Design Thinking (Some Rules for the Road)

4 Career Lessons From A Former Design Intern

AMATEURS AND ESTABLISHED PROFESSIONALS ALIKE CAN BENEFIT FROM THE PEARLS OF WISDOM GEOFF LEDFORD LEARNED THE HARD WAY.

The U.S. armed forces have a practice of formally recording the stuff they’ve learned in the course of any conflict. In military parlance, it’s called making an “after-actions” or “lessons learned” report. When you consider that much of the armed forces’ time is spent dealing with people who want to kill them, passing experience on to the next group of men and women coming in seems like a pretty good idea.

In September 2012, I began a deployment of sorts. But instead of going to Iraq or Afghanistan, I headed for an internship at Soulcake Creative, a boutique design consultancy in San Clemente, California, to test my hard-earned Art Center College of Design stripes. What follows is my own “lessons learned report” from the experience. Hopefully, my takeaways can help other young designers minimize bloodshed as they transition into new posts.

THE CONVERSATION SCREECHED TO A HALT. MY BOSS HAD STRONG WORDS FOR ME.

1. KILL YOUR EGO

One afternoon my boss and I were working on a big presentation for one of Soulcake’s larger clients. Somewhere in our discussion, I said something about how badly our client was missing the mark in one particular area of the company’s brand. The conversation screeched to a halt. My boss, a former Microsoft design manager, had a few strong words for me. Over the course of his career, he had worked with almost every major studio I could imagine. And in his experience, nothing turned him off to a studio quite like having a designer talk down to him--as if the designer was going to teach him something about his own business.

A tinge of hubris can quickly contaminate an otherwise good relationship. And with so many capable design consultancies all ready to do the same job, it’s important to stay humble.

“Don’t ever say anything that suggests that you understand their business better than them; you don’t,” my boss chided me. ‘It’s their skin in the game, not yours.”

2. BRING SOME PASSION INTO THE PRESENTATION

After my first presentation of work at Soulcake, one of the partners pulled me aside to discuss how it went. While he credited me for hitting the nail on the head with the information I presented, he dinged me for ignoring the tone and feeling of my subject matter.

“A good presentation shouldn’t just give me information--it should evoke emotion.”

My design training has made me intensely analytical about my work--thanks to value propositions, visual brand languages, and defending my work to teachers who are pushing me to be better. And none of those tools or ways of thinking about design is bad. But unless you’re presenting exclusively to a group of hardcore geeks, purely analytical justification for a design probably won’t resonate with a real person. Analytical justification for a design works best when it’s combined with a story or metaphor that hits an emotional chord.

3. FIND YOUR OWN VOICE

I’m a trumpet player (so forgive me if this is self-indulgent), but my next point will be made by way of analogy:

Through the 1960s and ’70s, Freddie Hubbard was one of the hottest jazz musicians in the world. His trumpet playing possessed a kind of bravado and ferocity that few have ever been able to duplicate. But that didn’t stop the great Miles Davis for calling Hubbard for his lack of originality one night at Birdland, theseminal New York jazz club.. “Miles Davis was already a legend, so I used to try to play like him,” remembered Hubbard in an interview. One night in the middle of a set, Hubbard looked down to find Davis sitting in the front of the stage. Afterward, Davis told Hubbard in no uncertain terms to “play his own stuff.” (I imagine the advice likely a bit more colorful, but no matter. ) In the years that followed, Hubbard found his own voice, a brazen style that I can only describe as wonderfully cocky. Today, both Davis and Hubbard, each with his own distinct style, are unarguably legends.

I THOUGHT I’D HAD SOME ROUGH CRITS, BUT THIS MADE THEM SEEM LIKE A PILLOW FIGHT.

Fast-forward several years. When I arrived at Soulcake, one of my first presentations was an absolute disaster. I thought I’d had some rough crits during my time at Art Center, but this made them seem like a pillow fight by comparison. Halfway through my presentation, I distinctly remember wanting to hide under a desk. As it worked out, the disaster happened on a Friday afternoon. After an agonizing weekend of reflection, I came to an inescapable conclusion: I’d been trying to design what I thought my boss would want to see using techniques that I’d seen the other designers using, instead of just being myself. The result was a bunch of concepts that lacked my voice and, consequently, weren’t authentic. I’d been trying to play like Miles instead of just infusing my work with myself.

4. WORK WILL ALWAYS BE THERE

One of SoulCake’s owners also happens to be a surfer. He surfs nearly every morning before work, most of the time walking into the office with sand on his flip-flops. One night during a particularly busy week at the studio, I got a text from him asking me if I was going to surf in the morning.

With lots of work on my plate and wanting to make a good impression, I texted back that I was going to pass. I wanted to get to the office early so I could finish the concepts I was working on and proceed to the next phase of the project.

His reply: “I think you should surf. There is always work and the waves aren’t always this good.”

After three grueling years at school (where little matters beyond the next crit and the quality of your work), his response was an absolute revelation to me. Contrary to what many designerds (not a typo) constantly profess, life outside of design should exist. Design schools love to talk about how “design is something that should encompass every part of your life” and how “design is a calling to something greater.” I’ve even seen a bumper sticker in the parking lot at Art Center that proclaims “Design can save the world.” It’s almost like design has become a god thing that we must serve with the entirety of our lives, like bowing down to a ziggurat or something.

AT THE END OF THE DAY, DESIGNERS ARE SIMPLY PROBLEM SOLVERS.

I come from a place where one or two all-nighters a week isn’t extraordinary. Art Center trains you to work your fingers to the bone--and then wear out the bone too. And for good reason: There are times in any design project when you’re required to bear down, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and put the pedal to the metal into the wee hours of the morning. When these situations arose, I thanked my lucky stars for everything that Art Center did to prepare me.

But my internship gave me another point of view. At the end of the day, designers are simply problem solvers. And there are always going to be problems to solve. There’s no reason to forfeit your entire life by working to death, be it massaging a character line to perfection or slogging around in the Silicon Valley soup en route to the next iWhatever launch. There are times to work hard, but there are also times to play, and relax, and refill your creative gas tank.
You can resume those army-like design drills in tomorrow.

[Illustration: Web Icons via Shutterstock]

GEOFF LEDFORD

Geoff Ledford is an industrial designer, writer, and surfer from Southern California. His design work has appeared in Innovation Magazine, Creative ... CONTINUED