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Episode 62

About That Toilet Tweet

In today’s episode, host Meg Lewis talks about the new Fisher-Price rebrand, Netflix-induced sleep loss, and why you should always show up as yourself.

Transcript:

Meg Lewis: Boop-y boop boop! This is Overtime — Dribbble’s weekly podcast that explores the most interesting design news and gives you the tips you need to create your best work. I am your host Meg “Bing Bong” Lewis, and today I’m here to make you feel good, and just take a little feather – I’m going to tickle your design bone. What is the design bone? It is a little bone that you have, that’s floating inside your brain that other people don’t have! Lucky you.

In this episode, Pentagram gives Fisher-Price a playful rebrand, Netflix announces what their peak viewing times are, and it is not at all what I was expecting. I chat about amplifying your perceived worst qualities to make them strengths, and I get curious about my recent tweet about my toilet habits. And, could that tweet potentially hurt my career? I don’t know! Let’s go.

Let’s get into it with the news today. Alright, so Pentagram announced a rebrand of Fisher-Price. They officially launched this rebrand, and it’s been getting a lot of chatter, from what I can see, and I’m actually shocked that nobody’s really mad about it. I feel like people always, you know, have that friendly discourse online when a rebrand happens, and I’m only seeing some positive things about it. And I’m not mad about it, but usually, I like to see that healthy discourse and it’s not there. So, I’m going to make a discourse happen, so feel free to tweet at me or whatever after this episode and we’ll talk.

So, for those of you who don’t know of Fisher-Price, it’s an educational toy company for kids and they had a pretty sweet original logo that I didn’t hate – I don’t think anybody really did. It was good, it was fine, it was nice, and Pentagram was kind of in charge of refreshing that and not necessarily doing a major rebrand. And I like that. They took most of the letterforms from the original logo and just made them a little bit better, changed some of them, and just made it a tad friendlier and a little bit more current, and I love that. I love that it had a great original logo and they just made it a little bit better. They gave it a little hug, gave it a little makeover, and kissed it on the forehead, and wow, it looks better.

And now, what the end quality is, is a brand that’s really playful and fun and reflective of kids today, of what we want to see in the world. I’m saying “we” as if I’m a child. I wish I was. I’m kind of like a child – that’s okay. So, I think that being palatable for adults and kids is important because you want adults to want to buy something for their kids, so we have to cater to the adults. But honestly, it feels really good for kids to be able to look at a brand and say this is a beautiful brand. I would love to interview a kid on the show to hear them talk about how beautiful this brand is. They probably could care less.

That’s okay, because you know, I’m a fan of friendly, playful design and that’s what we have here with this rebrand. If you haven’t seen it, take a peek because it’s adorable. A lot of times, clients approach me and say, I just want to refresh my logo: “I like it but it could be better.” And those projects really scare me, but this refresh makes me feel like, okay, I can do this. This seems really fun – to figure out what parts are working and what parts are not, and take the ones that are working, and give them a caress and leave them as they are, and then make the ones in the parts that aren’t working better. And I love that about this rebrand. So, props to Pentagram for doing a nice job. I love that you kept some original qualities intact and you just, you made it better.

So, I got tipped off to this next story from a piece published by AIGA’s Eye on Design. So, Netflix has, in the past, admitted when their CEO said that their biggest competitors aren’t what you think (which are Amazon Hulu HBO Go, NBC, bingo bongo, whatever streaming service). But rather, their biggest competitor and competition is sleep, which is shocking to me. But I guess that makes sense, because when people are sleeping, they can’t really be watching things on Netflix. Yeah okay I, I understand. And I understand that as a product designer that works at Netflix, as somebody who’s working on the UX as well, you know you’re probably tasked with the challenge of getting people to stay on Netflix longer, to increase the numbers and that’s probably a really fun product challenge.

Because, as we know, cable and broadcast television, the prime viewing time is like, 8 to 11 pm. It’s a set schedule and you’re kind of adhered to what programming they are giving you, these networks, during those times. But when it comes to Netflix we’re just watching on our own accord when we have free time, and our patterns are changing and we can do whatever we want when we’re watching Netflix, which is – I like that. I like doing what I want, whenever I want it. That is the Meg Lewis way. But what happened when they, you know, launched this research and these findings, is that they found out that [the] prime Netflix viewing time is actually 12 am to 2 am.

So, when those product designers and the people working on the UX are trying to get people to watch Netflix more and more and more, what happens is, we’re getting less sleep because we find that the time in our day when we’re watching Netflix the most is from 12 am to 2 am. So, it’s fascinating to me that streaming times, that’s when people are watching – that is so late. How are people sleeping?

But I’m guilty of it too. I found that I tend to watch Netflix and finally turn my brain off and become mashed potato brain around that time. It’s usually not that late but it’s right before bed, so I finally turn on Netflix and I watch some TV right before I fall asleep because it helps cool my brain down, which I know isn’t the best thing to do. I know I’m supposed to read a book, drink a glass of tea and wind down, but instead, I just watch Parks and Rec or The Office until the moment I fall asleep. And I guess other people are doing that too. I’m interested to know what y’all are doing. Are you doing that? Are you watching Netflix on a school night until 2 am? Oh no, and then you wake up at 7, 8 am. I don’t know what’s happening.

