Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: David, welcome aboard to the show. For our audience, seeing Block block and like, no, there is no family relation. We look into that. It's just a coincidence. I saw your book and I was just delighted. My confession is that I was a dungeon master when I was a kid. I played Dungeons and Dragons. I was all up and about. My favorite fantasy book, which really opened me to this whole area, was a dragon Twilight, if people know, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weisz. Wonderful, wonderful book series.
You decided to write a book about design through fantasy. What the hell?
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Exactly. Well, I've been a graphic designer for about 33, 34 years, and I've been a design teacher at a high school here in Southern California for about nine years now. And to be honest with you, I really just wanted to be able to find a way to reach down and into the middle schools and let them know a little bit about design and, you know, hopefully, especially in my district, get them interested in coming to my program. That was kind of the very beginning of it, and it just turned into sort of a passion project that took me about the last year and a half, and I finally got it published.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: There's something so fundamentally delightful about what you're doing, because my philosophy about teaching is that it's not about teaching somebody something. It's about inspiring the love of the thing itself. And I feel like without us, you know, knowing each other, I feel like that's what you're doing. I am so, you know, envious of your students to. To have you as a teacher. I think it's so delightful. With that said, what is the big thing that you try to convey to your students about design throughout the. The program?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: That's actually a really, really good question. I think the. One of the. Well, I'll be honest with you. I start my entire year off with. I talk. We talk about this book called Steal like an Artist. I know it's backwards, but Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon. It's a really great concept, and it's something that I push throughout the whole year. And what it means, basically, is that when we look at the inspiration that. That surrounds us, the work that's out there in the world currently, we want to take inspiration from that, steal the best parts of it for the work that we create and turn it into the work that is our own style. And so not copying, but stealing. Right. And there's a big difference. In fact, Picasso said, let's see if I'll probably ruin this, but he said that good artists or bad artists copy Great artists steal, I love. And that's essentially the thing that I pushed throughout the whole year, is to inspire yourself by looking at the world around us and the design that's out there in the world and take the best parts of that and use it in your. In your work. And that's really the best way to create your own design style.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: I think that's absolutely delightful. I want to. I want to. I want to drill into this. What exactly are you stealing from the artist? Is it inspiration? Is it the way that they feel? Is it a technical element?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: It's. That's actually all the above, but essentially. So in the background here, we've got.
We've got the Aladdin. This is the Phantom of the Opera. It's a sequel to it. So let's just say, for instance, I really like the way that they've got that mask there. They've got the black and the red. It's a really nice layout, but obviously I'm not going to steal it. But I could easily take the way that they did that background and utilize it in my design or, you know, just take. Take inspiration from it and come up with my own way of doing that. So that that's essentially what it is. Or, for instance, like, I don't know, you can't see it over here, but I have another one for the Fiddler on the Roof, where the typography was created with brush strokes. And that's an instance where you could take and steal the idea of doing type made from brush strokes and do that in your own project. That's kind of the idea.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: What are your students who kind of go through the program?
They come back to you after a year or two or three, or at the end of the program. What do they tell you? What do they say?
[00:04:16] Speaker B: It's interesting you bring that up. Actually, I just spoke with a student of mine who. He just emailed me a couple days ago.
And I usually get students that when they come back, they're asking for advice, because my program is really what I try to teach in the advanced and honors classes, is about freelancing and starting your own business and what it is to be a freelance designer in the world. And so push that they go out and be a freelancer. But I talk about it, and because it's.
Quite honestly, it's a lot of. A lot of the work that I do on the side is freelance. And so I figured they would probably be in the same boat. But the sort of things that they ask, you know, would be, you know, how do I, how do I do this in business? How do I get my own business going? You know, things like that. I actually, I had a student come back and ask for advice on how to price his work. So, you know, a lot of the students that I have, I would say maybe 75% of them go on to design college or just go out in the world and get a, get a job in the creative industry. You know, my classes have inspired them that much to want to continue.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: That's the compliment I was going to give you. For you to be able to inspire your students in such a way is just such a compliment, honestly. So my son, he had a teacher and he was doing very poorly in math. Now he's gt and we know what he could do and we know his skills. He was just doing poorly. So for us, it was a clear indication that there was an issue with the teacher. We went and we spoke to the counselor. She said, I get it, we're almost done with the year. Just wait for next year. Next year will be better. In that next year, he jumped two grades. She told us he would jump to grades. He did jump two grades in that one year. Now to me, that is mind boggling. And it shows to, you know, parents and students and everybody really the.
I almost want to say the sanctity or the importance of the role of teachers and how they can completely change the lives of going through their programs.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: I'm trying to teach them to see the world like a designer and to interact with things and people as though you're a designer. That, that actually helps them to sort of work through the creative process in their work a little bit easier to understand the world as a designer. Come at the creative industry in the same way that I have and just have fun with it. And because I enjoy it, it's a hobby for me. It's kind of like I design things just because I want to, not just because I'm getting paid. And you know, I've got a stack of sketchbooks that I've kept for the last three decades and I keep it in my class and I share that with my students and I try to instill that with them. Just like it's a way of life. It's not just a job. This is everywhere you go. As a designer, you're going to critique everything you see and it's kind of, you know, it's just the way that it is and it helps you to become a better designer. And so that's really what it is. I try to help them to understand how I see the world and how I interact with the world and try to get them to do the same thing.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Is the ability to be a good designer, is that just something you're born with? Are there people that, no matter what they do, like, that's not the career choice for them? What's the truth of the matter?
