Dare to use your voice where it counts - Jessie McGuire

23:00Jessie McGuire:about creatively funding ideas wow i wrote down the word fearlessness then you were talking i was like that's what who you are that's how i perceive what you're telling me so far but also like what you instill into your students because i really want to know what where the the yes the question of do you want to teach here you know where the yes come from and what was the motivation Yeah, no, that's good. I like that you keep asking the like, why? Or the like, where did it come from? You know, to be honest with you, when I did the talk, and again, it was Here You, Me Now, it was all about creative nonsense.

23:37And I really do believe that that is how we all as designers or creatives are going to get through this new, you know, every era has like a villain. This new era of, I mean, I pick the villain right now, but it's going to be what the imagination that is in our minds. Like that to me, and that sometimes doesn't make any sense. creative people shouldn't make sense when it shouldn't. I feel like where we should come back down to is where does our creative ideas and the dots that we're connecting, where does that bring value and what places does that bring value to? So that was really my talk. And what I actually absolutely loved after the talk and go back to validation, you want validation.

24:17Like I really wanted a professor to be like, wow, like you look how far you've come. None of the professors necessarily did that. But I had a line of students waiting to ask me questions. And I've been there. You see somebody on stage and you're like, let me ask him a question. And you don't even care what question it is. You just want to like get up there. And that's just who I am as well. But what I loved was that there was a line of women or female presenting individuals that were all like different shades of brown and beige. And I was like looking like, man, this is what I want. Like, I want to be able to have the conversations with maybe the students who wouldn't necessarily go and ask the question or wouldn't necessarily go and stand.

24:55And I had one young woman say, I actually don't have a question about any of the content in your presentation, but I just loved that, like, you're here talking about this. And, like, I see myself in you and I wanted to be like, you got better skin than me. But I love that, you know. And so but that was actually a lot of the they weren't necessarily questions. Or actually, I had another woman ask me, like, can you give me good interviewing tips? Like, you seem like you would know how to interview. And I was like, I love interviewing. So so it was I think when then I was presented with the opportunity from Peter and the assistant dean, I realized even if it makes me uncomfortable, like you were saying, like, even I knew this, I knew it was going to be uncomfortable.

25:31I knew I was going to have to, like, go into a classroom with young people who were going to, like, stare at me. And, you know, my kids are I have a middle schooler who, you know, he'll show me his Tic Tac where they're making fun of the teacher. I'm like, I'm gonna be on social media. Like, this is crazy. But regardless, I was like, you know what, I owe it to my younger self to go in front of a classroom and not necessarily look like the teacher who's supposed to teach entrepreneurial mindset or the person who's supposed to be talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. I think I owe that to my younger self to have those conversations.

26:02So that's where the yes came from. The yes came from the opportunity to deliver something that I don't see out there.

26:09Jessie McGuire:It's really interesting what you just said. you said i'm not someone who's supposed to teach or i'm not supposed to there is the template we just go back to the tall white men populating the faces and you said i don't look like someone who's supposed to teach but times are changing like this is it it's a changing narrative like even just having no you having a queue of people asking you questions it's like they feel validated they feel somebody that the narrative and you know the color makeup is changing and i think that that to them is is is the way going look there are people like me doing the thing i want to do and therefore you're giving them the hope and chance to be seen and to actually have a feeling that they can progress you know even as late as you can see it now like i mean this should have been happening 50 years ago you you touch on something because i think this is really true that things are changing we want things to change but they only change if those that haven't seen themselves change that narrative.

27:09Like if I had said, you know what, I don't think this is really for me. It feels too, you know, I don't want to end up on social media as like the bad professor. I think I should sit this one out. I'm not saying that they wouldn't have found somebody else who has a similar maybe background to me, but they wouldn't have found somebody who's had the same opportunities as me, right? If I had sat it out, if I had said exactly what you said earlier, if I was, if fear had taken over my opportunity to say yes, or if I said, oh, this just seems like it's too uncomfortable for me, then the narrative doesn't change.

27:39So I actually think that more, yeah, more creatives who have not seen themselves in the mainstream narrative have to get off the benches. We have to get off the, not off the bench, but I guess we have to be ready to play the game and push back on exactly what you're saying, which is how to be less fearful, more confident, but find it intrinsically in ourselves.

