This more subtle definition of class creates a division where one group is perceived as “better” or “higher” or “more refined” than the other. This trend is nothing new. Art, architecture, literature, culture, music, etc. all have created similar class systems. And we as designers are somewhat guilty for creating artificial divisions in design. Let me explain.

I recently listened to an online video given by Malcom Gladwell, well known author of the Tipping Point and Blink. He tells the story of how in the early ’70′s Grey Poupon Dijon mustard broke into a field dominated by two plain yellow mustards. How? First, they created a different type of mustard that was spicy and brown. Then through design and advertising they created an artificial mustard social class, where plain yellow mustards should be perceived as “common” and Grey Poupon as “upper class” mustard. Grey Poupon became a mustard to aspire to, not merely consume. Soon, many in advertising and design were following their lead, creating products and services that were based on aspiration and social hierarchy where there had been none before. Think computers: Mac (creative class) vs PC (corporate working class). Think cars: Ford (working class) vs BMW (upper crust).

There used to be only two manufacturers of spaghetti sauce on the national scene: Ragu and Prego. Ragu dominated the market. Their sauces were based on what was considered at the time to be the perfect, authentic Italian pasta sauce: thin and watery with one basic flavor. Spaghetti sauce makers aspired to a single perfect sauce in the mold of Grey Poupon. Ragu hired a fellow to help them revive their struggling product in the face of the dominant Ragu sauce. What he discovered was that there is no perfect sauce to aspire to. There are perfect sauces. In other words, there is no class system (social or aspirational) in spaghetti sauce. There are many classes (i.e. different kinds) of spaghetti sauce that would appeal to many different folks. Interestingly, he found that one third Americans actually like chunky sauce versus the authentic Italian thin, watery sauce. Prego created a chunky sauce plus 20 other variations and began to dominate the sauce market. So, what does this have to do with design again?

Think back to the last time you presented several design concepts to a client. And of course there was one concept you thought was the perfect solution. We’ll call it the Poupon concept. The others were not as “good” for whatever reason. And of course, the client chose one of the “weaker” concepts. Or maybe you just presented a single, Pouponesque concept and the client rejected it. We all know how that feels. You argue your point and still the client wants some “lower class” concept. Maybe they even pull out something that their friend did for them as an example. You hold your head (and nose) high and try not to look too offended by the assumption that this concept could be in the same design “class” as yours.

Like it or not, we’re creating an unnecessary class system in design. One design is not in a higher social class than another any more than Dijion is in a higher social status than yellow mustard. They are just designs with different strengths and weaknesses. The sooner we recognize that design should be devoid of social hierarchy, the more creative both designer and the designed will become.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky—I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Think back to the Danish editorial cartoon, the book by S. Rushdie and most recently the modification of a musical performance in Germany. It seems so small and insignificant, but these are signals that something is shifting in our world — a shift that will eventually constrain our freedom to speak the truth through design.

It’s a spirit of fear. And it’s not exclusive to Islamic extremists coming to get you if you say anything against the Prophet Mohamed. You can find fear operating in dictators, emperors, fascists, communists, capitalists, democracies and even Christian churches. We’re naïve as designers to think that the power of fear which for centuries has shaped, stifled and controlled the expression of truth through the visual arts can’t exert it’s influence again. Let’s take a little quiz to see how fear might already be impacting our choices:

• Do you have a burning passion or project in design that you’d like to pursue, but just can’t seem to do it?
• Do you dream of working independently, but can’t break free of your current employer?
• Have you ever known what the best design solution was for a client’s problem, but didn’t suggest it?
• Have you ever wanted to break the creative boundaries on a project, but couldn’t?
• Have you ever wanted to share your idea with your colleagues but didn’t?

All of these questions, as simplistic as they are, indicate that at some level fear is shaping our decisions. Fear limits our creativity. Fear hampers our ability to do what is best for others and ultimately ourselves. Fear makes design bland and ineffective.

Probably none of us reading this blog have ever lived or designed under a system of fear and repression like those in communist, fascist or even Islamic fundamentalist countries. We are, however, familiar with the spirit of fear in our everyday lives. We must fight against fear where ever we find it. The truth is our greatest weapon against fear in design. Let’s find the truth and use it to drive out fear so that design can touch the heart.

