On 20 Years in Design, Letting Go of 'More', and Why Discipline Beats Passion, with David Airey

0:06Katy:Hello and welcome back and first of all an apology my voice is gone again what is going on with me this year I just seem to be getting cold after cold I guess that's what happens when you spend a year on the floor with a back injury and yes I'm mentioning it again I will it's part of my journey and my story and it is absolutely shaping some of the conversations I've been having with creatives this season. Now this week I'm going to be chatting with the epic graphic designer and author David Airey and I thought this was going to be a conversation about design and you know with me by now that it yeah definitely will brush on that we'll definitely talk about two decades in the industry logos books all that good stuff but actually it's turned into something much more about life.

0:52Katy:I can't help myself and if you're a fan of the show you'll know that that's a theme I tend to lean back on. So we talk about burnout and pressure, social media, how it's changing, how we used to really love it back in the day when Twitter was a lovely thing. All the noise that comes with being a creative right now in this super weird time that we're going through, lots of fast change, lots of disruption, and also how to deal with it all, how to build a career that actually feels sustainable, not just a success on paper. David shares some really honest thoughts on things like discipline versus passion, why he works less now than he used to, and how becoming a parent completely shifted his priorities as you would expect it would.

1:39Katy:And I think what you'll get from this, certainly what I got from this, more than anything, is a bit of perspective. Just a reminder that you don't have to chase everything, be everything, do everything all at once and actually focusing on what's right in front of you right now is probably enough. Really lovely grounding chats thanks to David. One of those where you will feel a bit calmer afterwards.

2:07Katy:This episode is kindly sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio. Now I know what you might think when you hear the word PDF. It's for editing secure documents or signing a contract but Acrobat Studio is here to completely change that perception. It isn't just for completing essential PDF tasks. It's an AI-powered space where you can use simple language prompts to get information quickly from across multiple sources, not just PDFs, but also Microsoft Office 365 files, web pages, and more. Find out more at the link in the show notes.

2:45Katy:well if we're going to be talking about 20 years of a career David then I have to say what's your secret have you have you relented are you on the Botox if you had the fillers oh it's just good genes good genes well whatever it is I want to know um you and I I think are at a similar stage in our careers um I always say this to every guest I think I'm older than everyone I think I am actually older than you and I'm not going to ask you how old you are, but it's just good for cultural reference, you see. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm 46. Right. So we're very similar age. I'm slightly older. So you'll know of Anne of Green Gables then?

3:24Not too much about Anne of Green Gables. It rings a bell. Tell me, what's the reference?

3:29Katy:It was a good friend of mine here in the market town I've moved out to. We were getting to know each other. And when she mentioned Anne of Green Gables, it was almost like, have we just become best friends so anyway sorry kirsty i can't believe i've just told you that but the thing is we've we have so much in common david because we have really been through it haven't we we've seen it we've seen it all these last two decades yeah i know that from the posts that you've made and from your podcast interviews we had a similar growing up uh the years our formative years in the teenage years you know i spent some time clubbing and you know friends and a and a little beat up voxel nova going to the north coast where kelly's was probably the most popular club at the time wow and yes i had the best djs and yeah i i loved i loved just spending even nights on the dance floor um and i couldn't i couldn't dance I still can't dance to save my life, but I didn't care.

4:36Just get rid of your inhibitions and let go type of thing. Yeah. So I think we did have, you know, we did have quite a few similar things going on.

4:47Katy:Yeah. But you're, you're, at least you're not deluded. Whereas I'm in the other camp where I'm deluded. I think I'm a good dancer, but I'm actually not. Well, the best thing is just to ignore what anyone else thinks and just, you know, let the music take you. Totally, totally. In actual fact, somebody was asking me the other day, you're always on about this, Katie. You're in this kind of, you're not millennial and you're not Gen X and you're certainly not Gen Z. You're a Xennial. Have you heard of this concept? I haven't. Yeah. No, these generations is one that I don't keep track of that much.

5:23No. It seems like an overused buzzword to me, but what is the one that you said there?

5:30Katy:Well, I said to my friend, oh, I'm over that. I don't talk about that anymore. But funny enough, because we were having this conversation, we came across something on YouTube last night, my husband and I, and it was one of these really beautifully done informational, you know, lots of illustration, educational kind of five-minute thing. What is a zennial? And we are very unique, David, apparently, because we grew up analog, basically, and we entered our adulthood just as um digital was becoming this huge thing so you and i were used to knocking on doors is is tim in is he coming out to play um and then you would like arrange to meet a friend on the telephone which was in my god i remember having a dial telephone you remember yes yes there was one of those in my house too so good and wasn't it such an amazing technological advancement when we got those ones with the buttons.

