The other day I found myself irrationally envious of someone’s job (barista).  I then found I was envious of another person’s job (window washer).  Then another (carpenter). The envy wasn’t because it was a job I’d like to one day have, but on the much crazier notion that I was envious that all of their work existed in the third dimension.  It really made me reflect on how most of what I do amounts to nothing.

Not in the sense that it’s worthless, but in the sense that much of it never exists in physical  form.  So much of design—specifically graphic design—can be created without ever occupying three-dimensional space.  Digital flyers, programs, and the most ubiquitous, websites, all exist in an entirely digital world.  Sometimes these items are transformed into a physical form (such as in the example of a flyer, it can be printed on paper), yet even so they were birthed and manipulated in the world of bits and bytes, and are at their essences, were merely the absence or presence of pixels.  This leads to the ever sad notion as to why most of the world isn’t willing to pay for design.  The worth of something intangible requires an inherent understanding of what it is—essentially an idea.  When you combine an idea with raw materials, something people can thumb through, touch, see, feel, its worth is more easily understood.  But when something you do is not, like a website, a logo, a rebranding of a slogan—when its an idea and an idea alone—people have much more trouble understanding why it’s worth what you charge.

The barista, the window washer and the carpenter all walk into a bar (I couldn’t help myself).  The barista and the carpenter can bring their goods and display them.  People can see that the barista had to buy beans, so they’re paying for the service of converting those beans into coffee, and the coffee itself.  People can see that the carpenter had to buy wood, and created that wood into a piece of furniture.  The worth of those items to some might merely be the cost of the materials, and the cost of the labour.   People might not remember that in addition to those two things, is the cost of the idea; the cost of the design time the carpenter spent, or the countless hours the barista cupped the coffee in order to understand and articulate its tasting notes.  Yet the window washer comes empty handed.  The palpable result of a good day’s work in that world is the nothing at all—the absence of filth and grime.  You might not look at a window on a skyscraper and think to yourself, “Wow, the last window washer did a really excellent job.”  However, if you’ve seen the intense climbing gear and the imperturbable nature of a window washer, you know that it’s not easy work.  So when it comes time for your skyscraper to get a bath, you pay up.

One of the most gratifying design projects I’ve done in a long time was wedding invitations for my friend.  Instead of battling with aqua-coloured guides and link updates, I tackled paper manipulation, created fluid calligraphy strokes and wielded an Exacto knife.  It forced me to have patience with the materials, and patience with myself.  By having something in your hands, in three-dimensions, you’re forced to interact with it in a way that the computer monitor prohibits.  Real things are fragile, imperfect and ephemeral.  If you cut it wrong you can’t Cmd+Z it (though I’ve embarrassingly tried).  Since I only got one go, I tended to take the extra few moments to question my decisions, something I don’t do nearly enough when I’m designing through a computer.

Clearly my design process has been affected by the fact that the computer doesn’t (with rare programming exceptions) really force me to commit to any decision at all.  If many designers are inventing in a non-physical world, what limitations are they facing?  Does design using a only computer stifle the time that innovation requires so that we can creatively problem-solve?  Are we preventing ourselves from using the full breadth of our five senses?  Yes.  Because design is mostly digitised, we’re operating in a reality of doubt and uncertainty, retracting quickly-made decisions with a keystroke.  Not only does this affect process, but it psychologically makes us (at least it does me) question nearly every design decision I make.  It also can be detrimental if the digitally-created job will ever become real—it’s easy to forget about the way pages creep when they’re bound, or how vividly something can look on screen in contrast to how dull it looks printed.  How everything is slightly more beautiful when it’s illuminated from behind.

Because I don’t think computers are going to disappear anytime soon, I can’t really take an extreme approach and say I’m going to design by hand (though I could see that being a niche success). My only fight against this is to bring things into three dimensions whenever I can.  I try to sketch logos by hand before ever opening Illustrator.  I still make dummy booklets to crawl my text away from the creep.  I practice my calligraphy, which reminds me that sometimes the hand has a better eye than optical scaling in a computer.  These are small defenses in a war on technology, but hopefully it will satiate me enough such that I don’t find myself 1,000 ft in the air with only air beneath me just to be reminded that I live in a three-dimensional world.