The First Renaissance started in Italy in the 1300′s, lasted several hundred years, and centered around the rediscovery of ancient texts and classical learning that was dormant Europe during the Middle Ages. This rediscovery brought about profound changes in every area of society that formed the basis of what we now consider Modern society. The First Renaissance witnessed the birth of the Reformation, the rise of Humanism and the spark of the Scientific Revolution. And the institutional Christian church played a significant role in funding and shaping much of the major movements during this period. As a result, the art, philosophy (minus humanism) and music of that period bore the distinct marks of the church and a calling to a higher, deeper Purpose that those disciplines serve.

The Second Renaissance is quite different. While technology still fuels it–the computer and Internet taking the place of the printing press and monks–the Second Renaissance signals the transition of the Modern era into a Post-Modern one. This Second Renaissance is not being shaped by institutions–the Church or otherwise, but by individuals and organic groups formed and reformed for specific purposes. The focus is largely now on the rediscovery of pre-classical, ancient themes of good ol’ hedonism and primitive thinking. And the flourishing of the arts is not funded by the church with a Higher vision, but by business via advertising and design with a singular vision of profit and materialism. These differences between the First and Second Renaissance raise several important questions for us as designers.

What philosophies will the Second Renaissance give birth to? Will business continue to be the primary patron of design? What will be the impact on society? I’d like to suggest that the institutional or organized, visible Christian church will have minimal impact in this Second Renaissance in the arts. I’m not being harsh here, secular institutions will be equally as ineffective. The Internet has profoundly shifted the balance of power away from institutions toward the organic and the individual. The work being done by the visible Christian church in the arts is mainly copy work. The few sparks of life touching design that I have seen exist outside the visible church and with individuals functioning as the organic Church. The same can be said of design in general as it flourishes beyond the boundaries of the profession’s institutions and corporate structures.

Designers must shed these institutional shells that have served their purpose and be transformed into new creatures that look and function differently. Only then will they be able to speak life and meaning into design, find it’s true heart purpose and give birth to a Divine purpose that changes society for the Good.

What intrigued me the most were the things that fueled his creative growth growing up. So rather than guess what those things might be, I asked him. Here’s a list of things Dave did or was free to do in his childhood that exercised his creative muscles (Thanks for sharing Dave):

• Exploring and drawing maps of the woods near our neighborhood, including secret bases and paths
• Drawing huge murals on butcher paper of imaginary worlds and characters
• Making fictional television guides with shows like “Lego” and “Dinnertime”…if we were ever bored, we would just look at what time it was and check out what the different imaginary channels were playing.
• Writing journals and stories in spiral notebooks
• Creating construction paper menus and taking drink orders whenever we had relatives come over for dinner
• Making short films with stuffed animals and action figures
• Starting a detective agency called Outlook, making secret codes and using walkie-talkies
• Having a full bookshelf, always reading
• Making radio shows or singing impromptu songs into our tape recorder
• Having massive treasure hunts outside with the neighborhood kids

Now, how many of us were able to do any of these types of things in elementary, middle, high school or even college? Probably none of us. That kid day dreaming out the window may be the next Dave Werner. Or the girl doodling all over notebooks the next _____. Most of these activities were labeled a waste of time by our teachers (and maybe parents?), but they are an essential part of exercising the imagination. Maybe what we need in school and life is 4 hours of “recess” and 2 hours of “classroom” time? i’ve talked about the power for creative Good that is held in our imaginations when we looked at C.S. Lewis’ work in the Narnia series. It is no coincidence that Lewis’ ideas for the entire series came his imaginary play during childhood.

So, what I’m going to try and do for my children (I have 5 under the age of 15) is encourage the very things that seem to me to be “childish”, and maybe in the process I’ll discover some part of my own imagination.

If you actually saw the pieces and parts that make sausage, there’s a good chance you’d never eat it. He applied this sausage thinking to the creative process and clients. He reasoned most clients don’t want to see all the wadded up ideas and missteps in the design process. And he’s mostly right.

Yet, I’m coming to the conclusion that no one wins when clients can’t see into the design process. Client’s are generally ignorant about the time, energy and discipline necessary to produce effective creative on schedule and within budget. Showing the end concept without involving them along the way further contributes to their ignorance. Why? They have no sense of appreciation for your creative process. Having “grown up” on the client side of things, I’ll never forget the first time the contracted design team presented logo concepts for our project. As they unveiled a concept (there were three), they tried to explain the thinking and meaning behind each. I’d already formed my opinion within 5 seconds. I wasn’t impressed with any of them. Why? I hadn’t been involved in the design process or even seen the work required to get there. When I took some time to walk around their offices during a break, I saw the drafts pinned to the wall and the notes scribbled on the boards. Only then did I begin to understand the blood, sweat and fears that went into their design.

