CREATIVE BRIDGES – KATE PABST LECTURE
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 4/18
DAVE ANOLIK:
Kate Pabst and I first worked together 12 years ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I met Kate when I was working for a firm called Prospera. Prospera was the design firm for McCann-Erickson, the mega-huge international advertising agency. Their PR firm was—and still is—Shandwick International, and Prospera was the design firm for that. In the Minneapolis area, Prospera was the very first and only firm doing Web and multimedia. I remember being in a conference with big corporate executives. I was totally intimidated with these senior executives: white males in suits. I was totally out of my element.
This was the first time I ever saw Kate. There was a slam on the door. She was holding a cup of coffee and acted like she was going to spill it on an executive, then slams it down onto the table. Once she had everyone’s attention, she proceeded to run the meeting. When we later worked together, I realized that moment wasn’t an accident and that she has a bag of tricks to lighten a room up to start communicating with people on a very sophisticated level.
With that, Kate is going to talk about her career and what she is doing now. We’re going to go back and forth and I’ll be interacting with Kate.
KATE PABST:
What I am going to show you tonight isn’t necessarily earthshaking work. I’ve seen many presentations over my career, and my career up to now has been 25 years. When I was getting ready for this, I was thinking about all the other presentations I’ve done and seen too. All the ones that have stuck with me are not the ones that were not the eye-candy presentations. But the ones that stuck with me were the presentations where they were talking about their process and their paths—which I find really interesting—and how it shapes us, and their inspirations. That’s how I’m going to present tonight.
Displays a timeline
This is a timeline of my career on the left. The first time I ever saw something as a graphic designer was probably in third or fourth grade. I remember looking at this lunchbox with beautiful blues, line quality, compositions, and typeface. I was in awe of it. Not just from the character or any of that stuff. There was something else that happened. I didn’t have the language at that age to know what it was, but now looking back at it, I know that it was the first time I saw something differently.
I collect lunchboxes. I have over 150 of them. I collect them because when I was growing up, there were only three networks. Those networks pretty much defined your cultural cues and that was how people identified themselves. It’s funny; when friends or clients come over, they see these selves that are filled to the ceiling with lunchboxes. And they pick up the lunchbox that really made a difference for them. They would say, “I had that one as a kid!” and it would be such a great way to start a relationship. It’s a great way to share intimacy with a client, because when someone connects to you at that level so fast, it becomes really, really fun.
Displays an image of a lunchbox
This is a lunchbox I didn’t have. I actually hated the Osmonds. I was a Jackson 5 person. But what I wanted to show this to you for is because the brother on the upper right, someone scratched his front tooth off. When I found this lunchbox, it just made me laugh. As I was looking at it, I was thinking about the little brother who scratched the tooth off of his sister’s lunchbox and imagined whole scenarios that had this lunchbox. I am showing this to you because I think it is important in my early path. And as designers, we are all storytellers. Anyone who looked at this would have a completely different story for it.
What is important about the timeline of my career is not so much where I worked, but the departures. I entered the design field where technology was changing really fast, and I was fortunate that I didn’t know anything so I didn’t know any rules. This allowed me to embrace all the technologies and was very flexible. I never said ‘no’ to anything. I was fearless.
I started as a preschool teacher major in college. I realized I would be wiping noses and hanging up shoes for the rest of my life for very little money. What’s important about this first start to my path is that this is what I had to look to for mentorship in graphic design. There were no graphic design schools. I had nobody to lead me. Looking back at it, going into preschool teaching was a way for me to be creative and to be expressive. It didn’t last long. I quickly changed my major to marketing and advertising. But when I soon came close to graduating, I dropped out because I started panicking about how much I didn’t know.
DAVE:
The notion of being a graphic designer in that era wasn’t very common. Unlike now, which is commonly known, no one knows about this career path.
KATE:
I then moved to Chicago and found a place that taught graphic design. And it was all very abstract. But it still gave me no tangible direction. So then I moved on to Triton College. It was a small, two-year school in Chicago. But, the important part about this departure was that it taught tangible skills. I learned how to run a camera the size of a room. It was really intense. But I learned a tangible thing. I can actually go out and now look for work. It was a huge departure for me, and that was a job.
I now had a portfolio, and I knew what terms meant. I got hired by this company in Chicago called GTE directories to their creative services department. I took this job because they were starting to get into this thing called “computer graphics”. I didn’t know what it was but it sounded pretty damn interesting to me. A lot of other designers I heard talking fearfully about it and saying how it was something that would put them out of work. And I didn’t think so. I saw it as another tool to me. I also saw it as a pet. I think I got the job because of that. No one else wanted to and didn’t want to head in that direction. So that was another departure for me.
I then moved to Texas and was working print and computer graphics. And this was not a Macintosh. I haven’t even heard of Macintosh at that point. This system was an AVL system. It was huge. It was a massive turnkey system. It output slides and you had a real 35 mm camera that was attached to this thing. There were 12 users around the world who could use this system. This was the emerging computer graphics. Nobody else was doing anything. This was the first machine on the market.
This was literally multimedia, where you had multiple slides and projectors to create images. I didn’t know what I was doing and neither did the people above me. I had a lot of freedom to make it up. I learned a lot.
I freelanced for Southland Corporation. We did a lot of in-house projects for Southland. But we also had a lot of outside projects like the Boy Scouts, distributors, and a ton of diverse clients. Texas was a great place to be. A lot of agencies were leading the new trends.
DAVE:
Wasn’t there something going on in Texas in the 80s?
KATE:
Oh! Junk bonds. Junk bonds were what brought it down. Clients were throwing a lot of money at projects and then the junk bond crisis happened where corporate raiders who tried to come in and take over.
DAVE:
Was there a comparison between the takeovers and the dot-com bubble in the culture and the work?
KATE:
Exactly. It was the same. The culture was this faucet that would never turn off. There was a lot of money that suddenly disappeared. Here’s another departure for me: My company was actually the last to be liquidated because I was doing the slides of the other companies that were being liquidated to try to stop the corporate raiders. So I knew I had job security as long as they had something to sell. The way liquidation happens for something like this is for them to buy the employees’ stocks back so they will have the majority of the shares. Then they can do what they want with it. But it made them very cash poor; no one would give them any loans. They ended up getting the cash loans from Japan or China. And the way they were paying it back was by liquidating companies. So as long as there was something to sell, we were okay. I saw that coming and eventually, I got laid off.
DAVE:
I just want to say that that was such a great lesson for designers to be hyperaware of the content they’re working on. If you find yourselves motoring through a case study, corporate document, etc… and you’re just laying down blocks of text, well there might be some pretty important information that you’re laying out. But it probably paints the environment you’re in.
KATE:
So I was suddenly unemployed. I had a few margaritas and then started my own business. It was a huge departure for me because I went into business with someone else. We did silk screening, I did some freelancing, some advertising, and I bought this stat camera. It goes in a room the size of a closet. You put whatever you’re shooting on the bottom and the film on the top in a pitch-black room. Once you shoot it, you put it through a developer and you have a black and white ‘positive’. What was important with this for me was that I started experimenting with what to put on the stat camera. I started putting pencil shavings, string, textures, and stuff like that.
I also started a greeting card line and t-shirt line that was nationally distributed. We had a store too that had art, t-shirts, and other artists in it. At this point, we felt really stretched. So when we got the opportunity, we sold the store and moved to southern Florida. It sounded good at the time and it felt financially good to get out of all that. I knew it was a bad idea even before we finished packing it up, but we knew we just had to go with it. So three months after we got there, we were trying to figure out how to leave.
Southern Florida isn’t really the best place to live. It rains for like an hour and then it gets sweaty hot. It’s unbelievably uncomfortable and not a lot of fun.
DAVE:
Your business at this point was evolving too, right? You were creating all these cards by hand?
KATE:
Yeah. What’s unique about the cards was that they weren’t category cards. They weren’t “Happy Birthday” type or event driven. They were more possibility cards. Stores had a hard time figuring out where to put them. They weren’t used to that. It was brand new for them. But now you see random category cards everywhere.
Florida was so bad that I finally put up a map and took out the darts. Wherever that dart landed, the next big city closest to it was where we were moving. So I threw the dart and it landed on Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So I said, “Okay, that was practice.”
When I pulled the dart out, my phone rang and it was a friend of I talk to once a year to catch up. She lived in Minneapolis and two weeks later, we were packed up and had moved to Minneapolis.
So we moved to Minneapolis and I’m still doing the greeting card line. I get this opportunity to go back to school at a school called Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It’s a really good school. I’m getting tired of doing the card buying and it’s to the point where I’m investing a lot of money to keep it going, and I’m not committed to doing that. I’m just ready to learn more about graphic design. I went to MCAD to finish my degree in graphic design and a little bit of painting. What was important about this departure was that I was learning the math for the first time. I was able to bring everything I’ve learned previously to the digital realm and it created this style of design for me, which a lot of the students there didn’t have. They didn’t have the experience to do that.
DAVE:
It sounds like from your experience with the technology, and perhaps from not knowing how to use them and not being afraid of them, that you discovered using technology as a whole.
