Simple scraps and yards of bone
There is a fierce professionalism here, in these faces, an intelligence, quick wittedness, the fastest, most agile players, their seriousness and intensity are too fleeting on the field but once frozen, unexpectedly, it is all commitment, all hard work, life ambition, and prayers.
Posted in careers, energy, photography.
– July 16, 2010
My friend and itinerant blogger designer, Barbara De Vries wrote a post called Womentor on her Barbidoesmiami blog that got me thinking about mentors, preachers and teachers. Preachers have been left on bookshelves in my long vacated houses. Mentors, in my case is a vacated position. Can’t think of a single one. My father died as I was busy lining up my life’s journey when I needed his guidance in what I thought were serious matters. He was in turn father, mentor, teacher, guide. Now, some thirty five years and countless questions later I still ask the empty room I’m in from time to time, what he might advise when baffled in this complex life. There is no shortage of people ready to assume the role of advisor — offering conclusions about what I should do, where I should go and judgements about my doings — obviously individuals who have not seen enough pain. My teachers now show up for a eureka moment, for half a day, a weekly email, a TED talk, or they sit on my night table buddha-like, words from the ancients, insistently relevant forever. I read a few sentences and stare at the wall in admiration. They don’t provide answers as much as reframe my questions. I am profoundly grateful to every one of them. I am also incredibly grateful to so many friends, a circle expanded by technology’s touch, as after decades we burst into laughter and throw a ring of support around one another. Preachers, charlatans, spiritual pitchmen, and old new agers, I have learned to spot ‘em before they say a word. They are the hoodwinkers. Keeping one’s guidance takes practice like anything else. The actual subjects keep shifting. A schoolroom in a shoe. Each viral step leaves me flapping looking for a place to land this soul I own. There are guides for this too, but chosen with even greater care. There are no experts. At all. Anymore. Knowing now that I don’t know anything, a mentor might appear.
Posted in living.
– June 25, 2010
I have recently wanted to do logos again, the expectancy and landscape of branding beckons. Small businesses are buying logos and not understanding how much they should know, how much their investment matters, and how helpful and involved they can be. Small businesses everywhere are buying into logo mills. It is now possible to go to, say, Elance, perhaps the largest of global freelance sites and put a budget of “under $500″ on your logo or entire company branding project or website design. Fifty dollars is the lowest permissible bid, and “design” companies flock to join hundreds of bottom feeders trying to win the gig. Thousands of designers from Argentina, India, Pakistan, Russia, happy to take it on, limitless free revisions, open 24/7. The internet has not so much opened up cheap design to western customers as it has opened a global marketplace to cheap designers previously confined to their local markets. As Seth Godin points out, if you rely on numbers alone, you get deniability. Blind bidding means you don’t have to care about anything but price. An RFP means you don’t have to compare apples and oranges. Anonymous business clients means you don’t have to answer the phone. Follow up is bound to be like a bad or dropped cell connection, understanding of foreign client culture is simply not possible for fifty or a hundred dollars. It is a blatant rip-off to call it branding, the exercise everyone wants without knowing what it is. I might mention Elance is a $270 million business and there are others … This is a new and serious consideration for committed designers. If we are educating clients or teaching students, mention this market early on.
– June 21, 2010
I always carry a camera. A few years ago it was a heavy Canon DSLR. It was cumbersome when also walking two boxer dogs. Next came a Leica, a lot less cumbersome, and now a small and light Canon G10. I know with certainty that going out without the camera causes good pictures to appear. Occasionally the light is simply poor. Flat. Dead. Cloudy hazy and hot seems to be the worst light for me. There appears to be no sky. The habit of looking began more that forty years ago. Searching out means looking at everything. It is now part of my physiology. I don’t even have good vision. The world I live in is composed of shapes and it is my inner world that notices when those shapes drift into alignment to form a pattern which I photograph. Most of my thinking at that moment is below consciousness. All I feel is a quickening of discovery and a steadiness that has its root somewhere in lifelong discipline.
I founded DOON to be a place for this living looking, making, selling, however it manifested.
