What’s the Return on this Failure?

How embracing failure and pushing past quit can come back to you in ways you could never imagine

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 8th, 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.

Last month, I was asked by my friend Russell to come present again at his annual “Portfolio Pep Rally” that he holds as an end-of-year celebration for his design students at Austin Community College. He caters in beer and tacos, and invites local Austin design professionals to come in and give a quick, 20-minute talk about their careers, the industry they’re about to step into, whatever they feel would be valuable to them, essentially.

In true Hamrick form, I didn’t really stress too much over what I would talk about until the very last minute. Two years ago, when I participated the first time, it was done remotely from a hotel room in Atlanta that I had just walked into moments before, on day 35 of our 40-day nationwide summer workshop tour (In putting that thought down in words and hearing how ridiculous it sounds, I realize that’s a great topic for a future letter. Remind me to tell you about that wild summer.).

Having just driven the 10+ hours from our last stop in Washington, D.C., my “plan” was just to be on Google Hangouts in time (nope), and give these students some sort of inspiring talk (maybe?) about being an independent designer, how they were already way ahead of me, being that they actually had a formal design education, and talk a bit about this crazy trip we were on as a family. Oh, that’s right, did I mention it was our whole family of four on the road for 40 days? Yeah.

So there wasn’t a ton of prep for that one either, but this time, I at least was going to be there in person. I can bullshit about myself for far longer than 20 minutes, if called upon, so it was just a matter of putting a keynote together to give myself a path to walk down over the course of my time. I had a pretty big-deal (to me) project I had just completed and shared publicly, so the crescendo of the talk was easy to figure out, but then my wife gave me the key idea that would change this from a casual meandering through my journey to where I am in my career, to an anecdotal story about how embracing failure and pushing past quit can come back to you in ways you could never foresee.

THE SHOW

The story I told at the pep rally show was rooted in another show from way back in the fall of 2018 — AIGA’s After Hours Poster Show. After Hours takes applications in the form of a designer or artist’s past work, and picks a certain number of them to fill out the show. A big part of the proceeds from poster sales go to a chosen charity partner each year, and there’s a big launch party to kick it off that’s become one of the biggest events of the year in town, especially for AIGA.

So I’ve wanted to participate for a long time, and last year, I finally managed to catch the application window and get some things submitted. And I was included in the show! I was particularly excited, because the charity was Kids in a New Groove, a music-based mentoring program for youth in foster care, so the poster theme was music — a subject that is very important to me and already a huge source of inspiration in my creative work.

Almost immediately, I decided to make my poster a hand-lettered quote from some of my all-time favorite lyrics from one of my all-time favorite musicians, Frank Ocean.

“Hope a garden grows where we danced this afternoon/
Hope our children walk by spring when flowers bloom”
- Frank Ocean, “Wither”, Endless

I was working my part-time job at Apple still at that time, but slowly and surely, I was making progress on what was shaping up to be a design I was incredibly proud of, and as a piece of screen printing alone, would’ve been a pretty impressive thing, I thought.

When I finally got to a place where I felt like I was about ready to go to print, I started to reach out to the usual suspects, and see which of my print shop friends would be ready to make this thing real. “Be sure to reach out to print shops early,” they said. “Here are the shops partnering with us to give you special pricing,” they said. “This is one of our biggest events of the year,” they said.

“We don’t have space in our calendar to do this in time, because we’re already printing the posters for everyone else,” every print shop (essentially) said.

By the time I had finished fussing over my design, it was too late. My poor planning left me stranded and on my own, with a design I was super pleased with, and no where to go with it. I’ve done some home screen printing here and there, but never more than one color, and never even close to this size, nor did I have a single piece of the equipment or paper to pull this off once, let alone the 40+ times I needed to for the requirements of the show. And did I mention I had viewed this (from my inexperienced point of view, at least) as what might be a somewhat challenging lift of a design for an actual print shop?

Nevertheless, I looked into the cost of finally investing in a screen setup big enough for these 18”x24” posters, an orange paper like the one I had in mind, inks, the whole thing. Not ideal. We were about a week out from when the printed, signed posters were due to be turned in for the show.

I froze.

I knew that, at best, I was not going to give the design I was so proud of anything that even remotely resembled justice. Then, I’d be living with the excruciating combination of satisfaction that I made it happen and didn’t have to back out, with the dreadful feeling of not even wanting to claim your own work. That wasn’t going to be an option for me.

I also didn’t think that backing out of this show was an option either, but as the deadline crept closer and closer, I had to start seriously considering it. A spot in a limited-artist art show was given to me, I accepted it, and now it was officially the eleventh hour. So it would be a pretty terrible look for me to bail and leave the equivalent of a gaping, Hamrick- shaped hole on the gallery wall. Did I mention I was on the board of AIGA Austin at the time, the organization that puts on this show?

The pure lack of desirable options had me fully paralyzed by my impending public failure, but instead of single-mindedly focusing on the task at hand and figuring things out, I pushed it further and further from my mind to avoid dealing with it.

THE TURN

It was a Thursday night. The deadline to turn in the finished posters was the following Monday, and I still had nothing. My father-in-law was visiting, and the whole family was sitting in the living room, watching TV and hanging out. I must have been visibly distraught, because I’m pretty sure my wife addressed what she knew was on my mind.

“What are you going to do?”

“I really don’t know,” I forfeited. “The only thing I can think to do at this point is to just design something simpler and make them myself, by block printing them or something.”

“Do you really think you could pull that off?” she fairly asked.

“I don’t see any other options at this point. I know how to do it, so yes, technically I could.” I said.

“Well, make it happen. What do you need?” she heroically offered.

I immediately got up, grabbed my iPad, and starting drawing something new. I’d made another lyric design I’d always really loved from an Alt-J song a while back, but that one wasn’t really any better for directly translating to a carved block of linoleum. The lyric was short, though, and seemed like my best bet for quick content that I could be happy with.

“Love is the Warmest Colour”

– Alt-J, “Nara”, This is All Yours

Through the miracle of Procreate and the iPad Pro, and a strong passion for the message and beauty of the lyric and its song, I was able to accomplish something I was pretty happy with before the night was done. But this poster show doesn’t allow digitally printed artwork, as a big point of the whole show is to celebrate the art of print and poster making itself. I whole-heartedly support and agree with that, but that meant my work was far from done.

The next day, I dragged Dad down to Jerry’s Artarama (he certainly didn’t mind) and picked up a big piece of clear linoleum — not ideal, but the only thing big enough to not have to do it on two pieces — some black ink, and some heavy white paper. This was going to have to work.

That night, I got to work carving out my design, coming a little too close for comfort to not doing it in reverse and ruining my one piece of linoleum before Dad saved me. I was a full-fledged, one-man shit show at this point, is what I’m trying to tell you.

Between that evening and the next morning, though, I managed to get it all carved out and ready for print. It’s mid-Saturday morning at this point. I didn’t have a press or a drying rack, but I built a little setup to keep things somewhat consistent and cleared about a room worth of space for everything to dry flat or standing against a wall. It was coming together.

The family was holding the rest of the household down and being my little personal collection of rocks so I could power through this thing. Being independent feels less lonely with the support of a family. If you’ve ever thought about getting one, I highly recommend it.

BUZZER BEATER

With virtually no seconds left on the clock, and a heavy assist from the fam, I made the poster drop off just in time. Aside from an inevitable eventuality where I willingly spilled this whole story in dramatic detail, no one even needed to know that I had made this so damn hard on myself.

The point was, I made it, and in fact, a few others needed an extension because of posters not getting back from the printers in time. Funny.

Over the course of the two weekends of the show, which takes place during Austin’s famous East Austin Studio Tour (EAST), I only sold two posters. At plenty of points throughout my career, I would very much have considered that a small kind of failure. By this point, though, not failing a ton of underprivileged kids, or losing any remaining credit I had left with the local community, made anything a win.

THE UPSHOT

Procrastinating to the point of narrowly escaping disaster is not necessarily a new thing for me, so I was existing in a hazy glow of post-near-fall relief that was all too familiar, when I got a very interesting email.

SUBJECT: EAST Poster

A man visiting from New York happened to wander into the poster show, but couldn’t buy anything because it was a cold, rainy day and anything would have been ruined. He was interested in my poster, and had tried calling the gallery, but to no avail, and wanted to purchase one if there were any left and I was willing to ship it.

Wow, pretty cool! I responded, saying I was sure there would be some left, and that I’d holler when I got the remaining prints back to coordinate payment and shipping.

The sender followed up before I had a chance to, but this time, from a work email with a formal signature. One that included “Creative Director, Sports Illustrated”. He was looking to acquire one of my posters as a holiday gift for his significant other. Oh, man. Do I play it cool, like, “Oh hey, cool job. Anyway, here’s where to send me money.”? Or do I try to somehow finesse this into the beginning of a working relationship?

I’ve found myself at a crossroads like this many times over the course of my relatively short life as a designer. Act like I’ve been here before and pretend to be chill and nonchalant, or be transparently excited and honored to be noticed? There’s an awful lot of advice out there advocating for the former, pushing the idea of faking it ’til you make it, and projecting more confidence than perhaps you have. There’s definitely a place for that, and plenty of scenarios where that can be advantageous in trying to advance a career as an independent creative person. Still, I feel like I’ve been nicely rewarded far more often than not, for opting to own my insecurity and be honest with people.

