Design has always been at the heart of charity: water, and in a lot of ways the company started with design. The first creative director was the founder’s wife who was actually a motion and graphic designer. I was also really fortunate to come after Mike Smith—because he did a lot of the heavy lifting of cultivating a design culture around the company and educating everyone on a foundational design level. So the team had a good sense of the kind of design that would work and the kind that won’t work. This inspired the company to stand out from the crowd design-wise and encouraged them to push the boundaries even further.

I would say so, but that was also because of a weird perfect storm of a lack of stringent creative direction and a open willingness to try new things. I pushed the brand in directions that I thought were interesting and unique, but I’m not sure I spent enough time evaluating whether that direction was the right direction. The experimental side of me just wanted to see what we could get away while still being useful. The team and I put a lot of effort in ensuring that what we made would work and in the end it all boiled down to “just put it out there, and see how people react to it”.

We had the opportunity to be so experimental primarily because of such a strong target audience/donor base. We had an audience which was so supportive of  the core mission that honestly, we couldn’t do a whole lot to fuck it up. The core mission of charity: water is so pure and well-known amongst the people that need to know about it, that they will show up, no matter what.

It was a combination of a lot of things. By moving to New York, I quickly put myself in a culture with a lot of amazing artists and designers. A lot of designers here are far better and far younger than I will ever be. It’s not at all like in Austin where every cool designer in town hung out together and shared projects. They’d even split into small groups and chase after clients together. There was a real sense of belongingness and togetherness there.

But in New York, everyone is just competing.

And being in New York for two years and working for charity: water, I really became aware of the competition in ways that I wasn’t before. In general, I felt that if I was to do the kind of work I was bookmarking and longing after, I needed to be in a place where those challenges were a little bit more accessible. And those opportunities do come along with having individual clients, so I made the decision to go work for a studio. I hadn’t worked for clients in a while—although I have freelanced pretty heavily throughout my career.

While looking for studios to work for, I decided that a large agency didn’t suit me and didn’t sound like fun. So, my pool of who I wanted to work for was pretty limited because not many people were hiring and I didn’t get a lot of emails back. I finally got one back from a really small brand/e-commerce/photography/everything studio, and that was the next jump to working for clients again.

I really hadn’t thought about that in those noble terms, which is kind of embarrassing. But now, I’m very aware of that and have a lot of hot-takes on larger agencies for a variety of reasons. But at the time, my primary motivation was that if I went to a larger agency, I would just get lost and I wouldn’t be noteworthy or interesting—which is really selfish to be honest. There’s awesome art directors and really killer designers that work at bigger agencies—but I didn’t want to be another awesome designer. I actually wanted some level of visibility with the work I was doing. It’s a pretty selfish reason but I didn’t want to get lost in the big wide world of big agencies.

There are great agencies that I would have surely loved to work for, despite being on the larger side. I thought it was important for me to be as close to the client as possible and away from the bullshit—in terms of how many hoops you have to jump through before the idea even gets to the client. And I’m of a firm belief that getting closer to the client helps produce better and more honest work.

An idea might even get killed before it’s even presented to the client!

I remember at one of my first agency jobs in Missouri, I had an idea that was truly bad—but for some reason the copywriter and I thought it was great. The creative director told us that he thought it was utter crap, but let us include it in the options anyway. Lo and behold, the client freaked out. They thought it was the coolest thing they ever saw, and immediately started applying it to all their campaigns. That necessarily doesn’t mean that it was a great idea, but it goes to show that things that are meant for certain clients are hard to gauge unless you’ve had a direct conversation with them. I think that was one of my primary reasons for leaving charity: water—not only to escape the ring of fire of ideas being churned out and stepped on, but also wanting to be closer to who I was working for and use their specific challenges to make interesting work.

There’s also a level of speed associated with smaller projects. I really love a lot of the web and design work coming out intentionally small studios, because I think there is an element of scrappiness to them. Even if it is imperfect, it is far more interesting to me than something that somebody spent 8 months fine-tuning. Things move so fast, that if you wait too much to try an idea, someone else will. There’s not an infinite amount of ideas and there’s not an infinite amount of clients as well. Multiple clients can have very similar values which can lead to producing a lot of similar work. The idea of working on something for too long and not releasing it feels like getting left behind. And that’s a disservice to the people you’re working for.

I think that most of my job opportunities have come by because of my freelance work. I’ve never walked into an interview and shown work from a previous job and had any sort of positive reaction from it. What I end up presenting is usually like an album art/website I did for a band, or a logo I did for somebody I met on Dribbble.

