The Moments That Changed Our Creative Practice
This month we feature a guest post by In-House co-founder Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz, in conversation with studio partners Michu Benaim Steiner and Alexander Wright. Conversations have been edited and re-organized for brevity.
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As creative professionals’ careers mature, so do the perspectives of its practitioners. This evolution is not just due to a change of role, or because of the rapid changes in what skills are considered valuable — though these are both part of it. For this conversation, I’m interested in the changes that come from experience and not from circumstance; what shapes the practices and idiosyncrasies of creative professionals. As you might imagine, this process isn’t a straight line for anybody, it’s more like a winding road, in which research, dead-ends, serendipity, risk and challenges come into play.
Every growth process is different of course, but over a week-long conversation at the studio we quickly found some common denominators, some ideas and moments in our evolution as creatives and as studio members that (IMHO) could be helpful to others — no matter if you are a client looking for a studio to partner, a designer finding her / his voice, or a studio looking for a way to grow.
I grouped the partners’ answers into six themes — six moments — that shaped both our creative practices as a studio and as individuals — then wrote this summary out of several hours of conversation. This month we present the first three of these moments, but there is an important thing to point out: the founding partners at In-House International come from different walks of life, and yet have found a common ground on their creative practice together that supports their individual traits, helps their work flourish, and truly embodies the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — how did this come to happen? Is there anything that can be replicated in other practices? What things don’t work? Answers below!
When I Realized Community is Key
Alex: Alright, I’ll start — one moment that definitely changed my creative practice, my design practice, happened very early in my career, when I was part of an audiovisual collective called Simpl3. Simpl3 was a group of people with very different backgrounds and areas of interest that got together around music and design — at the beginning it was much more about the music. We did parties and events, which meant flyers, and others in the collective started to make stuff. I was studying graphic design at the time, so it made sense for me to make stuff for the music events too. But eventually we started making art exhibitions, brining international guests, and doing more and more ambitious projects.
It was a time when internet access was more limited, so the design ethos was very DIY: photocopies, hand-made graphics, etc. and it was precisely during this time that I started to understand what community truly meant: it meant that Simpl3 was able to make things happen not because of its name or its fame, but because of the group of people that were part of it, because everybody pitched in their specialty. Organizations and communities are just people, and if you happen to be part of one where everybody pushes each other to be better by bringing their best work to the table; well, let’s just say that you learn and grow very quickly — I feel very thankful for the experience, and it changed my outlook on creative work forever.
“if you happen to be part of one [organization] where everybody pushes each other to be better by bringing their best work to the table; well, let’s just say that you learn and grow very quickly”
Lope: I share that sense, and had a very similar moment as well. I started my career working in arts / design / music magazines; as a reporter, writer and editor, and eventually curating large scale event. It was doing this work that I came to see how important community was for every single artist or creative I met. How much they valued their circles of friends and colleagues, not only because of their support, but for their honest input and critique.
Before I knew it, this was happening to me too: I was part of ambitious projects because of people around me that were (gently) pushing me to catch up, to explore, to experiment, to learn — but more importantly, given the nature of my work, it was necessary for me to be immersed in several different creative communities at once: visual artists, filmmakers, designers, musicians, you name it; and it was this cross-pollination of areas of creativity what left the biggest, most enduring mark on me and my work: the more diverse your community, the more you can learn and the more you can give back. The concept of cross-pollination is at the center of my creative practice, nowadays even going beyond community, and manifesting itself in my learning habits, creative habits, and hell, even my approach to software tinkering!
“it was this cross-pollination of areas of creativity what left the biggest, most enduring mark on me and my work: the more diverse your community, the more you can learn and the more you can give back”
When I Let Curiosity Dictate the Course
Michu: It’s also interesting that you can take that concept of cross-pollination and apply it to areas as different as communities or your design practice as an individual. For me, something similar applies to curiosity, which I consider to be a practice and not a personality trait. Putting curiosity at the center of my approach on decision-making and creative work has shaped my worldview and habits. It also relates to community because in many ways curiosity is an opening for connection. And it also makes you gravitate to different people and places, which is how it sounds like we all found community.
But if we’re talking about moments, I’ll go back to early in my career as well — actually in high school, so just early in my life. I was a pretty shy kid, but also really into music and books and art. As I got old enough to get an after-school job, I heard about this opening for a kind of intern-ish journalist / fact-checker / copy-editor at a newspaper. I was pretty comfortable with the writing part, but if I’m honest, I was excited to have a real reason to talk to people who were doing interesting things, to start conversations with strangers. And the paper was really open to pitching them ideas, so that trust really helped.
I went out as a culture journalist, and early on the job I realized that being creative is as much how curious you are, as it is about the level of exposure you have to things in the world. The contours of your world are shaped by the things you have taken chances on, and letting curiosity dictate your next step has worked great for me.
