Garrett Fowler

@whale @kevintwohy Such a *lovely* share. Thanks for putting this out here. 😌

I was inspired by @kevintwohy recently and his comments about design legends. The people who have guided your journey, who inspire you. I think my own are a bit unusual for design and more art-centric, but I’d love to know yours too. Respond with who they are and what it is about their work that’s been influential. For me it was my professor of ceramics, Richard DeVore, has had more influence on how I think about art, design, language, visual language, and meaning than any other character in my life. When he passed, I wept. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D… artsy.net/search?term=ri… DeVore was my professor at Colorado State University, and he quietly rewired how I see art and design. His ceramics were dense, almost geological, and a little bit … sexual. Thin clay walls. Subtle, skin-like surfaces with dips and valleys. They often had false bottoms. One time in a review, one of us asked if they had S&M motifs and he said: don’t knock it till you try it, with a little wink. He was a character. His work is held in major American museum collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few. He attended and received his master’s degree from Cranbrook, a college founded in the 1930s. It became one of the anchors of early American modern design, including Eames, who was faculty for a time, and included faculty from the Bauhaus who escaped Germany during the diaspora. These are my design grandparents. They shape the way I think about design, typography, layout, form, line, direction, communication, intention, value, and purpose. Lesson one of the unforgettable things Richard taught me was to escape the preciousness of work. Instead, find in series and in the practice of the work itself a discipline that cares not for style, but for service. Style is dressing. Design is service, which utilizes style as one of many tools. One day in class, a classmate was obsessively reworking one piece over and over. He encouraged her to start over. Work in series. Play. She refused stubbornly. Without warning, one afternoon he grabbed her piece, as she protested, and brought it to the crit table at the center of our clay-dusted concrete studio. Her protests were a kind of alarm, and we all waited to see what was happening. We watched as he brought one of his own pieces, bone-dry and ready to be fired, and placed it next to hers on the table. Then he drew out a hammer from his apron. He handed it to her. Looking her in the eyes, thin cigarette behind his ear, staring through his glasses with a snarky grin. If you break yours, you can break mine. And she did, with fervor. We all watched and learned. The context here is that we all knew his pieces were displayed throughout the country in museums and galleries and at the time, in 1998, were selling for about $45k each. He knew he could make another. This coincided with knowing that he often placed Halloween candy in one of his pots at his house on his porch. The man literally gave no fucks. Lesson two came at the beginning of our time together. Constraint is where power comes from. I had him for four semesters. During the first three semesters we were limited to building cups and saucers and using only white glaze, at least during class. For artists this felt like a prison at the time, but what I know now is that the constraint he placed on us created a protective gate for us to focus on the character of clay. The simplicity of two forms, with near endless possibilities, and one simple glaze. Even within those constraints, there were almost no boundaries. This was the constraint of a kind of design-parenting. These two lessons have informed almost every project I’ve taken on in design, and likely nearly every action or inaction since, across personal life, work, and play. I’m choking up writing this, and it’s long overdue. It deserves a home on my site, and will soon, but it was sitting in me and I needed to get it out. Thank you, Richard. You pushed me. You saw in me something that at the time I didn’t know I had. Something unique. A way of seeing the world that had drive, character, dimension, and possibility. I can look back and see in the long trail of my life the point at which we met, and everything after. I’m eternally grateful. May all the dust you became be the clay in some future universe, formed and formless. ---- Others that I found through him that have influenced all my work: Jasper Johns artsy.net/artist/jasper-… Jenny Holzer artsy.net/artist/jenny-h… Bruce Nauman artsy.net/artist/bruce-n… Yoko Ono artsy.net/artist/yoko-ono Brian Eno artsy.net/artist/brian-e… Tim Hawkinson artsy.net/artist/tim-haw… youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3-U7… (the work called Spin Sink changed my brain)

@kevintwohy @boardisfun Love this! Nice work, friend! 👏

Introducing Daily Build: a daily 3D puzzle game that’s deceptively simple, genuinely satisfying, and harder than it looks! Enjoyed working on lots of the tiny details for this game — it’s out today on @boardisfun. Good luck!

@withkynam I mean, listen… this is not that high of a number tbh. We are *routinely* hiring product designers with annual TC of $600-800K. 😳

BREAKING: Anthropic is recruiting their last Software Engineer for 600k

Good people is what it's all about.

@benln Dreamy 🥹🥹🥹

Nothing quite like the Notion NYC office

@vinvan Oh boy, do I feel this. I was using @pliability_ for a hot second and then stopped once things got “real” lol…aka I was sore just from stretching. But, overall, they have so many options, plus a solid app. 👌

According to my iPhone, I spend more time in Uber Eats than Instagram, X, and TikTok combined. Should I be worried or should I just find a gym ASAP? To be fair, Duolingo is my most used app, which, comes in handy... ...for ordering off Uber Eats when I'm globetrotting. 😂

This how you pivot. This is how you pivot. THIS IS HOW YOU PIVOT. Well done, @magicaltome!! Love this so much!

@ormanclark Human design 🧘

@RaminNasibov “Ohai” 👀

jonathan_koons

@greg16676935420 Lollllllll wow. How did this get implemented?

You have 3 months left homeless people

@davidhoang Love (but like realllllllly love) this!

When I meet people I often get someone saying, “You have such a great network!” The truth is I don’t spend much time networking. It’s a 20-year graph built on authentic relationships. Make a positive intro, respond to an email, take an intro call. It will compound and weave.

@hliriani @magicaltome Love this, @hliriani and team!! Keep up the awesome work! 🚀

We're rebooting Tome to be a different company. @magicaltome is now an AI assistant for breaking into new enterprise accounts. Here's a bit on the journey we've been on…

@williamchanner 👏🙌😇😎

Life update: I’ve decided to become a recruiter. Every time I speak to someone incredibly talented, they always complain about their job. If you’re a creative and need support in figuring out your next steps, tell me what you’re looking for, I’m listening.

Heyooo! Is anyone going to @usbynightfest in Antwerp this year? For a while now, I've heard it's unlike anything else out there and is a ton of fun! I just couldn't resist this time around, so I'll officially be there. If you and/or someone you think I should know are going, hit me up! Let's gooooo! 🇧🇪 🌚 🎨 🪩 #UsByNight #UsByNight2024 #Design #creativecoding

@cleandood @Pinterest Yusssssssss!!!! Go get em, friend!!! So happy for you! 💪 🎉 📍

I'm happy to share that I've joined the strategy team at @Pinterest.

Hallo! What Berlin design+creative peeps should I know? I'm here for a month and would love to treat some folks to coffee, drinks, etc. 🇩🇪

@mahaaaay 😂 this is… so real

“your screen time is down” thank you i have been spending more time looking at medium screen (laptop) and big screen (tv)

@LukaMarr @lennysan @kevinyien @kevinyien is a 🐐. Loved this!

Just listened to an incredible episode of @lennysan’s podcast with @kevinyien from Stripe! 🔮✨ Kevin dropped a lot of gems on product management, hiring, and writing. youtu.be/xOTO98MXG9o Here are three most insightful interesting takeaways from the conversation: