Setting aside the arrogance of an article centered on an unsolicited JPG of the easiest page of a site to tackle—he “spent a couple hours redesigning [their] front page”—I’m amazed that anyone purporting to be a professional interface designer would assume a night of Photoshop earns them the right to be smug. It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function. It’s easy to look at their site versus your comp and go, “See, mine’s better. You guys must really suck at this.” Unsolicited designs, if they’re going to be done at all, should be communicated with class, humility, & a ton of research.

Andrew Wilkinson wrote a similar article recently redesigning the Zappos.com homepage and, while he was summarily ripped to internet shreds in this Hacker News thread, he was graciously responded to by Brian Kalma, the Director of UX/Web Strategy at Zappos. Wilkinson says stuff like, “I don’t know if your designers are using Photoshop 6 or what…here’s a tutorial to share with them.” Kalma responds with, “I appreciate your thoughts, your creativity and your care.” The company shows more humility than the designer, which speaks volumes about Zappos’ corporate culture and employees, and highlights a forgotten nugget of knowledge—there are real people on the other side of those sites.

Somewhere along the way on the web, a lot of designers and developers have abandoned common courtesy for condescending quips that drip with pride and ignorance. And these sorts of unsolicited designs, apart from their accompanying snarky commentary, would be interesting cases studies in what young designers think up, apart from the external factors affecting large sites. However, with the attitude they’re currently wrapped in, it’s hard to separate the message from the messenger.

But back to AmericanAirlines… apparently one of the UX Architects who worked on AA.com responded to Curtis’ article under the guise of “Mr. X,” talking about their process, how huge the team creating the myriad of AA.com content and functionality is, how it takes relatively no effort to create a homepage comp (”You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives.”), and how enterprise-level companies don’t turn on a dime. He closed with some specific details about upcoming improvements to the site and signed his letter “Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent)”

Only he did get fired. Even anonymous airing of corporate secrets is still a violation of most Non-Disclosure Agreements. And since little in corporate world is truly anonymous, it only took AmericanAirlines an hour to search their email servers, identify the guy, and show him the door.

Curtis posted The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X telling a bit of the tale. He says, “AA fired Mr. X because he cared…enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could.” No, they fired him because he violated his contract, in a very public way. His attempt to “clear the company’s name” made them look slow, dysfunctional, and incapable of internal communication between departments. Even if that’s all true, no company wants that image portrayed online by an employee. Employees can’t put their personal agenda ahead of the company’s agenda.

Companies with shareholders may very well be incapable of tolerating the openness and transparency so many social media folks clamor for. When every corporate decision you make influences the bottom line, in real time no less, you seek and destroy bad PR wherever it is found. They’re not clueless, they’re heartless—they exist to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. This isn’t horrifying; this is every day in most of corporate America.

So where does that leave us? A 21-year-old wrote a blog post. A guy broke the corporate rules and got fired. The internet (and the blogger!) is outraged. The name-calling continues, as everyone blames the big, bad, clueless, hopeless company. Mr. X will likely land somewhere less corporate, where speaking his mind is welcomed and his designs will see the light of internet day.

But the web will still be full of arrogant, uninformed, polarizing, self-promoting, controversy-creating content that has ramifications no one wants to own up to. And consequently, the web will still be lacking in common courtesy, humility, and the admittance that most of us don’t know best. Which is sad, mostly because it’s true.

Full Disclosure: I was an Interactive Art Director for AmericanAirlines’ advertising Agency of Record in ‘06/’07

So, what’s the problem? Isn’t this the missional mindset of learning a culture and then meeting people where they are? The church is attempting to use all the available tools to spread the Gospel and utilize a visual language that people understand—how can that possibly be a bad thing?

Simply put, we typically do it poorly. We have an over-inflated view of the artistic merit of our endeavors. We have an underdeveloped sense of the time, effort, skill and passion it takes to execute world class creative ideas.

