Designer Kids
How do you define success designing a creative career around your family?
This letter was originally sent out to subscribers of the Love:Letters mailing list, a weekly longer-form email series from the desk of Ryan Hamrick at ALFA Studios, on June 16th, 2019.
If you’re interested in personal, honest stories and thoughts on life as an independent designer, parent, spouse, and more, sign up by clicking the image below, and I’ll see you in your inbox this weekend.
I got a lovely response from reader Rich Lim last weekend with a great question that I’d love to address for this week’s letter. If you didn’t manage to make it all the way to the end of last week’s 3400-word letter (fair), I did solicit responses from any of you that have questions or topics you’d be interested in seeing me cover here. I won’t be able to answer them all in these letters, and some I may just respond directly to, but it should at the very least provide a decent pipeline of subject matter to keep this series topical and relevant to what all of you are here for. So holler if there are things you want to know!
Thanks again to Rich for the question. He asked if I could talk a bit about life as an independent designer and parent, and balancing those priorities, especially while trying to learn a new and incredibly deep subject like lettering on the side, in his case. He himself is showing a lot of promise with the work he’s posting to his Instagram, and definitely seems to share a similar, growing obsession with cartouche style lettering to the one I caught long ago. Check him out and keep up the good work, Rich. Also, happy Father’s Day to you and all the other dads out there! All right, let’s get to it.
LET’S CALL IT A WARMUP
I’ll be honest, the reason this letter is substantially later than our previous two, is because I had 1500 words written, and scrapped them as of about 2pm yesterday. Well, copied and pasted them into another document, technically. I sort of took it all the way back to the beginning, and started recounting my entire random path from wireless retail management in northeast Indiana, to my current station of self-taught, independent designer currently leaping off the precipice of turning that solo career into full-fledged studio. If that sounds like a long, and often weird story to you, you’re absolutely right. As I crossed that 1500-word threshold, just beginning to get to the design part, I decided that maybe that was too indirect a route to talking about this topic, and perhaps context overkill, and chose to save all that for another time.
This is good, though. A big part of why I wanted to start this series up was to get in the habit of writing more, and back to a place where I could more efficiently convey my thoughts in applications of all kinds, from writing on design publicly, crafting messaging for clients, you name it. Recognizing yesterday’s writing as productive, but ultimately a failure in addressing the topic at hand feels like a kind of growth I can be proud of. Okay, moving on.
AN UNDESIGNED PATH
Central to theme of my now relocated story, is that my kids were so young — one and four — when I first stopped working out of the house, that it’s virtually all they’ve ever known. Especially for my youngest Lyric, our daughter. That’s why I started so far back and attempted to cover so much ground in the first place, because the way I manage work/life balance, and my time, and how I came to do those things the way that I do them, is all a product of my path to design and my specific situation, and therefore may be uniquely non-applicable as helpful advice or a model for anyone else to follow.
I’m pretty sure we’re in a moment in civil society where it’s unfavorable to say, “Find you a sugar mama that’ll support you no matter what,” or, “Try being a straight, white man who hasn’t experienced any substantial reason to doubt himself, when it occurs to him to randomly try an entirely new thing that countless others have studied and paid to be formally trained on for years, but he feels like maybe he can do it, too.” A moment I fully agree with and believe in, relevant as those statements may be to my life.
Short of that, though, my experiences certainly aren’t all useful bits of information for deciding how to move in your own path, but I think there may be a few.
A SMALL CORNER OF INTENTIONALITY
My design career started alone, at home, with kids, and is only now, over eight years later, beginning to transition into the very early stages of a situation where it might soon be away from home, in a studio of my own, no longer alone. I’ve never worked at a shop or agency or for anyone else at all, so my experience balancing a personal pursuit like Rich is doing outside of his day job, and like so many other people, has been super limited for nearly all of my career. More on why I say “nearly” later.
