logos, brands, and identity systems

two recent(ish) episodes of obsessed with design have me thinking a lot about logos, brands, and identity. i wrote a bit ago about my thoughts on branding as the aesthetic manifestation of systems thinking. the obsessed with design interviews with paula scher and prescott perez-fox have deepened my thinking.

the following details from prescott perez-fox interview really stuck out to me. basically, he says that a logo on its own might be nice, but it’s more or less irrelevant if it’s not integrated across the brand of an identity.

heavy paraphrased thoughts from the prescott perez-fox episode: “a single logo might be pretty but without a system, it’s basically just clip art. without the identity system, we don’t know if the client used it or if it successfully carried meaning across the brand / identity. a much more impressive thing is a simple logo with amazing system application. for example, h&r block is just a green square but when you see it applied everywhere in ways that make sense, it’s awesome.”

paula scher’s interview landed this particular point for me: identities are living, breathing things. the strength of an identity isn’t in the mockups, it’s in the world.

heavy paraphrased thoughts from the paula scher episode: “identities can never be judged at the moment they’re created. identity systems need time to live in the public. it takes a period of time for the public to digest an identity and also for the identity to have time to correct itself.”

the deeper i get into brand-thinking, the more i’m beginning to value the work of identity. it’s a complicated, but it seems the most talented designers strike a balance between predefined elements and guidelines within which future artists and designers can create.

supa cool.

shoutout to josh miles and obsessed with design; such an awesome show.

side projects as a strategy

i am really into side projects. i work on them in two very specific ways:  

1. with friends. occasionally, i’ll have a solo project, but those are generally less fun/interesting to me. 
   
2. with the mindset that done is better than perfect.

the older i get, the more i’m coming to see my approach to side projecting as strategic for following two reasons:

making time to hang out with my friends

working on side projects gives me a structured, productive excuse to hang out with my friends. given my desires to not waste my life, i have a really hard time “just hanging out.” working on side projects, especially when they have regular, recurring meetings, helps me connect with friends while also creating the world we want to live in. and i looooove creating.

that’s how people “make it”

this point is best illustrated by a story:

one of my best friends is marrying a composer. the other day, he was telling me about how people go from being no visibility composers to famous composers. and their strategy is working on cool projects with their friends.

as a young composer, you create music with people you know. the more music you create, the more you begin to develop your voice. as you are doing that, you’re also connecting with more and more people. each person you compose with is connected to everyone they have ever made music with. connections happen over time as people naturally connect people who should be connected (”oh, you’d really like ___ because she does ____ which i know you really want to put in your next piece”).

as people get older and move forward in their careers, they continue to work together, but as people in higher positions.

and then, bam. you’re john williams.

ok, so maybe it’s not exactly that simple, but i think you probably get the point.

so. onward with the side projects! a full list of my side projects is coming soon…

why i schedule six weeks in advance (part 2): becoming allergic to frenzy

last year or the year before, at our end of the year staff party, my colleague, curtis, shared that he was going to start avoiding frenzy. he had been running himself pretty ragged and was tired of being tired. he was tired of himself (and others) using ‘busy as a status symbol.’ his words resonated with me because i often felt the same way. 

and with my intention set so clearly on matching my time with my values [see part 1], i had a clear place to strategize. so i started to look in my life for what made me feel frenzied and started to build ways to make myself allergic to it.

i started watching my energy levels over the course of a few weeks. one key thing i found was that hanging out with multiple people a day really drained my energy. why?

• i hate small talk with a passion. i would rather be silent and just share someone’s physical company than to talk and think about meaningless things.  
  
• when i meet up with a friend, i want the time to be directed towards maintaining or deepening that meaningful relationship. doing that actually takes quite a bit of mental and emotional energy. so doing it multiple times a day is quite resource intensive.
  

so i decided to strive to meet up with only one person per day. on my calendar, this is implemented via a weekly cap.yes, i have a numerical maximum on the number of friends i will see in a single week. of course, there are exceptions and the number can change (a little) based on what else is going on that week, but i try to keep to it pretty firmly.

having followed this strategy for about a year now, i’ve found the following:

• based on the number of people i know, the frequency at which i run into them around town, and the time i allot in my schedule to see friends, this books my schedule out about six weeks on average.
  