“being creative is as much how curious you are, but also how exposed to things in the world you are”
Alex: But there’s also this thing about curiosity, that people think you can run out of it, run out of energy to keep exploring, when in fact is the opposite. Not just that, but it can be learned. Curiosity was the key requirement of my first gig at an arts magazine (where I first met Lope) and there were basically no rules about where we could take the art direction of the magazine — the only guidance was, explore, experiment, and do something different on each edition. This setup sounds terrifying but I learned so much in such a short period of time.
When I arrived at the magazine I was a digital-first designer, and I was working with Martin [Allais] who pushed me to do more hand-made stuff, collage and tape, photocopies, analog film, which completely flipped my design process. Like Lope mentioned, Platanoverde [the magazine] was also a microcosm of people from different worlds passing by, and so our work was very collaborative by nature. The combination of those two things kept me constantly aware of ideas, options, ways to grow — because when you are not afraid of being out of your comfort zone you are opening yourself to the possibilities of what the next stage in your life / work is going to be; had I refused to participate in the madness that was that magazine who knows what kind of designer I would have ended up being.
“when you are not afraid of being out of your comfort zone you are opening yourself to the possibilities of what the next stage in your life / work is going to be”
Michu: I think that the fact that we are sitting here today is a testament of the magnetism of the universe that was created in that magazine — so the fact that you accepted to be out of your comfort zone influenced much more than just your life. A lot of people gravitated to it and created community there.
Lope: Yup! Looks like we all have a moment that defined our practice determined by our relationship to curiosity, because I also have one — although from a pretty different perspective: when Michu and I (and later Alex) started Gopher Magazine / Gopher Projects, we studied the landscape of independent magazines and small art publishing houses in North America and Europe and decided what was going to be a realistic goal for our project, what a success could look like.
I was curious about whether it was within our possibilities to make something that could stand next to some of the publications we admired. So, for the first time ever I started a project with a clear goal post, and clearly defined ambitions, goals, aspirational peers, possible competitors. It was wild doing this from a small office in South America, and yet it worked! Gopher was the seed from which the design studio grew!
Being curious (not just worried, but actively curious) about how to build the future that you want, from the aspirational to the practical, is absolutely process-changing — and life-changing. Driving my curiosity towards the BIG scary questions like “how can I build something successful, when it means competing against so many amazing people” or “what would success look like for me, personally?” Or the worst one: “how can I create a life that allows me to always make work that I’m proud of?” as a decision that still resonates me. But hey, I’m still constantly kicking myself in the rear, for sidetracking from that future that I want.
Being curious (not just worried, but actively curious) about how to build the future that you want, from the aspirational to the practical, is absolutely process-changing — and life-changing.
When I (Finally) Understood That is Process is Freedom
Michu: what’s weird is that you have always been methodical about your curiosity — it’s like everything you get interested into you research, but I think that spirit is shared at the studio.
But here’s a more recent thing, and something that connects to that idea of maturing as creative professionals: designing processes so that we can focus on what matters. And it took us a while to get here, because I think all of us were a little reticent to feel trapped in protocol. Design is a high-touch job, with lots of personal interactions with clients, designers, agencies, etc. We have been on both sides of the table, as studio and as clients, and have seen the power of method, or more precisely, of process, to streamline efforts, save energy and build good relationships. I think that [how you run your] process is half or more of the experience that the client has of you: is what sets expectations, what defines the tone of relationships, what not only allows you to take care of client’s needs and keep up with those needs if/when they change. We‘ve talked a lot about working on active listening, and having a clear process has freed us to really prioritize listening.
“process is half or more of the experience that the client has of you”
The moment when all of this became clear to me was when a few years back when we were doing a massive project that went completely belly up. This failure forced a reckoning, and Alex and I talked a lot about this. We realized that the error was that if you are too enthusiastic, to the point where you start matching the client’s energy and anxieties, it’s inevitable to end up giving the reins of a project and make things messy — the only way to avoid this is with a clear process that provides clear pathways forward, to address what to do in what situations.
“if you are too enthusiastic, to the point where you start matching the client’s energy and anxieties, it’s inevitable to end up giving the reins of a project and make things messy — the only way to avoid this is with a clear process that provides clear pathways forward”
Lope: I think it’s worth mentioning Run Studio Run; that book, while being fairly short, changed my approach to the business of design — some days I just want to tattoo the phrase “everything you make repeatedly should be a process” inside my eyelids using glow-in-the-dark ink. Taking the time to build, organize and improve the assets that we use for repeated actions (decks, briefs, forms, etc) has saved me literally hundreds of hours of work, hours that I can dedicate to the kind of things we have talked about today: curiosity and community. In other words: process has made me a happier, more effective creative.
“everything you make repeatedly should be a process”
Alex: You’ve been saying that Run Studio Run is one of only two books you keep at your desk — on top of the… other one we’ll talk about next time!
Curiosity, community and process were part of the moments that defined this month’s conversation about the evolution of the creative process at our studio. Next month: Fear, Time, and Giving Back — stay tuned!
