Illustration by Ben Porto, founder of Porto Architecture. Brooklyn, NY

Illustration by Shantell Martin, visual artist. New York, NY

Illustration by Marloes Haarmans, photographer and art director. Madrid, Spain

Illustration by David Milan, lettering artist and illustrator. Madrid, Spain

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 06 with the headline “What’s On My Desk?” Subscribe today.

]]> https://sixtysixmag.com/influence-of-fashion-on-design/ Wed, 09 Dec 2020 12:00:23 +0000 https://sixtysixmag.com/?p=30507 The drape of fabric, sheen, texture—fashion elements like these show up in designs that go beyond clothing. Some of the best designers working today say researching across mediums keeps design interesting, and fashion is a top influence in works that span from packaging to faucet design.

Just look at the Invari Bath Collection by Brizo®. The design borrows decorative Edwardian influences, as the campaign was styled and shot by Leta Sobierajski and Wade Jeffree using ornate floral sets with subtle “made you look” details like a black lace glove.

Fashion is everywhere, from finishes to photography to interior design. “Within creative circles so many things are interrelated, and we’re all inspired by what each other does,” says famous fashion designer Jason Wu, one of four creatives we recently talked to about how fashion influences their work.

Here’s more of what Jason and others had to say.

Jason Wu

Artist and Fashion Designer, New York City

Known for his fashion designs, Jason Wu has branched far from the fashion sphere, designing kitchen and bath collections with Brizo and more. Photo by Daniel Dorsa

A Lead toy sewing machine from the 1920s or ’30s started fashion designer Jason Wu on his journey when he was a teen. “It’s a really beautiful object that set the path for me wanting to become a fashion designer,” he says.

The gift from his father still sits in his Garment District office. Now 38, Jason can and does design anything—dresses for Michelle Obama, dolls for family-owned Integrity Toys, kitchen and bath collections for Brizo.

The latter he’s worked with for more than a decade, even to raised eyebrows from other designers, but his vision was clear. “My work with Brizo has been pretty instinctual. The Matte Black (bath collection finish) was my first idea and the idea we landed on. The Matte White finish (pictured) was my initial plan for the kitchen collection and also where we landed.”

Launched in August 2020, the Jason Wu for Brizo™ Kitchen Collection has a signature Matte White finish, a complement to the Matte Black finish in the 2012 Jason Wu for Brizo Bath Collection. The Matte Black finish was unusual for its time, but now it’s everywhere. “I call that the little black dress of faucets.”

Elizabeth Dilk

Art Director, New York City

Elizabeth Dilk’s latest branding project was inspired by lettering she saw in a French film. Photo by Daniel Dorsa

Elizabeth Dilk is a storyteller, whether she’s crafting an ad for Nordstrom, art directing a music video, or designing a logo.

She recently worked with beauty brand Virtue, taking inspiration for the logo from lettering she found in a French film. She may not remember the film’s name, but it was enough to make her pause for a screen grab so she could redraw it. “It’s an elegant serif, and the cues to more archetypal fashion lettering were all there,” she says.

She was also influenced by the paintings and illustrations of artist, designer, and fashion illustrator Tanya Ling, who was hired to create portraits for Virtue. “She has such a cool, fluid tactile style when it comes to rendering women, and knowing we wanted to show a huge range of hair diversity, we thought her hand would be amazing at rendering tons of different types of hair. Her palette is also really elevated and unique and really worked well with the palette I developed for the brand and packaging—natural tones mixed with bright, completely unnatural colors.”

Sonya Haffey

Interior Designer, West Palm Beach, FL

Sonya Haffey says fashion plays a big role in her interior design practice—magazines are often the first place she goes for inspiration. Photo by Ryan Loco

Elegant gold leaf, delicate pink, and deep green speak to interior designer Sonya Haffey from “Pedal Back,” a painting by Tampa artist Stephanie Ong. As V Starr Interiors vice president, Sonya often finds herself going back to Stephanie’s work, using her paintings on paper as inspiration for her own interior design projects. “She does an amazing job with color, and she always tells a story in her art,” Sonya says. “That’s how our projects work, too.”

Works like these as well as paint and fabric swatches show up on mood boards at V Starr, Venus Williams’ interior design company known for making luxury spaces. Sonya spends a lot of time flipping through the latest magazines for color inspiration and trends, pulling a ruffle here or geometric pattern there. “We’re constantly going back to that concept board and asking, ‘Does this tie in with what we were thinking?’ All sorts of things inspire us, but definitely fashion is one of them.”

