Keeping your soul while doing your work: community and design.
In the year 2003, I was working as a graphic designer for a small company that manufactured hats and visors of golf resorts. It was the height of “The Apprentice” TV show, starring Donald Trump, and everybody thought it was very funny to say “You’re fired!” to each other in the office hallway. Well, somehow we landed the business of Trump’s golf courses. They chose us because we were an American manufacturer, and were known for our personal service.
We worked hard to make excellent products for the Trump golf resorts, but after many months they simply stopped paying us, citing “poor quality” (not true). It felt like my efforts to design a great product for people were utterly useless.
Design is a cog in the great business machine, like anything else.
Most design is created to buy and sell products. There are a few outliers like Facebook and Twitter, but in the end the product of those well- designed apps are your eyeballs. Smarter people than I have more intelligent things to say about capitalism and technology, but I will say this from my worm’s-eye view: selling your creativity for the endless, boring pursuit of the almighty dollar wears on your soul after a while.
My personal design journey kept me scraping by with a pirated copy of Adobe Illustrator 6, and believe me, getting design work in a gig economy is something else. In the words of the great comic and blog Achewood: I “If I have to freelance-design any more business cards and stationery for bullsh*t little businesses I’m going to hit my writing hand with a hard mallet.” Kind of harsh, but if you know, you know.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we talk about the tech industry like people in L.A. talk about entertainment. I watched closely as Silicon Valley grew over the last decade, along with the inescapable presence of smartphones and their apps, a career in design seemed to be in the rarest of air. The design-in-tech job market was ruled by brilliant young people in turtlenecks and vests and a lot of mysterious funding (the Young Turks! Disruptors! Ted Talks and Segue scooters!). We were in a sans-serif, big blue button wonderland, and as a designer, I personally felt outpaced and underqualified for a career I wasn’t sure I was suited for.
Also, I was more interested in working with people face to face. I was lucky enough to be part of a community journalism fellowship (shoutout to Oakland Voices!) project that launched a modest writing side hustle, and I took a position at our neighborhood public school that had me working with children with cognitive and learning issues. This is partially because I wanted to engage with the community I was raising my family in, and partially because I needed to get out of the house.
Engaging with the stories of the people I worked with every day opened up worlds to me: I spoke with politicians, small business owners, interviewed children on the playground, activists, and everyone in between. Working in education, I learned concepts I didn’t even know were related to design, like cognitive load and accessibility. But for the first time in a long time I felt activated and joyously involved in my community.
It’s funny what you see when you are a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, but your experience of life is very low-tech. Especially when Covid went from a two-week threat to a year-long challenge, we were forced to seek technological solutions to very serious problems.
Friends who work in healthcare, education, government and public service felt the failures of technology deeply when the pandemic hit. These public structures were woefully under-resourced to help those who really needed it. Students I worked with were joining Google classrooms from behind the counter at their parent’s bar, because they had unreliable WI-FI at home. Patients at the New York hospital my friend was working at during the early days of Covid had siloed, hard-to-find medical records. Libraries that once provided deeply necessary internet resources for the public had to shutter their doors, and suddenly the tech divide between the have and the have-nots became a life-changing matter.
At the risk of virtue-signaling, what’s the point of all this slick technology if it helps only the people making money?
This all sounds very high-minded of me, but believe me, I’m not that good of a person. The toxic cynicism of Gen X is tattooed on my personality, and despite wanting to change the world for good, I wonder what I can really do to help, and if I can actually feed my family in trying. But I’m trying.
So here’s where I am now: I’ve left my job as a special education teacher, because I miss design. I love a good “grind” in putting a blog site together, or getting the vectors artwork look just right for a logo. I follow artists and designers on social media, and well, after everything…I just really like design.
A friend (and my TikTok algorithm) suggested I look into UX, and I fell in love. The joy of figuring out what makes people tick and how to make their lives easier is catnip to me. I love conducting research, coming up with solutions, and designing- not only with vectors and pixels, but with a holistic approach that takes into consideration the environment we engage in. The field is really, really saturated right now, of course- but I’m changing tactics. I’m just going to put myself out there- I’ll do what I want to do. I’ll take some of the knowledge I’ve gained in data visualization and apply it to journalism. I’ll work with organizations in the ways that make sense for my emotional health and well-being. So far I’ve done a lot of spec work for non-profits, including a metastatic breast cancer community site, a trauma-informed meditation non-profit, even a medicinal psychedelic church. It feels good. 😉
