T-shirt for it. And I designed this T-shirt which I thought was a cool, interesting illustration, and I was aware that it was somewhat similar to one of Frank's illustrations, specifically he has the illustration of a row home with somebody working in the top window and it's at night and the window's lit up and you can see this person over their desk working, and my creative take on it was that... I don't even want to say it, it's so atrocious. But the point is I did this illustration and I thought to myself, "I think this is totally fine. I'm 90% sure that this is not just totally cribbing Frank's style, but I'm going to sit on it for a couple months because I'm a little afraid that I'm doing that." And a couple months later, it was so blatantly obvious that I had just completely lifted it.

Oh.

And thank God I never put it out, I never showed it to anybody. I just... I made it and I was like, "This is great. Good job, Andy. You're a good designer."

And then I was like... This little voice in the back of my head was like, "But are you?" And then, now... Now, six years later, I can see so clearly that it was just I admire his work so much, I had so few other reference points for that kind of illustration that I liked, that it was just a blatant rip-off. That I luckily was... I actually even had the thought at the time, "Should I email Frank and ask him if this is cribbing his style?"

And I remember thinking at the time, "I bet if I was Frank, I would think this was cribbing his style." And then slowly, over time, I came to the realization it was definitely just totally stealing whatever he was doing. Anyway, all of those dumb anecdotes are to say that I think there is a difference between a big company stealing your money for work and somebody who is overly influenced or trying to save time and just cheat and cut corners where they can. And one of them is gross and should be reprimanded, and the other one is a little sad and someone still early in their career maybe trying to find their voice. I don't know. Those are my complex feelings on that subject.

Gives you some... Makes you have some sympathy for Buddies of the Internet, that's what you're saying?

Yeah. I think having sympathy for people, even when they are blatantly ripping off your designs, I think it's really important because at some point you did it too, and if you were lucky you did it in the confines of a classroom... Oh, God! I have another great example this. Oh, man.

Alright, so...

I was worried you wouldn't have enough reasons to talk, I'm excited.

Shut up, Matt. [chuckle] So this is another example, this one I actually did get... So, man, it was... This was junior year of school, I was even younger, and they were gonna do a screening of Objectified at our school. They were gonna show Gary Hustwit's new documentary about industrial design. And at the time there was that beautiful poster that Build had made that was the word "Objectified" and then below it, it was a bunch of objects are drawn in just silhouette, a bunch of just rendered objects. And I had this brilliant idea where I was gonna do my own take on that because the audience was the design students at my school. They had seen this poster, they were aware of that, it wasn't like it was going out to the larger world. But I had this design in my head that I would do my take on it and what I did was for 24 hours, I kept a notebook with me, before I had a smart phone, and I just noted down every single object that I touched all day, for the entire day. I just kept track of everything. And then I made a poster that was visually similar to that poster, but it was all the things I personally had touched labeled with their time for the day. And I thought this was an interesting take on it, and of course it's not, it's just a total rip off.

And I actually even... This was put up at MICA, which is the school I went to, in the hallways and this is also... Oh, God, this is all so embarrassing. This is also the time where everybody was signing the work they did. You would write, "Poster by so and so," on the bottom of your own poster. At the bottom, I had in small letters, "Designed by Andy Mangold," and then it was hanging up for a little while and then somebody vandalized the poster by scratching out design and writing, "Stolen," on the poster that was hanging up at school.

Oh, shit.

Which hurt, obviously, at the time. And then I even put it on my portfolio website 'cause I was proud of this poster, I thought it was nice. And once it was on my website, it made its way all the way to the creative director of Build, who sent me an email and just said, "Hey, by the way, you're kind of ripping our work off here." And I think at the time I even had the bravado to say like, "Oh, but here is my special idea. I kept track of all the things I touched myself personally and then I drew them all, and so it's they're in order by the day." And he wrote back and was like, "Yeah, if you look at the original poster, they're also things in order for the day." There's a toothbrush at the beginning, and it's not as obvious 'cause it's not as dumb and blunt as a sophomore graphic design student would make, but it's the exact same idea. So not even my unique idea was actually unique, I just didn't realize it. So we've all put our foot there. And those are my stories of me putting my foot in places where it doesn't belong. And yeah, someone just scratched out, "Designed by," and wrote, "Stolen by."