Greg Lotus

Photographer, Los Angeles

Greg Lotus has a flair for glamour. Whether he’s shooting for Vogue or Brizo, he’s always looking to bring a sense of elegance to his work. Photo by Greg Lotus

Flapper fashion documented in dramatic lighting inspired by turn-of-the-century theater sets the stage for artists like Vogue photographer Greg Lotus. “There is this famous black and white photo from the ’20s from Penn Station where people are waiting for the trains, all wearing the fashions of the time—Coco Chanel, you name it. You could see the beams of evening sun shooting through the dusty building. That really struck me,” Greg says.

He’s shot covers for Vanity Fair, GQ, and others, and he’s always looking for glamour. Photography, like cinematography, he says, has a lot to do with lights. “Lighting is very important because you can see the layers of a picture. The shadows, the light, how it changes things, it has to be the starting point.”

When it came to shooting the Sotria Bath Collection by Brizo, Greg had to get creative. The team wanted a fashion model in the shoot to make an ordinary moment extraordinary.

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 05 with the headline “The Influence of Fashion.” Subscribe today.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Produced by Studio Sixtysix
Portraits by Daniel Dorsa, Ryan Loco, and Greg Lotus
Words by Laura Rote
Art Direction by Kristina Walton Zapata

Studio Sixtysix is the in-house creative agency to Sixtysix magazine. Studio Sixtysix stories are conceived, produced, and edited by Studio Sixtysix.

Here Mary Jo explains how to tackle that intimidating start of a new creative project, from small personal designs that lead to big HBF Textiles collections to testing out ideas and letting the monkey out of the room.

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Don’t be precious about your work.

I make potholders. I love to make potholders. I do experiments with color. I’m always doing these little trials of color and patterning with each potholder. To me that’s weaving 101, and yet it’s so simple. The other day I did some batiks with my daughter. I love that! Getting started is about not being so precious about the work, and then the accidents are happy accidents. You’re like, “Oh wow, that turned out cool.”

Get your hands involved.

My background is in fine art; I was a printmaker. So right now, other than my potholders, I’m looking into doing more monoprinting. I’ve also been going out into my yard and picking up sticks for a macrame piece. That’s next on my agenda. I have this big branch that my husband found, and I’ve had this thing forever. I was in the grocery store, and they had clothesline, so I bought four packs and started this giant macrame. I thought, “Oh my god, I think I bit off more than I can chew.” So I made a little mockup with a smaller stick. My kids were like, “What is that?”

All of this to say that you have to really lean into the creative process itself. When it comes to color, material, or pattern, I would rather make a weaving out of paper or magazine strips first. You have to get your hands involved.

Test out your ideas.

We have this giant table that’s about 20 feet long and 8 feet wide. We do everything on that table. We have all of our projects laid out, with a giant pin wall nearby where we can evaluate things. Then we also have a sofa near that area that we can mock up upholstery on so we can really visualize it. Is this too busy? Is the scale right? Where it repeats, is it repeating in an odd way? Inevitably there is a pattern where you’re like, “Oh, I see a monkey in there. We have to get rid of that!” It’s almost like a Rorschach test. “I see an owl!”

Related | Christiane Müller’s Lost & Found Collection was Born From Fabric That Shaped Her Childhood

Don’t pay attention to redundant trends.

Put your phone away, open your eyes, and look at your environment. Don’t be so dependent on that phone. Patterns are everywhere. I don’t like to Google or Instagram search color trends because it’s redundant. We end up all creating the same thing—something in pastel pink. Instead take a look around you for inspiration.

Get to know your creative partners face-to-face.

I believe in face-to-face conversations. I believe in talking, not a bunch of emails back and forth. You can’t design that way. When I work with outside creative partners, I have to spend some time with them. I don’t think you can fully understand people if you don’t meet them face-to-face. Not just looking at their work, either, but it’s so important that you are compatible. I really feel like if they are not someone I can spend a good deal of time with, then it’s not a good creative match. If they respect my background and what I’ve built, and that respect is mutual, then I know it’s going to work. I will say that the people I’ve worked with have never treated me badly, but I do want them to understand that this is a give-and-take process.

Related | What It Takes to Really Make a Creative Partnership Work

Sketch daily, even if you think you have nothing to draw.

