What I Learned About Design By Working at a Crappy Dive Bar

I worked at a dive bar/restaurant from the ages of 16-21. The many hours I logged as a dishwasher, prep chef, and kitchen grunt were, for the most part, fun. I met many people there whose names and eccentricities will stay with me for a long time. Like a lot of people, I wanted to work in a restaurant because it’s a good way to make side money, it was a chance to meet interesting coworkers, and I wanted to learn more about cooking. Aspects of the experience were challenging, or put me off of people and kitchen labor. But in working through those tough or disgusting moments, I feel bonded with most former service workers for life, and today, my designs are better for it.

Cover for my upcoming graphic novella "Oven Fresh"

A Graphic Novella Called "Oven Fresh"

In the summer of 2018 when I started looking for my first grown-up job after graduating from UT Austin, I spent a lot of time at the library watching Adobe creative suite tutorials. I loved InDesign. I was familiar with the program, having helped out with newspaper design and layout at both my high school and college publications, and made a few more extensive documents, but as I re-familiarized myself on type, baseline shift, small caps, and paragraph styles, I wanted to try my hand at laying out a book. When I racked my brain for subject matter, I realized that I had a lot of stories and content stored up from my time at the restaurant. This month I finally finished my restaurant book, and hope to put it out into the world very soon, so stay tuned! The experience of writing and drawing all of the content brought up memories and reflections, and here are some as they relate to design:

1. Good Design Looks at the Bigger Picture

During the last summer that I worked at the restaurant, I was saving up money to study abroad, and therefore working long day shifts. After working a 10 hour shift, cleaning the kitchen at the end of the night can be particularly brutal as the minutes drag on after closing and you are desperate to just go home. One night, someone knocked an entire container of mozzarella cheese pellets into the pizza station fridge and it was my job to clean them all up with brown paper towels and cleaning spray. As I crouched down, straining my ankles, nose full of cheese grease and chemicals, I repeated a mantra to myself. "I will look back on this moment in a few months when I am taking a weekend trip to Japan, or Malaysia, and this will have been totally worth it."

I have found this big picture thinking to be applicable in all aspects of life, be it pulling weeds in the garden, training the dog to go outside, or designing a logo for a client. Logo designs can be particularly painful when you are in the middle of the project. The best laid briefs may go awry when a client decides that they actually really don't like the look of the font you selected many rounds of feedback ago. Emotions run high since branding is so personal, and as a designer sometimes you just want to tell the client, "Please just take the leap of trust, I promise that this looks good!" Which I don't ever actually do, because I want clients to feel like they have ownership of their branding. However, when I find myself in the midst of a frustrating round of feedback I do tell myself, "in a few months this logo will feel natural and comfortable to the client. I will be able to point proudly to this project in my portfolio, and the frustrations of the process will be in the past."

2. Good Designers Work Quickly Under Pressure

Line cooking during a dinner rush feels like combat medical triage—you're just trying your damnedest and fastest to keep moving during the assault of incoming orders. Before you even realize it's happening, there can be twenty open tickets with more piling up, and then it's on the line cooks to do their best. It is a delicate and difficult dance of timing. One mistake can back you up by ten tickets. The rush can also be kind of fun… in hindsight… It’s true. Banging out orders with extreme efficiency feels like flying, but it is absolutely 100% exhausting.

Freelancing has a similar feeling. Work comes in waves, and often my workload is feast or famine. Learning how to keep calm while multitasking between three or four or eight different projects is a skill that I credit to my restaurant years. Deep breath, stay calm, take stock of what needs to get done, prioritize, and then carry through as efficiently as you can. It's better to do a job correctly than to do it fast. With practice, you become fast and accurate.

3. Good Design is Humanist

The restaurant that I worked at was pretty gross. Most of the food was frozen and the ingredients were low-quality. Working there made me seek out restaurants that served food I would be proud to cook and want to eat in the future, which I was lucky to do later on in college. I would get very down thinking about the customer who came in and bought lasagna for lunch when I knew that they would be getting a months-old microwaved creation that was uninspired at its freshest state, and sad at its price point. The audacity of selling the lasagna at a premium price also grossed me out. My design metaphor for the lasagna is a cookie-cutter solution to a custom problem -- icon art, something plagiarized from a Drake video, a stale proposal deck with the client's name swapped out. We designers are hired to think about our clients' mission and situation, and to do our best to create a solution to their problem that is meaningful and good. Understanding people is crucial! Good cooking results from tradition, passion, and high quality ingredients. Good design is the same -- it is appropriately contextual, made with love, and made with good materials (well-crafted typefaces, harmonious colors, thick paper, clean code).