What happens with schedules? For me, I’m like a healthy, at least eight or nine hours of sleep kind of person, I like to do that. And my body is happy but, I don’t have to wake up at a certain time for anybody because I’m a freelancer, so I wake up when I want to wake up. Which is, you know, it’s not that late. Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Don’t clutch your pearls. I wake up around 8:30-ish, which is probably late for a lot of people, but for me, that is great. But, is Netflix keeping me up? Is Netflix ruining my sleep patterns? I don’t know. I’m so interested to see what happens as more research comes out on this.

Recently, I saw a tweet from designer Kurt Varner talking about how it’s a really good idea for us to all be a little bit more vulnerable with each other about our insecurities and what makes us different. And Kurt shared that he is a designer and he’s colorblind, and that’s been really embarrassing for him and it’s kind of held himself back because he didn’t want to share with other designers that use colorblind or other employers because it might make him seem perceived as a bad designer, because he can’t see color properly.

And of course, all the comments on Kurt’s tweet were like, “Kurt, think about this as a strength, you’re able to help us all with accessibility, you can see contrast better than most of us can and you can keep in mind other colorblind users when designing, which is a beautiful thing to be able to do.” And it made me think a lot about what my weaknesses [are]. What are the things that I feel are insecurities of mine that make me feel like I can’t share those things with other people because people will think negatively of me? And at the basis of what is happening here, you know, we’re trained from a young age that if you’re different than other humans in some kind of way, it’s bad. And the world has trained us to keep consuming and buying more products so that we can conform into this idea of what a perfect human is. And, of course, when our bodies or personalities are different from other people, it makes us insecure, and we freak out, and we feel bad about those things and so we just – bye bye bye blah blah blah. Of course.

So, whenever there’s something about our bodies or personalities that’s different from us, we suppress it, we hide it, we don’t tell people about it, because when we do, people point it out, or make comments on it, and we see things on media that make us feel bad about these things. So, of course, we all have all of these little insecurities that we’re hiding all the time about ourselves, our true selves. And what are those for me? One of them is definitely that I have an inability to feel negative emotions the way that most people do. So, I’ve gone to therapy for a long time about this and I don’t tell people a lot about this because when I do, they have a lot of questions. They think I’m lying, they think it’s fake, and it’s not.

And what I’ve learned in therapy is that every human feels a spectrum of emotions and some people feel really high highs and really low lows. And for me, I’m kind of always just sitting in a very specific range and it takes a lot of effort for me to get low. And, in fact, I’ve never felt the lowest lows that most humans do. Every human’s range of emotions are different and mine are very specific. So, especially when it comes to a scale of anger, frustration is usually about the highest level of anger that I feel, which is dangerous for me because when somebody is frustrated with me, I automatically think the world is over. And I think, oh my gosh, frustration is the worst thing someone can feel, so if they’re frustrated with me, I’m done, they’re done with me, they’ve moved on, they hate me now. But of course, that’s not true, because hate and frustration are two completely different things for most people. But for me, when I get angry it just feels like frustration and that’s as far as it can go.

So, I don’t tell people about that very often because it makes me feel like a robot, it makes me feel like I’m not a real human, but of course I am. It’s just a quirk in my personality that makes me different from most people. And what I need to do, and what everybody needs to do, is take those qualities that they have in themselves that makes them different, and don’t waste them. These are things that make you special. So, for me, taking this inability to feel a lot of negative emotions, is a superpower that I can use and make the world a better place through that superpower. So, how can I create business offerings? How can I get a full-time job or a job-y job, or whatever I need to do in order to make the world a better place, using this quirk in my personality? And for me, embracing this inability to feel negative emotions, or whatever this insecurity or vulnerability I have, helps me create better things, and to design for good, and to make the world a happier place with my quirky weird insecurities.

So, I challenge everybody today to think what is the thing that you’re most insecure about and makes your personality, or maybe even your body different for most people. What are the things that you’re hiding about yourself? Try to assess what those are and lift them up as much as possible and push them out in trying to think, “how can I, from a marketing standpoint, strategize what these negative things about myself are? Are these things I think are negative, how can I take those things and amplify them to position myself in a way that makes me unlike anyone else?”

So, when I looked back to my career and I said, How can I take this quality about myself, all these things that make my personality different, how can I amplify this as much as possible so that in my design work, on my portfolio, the way I talk about myself, the way that I write, the way that I talk on this podcast, is truly reflective of my extremely unique personality. And the end result is me positioning my brand in a way that’s truly reflective of me, but it’s also making me seem like a person that’s unlike any other designer that exists in the world today, which is excellent and helps me get work that’s more aligned with who I am, which I think is absolutely incredible. So, I would challenge you to assess what makes you unusual and different, and what is an insecurity of yours, what feels vulnerable to share with others, dig deep and think, how can you actually lift that up, push it out, and make it a strength.