I’ve recently realised that any decision I’ve ever made that’s ended in success or happiness or growth has been inspired.  I was inspired to go to high school journalism camp.  I was inspired to write my parents an honest letter about my childhood.  I was inspired to live in Cairo.  I was inspired to start my company.  I was inspired to learn as many languages well as my brain can handle.  I was inspired to quit my stable job just over a month ago. Instead of allowing societal constructions, peer and parental pressure and self-expectations to dictate my every move, I allow this concept, this idea, to direct my decisions.  Living my entire life which is generally very controlled by way of something as uncontrollable as inspiration is a challenge—and maybe privileged and selfish or stupid and naïve.  So be it if that’s the case, because so far, everything I’ve done has resulted in something I want to be a part of my personal history.

It’s taken me a long time to understand inspiration, and longer yet still to define it.  Inspiration can be subtle and overt: in its quieter moments, it can be as understated as a reflection, a papercut, a disarray of clothes; in its louder moments, a cacophonous and deafening explosion, a wall to wall painting or a World War.  Inspiration looks beautiful or ugly: an elegantly-designed cord or a messy divorce.  Inspiration is both necessary and a distraction—sometimes it’s what you need to begin or end something, other times it’s just what distracts you from the relevant for the irrelevant.  Inspiration is inconsistent and a terrible timer—a wicked muse who seems to only has time for us when we have no time for her.  It is an amorphous being that can live in the chorus of a song or the air of a city, in the handle of a drawer or shadow of a hallway.  A patron of all professions—athletics, art, music, engineering, medicine, education, politics and law (and those other ones, too)—it can elicit actions, words or even feelings.  Inspiration is a million and one things—everything but one thing: permanent.

When inspiration arrives at what we perceive to be the right time, it’s amazing.  Inspired moments can easily outweigh uninspired hours (after all, time flies when you’re having fun).  Inspired work is, well, just that—inspired. You have an idea and you’re executing it in the moment when it’s freshest.  The connection feels genuine and sincere, and thus, the product of inspiration is also genuine and sincere.  Sometimes inspiration strikes at the wrong time or never at all. That’s when you stare at blinking cursors, blank paper, unpainted walls, a garden of dirt or an unplugged treadmill.  Facebook gets a few more hits. Zuckerberg’s a few million cents richer.  One of two things happens: you either quit, or you attempt to ‘inspire yourself.’  The former is easy to dismiss.  Whatever you want/need to make won’t be made.  Maybe you’ll come back to it.  Possible, but unlikely.   The latter is—by my definition of inspiration—an oxymoron. Inspiration is, by nature, organic.  To artificially recreate it inherently would prevent the very thing that makes inspiration amazing, authenticity.

So how do you live by the untamable, unsummonable inspiration? Change your expectations. You’re expecting too much of it and not enough from yourself.  It’s not here to fix all of your problems, and do your work when you’re hungover.  You have to work with not against.  To truly work by this fickle light, you have to indulge in its desires in the moment and execute to completion, as impractical and undesirable as that may be.  That’s the only way to guarantee anything, and as with any light—whether the daytime sun or a midnight firefly—the flame will eventually extinguish.  To succeed with inspiration, you must decide—quickly—what to do, and do it as it burns.  Otherwise, one day you might find yourself having passed hours, days and years in the dark justifying your time spent there with excuses from statistics, strangers and former friends, without a single ignitable inspiration to show the way out.

My history with owning one’s own business began from a young age.  I spent the majority of my diapered years at my parents’ pre-press business.  My primary colours weren’t yellow, red and blue but instead their process counterparts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.  I forwent candy beepers for the real thing.  My dad has always been entrepreneurial and my mom pragmatic.  Many hours of my childhood life were spent on SE Belmont sitting on light tables, tearing masking and lithographer’s tapes against razor blades.  Everything that my parents created was of their own accord, to their own exacting standards and of many labourious hours.  Dad is always the one with the ideas and the insanity to execute, whereas mom is the one with the figures and pragmatism to prevent the blind optimism from spiraling out of control. Eventually my schooling took priority, but the entrepreneurial spirit proved itself a difficult thing to suppress, as my parents eventually re-opened a digitised version of their once-successful business.  The second go ended less ideally than anyone ever anticipated, but I wouldn’t say it was a waste, because the second time struck something within me that is only beginning to resurface.

In 48 days, 22 hours and some odd change, I will end my stable income, health care, 50 hour work weeks, and a (relatively) normal desk job in order to pursue something that I’ve been wanting to pursue—consciously, at least—for many months now: true self-sustainability with my graphic design business.