The thing that haunts me the most now is that I had absolutely no sense of what money meant in terms of how much things cost and what I needed to make to live my life. It really made the whole freelance experience about the sheer joy of the work. I never really let cost enter my mind, and I hardly priced my freelance projects responsibly. The problem with that approach is that inevitably you’ll get to a point where you haven’t set any rules and you wouldn’t have been compensated fairly for the amount of work you’re doing. You’ll start to resent the work as well as your client. And that was something that happened a lot at the end of a larger freelance project. And then I would immediately forget about it, and move on to the next project. For the most part, even when I felt burned out or overworked, I somehow got excited about the next one again.

It was a huge learning experience for me because now I understand how to appropriately charge for the services we provide in our own studio. I never really had to worry about the financial aspect of things when I had a full-time job, which is a comfortable position to be in. But had it not been for freelancing, pricing myself and understanding the economics of running my own business would have been much harder.

It varies with each client but it varies in only one way: the amount of self-awareness that an artist has. What they do and what you do is similar but in different mediums. The best musician/artist clients I’ve had are the ones that are fully aware that they are paying me to do something that they could not do. The worst ones I’ve had are the ones that thought that they could do what they’re paying me to do, but just don’t want to. The way that manifests is in the way that they give feedback. I once showed 10 different album art concepts to a musician in one go. Within five minutes I got an email saying that none of those worked. I never got a reason why. That mentality of “I’ll know it when I see it” is very dangerous because that means that there’s already something in their head and you are supposed to somehow read their mind.

While working with fellow artists or creatives, you have to understand where their heads are before you start working with them. The difference between someone who’s willing to put that time in with you vs. someone who is not, is definitely is an indication of how the project is going to go.

It’s just as important for you, the designer, to have trust in the musician/artist as well. You have to understand that as you put a part of yourself in a project, they are doing the same thing. There’s a crossroads where you can meet up, and that requires a lot of work. If your client doesn’t want to put in that level of work, it doesn’t usually bode well for the project.

I think running my own studio is something that I’ve always wanted to do. It was also on the horizon in terms of the decisions that I made. Right after I quit my last studio job, I was in a really weird space where I was freelancing, trying to make my own studio, and also working part-time for some friends in Nashville. I think by working for them, I figured out what I wanted our studio to look like. I got to look at the inner workings of a small studio, the way they bounce ideas off of one another, and the ways their strengths and weaknesses interplayed with each others’.

Apart from all that, another reason I wanted to form a studio was that I wanted to make websites. It was something I thought I was pretty good at, so, I needed someone who could build/code them for me. I don’t know if there was a concrete moment that I can point to when I made the decision to start a studio—it was more like a natural progression of things and us saying to ourselves, “let’s keep going”.

The way things got kicked off in the beginning is that I pitched a project with my friend Ian for a special effects company that needed a website. We had never been approached together by anyone like this before and there was really no reason for them to ask us to work on it together. We put so much effort into it that we made the entire website for our proposal. Once we did that, and thought about projects collectively, it was kind of hard to stop. So we continued positioning ourselves as a collective to get new work. It was almost like we tried working together, and we just didn’t wanna go back to the way things were before.

Oh, it totally was. After that experience, it became hard to think about work in a singular context anymore. It just felt so natural to have a couple people with you, by your side, on the same wavelength as you are.

The studio has taken a lot of different forms in the short time we’ve been open. When we first started, we had structured our income to be personal. Essentially, the projects that you worked on, that was the money that you took home. We didn’t really think about it in terms of a payout system where the income is shared. The work was going through the Alright Studio banner and the partners just took home a piece of it.

Acquiring new clients forced us to change how we gave ourselves money and we structured in a way that made the payout equal for each partner. It is funny that you’ve brought it up because we spent the whole of last week reminiscing this whole situation. When that shift happened, we didn’t realize at that time, but it marked a pivotal moment for us because now all of a sudden, our incomes depended on each other. You have to be really careful when you’re navigating a situation like that because it’s a very tricky position to be in.

I’m very prepared for this question. (laughing)

There are a lot of stressors that you have to isolate and be aware about, which we weren’t until very recently. My partner Hope and I have this agreement now that if anything goes weird during the day, we can come home and unwind about it, rage about it, and basically do whatever we need to do to process it.

Yeah, that’s helpful for us. It’s great! Where is it’s not so great is that the level of communication me and my married partner have wouldn’t apply to our other business partner, Ian. So if Hope and I get back home after a tough day, we can unwind about it, and there’s none of that with Ian. I think you have to learn to set and respect boundaries earlier on than we did. So we’ve been learning how to communicate together really well before we take on more work. Any advice that I would have for people in a similar situation is to take the time to be small, work out of the apartment or coffee shop for as long as you can before you raise your “clout” level. And just make sure that you have all the rules laid out clearly beforehand.

