I’ve always appreciated design in the broadest sense. When I was a boy, my dad and I would walk car lots and just appreciate the design of cars together. My mom and I would often walk in the evenings through the neighboring houses that were being built. As I was growing up, I decided at some point that I wanted to be an architect, but then ended up majoring in interdisciplinary studies, and later got a graduate degree in The Arts & Theology. And I guess that is why I really enjoy running an agency today that is a little more like a workshop than traditional agency, creating opportunities to design in the broadest sense — designing physical objects, and digital interfaces, and especially designing experiences that integrate both.

I’m not really sure I had a choice. Becoming a creative chose me more than the other way around, but the reason I became the kind of creative that I’ve chosen to become probably developed out of a desire to solve challenges — all kinds of different challenges — because, frankly, I get bored. I get bored creating the same thing in the same style for the same people. I like learning about new industries and new audiences. I like the challenge of learning about a corporate culture and trying to visually communicate that to others. And when you approach each company and each situation individually, you are never bored with the same, rote process.

I run a small agency in Oregon in the northwest of the US called Drawn. We describe our work as trying to design meaningful experiences that people are naturally drawn to — the idea being that if we create an experience that is authentic and aligned and all working together, down to the tiniest of details, then people will naturally find all of these details working together, and they’ll begin to trust these experiences, and become drawn into these experiences, and hopefully become long term fans of these experiences. I started this agency over 20 years ago and continue to serve as the creative director.

Creativity is trusting that there’s an indirect way to accomplish something that has a direct need. When I exercise my creativity, it’s like I’ve been asked to solve a direct need without any clear path to get there. I have to use my own imagination and ingenuity to come up with a solution. Sometimes, whatever I come up with is tangible — like if I need to get water up a hill, I can see the solution that I end up designing. And sometimes it is harder to put your finger on — like being asked to make people feel comfortable when they walk into a restaurant. When starting, it is usually hard to see right away how to get from the starting point to where we’re trying to arrive — that’s the mystery of the process, the imagination that’s involved to trust that I can find a way to accomplish whatever is put in front of me through my own creative processing.

I think the role of design, and perhaps what you’re trying to get at by asking what makes a “creative idea” or “creative design,” requires us to create something that doesn’t reflect my own personal style or expression, but rather it reflects the one for whom we are designing, and it speaks to those they are trying to connect with. If I do my job really well as a designer, it should be hard to tell that I was even involved. My work should reflect the client’s personality, and it should speak to their audience, and it should pull those two closer together while I can quietly step back out of the way.

We always begin by trying to understand who we are designing for — their personality, their ethos, their culture, those qualities that are deeper than a simple mission statement. We want to understand them at this deeper, more fundamental level. And that becomes our north star; that is what we are trying to visually and emotionally and experientially communicate in our work. And from there, we have intentionally built very interdisciplinary teams so we all bring ideas from different places. We’ll have people who are visual designers, but also writers, coders, fabricators, philosophers, introverts, extroverts, young and older all contributing ideas. And we always start with the pencil. We start by hand and work the problems with a pencil — the most basic of fidelities — and iterate our way toward more and more refined work.

There is a little bit of fear that comes with that first stroke of the pencil. It is like diving into a pool in the dark. You’ve done this a thousand times, but there is still a bit of fear and a lot of unknown to the process you’re about to begin — how long will it take?, will it go smoothly?, will there be conflict along the way? So when you get to the end of a project and look back at that whole journey and you can see all of the micro moments that defined the journey — the bumps, the surprises, the inspiration that came from chance encounters — when you can look back and see how that all influenced this journey and led to an incredible outcome, that is probably my favorite part of the process, and it gives me confidence to jump into the next one, trusting we’ll get through all of the unknowns somehow.

My hope is to never have a style. If I have a style, it really should only be for my own personal work. When I design personal work, I am trying to create something from within me, but when designing for a client, when I’m designing for someone asking me for help giving an identity to their story, or creating an experience that reflects their personality, I feel like we have a responsibility to implement a style that reflects them, not us. Our work for each client should look really different, because it is not about me and my agenda as much as it should be about them and their cause. This is one of the big distinctions between design and architecture. Architecture is typically about the architect and his or her vision, about their style, about what they are wanting to contribute to society. They are creating sculpture, and in a few cases, I find that approach to be understandable. I really think that all design should have something we are trying to accomplish that isn’t determined by us, and we should be disciplined and willing to let that goal be the arbiter of the process, not just heading out to design something I happen to like or seems to be en vogue.

For sure. We are all significantly impacted by our cultures, and that is why we need to be such great listeners when we are trying to design something that reflects others, and connects with others, because both of those groups are going to have different backgrounds than my own. I think the best part of the culture I come out of is an openness to new ideas, to a freedom of ideas, an embracing of entrepreneurial ideas. These all have a positive impact on my creative process, especially early on in the process. But there are also plenty of burdens that come with our cultural heritage — like how everything has to have an economic value, and how much ideas are weighed against their ROI. If an idea can’t make money, it will have a hard time being supported, and that kills a lot of great ideas, which is unfortunate. That said, this reality does in some ways encourage us to push ideas further to figure out how we can keep the heart of a good idea while adjusting it to fit within the cultural constraints we all have to deal with.