The past few years have been spent in a way that’s Mother Approved (do I have to pay if I only used half the saying?)—I work my hours and pay my student loans.  As much as I disdain regret, I can say I most certainly don’t want to spend the next few years doing what I’ve done.  I feel as though I’ve worked hard and learned much in my time at my last job.  And it’s not that hard work in it of itself isn’t fulfilling, but working hard for a cause that isn’t your own isn’t. It’s hard to be happy being a part of a large machine you didn’t help to invent.  Passion can’t be convincingly faked, not even by the of best liars.

If I run a poll of my emotions right now, it would go something like this: 70% excited, 20% scared shitless and 10% boozeahol.  The mom in me is telling me how I shouldn’t forgo stability for a chance.  The economist (and Economist) in me says I’m putting my student loan payoff-retirement plan at risk.  But the entrepreneur in me craves the adrenaline of successful cold calls, the relief of a site built and launched, and, most superficially, the reach for the Fortune 500.  The entrepreneur and business owner in me scolds me for not trusting in the business that I’ve built for the last three years.

And it’s hard to—the responses to a 25-year-old business owner are usually, “oh, so you freelance?”  There are expectations of discounting and charging student rates.  Managing my own time presents its own challenges, and not knowing what I’ll make each month is unsettling.  Even with the anxiety and uncertainty, I know that this is what I want.  Design gets me up in the morning (even if sometimes it’s just because I hate the way my desk looked when I went to bed), and after successful days, allows me to sleep soundly.  Design challenges me to solve an endless array of problems.  Design further sweetens travel, by reminding me that everywhere—anywhere—good design can and does exist.  Designers might have constructed a small army in comparison to the world’s problems, but its army is passionate and not easily dissuaded.  Design is my cause, and I look forward to continuing to build my own machine.

As an avid reader of The Economist (maybe perpetually chasing the current issue is more accurate), I feel constantly discouraged by the statistics of unemployment.  Even the EU as a whole (see Eurostat’s extensive documentation) has struggled to maintain its relatively low unemployment percentages with the ongoing disintegration of the Euro.  Though worse for some countries (Norway and Austria) would be excellent for others (Spain and the eastern Balkan countries), this developed world sector illustrates the difficult recent times and the even more difficult times to come.  Visually we’re saturated with downsloping graphs, cartoons of giant Euro coins crushing Merkozy and photographs of the affected masses.  The media essentially dictates how we think (whether we realise or not; just ask any rhetoric major). The media rarely reports on the entrepreneurial spirit, and when it does it’s below the fold. So, we believe that the global economy is left to the hands of the the world banker, the policymaker and anyone but us.  While there is truth to what media says about multi-million dollar labour cuts, and the actions of those heavy hitters do affect us masses, there is a much larger force that can reinvigorate the economy before they’ll convince Angela Merkel to use Eurobonds—the creative market.  Artists (herein used as all-encompassing term for all creatives for simplicity of argument) can be the answer to tough times because of their resilience, ingenuity and sense of community.

When many people think of artisanal goods, they think of trinkets and tchotchkes sold at the weekend fair—hardly an economic competitor that can save the world of its debt, largely caused by war.  But this notion of art as excess is an antiquated falsehood that perpetuates misconceptions about how much art can fiscally contribute; at one time art was only for those rich enough to eat and bathe once a month.  Then art became for the dirty, drunk and poor.  Now, art is still one or both of those things, but art is more importantly, a commodity worth just as much as shale gas, corn and even oil.  Just look at the contemporary art market (see The Economist‘s “Bubbly Basel” article), which doesn’t just survive in Europe but expands despite the failing Euro.

Artists are able to work in difficult economic times first because they can work without currency.  Bartering agreements of work for work supersede the need to reconcile dollars versus pesos versus krona.  Messy calculations aside, this lack of currency allows both parties to value their commodity against something other than the intangible federal reserve note—valuation of art as ideas, materials and labour.  Creativity not only makes for good art, but it also makes for clever problem solvers.  The upward-hill battle to find inspiration and afford expensive tools (paint or Photoshop) builds someone who doesn’t give up in the face of financial adversity.  You can’t be a successful artist with out a sense of entrepreneurship.  In fact, most artists are self-employed, which means short of a Jekyll/Hyde crisis or drinking themselves into a stupor, there aren’t any labour cuts here.  In short, everyday is an artist’s recession; they’ll still be here whether the stock market is or not.