KATE:
Right. They’re just additional tools. My career has been about not knowing and it was experimental. There was still no web presence yet. In fact, in our lab there was a computer that had Gopher and everyone stayed away from it. I remember listening to the creative directors from Wired magazine saying that they stayed up for three nights to do a website. The one thing I remember them saying was that the web needs graphic designers. And that’s all I heard.
After I finished MCAD, I got a job at Prospera, where I met Dave. It was the only design firm in Minneapolis doing web work so that was a magnet for me. You didn’t have anyone over you because you knew more just from hacking around on it than anybody around you. There were no rules so you could really push it. My whole career was about having no rules and really pushing it.
DAVE:
There was a really interesting conflict between “print” designers, multimedia designers, and web designers in these traditional agencies. Graphic design was a very formalized structure, especially in Minneapolis, which was very Swiss and European. It was very disciplined. The concept of the Internet at the same time was that those things shouldn’t have married.
KATE:
That’s true. At that time, no one knew where to put projects. They didn’t know who should own those projects. And those projects would like putting a brochure online. I worked a lot of tech guys who hated design. It was just a big struggle every step of the way.
At Prospera, the creative director thought I did websites, but I have never done websites. I just came out of MCAD, but my work must have looked like it could be translated to web or something. So I was like, “Okay. I can do that.” So I figured out how to do it and I ended up doing a lot of first generation websites for big corporations like Hanes, Hanes Her Way, Shell, Northwest Airlines, and companies like that.
DAVE:
To show what it’s like to be a graphic designer at the time, when you were there, no one really knew how to manage you. You didn’t know who your coworkers were. You just kind of showed up. “Who’s the web person?” “What’s a web person?”
KATE:
Yeah, it was an interesting time. You would sit with these major clients and you were going, “Yeah, you can do that!” without knowing what to expect.
I then left Prospera to go to Larson. I did major websites, like SPAM. I made their first website, which I will show you later. In fact, it just came down 6 months ago. 10 years, that website was up, and they just relaunched. But the website was tiny. It was 640 x 480. I also worked on children’s hospital and got a lot of experience in how to communicate to different industries and how to communicate on the web. I would think about how and what the users to do.
Another departure was in 2000 when I left Larson and went to a company called Aisle 5 to be a design director. I worked with Phillip there. I did all web. It was pretty much a tech-centric company when I got there. There were six designers, and me. It was kind of a shock for me because I have always come from design-centered companies. Design is king, there was a lot of support, and you don’t have to explain yourself as you worked.
DAVE:
2000 was just eight years ago. Immediately after the dot-com bubble burst, there was a shift towards design. Design then was viewed as extravagant, as fluff, as candy, and there was a push for a utilitarian software and feel for experience. It’s been pulled back now, but for about a year, there was almost an anti-design movement.
KATE:
That was also during the time of the dot-com going crazy. We had meetings with people and they would be interviewing us but it always seemed as though they were trying to prove to us that their business was worthy. At this time, my art started rising up again and I joined a gallery in Minneapolis. It was a gallery of 12 artists and we would have a 2-person show once a year and catch other shows as a group. I was starting to do a lot of art. It was interesting to me because I started to see a different kind of art than what I was producing over the years.
I soon left and joined velvetpeel. I’m still with velvetpeel, although I don’t work fulltime. I still collaborate on a lot of projects. I started doing print again, but print in a different way. I started doing projects where we had an overarching branding challenge and we just had different ways of communicating it and what is best for the user. Whatever websites we created were always from the user’s point of view and I started adding photography to design. I also started to bring in my own work. Fortunately, it was appropriate for the projects.
I left velvetpeel and joined another company because they did usability primarily, and I thought I didn’t know what I was doing. I was the design director for them, but I wanted to get more about usability because I’m completely fascinated by human beings and why they do what they do and how they do what they do. I have an intuition that I think all designers and communicators do. And if something doesn’t work, you have to figure out why. You’re dealing with human beings, and not with machines.
After a year and a half, I left and now I’m at a company called MRM Worldwide, which weirdly, is kind of where I started, because they’re owned by McCann-Erickson. They used to be Shandwick. They had an advertising agency’s point of view, but we do online marketing campaigns and promotions. I work there four days a week so I can still do a lot of freelance work.
Rather than the next section, I would like to talk about how my career has affected me as a human being and person. I’ll show you my eight commandments before I show you my work. As I do this, I’ll show you random shots that I take. I bring my digital camera everywhere. The digital camera is the one thing that has rocked my world more than anything else. I probably have over 60,000 photos. I use not only to record things, but to experiment. The pictures you’re going to see are just kind of random and won’t sync up with what I’m talking about. So just enjoy them for that. Some will have a timestamp on them. Ever Monday I send out a “What I Did Over the Weekend”, and I have a mailing list that I send out. And it’s one photograph of one moment of my weekend.
DAVE:
You’ve been doing that for years. Every Monday, in my inbox, there is a photo. It is a single photo and it’s relentless in its discipline. Kate has been sending out and reaching out to people in her network to show how she’s seeing the world. It’s not that she’s trying to take the most beautiful photo. It’s not like she’s saying, “Check out my photographic ability.” It’s more like, “Here’s a true slice of my life.” When taken collectively, I personally get to know Kate on an intimate level because you see what she’s seeing.
KATE:
There’s so much revealed in a moment in time. It’s so rich. Here are the eight commandments.
Be the thinking, not the thinker.
The thinker is the two-legged animal that assess, that judges, that places meaning on things. As the thinking, you disappear. You become what you’re looking at. If you ever played sports, or are a musician, a designer, an artist, anything that you do that you’ve lost yourself and come out of it. When you lose yourself, you’re thinking. When you come out of it, you’re a thinker. When you’re thinking, you become one with it. You’re in the zone. Life is about change. It’s not static. I think that’s why I had such a diverse path in my life; it’s because I just jumped on the raft and went down the river.
Show picture
So this is an example of what I did this weekend. I just love what’s revealed. I rarely look through the viewfinder. It constantly amazes me of what that moment captures. There’s going to be visual elements. The compositions become a part of you; you don’t have to think about it.
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This was taken in San Francisco. Simply looking up. Yeah, I don’t need to say anything.
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I saw this driving into a cabin. It’s like the aliens have landed and I do a U-turn like I always do. It was weird. It was in the middle of a field. There was nothing else out there and there are these big silver aliens.
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I’m sorry about the quality of some of these too.
Be the scene.
That’s our connection with cross-influences. I’ve studied the visual language of architecture, dance, orchestra, nature, poetry, and mostly watching people. I’ve used tragedy to feel what other people feel. I’ve had a lot of people die in my life and you start to process life differently for something like that.
I’ll tell you a story about something that happened to me when I was in Chicago at Columbia College. I would be waiting for the subway, and I had my print portfolio—this was before computers—and there was a crazy woman playing a laptop organ, or something like that. She had a Folgers coffee can and it looked like she was blind. I noticed this gang of teenagers and they were being really disruptive, like bumping people, being loud, and looking for trouble. I knew there was going to be trouble.
I kept my eye on these kids, but there was this one kid in particular that was kind of hanging back. He and I met eyes. And we were locked. We were just looking at each other. I was just watching them; I was ready to jump if they made a move on this woman. The guys passed me up, but this kid never pulled his eyes off me and I didn’t stop watching him. He knew exactly what I was looking at and he put his hands in his pockets—our gaze never broke—and pulled out all the money in his pockets. Without breaking our gaze, he put the money into the Folgers coffee can. It was like a movie moment. The gang of guys never turned around at this point; they were making their way up the escalator.
There was a level of communication that had happened. He knew exactly what I was thinking, and everything had shifted for me. And then I came out of that moment, and everything was real-time, and the guys on the escalator went, “Jermaine, let’s go!” So the guy went off to catch up with them. These guys didn’t know what had happened, but what it taught me, is to see beyond the situation. You’re always going to be dealing with individuals and you never know what is going to happen. I’ve had this happen to me a hundred different stories like this where seemingly random things have happened like that, that aren’t random at all.
Get into the storytelling of living. It’s your teacher. Be the scene. I don’t miss anything. I’m like the Murder She Wrote school of observation. I’m truly interested in people and how people interact. This also shows up in my designs and how I work with clients. I can read between the lines. Question everything. Get comfortable with “I don’t know.” Trust your intuition. Be the storyteller of how of how we learn. Be the scene. Look at all sides of things and explore.
I have a blog. I started this blog because I can’t write and I wanted to work on my skills of communication. My mind is racing around so much all the time and I have a hard time sticking out with sentences, as you may have noticed. I don’t finish up on a thought before I move on to the next thing. I don’t have the patience to stick with it. So the blog was a way for me to kind of focus and funnel my thoughts. I would love if you would go out and read it and comment it.
The blog isn’t really about what I did. One example of what I post, is a story about a friend of mine who bit a pit bull to release her dog. It was on CNN, it made the national news, and this little artist friend of mine, Amy Rice, bit a pit bull’s nose. It ran away and Amy was able to save her dog’s life. The posts on the blog are more about observation of life and spirituality and that kind of stuff.
I’ve learned amazing things from this blog. They come to mine and I go to theirs. It’s amazing how you can create a community so easily. It’s amazing how you can get that connection. Being the scene isn’t all about being what’s seen, but more so what’s unseen and seeing the moment captured in time. Seeing beyond the form: color, energy, possibility. For me, ‘seeing’ is a verb. It’s always changing; it’s never static.