Approximately 18 kazillion awesome things happen around us everyday, each with the potential to inspire and spark creativity in us, but more often than not we choose to flip through yet another graphic design annual or web design gallery, look at the same handful of magazines that everyone else in our field is flipping through and skim RSS feeds instead of trying to dig into research and study. We employ the tired, misused excuse of there being “nothing new under the sun” to justify our latest poorly-executed pop culture parody. At some point, we stop cultivating and start copying. Artists and designers walk in a strange tension between derivative inspiration and flat-out plagiarism. The former is natural and healthy, driven by curiosity and a desire to learn and experiment. The latter is a deadly combination of ignorance, laziness and lack of skill.

In the church’s deficiency of knowledge about our own history and our willful abdication of visual influence in the last 200 years, we have become artistically lazy, careless and negligent—as if nothing is truly at stake in the art and design we make. “Good enough” is often just that to us—as if God is only concerned with truth & justice, not beauty & craftsmanship as well. These passive, lazy art and design practices will consistently produce immature artists and designers who are incapable of creating compelling work. They will likely only produce sub-standard works while trying to play cultural catch-up with the rest of the world.

The church is currently experiencing a resurgence of creative expression, which is welcomed, but we’d rather not be bothered with using our brains when someone else has already done the work for us. And if Jesus didn’t explicitly command us to “Love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart, soul, and mind” in the Gospels, we might be able to justify our actions. But for the Christian, thinking, worshiping and working are inextricably linked by that command.

The newly (re)perceived need for creativity in the modern American church brings with it a swell of untrained, uneducated, under-skilled artists and designers into positions of visual influence. Those positions are frequently the first impression anyone has of the local church and of Jesus Christ. But most volunteers and staff members in these roles, myself included, have learned on the job, teaching ourselves along the way. So, where do we turn for education, inspiration and improvement? How does an untrained person worship God by using their mind and serve others by refining their creative talents?

First stop: your local library. It’s a free education in exchange for time and effort. I’ve spent the last six years trying to make up for not studying art or design in college and I’ve done it all for “a dollar fifty in late charges,” as Will Hunting would say. Don’t make the mistake of thinking there is a shortcut to learning the basics of your field, or that they are unnecessary. We can’t build a strong creative culture on top of a foundation full of holes, so take the time to build on solid ground.

Second stop: everywhere else. It’s not just about art and design; we need to begin looking outside our field(s) for inspiration. “The thing about architecture is that everybody reads too many [architecture] books. Architects look at architecture, but they don’t open their eyes and look beyond that,” says Mark Dytham, an architect himself. You’re probably not an architect, but you can replace “architecture” with your field of choice and it still rings true. Whatever it is that you do every day, chances are you spend your time reading, thinking, dreaming and planning similarly to many of your peers. Too little of that and you’re inept. But too much inward focus and you lack objectivity or the chance for original thought. Then it’s easy to slide into creative cruise control. And then it’s tempting to copy and not think.

As fashion designer Paul Smith challenges, “if you can’t find inspiration in the things around you, you’re not looking hard enough.” Magazine spreads from Smith’s Small Paul campaign make frequent appearances in my office. So do articles about new takes on craft, books on photography, architecture and interior design, a calendar of live performances, places to visit and a laptop full of links relating to installation art, new music, furniture, comfortable shoes and how to grow tomatoes for a few weeks longer than my neighbor. In fact, after building that initial foundation, I find the less graphic design I look at these days, the less my graphic design looks like everything else. I started collecting magazine grid layouts for inspiration to use in web design user interfaces. Hand-drawn lettering has helped to shake up my Swiss typography sensibilities. Gardening gets me out of the office and into nature. Morning walks give me time to let my mind wander, free from action items and pixel-pushing. You can’t cultivate anything new using the same raw materials you’ve used before. Get outside, literally and metaphorically, & watch the work you do branch out and improve.

Martin Luther wrote to pastors and preachers, “pray, read, study, be diligent… [T]his evil, shameful time is not the season for being lazy, for sleeping and snoring.” Should we, as artists and designers, be content to settle for good enough when good enough is so obviously “sleeping and snoring” in light of our culture? In an era where images are often more powerful than words, should the image-makers consistently choose the easiest solutions and abdicate any responsibility for the cultivation of a creative culture? Our challenge isn’t to strive for originality above all else; originality can quickly become a pressure-laden, unattainable goal and an idol to bow down before. Originality may likely be a byproduct of hard work, but it can’t be the goal if we haven’t already been diligently working towards competence in what we do.