6:29It was. Yeah, we couldn't comprehend the leap.

6:33Katy:I know. And then you rang your mate and said, I'll meet you at so-and-so at six o 'clock. And you just had faith that that would happen. And it did, nine times out of 10. Yeah, I was talking to a friend recently who, to this day, he can still remember the phone number of the landline at my mum and dad's house where I lived. Yeah. And that was 25. No, that was 30 years ago. Yeah. You would use the phone boxes. You would crowd into the phone boxes to call your friends and see where you were going to meet up. Yeah. And if you were, yeah, people weren't there. People were there, you know? Yeah. You had to be.

7:14Katy:I remember having 50p and going to the phone box so I could chat to my boyfriend without my mum listening at the top of the stairs? Oh, there was this game. There was this game that I played. I used to play a lot of football as a kid. Not so much any day, not so much these days, but there was a game called In Off The Post. It was one of those games where you were like, it's like fantasy manager, but it was through letters. So once a week you got a letter delivered to you and it would tell you your match, how your match played out. So you'd have the paper and you'd be gradually inching the paper down as if you were reading the highlights of the match and if you wanted to make any transfers you had to call other managers so i would go to this phone box close to the house and uh i remember calling the manager of rangers glasgow rangers and his dad answered and i said and i said oh and he said oh it's uh it's uh walter smith on the phone there for you uh no Well, I was the rangers manager at the time.

8:15That was it. Yeah. Oh, it's just funny. Funny these things you do.

8:19Katy:I'm making a point here because I think it defines the people that we become. Having had that very slow and patient start to life where we were used to not getting everything we wanted instantly. You know, we didn't have the internet. We didn't have, I mean, I remember like playing behind my dad's back with my lad friend's leisure suit Larry and thinking it was the most filthy, naughty thing ever. I think we were about 10 or 11. Oh my God, this is so like adult. I don't know if anybody remembers Leisure Suit Larry. I would just like to say I am a feminist and I didn't know what I was doing at the time.

8:58Katy:But we had to be patient. Things didn't just instantly happen for us. And I think that kind of made us very resilient and able to adapt. I mean, we did just adapt to all that technology that came rushing in and I mean how old were you like 18 when you got your first mobile phone I was older than that I was uh I was 19 it wasn't until when I was 19 I moved to Edinburgh to study and I ended up living there for about 10 years and it wasn't until halfway through my first year at uni when I got my first phone it was a an old Siemens phone and just yeah text messages and calls and i often i often think about getting one of those phones now just to say remove the distractions yeah phone is that what they're called yeah yeah we're addicted aren't we to our phones we're just that yeah whenever you've got like a question that needs answering i mean the marvel of it the the absolute joy of just being able to like well for a long time go on whatever um search engine we were using i'd love to say that i I'm an angelic, you know, internet user and I'm always on DuckDuckGo, but sometimes I succumb to Google like the best of us.

10:15And now it's like talking to an LLM through Siri.

10:21Katy:Can you look this up? And obviously that gets frustrating. Sometimes you end up shouting at it, the poor thing, which is not good when you want them to remember you in future when they take over. Oh, don't leave her. She was nice. Yes, yes. That's why some people put thank you after their prompts. Can you answer this for me, please? Just in case something does happen like that. But I do worry about what it does to youngsters. Oh, yeah. I have two kids. Scarlett is 12 and Isaac is eight. And Scarlett was one of the last kids in her class to get a phone. There were only two of them out of a class of about 30.

11:03So we'd been holding off as long as possible. And we put restrictions on it. But even then, you know it's just more screen time yeah it will be affecting their ability to focus so many distractions i just wonder what it does for their patients they are great kids you know katherine is my my wife and we're both doing the best we can and i think we're doing a decent job because we can see how well scarlet and isa get on together but at the same time thinking back to my own childhood i wouldn't i wouldn't have liked the ability for one thing for anybody to be recording what we did or photographing oh i know having this constant reminder or hanging over your head because if you were anything like me you know we got off to some shady stuff that we wouldn't like being brought up and over over over and over so david you look

