Things move quickly in the art and design industry, and SkinIt’s Creative Director John O’Brien gives a few words of advice to keep it fresh.
By Lynn Le
I pass many gargantuan, almost monumental structures on my way to work, one of which is the huge, wiry white pyramid that is Ashley’s Furniture Home Store. As I turn the corner of its mirror-windowed exterior, a long building comes into sight. At the end of it, a large black and green logo reads “SkinIt” as if it owns the whole edifice. I straighten my suit, enter through the front door, try not to get lost, and hope that I don’t seem too shy. I’m still intimidated by the whole idea of being an intern and working in a world outside my school. It’s just after 9:00 AM. I’m early.
John O’Brien walks into the art department office soon after I arrive. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a black polo over it, and there’s a striped collared shirt draped on the back of his chair that never seems to be worn. He sits down at his messy desk and gets straight to work, ignoring the scatters of paper around him. He checks his email, opens Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, and starts designing. Within the hour, he gets countless phone calls and rushes off to go to various meetings. When he comes back he talks to a coworker about what was said at this meeting or that thing that the sales department wanted them to do. The ideas bounce, they get back to work, and the office falls awkwardly quiet.
John is a native San Diegan who went to school at Chico State in northern California, where he was an avid art student. With encouragement from his friends and family, he pursued his passion for design, and AP art classes in high school and the Otis College of Art and Design pushed him along the path to his career. However, he didn’t quite get out of college with the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree he had aimed for. He had been two classes short of getting it because he switched from Bachelor’s Fine Arts. He was okay with it, though. “I’ve realized, in my particular field, a degree is a nice thing to show people, but it’s not necessarily going to help you get a job depending on where you’re going. Some people look for it more than others,” he told me with a smile. The experience of college was enough for him. When he was going to school he worked at the Instructional Media Center on the campus and took glass art and steel sculpture classes.
Interestingly, John admits to having about twenty jobs over the years. He’s done everything from oddball things like being a driver and moving man to construction and glass-blowing. Of course, he’s had plenty of design experience, as he had worked as an Art Director in Silicon Valley, a freelance designer, and he’s worked in places like the media arts lab. His hands are rough and sometimes he wears a wrap around them, because if it’s not hot metal and melted glass that hurts him, it’s the tablet mouse. He sits at a desk in a somewhat small cubicle all day with his hand in one position, only his index finger moving to click down the dirty white Wacom mouse. He only gets up to go to meetings, but even then he’s just sitting. It was no wonder he hurts himself so often. When I first arrived at my internship, he gave me a little guide titled “Repetitive Strain Injury”, which detailed things to do so I wouldn’t cramp up or hurt myself by sitting at work too long like he did. Though his work might cause carpal tunnel or back problems, he still went into the office every day, and he persevered. It’s obvious that he’s a very hard worker.
John has a few hobbies outside of work, though. He hangs out with his friends, runs and surfs, reads, watches movies, and he likes to travel—but he’s constantly checking his email, at home and on the go. It’s what takes up a lot of his morning when he comes into work. When I went out to lunch with him, he took out his phone when we finished and commented, “I got thirty emails in just my lunch hour.” He’s an important man in SkinIt, and half his emails aren’t even addressed to him. “People CC me and some people just hit ‘reply to all’.” He’s in on almost everything going on in the company.
He first joined SkinIt by answering a Craigslist advertisement, and he’s been with it since the beginning. It started in Colorado about five years ago, but it merged with the San Diegan personalization company Cellfan a year later and moved to California. It’s become a large company that helps its customers personalize their devices using professional-grade vinyl and popular licensed designs, which are more than just gumball-machine stickers. Their products are high quality, protective, and they leave little adhesive residue, which makes it easy for a customer—like me for example—to take off the skins or switch them out. They “skin” everything from laptops to music players to cell phones and more. The business is booming, and I had the chance to work with them for a while.
While John is a busy man, he put aside half an hour to sit down with me in the office and answer some questions.
Lynn Le: When you were in high school, where did you see yourself headed? Did you ever expect that you would be working at SkinIt or in graphic design?
LL: You studied glass and steel sculpting in college and had a glass-blowing job. Was that job fun? How does it help you now?
JO: I like working with my hands and doing that kind of work. I think it is definitely helpful as a designer. I saw a lot of people who just studied design, and their work was pretty stale. I don’t think it necessarily has to be, but I think if you’re not exposing yourself to a wide range of what’s out there, you’re going to be kind of weak as a designer. A big part of being a designer is problem solving: it’s how creatively you can approach the situation and how good you can make something look. In design there’s a lot of compromise, and that was one of the things I liked about art: there was very little compromise.
LL: What do you do around the office? Do you just design or work on daily production?
JO: It ranges a lot. I’m trying to manage the team and get the best work out of the ten-person art department, while at the same time it’s basically going back to compromising. I’m getting requests from people in sales and marketing, who often have concepts that are challenging for one reason or another. As a designer you always have a client and there’s always someone paying, so it’s basically trying to get the best possible design when you’re given often very difficult constraints. But basically what I do here, ranges tremendously. We’re working on projects for the web, we’re working on projects for print, we’re doing stuff for retail, we’re building a community website, we’ve got white label websites, we have all sorts of marketing initiatives, and we have a busy production environment… There’s a lot going on.