28:05Jessie McGuire:How did you get to where you are now when you have worked out what your voice is and what you want to achieve with it? I feel like in many ways, it feels like my life's work, even though I feel like I'm still figuring out what that is. But if I could take one step back to my master's, because I think it's important how I got to Thought Matter. So again, I continue to be tremendously lucky. It's like the harder I work, the luckier I get. I had a chance in 2009 to, actually 2010, I applied in 2009. I applied to Debbie Millman's master's in branding program. It was the first year. It was the first master's of its kind.

28:46I knew that I wanted to go back to school. I didn't know exactly what it was going to be. But as soon as I heard Debbie Millman was coming up with this program, I was a fangirl. She knows this. I know that I was probably, I like to think I was the biggest fangirl of Design Matters when she first started, when it was on, when she was recording in the Empire State Building and she had her monologues. Like, it's still some of my most favorite podcast experiences. I know she has since moved on to, you know, huge national, international guests and everything. Anyway, so I was obsessed with Design Matters.

29:18Debbie Milman was doing a branding program. I was like, I absolutely have to be in this program. I don't care what happens. It's going to happen. I luckily got in. So I think I had actually read all of the professor's books. Like I feel like I took the course before I even got there because I was so obsessed. But I got in and I was the first I was in the first class. I was in the first cohort, which is one of the most tremendous. I actually love being in a first of anything because you don't know what you don't know and you just figure it out together. So I was with 22 to 23 students. We had no we really didn't know what we're doing.

29:48Neither did the founding professors, which shout out to all of them. Tremendous. They're still there at the program 16 years later. So I was there for nine months on the 11th floor. SVA. That was the only thing that I thought was important. And it was all about the practice of branding. And now we all know, I mean, it's again, 16 years later, branding is so ubiquitous. A lot of people enter, I think, the design world through the door of branding. But this really was like, what is the practice of branding? And it definitely came out of a, I would say, a consumer packaged good, a commercialization of design.

30:19What is branding? And, you know, E-Debbie and many of the professors had built their careers on, yeah, mass commercialization of great design. She talks about making the grocery store beautiful. And so I believed that. And I was like, that's what I want to do. And so really convinced myself that that was my life's work at the time. And right out of grad school, I was very lucky. Had a wonderful mentor, Christine, who I got to work with at Kimberly Clark. At Kimberly Clark, moved to Wisconsin and got to work on, that's why I said toilet paper, in a 99.9 % saturated category of toilet paper, which is, you know, people talk about, oh, you want market share.

30:56Yeah.

30:57Jessie McGuire:You want more consumers, but you don't need to make the market bigger. Most people in the U.S. use toilet paper. So anyway, so I got to understand branding in its most fundamental way. I, you know, dreamt of working on the Kleenex brand. Like, again, most ubiquitous brand there is Kleenex being a billion dollar brand. Got the chance to work on Kleenex. And so it was it was really wonderful. I was in Wisconsin for three years, had my first baby and then was like, I need to come back to New York because I just wanted to be around family. And I really wanted to raise my children in New York City.

31:24So I came back to New York, worked at a London-based packaging design studio, had an amazing opportunity to work with Jonathan Sands at Elmwood. And I was in the New York office and I learned a lot about, he would say Leeds, it was a Leeds-based studio, but they had a London studio. But I had a chance to get to know packaging from an international perspective. And Jonathan and the team in New York really helped me understand how to build a culture of design, how to bring people together and really believe that you're part of something bigger than yourself as part of an agency. So really lucky, lucky for that.

31:59But I did get I started to get a little, what's the right word, restless because I felt like maybe, maybe mass commercialization of design, you know, another violator on another, you know, consumer packaged good at a grocery store. Maybe there was other ways to think about what I knew, which was how to influence people's buying decisions. So I started to put my feelers out and say, is there another way in which I could utilize my skills? So I had a chance to work or I got hired at Thought Matter for six months. It was a six month contract to help me get them off the ground. They were just starting out.

32:36And when I started, I realized the founder named Tom. Tom had a very unique perspective on building an agency. He wanted to build an agency all based out of curiosity. And I was like, well, let's be more curious. What are some things we could be doing? And so we started to stretch where we could build brands. So we first started in public arts. Then we worked in, we started looking at business improvement districts and working on like the flags and the trash cans and the flags in Union Square, Times Square, Long Island City, and really thinking about design in our own city. So we did that for a little bit.