If it makes you feel better, Andy, I also designed an Objectified poster in college 'cause I was very excited about that movie, and I just did a version of that poster and I just drew all objects that I wanted to draw 'cause I thought it would be fun to draw the objects I wanted to draw.

Yeah, we all drew the silhouettes projects.

And not even really thinking that it would be ripping off. I just was excited... Yeah, I was just excited to draw the objects because I was getting good at Illustrator. That's all it was.

And to me, that's a perfect example too because I... I knew, I had seen the poster. It wasn't like I was totally in the middle of nowhere. I just thought, in my twisted brain space, that this was an appropriate parody or homage or something to it. And it just so clearly is not.

More like appropriated. [chuckle]

Yeah, more like that. Exactly. I've talked enough now. Does anybody else wanna talk more about stealing things?

Just don't.

Don't do it. Don't be like me. Do as I say, not as I do. Don't just steal the Build poster.

Yeah. But feel free to do it in your own time, to learn. Also, the Objectified poster is a Luba Lukova... Is that her name? Luca? I always forget her name, but she did some very similar stuff and then early days Herman Miller posters looked like that.

Oh, for sure.

And it's just like, "Everything is a remix, guys."

Oh.

This has been your favorite character, Punk Linda.

Punk "Everything is a Remix" Linda, yeah.

Nothing matters. [chuckle]

Alright. Let's get one more lightning round topic in, and then you, dear audience, will have to just sit and wonder what the other topics that we'll never get to might've been. One of the things on here that we never got to a full episode about, that we did touch on a couple of times in other episodes in passing, is the relationship between design and testing. We're talking about data-driven design. Nowadays we have all kinds of tools and libraries that allow us to measure how people are interacting with the things we're designing very finely and in a very detailed way. We can understand who clicked on what, how long people stay on a page, how many pages they go to before they leave, all kinds of different analytics and things about the designs we're making. And I think more and more people are starting to do robust user testing, where they're trying to decide between maybe two different versions of how a page or a view ought to look. And I'll just open it up, I've talked enough. Who wants to... Who has an opinion about the relationship between design, making a decision for yourself, and using data or analytics to influence your process?

Well, I think it's... It's a very powerful and awesome thing to do. And I've seen it. I've seen testing move numbers to make companies extra millions of dollars, so I think it's definitely something you should be doing and you shouldn't constantly be this renegade designer who's just like, "Oh, no. The users don't know what they need." I like it when people use that, that Ford quote, "If I ask people what they wanted, they would've asked for faster horses." But I don't really feel like it's like that. I think that you have to have a 50:50 approach to user testing. Sure, do that, and validate, and test and test and test, and iterate, but also get away from the user sometimes and just try to come up with your own ideas and try to have a brain inside your head. I think that if you're too results-focused, you can get a little bit stuck in your own feedback loops where you're just so focused on these little nuanced details that you're completely forgetting about the big picture. But I'd like to hear what you guys have to say about that too.

Well I think also with data-driven design, that data is often gathered from whatever the respective audience is for that design. So if it's a website for example, whatever the bounce rate is or things like that might be applicable to that particular audience, but that doesn't mean that if you try to... We were talking before about stealing design for example, you won't be able to maybe take that same type of UI pattern or what have you, and replicate it for your site and get the same results.

Right.

I think of course also looking at the data is good to know what you should do for your audience, but I don't think there's... There's certainly websites and things out there where you'll see best email templates or really good calls to action or things like that because these are things which may have worked for people through some level of trial-and-error. I don't think that the results of data-driven design should really be like a starting... Well I wouldn't even say a starting point, more like an ending point. To say, "Oh, well we looked at this and it apparently worked for these guys, so we're gonna do the same thing." And you may not get those same results. Your results may vary wildly.

It's also really tricky because you have to trust the numbers, but to a certain extent. Like say for example you did email campaigns on the month every single month, and you can test how many opens there were and how well things did and... But from then it's all somewhat speculative because it might have been that your email campaign that you did the month before, once the user opened it, it was actually horrible and they really didn't like it. And so the next month, they're just not even gonna open it, and so then when you test that one, you say, "Okay, well this was clearly just a bad email." But no, that could've actually been your best one. They just didn't get around to opening it because last month's sucked so bad. You still have to kinda go with your gut and realize that you're working with human brains, which are more complicated than that.

Very true.