It does help if your colleagues are your friends beforehand. Personally, if I didn’t have Ian and Hope with me, I wouldn’t have started this studio.

Yes, definitely because you are directly responsible for each other’s bank accounts. I think making sure that you have a really functional relationship with a business partner is about being willing to put in the work that doesn’t come easily.

There are different kinds of pressure. I would say that the pressure I felt while freelancing to consistently get better and do more interesting work is a little bit less of a factor now, which I’m grateful for—mainly because it’s hard to work specifically to make that pressure go away. There’s always going to be someone better than you.

The pressure that you feel when you run your own company is more of a given. I’ll find myself working until 9-10 p.m. and not even realize it sometimes because I’m the only one that’s gonna be able to do it. So, I would say that the pressures are different and this point in my life, I’d rather have the business pressure.

The pressure of constantly having to upgrade your skill set is really dangerous because there’s no clear end goal to that. It is easier to look at a business and say, “we have to hit this number to pay our rent, and have this project out by this date”. Those are actionable and concrete goals. The idea of just trying to be better than the other 3000 odd designers in New York is super scary. It also has a lot to do with age, I think there’s a time in your life when you should feel that pressure. That time of your life should intentionally be very short, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

Out of those three options, I would say freelance was the easiest. And in some ways, also the most enjoyable. Because you really didn’t have to worry about anything other than the project at hand. I recognize that it’s kind of an elitist thing to say because making money while being a freelancer is really difficult from a logistical point of view. But in terms of the voices in my head and the kind of stuff I had to work through, freelance was so much easier.

It’s hard to tell the two apart.

I’m sure this is true for everyone on some level, but I know deep down when my work isn’t as good as good as it should be. And before we have to present it, I get extremely anxious because I’m aware that I’m not performing at top capacity, and there’s seemingly nothing I can do about it.

I’ve also realized that my brain needs a healthy recharge to produce good work.

I actually took a weekend off to go see my family and near the end of the weekend, I found my head smack down into business—I was buzzing with incredible ideas. And three days before that I was so burned out that I couldn’t process anything other than getting ready to give the presentation. There needs to be a healthy recharge that I’m admittedly not good at maintaining.

People don’t often realize that mental health and your stability have a very strong effect on the work you produce. On the other hand, I also believe that just like sad kids make good emo bands, emotional graphic designers are the ones that produce the most interesting work.

Since I was 18, I’ve known that I have clinical depression and have been taking medication for it since. What I didn’t know—and got to know midway through a job—is that I have clinical anxiety as well. Anxiety that was so bad that I had to figure out a way to manage it. You’d be surprised that how many people don’t understand, or are unwilling to understand, what anxiety means and the effects it can entail. I’ve met a lot of people with the attitude, “Oh, you’re a graphic designer, just push through and you’ll get there”. For me, it’s not always possible to just push through and make something if I’m not in the right mental space. There’s an element of that in every job but I think it applies more so for creative work for obvious reasons.

In order to sustain a healthy working atmosphere, you have to be aware that people can just sometimes have off days. I had some really good advice from one of my dear friends that helped me out a lot—”If you’re having a bad day, it’s totally okay to not get anything done. But if you realize that you’re having a shitty day, make sure that you don’t have a shitty day tomorrow. So just do whatever you have to do to make tomorrow better.” It sounds really obvious and simple, but it was really helpful for me to let myself off the hook if I’m having a bad day.

Also I know for a fact that I am really bad at taking care of my life in any non-work way. For example, I do not work out, I’d sometimes go 8 months without a haircut, and I generally have to put a lot of effort into taking care of myself. On the other hand, I honestly don’t have to put a lot of work into making myself do design. Even though the work that we do is obviously hard, challenging and specialized, it’s still so much easier for me to get myself to do that, because that just comes more naturally to me.

Oh no. (laughing)

So I did not drink alcohol for six weeks. There wasn’t a specific reason why I did that. If anyone thinks that they may have an issue with alcohol or any substance, the best thing to do is simply see what happens when you don’t have it. What I found what happened when I didn’t drink is not the experience that I necessarily heard from other people. Not that I had been drinking everyday, but I generally observed that I was able to maintain a positive mood for a longer time.

I vaguely remember that I posted something along the lines of “unfortunately, I feel everything now” which was the really interesting part about it because there was no longer a way to not feel everything everytime. Earlier, there were nights when I just wanted to switch off my brain and call it day and drink a couple of beers—which is a luxury I no longer had. It intentionally forced me to see what it was like to not be able to turn off my brain. It was a valuable exercise for those six weeks.