33:13And then we worked with cultural institutions. We worked on what I call bottom-up design. It was working with communities and it was really getting into how you could bring the outside into an institution like the Met or the Rubin Museum of Art. And so we started to build the studio that way. And I realized that that's what I was meant to do. I was meant to really stretch what are the possibilities of design and branding in what we now and again, this is in I didn't know this was not the words I used then, but was civic imagination. How do you get people to really feel like they can participate in the world around them?

33:53And design can really help influence that. And so one of our first internal projects that we did was to redesign the United States Constitution, which is still one of my favorite, most favorite projects. But the 2016 election happened. We were ready to celebrate our first female president. That did not happen here in the U.S. And so we were all a little shell-shocked that we had our first Trump presidency. And so as designers, we were like, do we put our heads in the sand? I know what you were saying earlier. Do we let the fear overtake our ability to actually do something? And so I remember sitting around the conference room being like, what can we do to participate?

34:33And we did some posters for the Women's March. And then we said, what if we actually started to design some of the elements that are always in the news? And something that was happening at the time was a question about whether or not President Trump actually read the Constitution. And we were like, you know, and then it was like, can you read and what all this silly thing? But we were like, have we read the Constitution? So we ordered 15 copies of the Constitution around, you know, different places, and they were all terribly designed. Like they were small print or terrible fonts, no picture. Like it was really terrible.

35:04And we were like, OK, so this is why no one's looking at this. And so we recognize we are not going to have a partisan debate about politics, about the amendments in the Constitution. But what we could do is actually not touch the content, but just choose a font that's more accessible. Choose paper that's more interesting. Print it in a way that makes it feel like an artifact. I mean, how many of us designers are obsessed if you walk by a zine making, you know, fair or like just anything physical, like you want to touch it and you want to have it. I have so many different random things on my bookshelf that I just bought because they look good.

35:40So we were like, let's do that. So we spent the summer. We did a Kickstarter. We raised thousands of dollars to be able to print the U.S. Constitution designed in our way. We use open source fonts. We used images from the Library of Congress. and we printed these at Rizograph because who doesn't love a good Rizograph? And we printed them and it kind of took off. And we ended up, I think at this point, we've donated about 5 ,000 copies to schools here in New York. So that's my best story of the work that we do. And we've been spending, again, this last 10 years continuing to figure out how to prove that imagination is meant to be expansive and that we should all be thinking about that as designers.

36:25How do we redefine the thought that the value of design is not necessarily always commercial success, but the value of design can truly be our ability to participate in the world around us in a way that makes us feel like it's meant for us.

36:42Jessie McGuire:I like when you said civic imagination. I would like to believe that goes to how you redesign a constitution. It's just like, how do you make it accessible to people of now and how do you make it in line with what we're used to seeing? Because let's be honest, most of the brand work that gets done and most of the retooling and rebranding and refreshes are done because the world is moving. The world is not standing still. Therefore, the elements are changing. The landscape is changing. Therefore, we are just fine-tuning all of the elements just to make sure that people don't get bored. People get excited.

37:15Jessie McGuire:People actually, you know, the things that didn't work before or the things that stopped working actually are working a bit better. So when I see what you did with the Constitution, I was like, oh, that makes a lot more sense because it looks appealing. Like, you know, it does. In my opinion, it definitely embodies the civic imagination because you can actually make something of importance, make it accessible. It brings it to people. And actually, it goes back to the beginning of our conversation. It encourages people to know more about what's actually happening in their lives and to have more accountability and more power of their daily decisions, I would say.

37:49that and I definitely you know early in my career even before I'm gonna say the pandemic there was so much conversation about designers getting a seat at the table right I grew up in the era of like your first chief design officer and like design should just have a seat at the table and like just imagine if design could prove its ROI like all these big conversations And we're here and it is so apparent how powerful design is. We not only have a seat at the table, over the last few decades, designers and designers I know or I've read about or I've, you know, slightly worship, they've designed the world that we live in.