12:01Katy:so innocent. Well, times have changed. I don't regret any of it. I think it's shaped who we are. Definitely. Yeah. But yeah, I used to be a naughty kid. I left home at 15, you know. Oh, and how were your parents with that? We fell out and I was with an older boy and I lived in various different places on people's floors on sofas and um I ended up getting a little kind of bed sit to myself in in at such a young age at 16 um and we kissed and made up I think a year later and I went back home with my tail between my legs I was a terror and um and then I I was I was a good kid I did well I was always a good kid really I went and did my A-levels and and then I went to university and the rest is history but i mean that is that is that's a podcast series the day katie left home uh-huh but i'm 15 i love them to bits i saw them yesterday they're brilliant people um it's just uh i think they were a little bit too strict with me so if there's any caution warning that i can give you with a daughter it's just trust that you taught her how to live and look after herself and and yeah accept that they're going to become an adult yeah yeah they all have their moments um oh yeah but in general so far so good like i said she's 12 so there have been flickers of the expected teenage tantrums but uh yeah it's all ahead of me i think we we had a good time didn't we in the mid-90s all that new music and nirvana and drum and bass it was yeah I was a bit too late for the the raves in the forests and the the white gloves and the whistle posse that type of thing but but it was brilliant yeah I loved I loved the friends that I was with and and the times that we shared and and then it all kind of changed whenever I went to uni um because I hadn't lived away from my parents before so it was a real kind of time that I grew up.

14:20I spent three years studying at Napier University. I was on a graphic communications management course, which my friends on the course, we all thought it was more of a graphic design program, but it turned out to be, there's only one module. There's eight modules a year and there's only one module in one year that was graphic design. So most of what I learned business-wise now has come as a result of being on the job and not my formal education, which I guess is true for a lot of people. Yeah.

14:49Katy:Yeah, I don't think I went to any lectures. It was easy to miss them, wasn't it? Well, I think I was just stoned. I wasted my education, really. But, you know, it all turns out all right in the end. Yeah, and it formed you. It formed the lovely person that you are today. We don't... Do you do... I mean, the big question here is, do you have any regrets? because I feel like anything I've done thus far has led me to where I am today. And I just don't see the point in beating yourself up about basically growing and making mistakes. I think that's just part and parcel of what it is to be human. Yeah, I couldn't pinpoint any regrets.

15:36No, other than, well, there's one thing that I come back to when I was about eight or nine. my dad used to keep a bit of cash in his drawer uh so i i i took some and we spent it at the shop down the road and i was saying to my brother i found it so he was none the wiser and and my dad yeah he was not happy about that at all so it's just one of those things that stuck in my head but other than that no i've i've no big regrets because yeah like you say it leads us to where we are now and everyone makes mistakes you have to make mistakes otherwise you're a or you're a

16:13Katy:robot you know yeah i love that this turns into a confessional sometimes you know i feel like i need to get a collar like two hail marys and three our fathers and off you go yeah yeah there wasn't a lot of religion in my house growing up my parents took me to sunday school so they went to church some Sundays but I think they did that more as a way they thought that that's what they should be doing maybe for me and my older brother I have a younger sister too she's 10 years younger my older brother's two years older so my my sister wasn't around at the time but yeah I remember going to Sunday school now and again but it didn't last very long I think it was one of those things that my parents thought that they should be doing rather than a real conviction yeah I think that happens a lot or to get you in a decent school.

17:01Yeah, maybe.

17:02Katy:Or just pretend to be Catholic for 10 years. Oh dear. Yeah. I remember my mum was religious very much so on her side of the family. My dad wasn't. And I remember being a kid and asking my dad, do you believe in God, dad? And he would never answer the question. This is very politician-esque about it. He would always just say, well, how do you know what's right from wrong? So it was a good kind of way of making And you think as a kid, that kind of moral purpose, why is it that we have this kind of moral standing anyway? Where does that come from? Is it nature, nurture? Oh, you know, I feel like we need to roll up a spliff.

17:41Yeah, let's do it.

17:42Katy:Anyway, I'll be professional because David, you've had a phenomenal career. You're very well respected as a graphic designer. You've written books and you've just actually got a new version of the classic logo Design Love out. um i mean that's when's that coming out is that out now or it should be released this month um and on amazon.com so the us site will have it available later this month but not in the uk until july i think the last time i had a look so yeah i finished that at the end of oh thank you by the way for the kind words it's one of those growing up i don't know maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's a cultural thing or maybe it's just a familial thing but I find it hard to look at what I've done and think and not think that I could be doing more maybe that's maybe that's got to do with when children came along you know I spent a lot less time working and so I was used to doing a lot more and then now not so much but yeah the book should be out soon and it came about as a result of my publisher asking if um if I wanted to update it because yes the second edition was published back in 2014.