Goes through pictures
I take these photos in a few seconds. I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. And for the “What I Did Over the Weekend,” I don’t alter the color. I want it to be as authentic as possible. I mean it’s a painting: frame it and box it up.
Be Humble
Ego belongs to the lost. Hip is short-lived. Character is forever. Let’s say it again: ego belongs to the lost. Hip is short-lived. Character is forever. When I lived in Dallas, we used to have garage sales a lot—we needed beer money—and it was perfect because it was so fascinating to what people searched for, how they looked at it, what they bought. This homeless woman walked up at one point and I watched her from the moment she walked up. It was another moment like the Chicago subway where she knew I was looking at her. I watched how what she picked up and how she looked at things. She did the same thing: she never took her gaze off me as she tried on my shoes and walked around with them, trying them out. They turned out all right and she put her shoes in her book bag. All she was carrying was the bag.
And the only other thing she bought and spent a lot of time with was a book. A really thick book. It was like moment. I can’t really explain it, but it’s when you connect with someone on a deeper level and you know a truth and learned a new perception. I’ve stopped looking at homeless people like they’re victims after this happened. It actually occurred to me that we pick our paths for whatever reason. We really do, but that’s a whole different conversation. This woman was not a bad lady. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Be humble. Doing non-profit for the doing. Do a lot of non-profit work for the work, not for the awards, not for anything but the doing of it. Do it for the passion of it. Do something for someone everyday and don’t tell anyone about it. Trust the process even when it doesn’t fit your pictures. There’s a lot of version in my path, and I know now to trust the process and not get hung up on how it looks. I am human, so I do have my fits, but I know better to trust the process and never ever call one of those processes—even Florida—a mistake. It was all perfect in the path.
There are no mistakes in the path. The perfect people in situations show up us for our growth. Even the people you stand next to in the grocery stores. There are no mistakes. Some of my worst endings have been my biggest beginnings. Be humble.
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Looking at things differently. Be humble. This is the fire in San Diego. Can you see the flame? That’s the line of fire, where the smoke is from 20,000 feet. That was the massive one. It wasn’t the last one. It was the one before that that was even worse.
Show picture of Helen Thomas
Oh Helen. This is Helen Thomas. She’s 86 years old. She’s the reporter that you often see at the White House. She’s the reporter that all the presidents are scared of. She’s the most amazing woman. I went to listen to her speak at the Synagogue in Minneapolis. She’s one of my heroes. Her first job as a reporter was when JFK was president. She couldn’t even go to the pressroom because she was a woman. She would have to wait outside and get the skinny from the guys and then write her article. She still asks those questions. She’s been through that.
When I went up to the table—I don’t usually think it’s a big deal to meet celebrities—I just wanted to meet her. The thing about being humble is clear with this woman. When I went up to get my book signed, she looked me in the eye like I was the most important person on the planet to her, and it was just an amazing moment. It was amazing because you’re used to the book signing where they just go, “Hey, thanks.” But this was different. She did this with everybody, not just me. She took the time with everybody to look them in the eye and ask them what they did. Isn’t that great? It’s like, “Wow. I do something important.” Be humble.
Show picture of Christo and Jean Claude
This is Christo and Jean Claude. They did the Central Park orange curtains a couple years ago. What amazing people. I saw them in Salida where they were working on their next project. I talked to them for a really long time; no one was even going up to them after their presentation. Their presentation was in Salida where they were doing their next project. They wanted the people of Salida to be there so they can explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it. What I learned from this was that their art wasn’t about the end product. Their art is about their conversation.
They’ve spent 10 years working on this. They’re 72 years old. They were born on the same day on the same minute in different countries. Are they destined to be together? The more they talked about their process, the more I realized that their real is art is how they are with people. They treat everybody equally important. A lot of these people that they work with, like the city planner, don’t know about art or don’t care or are really hateful about it. These people think [Christo and Jean Claude] are hippies because much of their art are in remote places. They’ve done 85 projects and 14 of them got realized in their career. That’s a lot of ‘no’s. That’s a lot of failures. I was just in awe of that.
DAVE:
There is a documentary about a specific work of theirs in Colorado. It was an event that lasted just a day and it involved them putting a curtain up. But it took many years for that to happen. Just think about the bureaucracy to get anything to happen at Central Park. They did the running thing in California and a great part of their art was a documentation of the legislation they had to work with and get around. The actual event is a very short documentable thing.
KATE:
They don’t take funds from anyone. They self-fund their projects because they don’t want any of that mixed in with what they are doing. They’re not wealthy people either, so they raise money. They fund everything selves by selling sketches, posters, all their process stuff. Be humble. I was just in awe.
Be curious. I am tireless in my quest to understand the unknowable. It’s what gets me up in the morning. I am driven by what I don’t know, and I don’t know a lot. Put yourself in experiences, not necessarily adventures, but experiences. Experiences can happen anywhere. It can happen as you cross the street. There’s no shortage of it. It’s how you learn about yourself and about other people.
This becomes a part of your visual language too because you understand the world to that level. You don’t think about it when you’re solving something in a project. It just becomes a part of you, something you can pull from.
Hang out with those who are not like you: different ages, different backgrounds, and different fields. Design offers us this opportunity because projects are so different and it’s a perfect place for us to learn about so many different things that people don’t get the opportunity to learn about in their career.
Take road trips, eat in diners, go to family events, try churches and lectures. See art, ask questions. Be a listener. Curiosity has driven my career and has me explore emerging technologies. Unfortunately, I was at a time there was a lot of emerging technology so I took on a lot of things not necessarily because I was qualified, but because there was no one else. Curiosity for me has always overwritten fear. Allow yourself to look stupid and make mistakes.
Goes through pictures
I travel a lot. I’ve been to Europe a lot, Thailand, Vietnam, Italy, Istanbul, and Amsterdam. I’ve always kept these journals with me. When I find things, like tickets from museums, I glue them right in; I don’t wait. Again, it’s building your visual language. Finding things from other cultures is awesome: Dutch design is phenomenal and in Venice I would be ripping posters from walls in an alley. There’s so much and it’s such a great thing to look back on when you’re back from your trips.
DAVE:
I would image those were incredibly handy in working out design problems under the gun. It must have a very practical application.
KATE:
Right, exactly. It’s all about developing structures in shape and form. It translates to any visual that you’re working on.
Shows picture of a bowl
This is an image of a bowl in my kitchen. I woke up in the morning to get a banana and I saw it and said to myself, “I could not have set this up this well.” The proportion, the velocity of speckles on the way the banana break it down matches the bowl. And I didn’t even touch this. I just saw it. It was there, on the scene.
Be a ‘yes’. A little secret: nobody knows what they’re doing. We spend so much energy to pretend to know what we’re doing and trying to keep other people from knowing that we don’t know what we are doing. I guarantee when you’re in a meeting with clients and you worry about what they think of you, they’re not worried about you. They’re worried about how they look to you and if they look like they know what they’re doing.
So be a ‘yes’. Be fearless. I rarely say ‘no’ to anything. All these jobs I’ve had, I’ve had because I said ‘yes’ and then I think about how I’m going to figure it out after the fact that I already accepted it. I’d still be working in a print shop in Chicago if I didn’t say ‘yes’.
Shows pictures
Be inspired. The only way to be inspiring is to be inspired. Have something to believe in; have someone to believe in. I’m reminded that we all have a purpose on this planet. I’m on the Make a Wish board in Minnesota so I’m around sick kids that are so inspiring to me. I always feel so humble after I leave those events with those kids who are either sick or dying. There’s no one that they don’t touch and that aren’t inspired by them.
As designers and communicators, we have incredible power. We create the messages, the icons, the visual cues, the visual library, and to create meaning for others. What would we say? What story will we tell? How will we say it? We are entrusted by a mass market to tell them what to think, feel, and how to act. Never forget the responsibility or the opportunity. Government is known for this. Whenever there is civil unrest, they always go after the creatives because there is a lot of power in the free will and what you’re creating. Allow yourself to feel moved. Love the uniqueness, the humanity, and the flaw of others.
I’ve always been a cognitive person. When I was a kid in Chicago, I used to lay by myself under a tree by myself in the front lawn and I would watch the wind blow through elm trees. I would watch the bugs, the birds, and the whole ecosystem. I never felt separate from that ecosystem. To this day, when I need to get renewed, I go out to nature and I don’t think I’m better than it. We are all one.
Look to nature; it’s the perfect designer. Its system, color palette, shape, proportion. Pass on your inspiration to others. Share it. People are dying to be inspired. Have causes. Share your influences. Nothing I have I got on my own. The music that I listen to, any influences that made me into who I am, nothing I have I got on my own.
Follow the light. I mean this literally and metaphorically. I always had this spiritual curiosity, and I don’t mean religious. I just mean a connection. My study of scientific metaphysics has always been my source of unconscious living. I see differently with that awareness. Light is what gives meaning. Light, dark, shadows, reflection, refraction, highlights, diffusion, soft, hard, contrast, warm. Light defines by where it is, and where it’s not. It’s a paradox. When we shine a light, we also cast a shadow. There’s as much in the shadow as there is in the light.