38:31They've designed the algorithms. They've designed the interfaces that we don't even notice. They've designed the way that we are, you know, socializing or not socializing. with people. They've designed, you know, everyone's on a phone. I got my phone. That has all been designed. And so I think we're all now realizing is, wait a second, is this actually how we want to interact with each other? Is this how we want to participate in our lives every day? And so I'm actually really excited for the next, I'm hoping it's a renaissance, of designers who realize that we have the seat at the table, but now what do we want to do with that?

39:10What do we want to do with that power? How do we actually want to be thinking about the local democratic principles in our whatever countries we're in or wherever we're like sitting? How do we look at our local elections, our local, you know, we both have kids, the schools that our kids go to? Like, as designers, like we should all be really excited to figure out how to make all of that better for our children. We should be thinking about how do we actually create the infrastructure that comes from imagination. And so that's what I'm like, how do we do more of that? How do we help people like, yeah, I don't know, redefine design to design the world we want to live in?

39:49I don't know. It just that to me is what I'm really eager for. And I keep trying to talk to our designers in the studio, the young people at Pratt. It's like, you know, honestly, we don't need more businesses that have to scale we just need businesses that are really caring for each other caring for the community and if you're a creative soul or a creative individual and you want to create a practice like figure out how you can do that work get paid support your family like you don't need to be the next amazon i'm sorry like i just feel like we are we've been sold this i don't know a little bit faulty bill of goods that it should be the amazons the googles the the next unicorn yeah yeah like no i didn't want a unicorn i think when you when you speak to people

40:33Jessie McGuire:who are rich or trying to make themselves rich it's always the void they're trying to fill in a fulfillment of something that they're missing and inside of course some people happen to work on successful products they create successful companies and some people deserve to have all the accolades and all the money and they are very good with that but then you meet people who want to build that next amazon or the next facebook they're thinking like around the dinner table like yeah i'm gonna invent a new facebook why because i want to be famous i want to have lots of money no like it doesn't like they are detached even from the problem solving is because it's about them when you talk about small companies that that comes from the soul because i love when you said we don't need more businesses to scale because we've got plenty of those we scaled yeah like It's almost like how do we retool or rethink or redefine what success is, right?

41:25Like be famous because you got more people to vote. You got more people to participate in the world around them. Be famous because you, I don't know, changed a local school district. You rebranded the Department of Education. Like there are things that I feel like we all have in common that we want to be a part of. Like we want our families to feel secure. We want people to feel safe. We want to feel like we are giving back. Like I always say history is going to look back at us, whether we whether we like it or not. And so that's what I'm really interested in. And again, yes. Are you can you do people want more money?

42:03You said rich, right? Like I get we are in people need capital. But I think that there's other ways for us to be talking about how to get capital. I'm the first person to say, get your paycheck. Make sure you are getting paid for the value that you're bringing. But how do you redefine that value that you're bringing so that we are really generating, I don't know, a community and even for designers, a world that we feel really proud that we designed. So yeah, get paid, get the money, but make sure that it is still delivering your own intrinsic values of what you are going to look back at your own legacy.

42:42Jessie McGuire:those are very important things to do when you see it from your side or you see it from your student's side sometimes it's a life work to actually discover what you stand for what you mean how do you get paid what to do this but the journey with the help of people like you teaching people not teaching your students they're going to get there faster that's the most exciting part i can see in the world right now that we can teach people how to be ahead by 10 20 years in their careers rather than us going hey we walked on this path we stumbled a lot we found ourselves we picked ourselves up and then we worked out there's a door that can take me to the other side whereas i'm sure you see it in the world of your children and my children like they have got a rocket ship already available to them you know in terms of information more empathetic parents you know more compassionate parents we are creating a new generation i'm excited because those will be the people who will be changing the future but i think this is this is our realization because as you said earlier like we need to get off the benches and i'm very much behind that statement like we need to get off the benches and actually do what we believe we can actually volunteer in the best possible way to the benefit of the future because it's easy to get a paycheck it's easy to then hide away with that paycheck and fail say the life keeps happening to me and then something derails your career derails your life and you're like oh you know i don't feel like i had an active part in my life and i think this is where that's radical accountability comes into place and say, you know what?