Okay, speaking of Twitter, I tweeted something last week, that was very specific to me. That said, quote, here’s my tweet, quote, “Anyone else like sitting backwards on the toilet just for fun?” First of all, hello and welcome to my Twitter. My handle is at @darngooood with four “o’s.” Secondly, I tweet stuff like that all the time and sometimes people ask me, “why I do that?” and, “isn’t it hurting my career?” “Aren’t I turning off clients? Is this bad for personal brand?” These questions are all very good, very good questions. Should I be tweeting about my toilet habits on Twitter? Let me explore this with you and we’ll come to an answer together or maybe we’ll disagree. Let’s see what happens.

So, I truly believe in using social media to present yourself in a certain way to attract the kind of work you want. And I spent a lot of years in my career, my freelance career, when I first started out curating my personality and curating everything I did to try and attract a very specific client type, which I believe is a good move that makes sense from a marketing and branding perspective. Yes I’m tracking all of that, that is good. But what happened was, I was curating my personality in a certain way to attract a certain client type, and so once I finally got those clients – yay, good job me – I had to become that curated version of myself the whole time I was working with them and around them. And that would mean, you know, month-long client engagements where I was pretending to be a different version of myself and it was exhausting. And, then I was creating work that didn’t feel truly reflective of me because it was curatorial, and none of it felt 100% great. I didn’t love having to pretend to be somebody else all day with my clients.

And so, eventually, I just got tired of it and decided to do an experiment for a single month, where I decided to be 100% myself and push past the fear of other people judging me. And so, I did this for a month where I changed over the language on my website, I tweeted what I wanted to tweet, I posted on Instagram whatever I wanted. My 100% weird personality came out and I thought, “I’m going to see what happens after doing this for a month. I’m going to debut who I really am. And if people go running and everybody hates me, then I’ll just go back to the curated version of myself that I was before.” And once I decided to finally start being myself and I let it all go, I let the fear go, the first thing I found out was that the perceived reaction that I thought people would have didn’t happen. Nobody pointed fingers and laughed at me and made fun of me and said, “You’re a terrible human being we hate you.” Clients didn’t run away, in fact, people were laughing at me, they thought it was funny, they enjoyed what was happening and they, a lot of the reaction was, “look at you, way to go!” And I did not see that coming at all.

So, once that happened, I got kind of addicted to doing that and I thought, why have I been wasting all this time curating my personality to become somebody else, when I could have just been myself this whole time. So, the end result has been me tweeting things about my toilet habits, butts, the fact that I love chain restaurants. I talk about clowns a lot because I love clowns. This is who I am. And when I do these things, it makes, sure it makes my brand stronger, but it makes me feel better knowing that I can be 100% myself and explore who I am on the internet and allow everybody to follow along.

So, yes, I am presenting myself to attract the type of work that I want now, but the type of work that I want now is people who want to work with me for who I am. And so, what I found is that the more that I’m me, the more clients that I attract, the more jobs and opportunities that I get that are in line with who I am and what’s important to me. And I find that my work is easier to create because I’m creating design work that is reflective of my personality and my unique brain, which is really, really cool. It helps me to feel more fulfilled.

So, it’s a weird thing to say that the more I tweet about sitting on a toilet backwards, the better work I get, and the more opportunities I get, but it’s true, because I am attracting and getting to now work with people who are like, “Meg we loved your toilet we and we want you to bring that personality into our brand,” which is so wacky to me to think that that happens but it does. People will message me and say we like your story about how you barfed and then gave a talk about it 30 minutes later on stage, which has happened, unfortunately. But I actually get clients that say that they’re excited about who I am, and they want me to bring that personality into their office into their workspace and into their brand and that’s really cool.

So, I would definitely challenge everybody to think about what you’re doing. Are you doing it to attract people for a specific reason? Are you curating who you are to attract the work you want, which I have no problem with? But, I just want to make sure that you’re showing up for yourself and feeling like you can be yourself a hundred percent. And, I feel like for most people tweeting about the toilet is not who they are, they don’t want to do that, and I understand, that’s who I am. And so, I’m going to be me over here 100%, and I want you to figure out who you are, and how you can be that version of yourself online and off as much as possible, because, really the more that you let go of that fear of judgment, of what people think about you and who you are, the more you’re going to succeed and, trust me, the perceived outcome of what you think will happen, the scary things and results that you think will happen, it doesn’t happen. It never does, it’s always so much easier and more magical than you think it will be. It’s just your fear getting in the way and I totally understand, I get that, and it’s going to be alright.

Wow wow wow wow wow, that’s it for this week’s episode of Overtime. I hope that wasn’t too much toilet talk for you, but we got a little bit of information out of this episode. Oh, I hope. But if you want to continue the conversation about how you sit on the toilet on the internet, use the hashtag, #DribbbleOvertime.

And if you loved this episode, please let us know by leaving a kind review, please, on Apple Podcasts. And touch that – just bop it, bop your little finger on that subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts, and please don’t forget to tweet at me or tag me. My handle on the internet is @darngooood with four “o’s.” And this has been a true pleasure. Love you all, want to squeeze you around the torso. I’m short, so, you know, bye. See you next week.

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