Be still, be quiet. Put away your cell phones, your iPods, your Blackberries, your iPhones, and other distractions. Take in the world you walk through. Listen to it, watch it, feel it. It is you.
These are my eight commandments. And now, the work!
I’m going to show you some print samples first and then some interactive work later on. But what’s important about what I’m showing you and what I want the message to be is that I’m trying to bring my art, the fine art into the print pieces.
Displays sample
This is a company that gives loans to help communities build communities. Their mission is to not do it for them, but to empower them to do it for themselves. So there is a pride, an ownership. When we designed this, we wanted it to have that hand-made feeling. I used a lot of collage style art and some icons from neighborhoods. This is a spread. Each spread had a different color and collage.
Displays sample
This is a piece I did for Paris Flea Market, their identity. Again, bringing in the illustration: all hand drawn. I also used pieces of a French book that I copied and cut up.
Display sample
These are icons I did for the Y. I thought they really sucked, but they really loved them and sold so many. Each icon represented one of their programs.
Display sample
This is another piece I did for the company that handed out loans. This piece actually created the brand for them. They were a start up and this became a style that they were defined by. This hand drawn illustrative collage’ie piece also had masking tape. This was really fun for the printer. When he scanned it, he didn’t know what was on the tape. But he knew me well enough not to touch anything. And I used a lot of bottom layers to create different levels of opacity.
Display sample
Toilet plunger? How do you make that look sexy? You put a painting behind it. A painting and a collage so all of these pieces are hanging together with tape and glue.
Display sample
I put this in here because I wanted to show you—my art is on the right—how that toggles back and forth with how I approach my design and my paintings. You can see in some of the flourishes the same kind of feel.
Display sample
Painting behind. This is also for the Y campaign. And you can find different colors for each program area and so this became much their brand for the two years we did their campaign.
Alright. Interactive work.
Shows SPAM site (www.spam.com)
SPAM. What’s interesting about this project was that I worked with Jon Wettersten.
DAVE:
Our first speaker in the lecture is a fellow from IDEO. The three of us worked on a team 11 years ago, and Jon was the programmer for the website.
KATE:
When you rolled over this can, there’s a globe behind it, and when you opened up the homepage you have this shopping music. And I also did a very conservative direction because we were talking about a company, Hormel, that was headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, in the middle of nowhere, and they never leave.
I really stretched on this one. It doesn’t look like much now, but then you think 10 years ago and that Jon figured out how to do this to make this footer look like a graphic in HTML. What I liked about Jon is that he’s a ‘Yes’ for everything. I would say, “This is what I want to do,” and he would say, “It’s never been done before, but I’ll try to figure it out.” Everything had to be on a grid back then. You didn’t have a lot of opportunity to waver and this was all about waver.
The night before I went out to Austin to do the presentation, knowing the audience—this is an example of how to get to know your clients, and bought up all the magazines from the bookstore that were about surfing, skating, everything that that demographic was reading. These guys at Hormel were people who never left that small town. They don’t know what’s happening in the world. I knew that I had to get them listening to where we were talking to the end-user, not to them. And when I did this direction, what was important about it, was that people weren’t going to buy SPAM online. Let’s look at it. SPAM is an American icon. And kids were into that. Let’s celebrate that and target that. We’ll get a lot of mileage out of this age group wearing t-shirts. It would do more for the brand than anything else. So the demographic was 16 to 20 or 30. So I got all these magazines, brought them out there, and didn’t tell my company I was doing this.
Before I brought out the design directions, I handed the magazines out to the corporate guys, and they were like kids at a candy store. The have never seen anything like that. They were swapping magazines and looking through them. By the time I did the presentation, it was such a piece of cake. They were so excited about it and they had no resistance. They picked this direction up rather than the conservative one.
DAVE:
I was in the room. I was the project lead for site. To kind of emphasize the gravity of what Kate is saying, Kate came up with the process very quickly of educating people who had no design background or design language of demographics and marketing in a span of a 10 minute exercise. Then, immediately after that exercise, where very little money was spent, they picked this! In the mid-90s in Minnesota in an incredibly conservative corporate environment, this design was way outside. I was blown away. I just had to thrown in. I’m still blown away, and I still use that exercise whenever I can.
KATE:
I knew the meat of the site, no pun intended, was about the timeline that was really going to be the interest. I also knew that even though SPAM had a long history, how much can you read, really? So what I proposed was to do a timeline that said SPAM history was with American history, because it also reinforces the idea that SPAM has been here as long as we’ve been here. So in each section, the can would open up and reveal the graphic of the section.
I did research of the color palette of the time, the cans of the time, the thoughts, as well as the history. I worked with a writer from an advertising agency and we collaborated on what was important about each decade. What was really amazing about this though, was that no one was doing interactive or animation at this time, and these timelines were filled with them.
My company didn’t want certain animation like the smoke right there. They said it was too negative. But I just kind of ignored it because it was history. I think I finally worn them down. I wanted this part to be a rollover, but we couldn’t do it technology wise.
In the 60s, all this stuff to make this collage was stuff that I had in my lunchboxes. This was a necklace. This was a poster. This part was a pop-up. So the shape of it was one long scroll for each decade.
70s. The can changes again. All these little arrows were interactive features. This Dress-the-Can thing had a SPAM can and you could pull different hair styles from the 70’s to it. You can change the shoes. It was just a fun little thing to do.
Then the 80s. This was so hard to do. The design. It was hard, but it was accurate to the time. So you can see how the SPAM history has emerged.
Shows TV By Girls site (www.TVbyGirls.com)
TV by Girls is a site that just launched a little while ago. This is for ten to eighteen year old girls—it’s a non-profit mentorship program for film. So I wanted it to be very much about them, so they have the ownership. With the style, the colors are really bad here—but it’s bright pink and brown, so it’s not “girly”, it’s powerful, but it’s bright and vibrant, and they love it. And these are all their videos that you can play. You click and a pop-up window plays the videos that these girls do.
Shows Minnesota Opera site (www.mnopera.org/)
Minnesota Opera just launched not too long ago. I had some “befores” I wanted to show you, but it’s running so long that I didn’t put them in here. One of the challenges was understanding the audience—most people that go to the opera have very specific behaviors in how to get to buy tickets. And so one thing that was important was to have a calendar on the homepage. And not only the calendar, but I put in what was happening on that date so there was no clicking beyond this homepage to get as much information as possible. It’s all about selling the tickets.
DAVE:
I would image that in the research, the demographic probably wasn’t your average fourteen to eighteen year old Xbox user?
KATE:
And the previous site to this was all Flash and nobody used it, they would end up calling, and so somebody had to answer the phone and take ticket orders. And so they weren’t using the website appropriately. And so this has been really successful for them. It loads really fast and then the calendar’s on every page, so you have an opportunity to—it’s about getting in the user’s point of view. Like why are they there and what would you want if you were there? It’s very clean and simple. It’s a project management tool so they do their own updates. There are all these tabs up here. I wanted to make sure that the user can navigate without leaving the page, without back tracking. So I had a top menu, allowing them to go anywhere.
Shows Now House site (www.nowhouseproject.org)
Their whole concept is to do 13 of these houses that were completely sustainable. What they do is build old houses, break it down to the foundation, and then build it up using used materials. These guys are phenomenal. What I wanted to make this site transparent. They used bulletin boards to insulate it. In fact, when you touch the house, it moves. It’s not solid. It keeps heat better that way. The house is absolutely phenomenal. Their vision is amazing too.
So what I wanted to do when I was designing it was to have a transparent feeling. It was kind of like a trademark to their approach. When people in Minnesota pushed on a house and it moved, that’s a hard sell. But I wanted everything to be layered and transparent because that’s very much how you felt when you went through the house. You can see how simple it is. And that’s how the house is; it’s really simple.
Okay. Fine art. This is just another example of one of the trip journals. This was from France, I think, and it shows you how it influences the work I do. It’s hard to peg what style of art I do because I’m changing all the time. I can’t finish sentences. I certainly won’t stick with one style of artwork. I’m always experimenting with objects and how materials react to each other. Materials that shouldn’t be together like pastels and India ink.
Shows work
This is an example of my process. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with roofing material. It comes in a big roll; it’s not porous. That was pretty challenging when you try to put things on it that are not being absorbed. When you glue on it, some stick, some don’t. I started experimenting with pastel when the wetness pulls the pastel into the tissue. This piece is huge.
Shows work
This is another example. Those are coffee grounds on the right. Most of my paintings have layers on top of each other. I like working on surfaces. I try to reuse everything from other pieces.
Shows work
This is piece I did on a letterpress with another artist friend of mine that somebody worked with the Jazz posters. I would find something in the antique store and that’s where we start the collaboration. And then we’ll work 3 in the morning. He’ll be like, “How about this?” He’s a third generation letterpress printer so he’s quite versed at it, and it’s all about breaking rules. On the right is a headrest from the 1800s barbershop chair.
Shows work
Here’s a piece that doesn’t look as good when it’s projected. This whole series was a series on paradox. Light and dark opposing and how your point of view depends on where you’re standing. That’s pretty much how I live my life. I know that everything is all there, but I can only see one part of it at one time. So you really have to engage with these pieces and move around it. That’s another one on the right.