44:11Jessie McGuire:Everyone's got a voice. Why don't you use it? No, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I love that you're talking about the future and the future. And I tell my kids that all the time. They're like sick and tired of hearing me talk about design. But I learned so much from them. But something that I think is exciting that I just started actually this semester. I have a really talented graduate assistant named Jura. And they are working with me on exploring what we're calling creative economies in the margins. And it's something that I really do think about, which is like in the future, how can we be thinking about different ways of creative economies?

44:46Like right now, we're very much in an extraction mode. Like all we want to do, again, we talk about scale or like people want to create the next baseball or whatever the next thing you think you want to create. It's all about extraction. It's all about taking something from people to prove that you've created this value. Right. And then you're going to get paid for it. But I think that there's something more interesting about how does creativity actually generate more for more people? Like as opposed to pulling out things from like data or personal information to prove that you can make money.

45:19How do we actually generate more for our, like I said, our communities, our people, our families, our loved ones, our chosen families? And so I'm really interested in what that looks like. I don't know what, honestly, we just started the research, but that to me is really exciting. And I think, you know, even an institution like Pratt is like excited to put money behind that kind of expansive thinking. So yeah, I like to think that there are people who are creative and talented and excited who can help us see new ways to create creative economies, to fund them, to create more, but not through extraction.

45:58I don't, that word just came to me, but like, yeah, it's just like we keep pulling away, but how do we push in?

46:03Jessie McGuire:When you look at everything that we do as a society, as humanity, it's an extraction. We're still trying to make sense of it. So we're still pulling it apart and just realizing what's in it. But I just hope that at one point, this might sound weird, but at some point that humanity will slow down and say, hey, we've got plenty of everything. Now, how do we make sense of it? You know, how do we actually make sense of it? because I'm going to circle back to the design has got seat at the table now, which there are people who are flying the flag very well for design to be, you know, having a seat at the table.

46:39But the general underbelly, middle section of design,

46:43Jessie McGuire:when something happens in the world, creatively, non-creatively, the design people should not speak up, especially in like LinkedIn. and volunteer and this is going to be a bit of a bash in that volunteer opinions that no one asked for because that gets them engagement you know rage baiting is is very good popular hobby for some creatives on the margins and i'm thinking who are you doing it for because you're not really helping anyone you're not helping yourself you're helping linkedin show more advertising thank you for them who are you helping because we need to be careful how we conduct ourselves and how we carry ourselves and how we use our voices and use our experience because i sometimes feel like this could be used for so much of a better good than just rage baiting and hoping that you get thousand likes and go viral on linkedin and everybody forgets about you the next day because in my opinion the mixes look stupid all of us because we are part of this group but i just wish how do we get that to be pushed a bit more yeah you know i think about that all the time because yeah i go on LinkedIn, I always get, I get rage baited just being on LinkedIn and I mean, I'm on it right now.

47:51And I know it's important and there's, it gives you access and whatnot, but, but even Instagram or anything that has a way in which for us to comment, I always say to myself, cause I do read the, read the comments against a new logo comes out or a new brand, you know, someone's got my hot take and it's like, great, let's all have a good, interesting debate and dialogue. But I can't helped think when somebody has a hot take on a logo brand that they never saw the brief, they didn't understand the clients, they didn't know the context, that I just wish they would go take their common, walk down to their public library and help that library like get more people to come in.

48:28Like if you have such a hot take on how you can design something better, go design something in your community. Because if you're that eager to create something to your point to get somebody to notice you, go do it in a space that actually is generative. That's really like helping. Like I said, I like to think that some of the people who have hot takes are really talented designers. Great. Go use those talents. And like I said, get more people to vote. Pick a passion or something that like brought you joy when you were, I'm a 12 year old, 12, 13 year old, when you were 13 and go design that to bring that feeling back.

49:03Because having a hot take on like a a Jaguar logo or a Grat Corvera logo or American Eagle or, you know, this was a bad year for brands. Anyway, name a brand that everyone's had a hot take on or a logo. Next time, take that energy and put it someplace that you then, then go back to LinkedIn and be like, look at the sign I made for my public library to get, you know, more funding for more computers for the kids that don't have it. I would, let's like that, you know, as opposed to like thinking about, you know, Yeah.

