Entrepreneurship Lecture : Joseph Carter Brown
The story of how Joseph Brown landed his first job, sets the tone for his life as a persistent designer. During his teen years he understood the importance in keeping up with the changing technologies, but always discovered ways to improve current products. As a fan of Apple products he would write to the company and offer his own advise in how to improve their own products. After a year of constantly sending emails, he finally recieved an email back, which was a job offer to open a new flagship Apple store nearby. At the age of eighteen he learned the importance of persistency, which encouraged him even more to integrate the tools of technology into his professional life
Joseph Brown understands the importance of adapting ever evolving tools that are used throughout the design process. He said during the lecture that some people he met along the way inhis career were adamant about keeping firm to their own design habits. He addresses this contrasting view on the role of technology by saying that the artist is the creative force, the evolving technology is the tools that help the artist, by not keeping up with the tools of the trade the artist limits themselves to only what they’re comfortable with. Joseph brown is an entrepreneur because he understands how the advances in technology help to shift a trend. A lesson he learned first hand when he helped to start up a paper publication that centered around the hiphop art movement. During the recession in the early 2000’s he began to focused more on web design, which he still is involved with today.
One of the interesting things I learned during the talk, was how the perception of many in the industry to what a designer was. Joseph said earlier in his career he would grow tiresome of someone giving him a set of parameters and told him to make the website “pretty”. He goes on to say it frustrated him that his clients saw his job as a the creator of the outer package of a product, and not the functionality of the end product. I was under the assumption that the designer was always the face of the final products functionality. His argument was that the perception of the designer as merely the aesthetics of a product, doesn’t reflect how the technology has driven the designer to take on more roles in the digital medium of the web.
Joseph says if he were only focus on the aesthetics of a product, the website wouldn’t get much traffic because it wouldn’t be functional. I find it interesting because I had always assumed the back end and the front end web designers worked in tangent with clients in order to create a website. Although Joseph describes himself as a “jack of all trades”, maybe he just doesn’t want to be locked down into a single aspect of each of his projects. I’ve always been up to speed on technology innovations, and I would consider myself a jack of all trades. If there is one thing I would incorporate in some of my own artistic pursuits it would be to incorporate the web into my works. I guess when you have taken as long as I have to finally get the ball rolling, you don’t want to just stick to only one medium and the web is one of my elusive mediums. I have ideas but just haven’t had a chance to learn how to incorporate them into the web. As technology improves, the possibilities for me to explore using the web for artistic expressions only increase.