Lastly, because all artists are starving over-sexed commune residents, they share a great sense of community.  Before strangers buy, friends, family and colleagues are the first to shell out cash (or in the bartering case, business cards or a bed).  Community buying allows for money to stay in the family (one can extrapolate this as a microcosm to the way many unstable or newly-stable countries like to produce and keep their own goods in-house), certainly, but also is the vehicle on which to spread a name by word of mouth.  Members of a community talk about what they do and what they have.  Beyond support, creative communities can combine talents to create full-fledged services; microbusinesses like such create a more stable workflow for involved parties (and if one person’s sick, the whole operation isn’t placed on hold).  Communities of artists also pool together to create fairs, many of which become significant contributors to their neighbourhoods (think Argentine ferias).

So is it up to artists to save us from economic collapse?  Well no, because the math would be all wrong.  But more importantly, artists produce art.  Artists’ friends can only buy so much of that art (they are, after all, really poor).  So non-creatives need to help support artists—whenever possible.  Get a friend earrings from a street fair instead of some Made in Chinas from Target.  Have a designer make your business cards instead of ordering 5,000 crappy ones off of Vistaprint.  Find a reupholstered vintage couch instead of an impossible-to-assemble one from IKEA.  Buy flowers from your local flowershop instead of biologically creepy ones off FTD.  And artists—you need to remember to be a smart business person.  Know your audience, your market, your competition, and most importantly, the value of your art. Then don’t be afraid to sell it for what it’s really worth, whether that’s 5,000 krona, a custom-made bed or political cause.  Together, artist and consumer may not be the entire solution to the economic problems we face, but they sure can be a significant part.

As an individual, it’s always been hard for me to accept being called ‘well-rounded’ as a compliment.  Besides just its potential innuendo of rotund or portly, it can also mean that an individual lacks focus, or is unable to engage a topic past superficial strata.   In a family that valued specialisation (and professions that required it), it was hard for me to find my niche in any one corner.

Throughout college, this meant that my academic interests fluttered from building to building, never finding rest in any department.  My environmental studies professors found me too hard and logical; relying on definitions, proofs and formulas to prove ethical dilemmas.  My math professors found me too soft and indecisive, seeing multifarious routes when one would suffice. And of course, nothing angered them more than ethical arguments that began “but this way would also…”  (an aside: My random-interest professors—art, languages, economics—found me flat out bizarre for loving both the indecisiveness in environmental studies and concreteness of math.  Then again, they never rejected my “no, you can’t recycle that” and/or computational help on syllabus grade breakdowns that didn’t quite add to 100%.)

In a business, being ‘well-rounded’ carries similar connotations.  Consumers demand, in most vocations, that businesses can complete one simple task—plumbers damn well know how to plumb, and gardeners ought to know how to wield a spade.  Yet no one asks a plumber to nanny.  And certainly, no one would ask Fran Drescher to plumb.   The exception to this rule of course is in the world of design.

To call oneself a ‘designer’ leaves much to be explained—fashion, graphic, web, interactive, textile, industrial, interior, exterior, landscaping, zen and Buddhist garden, flower float, colour, cake, visual display, packaging, jewellery… you get the point.  Each job presents its own clogs and requires its snaky tools, but yet somehow to those living outside of the design world, they’re all a bit interchangeable.  You might ask your interior designer friend to fix your wedding dress because he/she is handy with a sewing machine.  Your artist friend owns Adobe Creative Suite, so maybe he/she can throw a website together for your neighbour who owns a food cart.

And since this happens more than not, the creative world becomes saturated with interior-exterior-designers SLASH photographers, graphic designer SLASH filmmakers, jewellery artists SLASH muralists SLASH graphic designers.  We’re all double- and triple-dipping our hands in each other’s jars, eager to help the left-brained half of the world add a bit of colour to their otherwise monochromatic, fluorescently-lit existences.

All of these individuals become diluted versions of one another; trying hard to identify themselves amongst a sea of well-rounded buoys. Some certainly much more talented than others; those less talented hoping that the ambiguity of it all will mask their ambivalence.  Struggling to float, these individuals form collectives (professionally known as “design studios” ) which are equally, if not more vague than the employees who comprise it.  Design studios that create websites, clothing, installations, cakes.  Anything peripheral becomes territorial with the simple question of, “hey, do you know how to…” quantified by a “because I need a…”  Uncertainty like this muddles the market, and confuses the general public on how (and why) to quantify design both monetarily and emotionally.