• seeing one friend (or small group of friends) per day not only allows me to show up more fully for when i DO see someone.
• at the end of each day and week, my overall exhausting levels have gone down drastically compared to previous phases of my life.
• running this type of schedule seems like it is also based on living on boston. other cities with different types of social gravity work differently. this sort of thing would never work in gainesville or new york.
• a great side-benefit of a drastic cut in my spending on alcohol, food, and snacks. so often we use consumption as a way to facilitate communion, but that needn’t be. i’m actively trying to get away from that in as many ways as possible, but it still happens, ya know?

anyways, that’s all i got. being allergic to the frenzy feels like a really good thing. at least for me for now.

ps - in all of this, having a more fully developed practice of saying no has been amazingly helpful. definitely necessary.

why i plan my schedule six weeks in advance

​since about the middle of 2015, i’ve gotten real rigorous about my calendar game. i’ve always been a calendarer, but after my 2015 reflection weekend, i really stepped it up a notch.

this increased rigor regarding my schedule has had many impacts, but the one that most of my friends encounter is this: when people want to hangout, i schedule it (on average) six weeks in advance.

this has prompted all sorts of interesting (hurt, annoyed, frustrated) comments from people:

• “wow! you’re really that busy?”
• “oh, you must not care about hanging out with me that much.”
• “i don’t even know what i’m doing in six weeks; put it on your calendar and remind me two weeks beforehand.”

here’s a little more backstory: in 2015 and 2016, i took 1-2 days during the first weekend of january to reflect on the previous year. the 2015 reflection was at a coffeeshop called simon’s too on mass ave with my dear friend, annemarie. i forget where the 2016 reflection happened… i used this holstee tool. it basically lead me to this process:

• make a list of your priorities,
• review how you spent your time* last year,
• check to see if how you spent time lines up with your priorities,
• if they match on all accounts, change nothing; if they don’t, make changes.

i saw that my time didn’t match what was important to me. and i know from the getting things done methodology that most people struggle to achieve their high level goals/vision because they have insufficient mechanisms for connecting minute-to-minute decision-making with the big picture ideals. all of this lead to me thinking at a very granular level about how i spend my time each week. based on my priorities, i determined that the following categories were how i wanted to spend my weeknights:

• personal projects
• friend/group projects
• close friend hangouts (these are recurring with certain people and only certain people)
• friend hangouts (these are for when someone wants to get a drink or coffee)
• wildcard or network-building
• preparing for the week

this has had lots of impacts on me and my time. it’s made me think clearly about: who my close friends are and how i want to cultivate and invest in those relationships, what do i want to spend my energy on outside of work, how do i want to use my social energy when not with close friends, et cetera.

the different catgories don’t have to be on the same day week to week. normally i plan for network-building things to happen on saturdays, but if something comes up on friday, i have no problem swapping it from saturday to friday and then moving what was planned for friday to saturday.

that said, some of the categories are much easier when they are regularly scheduled. for example, preparing for the week almost always happens on sundays. that way, food i cook lasts the whole week without going bad.

close friend hangouts are also easier on fixed schedules. it helps both parties stay committed to seeing each other when (1) we know exactly how to plan other things around the time and (2) we don’t have to worry about it being too long before we get to see each other again.

anyways, when all of this thinking combines with the number of people i know and the rate at which i make new connections, it results in my schedule being planned about six weeks in advance.

so in early august when i schedule our dinner date for mid-september, now you know why.

ps - wow. realizing that this should have been multiple posts and this is sort of all a jumble, but i just couldn’t stop.

pps - i was encouraged to write this post after a real good conversation with my friend, dan schenk, at haley house last week. thanks for asking and subsequently prompting the writing, dan!

ppps - my thinking about all this stuff has been shaped by more than just what’s included up there. i know i’ve had conversations with my friend, ofer, about these things, but many friends as well.

* note: the word ‘time’ can be replaced with any list of resources: ‘time and money’, ‘time, money, and energy,’ whatever you want to and have ability to measure. 

“it's all here”: american environmental diversity

back in may, i was talking with a new friend and colleague, deina, about travel. she and i were talking about traveling in the united states between new england, the south, and the west. she and i both had trips planned and we were just chatting about it all.

and then she said something that stuck with me:

“in america, you can really choose what type of lifestyle you want. cities, rural, busy, quiet, crowded, not crowded; it’s all here. it’s not like that everywhere.”

and i just sort of sat with that for a second. she’s totally right. without leaving my country, i can see mountains, beaches, tundra, forest, desert, and more. without crossing any international borders (which is an increasingly prominent social problem these days), i can see all of that. having the resources to do that travel so is a different question, but still.

as our conversation continued, she explained that not only do americans have access to those places, but we can choose to live in almost any one of them. again, not a common global phenomenon. where she’s from, pretty much everyone lives in the same condition.

and, if i’m honest, i’ve always known that, but i hadn’t known it in this way until she surfaced it. this is a huge privilege (i think). but what to do with it (if anything?)

a couple of friends (annemarie, cameron, ben, miriam, others) have this dream of having a network of houses all over the country (world?) where we can collectively exist, raise our families, work, vacation, etc… maybe?