I LOVE NU

New work for the University of Nebraska:

I don’t know where I’d be without the university. My time in Lincoln as a Husker was extremely formative. Full of smart stuff, dumb stuff, growing stuff, changing stuff, etc. Being pushed. Challenged. Getting out of my comfort zone on a scale that was big. Still Nebraska. Still a city I was familiar with. But different. This place of higher learning was where I learned, lived, and started my path to where I am today. I owe it a lot. And I won’t forget it.

Midwestern Meh

If you’ve lived and worked in the Midwest for an extended period of time, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it first hand and have had to navigate how much to let it go and how much to hold someone’s feet to the fire.

Midwestern Meh is very real. And it bites like a motherfucker.

There you are. Doing your job. And someone who has been hired to work with you in some capacity simply doesn’t live up to expectations. Not even that, they stink. And worse still, they think you won’t notice.

But of course you do, because anyone with eyes would notice.

They think it doesn’t matter because this is the Midwest and things just don’t need to be that nice here. So what’s the big deal anyway?

Turns out, lots.

If we’re all cool with Midwestern Meh then what in God’s name is the point of all this?

I’ve experienced my fair share of Midwestern Meh the last couple years. And I am getting sick and fucking tired of it. I think you are, too.

Years back, I read an article about the percentage of a project that turns out as expected. In this particular designers’s view it was about 87%. Which seems right. Remember, this is the real world of budgets, opinions, timelines, talent, and any number of externalities that happen because that’s what life is.

In terms of a percentage, Midwestern Meh is in the 40s.

Whether graphic designer, architect, web developer, video producer, etc. We are all capable of Midwestern Meh if we don’t put in the time. We must do the work. No way around it.

To all the Midwesterners who phone it in because they think no one will notice, trust me, everyone notices. And there are going to be consequences.

Step ya game up, bud.

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PS. If you happen to not be familiar with Midwestern Meh just think of East Coast Fuck It but more polite and way more bush league.

America Needs Media Literacy

In order to understand our world, we need to be able to see it. Not what we want to see, but what actually is.

KEXP Office Radio

All day every day. We love the music, we love the DJs, we love the mission, we love all of it. KEXP has fueled my design career since the beginning. Stop into Round and Round and you can pretty much expect it to be on, loudly. To learn more about why it means so much to me and the team, check out this nice article on the most important independent radio station in the world:

Can Music Heal Your Mind? This Radio Station’s Mental Health Programs Aim To At Least Try.

One of my biggest mistakes

Is that I gave too much consideration to what is said rather than how often something is repeated. My approach to life has been one that operated with the incorrect assumption that what is said is the most important thing to care about. But I’ve recently come to realize, probably because of social media, that anything can be said, what really matters is how much it’s said.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s how shit gets done.

Frequency over novelty.

The new thing gets forgotten while what’s repeated becomes dogma.

Unjudged

I find myself seeking out spaces where there isn’t any kind of judgment present. To fill the need for no recognition whatsoever. The desire to just be without comment or buttonary reaction. No count, nothing trending, nothing following, no curation or algorithm, not a feedback loop at all. I just want to be for a moment, which should be enough. But will it be, if I can find it? What do you think? Do you like it?

Frequency vs. Not

I just finished Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. A great read in very typical Klosterman fashion. And as a product of those Nineties he’s talking about, I enjoyed going back through them with over two decades of hindsight and firmly being able to put those years to rest. They’ve been over for awhile, but now they strangely feel finished.

One thing I do miss from the nineties was the frequency of everything. Movies, music, books, TV shows, and whatever else, there was just less of them. So you had to replay what you liked over and over again. You couldn’t just ping to something else that was newer because there was nothing else, even if your mission was to find and consume things very much out of the mainstream.

The frequency of the nineties increased your understanding. It made the music mean more, sound louder, and speak to deeper areas of your soul.

Frequency, in general, can offer a perspective only grasped through repetition and the passage of time. There are no cheat codes for watching Pulp Fiction 20+ times or listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind every single day for years and years.