19:00Good grief that's a while ago. It is and my work has come on since then and the work of the people that I included in the books it's about 50 % my work 50 % the work of other designers around the world. I never wanted it to be all about me. I thought it could add more value if there was a range of work in there and a range of opinions. So I invited people to come on board and yeah, the publisher expected about 25 % of the content to change from one edition to the next, but it's probably about 40 or 50 % different. And I was a little wary about updating it because maybe I've lived with the name for too long but just the name logo design love I I felt for a while as if I was over it yeah and I and I switched on to my my previous two books before this new one's coming out were identity designed and I felt that was a bit closer to where I wanted to be but when I think to what I enjoy most in work it's logos designing logos I wouldn't take on a project if a logo even a refinement was was some part of it.

20:09So it made sense if people were picking up the second edition of the book, I don't think it's reflective of the work that I'm producing now. And it does still sell. And sometimes it sells better than my more recent books. So it made sense to update it. And I'm looking forward to getting that first box of copies in the post, which is always great to hold something you know rather than just looking at a screen i like the i like the the physical aspect um because it's it's rare in my work most of it is looking at a screen or well i really enjoy the sketching aspect and that's getting away you know the you can thumb through the pages and you can look back at them quickly and you can show i can show my kids what i've done over the years just here here's some sketches because my kids both love drawing oh so it's great to see how much they've progressed you know they'll be just sitting in their rooms they will have they'll sometimes have their ipads propped up on their desk but they'll have they'll have the sketchbook in front of them and they'll be copying what they see on the screen and isaac lately he's been taking real care he's only eight so he's taking real care over the shading and getting the forms right of characters from his favorite tv shows so it's it's brilliant to see oh it must be so wonderful

21:30Katy:seeing these little people that you've made like growing into little little bigger people it is it changed me in ways that i never would have expected it was like my emotional spectrum before kids came along was here and now you know the highs are high much higher and the lows are much lower because i thought i was i thought i had good patience before children uh but then i'm much better now but seeing those early years when they were one two three four just the the raw anger that they can express whenever they don't get their way it's incredible so it took it took some learning to be able to just count to ten myself and realize look they're they're only two it's okay it's normal yeah but it is amazing so i get a little tiny sense of what that must be like it's so uh so lovely to uh to be an auntie i saw a little benji yesterday he's about eight and he was wearing he's really serious about his clothes he likes dressing a certain way and i was just like nice fit kid nice fit like i'm liking the varsity jacket very cool love how you've matched it with the with the trainers and then i started talking about my outfit and then my nephew comes my older nephew seb comes downstairs talking about um school and gcses and he went auntie kate did you enjoy english literature at school and it's just like oh you know you just get it right here don't you you just have so much love for these kids and you're like try not to cry all the time because they've asked you a question and you're important in their life it's just magical it's magical i didn't want kids myself um but um i love kids and they are just the most magical people um and by the way david you said before um you regret sometimes maybe that well i don't think you i'm putting words into your mouth but what was i going to say i've written i just wrote regrets down on paper oh yes nobody regrets um not working more and harder when they're on the deathbed that's all i wanted to say so yeah there's got to be a balance yeah that's a very good reminder i have watched uh i've purposely searched for youtube videos about what the elderly what regrets they have yeah things like that because it it means it means a lot to me to spend my time as wisely as possible i live in in bangor which is about 12 miles outside belfast in northern ireland and well obviously you know that and just saying that for the people that might not know but um my two parents live in the same town and my older brother and younger sister and my one surviving grandparent my gran is uh she is she's housebound she was in hospital there and now she has a medical bed that she spends all her time in and she has carers visit four times a day and i know that she doesn't have long left she's in her 90s and her partner my grandfather he died a couple of years ago when they were married for more than 70 years wow which i find it incredible i think they might have got a letter from the queen about about that and it just whenever you have relatives who well we all suffer and whenever you have relatives who die it puts it in the perspective what's important in life and and i visit her as much as i can and my my parents they i can see the impact that the death of their parents had on them and it makes me think about what impact that's going to have on me because and eckhart tolle is a man that i listen to as well and he talks about how if things are great in your life just wait a while you know it's this constant flow of ups and downs and and we all carry some suffering to some extent so i'm very conscious about spending my time with with my loved ones uh with my friends and with just with myself away from work because like you say we're not going to be on our deathbeds thinking i should i should have taken that project on no or what people think or you know whether we kind of sometimes you wonder what you actually reaching for yeah and i like to bring it back to those small moments throughout the day whether that's enjoying a hot shower or listening to my children laugh or just watching a program with my wife just on the sofa so good yeah just little things day by day and try not to look too far ahead because yeah we don't know how long we've got we just make the most of it we do not we do not know how and i was scrambling around then trying to find this lovely um snippet of a poem by yates um the world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

26:52Katy:Isn't that lovely? It is. Yeah. And it builds on that. When you go through life, whether it's like if you have something really sort of positive happen to you, like you have children, you become a father, that kind of changes your perspective, I expect. And like if you go through a really difficult time, if you lose a parent, that changes your perspective. It's like a jolt, a wake up call to remind us that, you know, what we do for a living, whilst it's valuable and it's important, it's not everything. And I think, you know, as well as I do, that you can get very wrapped up in your work. And especially in this industry is what I'm trying to say when there's so much competition and so much happening and so much new talent coming up.