That act, the noticing framing and capturing is ninety percent of working with a camera. It often ends there. The next stage is the quick viewing of the images and the pausing to decide — does this one go further or not? This looking is instinctive, confident, decisive. It is an operation. It is careful only in that if I go further with an image I could be in for hours of work. I tread water a little. Usually a selection of images go through simple processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, nothing fancy, just making the picture. I am simultaneously looking for another level of activity which is making an illustration using the picture. These are expensive skills I have that separate me from other photographers. I can draw. I trained for years. I take time. Seen from here, photography is relatively easy. Correct that: Taking pictures is easy. Making good photographs less so. My decision-making in choosing color,detail, texture, then drawing that — and turning it into something completely new — this is my niche and my nickel. Nobody else does exactly what I do. This act of looking, slowing everything down, photographing, looking again later on my screen, selecting, looking, beginning to draw with absolute attention and care, I own this it seems, whether I like it or not. And I love it passionately. I improve it continually. And something in me drives me to do it again and again. I cannot explain my process much more than just this. It is an insistent asking, for the act of looking.
Posted in DOON, art, photography.
– May 30, 2010
Am waiting on a client who did not call Friday. Left weekend empty. Surf web, feels like smashing information in the good English way, Gosh this is smashing. Discovered new people. Art Directors. Having been out of the publishing world for so many years busy with other storming visual ponds, suddenly I need art directors. Not only that, I need to hear back from them. One cannot actually call an art director. One can call voicemail. Call assistants. Get assistant’s voicemail. Email addresses definitely not for the public. The usual wall. They do work for the public however. Ah, I know. Everybody is talent now. I discover Fortune magazine has had a remarkable art director for 27 years. Nai Lee Lum. Everybody knows who she is. Within the industry of course. As everybody knows Arem Duplessis design director of The New York Times Magazine, an enviable post for an excellent designer, reams of freedom. John Korpics, now independent, with a hilarious blog. I studied art directors when I was a teenager, waiting three months for the annuals and issues of Graphis to arrive by boat to land on my bedroom floor in South Africa. I devoured the greats… Later, in New York, I actually made appointments and showed my portfolios in person, a great thrill. I was making it, even when not being assigned work. Now illustration is just one thing I do, publications just one of myriad surfaces. It’s good to see strong confident layouts, photo shoots, typography, at a time when magazines are fighting for air. Perhaps that is why the work is looking good. Or perhaps the Brits again veered off course, rammed the wheel to the right, then the left leaving smoke and dust and out of that came a funny looking new vision, a design drama no-one had dared, woohoo! That is good! Thanks for the permission. The adrenalin flows through the players or it should. It gets instantly absorbed, drives fresh art direction, flickers of a form of copy paste. Inevitable. Even with more visual disciplines at their fingertips than ever, art directors are a pretty disciplined lot, seldom if ever having having final word. So pick up the phone AD’s, DD’s. Return the call. Return email. And tell your assistants they are not allowed voicemail. Ever. Turn yours off too. Take calls. Connect. Be brief if you must. You will be much happier people.
Posted in art, business, design.
– May 23, 2010
I stumbled into a TED talk by Shekhar Kapur who launched into his approach to working and living, referring to it as throwing himself into a state of panic, using that as a way to rid himself of his mind. We are the stories we tell ourselves — we exist because we tell ourselves stories. My stories are visual, creativity for commerce, and moving house three times in one year to find I could not create commerce purely online. Always the sense I was not doing enough of the right things. Location may have little to do with it but not everyone can live in the woods with a fast connection and make a living. The commercial stream has to be pulled to your desktop. If projects don’t come to me, I need to be going to commerce. Real connections, face to face, by phone, or referral, email — what have you, remain essential for most small business even though most of the work will happen on the web. My products are not obvious so I have to go and explain them to the market. Social media is also not live. It can get close, but it is not live. Sometimes the very ingredient that’s missing is that live-ness. Having an extra thousand pictures on Flickr doesn’t bring me shared experience. Neither does using as many bits of social media as one can possibly handle in the waking hours. Better to read a contrarian’s point of view once in awhile. When I read through social content, what stands out is the difference in the quality of comments between people who actually know each other and those who are just more ‘friends’. Online media and a shared interest is not shared experience. All the little apps such as posting where you are standing or eating, or going, or reading — who cares? Sometimes it seems it’s all a mass posting of some stuff one runs across and feels this need to share. I do it too. It’s about a neediness for real community and a lack of discipline. What I learned this past year was how impersonal online relationships are. I need to make contact with people, with teams. Nearer the center of the concentric circle — real networks. Then I can share my abilities and interests across media. Dabbling in social networks by posting cool stuff for others to see and hear, all the while collecting more friends is an entirely different activity to making lives that work.