49:33Jessie McGuire:Okay. Maybe it could have been better curing, but go current something that's, you know, going to get people to participate. You said it was a bad year for brands, but I think it was a good year for brands. It's just a really, not a really bad year for stupidity. And it's just like, it just, it makes you realize like how ridiculous is the age of algorithm where people follow templates, people generate nonsensical AI posts. and it's like the what the age of a guru like i mean actually what you said earlier sort of every year has got a villain and i think the villain is is the self-certified thought leader on linkedin that we're just destroying resources and talking out of fucking nonsense just because hey look at me whereas what i love what you guys do and what you're telling me is like you live and breathe movement you live and breathe change you want to have change in the world because it's ultimately is going to change someone's life.

50:26I think that the tools that we have can be really amazing. We just worked with a tremendous organization here in the city called the Street Bender Project. Now, the Street Bender Project is one, there is a very small team. And so their ability to use Canva or their ability to use ChatGPT to come up with some messaging is tremendous because they can get more resources to street vendors here in New York City who are some of the most hardworking small businesses that there are. That is a great use of those tools. I also get worked up when I hear, again, yeah, thought leaders start talking about like AI is terrible.

51:00All these things are so terrible. And it's like, yeah, if you're using it to, you know, come up with fake thought leadership ideas or you're using it in a way that is very extractive. Yeah, I agree. But let's not forget that these tools can also be used for positive engagement for brands or small businesses that otherwise wouldn't have those kinds of resources. So again, it's almost like we're, I mean, you said this and now it's getting late or later in the morning and my coffee's kicking in. But you said this, like it just feels like we're tackling the wrong conversations online when we could be tackling real conversations in real life to change what we're ultimately, I feel like, unhappy about.

51:43Like, I think some of us are really lonely or, you know, really, maybe people should just admit that they like a lot of noise and they like to be around people. but yeah it's like how do we take that energy and put it into a place that's going to feel when we wake up the next day we feel better not worse about ourselves just see everything you just said

52:03Jessie McGuire:is exactly what you do i can see it from your work i can see from what you're saying because you care you care about the future you care about now you care about people you care about the future and the way two words i'm taking from this is civic imagination it's just like how do you get actually how do you encourage people to look to the future with positive outlook you know like how do we bring people together because all of the nonsense all of the rage baiting all of the algorithms you know the dark corners of the web pushing right-wing agenda on behalf of billionaires it's like we are the same humans you know we we do have this hardwired instinct to us that we fight over resources when there's a lack of resources that's where people get angry and scared and fighty but we are still the same humans because if you were to line up all the people of the world all the colors and all the racists and all the you know atheists and stuff most of us want exactly the same thing from life it's like how do we get that to instill them so thank you for this conversation because yeah i love what you do and and it's it's exciting to see how much you are excited about where the future can take you so thank you so much yeah thank you so much for having me i said this was such a fun conversation now all day i'm gonna be like now why did i do that what's the why behind that what made me think about it but tremendous and thank you for all the conversations you're having because again it's it's getting us off the the algorithm you're hearing from real people talking about real things so i love it thank you and it was fun when you said no there were you were in debbie's class because i feel like my podcast is turning into debbie's alumni you know she would love that oh man that's all debbie wanted we've had we've had Dani Gosset and all the others, like Amelia Nash, who works with Debbie right now.

53:44Jessie McGuire:It's just that it's such a nice accolade and testament to what Debbie's achieved by getting all these amazing people together, teaching them, giving them this view on life that is changing lives already. So yeah, it's great to see. Thank you. That anything's possible. Thank you.

54:08Jessie McGuire:thank you for listening to this episode of daring creativity podcast i'd love to know your thoughts questions and suggestions so please get in touch via the email in the show notes or social channels this episode was produced and presented by me radim malinage the audio production was done by Neil Mackay from 7 Million Bags Podcast. Thank you and I hope to see you in the next episode.

54:53Jessie McGuire:if you enjoyed this episode and would like more accessible resources to help you discover your daring creativity, you can pick up one of my books on themes of mindful creativity, creative business, branding and graphic design. Every physical book purchase comes with a free digital bundle including an ebook and audiobook to make the content accessible wherever you are and whatever you do. To get 10 % of your order visit novemberuniverse.co.uk and use the code podcast. Have a look around and start living daringly. Thank you.