“Show your work,” as my teachers used to say, is an important part of gaining client buy in. Clients must not only see the final product, but understand the journey along the way. This is true in most professions. Home builders constructing a new home interact with the owners throughout the process. They see the sludge and scrap generated during the building process. They see the complicated nature of the electrical wiring and the time it takes to trim a house down to the door knobs and crown molding. In design, we need to show people how we make the “sausage”. Movie producers have long understood this concept. Next time you rent a DVD, you’ll surely find a “behind the scenes” or a “making of” selection of clips. Take note.

Want to see a good example of designers showing their creative process? Try Dave Werner’s portfolio site, OkayDave.com. Not only does his work touch the heart (see the Impact Chair and Reflect/Respect Projects), but it gives valuable insight to potential clients as to how Dave’s design process works for them.

Just pick up any issue of HOW, Print or ID, and you’ll quickly see what I mean. Rarely will the work of anyone over 40 be featured, and if they are, you can bet they’ve been featured before when they were in their 30′s or 20′s. Take a look across your agency or firm at the creatives there. Most of the hands-on design is done by those in their twenties or early thirties, while those 40 plus are confined to management positions. Why?

Our American design culture is enthralled by the shiny new thing. I guess I can’t really blame us, everything in America is new, relatively speaking. From architecture to music to theater, our nation has only been around for 200 plus years. Hardly mature compared to the creative cultures of Italy, France or Germany—not to mention China or Egypt. And to be fair, design as a profession is a babe when in the company of art or music.

So, it’s somewhat understandable that American designers tend to gravitate toward the next Stefan Sagmeister or Joshua Davis or whomever. We identify these young guns, promote them, show them over and over in magazines and give little thought to what it does to the design community. We implicitly demand that our new stars be young. When was the last time you saw an up and coming designer at age 50? What this culture of youthful design assumes is that if you haven’t “made it” or been recognized by the time you are 30, then you’re work is at best average. Unfortunately, of these emerging young guns have been cut from the same cloth by attending all the big name design schools, worked in the venerated design firms and won the same industry awards given, incidentally, by older designers who have traveled the same path as their protégés. A youth oriented “system” like this severely limits the work we see as a design community and creates dangerously homogeneous, almost bland design. Don’t believe me? Take out the design annuals from any three design magazines from a single year and tell me what you see. Or maybe you’re like me—you’ve already stopped subscribing.

This system of promoting young designers isn’t all bad…I like to see what recent grads are doing. Often times though they’re just copying a style and doing it very, very well. So well in fact, that it passes for something new and good. But in reality, everyone matures creatively at different times. Unlike sports, there is no true creative advantage in youth. You see, creativity must be aged with both the good and bad experiences that life brings. And like a great wine, creativity absorbs these flavors of life and produces rich works full of perspective, maturity and meaning. I suspect that the stronger a designer’s creative vision is, the more awkward and unpolished their work will be early on in life. And it won’t be until much later in life that the skills for expression and the clarity of purpose gel into full blown masterpieces.

So, all of you aging creatives stuck in management or late starting designers take heart, your best work is yet to come.

I’m guilty too. Often overlooked and frequently disdained by professionals, ordinary people practice extraordinary creativity everyday. Here are three insights I’ve gained recently by observing people whose creativity is not part of their professional identity (a.k.a. “non-designers”):

You don’t have to be perfect all the time.

I have two very different sons of 8 and 10 years old. The 10 year old, Javan, is definitely the artist/designer/inventor type who has to have everything perfect before it can be seen in public. My 8 year old, Noah, is good with people, tries his best with creativity but is willing to live with good enough. When you look at Javan’s work table, it’s strewn with projects that are not complete and probably never will be. When you look at Noah’s table, it’s filled with completed projects that are good enough but not perfect. While there is a time for perfection, I think many worthy creative ideas never become reality because of the inner pharaoh of perfection. Good enough really is good enough.

Function with out aesthetics in design is boring, but aesthetics without function is useless.

