01/52: Designasaur

This post was originally posted on June 25, 2017 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

A new side project to postpone creative extinction.

01/52: Designasaur

01/52: Designasaur

Each week for a year, I’m going to be designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the first design of fifty-two.

Almost 20 years ago, I attended a lecture at the University of South Carolina School of Art hosted by the Columbia Communicating Arts Society. I was a young designer and trying hard to network with other designers and CCAS was the hub of the Columbia creative community at the time. The speaker was a designer from Atlanta, Bob Wages from Wages Design. Like most designers who came to speak at events like this, Bob showed his work and talked about his creative process. I distinctly remember him mixing in a fair amount of career and business advice, giving tips about how small the design world was and how important it was to be fair to everyone you worked with. But one offhand comment has stuck with me since that lecture…

Bob Wages introduced me to the concept of the “designasaur.”

A designasaur is a designer that never evolved. Someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t adopt new technologies or new styles. A creative who hasn’t embraced the changing world and risks “extinction.”

Since the advent of desktop publishing and the creation of the internet, the design industry has grown and changed in amazing and unbelievable ways. Technology continues to evolve at an absurdly rapid pace. It’s hard — maybe impossible — to keep up with it all. The struggle to figure out and incorporate new tools and trends is constant. And it feels sometimes like extinction is just around the corner.

Almost two decades later, I realize that all my side projects have been about continuing to grow as a designer and to avoid becoming a designasaur. Trying out new challenges and delaying creative extinction as long as I can. I figured the perfect shirt to kick off my new project was a designasaur shirt.

I sketched out my designsaur* over the course of a couple of days in pencil. Once I’d refined the sketch, I took a photograph of it with my iPhone and then reconstructed it in Illustrator on my Mac. This is a pretty normal workflow for me and that familiarity actually bothered me a little. For this new side project, should I put more restrictions on the production process? Should I only use non-Adobe apps like Affinity Designer? Should I actually use the sketch instead of rebuilding it in a vector format? In the end, I decided that the challenges of production mattered less to me than the process of creation. I’m okay relying on more comfortable production processes, especially at the beginning of this project. I hope to extend a little more out of my comfort level on the production process as the project continues.

If you want a Designasaur t-shirt of your own, head over to my Threadless store and order one. It’s available in a bunch of colors and in three different styles: a unisex classic t-shirt, a men’s tri-blend shirt and a women’s tri-blend shirt**. (And as a bonus, for the first week a new shirt design is available, the price will be discounted.)

If you are interested in the project and like the shirts, please follow along and share on social media. Let me know what you think. You can reach out on Twitter and Micro.Blog.

Buy “Designasuar” on Threadless

* My 9-year-old says I should name him Bob. Or Inky.
** It’s my wife’s favorite kind of t-shirt.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.

Splash.

Baby Gray.

Ruby.

Rutledge

Flower.

Override

Library

Sunflower

Giant eyeball

20 seconds left. Pathways workshop… #aiga

Odd reflection on our table.

Donuts. #neon

Enjoyed getting to see @khoi speak at the AIGA Leadership Retreat. Great presentation about careers… but I especially enjoyed his points about design writing. #aiga

Wing at sunrise #delta

For liberty and world peace.

Maxcy Monument.

A decade ago, I gave my AT-AT to my Star Wars obsessed nephews. Now, it’s coming home with my Star Wars obsessed son.

Remember the Sony eMarker?

This post was originally posted on May 15, 2017 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Of course you don’t. What we can learn from design and product failures…

In 2000, the potential of digital music was uncertain. There were a handful of limited MP3 music players. And Napster was the main way that people shared digital music (illegally). iTunes and the iPod hadn’t been launched yet. Everyone knew that the Internet could revolutionize the music industry. No one really knew how…

Sony released a product in 2000 that tried to bridge the gap between the old music world and the new digital one. The Sony eMarker solved a legitimate problem. It would let you mark songs that you heard on the radio so you could buy them later. This $20 keychain had a button and a small LCD display. When you heard a song on the radio you wanted to remember, you pushed the button. You could save up to 10 “eMarks.”

When you got home, you plugged your eMarker into your computer and fired up a Flash app that cross referenced your time stamp with the radio stations that you said you liked in your area and told you what was playing at that time. It then offered you a link to purchase a CD from Amazon or CDNow.

The eMarker worked surprisingly well. I know because I was one of a small number of people that actually owned one. It’s mostly a forgotten experiment, though. The service was discontinued in 2001. It’s even hard to find a good picture of the eMarker online.*

Here’s the thing about the eMarker. It was a relatively well-designed and reasonably effective solution to a real problem — music discovery. But the product was a failure because it wasn’t where the market was headed. The eMarker was based on the assumption that radio would still be the main way people discovered new music. And then users would pay to buy CDs from Amazon. iTunes and the iPod destroyed that world. (The problem of figuring out how to purchase music that you heard around you was eventually solved by Shazam, the iPhone and iTunes.)

Often, we see projects fail because they are based on a flawed strategy or approach. Look at Apple’s recent admission that the design of the new Mac Pro was a misstep. Apple “backed themselves in a thermal corner” because they bet that the future of professional machines was multiple, lower-powered GPUs. They designed and built their concept of a professional machine, but the rest of the industry charged ahead with large, power-hungry GPUs. Apple’s design couldn’t accommodate where the market needed them to be. No one doubts the skills or abilities of Apple’s designers, but the new Mac Pro wasn’t able to serve the pro audience because it was based on a flawed concept.

Even the best designs are only as good as the assumptions they are built on.

* It occurs to me that it’s impossible to find a high quality images of the eMarker because there weren’t any high quality digital cameras in 2000.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. In his spare time, he is trying to figure out how to use all the ink he has purchased.

Celebrated Mothers Day with Team Wertz at St. Paul Aiken this morning. Had to get a family picture. 😀