There are levels to the game.
There are levels to the game and the game will punish anyone who does not respect them.
The levels of the game are hard rules of reality, more real than gravity and more inescapable than the heat death of the universe.
The game will punish you without regard for whether you knew the rules.
There are no take backs in the game. No do-overs. No rematches.
You do not need to view any part of life as a game.
But you may have to accept that you will lose to those who do.
In 2004, the owner of one of Denver’s finest comic book stores picked up and moved his life to Seattle. Before he left he said something to me like, “Hey, you went to art school, right? You should take this screen printing press.” Before I could tell him that my focuses were painting and fiction writing my basement was full of printing equipment. But he wasn’t wrong. I had taken some printing classes. And I actually had some experience with analog photographic chemistry, not enough, but some.
In short order, my basement was turned into a print studio — the half of my basement that wasn’t used as a dojo. It was a decently large basement — used to be a Smaldone family winery during prohibition.
In Denver, in the late ‘90s and early naughts, rent was cheap. As a consequence, everyone who could consistently hit at least two of the four cords needed for nearly all of popular music in something approximating four-four or two-two was in a band. I know a bunch of people who were in three bands and holding down a day job. So, I started designing and printing band shirts.
Printing shirts for my friend’s bands led to printing shirts for bands they played with led to a feeling that I was doing pretty well led to a false sense that I knew what I was doing. I did not know what I was doing. In my hubris, I accepted a job from a chef with a line of condiments I couldn’t afford to put on toast. Though, he gave me some and they were delicious. The job: print his logo in the upper center of brushed cotton shirts. A five inch wide print, in white ink, on a black T-shirt. I printed the order and delivered them without much thought. He opened the box. He looked through the shirts in the box. He was not pleased.
“What is this shit?”
The blood drained from my face.
In that moment my gracious client remembered that he wasn’t talking to a sous chef in a Micheline Star restaurant. He softened his tone and pulled a single shirt from the box I’d packed them in. He laid the shirt on the table between us and tapped his finger near a tiny white spot.
We talked about the shirts and the client understood well before I did that what had happened was that I had failed to understand the assignment. A number of successful deliveries to punk and indie bands had given me the impression that I was good at printing T-shirts. But, the pinholes and printing anomalies that make rock merch feel authentic do not make a premium brand look premium.
So. There are levels to the game.
The levels of the game are not that there are rock bands at one level and premium condiment companies at another level. That’s a lateral move. I printed merch for two bands on the Warped Tour. And, every piece of merch I produced for those bands was distressed and printed with a hand marbled screen. Intentionally rough and chaotic. In fact, if you know anyone who has a Me Against Sunrise or Pirate Signal T-shirt from that era, tell them to have it dry cleaned and shrink wrapped. Each of those shirts is unique and its some of my best work.
No. The levels of the game aren’t a jump from rock music to spicy jelly. Those are just two peers — different but equivalent aesthetic modes. Leveling up meant thinking about what the client needed instead of just doing my thing. A lot of people with a craft just go through life focusing on their craft. Being focused on your craft, to the exclusion of other concerns, is usually just a matter of focusing on your experience of the outcomes you generate. Only caring about how you experience what you produce is a lot easier than focusing on both other people’s subjective experiences of the outcomes you generate and the objective outcomes you generate. That’s the next level.
Obviously, I’m telling you that I am guilty of this. And, I didn’t just suddenly get it after that first failure. I went through a few similar experiences with clients before I started to understand that there was a whole different way of looking at doing design and production. I came to learn that the business of design necessitates learning the design of business.
It takes a certain skill to translate the mostly auditory vibe of a rock band into the tangible look and feel of their merch and promotional materials, but it isn’t a long bridge to prop up. Rock band front personalities are the greatest brand strategists in the world. See also: the glorious relationship between Snask and The Viagra Boys. Band leaders are not only great at this because of the enormous competition for musical success but because of the deep connection that bands have with their audiences and the natural aptitude that musicians have for merging creativity and rigor. Few humanities have remained as tethered to the maths as music. So, designing for bands is mostly just listening. Designing for other businesses can range from gentle facilitation to pulling teeth.
Learning to hear and translate expressions, that’s one level to the game. Learning to solve business problems with those expressions, turning aesthetics into tactics, is a whole different level of design.
Damon Albarn did pretty well with Blur. They achieved enviable rock band success. But Albarn knew that he wanted to do more than the other members of the band. More by quantity, which is pretty common. One person in a band can have more drive to create than the others. John K. Sampson, Gerard Way, etc. Blur is still making music. They put out an album last year. Albarn just wanted to make more music, and he wanted to work with a lot of different musicians. So, Damon Albarn teamed up with a comic book artist, Jamie Hewlett, to create a virtual band made of cartoon characters, puppets which other artists could rotate through. The Gorillaz were born. That’s how you solve a business problem with design. Albarn and Hewlett changed the geometric and economic nature of what a rock band is in order to facilitate a degree of flexibility and expressivity not possible using the traditional expressive model.
Next up in this chapter, I’ll be breaking down why the complaint that Jeff Bezos “has” 180 billion dollars doesn’t math — though there are plenty of valid criticisms of Bezos’s actions and affects in the world. I’ll also be digging into why popular movements like the 2023 uptick in concern for Palestine, the trendification of the lives of black people, and other doomed-from-the-start efforts are strategically misguided — despite the value of their causes.
If you like mouthfuls of words about important stuff, come along.
It’s gonna be fun.
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cheers.