From day one, though, I had to learn how to supervise kids, feed all three of us, manage nap times, give the kids some form of entertainment here and there so they didn’t grow up to resent their childhood (and me) — all while trying to learn about terminals, swashes, and ligatures. I’m realizing this probably isn’t the first time I’ve attempted a call-back to that entire aforementioned letter I already wrote but decided not to include here. If I miss a clarification, and anything doesn’t make a bit of sense, let me know, and I can elaborate, but for now, you should know that when I started my design career, it was also just shortly after having to leave my job and move to a city with no connections of any kind, and not working for the first time in over ten years, with my then one and four year old.
Managing a design career around a family and kids is all I know, and it’s certainly not easy, even after over eight years, and with completely different characters involved than those little babies at the beginning. The challenges just grow and shift into different ones over time, from literally starting with a helpless toddler needing constant supervision, to having teenagers with extracurricular activities to get to, social events they just have to be seen at, it goes on an on.
NIGHT SHIFT
You have to adapt. One major change I made early on stemmed from a concurrent need to find more viable work time in the day, and a realization that at age 27 or so at the time, I suddenly had lost all ability to stay up and work on anything requiring even a modicum of focus after, say, eight or nine o’clock. My loving wife was also less than thrilled with me often not coming to bed with her, only to spend an extra hour or two fighting sleep and not actually getting anything accomplished. So I started going to bed earlier with the responsible adult, and getting up around 4am every day instead.
What sounds like maybe the worst idea ever was surprisingly easy to get used to, and made a profound difference in my ability to carve out a decent number of quiet working hours each week. I also found that it’s pretty painless to pop out of bed at that hour, when you’re getting up to return to work that you love and are excited to get back to.
I don’t recall exactly when I started getting up early, but it’s been at least seven years, and I still do it to this day. These days, we not only have our two kids, now 11 and 14, but we also have a house filled with three dogs and two cats as well. Early mornings are one of their few calm, quiet periods of the day, too.
I want it to be clear that I’m not trying to glorify extending the work day and actually working longer hours. It all goes back to balance; in this case, trying to balance out what would amount to as close to a normal workday as possible. Being the parent that’s been home with these kids since before they can remember, I’m an integral part of their routines in the morning, and actually dedicate almost the entirety of the hours from 6–8am to helping everyone get up, ready, and out the door, including their mother. On the flip side, when the kids start arriving back home from school around three o’clock, there are rarely days when a whole lot of quality work time get’s done past that point. That’s getting a little better lately, now that they’re getting older, and can be expected (usually) to come in, say hello, and then move right on to getting chores done, starting homework, etc.
This has just been an exercise in trying to extract a normal work day from what’s available, rather than to cram in a bunch of extra work into already full days. If you’re like Rich, and trying to learn a new craft outside of your normal day job, this could be helpful for you, too, perhaps on a smaller scale. You’d be surprised how fruitful an extra 30 minutes before you would otherwise need to be up and getting ready can be, especially when you’re doing focused, intentional practice. We’ll talk more about that in this series, for sure, but in the meantime, focus on one thing you know you need to improve on, and specifically work on doing that in a deliberate, structured way with a goal of improvement over pure repetition, rather than just getting up to doodle, answer emails, whatever.
DESIGN YOUR PARENTING
If you’re out of the house every day for work, it can definitely be difficult to justify spending any substantial part of your time at home working as well. If the thing you’re trying to practice and learn in that time is design related, however, especially lettering, make it a family thing! There’s this period when kids are younger where, when they sit down to draw, letters become an important tool in their creative arsenal for a while; some time between when they’ve learned what letters are, and how to draw them, and when they’re required in school and in life in general to use them in more serious, less creative applications. But in that period, letters show themselves to be super helpful for labeling drawings, creating cool-looking messages, and so on. Invite your kids to hang and draw cool letters with you!
You get a little practice in — perhaps not particularly focused or considered every time, but practice nonetheless — and you get that quality time with them rather than feeling bad about choosing to get a little more work in over that time. And who knows, maybe that will be a foundation for what could be a lifelong love of letters and design for them as well!
AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS DAD AWAY
I foreshadowed above that while my experience almost entirely consisted of managing this design career around the lives of a whole family, and doing so from the center of it all in our home, there was an exception. If you tuned in and read the entire first one of these letters, you’ll remember that from February of 2018 through mid-April of this year, I actually took a part-time job at Apple to secure some quality insurance for the family for a while, and provide an extra small dose of stability while we explored what the next season of our lives would look like.