So this was my presentation. Thank you for listening; I really appreciate your time.
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 4/18
DAVE ANOLIK:
Kate Pabst and I first worked together 12 years ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I met Kate when I was working for a firm called Prospera. Prospera was the design firm for McCann-Erickson, the mega-huge international advertising agency. Their PR firm was—and still is—Shandwick International, and Prospera was the design firm for that. In the Minneapolis area, Prospera was the very first and only firm doing Web and multimedia. I remember being in a conference with big corporate executives. I was totally intimidated with these senior executives: white males in suits. I was totally out of my element.
This was the first time I ever saw Kate. There was a slam on the door. She was holding a cup of coffee and acted like she was going to spill it on an executive, then slams it down onto the table. Once she had everyone’s attention, she proceeded to run the meeting. When we later worked together, I realized that moment wasn’t an accident and that she has a bag of tricks to lighten a room up to start communicating with people on a very sophisticated level.
With that, Kate is going to talk about her career and what she is doing now. We’re going to go back and forth and I’ll be interacting with Kate.
KATE PABST:
What I am going to show you tonight isn’t necessarily earthshaking work. I’ve seen many presentations over my career, and my career up to now has been 25 years. When I was getting ready for this, I was thinking about all the other presentations I’ve done and seen too. All the ones that have stuck with me are not the ones that were not the eye-candy presentations. But the ones that stuck with me were the presentations where they were talking about their process and their paths—which I find really interesting—and how it shapes us, and their inspirations. That’s how I’m going to present tonight.
Displays a timeline
This is a timeline of my career on the left. The first time I ever saw something as a graphic designer was probably in third or fourth grade. I remember looking at this lunchbox with beautiful blues, line quality, compositions, and typeface. I was in awe of it. Not just from the character or any of that stuff. There was something else that happened. I didn’t have the language at that age to know what it was, but now looking back at it, I know that it was the first time I saw something differently.
I collect lunchboxes. I have over 150 of them. I collect them because when I was growing up, there were only three networks. Those networks pretty much defined your cultural cues and that was how people identified themselves. It’s funny; when friends or clients come over, they see these selves that are filled to the ceiling with lunchboxes. And they pick up the lunchbox that really made a difference for them. They would say, “I had that one as a kid!” and it would be such a great way to start a relationship. It’s a great way to share intimacy with a client, because when someone connects to you at that level so fast, it becomes really, really fun.
Displays an image of a lunchbox
This is a lunchbox I didn’t have. I actually hated the Osmonds. I was a Jackson 5 person. But what I wanted to show this to you for is because the brother on the upper right, someone scratched his front tooth off. When I found this lunchbox, it just made me laugh. As I was looking at it, I was thinking about the little brother who scratched the tooth off of his sister’s lunchbox and imagined whole scenarios that had this lunchbox. I am showing this to you because I think it is important in my early path. And as designers, we are all storytellers. Anyone who looked at this would have a completely different story for it.
What is important about the timeline of my career is not so much where I worked, but the departures. I entered the design field where technology was changing really fast, and I was fortunate that I didn’t know anything so I didn’t know any rules. This allowed me to embrace all the technologies and was very flexible. I never said ‘no’ to anything. I was fearless.
I started as a preschool teacher major in college. I realized I would be wiping noses and hanging up shoes for the rest of my life for very little money. What’s important about this first start to my path is that this is what I had to look to for mentorship in graphic design. There were no graphic design schools. I had nobody to lead me. Looking back at it, going into preschool teaching was a way for me to be creative and to be expressive. It didn’t last long. I quickly changed my major to marketing and advertising. But when I soon came close to graduating, I dropped out because I started panicking about how much I didn’t know.
DAVE:
The notion of being a graphic designer in that era wasn’t very common. Unlike now, which is commonly known, no one knows about this career path.
KATE:
I then moved to Chicago and found a place that taught graphic design. And it was all very abstract. But it still gave me no tangible direction. So then I moved on to Triton College. It was a small, two-year school in Chicago. But, the important part about this departure was that it taught tangible skills. I learned how to run a camera the size of a room. It was really intense. But I learned a tangible thing. I can actually go out and now look for work. It was a huge departure for me, and that was a job.
I now had a portfolio, and I knew what terms meant. I got hired by this company in Chicago called GTE directories to their creative services department. I took this job because they were starting to get into this thing called “computer graphics”. I didn’t know what it was but it sounded pretty damn interesting to me. A lot of other designers I heard talking fearfully about it and saying how it was something that would put them out of work. And I didn’t think so. I saw it as another tool to me. I also saw it as a pet. I think I got the job because of that. No one else wanted to and didn’t want to head in that direction. So that was another departure for me.
I then moved to Texas and was working print and computer graphics. And this was not a Macintosh. I haven’t even heard of Macintosh at that point. This system was an AVL system. It was huge. It was a massive turnkey system. It output slides and you had a real 35 mm camera that was attached to this thing. There were 12 users around the world who could use this system. This was the emerging computer graphics. Nobody else was doing anything. This was the first machine on the market.
This was literally multimedia, where you had multiple slides and projectors to create images. I didn’t know what I was doing and neither did the people above me. I had a lot of freedom to make it up. I learned a lot.
I freelanced for Southland Corporation. We did a lot of in-house projects for Southland. But we also had a lot of outside projects like the Boy Scouts, distributors, and a ton of diverse clients. Texas was a great place to be. A lot of agencies were leading the new trends.
DAVE:
Wasn’t there something going on in Texas in the 80s?
KATE:
Oh! Junk bonds. Junk bonds were what brought it down. Clients were throwing a lot of money at projects and then the junk bond crisis happened where corporate raiders who tried to come in and take over.
DAVE:
Was there a comparison between the takeovers and the dot-com bubble in the culture and the work?
KATE:
Exactly. It was the same. The culture was this faucet that would never turn off. There was a lot of money that suddenly disappeared. Here’s another departure for me: My company was actually the last to be liquidated because I was doing the slides of the other companies that were being liquidated to try to stop the corporate raiders. So I knew I had job security as long as they had something to sell. The way liquidation happens for something like this is for them to buy the employees’ stocks back so they will have the majority of the shares. Then they can do what they want with it. But it made them very cash poor; no one would give them any loans. They ended up getting the cash loans from Japan or China. And the way they were paying it back was by liquidating companies. So as long as there was something to sell, we were okay. I saw that coming and eventually, I got laid off.
DAVE:
I just want to say that that was such a great lesson for designers to be hyperaware of the content they’re working on. If you find yourselves motoring through a case study, corporate document, etc… and you’re just laying down blocks of text, well there might be some pretty important information that you’re laying out. But it probably paints the environment you’re in.
KATE:
So I was suddenly unemployed. I had a few margaritas and then started my own business. It was a huge departure for me because I went into business with someone else. We did silk screening, I did some freelancing, some advertising, and I bought this stat camera. It goes in a room the size of a closet. You put whatever you’re shooting on the bottom and the film on the top in a pitch-black room. Once you shoot it, you put it through a developer and you have a black and white ‘positive’. What was important with this for me was that I started experimenting with what to put on the stat camera. I started putting pencil shavings, string, textures, and stuff like that.
I also started a greeting card line and t-shirt line that was nationally distributed. We had a store too that had art, t-shirts, and other artists in it. At this point, we felt really stretched. So when we got the opportunity, we sold the store and moved to southern Florida. It sounded good at the time and it felt financially good to get out of all that. I knew it was a bad idea even before we finished packing it up, but we knew we just had to go with it. So three months after we got there, we were trying to figure out how to leave.
Southern Florida isn’t really the best place to live. It rains for like an hour and then it gets sweaty hot. It’s unbelievably uncomfortable and not a lot of fun.
DAVE:
Your business at this point was evolving too, right? You were creating all these cards by hand?
KATE:
Yeah. What’s unique about the cards was that they weren’t category cards. They weren’t “Happy Birthday” type or event driven. They were more possibility cards. Stores had a hard time figuring out where to put them. They weren’t used to that. It was brand new for them. But now you see random category cards everywhere.
Florida was so bad that I finally put up a map and took out the darts. Wherever that dart landed, the next big city closest to it was where we were moving. So I threw the dart and it landed on Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So I said, “Okay, that was practice.”
When I pulled the dart out, my phone rang and it was a friend of I talk to once a year to catch up. She lived in Minneapolis and two weeks later, we were packed up and had moved to Minneapolis.
So we moved to Minneapolis and I’m still doing the greeting card line. I get this opportunity to go back to school at a school called Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It’s a really good school. I’m getting tired of doing the card buying and it’s to the point where I’m investing a lot of money to keep it going, and I’m not committed to doing that. I’m just ready to learn more about graphic design. I went to MCAD to finish my degree in graphic design and a little bit of painting. What was important about this departure was that I was learning the math for the first time. I was able to bring everything I’ve learned previously to the digital realm and it created this style of design for me, which a lot of the students there didn’t have. They didn’t have the experience to do that.
DAVE:
It sounds like from your experience with the technology, and perhaps from not knowing how to use them and not being afraid of them, that you discovered using technology as a whole.