In this, we lose the dedicated few brave enough (myself not included) to define themselves by one term alone—furniture designers, graphic designers and all of those terms that make the obsolete phone book useful.  Individuals with enough wherewithall and restraint to pick and refine. I commend the individuals strong enough to sacrifice throwaway hobbies for their isolated passion.  Please continue to build your individual talents; one day I’m going to recruit you to make the fattest—I mean, most well-rounded—design group out there.  No cakes, though.  I’ll leave that to Duff, Geoff and crew.

If you’re anything like me, (it’s okay if you don’t want to admit it) you’ve found yourself up at 3:30 am watching infomercials.  Insomnia always makes you hit a point where you think that you really do need the Magic Bullet, and good Lord, how have you been going so long without liquefying all of your meals?  You’re ready to charge your low-limit credit card when you realise that your phone is at the other end of your studio apartment.  You have exactly 30 seconds to get three Bullets for the price of one, when you trip over your Snuggie in a panic and die.  You would have avoided this macabre situation had you simply had this brilliant notepad.  Reusing your coworkers useless printed-out e-mails (does anyone read their printed out e-mails?) and failed term papers, you too can make this kind-of-ugly but totally-useful-for-jotting-down-1800-numbers notepad.

You will need:

• Stack of one-sided use paper (found in most office paper bins)
  
• pH neutral PVA [professional quality adhesive (found at specialty paper stores and creepy scrapbooking boutiques)]
• 2+ large binder clips
  
• scissors, paper guillotine OR rotary paper cutter
• old cereal box

Time: 10 minutes

While mostly a mindless dramaction and poor commentary on the Patriot Act, Steven Spielberg’s Eagle Eye did get me thinking. This very fact pissed me off because the last thing I expect to do during a Spielberg movie is think. But, nonetheless, it got me thinking about what identity means in the 21st century, and how much of who we are is what we unintentionally and intentionally share on the Internet.

Back in the day, let’s say Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a russki‘s identity was dictated by the company russki kept, what sort of vodka russki drank, whether  russki was a farmer like Levin or an aristocrat like Karenin.  Sure, gossip trotted as fast as the mail horse, but identities were relatively safe within the gates of  royal estate.  Fast forward to today, let’s say Josh Schwartz’s Gossip Girl, where identity is partially determined by parallels to Tolstoy’s world—dress labels, artisan cocktails and how high you live in the UES.  The rest of these broken teenagers’ identities are dictated by the eponymous Gossip Girl.  Serena “the impulsive blonde bombshell with an Oedipus complex” VanDerWoodsen.  Chuck “bad boy with trust issues more complex than the Brooks Brothers bowtie pattern” Bass.  Bits and pieces of these farcical characters’ actions are delivered via 3G as fast as the male whores can text it, and instantaneously, who they are is published even before they can figure it out for themselves.

Who we are is not as limited to what we write on our Facebook profiles.  No, it’s an amalgamation of all of the platforms on which we can share our thoughts, actions and tastes.  You would know that I love Flanders reds and am lactose intolerant from Yelp.  You would know that I lived in Cairo from my Flickr photos.  You would know that I own a design studio from LinkedIn profile. You would know that I love short stories from GoodReads.  These are all things that anyone—Ashton Kutcher, Rob Blagojevich or “Eagle Eye”—could find out just by searching my name.  This is the digital equivalent of flashing strangers on the street out your window, then blasting (magazine flyer style)  millions of photo copies of your social security card with a chronological list your exes printed on the back.

But besides perhaps not understanding the full breadth of our ASCII actions, why do we volunteer so much of ‘who we are’—our identities—to anonymouses worldwide?  I’d guess that because who we share is not an accurate, or at least not complete, version of our best selves.  We share relatively superficial (albeit useful for an avid stalker) information on a colossal scale.  If we represent ourselves by the pieces of our likes/dislikes, memories through photos and tweets and our communities by our social webs, we avoid the substance that connects the irrelevant dots—our ethics, beliefs and convictions. We are so quick to shed the outermost layer for the virtual vultures in order to protect the innermost layer from ourselves.  The less we are to access this substance, the more who we are is defined by our internet pseudonyms.  The more our tastes become aggregated suggestions from big brother Google searches, music genius Pandora,  and Amazon ‘thought you might likes,’ the further we run from individualism toward assimilation.  As politics are dictated by the media, not vice versa, we become the very Internet effigies that we fabricate.