Executive Creative Director, Peopledesign
Education: BFA Design, Carnegie Mellon University

Did you always know you wanted to pursue Graphic Design? 

No, I didn’t know what design or graphic design was until I started searching for colleges. In an Asian household, you’re either a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. I wasn’t going to be one of those, so I needed to find another career path. I did gravitate to art in primary school, but I didn’t know that it could turn into a career. I discovered graphic design through college searches, and it seemed to be a good balance of art and commerce. Asking my family to pay for my college with an unsure outcome would be ungrateful. It was important to me to go to a university and not an art school. If I wasn’t any good at design, then I could do something else.

When did you first see graphic design as a career possibility?

Sophomore year of college is when I could see that there were graphic design jobs. 

What has your career path been? What was your first job out of school? How did you get it?

I had an internship the summer of my sophomore and junior years with Ethel Kessler Design in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a three-hour commute for me. I didn’t care. I was so grateful that they would let me hang around and see the inner workings of a design firm. The reason I was hired was that they had just gotten a Macintosh computer, and they didn’t know how to use it.

I learned so much about the design profession, but mostly about how to be a professional. Everyone there was very generous and patient. 

Then school was over. Just like today, the job market was not great. Everyone wants to hire someone with 3-5 years of experience. That’s the magic number where you have learned enough to be able to do a small project on your own. 

You don’t have experience, so people won’t hire you, and you can’t get that experience because people won’t hire you. Catch-22.

Some companies offered internship programs to college graduates. Walker Art Center and Herman Miller offered paid internships. I think it was $8K and $14K a year, respectively. I had heard about the Herman Miller internship program at school. They had hired from Carnegie Mellon two years in a row, so I thought I’d try it. I met with Steve Frykholm and the marketing team. Herman Miller and Steve are legendary. It was instant cache if I could get it. Fortunately for me, the program was for one year and the junior designer was leaving, and there was a spot. No brainer.

You were successful at Herman Miller. What made you decide to strike out on your own?

I’m not sure that there was some kind of master plan. In the corporate life cycle, there are ups and downs. We hit a low point, and people were being laid off, and groups were being shuffled. I followed Steve to the smaller division, SQA, and the work was different and more importantly the atmosphere was tenuous. It didn’t feel like we were part of a design office anymore. We were clearly in a corporation.

We decided that design was more important than Herman Miller. That was in 1997. In our new company, we started taking on projects and slowly started growing and built a business.

Beyond design, did you aspire to be a principle in a design firm? Did the business parts attract you as much as the design work?

We were too young to think about running a business. We were just going with the flow and were lucky enough to have work to do and get paid. The administrative business activities were not attractive to me. My attention was on design.

But we were fortunate enough to start our careers within a corporation and were accustomed to following protocols: payroll, insurance, healthcare, expense reports, mileage reimbursement, timesheets, etc. That gave us a framework to build on.

Running and designing a business is definitely challenging, and we’re still learning how to do that.

How do you think about mentoring young designers who join your firm?

When I work with younger designers, I try to remember the generosity of Ethel and Steve and pay that forward. 

Who has inspired, guided, or mentored you?  How can young designers find mentors today?

Ethel Kessler and Steve Frykholm are my biggest mentors. 

Graphic design is a combination of blue-collar and white-collar work. There are many parts that resemble brute work. Long hours of painstakingly perfecting one little detail that only a handful of people would ever understand. You could see it as an old-school apprentice model. Frankly, I wish people still saw work that way. You work with the best, and you get better.

Working by yourself is not a good idea. It’s comfortable, but it will not get you further faster. Go seek out a firm you admire and ask to work in person. Don’t be too picky. Any experience is better than no experience.

What have you done in terms of professional development that you feel was worth your time?

In sports, if you play with better players, you get better. That’s true all around. Going to conferences and shows has helped me get inspired. Seeing other people doing great works makes me want to work harder.

What do you find satisfying about the work you do?

The best part of being a designer is learning new things. You learn something new with every project and client, and that discovery process keeps me interested.

I also love plant tours. Sign me up.

How do you approach problem-solving as a graphic designer?

Most clients come to us with something they say they want. It’s our job to uncover what they need. Gather all the information you can and talk to as many people as possible. From the customer’s customer perspective, try to uncover the real need. It is usually an exercise of editing and simplifying their offer, message, or approach.

What kinds of changes have you observed and participated in over your career?

A big, obvious one is the computer. In the 19-ancient-times, before computers, there was more manual labor to get to a prototype. We had to cut things out and glue them down and take it to a printer to get photocopies made. Everything just took longer to do. We’ve become faster at doing technical things.

The next big change was designing for screen-based media. Responsive layouts changed the notion of grids.

We’re now in the AI era. We don’t know enough about it yet to know how it will change the work of a graphic designer.

Where do you see the design profession going?

More and more tasks will get automated. As an example, social media ads can be generated. We’re not going to ask a person to create 100 variations of an ad in one hour. We will be doing the critical thinking work of uncovering the need, which is different from what someone said they wanted, then creating that future world in an appropriate manner.

How do you see the role of design in business and culture changing? 

I’m not sure it’s changing at its core, but more and more people know about it, dabble in it, and want to be involved. Everybody has an opinion, and they want to be heard. In today’s world, you have people who don’t have subject matter expertise inserting their opinion. They want an equal say, even though they don’t have the experience or expertise.

Funny aside: My mother has some issues with her teeth. She has three cavities. She wants to see the X-rays. Fair request. She looks and says it looks fine that maybe she doesn’t need any treatment. She goes and gets a second opinion. Great idea. The new dentist confirms that she has cavities, but she’s still skeptical. She’s not in the medical profession and has never been trained to read X-rays, yet she thinks she can read them. Now we’re into conspiracy theories about how all dentists are bad and they’re out to get you. Meanwhile, her teeth are rotting, and she’s headed to a more expensive root canal.

This extreme questioning of professionals is what we’re all suffering from. It’s ok to question. It’s ok to ask for clarity. It’s ok to get a second opinion. But we should move forward.

A lot has changed since you entered the field. What advice do you have to a young professional just starting out in the field?

Get into an office, in person, and learn from the design professionals around you. You don’t know what you don’t know.

What is the one thing that a graphic designer needs to be successful? 

Grit. A good attitude helps.

How do you think future designers might be made aware of the graphic design field sooner? What could be done to reach them?

Today, we’re overloaded with media. There’s no escaping all the ads. Side hustles, affiliate marketing, and UGC are mostly about convincing someone to buy something. The public has turned into novice marketers. Little kids think they are tastemakers. 

More education in school that shows kids different future paths. Show them what the work looks like. There was an effort to show kids different careers. Many professionals signed up to host a number of kids, spend time with them, and show them what they do. Schools should try to make this a mandatory class. And if you’re not ready for a career, offer some other ways forward.