KATE:
Right. They’re just additional tools. My career has been about not knowing and it was experimental. There was still no web presence yet. In fact, in our lab there was a computer that had Gopher and everyone stayed away from it. I remember listening to the creative directors from Wired magazine saying that they stayed up for three nights to do a website. The one thing I remember them saying was that the web needs graphic designers. And that’s all I heard.
After I finished MCAD, I got a job at Prospera, where I met Dave. It was the only design firm in Minneapolis doing web work so that was a magnet for me. You didn’t have anyone over you because you knew more just from hacking around on it than anybody around you. There were no rules so you could really push it. My whole career was about having no rules and really pushing it.
DAVE:
There was a really interesting conflict between “print” designers, multimedia designers, and web designers in these traditional agencies. Graphic design was a very formalized structure, especially in Minneapolis, which was very Swiss and European. It was very disciplined. The concept of the Internet at the same time was that those things shouldn’t have married.
KATE:
That’s true. At that time, no one knew where to put projects. They didn’t know who should own those projects. And those projects would like putting a brochure online. I worked a lot of tech guys who hated design. It was just a big struggle every step of the way.
At Prospera, the creative director thought I did websites, but I have never done websites. I just came out of MCAD, but my work must have looked like it could be translated to web or something. So I was like, “Okay. I can do that.” So I figured out how to do it and I ended up doing a lot of first generation websites for big corporations like Hanes, Hanes Her Way, Shell, Northwest Airlines, and companies like that.
DAVE:
To show what it’s like to be a graphic designer at the time, when you were there, no one really knew how to manage you. You didn’t know who your coworkers were. You just kind of showed up. “Who’s the web person?” “What’s a web person?”
KATE:
Yeah, it was an interesting time. You would sit with these major clients and you were going, “Yeah, you can do that!” without knowing what to expect.
I then left Prospera to go to Larson. I did major websites, like SPAM. I made their first website, which I will show you later. In fact, it just came down 6 months ago. 10 years, that website was up, and they just relaunched. But the website was tiny. It was 640 x 480. I also worked on children’s hospital and got a lot of experience in how to communicate to different industries and how to communicate on the web. I would think about how and what the users to do.
Another departure was in 2000 when I left Larson and went to a company called Aisle 5 to be a design director. I worked with Phillip there. I did all web. It was pretty much a tech-centric company when I got there. There were six designers, and me. It was kind of a shock for me because I have always come from design-centered companies. Design is king, there was a lot of support, and you don’t have to explain yourself as you worked.
DAVE:
2000 was just eight years ago. Immediately after the dot-com bubble burst, there was a shift towards design. Design then was viewed as extravagant, as fluff, as candy, and there was a push for a utilitarian software and feel for experience. It’s been pulled back now, but for about a year, there was almost an anti-design movement.
KATE:
That was also during the time of the dot-com going crazy. We had meetings with people and they would be interviewing us but it always seemed as though they were trying to prove to us that their business was worthy. At this time, my art started rising up again and I joined a gallery in Minneapolis. It was a gallery of 12 artists and we would have a 2-person show once a year and catch other shows as a group. I was starting to do a lot of art. It was interesting to me because I started to see a different kind of art than what I was producing over the years.
I soon left and joined velvetpeel. I’m still with velvetpeel, although I don’t work fulltime. I still collaborate on a lot of projects. I started doing print again, but print in a different way. I started doing projects where we had an overarching branding challenge and we just had different ways of communicating it and what is best for the user. Whatever websites we created were always from the user’s point of view and I started adding photography to design. I also started to bring in my own work. Fortunately, it was appropriate for the projects.
I left velvetpeel and joined another company because they did usability primarily, and I thought I didn’t know what I was doing. I was the design director for them, but I wanted to get more about usability because I’m completely fascinated by human beings and why they do what they do and how they do what they do. I have an intuition that I think all designers and communicators do. And if something doesn’t work, you have to figure out why. You’re dealing with human beings, and not with machines.
After a year and a half, I left and now I’m at a company called MRM Worldwide, which weirdly, is kind of where I started, because they’re owned by McCann-Erickson. They used to be Shandwick. They had an advertising agency’s point of view, but we do online marketing campaigns and promotions. I work there four days a week so I can still do a lot of freelance work.
Rather than the next section, I would like to talk about how my career has affected me as a human being and person. I’ll show you my eight commandments before I show you my work. As I do this, I’ll show you random shots that I take. I bring my digital camera everywhere. The digital camera is the one thing that has rocked my world more than anything else. I probably have over 60,000 photos. I use not only to record things, but to experiment. The pictures you’re going to see are just kind of random and won’t sync up with what I’m talking about. So just enjoy them for that. Some will have a timestamp on them. Ever Monday I send out a “What I Did Over the Weekend”, and I have a mailing list that I send out. And it’s one photograph of one moment of my weekend.
DAVE:
You’ve been doing that for years. Every Monday, in my inbox, there is a photo. It is a single photo and it’s relentless in its discipline. Kate has been sending out and reaching out to people in her network to show how she’s seeing the world. It’s not that she’s trying to take the most beautiful photo. It’s not like she’s saying, “Check out my photographic ability.” It’s more like, “Here’s a true slice of my life.” When taken collectively, I personally get to know Kate on an intimate level because you see what she’s seeing.
KATE:
There’s so much revealed in a moment in time. It’s so rich. Here are the eight commandments.
Be the thinking, not the thinker.
The thinker is the two-legged animal that assess, that judges, that places meaning on things. As the thinking, you disappear. You become what you’re looking at. If you ever played sports, or are a musician, a designer, an artist, anything that you do that you’ve lost yourself and come out of it. When you lose yourself, you’re thinking. When you come out of it, you’re a thinker. When you’re thinking, you become one with it. You’re in the zone. Life is about change. It’s not static. I think that’s why I had such a diverse path in my life; it’s because I just jumped on the raft and went down the river.
Show picture
So this is an example of what I did this weekend. I just love what’s revealed. I rarely look through the viewfinder. It constantly amazes me of what that moment captures. There’s going to be visual elements. The compositions become a part of you; you don’t have to think about it.
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This was taken in San Francisco. Simply looking up. Yeah, I don’t need to say anything.
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I saw this driving into a cabin. It’s like the aliens have landed and I do a U-turn like I always do. It was weird. It was in the middle of a field. There was nothing else out there and there are these big silver aliens.
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I’m sorry about the quality of some of these too.
Be the scene.
That’s our connection with cross-influences. I’ve studied the visual language of architecture, dance, orchestra, nature, poetry, and mostly watching people. I’ve used tragedy to feel what other people feel. I’ve had a lot of people die in my life and you start to process life differently for something like that.
I’ll tell you a story about something that happened to me when I was in Chicago at Columbia College. I would be waiting for the subway, and I had my print portfolio—this was before computers—and there was a crazy woman playing a laptop organ, or something like that. She had a Folgers coffee can and it looked like she was blind. I noticed this gang of teenagers and they were being really disruptive, like bumping people, being loud, and looking for trouble. I knew there was going to be trouble.
I kept my eye on these kids, but there was this one kid in particular that was kind of hanging back. He and I met eyes. And we were locked. We were just looking at each other. I was just watching them; I was ready to jump if they made a move on this woman. The guys passed me up, but this kid never pulled his eyes off me and I didn’t stop watching him. He knew exactly what I was looking at and he put his hands in his pockets—our gaze never broke—and pulled out all the money in his pockets. Without breaking our gaze, he put the money into the Folgers coffee can. It was like a movie moment. The gang of guys never turned around at this point; they were making their way up the escalator.
There was a level of communication that had happened. He knew exactly what I was thinking, and everything had shifted for me. And then I came out of that moment, and everything was real-time, and the guys on the escalator went, “Jermaine, let’s go!” So the guy went off to catch up with them. These guys didn’t know what had happened, but what it taught me, is to see beyond the situation. You’re always going to be dealing with individuals and you never know what is going to happen. I’ve had this happen to me a hundred different stories like this where seemingly random things have happened like that, that aren’t random at all.
Get into the storytelling of living. It’s your teacher. Be the scene. I don’t miss anything. I’m like the Murder She Wrote school of observation. I’m truly interested in people and how people interact. This also shows up in my designs and how I work with clients. I can read between the lines. Question everything. Get comfortable with “I don’t know.” Trust your intuition. Be the storyteller of how of how we learn. Be the scene. Look at all sides of things and explore.
I have a blog. I started this blog because I can’t write and I wanted to work on my skills of communication. My mind is racing around so much all the time and I have a hard time sticking out with sentences, as you may have noticed. I don’t finish up on a thought before I move on to the next thing. I don’t have the patience to stick with it. So the blog was a way for me to kind of focus and funnel my thoughts. I would love if you would go out and read it and comment it.
The blog isn’t really about what I did. One example of what I post, is a story about a friend of mine who bit a pit bull to release her dog. It was on CNN, it made the national news, and this little artist friend of mine, Amy Rice, bit a pit bull’s nose. It ran away and Amy was able to save her dog’s life. The posts on the blog are more about observation of life and spirituality and that kind of stuff.
I’ve learned amazing things from this blog. They come to mine and I go to theirs. It’s amazing how you can create a community so easily. It’s amazing how you can get that connection. Being the scene isn’t all about being what’s seen, but more so what’s unseen and seeing the moment captured in time. Seeing beyond the form: color, energy, possibility. For me, ‘seeing’ is a verb. It’s always changing; it’s never static.
Goes through pictures
I take these photos in a few seconds. I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. And for the “What I Did Over the Weekend,” I don’t alter the color. I want it to be as authentic as possible. I mean it’s a painting: frame it and box it up.
Be Humble
Ego belongs to the lost. Hip is short-lived. Character is forever. Let’s say it again: ego belongs to the lost. Hip is short-lived. Character is forever. When I lived in Dallas, we used to have garage sales a lot—we needed beer money—and it was perfect because it was so fascinating to what people searched for, how they looked at it, what they bought. This homeless woman walked up at one point and I watched her from the moment she walked up. It was another moment like the Chicago subway where she knew I was looking at her. I watched how what she picked up and how she looked at things. She did the same thing: she never took her gaze off me as she tried on my shoes and walked around with them, trying them out. They turned out all right and she put her shoes in her book bag. All she was carrying was the bag.
And the only other thing she bought and spent a lot of time with was a book. A really thick book. It was like moment. I can’t really explain it, but it’s when you connect with someone on a deeper level and you know a truth and learned a new perception. I’ve stopped looking at homeless people like they’re victims after this happened. It actually occurred to me that we pick our paths for whatever reason. We really do, but that’s a whole different conversation. This woman was not a bad lady. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Be humble. Doing non-profit for the doing. Do a lot of non-profit work for the work, not for the awards, not for anything but the doing of it. Do it for the passion of it. Do something for someone everyday and don’t tell anyone about it. Trust the process even when it doesn’t fit your pictures. There’s a lot of version in my path, and I know now to trust the process and not get hung up on how it looks. I am human, so I do have my fits, but I know better to trust the process and never ever call one of those processes—even Florida—a mistake. It was all perfect in the path.
There are no mistakes in the path. The perfect people in situations show up us for our growth. Even the people you stand next to in the grocery stores. There are no mistakes. Some of my worst endings have been my biggest beginnings. Be humble.
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Looking at things differently. Be humble. This is the fire in San Diego. Can you see the flame? That’s the line of fire, where the smoke is from 20,000 feet. That was the massive one. It wasn’t the last one. It was the one before that that was even worse.
Show picture of Helen Thomas
Oh Helen. This is Helen Thomas. She’s 86 years old. She’s the reporter that you often see at the White House. She’s the reporter that all the presidents are scared of. She’s the most amazing woman. I went to listen to her speak at the Synagogue in Minneapolis. She’s one of my heroes. Her first job as a reporter was when JFK was president. She couldn’t even go to the pressroom because she was a woman. She would have to wait outside and get the skinny from the guys and then write her article. She still asks those questions. She’s been through that.
When I went up to the table—I don’t usually think it’s a big deal to meet celebrities—I just wanted to meet her. The thing about being humble is clear with this woman. When I went up to get my book signed, she looked me in the eye like I was the most important person on the planet to her, and it was just an amazing moment. It was amazing because you’re used to the book signing where they just go, “Hey, thanks.” But this was different. She did this with everybody, not just me. She took the time with everybody to look them in the eye and ask them what they did. Isn’t that great? It’s like, “Wow. I do something important.” Be humble.
Show picture of Christo and Jean Claude
This is Christo and Jean Claude. They did the Central Park orange curtains a couple years ago. What amazing people. I saw them in Salida where they were working on their next project. I talked to them for a really long time; no one was even going up to them after their presentation. Their presentation was in Salida where they were doing their next project. They wanted the people of Salida to be there so they can explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it. What I learned from this was that their art wasn’t about the end product. Their art is about their conversation.
They’ve spent 10 years working on this. They’re 72 years old. They were born on the same day on the same minute in different countries. Are they destined to be together? The more they talked about their process, the more I realized that their real is art is how they are with people. They treat everybody equally important. A lot of these people that they work with, like the city planner, don’t know about art or don’t care or are really hateful about it. These people think [Christo and Jean Claude] are hippies because much of their art are in remote places. They’ve done 85 projects and 14 of them got realized in their career. That’s a lot of ‘no’s. That’s a lot of failures. I was just in awe of that.
DAVE:
There is a documentary about a specific work of theirs in Colorado. It was an event that lasted just a day and it involved them putting a curtain up. But it took many years for that to happen. Just think about the bureaucracy to get anything to happen at Central Park. They did the running thing in California and a great part of their art was a documentation of the legislation they had to work with and get around. The actual event is a very short documentable thing.
KATE:
They don’t take funds from anyone. They self-fund their projects because they don’t want any of that mixed in with what they are doing. They’re not wealthy people either, so they raise money. They fund everything selves by selling sketches, posters, all their process stuff. Be humble. I was just in awe.
Be curious. I am tireless in my quest to understand the unknowable. It’s what gets me up in the morning. I am driven by what I don’t know, and I don’t know a lot. Put yourself in experiences, not necessarily adventures, but experiences. Experiences can happen anywhere. It can happen as you cross the street. There’s no shortage of it. It’s how you learn about yourself and about other people.
This becomes a part of your visual language too because you understand the world to that level. You don’t think about it when you’re solving something in a project. It just becomes a part of you, something you can pull from.
Hang out with those who are not like you: different ages, different backgrounds, and different fields. Design offers us this opportunity because projects are so different and it’s a perfect place for us to learn about so many different things that people don’t get the opportunity to learn about in their career.
Take road trips, eat in diners, go to family events, try churches and lectures. See art, ask questions. Be a listener. Curiosity has driven my career and has me explore emerging technologies. Unfortunately, I was at a time there was a lot of emerging technology so I took on a lot of things not necessarily because I was qualified, but because there was no one else. Curiosity for me has always overwritten fear. Allow yourself to look stupid and make mistakes.
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I travel a lot. I’ve been to Europe a lot, Thailand, Vietnam, Italy, Istanbul, and Amsterdam. I’ve always kept these journals with me. When I find things, like tickets from museums, I glue them right in; I don’t wait. Again, it’s building your visual language. Finding things from other cultures is awesome: Dutch design is phenomenal and in Venice I would be ripping posters from walls in an alley. There’s so much and it’s such a great thing to look back on when you’re back from your trips.
DAVE:
I would image those were incredibly handy in working out design problems under the gun. It must have a very practical application.
KATE:
Right, exactly. It’s all about developing structures in shape and form. It translates to any visual that you’re working on.
Shows picture of a bowl
This is an image of a bowl in my kitchen. I woke up in the morning to get a banana and I saw it and said to myself, “I could not have set this up this well.” The proportion, the velocity of speckles on the way the banana break it down matches the bowl. And I didn’t even touch this. I just saw it. It was there, on the scene.
Be a ‘yes’. A little secret: nobody knows what they’re doing. We spend so much energy to pretend to know what we’re doing and trying to keep other people from knowing that we don’t know what we are doing. I guarantee when you’re in a meeting with clients and you worry about what they think of you, they’re not worried about you. They’re worried about how they look to you and if they look like they know what they’re doing.
So be a ‘yes’. Be fearless. I rarely say ‘no’ to anything. All these jobs I’ve had, I’ve had because I said ‘yes’ and then I think about how I’m going to figure it out after the fact that I already accepted it. I’d still be working in a print shop in Chicago if I didn’t say ‘yes’.
Shows pictures
Be inspired. The only way to be inspiring is to be inspired. Have something to believe in; have someone to believe in. I’m reminded that we all have a purpose on this planet. I’m on the Make a Wish board in Minnesota so I’m around sick kids that are so inspiring to me. I always feel so humble after I leave those events with those kids who are either sick or dying. There’s no one that they don’t touch and that aren’t inspired by them.
As designers and communicators, we have incredible power. We create the messages, the icons, the visual cues, the visual library, and to create meaning for others. What would we say? What story will we tell? How will we say it? We are entrusted by a mass market to tell them what to think, feel, and how to act. Never forget the responsibility or the opportunity. Government is known for this. Whenever there is civil unrest, they always go after the creatives because there is a lot of power in the free will and what you’re creating. Allow yourself to feel moved. Love the uniqueness, the humanity, and the flaw of others.
I’ve always been a cognitive person. When I was a kid in Chicago, I used to lay by myself under a tree by myself in the front lawn and I would watch the wind blow through elm trees. I would watch the bugs, the birds, and the whole ecosystem. I never felt separate from that ecosystem. To this day, when I need to get renewed, I go out to nature and I don’t think I’m better than it. We are all one.
Look to nature; it’s the perfect designer. Its system, color palette, shape, proportion. Pass on your inspiration to others. Share it. People are dying to be inspired. Have causes. Share your influences. Nothing I have I got on my own. The music that I listen to, any influences that made me into who I am, nothing I have I got on my own.
Follow the light. I mean this literally and metaphorically. I always had this spiritual curiosity, and I don’t mean religious. I just mean a connection. My study of scientific metaphysics has always been my source of unconscious living. I see differently with that awareness. Light is what gives meaning. Light, dark, shadows, reflection, refraction, highlights, diffusion, soft, hard, contrast, warm. Light defines by where it is, and where it’s not. It’s a paradox. When we shine a light, we also cast a shadow. There’s as much in the shadow as there is in the light.
Be still, be quiet. Put away your cell phones, your iPods, your Blackberries, your iPhones, and other distractions. Take in the world you walk through. Listen to it, watch it, feel it. It is you.
These are my eight commandments. And now, the work!
I’m going to show you some print samples first and then some interactive work later on. But what’s important about what I’m showing you and what I want the message to be is that I’m trying to bring my art, the fine art into the print pieces.
Displays sample
This is a company that gives loans to help communities build communities. Their mission is to not do it for them, but to empower them to do it for themselves. So there is a pride, an ownership. When we designed this, we wanted it to have that hand-made feeling. I used a lot of collage style art and some icons from neighborhoods. This is a spread. Each spread had a different color and collage.
Displays sample
This is a piece I did for Paris Flea Market, their identity. Again, bringing in the illustration: all hand drawn. I also used pieces of a French book that I copied and cut up.
Display sample
These are icons I did for the Y. I thought they really sucked, but they really loved them and sold so many. Each icon represented one of their programs.
Display sample
This is another piece I did for the company that handed out loans. This piece actually created the brand for them. They were a start up and this became a style that they were defined by. This hand drawn illustrative collage’ie piece also had masking tape. This was really fun for the printer. When he scanned it, he didn’t know what was on the tape. But he knew me well enough not to touch anything. And I used a lot of bottom layers to create different levels of opacity.
Display sample
Toilet plunger? How do you make that look sexy? You put a painting behind it. A painting and a collage so all of these pieces are hanging together with tape and glue.
Display sample
I put this in here because I wanted to show you—my art is on the right—how that toggles back and forth with how I approach my design and my paintings. You can see in some of the flourishes the same kind of feel.
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Painting behind. This is also for the Y campaign. And you can find different colors for each program area and so this became much their brand for the two years we did their campaign.
Alright. Interactive work.
Shows SPAM site (www.spam.com)
SPAM. What’s interesting about this project was that I worked with Jon Wettersten.
DAVE:
Our first speaker in the lecture is a fellow from IDEO. The three of us worked on a team 11 years ago, and Jon was the programmer for the website.
KATE:
When you rolled over this can, there’s a globe behind it, and when you opened up the homepage you have this shopping music. And I also did a very conservative direction because we were talking about a company, Hormel, that was headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, in the middle of nowhere, and they never leave.
I really stretched on this one. It doesn’t look like much now, but then you think 10 years ago and that Jon figured out how to do this to make this footer look like a graphic in HTML. What I liked about Jon is that he’s a ‘Yes’ for everything. I would say, “This is what I want to do,” and he would say, “It’s never been done before, but I’ll try to figure it out.” Everything had to be on a grid back then. You didn’t have a lot of opportunity to waver and this was all about waver.
The night before I went out to Austin to do the presentation, knowing the audience—this is an example of how to get to know your clients, and bought up all the magazines from the bookstore that were about surfing, skating, everything that that demographic was reading. These guys at Hormel were people who never left that small town. They don’t know what’s happening in the world. I knew that I had to get them listening to where we were talking to the end-user, not to them. And when I did this direction, what was important about it, was that people weren’t going to buy SPAM online. Let’s look at it. SPAM is an American icon. And kids were into that. Let’s celebrate that and target that. We’ll get a lot of mileage out of this age group wearing t-shirts. It would do more for the brand than anything else. So the demographic was 16 to 20 or 30. So I got all these magazines, brought them out there, and didn’t tell my company I was doing this.
Before I brought out the design directions, I handed the magazines out to the corporate guys, and they were like kids at a candy store. The have never seen anything like that. They were swapping magazines and looking through them. By the time I did the presentation, it was such a piece of cake. They were so excited about it and they had no resistance. They picked this direction up rather than the conservative one.
DAVE:
I was in the room. I was the project lead for site. To kind of emphasize the gravity of what Kate is saying, Kate came up with the process very quickly of educating people who had no design background or design language of demographics and marketing in a span of a 10 minute exercise. Then, immediately after that exercise, where very little money was spent, they picked this! In the mid-90s in Minnesota in an incredibly conservative corporate environment, this design was way outside. I was blown away. I just had to thrown in. I’m still blown away, and I still use that exercise whenever I can.
KATE:
I knew the meat of the site, no pun intended, was about the timeline that was really going to be the interest. I also knew that even though SPAM had a long history, how much can you read, really? So what I proposed was to do a timeline that said SPAM history was with American history, because it also reinforces the idea that SPAM has been here as long as we’ve been here. So in each section, the can would open up and reveal the graphic of the section.
I did research of the color palette of the time, the cans of the time, the thoughts, as well as the history. I worked with a writer from an advertising agency and we collaborated on what was important about each decade. What was really amazing about this though, was that no one was doing interactive or animation at this time, and these timelines were filled with them.
My company didn’t want certain animation like the smoke right there. They said it was too negative. But I just kind of ignored it because it was history. I think I finally worn them down. I wanted this part to be a rollover, but we couldn’t do it technology wise.
In the 60s, all this stuff to make this collage was stuff that I had in my lunchboxes. This was a necklace. This was a poster. This part was a pop-up. So the shape of it was one long scroll for each decade.
70s. The can changes again. All these little arrows were interactive features. This Dress-the-Can thing had a SPAM can and you could pull different hair styles from the 70’s to it. You can change the shoes. It was just a fun little thing to do.
Then the 80s. This was so hard to do. The design. It was hard, but it was accurate to the time. So you can see how the SPAM history has emerged.
Shows TV By Girls site (www.TVbyGirls.com)
TV by Girls is a site that just launched a little while ago. This is for ten to eighteen year old girls—it’s a non-profit mentorship program for film. So I wanted it to be very much about them, so they have the ownership. With the style, the colors are really bad here—but it’s bright pink and brown, so it’s not “girly”, it’s powerful, but it’s bright and vibrant, and they love it. And these are all their videos that you can play. You click and a pop-up window plays the videos that these girls do.
Shows Minnesota Opera site (www.mnopera.org/)
Minnesota Opera just launched not too long ago. I had some “befores” I wanted to show you, but it’s running so long that I didn’t put them in here. One of the challenges was understanding the audience—most people that go to the opera have very specific behaviors in how to get to buy tickets. And so one thing that was important was to have a calendar on the homepage. And not only the calendar, but I put in what was happening on that date so there was no clicking beyond this homepage to get as much information as possible. It’s all about selling the tickets.
DAVE:
I would image that in the research, the demographic probably wasn’t your average fourteen to eighteen year old Xbox user?
KATE:
And the previous site to this was all Flash and nobody used it, they would end up calling, and so somebody had to answer the phone and take ticket orders. And so they weren’t using the website appropriately. And so this has been really successful for them. It loads really fast and then the calendar’s on every page, so you have an opportunity to—it’s about getting in the user’s point of view. Like why are they there and what would you want if you were there? It’s very clean and simple. It’s a project management tool so they do their own updates. There are all these tabs up here. I wanted to make sure that the user can navigate without leaving the page, without back tracking. So I had a top menu, allowing them to go anywhere.
Shows Now House site (www.nowhouseproject.org)
Their whole concept is to do 13 of these houses that were completely sustainable. What they do is build old houses, break it down to the foundation, and then build it up using used materials. These guys are phenomenal. What I wanted to make this site transparent. They used bulletin boards to insulate it. In fact, when you touch the house, it moves. It’s not solid. It keeps heat better that way. The house is absolutely phenomenal. Their vision is amazing too.
So what I wanted to do when I was designing it was to have a transparent feeling. It was kind of like a trademark to their approach. When people in Minnesota pushed on a house and it moved, that’s a hard sell. But I wanted everything to be layered and transparent because that’s very much how you felt when you went through the house. You can see how simple it is. And that’s how the house is; it’s really simple.
Okay. Fine art. This is just another example of one of the trip journals. This was from France, I think, and it shows you how it influences the work I do. It’s hard to peg what style of art I do because I’m changing all the time. I can’t finish sentences. I certainly won’t stick with one style of artwork. I’m always experimenting with objects and how materials react to each other. Materials that shouldn’t be together like pastels and India ink.
Shows work
This is an example of my process. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with roofing material. It comes in a big roll; it’s not porous. That was pretty challenging when you try to put things on it that are not being absorbed. When you glue on it, some stick, some don’t. I started experimenting with pastel when the wetness pulls the pastel into the tissue. This piece is huge.
Shows work
This is another example. Those are coffee grounds on the right. Most of my paintings have layers on top of each other. I like working on surfaces. I try to reuse everything from other pieces.
Shows work
This is piece I did on a letterpress with another artist friend of mine that somebody worked with the Jazz posters. I would find something in the antique store and that’s where we start the collaboration. And then we’ll work 3 in the morning. He’ll be like, “How about this?” He’s a third generation letterpress printer so he’s quite versed at it, and it’s all about breaking rules. On the right is a headrest from the 1800s barbershop chair.
Shows work
Here’s a piece that doesn’t look as good when it’s projected. This whole series was a series on paradox. Light and dark opposing and how your point of view depends on where you’re standing. That’s pretty much how I live my life. I know that everything is all there, but I can only see one part of it at one time. So you really have to engage with these pieces and move around it. That’s another one on the right.
So this was my presentation. Thank you for listening; I really appreciate your time.