Yeah, I think I'm more... I think I always feel like I'm just wary of any sort of... You know those blogs that are like, "Hey, here are some user tests that other people did, and therefore it's a rule." And you're like, "Well, no," because that's so hyper-specific. Even in your own world where you're testing just your site or your product or whatever, it's really hard to tell what the numbers even mean. If you make little tiny tweaks, you can tell what those things mean, but beyond that you're probably... You're probably discovering a lot more without information to let you know what it is. And so when you read those marketing blogs that tell you what color the button's supposed to be and where you're supposed to put it, it's so specific that it's pretty disingenuous. I just don't trust it. But there's certainly reasons to use data, obviously. It would be stupid to say otherwise. You just have to be smart about it and ask very, very, very specific questions because otherwise you're just making huge leaps and you're probably not actually learning anything.

To me, I feel like... More information to influence your decisions is always better, in my view. I don't think we're at a point in design where the average designer has too much information that parsing it becomes too time consuming such that we have to optimize that. And there are jobs where an abundance of information is genuinely a problem and you have to find some way to pair it down because you can't possibly consume all of it. I think when you're a designer making a decision about any kind of product, you should welcome more information because you're not overrun with it, even if you might feel like you are. And so for the designers that are out there using this kind of data to influence their decision-making, I think that's great, and I think that it's important to have an understanding of how statistics works in order to do that, otherwise you run the risk of doing... Using data in the way which is dangerous, which is as a means of avoiding making a decision. As a means of removing the responsibility from yourself and putting it onto some invisible third party. For example, I think a lot of times people will A/B test something just because they don't wanna decide for themselves what the thing... Which one is best for their particular problem or for their brand or for whatever it is they're laying out. In that situation, I think you really run the risk of not understanding why the thing you chose is working the way that it is.

So you can A/B test something and let's assume you have enough traffic that the A/B test is actually meaningful and the difference in the delta between the performance of the two different pages is actually meaningful. Which, frankly, I think a lot of people A/B test things when they don't have the kind of numbers where they can really determine a difference. But let's assume you do, let's assume you have a statistically relevant difference there. You want people to buy the T-shirt or whatever you want them to do, you don't really know why they're buying the T-shirt if you're just making the decision based on which of these perform better and you're not applying a bigger picture rigor to it. And some dumb examples are like you can imagine people might have bought the T-shirt because they didn't see the price and the price was too high and they didn't see it until they hit "buy" without knowing how expensive it was gonna be. Or they bought the T-shirt because it was unclear how many they were gonna get or because they felt like there was none in stock, even though there were abundance of things in stock. There's all sorts of deceptive and bad things that can happen there, and if you're not looking at the big picture, you might not know that, "Oh, with this particular page design when we sold 15% more, but we got 12% more returns." So it didn't really...

It kinda came out in the wash because people are... We don't understand behavior that cleanly. Yeah, I think in a broad view, I wish we could do more actual data-driven stuff on the projects we work on. It is a luxury because you do have to build it and you have to collect the data and you have to have a big enough audience that the data you're collecting is relevant. And short of that, I'm a big fan of qualitative testing instead of quantitative testing. Don't think about whether or not this thing performed 0.2% better over 100,000 views than this other option unless you're really at a scale where that matters, right? Like if you're working at Amazon, you're working at Google, you're working at Facebook, you have to live and die by this stuff, I have to imagine, because you don't have the option of understanding things in any other way because of the enormity of your audience. But if you're making something on a smaller scale, I really feel like there's so much more to be learned from qualitative testing, just watching somebody use the thing that you built and learning about [chuckle] what they're thinking about, what's going through their head when they're clicking through the different pages. That can be, I think, much more illuminating than looking at differences in numbers on spreadsheets.

Well, do people have final thoughts? We can end it there. Does anyone else have anything they wanna say before we close the line for the evening? Matt, let's start with you. Your last final... Your final final thoughts.

Oh, man, that's not fair. We just... I did final thoughts on three other things and now what am I suppose to say? I'll say don't steal stuff, which is super obvious. Don't get too bent out of shape if someone steals your thing unless it's a big company, then you should sue them for a million dollars or a billion dollars. Test your things if you want to, but don't make too much of it, nobody cares if your button is green or red. And thank you for listening to Working File, it's been really fun making the show with everybody.

Aw.

Oh, I like that. That's really good.

Linda, final thoughts?