I taught art to non-art majors early in my career. I asked them all to keep notecards to draw on. They had to do a sketch a day, and it could be anything. Some were more drawn out than others—but still, they had to sketch every day. That practice causes people to look at something new every day.

 

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of Design + Creative Direction at HBF Textiles. Coming to you from her home in Hickory, North Carolina, @maryjomiller18 highlights the detail of our latest textiles from our new Spring 2020 Collection featuring modern patterns and fun textures. . . . #HBFatHome #TextileThursdays #HBFTextiles #HBFT #Textiles #TextilePattern #TextilesToLove #TextilesToKnow #Hickory #StayHomeStaySafe #AtHome #MaryJo #NorthCarolina #HickoryMade #NewTextiles #AttentiontoDetail #Spring2020 #SpringCollection #Texture

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Understand that the creative process is a journey.

I don’t like the word “collaborative” because I don’t think that’s inclusive enough. I feel like creative projects are a journey. It’s a chapter, and each chapter is like, “We made it over the testing hump. We made it over the design brief on the pattern. But now we go into color work, and what does that chapter look like?” Sometimes it can take us a good 12 months from start to finish, or longer if it’s a project with more technical aspects. It really is a journey.

***

Invite people into your process.

So often we get caught up in our heads and think, “Who cares what I have to say?” Or “Everyone knows this already.” As you start to share with other people you hear, “Oh, that’s so interesting. I never heard that perspective before” or “I’ve had this same problem. How did you deal with it?” Share early and often, which is terrifying because you’re like, ‘I haven’t figured out my idea yet; I don’t even know if this is interesting,’ but that’s the way to figure it out, right? Designers know how important it is to get feedback early and often—especially from users.

Rethink your audience.

If you feel like you don’t have the experience, consider speaking to your past self—who might that be? Maybe speaking to people who are just entering the field or who are in university or in primary or secondary education makes sense. If you find the right audience it really opens up the topics you can talk about.

Remember to breathe.

One of the simplest but maybe most underrated pieces of advice is to allow yourself to pause and take a deep breath. A lot of times when you’re asked a question you feel like you need to say something right away and it doesn’t give you a moment to collect your thoughts. When the focus is on you, time feels warped—taking a second feels like a minute and you think, “I can’t keep people waiting this long.” Our breath is such a powerful tool to calm your body and give you that moment to collect your thoughts. I have an instructor who will say, “Use this opportunity to grab a drink of water and buy yourself some time.” Give yourself permission to take a couple moments and think through the answer. It makes a difference.

Related | Chris Rowson on How to Pitch Your Work

Ask for help.

One of the big lessons I’ve learned is to ask for help. This happens a lot with speaking, too. People are too nervous to ask someone else early on because they don’t want to share their ideas while they’re in progress, but having some conversations now with speakers or other businesswomen helps. I’m like, “Oh. I should have sought out asking these questions earlier rather than trying to figure it out on my own and feeling really alone in it.”

Get personal.

We teach a lot about storytelling. Our brain is wired to respond to story; it could be about anything, but I think a personal story is that much more powerful because it helps the audience connect to you. Having a story and a clear call to action is really powerful. At the end of every talk think, “What do you want people to do from here?” It’s important to tell your audience what to do. This could come partly from storytelling or this could be in part through other means, like allowing yourself to connect with the audience and be vulnerable. The audience wants you to succeed. There are very few situations in which they don’t, and when they see a bit of humanity in you, they’re that much more inspired to cheer you on.

Related | 6 Creatives on What They Wish They Knew Years Earlier

It’s OK to be nervous.

I’ve been a cheerleader, a camp counselor, an exercise instructor—throughout my life I’ve exuded confidence, but I still get nervous every time I speak. Every type of engagement is different, and you have to understand how to prepare for that, whether it’s an off the cuff discussion or going to be on a panel. I work with a lot of events and one of them is the Women Talk Conferences Panel, where the goal is to highlight a really incredible group of women designers from different disciplines with different levels of speaking experience. They share how they got started and so many of them say “I’ve given 100 talks and I still get nervous.”

“Designing systems for companies that have 2,000 to 5,000 to 10,000 people, or create an extreme amount of work each day, you have to build something for other people to execute against or build from, which is a totally different form of design than a small studio that designs all of the artifacts for a problem,” he says.

Here Ben shares how to shift your mindset to design better commercial work.

