Faking It ’Til You Break It
Thinking about perception as a “successful designer”
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 July 14th, 2019.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about perception. We’re all plenty familiar with the comparison trap and imposter syndrome, due to their near-constant presence in public design and creative conversation, if not from our own personal experience. The perception issue on my mind is something slightly different, though.
We’ve talked a fair amount in these letters about a real shift in the demand for lettering work recently from its latest peak of popularity a couple years ago. I say latest because, as we discussed two weeks ago, it’s a wave, right? Because of that wave, and maybe the coincidentally fortunate time at which I came into it, I never really had to proactively seek out much work at all over the course of my relatively short career. As the market changes, and that wave has been slowly crashing, though, it’s become clear that my same approach of just selectively picking and choosing which projects to take on from the many coming my way, is no longer sustainable. Which leads me to this perception issue I’ve been ruminating on lately.
TEN YEAR PLAN?
I’ve had the great pleasure of working on some incredible things for the biggest clients in the world. If you had told me just a decade ago — when I was running a wireless retail store in Fort Wayne, Indiana — that over the next 10 years, I would have partnered (as an individual professional) with companies like Google, Adobe, Jameson Whiskey, Russell Stover, Sports Illustrated and countless others, that I would have been brought in to teach what I do to people at the likes of American Greetings and Facebook, or that I would have spoken publicly at dozens of events and conferences, including giving the keynote speech at a conference in fucking Australia…
Honestly, the Ryan Hamrick of 2009 would probably have been downright terrified. Not just from a complete difference in professional and life experience than it would take to get there, and being a less public, pre-social-media-era person, but remember, doing anything remotely like what I do now wasn’t even something I knew was a career, let alone a thing I was considering.
So, the wild road of monumental life curves and turns that would have to happen for 35 year-old Ryan to have done any *one* of those things, was unthinkable. We moved to Pittsburgh for Brooke’s job in September 2009, requiring me to leave my job in Indiana, and setting off what would be that chain reaction of growth and change leading to a wholly different life and experience than we could have ever imagined. At exactly this time 10 years ago, it was less than two months away, yet we had no idea that all of that was right on the horizon.
MAKING IT OR FAKING IT?
Okay, back to the future. Those breakthrough opportunities that would establish me as a trusted expert at this thing I do, and set me up for a nice, long career of doing more of those awesome things have happened. I seized them, performed well for those clients and at those events, and emerged ready to tackle the next, bigger milestone.
In 2018, I wrapped up my extensive work on a complete rebrand of Russell Stover, joined the AIGA Austin board, gave a lecture and workshop at American Greetings HQ in Ohio, conducted small workshops at Facebook, was featured on Adobe Live, created live shoebox art at the launch of Nordstrom’s first “Pop-In” shop with Allbirds, designed an album for one my favorite musician’s, Geographer, and was flown and put up for my first visit to Australia to be the keynote speaker at the Typism conference.
These are all stellar highlights to be able to list as having happened in one year. Believe me, I understand and appreciate that. But let’s take a closer look. None of those highlights were a major windfall for me financially, with the exception of maybe Russell Stover — a project that though I was paid fairly and fully for, ended up being put on hold, perhaps indefinitely, so I can’t use it to promote and advance my business — and some of them weren’t paying gigs at all.
That’s not the part that leads me to the point I’m trying to make, though. I didn’t come in here today to tell you the sad story of the precious-white-guy designer who fucked up and didn’t make as much money as he should have working on wonderful projects and traveling the world for free. No, the point is, that between each project in that one paragraph worth of highlights from an entire year, I saw hardly anything else come into my inbox, and was working in retail 24–32 hours a week. I didn’t really share that I had taken a part-time job with anyone until my talk at Typism in August — a full six months after I started. All anyone saw were these highlights, these clear signs of me “making it”.
The aim for the speakers at the conference was “to provide a roadmap for our audience to help take their passion for lettering from a hobby to a thriving business”. The more I thought about that — especially considering that at the time I was first asked to keynote, I had just taken this part-time job — I couldn’t help but think, “Who am I to offer advice on that?” It was for sure a business, legally. But thriving? There was no way I couldn’t make this the whole focus of my talk.
That was a bit of a turning point for me. The beginning of an important realization. Pretending things were fine wasn’t helping the hundreds of people that paid to come hear me speak. It wasn’t helping all the people that ask me for help and advice every month, or every week at times. It certainly wasn’t helping any of the thousands of others around the world following me and potentially looking to me as an example or a leader.
This “faking it” was supposed to help someone, though. It was supposed to help me get bigger and better clients. It was supposed to help me build a steady, thriving business. It was supposed to help me “make it”. But it wasn’t helping me, either, and even if it was, it wouldn’t be worth the misleading and harm it was mean to everyone I’d be continuing to fake it to.
BREAKING IT
I saw a post from Gary Vaynerchuk on LinkedIn the other day that really felt strongly akin to this topic. Disclosure time: say what you will about Gary’s demeanor, his tone, or whatever, and I’d probably agree with you on most of it. But it’s hard to argue that the guy doesn’t have a pretty strong track record of ideas and business thought technologies.
All right, so he shared a video from a conference where he responded to an audience question about this very topic, and his stance was that he would be much more likely to buy from, invest in, hire someone who’s “documenting the truth”, rather than someone who’s trying to “come off as” something they’re not.
This is the side of this strategy that I’ve been turning over a lot in my head recently, and was coaxed out very effectively by my dear friend Diane Gibbs in a chat we had a couple weeks ago.
Fronting like you’ve made it and are bossing out may potentially get you the attention of clients you feel are of the caliber you should be working with. There’s a high likelihood that some of the great clients I’ve had the fortune to work with came to me at least partly for that reason.
As I’ve been saying throughout this letter, though, working on a few amazing things here and there throughout the year does not inherently mean that it’s the norm, or even that it will definitively lead to more of the same. So what’s potentially more likely, is that the smaller clients — clients with real money to spend, and with projects you could certainly use on your potentially thin schedule — will assume that they:
- Can’t afford you
- Couldn’t possibly interest you in their small project, and most importantly, that you
- Don’t have time for them
When in reality, you’re living high-profile gig to high-profile gig, struggling in between, and getting part-time jobs to keep up appearances. Stupid. Your great reputation and image don’t mean shit to your mortgage company.
Document the truth, and attract clients who not only respect you for your talent and work, but for your integrity as well. I’ll keep trying that approach, and I think you know at this point that I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going as I do.
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’Til Soon,
