Category: Learning

Molly Crabapple Works for No Man

“The first piece of advice I have for people if they want to be a crazy artist like me is that companies are there to exploit you, and to extract as much labor out of you as possible while paying you as little money as possible. Always treat companies with intense cynicism and try to exploit them back as much as you can. The big mistake that will fuck you over in life is being a team player, because you’ll waste years and years of your life until you wake up one day having made some company a lot of money and having made yourself shit. That’s what happened to my mom. She never made much money because she was one of those people who said, “I’m going to work hard and be talented, and then people will recognize my value and reward me!” No, actually, they will just take your hard work and talent to make money for themselves and discard you when you’re no longer useful. So be very cynical.”

There’s always been this weird dichotomy between business and art. Too often artists languish in obscurity or as a ‘secondary’ hobby.

I think artists who understand business, even just a little, are able to become successful artists. The business side is often to ‘square’ and over looked. Molly Crabapple gets it and remains a talented independent artist.

Bonus: The Great Discontent has some great interviews. You’d be hip to keep up with them.

Good Work Doesn’t Always Get Good Coverage

Gina Trapani is someone who I’ve admired for a long time. Not only for her professional success and acumen, but her strong sense of ethics and fairness in all that she shares. I enjoyed her thoughts on paying for promotion and the state of visibility online.

“My feelings about advertising are fraught. I’ve worked for advertising-supported web businesses my entire career, so I mostly hate ads, even while they paid my salary.

Ads can compromise the user experience by splitting product makers’ loyalties. Is the advertiser or the user the customer? Ads are a way for monied brands to buy exposure for a product that’s often not as good as an alternative. Ads give companies a reason to collect data about you and sell it to advertisers for targeting purposes.”

We need more people like her in all industries – especially technology. We should be more reflective. Thinking about your work and the perception therein can be very rewarding.

P.S. You should try ThinkUp. It’s a lot of fun and makes you think about what you’re putting out there.

Pendleton Ward on Leaving the Helm of Adventure Time

“He says this not with sadness or frustration, but with relief. “For me, having quality of life outweighed the need to control this project and make it great all the time.” So he stepped down from running Adventure Time to become simply one of the show’s writers and storyboard artists.”

Every time I hear about someone I admire, or unanimously successful, getting burn out and recognizing the importance of a work/life balance I feel both sad and happy. Sad that it takes them as long as it does to come to this conclusion. Happy that they have, and can now (hopefully) continue making cool things – without the cost of diminishing the other parts of their life.

The best advice I ever received about the time I graduated college was this – don’t work over 40, no one will thank you for putting in a steady 60, no one will promote you for it, and you’ll regret all the things you miss out on outside of work. Don’t do it.

Khoi Vinh Interviews Mike Monteiro

“At the risk of gross generalization, I think designers typically spend the first ten years of their career hoping nobody finds out they’re an impostor, the next ten years thinking they’re hot shit, and the decade after developing empathy for the people they work for.”

I didn’t even finish this interview before sharing it here. I really enjoyed Mike’s first book and I’m looking forward to picking up a second. The word is that it’s another fitted to excite desire.

On Stories and Memorization

Knowing the stories isn’t memorization. Once you know the stories you know how one thing causes another, how things are related and reflected, and you can think about the present and the future. And you end up knowing pretty well when things happened — because you know how things fit together — even if you don’t recall every single precise date and the names of every player.

Brent Simmons on why memorization isn’t just to remember facts, but to tell stories.