***

Understand that clients come to you because they want results.

It sounds really simple, but I think a lot of designers start from a very central point of view, which is, “What opportunity does this project allow for me and my craft to do?” It’s fine to think that, but when you’re talking to a client, you need to understand what they’re looking for out of this partnership. It’s no insult to designers, but a client comes to you because they want a result. They aren’t looking for beautiful posters; they’re looking for some kind of business outcome. You’re helping them get to that outcome, and you can make beautiful work in the process, but you need to help them understand why the choices you’re making help solve their problems and not just why the choices you’re making make for a better-looking artifact.

I try to step out of design and think of it from other professions. If I go to a mechanic, he’s obsessed with spark plugs in the same way that designers are obsessed with typography and color. But I don’t need to know that stuff nor do I really care, because fixing engines is not my passion. I just want my car to work.

Like Spotify, tap into the right brand narrative.

When we got involved with Spotify, they were really just entering the US market. Their reputation was more around a piece of software and not around an understanding of the culture of music. When an album launches, everyone gets the same press kits, so the challenge was how do we make Spotify a noticeable voice in this conversation and not just have the same images? How can we make it so we demonstrate this company’s musical knowledge and not just a platform on which music takes place? That was the shift we were making.

The visual identity was the tool for doing that. We went and looked at a lot of album covers, and thought the Spotify brand needed to feel like an album cover. So that’s how their brand ended up super colorful, vibrant, energetic, and always changing, because we wanted them to feel like music.

Recognize that everyone is allowed to have their own tastes.

If you’re having a conversation purely about the aesthetic value of things, everyone has different tastes, and you’re going to end up with misalignments and frustrating conversations where the client likes this shade of blue versus the shade you’re recommending. If they say that, you can’t win that argument; everyone is allowed to have their own tastes. But if you frame it from the perspective of, “Hey, this blue doesn’t work because it’s too close to your competitors’, and this blue is more differentiated”—that’s much harder to argue with.

Find more time to not be a designer.

I think a lot of young designers make the mistake of thinking that being a good designer means making your entire life about design. The older I get, the more I think the opposite is true. Increasingly these days, I try to find more and more time to not be a designer because it makes me more empathetic to everyone else, who are ultimately our clients. At the end of the day, design is for people and making people’s lives better. The more you understand people, it’s easier to solve problems.

Invite randomness into your practice.

Especially now, with so much of design being on the internet and everyone looking at the same sources for inspiration, you see a lot of trends rise and fall over the course of the month. That ability to accidentally stumble on something is much harder than it used to be. It’s nice to find opportunities for randomness in your life because it surfaces things that you never would have stumbled upon if you were being intentional about it.

For example, last weekend, I went for a walk around the city for three hours, which became an architectural tour—San Francisco has the most beautiful houses. I would never for a project sit down and go, “OK, I’m going to look up Victorian-era houses as an inspiration point,” but those happenstances are the kinds of things that fuel more interesting work. I saw these beautiful ornate houses, and maybe that inspires an idea of something being more ornate here and there.

To be interesting, be interested.

The most effective designers I’ve ever met and work with tend to be curious people. A healthy curiosity and skepticism of the way things are tends to lead to people who are interested in the world around them and seeing opportunities for ways to improve our world. It’s that cliché, “To be interesting, be interested.”

Photos courtesy of Ben Crick

***

Christian Swafford, Material Lust

The person you’re dating and the person you’re working with are two different people. You have to learn to collaborate with each other’s “work” version of yourselves, and the faster you learn each other’s boundaries, the better. When it comes to boundaries, having defined “work” hours and “play” hours is vital to making our relationship thrive. You can never really stop talking or thinking about your creative practice, but the mandatory breaks make it easier to step back and gain perspective. What’s special for us is that all of our creative output goes through a rigorous in-house critique before it’s released. The two of us can find easier compromises, since ultimately, the work is finalized by a third party.

Photo courtesy of The Little Friends of Printmaking

Melissa of Melissa and JW Buchanan,
The Little Friends of Printmaking

If I’d had a lick of perspective about how long and happy our working relationship would be, I’d never have fought about trivial design stuff. When we were starting out, we had fights about tons of things, big and small. They always boiled down to two fears. The first was that no matter what project we happened to be working on, it could be the last time we’d be asked to work on something like this. And so, if this is the first and last time we’re doing this, then we’re doing it my way and I will accept nothing less—and how dare you, sir? The other fear was that if you weren’t getting your way right now, the precedent would be set and you might never get your way ever again. Fast-forward 20 years, we’ve designed thousands of things together and we’re still experiencing firsts, but we’ve gotten rid of all the fighting.

