AMA with Designer Bethany Heck
May 8th, 2015 via MakerMesh
In your journey to become better at your craft, have you ever been discouraged by someone else? Perhaps it was a stinging side-comment or maybe even an outright insult to your talent, but the outcome was the same: your inner critic found a new friend.
Bethany Heck, creative lead at Microsoft Power BI, experienced just that. In a recent AMA, Bethany told the group that a drawing professor once told her she didn’t have the natural talent of her classmates. And you know what? — She was inclined to listen with the insistence of her inner pessimist. Let’s all thank the design deities she didn’t. Her AMA revealed much more about her path into design as well as her inspirations and resources along the way. I hope you read through you can continue to build, design and create whatever it is you dream of.
Ryan Oliver: I’ve got a few questions mainly themed around motivation as-well as the steps you took to get yourself where you are today:
- How has your work on Dribbble affected your work at places such as Microsoft as-well as did it help you get those opportunities?
- What creative habits do you use to help keep you thinking creatively as well as motivated to keep up with everything?
Dribbble directly resulted in me getting the last several jobs I have. Once, a copywriter with an appreciation for design had seen my post saying I was looking for a new job and passed it along to her Creative Director. It also got me seen by a recruiter at IBM, which is where I worked last year, and ultimately led to the job I have at Microsoft now. It’s an excellent way to easily get your work out there and consumed by others who are looking for new talent. When I am recruiting for positions at Power BI, I go to Dribbble first. I keep myself motivated by trying to not overdo it when I’m designing on my own time. I already have to design as my job, and if I take on bad clients or too much side work, it’s going to cause me to resent it.
When I’m designing, I try to structure it so I can insure I always have small victories and I’m never stuck for too long. I hate feeling stuck! I wrote a piece for 24 ways a few years ago where I talked a little about creative momentum and how you can structure your work day around what works for you and keeps your momentum going Link Here
Wesley: Your passion for baseball can be seen in full form with The Eephus League of Baseball Minutiae and I can’t help but wonder if that’s how it all started. What first inspired you to draw, create and make things?
I actually never drew much as a kid. My dad is a design professor, and he’d send me to art camps at the university, and I was clearly less talented than the other kids who attended. I didn’t have the “hand skills” as my professors would say (I had a drawing professor who told me I didn’t “have the natural talent” of my classmates) I was always into a variety of sports and I loved playing them and collecting baseball cards; that’s probably the first instance of me really appreciating visual design, even though I didn’t consciously make the connection between the two.
I had a drawing professor who told me I didn’t “have the natural talent” of my classmates
I first started playing with photoshop in junior high, when I’d take artwork from the anime I liked and mashed it together in truly dreadful ways, and I made web pages to organize them. That was when I think I began doing anything close to “designing”.
Ryan: I have to wonder, with what you described to Wesley, how did you keep on going?
Well, I had done enough design on my own time to know I enjoyed doing it, and I knew that my knowledge of web design was valuable and I could get a job doing that (I worked as a web designer throughout school). The hard part was going to be becoming a good designer in general, and for the first semester of design classes, I didn’t know if I could do it. I didn’t understand what made my work good or bad.
I was familiar with photoshop, illustrator, etc, so I could follow guidance and make things my professors liked, but I didn’t understand their value at the time. I was not a happy camper, to be sure. I’m not good at focusing on the positive! I’m a very big pessimist. I think for me it was a matter of treating it like any other subject in school: trying to give the professor what they want. Once I had a year of design classes under my belt, I had been in the design world enough to start to get a feel for what inspired me and what didn’t, and I was able to start applying what I was learning in school to these other ideas as well.
The short answer to your question is:
I got through it because I knew I wasn’t going to be good at anything else, and I was scared to death! Everyone encounters self doubt, and if you keep running into criticism, do your best to grow from it. I can’t emphasize the importance of peers and mentors who will constructively critique your work enough.
Wesley: What anime’s inspired you to use photoshop?
I think it started with just wanting to be able to combine and resize images that I found online. Gundam Wing and DBZ were my faves ☺
Maggie: Hi Bethany, I’m going to cheat and ask 2 questions-
- What’s been your favorite font to use recently?
- What’s the best non-design book you’ve read this year that influenced your design work?
My favorite font recently is definitely Calibre, by the Klim foundry. He makes beautiful typefaces and I feel the prices are fair. It’s a great mix of the Euro-humanist aesthetic that’s popular now and grotesque faces.
Best non design book I’ve read this year would be the Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It’s baseball-related and he does such an amazing job of capturing the sensory experiences of baseball, and those details drive me in my design work as well. It takes work to come up with things that add layers and richness to design, but that’s where all the fun is, in my opinion.
Wesley: Did you have a design mentor or someone who inspired you to improve? How did you consistently improve your talents and challenge yourself?