Posted in DOON, business, careers, money.
– April 11, 2010
What difference does a place make? I used to think there was weight behind having an address in one of the world’s great cities. It meant something, as if one had earned the right to work and live at a pricier level with richer rewards. Then it became apparent that great work and expensive work too, was being produced in odd places, small places, insignificant places. So much for big city theory. But if one works outside the brightest lights on a night time map, how does the creator get to collaborate on a project? Usually because of a reputation earned in a big city. With a reputation, one can work anywhere. So the fable goes. A fable is an instructional tale unlike a fairy tale which is for amusement. It is interesting that designers who do live “anywhere” appear to spend a lot of time on planes and places far from where they live. Ask them when they get their work done and they’ll tell you they work in the air. Quiet time. Like reading my newspaper on a local train. Personal time but with a time constraint.
I have lived anywhere. The first anywhere place I lived after New York City was lonely but it took me five years to realize how lonely it was. I’d been hooked on the quiet and the beauty. I relished the silence of night. I began to hate it during the day. “Will somebody please make some bloody noise!” I would yell at the office window. In five years of twice a day dog walking I made two or three acquaintances. And I am quite gregarious, interested in people. The place was Bedford , New York. What made Bedford manageable was frequent trips into New York City to break up the beauty and mix with humans.
The next place I lived was chosen hurriedly in an effort to change to a design-supportive community. It was populated with aging hippies. This is fine if things like productivity, ambition, hard work, curiosity, living on the edge, are not high on your agenda. To be fair, we were told that hidden in the hills, were beings of some significant accomplishment, whom we could look forward to getting to know. We got out of there too fast perhaps, to meet them, ensconced as they were, apparently, behind the deep foliage. That was Woodstock, home to excellent dog walking trails. And the most delicious tap water.
We had not had time to do an assessment of the town before moving in and were now hurriedly leaving. Where to go? A lifer in the area recommended a town to the south of us, closer to New York City. Another friend confirmed what a “pretty cool town” town it was. If you are not going to listen to the opinions of others, you need time. Why, I now ask myself, did I think, a town half an hour south would make my world a better place? We landed in New Paltz and cannot get out of here fast enough and get closer to the city. But you can hike, some protest. I don’t want to hike, I want to work! A one year tour of two Anywhere places and due to force of circumstance we made bad decisions. This is no reflection on these towns per se. It is about place and the factors that make place very different from space. There is space everywhere. Anywhere. Lots of it. With little sense of place. Which is why the great tourist destinations tend to be places which are inseparable from their spaces. It is noticeable. It is not Anywhere. What is important to each of us? Space or Place. New York has power in it’s place and that power is due in part to the lack of space. They also work at different speeds. Place is immediate, you feel it, you know it. Space is slow, spend half your life on that ranch before falling in love with the dust and scrub.
I do admire those who have a home in a beautiful spot on this planet. A place chosen, a place that has congruency with its space. I’ve had that in my past. Although at times I feel as if I am walking backwards now, the view is one of some hard won lessons. Perhaps when one is fully engaged with work and those dear to us, place becomes those relationships and the physical location, the structure, even the land begins to disappear. In living in my own most beautiful areas, I was so absorbed in my work, the surroundings earned only passing interest. Without work that provides essentials for living and no close knit friends or family, we look to the place itself as that which needs to be changed. When life is out of balance I look at the heaviest object as the one that might need to be moved
“It may seem sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing. And it’s true: we don’t. That’s a bit scary, but you can take comfort in knowing that nobody else knows how to do what we’re doing either… so there are no experts in what we’re doing. Except for us: we are becoming experts as we do this.” Tony Hsieh of Zappo’s
Posted in living.