Related | Award-Winning Illustrator Shanti Sparrow’s 8 Tips for Design Success

Edward Barber of Barber Osgerby

You have to be good friends to even consider working with someone. Beneath our working relationship is a friendship similar to that of siblings, so we always have each other’s best interests in mind. We respect each other’s opinions and ideas. If one person in a design partnership has aspirations to be more of a star than the other then forget it. The back and forth of collaboration and constant accountability can be challenging, but it really keeps us both striving for high standards. It also allows for unexpected results. When working with a long-term collaborator there are many things that don’t need to be said, and there are efficiencies in that. However, if we disagree on project direction (which regularly happens), it helps us explore the project in more depth. This almost always results in something unexpected.

Liz Meyer of Datalands

One of the most important things about working in creative teams is to understand each other. Be open, honest, transparent, and talk. Let time do the rest. If you’re together for good, you’ll succeed! At the end of the day, be friends with your partner. If you can’t enjoy their company and communicate openly, the partnership is not likely to continue.

Related | 8 Ways to Conquer Creative Block, According to Professional Creatives

Eva Yarza of The Yarza Twins

When you are negotiating (for anything in life), it doesn’t mean one of you has to give up everything and the other one will win. It means both of you need to agree on a middle point that half satisfies both of you. In the creative industry, this has a specific positive effect. Differing ideas mean you both have to really develop them. In these cases, you can often surprise the client with two completely different routes and have them select their favorite. Collaboration is at the base of all creative partnerships—it exposes your ideas to other talented people. When diverse ideas meet, you can make something extraordinary happen, together.

***

Each project is a marriage.

It’s a serious commitment because, as a studio, what we produce is our currency. That’s what we do. We’re not interested in paper architecture; we’re interested in building things. When we’re speaking with potential clients or collaborators, I always think, “Do I want to sit with this person for the next five or eight years. Would we enjoy it? Would we have fun? Would we learn from each other?” I did a project in Hong Kong—a 650,000-square-meter mixed-use Pacific Place—that started in 2005 and finished around 10 years later. That’s a long journey, and it doesn’t matter how exciting the project is, to keep your energies and interests and engagement you have to really enjoy the people you work with.

Weird is good.

Where does ambition meet convention? People often come to us with interesting challenges. It’s really about their vision, their confidence, their ability to not cut and paste what they’ve done before, to allow the space to do something different. We had someone come in and speak to us about designing an old people’s home. That’s not a typology that often gets brought to us. When I say weird, there’s an unusual, interesting design problem: “Why aren’t people thinking more about that?” Bringing a different perspective is exciting and interesting.

Work backwards.

Quite often when a project comes to us it doesn’t look like the same project at the end. We spend a lot of energy working with the client to figure out what the design problem is. We can spend weeks and months unpacking and repacking what our clients want and reframing it back to them before we put pen to paper on any potential solutions. Many designers were used to going along the decision tree—“Should it be tall or small? Fat or thin? Red or blue?” All of those hundreds of design decisions might lead to an outcome. We work backwards, looking at all of the different possibilities to unearth the real design challenge.

What are you really trying to achieve?

For the British pavilion in Shanghai—the kind of hairy building we designed—the brief obviously didn’t say “hairy building.” It was 200-some pages that said it must communicate Britain’s manufacturing heritage, the British landscape, our industry, David Beckham, the royal family, taxis, all of these things. But by trying to do everything we’re doing nothing. We went through that document to boil it down—What’s the purpose? At the end in small print it said it wanted to be in the expo’s top five pavilions. We said, “That’s what you want. The rest is ancillary.” This is a promotional tool for the UK, but if people don’t visit, you can’t promote. World expos are visited by millions of people. It can take hours to queue for a pavilion. In Shanghai they had over 200 pavilions so we were up against stiff competition. We started thinking about how when you’re there all you want to do is rest. You want to sit, but there’s isn’t anywhere to sit. We also wanted to do something extraordinary. People have to choose which of the 200 architectural “wow” moments to engage with, and if you create a building that doesn’t look like a building—it has soft, swaying edges—that stimulates curiosity. You think, “There’s a place I can rest, and it’s got something quite interesting to look at. Let’s go there.”

Leave room for stretch.

When we designed a new bus for London we asked thousands of questions. You go in with very little knowledge; it’s an amazing course in learning about someone else’s industry. When you get on a bus in the UK there are fluorescent lights, nuclear warning yellow handrails, strange purple and green seats, and you think, “This must be driven by regulation.” When you dig in, you learn you don’t need to make the handles nuclear warning yellow. The code doesn’t require it. It’s a learned behavior. You do need contrast between the vertical pole and the background, but people think “contrast” and turn to nuclear warning yellow. That’s the biggest contrast you can have. They aren”t thinking about what it does to your eye or the fact you have to sit there and look at that. Our distinction is much softer. You can still see the pole, as you must, and it still complies, but it’s a softer hue, and our seats are a warm reddish color. Nothing is stopping you from making this a nice place—why not design it like a lounge? You can use colors, materials, and tones that are restful, relaxing, and more meaningful.

Focus on what interests you.

We have five design partners, including Thomas Heatherwick, the founding partner. We each run a cluster of projects, maybe eight to 10. Individually we try to make our portfolio very varied, and that’s deliberate because we enjoy working all different scales. I might be working on a small glass house in southern England or I’m also designing a light at the moment, and I’m doing a big retail project in Prague. I don’t discern the difference—each one has its own particular design challenge, and each stretches different parts of my thinking as to how to solve those challenges. We only do the stuff we’re interested in. We have to be true to ourselves so you don’t get in a situation where you’d really like to work on one thing and not another. That’s dangerous because you start to produce work that has less thought and less care, less attention, and suddenly you’re doing a range of work that includes stuff you spent loads of thought on and other stuff you just managed to do. I don’t ever want to be like that.

Appreciate the making.

As things scale up, you can get more disconnected from the making—the actual creation of the thing. Our studio is always trying to keep as close a link to the making as possible. We used to have our own projects. We had our own construction company. We used to make a lot of our own stuff. As we’ve gotten bigger that’s become less practical and less possible. We now work with fabricators very closely to understand that whatever we design has to be built, manufactured, and produced. That connection with making makes our projects more readily deliverable so they can actually happen. And through the process of making we often come up with interesting outcomes.

Keep a fresh perspective.

Project teams are made of individuals with different experience levels and backgrounds. By doing lots of different things you exercise different parts of the brain. If someone has designed a hotel, quite often we would take them off the team that’s designing another hotel because they would have their own unconscious bias. They can come in and critique and give their opinion—we’re not going to lose that experience—but they won’t drive it in order to get a fresh perspective and to remove the possibility of repeating.

Now, he’s an Associate Creative Director on the global brand and design team at Spotify, working with artists and creating colorful ad campaigns. Below are some tips on how he designs for the world of popular culture in the Internet era—when to push the envelope, when to take a step back, and when to get weird.

***

Be open to the next big thing.

I grew up being into design, and I used to draw a lot as a kid. But I wasn’t one of those kids who was coding when they were 10 years old. I wasn’t hacking or building things on my computer. That’s kind of an interest that came later on. My last year in graphic design school, I took this new interactive design course. I was fascinated by what I was learning. That was before this became the decade of social media and the internet. Now interacting with each other on social media is the standard.

Stay versatile.

For the campaign surrounding Travis Scott’s album Astroworld, I had to be adaptable regarding the roles I was taking on. We made so many little things for that project, and some of them were funny while others were really experimental. It was very hands-on at some points. But when creating the short film that announced the album’s official release, I was more of a director and facilitator, while an editor friend of mine made that come to life. I have friends in Berlin who are great with 3D and motion so they helped on the animations, which were based off of 2D images I had created. I was always playing a different part with each element of the process.

Create something that does more than just blend in.

At my first job, the question was always, “How do we make tools that work well for people?” But after I began doing more freelance work, I realized that my interests with interactive design and technology were less about making those kind of tools. I wasn’t as interested in designing things that blend into your life. I became more invested in making things that might not be the easiest to use, but that will inspire you, and make you interact with an artist or their music in a way that you haven’t before.

Before you develop a visual style, develop a problem-solving style.

Design is always about solving a problem for someone. It’s a way to make things accessible for people. You’re bridging a gap, like between musicians’ fans and the musicians themselves. So I’ve never really considered having a consistent visual style. My “style” comes in with how I like to solve problems and do the thinking. There is a definite way that I like to approach a problem, where there’s always room for play.

It’s not about you; it’s about what’s best for the work.

What I’m learning more and more in my career is letting go. I am a designer. I love the craft. But I think that part of growing, especially in this sort of work environment, is understanding what I know I could do versus what’s going to be best for the project. How to collaborate and how to sometimes put your ego aside is only going to make the final product better. Not every brief you’re given needs to reinvent the wheel and be something crazy. Really figuring out the work is what design is all about.

Learn from the best.

When I worked at an agency, we spent a lot of time in Portland working at Nike and learning their sensibilities. With Nike, everything in their design and ad campaigns has to be top-notch. They know who their consumers are so it’s effortless for them. It never feels corny. It was more of a learning experience than just me putting my personal stamp on the things we were working on. Learning how they do things was good schooling.

What you’ve done a million times might be a great challenge for someone else.

Sometimes it’s critical to delegate. If there’s something that doesn’t feel like it’s going to allow you to push creatively, you might pass it to someone else. It’s mostly about identifying something you’ve already done a million times and finding someone who actually hasn’t done it before. For another designer on your team, it might be a cool assignment or challenge for them.

Find the right space to take risks.

I take the train every day to work in New York and a lot of things look the same now. Visual aesthetics have become this commodity everywhere you go in the world. That is the reality, and those are the expectations, so most people don’t want to take risks. It’s really important to see those opportunities for risk-taking and do the work. There’s a trust in the experimentation that comes with working with some of the emerging artists I’ve gotten to know. But then again, I couldn’t make a living if I only worked with these cool up-and-coming artists just making weird shit. It’s the balance.

“It’s not about you; it’s about what’s best for the work,” says Tal Midyan.

Photos and portrait courtesy of Tal Midyan

At the time, Herman Miller wasn’t focused on tables, so the idea languished. Yet Kim and Sam still thought the concept valid, that it resonated, and nearly a decade later, Herman Miller did, too. “Eventually Herman Miller approached us when they were focused on tables, wanting to look at our idea again,” Kim says. “Timing is everything, as they say, and we were just a little bit early in the first instance.”

And so Civic Tables was finally born. The comprehensive table collection includes designs for a variety of spaces and settings—work, home, play—each with choices in shape, color, material, and finish “so that when you look at a table for dining, for example, you don’t feel like it’s a conference table that has been repurposed,” Kim says.

The type of smart design choices and processes that lead the team to Civic Tables have long been part of Kim’s career. We talked to her about her tips for designing smarter and performing at your best.

Start talking.

The ongoing nature of conversations in the studio about topics that may or may not attach themselves to projects—we really think that that somehow gets into the work. Everyone in our studio is from a different country, a different background, so we have very different observations on daily life and mundane things. As we have these organic conversations, ideas become more articulate and materialize. Without that conversation, the projects themselves wouldn’t be as rich.

Redefine what it means to be productive.

That means appreciating what you’re doing as part of the process, and trusting that it’s part of the process without seeing an immediate output or uptake of your idea. I don’t think good ideas happen at scheduled times necessarily. Take the pressure of matching your expectation to what being productive means off of yourself.

“Every project has its own constraints and starting point, but Civic isn’t like other projects in that way,” Kim Colin says. “The intelligence of the project was an outgrowth of previous creative work.”

Let go of the idea of perfection.

What if you took off the constraint that it has to be so good, that first thing that you do? Design is a lot of never having done “it” before. Sometimes you have to accept that the first thing is going to be rubbish. Wouldn’t it be great to make that rubbish at the beginning of the process, instead of at the end? Remove your idea of what perfection is before you ever make anything with your hands. Take away that judgment.

Cultivate a sense of active curiosity.

Not necessarily observation, like writing things down. I just mean as you live, letting your eye catch on things, both the good and bad. The well-designed, the perfectly-placed, the brilliant color, the spatially interesting, yes—but also, it could be something where you’re like, “Wow, that’s bad. Why is that so bad?” Have curiosity about why things are the way they are, not necessarily how to improve them. Then, when it comes to a project, you’ll have this encyclopedia inside your head that can help inform your process.

Take a position with your work.

There are people who can make 50 different ideas, but the bad thing about that is that they have no position. They can’t judge which one is better and why. Design is a considered act. You’re taking resources to make things, and you’re distributing all over the world potentially. These should be well-thought out projects. What it means to take a position on a project is to understand from the beginning what the line of thinking is, and not have that be a nondescript or unclear goal.

For instance, even with the Civic Tables, we want them to be a lot of things, but we also know that there are certain things they are not going to be, and that’s on purpose. If you get lost as you’re working, you come back to those foundational principles that you established in the beginning.

The Industrial Facility studio in London.

Make your intent clear.

With Civic Tables, what we saw from our initial proposal to when we were actually designing it was that work and home started to blend. And as these things started to blur, the tables had more reason to have more capability. The design started to get richer, and once we put all the functionality in it, we had to start to simplify that visually. The way we did that was by giving a really rich choice of materials and finishes that had never really been accomplished before in a table program—but making those choices obvious and clear. If you have too many parts that have too many possibilities, that’s just too complex for anyone to specify. It’s all about balancing options and trying to find a visual elegance that works with all types of specifications.

Overdeliver.

I mean that in the best way. Overdeliver in the thinking. Companies usually put some thought to what they’re asking for, and you have something to add to that. You’re not just there to answer what they need. What can really make a difference in a project is when you add to the richness of what they’ve proposed, and then they see that in the work, because you’ve followed through.

Photos Courtesy of Industrial Facility

But like color, pattern exists on a spectrum. “Pattern can go two ways: It brings you in if the space is really minimal or stark, which is a trend right now,” says Dorothy Cosonas, creative director of KnollTextiles, “or it can be the large idea of the ‘Gucci mashup,’ where there’s a whole bunch of patterns in the space, and you go into overdrive looking at it.”

In the brand’s latest collection, called Decennium, Dorothy and her team have found the happy medium, pairing bold, abstract patterns—“when we do patterns, we tend to go big,” she says—with more muted designs. Here Dorothy shares how to achieve a similar balance, designing with pattern so that it overjoys, not overwhelms.

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The KnollTextile team’s mood board for the Decennium Collection.

Do your research.

With Decennium, it was about researching fiber art and exploring dimensional forms that you see in nature, meaning cloud formations and things like that. We kept these as overriding concepts and the main focus for Floressence and Billow, the two main patterns within the collection.

This image of clouds was the KnollTextile team’s main inspiration behind Floressence.

Find an inspiration point.

For me personally, I go to books for inspiration, not only from our own world, meaning interiors, but art, fashion, nature, and architecture. But I think the biggest driver for me is fashion. I feel like it’s the one industry where there are still a lot of disrupters, and I think that’s so important to keep design on its edge. That industry keeps design alive from a pattern and color perspective.

“Every time we launch a collection, I have to make sure that we’re not being repetitive in any way,” Dorothy says. “With Decennium, we reviewed our line, and we determined that we really have a need for more abstract, organic and bold patterns in both upholstery and wall coverings.”

Create a mood board.

We always create mood boards and storyboards in the office to keep us going, so we can reflect back and make sure we’re staying on point in terms of specific point of view.

Try a multi-color pattern.

Designers often want pattern, and they want it to be unique—but not too specific so they feel like they can only use it once. That’s the beauty of when you do a multi-color pattern. You can draw out certain colors and build an entire palette around it. In Billow, you definitely get the feeling of the drama, but because of the different colorways, it’s a pattern you can use and use and use.

Same thing for Floressence. There’s a specific colorway, for example, called Blackbird. It’s very moody and understated, and yet there are these underlying colors in the palette itself that are current—brown, lavender, purple. Those trend colors are fresh in a lot of people’s minds but are being combined with safe colors. That’s key in terms of designing. How do you make someone feel like it’s of the moment but will last a while?

“When we create a collection, it’s really about color, texture, and pattern,” Dorothy says. “When you do solids or textures that are multi color, those are the backup singers, if you would. But then you have the stars, which are the patterns in the line.”

Don’t be afraid to go bold.

Pattern can take a little getting used to, but it’s not that different from when people put a bunch of solids into a room. Pattern can be a focal point, but it also allows the furniture and the space to speak in a different way.

Add texture.

Together, texture and pattern together create even more visual interest. That’s an element you want in things that are meant for the long haul, meaning something people will live with for a while. When you add texture, it can hide the sins of everyday wear and tear and also bring warmth to the space.

Floressence is printed on a custom-dyed, ribbed velvet ground cloth.

Photos Courtesy of KnollTextiles