My design mentor is a professor I had at Auburn, Samantha Lawrie. She’s the smartest person I know and I went from being terrified of her to considering her family. She always pushes me to consider different perspectives when I’m thinking about design. She saw strengths and weaknesses in me I couldn’t have seen myself and knew how to draw them out of me in a productive way. I still ask for her input on things I make and write.
Ryan: How do you go about building yourself a network of designers to-do as you say constructive critique with as-well as just have a group of others passionate about design?
I’ve found it harder to find people who will honestly critique my work as I’ve gotten farther in my career. At a certain point most people just gush or snipe, neither of which are helpful.
Make friends and build connections with designers you admire, and who have different perspectives than you do, and once you have that personal connection, the feedback will get more honest and more beneficial.
Also, always have a plan when you’re showing something for critique. Don’t just send a design and ask for thoughts, frame the discussion around a certain goal you hope to achieve, or an element you’re having trouble with. You can train people to give you more constructive feedback if you give them a little guidance at the start.
Thomas: Great design work, I’m tempted to pickup a Halfliner as a gift.
- What environments and habits have you built around you to facilitate your work?
- What might be a surprising process you’ve formed to facilitate day to day work, socializing, or tasks indirectly influencing your productivity?
In terms of environments, I do my best work in isolation with pop music blasting (the power bi logo was created with Electric Love playing on repeat) I get to work from home when needed at Microsoft and I try to save any really exploratory work for those days. When I’m in the office, I can’t afford to be stagnant, so I try to keep a list of things to tackle, and keep each hurdle small and bite sized, so I can always say I’ve moved forward. many designers will brag about how long they spend on one design element, and I don’t think that’s a virtue.
Design is liquid, and it should never be choppy or dammed up.
If you’re stuck on one thing, focus on another. When I was stuck working on the new Eephus League site, I focused on one particular element until it felt right, and by fixing that one thing the rest of the design flowed out naturally.
Mood!
Dan: I have two questions-
- What is your favorite typography based design book.
- Who would you put on a “Mount Rushmore of Graphic Design?”
Favorite Type book is Graphic Design before Graphic Designers. I wrote a review about it on my blog. It’s a gorgeous book that’s meticulously researched and written. So many design books are simply filled with pretty pictures, and many others are simply poorly written. This has the lovely images and is also well written.
Blog link
Hmm, a Mount Rushmore of design. I’ll include a mix of people I admire today and design icons:
Five total:
Chén: What are your thoughts about achieving the right balance between personal and employer work, especially in the early stages of your career? Do you make time to do your own projects outside of work?
Hello Chen! It’s very easy for young designers to get burnt out on design because they’ll treat their job like their hobby and their hobby like their job. I think the key is finding a good day job that doesn’t kill you with long hours and that isn’t so closely in line with what you like to do on the side that you get burnt out. I know I personally feel like every good idea I manage to eke out could be my last!
As I’ve gotten more stable jobs I haven’t needed to take on as much freelance, which leaves me time to pursue my own self driven work, which I enjoy more. I make a rule of never, ever making myself do work on Eephus or any of the other side projects. It’s a hobby and therefore should only be done when I have ideas and when it’ll be fun. It should never be a chore, there’s already enough chores in life.
I am a homebody so I tend to have enough time to pursue my own things whenever I feel so inclined. I’ve told students before that the key to doing a lot of great work is to be a hermit. You’d be amazed at how much time you’ll find on your hands!
Ryan: How would you suggest someone introduces themselves to design or tech?
That’s a difficult one, because I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum when it comes to having good and bad teachers, and I honestly find most design teachers to be quite poor. Imagine my surprise when I spent a semester at MICA, supposedly one of the top design MFA programs in the country, and found the level of instruction to be markedly lower than what I received at Auburn. I’m also not sure the level of writing being done on design in books is markedly higher than what you can find online. I think sites like BPANDO are a great blend of thoughtful, constructive commentary and amazing imagery that will inspire you to try new things.
I know plenty of designers who never received a formal education who are still growing on their own and producing great work. The weakness I most often see from those designers is a lack of understanding for design fundamentals.
I’ve been trying to explore avenues for creating a series of classes for people to learn design and typography fundamentals online.
Jose: I’m 23 and just started studying design as a student after years of fooling around on Adobes CC programs. What advice would you give a creatively driven young student at this stage?
Hello Jose! Soak up as much good design as possible, and always question what you see.
- Why is it effective?
- Are there fundamental design principles at play here (hierarchy, color, form, rhythm)?
Start trying to group design you like by categories and find common threads, and then take those things you learn from observation and try to apply them in your own work. It’s less about the end product and more about the motivations and principles that make it effective. Young designers often blindly copy work they find inspiring without asking themselves why they like it.
If you can answer that question and boil design down to its essence, you’ll be able to create work that is effective in the same ways but might look totally different.