Now that I’m past that and drinking occasionally, I now realize that the clarity I used to feel on weekends and Monday mornings when I wasn’t drinking was a fucking high in itself. It made me feel like that there was something awesome to wake up to everyday. It was like that age old adage that you don’t know what life is like until you let yourself fully experience it. It was a good experiment in that it taught me that I should probably care more about my state of mind, and also that I am capable of doing so.

I haven’t done any music related stuff in a while, I’d like to get back to that a little bit. I think I want to financially price our studio in such a way that we can do smaller projects as well. We should be able to do more work that isn’t tied to the bottom line.

I think about it a lot, actually. But I don’t know if I think about it enough when I’m making decisions. I’ll think about the legacy I want to leave behind in a vacuum. But when I’m shitposting on Twitter and realize the way my legacy is going to live in this crazy social media age, it does not process well at all. (laughing)

If anyone looks at my work when I’m dead, I would like them to think that it came from a specific sense of raw emotion and reason. I think that’s what I like most about some of the album art, posters and even websites I’ve designed. It’s hard to describe what it means or where it came from and I like that about it. I like the fact that when I look at my work, it’s a mess of emotions.

There’s a lot of them. I think I’ve had people who have functioned like that at every job that I’ve had. The first one that I can remember is my boss Scott at the Austin based startup. He has always been a clear-headed voice of reason in my life. I’m a very emotional person and I sometimes react without thinking too much. And he is the opposite of that, even his humor is pre-vetted in his own mind. I think remembering his level-headedness has been a major influence in my work.

I also feel like I’ve had multiple friends that have inadvertently taught me stuff along the way. My friend Keith Davis Young is a designer and illustrator in Texas. He was one of the first people I met who had a weird, unbridled sense of joy about them. He was just so happy, so uplifting and so caring all the time that you couldn’t help feel a little bit better about yourself when you’re around him. I needed somebody to tell me that my work was good, because it’s hard for me to tell that to myself.

Also, my friend Joseph who runs a web design studio called Extended Play. He has been a mentor in the sense that he does not sugarcoat anything. I think that it’s important to have at least one person in your life who will not bullshit you about anything. I’ve had conversations with him where he’ll be honest to the point of even offending me. He’ll point out when I’m being a baby about a certain situation or if I’m overthinking too much.

I have to preface this by saying that I’m not a design book guy and I haven’t read many of them. But I’ll start with a design book.

The New York studio called karlssonwilker wrote a book about the first years of their company. It’s brutally honest and I wish everyone reads it to understand that it is okay to go through a tough phase.

I used to read a lot of rock band memoirs. Even though I think that The Doors are a shitty band, the book about their lead singer, Jim Morrison, is insanely good.

Also, anything about this author called Chuck Klosterman. He started out as a rock journalist, but then he widened his range. He creates a lot of significance around very mundane events, and I seem to gravitate towards that.

I recently watched a movie by the Safdie Brothers called Good Time which has Robert Pattinson in it. It was a really crazy movie and it got me going down a rabbit hole about those directors in general. After the night I watched Good Time, I watched their first movie called Heaven Knows What—which was utterly fucked up.

I don’t know if you know the backstory to this movie. The lead actress in that film was a heroin addict at the time of filming. Basically what I remember is, the Safdie brothers found this girl in New York and asked her to write an autobiography of her life. Instead of publishing the book, they made a movie about it. And after the movie was done, they sent her to rehab—which was really awesome. It got me thinking about the role and responsibility of filmmakers because the closer you get to some of these grittier topics, the more impact you can have. And that movie is freaking amazing.

I watch a lot of stupid horror films too. There’s two movies that I think about a lot for reasons that are beyond me. This film called We Need To Talk About Kevin with Ezra Miller. For some reason, it was so disturbing that I can’t stop thinking about it even five years later. The whole point of the movie is that when Ezra Miller’s character is born, he bonds with his dad but not with his mom. He goes through events in his life where he shows really disturbing behavior around his mom, and no one believes her.

And the other one is Compliance. It is a true story about a woman who worked for a KFC outlet. Some guy calls her manager and says that her brother is busted for drugs and essentially, claims that this woman is part of the investigation. The guy on the phone who claims to be a cop, holds the entire staff of the restaurant as hostage. It was such a weird example of how power can be insanely misused, and how people don’t generally question it.

Deathcab for Cutie, because I’ve listened to them since I was 13 and kind of feel like we’ve grown up together. There’s a band called The Gaslight Anthem whose discography I have totally exhausted. It would be really difficult to go without this band called The Rural Alberta Advantage. They’re obviously Canadian, but something about their albums reminds me of Winter time.

They’re all pretty different. Deathcab is sort of neutral, Gaslight is for when I need to get pumped up and Rural Alberta is for when I’m bummed.

I think a Gin and Tonic, which is a very neutral choice. I’m also a fan of drinking shitty American beers like Miller High Life.