Our challenge is to be craftsmen. To make good things. To kill the deformed, cobbled-together monster of pop culture references, derivative designs and lazy practices and watch God birth new creativity and skill in us. We can honor Him with the work of our hands and our minds. We can reflect the image we were created in by creating good things. We can build a culture of creativity. But it takes more work than we’ve been willing to give.

This article was originally published in the Sep/Oct 2008 issue of COLLIDE Magazine

The problem with these lists is that logos don’t do anything outside the context where they exist & the environment where they live. A logo in a big list of other logos is simply one more visual cue to identify something. It’s not a brand, it’s just a logo. Logos, in and of themselves, are far less important than we think they are. With no context of what the represented company, organization, product, etc. is or how that logo is supported by typography, colors, standards or more importantly, culture, people & ideas, logos are fairly worthless. A logo can be described along the lines of “a combination of letters and/or graphics arranged in a distinctive design used to identify something in advertising & promotion.” They are a calling card, a big nametag. Some of them are ugly, some are beautiful, some are clever. With the right strategy & personnel, a logo is easy to manage, use and/or implement. In most cases, we directly control the destiny of your logo in terms of how it makes its way into the public eye. “Reproduce no smaller than 50.8mm,” “Use Pantone® 17-2031 TCX for print,” “80lb text weight with raised lettering for letterhead”. We’ve got our visual identity on lockdown, so we’re good, right? We’re like, totally “branded.”

A logo may communicate “modern, friendly, professional” but the people who interact with our brand may see unclear wayfinding signage, a poorly-navigable website or, perhaps worst of all, lackluster customer service. Even if you hired a professional designer who picked the “right” typefaces, the bold complimentary colors & the coolest award-winning letterhead ever, all the logo in the world can’t change someone’s impression of you because everything meant to support your logo actually says the opposite about you.

Do you ever wish you could hear what other people are saying about you when you’re not around? Those are the conversations that define you and your brand. Did you catch that? You’re not in complete control. Your brand is who you are, what you do. No amount of standards, guidelines, rules or forbidden phrases will reign that in completely. A brand is built from perceptions, impressions, experiences — all of which happen in the mind of someone who isn’t us. How can we possibly think we can control that? Your brand has a life of its own the minute you interact with people for the first time. We can do our best to direct the conversation, to be transparent & open, but we have to admit (revel in!) the fact that our intentions in creating a brand are often irrelevant in the way that brand will be interpreted by others. You may have turned the ignition, but you’re just along for the ride.

Your brand should be ever-changing. Branding endeavors should understand & implement strategies that acknowledge the relative smallness of the logo in the overall take-away impressions of what we do. By all means, have a great logo. Make people jealous. Win awards. Be Big Chief Awesome Logo. But more importantly, make sure you’re actually living up to what that logo conveys in all your interactions.

Brands, branded, branding — the terminology is all wrong for what we need to be doing. If we want to be effective in our brand-building, we can’t approach it as an attempt to sear our message onto unsuspecting people (whether they like it or not). Branding like that is only skin-deep. It doesn’t add value to others, it imposes our rigid view of who we are onto them. It doesn’t involve anyone else. It isn’t interactive (and how can anything survive right now if it isn’t interactive?)

If our strategy is so dogmatic and inward-focused, we’ll always be limited by what we perceive ourselves to be. In turn, we’ll burn those same limitations into the people we’re trying to reach. We’ll never grow beyond the initial mark because we’ve choked all the life and possibility out of our brand by dogmatically trying to define it as a static, fixed thing. That disrespects, diminishes & seeks to manipulate people by shaping them into our image when we should realize that they’re the ones defining us.

That’s partially true, but deadly false if it’s your sole viewpoint. If design doesn’t show up on our radar until the end of a project and we see it as nothing more than the icing, we’ll probably get a pretty looking, icing-covered poop cake. From a distance, it looks great; the closer you get to it, the more you realize something stinks. And let’s hope no one has to actually use it, because they won’t walk away happy, much less ever wanting an encore performance. Second chances are hard to come by for those that don’t value design.

