What’s On Your Desk? With Nate Luzod
Note: What’s On Your Desk? is a series of interviews with friends who are doing interesting things. The dialogue always starts off the same way, by asking the subject to describe their workspace. The first in our series is with Detroit’s own Nate Luzod, who is, pound-for-pound, my favorite designer and the guy I want next to me in any project large or small. Nate’s new interactive design outfit, GRID, recently opened its doors and is heartily bucking the economy.
What’s on your desk?
Centerpiece is a 24” iMac with Intel Core2 Duo Processor, 3.06GHz. To the right of the keyboard is my Wacom Intuos3 Table. The setup is rigged wirelessly to 3TB of NAS. Epson printer and scanners are hooked up wirelessly as well. Non-hardware? An assortment of highlighters and mechanical pencils sits in a 25 year old Luzod Associates, Inc. coffee mug (my father’s business from his entrepreneurial days). In front of that is a picture of my wife making a face at the camera and picking her nose with both fingers. Beneath the desk is usually a sleeping Wheaten Terrier named Max - he’s both important and special. There are also unfinished moleskines, sketchbooks, paper samples, half-read coding reference books, weeks of unopened mail, House Industries catalogs, vintage Transformers, an old school Voltron, Gundams, kid robots, and all the other immature things you might expect.
You have become a coder but you started as an artist. How did you manage that transition and what would you tell people who want to have both skills?
I wouldn’t call it a complete transition - since I wasn’t exactly a Stefan Sagmeister who decided he wanted to learn code. I’ve just always been interested in tinkering and curious about the way things work. That’s the answer in a roundabout way; as with anything you do in life, intellectual curiosity is the prerequisite for developing any semi-marketable talent. If you’re not interested, if you’re not into the process, then there are better ways to spend your days.
I don’t think I qualify as an artist. I consider myself a designer, which means my work has a defined objective independent of “how I’m feeling today”. Design, like programming, requires critical thinking and the ability to solve problems. Programming, like design, involves patterns, mathematics, geometry, and insight. They have a lot more in common than you might think. If you have a mindset for one, cultivating the other doesn’t require an absolute paradigm shift. It’s just a matter of learning the rules and applying them.
It seems that a lot of today’s jobs are straddling this concept — two related but classically opposed skills. Is it better to get good at one first or do both at once?
If you’re just getting started I think doing them together is the way to go. On the web in particular, the technology informs the design and vice versa - so learning them at the same time would be a huge benefit. Understanding both the constraints and advantages of the technology will help you build realistic and functional designs. Understanding how things should look and feel and interact with the user will make you a better programmer. In my opinion, learning all this at once would minimize any ‘unlearning’ and adjustment time.
What are the books / websites / magazines that you used to chart these waters?
For development, Programming PHP by Lerdorf (PHP’s creator) gave me everything I need to know. For Flash, Hillman Curtis’s Flash Web Design got me started with motion, and Colin Moock’s ActionScript books from O’Reilly did the rest. Anything and everything you need can be found online via “the Google”, though. There are too many great sites to name.
For design, its important to know the rules. I didn’t understand this until later on, but to design “what looks right” is dumb and won’t help you defend your work against clients who “just feel”. To learn the rules, Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Tsichchold’s The New Typography are critical for typography - the importance of which can’t be overemphasized. For grids and layout, Kimberly Elan’s Geometry of Design and Grid Systems were really accessible for my short attention span. Learn the rules from books, then get your inspiration from living life.
Most important was Hillman Curtis’s MTIV: Process, Inspiration, and Practice for the New Media Designer. It focuses on approach and worldview, not just the rules of design. What is the designer’s role, what is his place in the world, how do you conduct fruitful meetings and get at the core of what a client wants; these are among the topics covered. Equally as important as design or coding talent is the ability to communicate clearly with your clients and run a successful business.
Lastly, the annual Graphic Artist’s Guild Handbook will go into concrete terms for best practices, contracts, and fair pricing for what you’re doing. You want to make money, right?
For the aspiring designer / coder, how much of the growth process should be assigned to learning from consuming books like this? I get the feeling that more of today’s new age designer is just “doing it” and learning on the job. True?
For me, it has been 98% just doing it and 2% reading and studying. Maybe I would be further along had I devoted more to formal learning, but despite their value I find most instructional books vastly boring in comparison to just digging in and trying to make something work.
What are your thoughts about living in the Detroit area? How has this affected your creative / professional growth?
This is something of a touchy subject. In many ways I love Detroit - namely because it’s my home. The city’s significance is undeniable in industry, technology, music, art, and the creative scene persists to this day. I think it thrives despite, or in some cases on account of, the current state of things. If you can feed off all these elements, I think Detroit is a great place to be. But that takes a special kind of person.
Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of person. I draw no mystical inspiration from our blighted, post-apocalyptic cityscape. I find it kind of depressing. We have great food, amazing music and art, but the fact that you can almost never come home without smelling like an ash-tray is a huge disappointment. There is no mass transit to speak of, and the much of the city is tragically unsafe. No need to even touch on the embarrassing city government (though I hold hope for Bing), the 25% unemployment rate, and failing school system.
I think most tech-saavy, creative young people would be hard-pressed to pick us over any other major metropolis if they had a job offer here vs. even Cleveland or Pittsburgh, let alone NYC or Frisco. Detroit has done little to attract the types of people it needs and much to repulse those it should retain. Most of my friends and classmates have moved away and I don’t fault them for this. The depleted talent pool is both good and bad, though. Great if you revel in the potential of things and have the next big idea, not great if you’re looking for a job here and now.
That’s a balanced and thoughtful opinion. Is this something that’s changed over the last five years, in either direction, or do you think this has been static for some time?
I should note that it took a long time to write that, mostly because its painful to admit those things in writing. I would say my opinion of Detroit has changed significantly as I get older. I used to live downtown and I used to love it. As I get older and value things like peace and quiet, safety, the want to raise a family, my perspective has changed. As far as I can tell, Detroit has shown only minor improvement in the six years since I moved back. I realize these things take time, though.
What’s a recent thing you worked on / completed / started that you learned something meaningful from?
I’ve been doing some side work for my previous full time job and have been surprisingly more pleased with the end product than I was when working full time with the company. It’s interesting to see how you operate without the fear of pissing off the wrong people, without the fear of getting fired. You could say that the less you have to lose the more adventuresome you can be with your ideas. This is probably why some of my best work is done in the freelance capacity.
Is there anything you plan on doing to recreating that freelance mindset in your non freelance work? Or do you think that’s just the way it is?
That doesn’t have to be the way it is. Your work environment is important, and I think this pertains to any career that requires creativity. Your relationship with your co-workers, the way the company is run and the condition of the business are all factors. If you constantly live in fear of being judged, fired at the drop of a hat or “head-count-reduced”, you’re less likely to have the comfort required to take risks. Ultimately, you need an environment where it’s OK to make mistakes. The right place will encourage experimentation and understand that many failures (fast, educational ones, preferably) are often required for each huge success.
To get this right in a full-time position, I think its important to be picky about the job you take (also important in freelance). When interviewing for my current job, I viewed the meetings as a two-way investigation. I focused not only on selling myself, but also finding out everything possible about the company and those I’d be working with. Can I get by with these people 8 hours a day? Do I really stand behind the mission of the company? What do others who work there think of the place? Being picky is necessary. This is difficult advice to digest in such a poor economy, but important.