27:36Katy:not that I didn't mean to make you feel all anxious but it's a good grounding reminder I think um not to take it all too seriously yeah and there is so much talent and the tools that are available to them today are unbelievable compared to what what we had whenever we were you know making our way first in the profession. Yeah. And it's hard not to have some anxiety about the output that I'm giving my clients, even though whenever I wrap up a project, my aim is to delight the client. And often that's the case. But when I see the level of work of other people it's it's one of those reminders that i need to stop spending as much time on social media and looking for inspiration from other studios if i can just focus on what's best for the client yeah and try to do some research that doesn't involve looking at other design work then it's a good way to stay grounded yeah and graphic design can be very um very much competitive and when I first started Creative Boom I remember this always I always relay this to any of my graphic design friends I always remember this conversation I had with someone like why are graphic design male graphic designers so mean why are they so mean because um that was the experience I got now and again um and then it actually I want to tell you this because it was you David that made me realise that that was an absurd generalisation, sweeping generalisation, because you are such a good egg and have been such a supporter of Creative Boom over, well, it must be more than a decade.

29:32Katy:So every time I get a mean male graphic designer, I'm like, think of David. I genuinely do this. Think of David, Harry. Think of David. Thank you very much. That means a lot. um i think there's a lot of um competition and a lot of fragile egos it must be so tough looking around and seeing all this amazing work so that's the compassion coming out when uh all i want to do is like what are these massive you know enter expletive why why get a life you're not gonna look back on your life and worry about whether you were a famous designer for god's sake i mean that's that's the thing you i i get the sense that you you have come into your fame uh without meaning to be um a name that people recognize you just always probably wanted to do good work and as a result of that have become known in the industry would you say that's a fair charge against you yeah i would uh but i go back to that what i what I mentioned earlier about not thinking that what I've done is enough almost because you mentioned fame there, but I wouldn't think of myself.

30:48I know people know about me through my books. Uh, I know also that there are so many designers out there that are better than I am. So that's another reason why I just like to focus on the client and doing and solving their problem because if I spend too long looking at the other work that's out there, it's just going to put me in my head too much.

31:14Katy:Yeah. So, yeah, I like to elevate others when I can. So that was one of the reasons why I started my first blog was on my personal domain, davideri.com. And I originally started a blog because I thought it would improve my search engine rankings and clients would find me. But I soon found out that it was designers who were leaving comments on the comment threads. So then I started to tailor my blog posts to designers and I started sharing their work and writing about things that would help them. And as a result, designers linked to my website and then that boosted my search engine rankings. So in a roundabout way, it helped me find more clients.

32:04and then I started a couple of spin-off blogs. The first one was logodesignlove.com.

32:09Katy:I remember it, it was ace. And then Identity Design and that was the title of my books. And it was always about just sharing work that I enjoyed, not so much my own, other people, in a similar way to what you do with Creative Broom. Creative Boom, I think that's brilliant. Broom, Creative Broom, that could be a spin-off. Yeah, get rid of the eyes. Just put a big mop in there. Creative ways to clean your house. yeah you could have like a oh i'll tell you what let's do a spin-off website you can design the logo okay we'll do it uh but much respect to you for what you do with creative boom because i have seen other people compliment you on helping them find more clients and more work so so yeah i think we have a similarity in that way we do we're the kind of pioneers david with the pioneers of the web and doing something nice giving back um it's a good it's a good thing it's a good thing and i i think um one of the questions uh the pre one of the previous guests put in the chain reaction thing we do was um what do you want to be remembered for and i'm curious like what do you want to be remembered for david because why do we why do we even do all this you I'd like to be remembered as a good friend, a good dad, a good son, a good brother.

33:35Katy:Yeah. It's nothing to do with work, is it? Or what we do for a living? It's not. No. And I'm also conscious of the fact that who's going to remember us after, you know, if we have grandkids, that will be the last generation that would remember us. No, I never met my great grandparents. My kids are, they're fortunate in that they do. They have met their great grandparents. But that wasn't something that I had. And yeah, I just think the most important thing is to be kind to the people that we spend time with. 100%. Anything other than that. Yes, I love what I do. I love my job and I love meeting new clients and doing good work for them.