LL: How do you deal with your collaboration with others?
JO: In design, you’re almost always in a form of collaboration. Generally, someone’s coming to you asking you to solve a creative problem, to make something look good, to communicate a message effectively, to help sell a product. So if it’s someone in sales, they’re coming to you asking for something, whether it’s a packaging project or a POP [point of purchase display], or something for a trade show. That can be trade show graphics or marketing collateral. Whether it’s a brochure or something like that, you’re basically trying to put it together so they look good and they can make their sale. When we’re collaborating with the tech department, we’re working with them to design something for the web. It’s my job to make sure there’s a good user interface, following the tenets of Heuristics. It’s basically common sense, so that someone can know where to click, so the user has a good experience. They know where to go, it makes sense. So collaboration can be really fun and really inspiring. Other times it can be frustrating, especially if you’re collaborating with someone you’re not on the same page with.
LL: Is what you do rewarding to you? Are you happy when people buy your design?
JO: Yeah, there are times when you feel a certain satisfaction, when you design something well. Basically, you’re taking pride in your work. It’s more a personal thing for me, where if I design something well, I’m generally happy. The flip side of that coin is when I don’t have the time to put my best effort into something, or a lot of time we’re rushing and I don’t get to do the best possible job, and I like to do quality work. When I get to do quality work, I enjoy that, and if for whatever reason if there isn’t time for that, that could be de-motivating.
LL: So is it worth it to do all this work, the project managing, listening to clients, etcetera?
JO: There are elements I like, and there are elements that drive me insane. My favorite aspect of my job is when I actually get to spend time designing, or when I get to work with the designers in the room on a project that comes out well or I think is successful.
JO: Yes. Basically, I’m always doing email, sometimes managing projects on the Base Camp software from home, and actually doing design at home. I used to do a lot more, but I don’t have a home office set up anymore, so I do less of that, and if I need to come in on a weekend, I’ll come in. I like designing stuff at home though. I prefer working at home to working at the office because there’s less distraction.
LL: Do you feel successful? What is your idea of success?
JO: I feel alright. Though I guess when I was your age, I thought I would probably be more successful. My idea of success is being more in-control of your own destiny. I assumed I would have something that was more mine.
LL: What would you advise aspiring graphic designers to do?
JO: For anyone who wants to be a designer, you have to put in way more work than you probably think you do. There are so many people who think they’re designers, but are lacking. They either lack the drive, the intelligence, the creativity or the motivation to be really successful with it, there are a lot of mediocre and bad designers out there. The flip side is that there are a lot of good designers out there as well, so there’s a lot of competition, and if you don’t offer something really special, you’re a dime a dozen. Part of design is having a unique perspective, especially if you’re getting more into illustration. Design is also challenging because of the competition from overseas, it’s a very global marketplace. You’re competing with people in China, India, Europe, Brazil, and people all over the world.
There are only a handful of people who are design-stars. They’re the kind of designers who get to pick their clients. If Nike or Apple or whoever is going to them and saying, “We want you to do the work,” they get to choose who to work for. To be a star in design is something like being a star in professional sports, where you’re going to have to put a lot of effort in and on top of that you have to have the talent to back it up.
My advice to anyone who wants to pursue a career in design is that you need to be working really hard and you have to always be looking at what else is out there. Don’t compare yourself against other students. Compare yourself against the best work you can find in the world, because that’s what you’re up against, not the other kids in your class. When I was in high school I was always thinking, “Oh, I’m the best artist in my class,” but it’s really, “Alright well, that’s thirty kids, so what?” It’s not whether you’re better than the thirty kids in your class, it’s whether you’re better than the five hundred thousand people you’re competing against. There’s a lot of people going into design, so I’d say it’s basically finding something that’s original about you and working really hard at it, not being satisfied with where you’re at.
LL: So not being satisfied is a good thing as being part of a designer?
JO: I think not being satisfied is a good thing as a person. I mean it’s fine if you want to be a Zen monk, “hey it’s cool, I’m happy with how things are,” but if you want to grow professionally and keep pushing yourself, you shouldn’t be satisfied. If you’re doing something “artistic” or you’re in any type of creative profession and you find yourself satisfied, then I’d be curious to see if you find anyone else that’s satisfied in the work you’re doing. The people whose work I liked were the ones who were more unsure, they were challenging themselves and always trying to grow, to one-up themselves.
LL: Where do you see yourself in a few years? Is there someplace better you want to be (promotion, better-paying job, etc.), or are you satisfied with working at SkinIt?
JO: I really don’t know. I have no idea. It depends on what sort of time frame we’re talking about, but I think I’d be here, maybe. I worked as a freelance designer for a while, so having my own design studio would be cool. I did that for four years prior to SkinIt, so maybe I’d go back to that, or maybe I’ll work for another firm or do something totally different. Maybe I’ll get into teaching, perhaps.
LL: Maybe at High Tech High Media Arts?
JO: Maybe I’ll be a bartender, I don’t know. People always need drinks.
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