Tag Archives: Architecture

8 ways to work more effectively, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s ultimate work center

Posted by on May 11, 2009 No comments

Everybody is crazy about outsourcing and working remote. Luckily for many freelance graphic designers, you have the luxury of your work already being remote, and you work from home, Starbucks, or wherever. Others work in 9 to 5 design studio environments, or corporate in-house design environments. And many of you reading this aren’t designers, and perhaps you work a regular career 9-5 job sitting at a computer. Either way, if you can become more effective at what you do, then you become more valuable, and thus have the opportunity to make more money, becoming harder to fire. So whether you work from home, a big office building, or a small studio space, here are 8 of the best tips I’ve picked up along the way that have enabled me to achieve super-human productivity.

#1. Separate your work area from your living area.

If you work where you sleep, your work day never ends. Separating your work area from your living area creates a necessary mental barrier for peace of mind. If you go to bed at night and your laptop is sitting 2 feet away you’ll be tempted to pick it up and finish the last bit of that project or send out one more email. Create some form of home office or work space and work until a certain time of day: 6 o clock, 7 o clock, then leave that space, close the door, revert to your personal or family life, then return to the work re-energized, creative, and ready to complete tasks.

This still applies to those of you who work 9-5′s, when you have to go into an office building. You already have the separation. You already have a place to escape from, and a place to escape to. The reason why I include you is because maybe you have secret plans to quit and start something from home, or maybe your career goal is to keep your job while negotiating a remote work agreement, or maybe you just want to work on side projects from home in your spare time. Keep this in mind for the future.

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Conformity vs. Revolution

Posted by on February 25, 2009 12 comments

Warning: this is a very long blog post, but it’s worth reading:) I wrote this originally as my Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis paper when I was at BYU, but the subject matter is timeless, and I think it will be useful to everyone, not just other artists and designers. Conformity vs. Revolution is a subject that had interested me throughout my lifelong education in art. The concept of completely new ideas and ways of doing things was what drove the art world forward. So it was only appropriate that I focus most of my senior year in BYU’s graphic design program studying it and writing about it. As I said it’s long, so get a snack and make yourself comfortable, enjoy:

Prologue

I was studying Art at BYU Hawaii. While taking a contemporary art history class, I experienced one of the highest points of my educational career. The course followed the movements of modernism and postmodernism, from the works of Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Marcel Duchamp.

It was then I began to internalize this concept of the Avant Garde; the idea of those who pushed the limits of art and thought. I dug deeper into this realm of thought and applied these concepts to my day to day thought process. I looked at everything different from that point on. Each piece of architecture I passed on the street, every song I listened to, every t-shirt graphic I saw someone wearing, I thought to myself, “Is this modern? Is that post modern? Is this cutting edge? Is this innovative?” I began to wonder at every piece of culture I experienced, “Is this original? Is this the “next thing”?, Is this what comes after post modernism?”

The class went through the history of the 20th century, through each sequential art movement in chronological order, and when we came to the end of the semester we had a discussion of all we had covered up to that point. Our teacher posed the very question that had been on my mind the entire time, “Whats next?” He offered a few examples of current artists who were currently doing interesting work, but then he offered us a possibility of the next major direction the world of art and style could take. From the book, A Theory of Everything:  “The Physical Universe actually has an inherent tendency to create order, just as when water chaotically washing down the drain in your bathroom sink suddenly organizes itself into a beautiful swirling whirlpool.”

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