“Hope you’re doing well. I’ve got posters in hand! At the risk of being super easy and predictable, I’d love to send you a print for your gift giving purposes and one for you as a gift from me, and as a reason to start a conversation about working together. Sports Illustrated would be a proud moment for me, for sure.”

There, I said it. I had also asked if he or his giftee were Alt-J fans, or if not, I’d be curious to hear what drew him to my poster out of all the amazing work that was on display there. I’ll be honest, y’all, my rough, one-color, black-on-white poster did kind of stick out like a sore thumb in the most literal and not necessarily positive sense of the phrase, among the very impressive works of art that everyone else created. Sure, there was a tale of struggle, and triumph, and hard, manual process behind mine, but I couldn’t exactly stand in front of it and perform an artful retelling of that story for the entirety of two weekends while it was on display. And people love needing to have their art explained to them.

Luckily, he didn’t make me hold my breath for more than a few hours. Turns out, his better half is actually a fan of me, and was shocked to unexpectedly wander into a gallery half- way across the country, and randomly find this poster she had just seen teased on my Instagram. What are the odds? The vast, overwhelming majority of attendees to this show were surely residents of my own town, many of them friends to some degree, and if you remember, a maximum of two people potentially knew how it was made and appreciated it enough to buy one. I actually don’t know who they were to this day, so it’s equally likely that they just prefer monochromatic design, hate color, and felt that everything else was overproduced. Or perhaps they were big Alt-J fans and would buy anything that went with all their other band merch.

At any rate, he too was also interested in working together in the coming year, and had a project or two in mind. A few months later, my new pal Steve at Sports Illustrated hired me to work on what would end up being a substantial amount of design for the 2019 swimsuit issue. Damn.

CRISIS TO CATHARSIS

Five months earlier, I was in the throws of an absolute crisis of character, debating whether to risk throwing my reputation away by letting a bunch of deserving kids down, not to mention my entire local design community, or slap something together that I probably wouldn’t be all that proud of and surely wouldn’t sell, but would allow my career and my conscience to live to see another day.

I can’t think about this odd series of events, without acknowledging the healthy dose of privilege that made it all possible. Would I have been accepted into the show if I weren’t on the AIGA board? There’s an awful lot of talent in Austin (and the work I ultimately delivered for the show definitely didn’t resemble the pieces I originally submitted for consideration).

Would my unabashed willingness to be so forward in my email about wanting to work with Sports Illustrated have resulted in the way it did if I weren’t a man? Steve’s a pretty good dude, so I know it wouldn’t have mattered in this case, but would I even have had the audacity to try otherwise?

I do know that it has nothing to do with me that, of all the wonderful studio tours and events happening for EAST, they just happened to stumble across the one showing work from someone they knew, while visiting from across the country. Nor that Steve showed the diligence to try and secure that gift for his partner against what would be reasonably tough obstacles like extreme distance and the very temporary, pop-up nature of many EAST galleries and events (this one was at a coffee shop and bar, of all places, so props to him for that effort).

You can’t really control who sees your art or what they will feel about it. You can’t know for certain what the return will be on your investment of time, effort and talent, into things that don’t necessarily have a clear path to a guaranteed payoff. The only control you have is over whether you view each opportunity as a strict matter of dollars and cents, or you believe that if you keep pushing your baby art birds out of the nest, they’ll inevitably take flight and sometimes, bring new and wonderful things back to you.

I have to tell you guys, I have really loved doing all this writing again. It’s been a while since I’ve made the time for it, and I forgot how much I enjoy it. I hope you’re enjoying it, too.

If you’re still reading at this point, first of all, thank you. That says a lot, and I certainly won’t have time to make these quite this long every week, so don’t worry. But I’d love to hear from y’all what topics you’d like me to write about. What struggles are you dealing with in your creative careers, or your lives, that you think I may have an interesting perspective on? I may not have one that’s all that interesting, in which case, I’ll humbly reply directly and say as much, but if I think I do, I’d love to share my thoughts on it with everyone. Having a flow of “prompts” to write about will definitely give me a great reason to dedicate good chunks of time to this each week.

I had the chance this week to do a Guest Curator spot/takeover of the @goodtype Instagram, which was a ton of fun, and I got to share and thank some of my earliest influences, showed a ton of actual pencil sketches from various projects over the years, and actually held a giveaway for a handful of the very posters I’ve been writing about in this letter. I still have quite a few of them from the limited edition of 40, so if you’re interested in buying one, reply and let me know.

I even got to interview my 11 year-old daughter Lyric, and had her show some of her recent paintings. I may be biased, but I think they’re getting pretty damn good. I’ll post that to my IGTV as soon as I can edit it down to 10 minutes.

All right, that’s about enough for this week. I should probably save some words for future letters at this point.

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!

Push those art babies out of that nest this week and see what comes back. I’d love to hear your success stories when you do.

’Til Soon,