The Double Lives of Designers
…and why a side hustle isn’t always enough. An interview with executive creative director Derek Fridman.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, Derek Fridman left his design job at Razorfish in Los Angeles and spent six months disconnected from computers. Fridman sat in his studio near Venice Beach and painted, refreshed his graffiti skills, and built up a cache of work that led him to host his first art show under the name UrbanMedium.
The politically minded work was a nod to skills Fridman picked up as an American teenager attending high school in 1990s Belgium, where he was first exposed to a bubbling street art scene. After UrbanMedium took off, it wasn’t until Fridman realized he needed health insurance and the safety net of a 401k that he got another agency job and essentially began living two lives: Derek Fridman, the agency designer, and UrbanMedium, the street artist.
Fridman maintains this double life today, as an executive creative director at Huge by day, and as UrbanMedium by night, working from a 600-foot studio space in the basement of his Atlanta home. “There are people I’ve worked with for years who are just now learning about what I do outside of work,” Fridman explains. “I like it that way.”
Here, Fridman explains the difference between a side hustle and a Plan B, how to hire the right people, and how to keep a good idea alive—even (or especially) if a client hates it.
A creative director’s role
Think of the creative director as a conductor: The conductor’s got an orchestra. Each individual in the orchestra is an amazing player. You’ve got a drummer. You’ve got a flutist. You’ve got somebody on a cello. They are the best at what they do, but they’re truly amazing when they’re brought together to make music. The conductor’s job isn’t to play an instrument; he has a very important role, which is to make sure that the tempo is set, to make sure that the right instruments come in at the right time, to really shape the music.
I try to teach people that, as a leader, there are things that you can accomplish with your hands, but you have to think of yourself as a conductor. Your role is to look across your instruments to other people. I may not play the drums well, but that person does, and we need a drum right here, right now, right at this moment. It’s leveraging the people around you to pull something off.
Where ideas go to die
A lot of good ideas die on Dropbox. If we design something for a pitch and the pitch fails, we say, “Oh, the files are on Dropbox,” and we just forget about them. A good idea that doesn’t work for one industry is likely going to be good for another; we shouldn’t always have to start from scratch. We should be building things that we know are going to work. It just may not be the right time or our clients may not be ready for it, but it doesn’t mean we should throw it away. If the “red” client doesn’t buy my idea and it’s a great idea, I’m going to paint that shit yellow and sell it to the client that’s yellow.
Go with your gut
I’ve hired some terrible people. I’ve also hired amazing people. It’s a bit of gut feeling — how do you get along with this person? It’s also about understanding their motivations and hunger. If it’s an art student, they might be hungry to get exposure and an opportunity to work on cool stuff. That’s a gift and a curse. The gift is you could give them that opportunity very quickly to offer exposure to high-profile stuff, and the curse is that the expectation from that point forward is that the work is always high profile or it’s not really that important.
You have to hire people who understand they’re getting a very unique opportunity to work with a bunch of amazing people and make really good shit. We always have to remind folks of those things, because you might get young talent whose expectations are blown out of the water because they’re working in a place where they get immediate access to something that a lot of people had to work very, very hard to get. With more seasoned folks who have been through the agency world, we try to avoid anyone who’s jaded. Agency people have shitloads of baggage. I love that they’ve had that experience, but I don’t want anyone to bring that into our home.
Plan for the worst
There’s the idea of the side hustle, and then there’s the idea of being confident in knowing that if one thing turns off, you can jump onto something else. Just always have a plan B, but then have a plan C, and a plan D, and a plan E. Always assume the worst. Always assume that you have to go to your backup. When you put all of your eggs in one basket, that’s when things fall apart.
Zoom out
“Zoom out” is a mantra I use a lot. It’s the idea that designers can get lost in the pixels. I’ll walk by a designer’s desk and I see them zoomed in on the same fucking corner of a PSD for days. I just tell them to zoom out. It’s literal and figurative, “Get out of it. Just forget about that and think about the bigger picture.”
Then they go, “Oh, the battle I’ve been having all day with this one particular thing isn’t really that big of a deal.” You have to distract yourself — you just have to repeat it in your mind, and you just have to put your pencil down and just go take a walk, or do something completely different. You can’t go to another website and try to find inspiration. You can’t say, “All right, Internet, help me figure this one out.” You just need to do something else.
Make something real
Work should speak for itself. If I tell you that I did something really cool and I show you the end product, that’s awesome. But I can also show you the place it was made, where it was born. There’s not an appreciation for creative spaces, because we think our offices have to look a certain way and we have to present ourselves a certain way. If you walk into a real studio, you feel something. You know that shit goes down there.
A client can look at a PowerPoint screen of a phone with something creative on it and they can go, “Yeah, that’s pretty. That’s cool,” but they need to see it in motion. They have to touch and feel it. If you don’t hand the client a phone with a prototype on it that they can actually play with, you are missing 90% of an opportunity to really get them to understand what you’re trying to do.