Good design is not a slick add-on or an optional extra. Good design is an essential part of every interaction, every touchpoint, every service opportunity, every creative endeavor, and every communication between your organization & your customers/guests. The wayfinding signage in your local mall or the international airport, the best path of traffic from the door to the register in an electronics or grocery store, the number of steps it takes me to accomplish a given task through your system, the flow of an event — all of these things are designed, or at least should be.

Design is a choice. It is intentional. For every dollar you spend & hour you devote to improving the design culture of your organization, you make a succinct, profound statement about what is valuable & important to you - about the character of your organization. Good design reflects the core of what you stand for and what/who you value. An all-encompassing design culture and strategy in every aspect of your thinking is a more tangible representation of your identity than any clever mission statement or advertisement. And if your design sucks, it simply means you don’t care about people. You don’t bother with their experiences, their perceptions, their take-away impressions, the way they move through your environments or see your world. You don’t care about them.

We can show people that we value their experience(s), top-to-bottom, and that we’re constantly thinking of how to solve problems, ease friction, remove barriers, & serve them in World Class Ways. We have a huge opportunity at changing someone’s expectations (not a word to be taken lightly), but a consistent culture of poorly designed experiences, communications, websites, & transactions shows the opposite. In that, we choose not to alter their perceptions or challenge the status quo. We do business as usual, which isn’t nearly enough.

Tom Peters says, “[Design is] damned hard work, and it requires constant care and attention and love and affection and obsession.” If you can’t sustain it, don’t start it. Don’t even bother. But if you don’t start it, it means you don’t see it as a valuable enough endeavor (too soft a word? How about mission?) to find or build a passionate design culture that owns every experience you create at every level.

Like Tom said, it isn’t easy. But it matters.

70 Gordon Street’s yard was full of well-kept tall flowers, blooming plants, & climbing vines. It was the beauty high-point of my morning commute. The wildflowers on the sidewalk side of the yard grew so tall & lush that the gardener kept them from sprawling out onto the concrete with thick twine lassos. I imagine it was difficult for her to even walk in her own yard with ease.

68 Gordon Street’s yard was full of weeds and bare patches of New England dirt.

Left to its own devices & the whims of its owner, 68 Gordon Street would remain a neglected, overgrown, ugly excuse for a yard. But a completely natural, oddly unexpected thing started to happen each week. Tiny spots of color started showing up in the 68 Gordon Street yard. A wildflower here & there, obviously smaller than its neighborly counterparts, but there nonetheless, growing between the weeds. Splashes of beauty, brought about by a little wind & long periods of proximity.

I don’t know that there’s a specific timeline at work here, but sooner or later, things start wearing off on you if you’re in proximity to them for long enough. If you want to grow & learn in any field, the quickest way to some form of success in that regard is to learn from others. Put yourself around what you want to be. Be near. Be in it. Behold what you want to become. I don’t say this with a goal of emulating. I think the greater goal has to be to contextualize it all. Make it your own. But if you want to make beautiful art, put yourself in the company of people making beautiful art. If you want to be an Olympic short track speed skater, don’t waste your time at the local rink thinking about it, go find world class skaters. Get to learning. Simply being around people who are trying new things & creatively learning will rub off on you. It’s inevitable.

If you don’t know anyone doing what you want to do, go get a library card. Start checking out the mass of wisdom & knowledge that’s available to you every day, free of charge.

This principle doesn’t always play out in the beauty-from-ashes manner; the opposite can be true as well. If you’re an optimistic, good-natured kind of person & you exist everyday in a work environment or social circle full of cynical complainers, they will eventually wear you down to a sliver of your former (or future) self. If you’re deeply motivated & full of ambition, sit in the company of the wrong personalities for too long & you’ll find yourself thinking the status quo looks appealing. And then you’ll die. It just might take another 40 years.

Both sides of the proximity equation have the potential to embolden you to greatness (or at least to next-ness, which is highly underrated.) Being in proximity of charisma, skill, beauty, & wisdom will craft you into something to be reckoned with. Conversely, being in proximately of lackadaisical, cynical, wet blanket types can push you forward in a search for more fulfilling work & life.

Or it can break you.

When it comes to what you keep close, & what keeps you close, choose carefully. Choose wisely. Choose for the long term while living in the short term. You’re losing or gaining your creative soul with every step you take towards or away from the people & attitudes in your periphery.