4. Good Design Draws on Unlikely Experiences (or, Why Folding Pizza Boxes is a Skill for Life)

When I worked at the restaurant, I made pizzas and folded a lot of pizza boxes. When I worked on social media for Laffy Taffy, I made stop-motion videos about timely jokes using candy. For National Pizza Party Day, I was prepared to make a tiny pizza and a tiny pizza box for the candy's Instagram post. The resulting video is something that I am gloriously proud of, as it represents my career coming in a full circle.

How have your past jobs influenced your career today? Whether through networking, life skills, or resume lines, they've probably helped you get to where you are in some way. I am grateful for my time at the restaurant because it sparked a lifelong fascination with food and cuisine, and taught me how to be fast, friendly, and patient. Those service industry skills have served me well. They also inspired my first graphic novella! Keep your eyes peeled -- hopefully "Oven Fresh" will be available to a place near you very soon. Thanks for reading!

#designblog #designthinking #customerservice #graphicnovel #NationalPizzaPartyDay #LaffyTaffy #logodesign #myfirst7jobs #memoir #crappydivebar

Keeping a Sketchbook: Around the World in a Drawing a Day

This summer my boyfriend and I took a two month trip around the world. We drove from Austin to Chicago, then flew to France. After two weeks in France we flew to Italy, then to Berlin, and then Budapest, where we then caught a flight to Tokyo, and stayed in Japan for three weeks. We left Japan for Hong Kong, stayed for a week in the fragrant harbor city, and then flew back to Chicago on the fourth of July.

I love to travel, and have been lucky to do more than a fair share of it in my lifetime. For this trip however, I wanted to make a project out of the experience.

When I do editorial illustration for NPR, one of my favorite parts of the job is accompanying journalists on interviews and creating fly on the wall verité drawings. These notes help me remember the scene as I saw and felt it to be when I go back to my computer to create a final digital illustration.

The other inspiration I had floating in my head was Rebecca Solnit's atlas of New Orleans, called Unfathomable City (also Infinite City, which focuses on San Francisco). The book is tall and thin, with thick colorful pages. It is a collection of essays and cartography, a collage of voices and views, and it painted the most vivid printed portrait of a place that I have ever read. I am fascinated by urban planning and city life (as my documentary, My Way is the Highway, will attest). Because my boyfriend and I were going to be in a variety of places around the world with unique architecture, food culture, and geography, I wanted to make sure that my project created a framework to think critically about the differences and similarities between the places we visited.

Ultimately, I remembered the words of my great uncle, a photographer. When I went to study abroad in Hong Kong in college, Uncle Bob counseled me to take a photo every day. I did. I didn't have to try too hard - I tend to take more pictures in places that are new to me, and Hong Kong is definitely not short of visual stimuli. Looking back on the photos, they paint a microcosmic view of life in the city, of cultural differences that are notable to an outsider, of contrast and juxtaposition that is too difficult to describe in words (like crazy construction techniques, beautiful sunsets, and hilarious umbrella vending machines in the subway station).

What I arrived on, then, for my 2019 World Trip project, was a hybrid: an atlas, a journal, and the big challenge - a drawing a day. It was invigorating. As the weeks went on, my sketchbook filled. Sometimes the drawings were of details, others tried to capture a setting in full, some prioritized people while others focused on architecture.

Architecture details of a baroque ceiling at the San Carlino church in Rome

A colorful cafe setting in Bourdeaux

As we visited different art museums, I tried to incorporate elements of different cultures' art styles into my own sketches.

Inspired by ink wash screen paintings in the land of the rising sun

Axonometric, a la old Chinese scrolls, on Hong Kong Airlines

In Berlin, we saw dozens of people sunbathing on the canal banks. In the art museums, we saw impressionist plenaire paintings of people in petticoats doing the very same thing 150 years ago!

I posted my drawings on instagram, and found that my drawings were a very good way to keep my friends and family in the loop about where I was in the world.

In San Fruttuoso, an idyllic coastal inlet in Italy's Golfo Paradiso, a boatload of school children arrived on a field trip. This image was my most popular social media post throughout the trip - I think it's the beautiful glistening sea!

Our route by plane

What I learned from the experience is that routine sharpens creative muscle. My eyes were fresh each morning, and as the trip went on I was better able to pick out a special moment of the day that I wanted to keep. My drawing also got much quicker as I practiced more! Thus the project was valuable experience for my abilities as a cartoonist and an illustrator, and my little book is a substantive answer to offer in response when someone asks, "how was your trip?"

We biked one day to go and see Mt. Fuji, but the ocean haze was too cloudy. Drawing from Hokusai's 26 famous views of Mt. Fuji series of woodblock prints, this one is titled View 27 - Fuji-San cannot see you today.

#travel #sketchbook #illustration #illustrationartist #sketch #journaling #journalist #atlas