– March 6, 2010
A spinning spoon will make froth. So I determine not to make froth. I like to live my life as if it were a model I am building and I am more interested in process than having a cut and dried future vision. I strive for success but prefer to keep the end picture fuzzy, variable. So this post series is about flawed thinking, instances of poor business sense, bad decisions, hasty judgements, a string of mistakes. And when I forget to draw from history I make the same mistake twice or on occasion over and over again. In here too, is hard work, determination to never never never give up (thank you Winston Churchill), and to stay small, focused, and light on my feet. Enjoy the process. I can choose when to plough on or when to turn away. I am no cruiseliner as a designer. I’m one of those fast rubber dinghy boats. I have a short life to live, and a lot to do. My field for several years has been making patterns for architectural interiors. My dream is always to work with splendid architects, get my work manufactured large in scale in transparent or translucent materials. Stack them or hang them in layers. The site is STUDIODOON.
From there I go to a tiny scale. Business card scale. Networking cards for anyone who has not joined a company that strips their name on to the standard company card everyone else has. Or simply want a card completely their own. These are custom cards, designed differently for each individual. They carry all kinds of networking data that would never appear on a company card. I call them DOONCARDS. Anyone can use them but adults have an understanding of the intimate interaction when cards are exchanged. Young people generally don’t know the game. I have to create opportunities for kids to demonstrate to themselves how smoothly these cards can factor in their relationships. Great project. Kids live in a virtual cloud and here is one tiny physical item that one carries and gives away and it has all one’s information on it. One buys a piece of personal artwork and gets a thousand cards for free. Carving the marketing to be a fish through water is a slippery process. DOONCARDS have yet to make money.
To fill in blanks, what else can I offer? I looked at my illustration skills, waiting for me to pick them up and dance again. I started doing portraits. Narrow focus once more. There is a wide application base here. From execs in annual reports to magazine features, every person is a portrait. I bring a fresh flat graphic style to it, mix it with some of my photography and I call the venture DOONFACE.
This posits a classic dilemma. When you take a direction and work at it, no matter what your field, and it does not yield income what do you do? How long do you keep at it. Persist or turn away? I’m squarely in the persistence camp. My gut is my guide. Throw in some common sense to stack the odds in my favor. Work hard. I’ll write further about these ventures but right now the point is there is no income from this work. My frustration is that this effort appears commercially viable and yet no commerce going on. I see viability because it is visible in the market. It exists throughout print and electronic media daily. (See Tony Hsieh’s comment in the above post). So I spread my images out to potential clients. Calls and emails. Voicemails. The dark cage on the ocean floor, that’s what I think of voicemail.
Financially we sit on an ocean floor as well. This is serious instability. How we get through this, is what this blog is about. Negotiating with myself now takes strange turns. Should I stack shelves in a supermarket? I already got passed over at Kinkos. You had better honor your education, I told myself. More thought about change and persistence. This time I have no chips to bring to the table. Nada. Flat broke. We used up our resources getting this house and moving in. We sold a great old Land Rover three months ago. And now we are below sea level it seems, and it’s scary. We will be forced out of here in a few weeks and if this is point A, we don’t have a clue how to get to point B. It’s the middle of a long cold winter.
Something nags at me. Instability runs through this like a river. Right now I can’t see light. Hard to make sense. There is work out there and I have to bring it home. Move closer to where there is a density of the stuff. The first time I went to New York was for raw excitement and I stayed and worked commercially for fifteen years. In New York there is always another possibility. The rhythm of projects and being paid is needed. I want my work in bedrooms and backpacks and the back seat of the car. Design inside life. Putting into play, at this late stage, the business of being a designer and illustrator, but with real, not imaginary clients.
Making sure that internet bill is paid is a monthly scramble. But we have learned how to do a fresh home cooked dinner for five dollars. Lessons are burning.