My wife needed to design an list for daily grocery shopping. We’ve tried many elaborately crafted grocery lists over the years, but none ever stuck. So, she came up with this simple, yet effective shopping list ordered for Super Wal-Mart aisles. She just prints out a copy of the list before going to the store and circles what she needs. Aesthetically pleasing design? No. Functional? Yes.

Design professionals have cornered the creativity market…a very small corner.

As “creative professionals,” we sometimes think that we hold all the really good ideas. Now we may say we listen to clients, but when was the last time a client had an idea and the idea was actually used? Would this be unprofessional? Aren’t they paying us to be creative? Would using a client’s idea be a concession that we couldn’t come up with anything better? Some of the most powerful creative work I’ve seen lately has come from non-professionals. What’s going to happen when we go head to head against a Korean or a Chinese firm for a design account? Their creative might be better, fresher and even (gulp) more relevant in our culture. Our main advantage may then be proximity and relationship with the client—a relationship that listens and acknowledges their creativity.

He sent my donation letter through “corporate mail” and said it would take a week or so to hear back from headquarters. I couldn’t believe it. Here is a store manager responsible for over $1 million worth of inventory and unable to make a simple, local donation decision. It must go to “corporate.” Why did he go to college? Why does he get paid so much?

Contrast this scene with one earlier in the day. My two sons and I went to a very large construction site in town to ask for lumber donations. The site manager, an older crusty sort of fellow, looked at me and said, “you’ve got some nice boys there. Reminds me of my two grandsons. Pull you van around, and I’ll see what I can do.” He then proceeded to load about $200 worth of brand new 16 foot 2×4′s into my van himself. When I asked if he needed a donation receipt he said, “Nope. Just hope it does some good.” This same scenario was repeated later at a different construction site where a foreman donated about 300 feet of wood fencing for the skatepark on the spot. Neither one of these guys consulted anyone when giving the wood away. Didn’t even blink an eye. And neither of them were “educated” past high school.

I’m beginning to connect the dots. Our ability to think and act creatively has been blunted by years of being taught to follow orders. From day one, we’re encouraged in school to color between the lines, connect the dots in a logical sequence, stand in straight lines, stop learning when the bell rings and start again at the next bell, and on and on. College is our first opportunity to create freely, and most of us enjoy this time…if it weren’t for those darn tests, grades and professors (maybe we weren’t that free after all). Then we get thrown into the “workforce,” where once again we must not make waves or venture outside the corporate lines or bite the hand that feeds us. There are approval chains, org charts, offices with windows and small cube cells—all of which create artificial power and authority structures that value obedience and following orders over genuine creativity. This power structure has dumbed us down to new levels of sameness.

Good thing this doesn’t happen in the creative world. Ever wonder why there are titles like “senior creative director” or “senior art director”? It’s all based on the premise that people need to be managed, especially their creativity. Why? Because we’ve been dumbed down. We need to be “directed” and “supervised” in our creative activities. We can’t be trusted to be creative on our own. How many “approval” chains do we go through with our concept developments? Would we ever dare showing something to a client without our “management” okaying it?

An “Art Director” friend of mine at an agency told me how he wasn’t “invited” to be on the creative team for an interesting new project. Why? Because his creative team boss said he “wasn’t ready yet.” Instead he was stuck cranking out mundane but billable projects for clients. Hmmm. Was Charles Lindbergh ready to make the first solo trans-Atlantic flight in history at age 25 having very little flying experience? Was David, the little shepherd boy, ready to fight the seasoned killing machine Goliath? Was Bill Gates ready to start Microsoft when he couldn’t even finish college? I think you get the point. Structures like these are created and maintained to ensure a class and pay system (no, I’m not a communist), not to nurture creativity. They don’t just keep people down, they keep creativity down too.

Have you ever met two people who were alike? I haven’t. Have you ever seen two designs that are alike? Ever wonder why creative people who are all so incredibly unique can produce such a pile of bland sameness in design (I’m including my own work in the pile)? Wouldn’t it follow that if the individuals are all unique, their designs would all be unique as well? So what happened? Management. Supervision. Direction. These structures dumb us down creatively and have been doing so since we were kids in school being taught to color between the lines. Relationships. Freedom. Passion. These are the things that produce unique creative work and allow crusty construction workers to load up your car with lumber and say, “I’ve got grand kids like yours. Hope it does some good.”