I actually started out entertaining the idea of getting a full-fledged job somewhere for those things our family needed, expecting to have to essentially put my independent design career on hold for a while. I quickly found that that my interesting, unique story and unconventional path to design was far less powerful when it came to something like making me hirable for a full-time design job (tossing that on the pile of future topics to talk about another time).
But when I learned that Apple offered pretty stellar benefits, even for part-time employees, I saw that as an opportunity that, while not the ideal kind of job I had in mind when considering going back to having an actual employer for first time in nearly ten years, it might be something I could do while still leaving time to focus on my design career outside of there.
Let me just say that I’ve developed an all new level of respect for any parents who work a day job, do any kind of freelance on the side, and find time to be with their families as well. Even though my gig was part-time, it was still retail, so that meant being gone at least one weekend day every week, working more like 24–32 hours than the “minimum to qualify for benefits” like I had in mind, and if you’re lucky enough to get a 10–7 or 11–8 shift, it has a way of effectively consuming the entire day, rather than leaving any time for side projects, let alone catching my kids while they were awake.
I was trying to do well at my job and be a good teammate there, put on a strong face and project a confidence and capability in my design life to keep that work coming in, be a good dad and husband, and get sleep and take care of myself. Instead, I basically just did a shitty job on all those fronts. I was rarely ever available or willing to cover shifts for my friends at work, and always felt like I was a bit of a burden on the scheduler and management for my extensive needs and ever-limited availability. I felt like I was largely living a lie as “Ryan Hamrick, the independent designer”. After over seven years of making it by, mostly because my wife made great money, I still wasn’t actually doing well enough to cover all of our family’s needs on the strength of my design career alone. Any work I did get last year just translated to getting less sleep and doing a worse job taking care of myself.
Then there was my family. For the first time in their lives, as far back as they could remember, the kids would often come home from school to an empty house. When they forgot to bring their library books back to school, and called dad to have him run them up to them, there was a good chance they’d be greeted with a reminder that “Sorry honey, I’m working today, remember?” — or worse, my voicemail. They were strong about it, and let’s be real, they were 10 and 13 for much of this time, and plenty capable of handling their own responsibilities, getting themselves ready, all of that. That might have been the hardest thing about the whole experience for me, though. Feeling that by doing what was needed for my family and adding an extra layer of security for them, I ironically took a major part of their lives away from the equation and disrupted a big source of comfort and familiarity for them.
My wife ultimately decided to return to startup/corporate life after a two-year period of working for herself from home as well, so as of earlier this year, the necessity for me to be at Apple was no longer really there. My son’s 14th birthday fell on a Saturday at the end of March, and through no one’s fault but my own lack of forethought to request it off, I was at work all day and hardly got to see him. I submitted my resignation and gave my two-week notice that day.
CONCLUSION?
This shit is hard, man. You can try to make all the right decisions, work your ass off, and even land some truly incredible, game-changing work along the way, but it often doesn’t change the game. If it does, it’s more likely to change it in that the next metric you decide to focus on as your signifier of success has shifted.
What works for me may not work for you, and honestly, you could make a strong argument that in some ways, it hasn’t even really worked for me. I have more privilege and unearned advantages that just about anyone could hope to have, and it’s still no easy task to perform this balancing act and find something you can call success.
My decision as of late, has been to choose to define success in the process, and in the fact that, because of my early learning in the open and overactivity online, and because of the relationships I’ve forged over the years, I now have some kind of platform to own up to all of this, and do everyone that helped me get to wherever it is that I am, the justice of being real with them and tearing down any illusion that I have everything figured out.
Most importantly, I’ve created a life where my kids actually care that I’m here for them and hate when I’m not able to be (I mentioned that they’re basically both teenagers now, right?). That feels like a pretty damn good measure of success to me.
If you want to support this series, one of the best ways to do so right now is to subscribe to get it in your inbox, and share it with a friend. You can also hire my studio ALFA for a project, which will obviously support me directly!
’Til Soon,