Posted in DOON, business, living.
– February 27, 2010
How long did I spend deciding to write this blog? Ten minutes. “Should I write about what’s going on?” I asked Gayle. “Actually talk about money. How many bloggers talk about their money situations unless they are dispensing advice, or buffing their prosperity hair before heading out to brunch. Lunch. Coffee. Whatever. Who talks about the crap one goes through? Should I do that?
Is there a speck of value here for people?” “Hmm. It’s a bold thing to do,” says she. Leaving the decision, of course, to me.
There is a certain amount of fakery going on. Ask someone how things are going. The most frequent answer I get is, ” Well, yeah, OK, though things are pretty tough out there.”
No shit.
Another thing. Do I protect the wicked? How about the innocent? Perhaps I’ll do it the way I do just about everything. Make it up as I go along. It isn’t an entirely blase way to read life. It’s a working method. Process. It all comes out of the same pot of stew, the way my life hums. And given my current circumstances, I am not doing it well.
Yes, unemployed. It’s a depression. Sometimes I envy those with jobs. Monday is my favorite day of the week. One weekend, I’d like to know what’s going to happen on Monday. Sometimes I am frightened, really frightened. It passes. I am sitting and standing, no prosthetics, no cancer or heart disease. I am one lucky guy. I have a beautiful wife. I have two amazing dogs. And I have, with increasing frequency an unease in my chest.
Right off, a few relevant details. I don’t drink and have not had a drink in almost eighteen years. I don’t smoke. I have no problem with discipline in getting work made. I work without thinking about it as work. Working on images is the most relaxing activity because it is so focused and in some kind of zone. The world cannot hurt me when I am making images.
I have a problem getting paid. I’m not the stupidest brick in the wall. I read books, magazines, blogs, newspapers, opinions. Advice. Business stories. Love them. How the titans did it. What on earth goes on in Richard Branson’s head? I have a fascination about how the major success stories happen. I grew up without television and was twenty two tears old when I owned my first TV. Thank you South Africa, for being the second last country on the planet to give your population television. I think India was last. So reading goes back to my crib. Nothing like a great new book, or a short burst of wit and wisdom from an online voice.
“You are SO talented, I hear, nearly day in day out. I am sick of it. Oh, the compliment sits well with me, but my inner voice answers, “So?”
I am broke. I have been broke for a year. No, eighteen months. Not two grand in the bank broke. Ten dollars for the weekend broke.
And this is the part that might be taboo. So I’ll dance with it African style. Personal finance is kept to oneself. Do not discuss politics or money or religion. Well religion I don’t care about, I got that squared away years ago. Politics was great sport during the election. Now it’s just an argument and the public is pissed off. Politics is too big, it has fallen off the table and made a mess on the floor. Too many cleaners and salesmen, too big a government. I leave it there. But my bank balance? Hey, that’s no one’s business.
Which is why I am going to write this blog and attach pictures that have absolutely nothing to do with the content. Because I take pictures, thousands of them, and this is where I’ll post them. I’ll write this blog because we are at point zero. From here there is only beginning. There is no end here, just the starting. I have absolutely no idea where this blog will go because I have no idea where tomorrow is going. Yes I know no-one does either, but if you have had a job for thirty years and a cubicle and there are no signs you are being let go Friday, well, maybe you have just a little more wiggle-room than I at this moment. If you are in this position, count yourself lucky and work very hard. You need your job.
Posted in money.
– February 23, 2010
For the third time in a year we will move house. We tried two small towns of upper New York State including the beautiful lower Hudson Valley, but sadly, they are filled with transparent buildings, one empty store after another. We also found out a thing or two about internet marketing and making money working purely online. We followed the some sage advice only to find it lacked the right flavor for our soup. There is little expertise to follow. We beat our own path and right now, face to face contact, in the design business it seems, is essential. So we spiral back to our roots, older, wiser, with some hard earned lessons won. New York offers opportunity and we hope to plant ourselves on its doorstep, a quick train ride from Grand Central. We will do our best work ever.
Posted in energy.
– February 22, 2010
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