It is certainly an honor. We are humbled to be sharing the platform with other agencies and companies that are doing some fantastic work. We actually didn’t apply for a single award for our first 20 years, so to finally put our work out there in competition for the first time and receive this validation is truly an honor.

We actually received three MUSE awards this year, so I’ll pick one to share about because it reflects some of the best outcomes that I think design has to offer. Porter is a digital platform that we designed to solve a very analog problem. As people are becoming increasingly connected digitally, we face some new challenges finding time for those real, in-person human connections. We saw this firsthand when we designed our first pub in 2013. We watched as people would make time to get together, and then they would spend too much of that time standing in line. So we began to build a digital platform that helped these people spend more time together. That platform continued to grow as we designed more pubs and food halls, to the point where we decided to package the whole platform up earlier this year to share with pubs and restaurants and food halls everywhere. And it turns out this problem of keeping human connections is being felt in a lot of places, which has led people to use Porter to create better room service at hotels, better experiences at theaters, and better fan experiences at stadiums. We have designed this new digital platform, but we did so entirely with a goal of creating better in-person connections — which we hope leads to a whole lot of good in a whole lot of places.

The project has constantly been fluid, changing month by month. As opportunities arise, or as the pandemic has interrupted normal behavior, we have had to constantly shift. And from a design perspective, that has required us to live with a whole lot of imperfection — a whole lot of in-betweenness. We have visual updates to the platform that were completed nearly 9 months ago, but because other development needs have been more pressing, we haven’t been able to implement those new changes. This is the right thing to do for the evolution of the app, but it is a challenge for sure to have to live with such a state of imperfect fluctuation.

To be honest, I was never drawn to apply for awards because I haven’t wanted to seek validation from awards. I’d rather our validation come from our clients and from our successes, so this is new territory for us to enter competitions. It is, however, a nice supplemental validation to be recognized among our peers, and I look forward to whatever doors it might open for us.

I guess I don’t see us as having an industry. I suppose there is a creative industry, but as we see the word ‘design’ making its way into all kinds of fields — service design, experience design, economic design — we find that design is becoming understood as a way of thinking, a methodology of solving problems, a philosophy that is underneath much of how we as humans think. And I find the growing support of this philosophy to be incredibly exciting. It is opening doors for designers to enter into conversations further upstream, and actually behind totally new doors where design hasn’t ever had a seat at the table. It has felt like design in the past was relegated to the end of many processes — “Can you make all of this work I just finished look good?” — and now we are being invited to enter conversations and share ideas in places where these ideas are still being formed. And I think this growing embrace of design thinking is very exciting for the future of our “industry.”

I find that the American willingness to embrace new ideas and encourage entrepreneurial pursuits to be its greatest support of creative thinking, or the creative industry, as you put it. This is not an attribute unique to the US, but I think this openness to pushing ideas and boundaries really promotes a creative way of thinking.

The movement into embracing design as a way of thinking rather than relegating it to the end of a long process feels like it will both eliminate “creative” as a separate industry and instead will only continue to incorporate design deeper into most everything. I think creatives will be finding roles far outside of the traditional advertising and marketing departments, and I find this a very exciting momentum we are seeing.

It is okay to become a creative with a specialized focus, but as you focus on any one medium or application, don’t become too narrow in your thinking or in how you approach your work. Find inspiration everywhere, in objects, in experiences, in nature, in other people’s work. Broad inspiration will help you become better at whatever focus you end up choosing.

I honestly think the best resources we have are observation, and our thoughts. Spend time looking, observing, reflecting, processing, reverse engineering. Even when you find yourself in a boring conversation about auto parts, for example, you have opportunities to learn how assembly lines were designed, how parts were designed to work together, how the order of operations for putting an engine together were designed, how future repairs were anticipated and pre-designed. We can find design behind almost everything if we take a little time to observe and reflect — and that will do wonders for our own creative process.

I secretly wish the pocket protector would make a comeback. I have never owned one, and probably would want to redesign the classic, plastic pocket protector before bringing it back, but I love the idea of the utility and accessorization that the pocket protector provides. I carry two pens everyday — one purple and one green — and try to only buy shirts that have favorable chest pockets to hold these pens. And someday, perhaps, I’ll redesign the classic pocket protector and rekindle the former trend that was wasted on engineers.

Alva was the college professor who taught all of my design classes. I went to a small school where design was not a prominent field, so by my final year I was the only student in some of our classes together. Alva was old school — never touched a computer — and taught me everything by hand. He would play his beloved jazz during our classes, always with a cup of coffee in hand, and quietly walk around with his positive feedback and carefully worded critique that my fragile confidence needed. He taught me how to see design in nature, how to understand the relationships between colors, and forced me to explain why I had made any and every decision. Alva had two rules: 1) always start with the pencil, fearful that the arrival of computers would cheat the intentionality that a pencil demands, and 2) go find inspiration everywhere, but when you begin to design, don’t cheat. We should appreciate good ideas when we see them, but we also need to have the integrity to push that inspiration into something original and meaningful from my own hand, not a cheap knockoff of someone else.

I think I have produced my best work when I’ve bravely pursued ideas I feel are right and good, but also didn’t pursue them alone. I have built a good cohort of people around me. I listen to them and am changed by them. And together, we bravely pursue ideas that we hope will become quite meaningful.