That was really sweet. My final thoughts, to summarize everything, is just eyes on your own paper. It's so easy to just look at what everybody else is doing all the time and...

Just to compare, it gets really nasty, even if it's you're doing great and somebody else is stealing your work. It's not long before you're looking at somebody else and you're like, "Oh, I wonder why I'm not as good as they are." And it's just so self-destructive, and those types of thoughts and things are just pointless and meaningless, and it's not gonna help you and your work get better. So yeah, just try to manage that. And then show your work to other people, get input, like Andy almost did with Frank.

Or have so much self-doubt that you sit on it for long enough that you realize how wrong you were if you'd put it out there.

Exactly, it'll become obvious to you.

And if you are looking at someone else's paper, you might just be seeing their work and you don't realize they have this crippling self-doubt that you can't see. Maybe that will make you feel better.

Exactly. That's like one of the best things that I've learned, is just that whatever you're obsessing about and whatever you're wondering other people are thinking about and whatever... Everybody is just worried about themselves, at the end of the day. Nobody is worried about you. So... [chuckle]

It's kinda freeing when you realize that and you're walking down the street and realize you're going the wrong direction. You just turn around and start walking the other direction, 'cause no one's paying attention and you don't need to be embarrassed. It's okay.

Yeah, exactly. If you're like, "Oh, man, I could lose five pounds." Nobody cares, just you. That's it. Anyways, those are my final thoughts. Thank you.

Maurice, final, final thoughts?

Final, final thoughts. I guess to sum up what everyone else has said thus far, there's a saying that comparison is the thief to joy, meaning that if you spend so much time comparing and looking at what you have based on what someone else has, it makes it harder for you to see the beauty in the work that you might be doing. So piggy backing again off of what everyone said, take pride in the work that you're doing wherever it is that you are at this point. And it's a new year, or it's about to be a new year, set some goals for yourself, don't stress yourself out if you're not able to actually meet all of said goals, but I feel like it's always good to try to work towards something, whatever that might be, big or small. I don't know. There's a lot of topics out there. I feel like Working File, this podcast has been a great platform for people to have really good discussions around a number of different topics, but if you've been someone that has been listening from the beginning or if you've just jumped on recently, use this as a springboard to take these conversations out into the community and have them with other people. Have other conversations, different conversations than the one we're having. Keep the thread going of always being, I would say, knowledgeable and aware of your surroundings and the community that you work in and all of that good stuff.

Hey, that just reminded me...

Those are my final thoughts.

Sorry. That just reminded me of something that I heard when I rode past a man on my bicycle, and this man was just like... I had just caught him mid-conversation and he had a thick accent, I couldn't even tell where it was coming from. But he was just saying to the woman next to him, "When you fail, hold your head high, and when you succeed, hang your head low." And I feel like I have just thought about that almost every day since I heard him say it 'cause I feel like if you apply that to everything in life, including your work and including working with other people and everything, it just makes you a better team member and a better friend and a better everything. That was just an add-on to my final thought, like some sprinkles.

Well, for my final, final thought, I just really wanna take another moment to thank everybody who's contributed to this show. Linda and Maurice and everybody else who's been on past episodes. These are people who are either friends of Matt and mine, or people that maybe we vaguely knew through Twitter. In some cases people we didn't know at all, who were willing to take time out of their schedules and open up, talk about these subjects with us and with you all. And they weren't paid anything for it, they didn't get any real notoriety or acclaim for it. I really wanna thank everybody because this experiment would not have been possible without everybody's help. And yeah, I'm really grateful we got to make the show we did for as long as we did, and I'm proud of the archive that'll live online for the foreseeable future. And I will close by saying that I'm horrified to discover that if you Google, "Objectified poster," the tenth result, after the first nine results of the real Objectified poster, is my knock off Objectified poster, which is still online somewhere, not on my website. And there it is, out there in the world, confusing people and embarrassing me 'cause my name is still on it on the bottom, "Designed by Andy." Oh, no! [chuckle]

That's rough, that's so rough.

So yeah, with that, I think we'll ride into the sunset.

Thanks as always to XYZ Type for the transcript, you can find them at xyztype.com.

And you know what? Still give us a five-star review, still matters. Get on iTunes, do it.

Hey, what if we decide to come back and we wanna do more of these? We're gonna need good ratings, so people keep listening.

We have to return to our kingdom full of stars.

Not on fire.