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Well, you know what the truth is? I think you can teach anybody to be a good designer. And now, of course, obviously, if you have that skill of you've got the ability to compose things appropriately, make them look good and it just comes to you naturally, that's fantastic. Or if you can draw like I can't draw the human form, if you had a. If you paid me, I can do it.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: For the children or young adults that don't decide to go down that path of design, my sense is that the process and the learnings are still incredibly valuable.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. And just as a continuation of what I was saying, I just remembered it. And this will go along with that is part of the thing that makes a designer a designer is following the creative process. And so that involves research, sketching, refining your sketches, getting feedback, executing the work, and then delivering the work, and in that order. And there are a couple of other steps in there. But essentially, when you follow the creative process, anybody can, as long as you're being, you know, you're doing as much as you can, finding as much resources as possible, sketching as much as possible, all of that will help you to come up with a great.
A great design, basically, or a good design, something that works. And you don't have to be somebody that has those skills. You could be somebody that's just learning those skills and you can still come up with something that really works well for you. And along those lines, if you have somebody that's not, let's say they're, they're really not here to be a designer, but they just needed to take my class. They'll walk away from this program with the skills to think like a creative, to go through the creative thought process and understand how to come up with creative ideas. So, absolutely, whether they are going to be an accountant or a designer, they'll come away with an understanding of what it takes to develop creative ideas.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: There is such an understated philosophy, and there was a book written about this. It's called the Ten Faces of Innovation. One of the philosophies there. This is a must read, by the way, on my side. But one of the philosophies There is cross polarization and it's this idea that you can learn a tool or a technique in another discipline such as graphic design, and you can apply that to other places. And here's my argument that I'd like to make the audience that the process that you described is so wonderful it can be used in business, as you said, in finance. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I can tell you, you just laid out the ways to innovate in building companies. It's absolutely delightful. How did you work with them towards that moment where they had that epiphany where the light bulb turned on?
[00:10:49] Speaker B: In the creative process, when you are in the second stage, approximately second or third stage of sketching, coming up with ideas and just generating just lots of things, just throwing out ideas, there's something that can happen during that process. And I'm sure you've heard the term happy accident, right. So that's, that is something that actually happens quite often. So when you're, you're iterating on a design, let's say, for instance, we're working on a movie poster design. We just watched Ferris Bueller's Day off and I had, we sat for two full days and just watched the whole movie. And now they're starting to get in to design their own version of the movie poster. Now to do that, they've got to. The very first stage is research. They gather as many different ideas, as many different movie poster ideas as they can and just inundate themselves with different ideas and then sketch compositions. And this is really where you see a lot of them kind of go, I don't really know what to do. So I tell them, start by designing, sketch out exactly what you see and then iterate on that idea. Put the title at the bottom, put the title sideways, put the title diagonally, you know, do different things with that idea and then move on to another concept and iterate on that one. And it's that whole process that kind of opens their eyes to, you know, I should not just take the very first thing that pops into my head because that's typically not going to be the right answer. And that is something that carries on and is true in lots of different disciplines.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: So let's say for instance, they're in English and they're writing a creative story. If you take the first idea that comes to your mind and just run with it, that could be good. But if you don't think about other concepts, other iterations of that, that story, you don't know, you have no idea whether or not. That's the best that could be. So that's kind of where it comes from. And so after that second step and you see them iterating on their work, you can really kind of the light pop on. Like I didn't realize that I could do that until, you know, you've actually worked it out and worked out the problems and coming up, come up with a brand new solution for that, for those problems.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: You know this, I tell this story all the time. Do you know why WD40 is called WD40? Have you heard this before?
[00:13:17] Speaker B: I've heard it. I don't remember.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Okay. It was the 40th formula they used. There were 39 failed formulas that just did not work. There's an exact similar story. It's not embedded in the name, but with the post its. So the big innovation behind those post its is actually the glue that they used. So you can kind of, you know, it sticks but doesn't stick. So that kind of like really delicate middle situation of the stickiness of the glue, that was the innovation. And I don't remember how many trials they had at it, but it was a lot. It's, you know, failure is just the first step towards success. That's all it is. I tremendously, tremendously appreciate your point, David. I have one last question to you. If you had to go back and give advice to 20 year old David, what would that be?
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you, there's not one guest that I asked that question that they're like, oh, easy question, right?
[00:14:18] Speaker B: I know.
You know, the advice that I would give myself would probably be to don't give up as easily as you have in the past. I don't know how else to say that. Keep pushing forward. If it feels like if something that you're working on feels like there's no solution, try something different. Come at it from a different point of view. Really just, it's like the whole idea about iterating on a sketch. Try something different. Try something different and don't give up. Because you know, once you give up then once you settle, then you've kind of, you've given up on the opportunity to make a better choice. And so when you iterate on ideas, so you know, for instance, if I'm doing a logo and I'm, if I, if I come up with one design idea and I settle with that, then I'm locked into it. But if I don't try other things, then I'm, then I'm stuck. So don't just don't give up. Push yourself until you can't. You're just exhausted. All possible options.
That would be the advice I'd give myself.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: David, thank you so much for coming on our show today. I really appreciate you. It was a lot of fun.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: No problem, Ari. Thank you for having me. And it's nice to meet another block.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: There you go.
