Butt What Can You Do?

In this episode of Overtime, Meg discusses Sears’ new rebrand, an awesome new hand-lettering manual by House Industries, and the trailer for Wes Anderson’s new movie. Plus, Meg chats with Fanny Luor and Sean Suchara about designing for social good and using your design skills to create change.

Thanks to Oxygen Bank for sponsoring this episode. Sign up for an Oxygen account, deposit $200 into your account, and use it 5 times in 60 days, and you’ll get $25 on us. Oxygen Banking Services provided by The Bancorp Bank, Member FDIC.

Subscribe to Overtime on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or download the episode via Simplecast.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• “But What Can I Do?”
• Playground

Transcript

Meg: Oh, hi there! Welcome back to Overtime. I’m your host Meg “#poodle” Lewis and I’m here to give you the design news and the good old tips you need to create your best work. Let’s go!

In this shiny episode, Sears makes another oopsie on yet another rebrand, House Industries announces their new lettering manual and I, yet again, commit to learning how to hand letter, Wes Anderson’s newest trailer is here and I poop my little pants in excitement, and I chat with friends Fanny and Sean about using our skills as designers to do some dang good for once.

So, take your little brains back to the year 2019, if you can remember that far back. Sears came out with a rebrand. They had a new mark, new logo and it was all fresh and new. And at the time I thought Sears was gone. I feel like I remember somebody telling me that Sears was goodbye, I don’t know. I go into Sears once every 12 to 20 years, so who am I to know. I just go in there to see what Sears looks like every so often: drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, I can buy some undies, I could buy some tools. They’ve got it all at Sears. But anyway, so they rebranded last year. And people didn’t love the logo because, oopsies, they knocked off Airbnb’s mark and their mark looked exactly the same. And I guess people have a problem with it when you steal somebody’s logo. I don’t know why that would be true. Just kidding. It looked exactly like Airbnb.

And so, fast forward to now, they just launched yet another rebrand, same type, different mark, but now it looks like a squatty little house. They made a little squatty house. And you know, honestly, it looks like if I were bending down, I have some sciatic nerve issues, so anytime I need to bend down, you know, I have to bend my knees. I can’t just hinge at the hip like a lot of people. I gotta bend the knees a little bit. And also, I’m short. I’m 5’2’, I’m a size medium. I’m kind of like a textbook, standard human if you just draw a standard shaped person. That would be me, except I’m short. So, if you’re thinking about this squatty house mark, and I’m just trying to give you a little visual here in case you haven’t seen it, it looks just like me squatting over to pick something up off the floor. No head, there’s just legs. Squatty legs. Oopsies, Sears.

I don’t know, people aren’t loving it and who am I to say. I’m sure somebody worked hard-ish on it, so I don’t really want to bash them too much. So, let me find the silver lining. I guess the silver lining here is that Sears is not dead. Sears is still alive and well apparently if they’re able to purchase a new logo or pay somebody – I hope so. Hopefully, somebody got paid. Sears isn’t dead, Sears lives on. Let’s move on to the next news story.

Do you love lettering? Does it make your mouth water? Do you salivate at the thought of some juicy type made by somebody’s fingers or toes? Then maybe you should check out the House Industry’s lettering manual, which they just announced, it’s only up for pre-order right now. I think it comes out on April 14. Hopefully, that’s not April Fool’s related, probably not because who does April Fools halfway through April? No one, no one at all. And of course, it’s written by their own good boy, Ken Barber, who is excellent. And we all love Ken. Ken’s great.

And there’s a foreword by Jimmy Kimmel, unless there’s a designer named Jimmy Kimmel out there that I’m unaware of. I think it’s forwarded by the Jimmy Kimmel, which is pretty cool. And you know, it’s a beautiful book, from the photos that I can see on the internet. It looks beautiful, and it looks really helpful. Like, they say that it will teach you how to do every lettering style under any scenario. So hopefully, we’ll finally learn how to make a flat, you know, I, as aforementioned, I’m short. So, when I sit on the toilet, there’s a little slope to my legs. So, a lot of times I can’t work on my laptop or my iPad, so maybe they’ll teach me, since they allegedly claim to teach every lettering style under any scenario, hopefully they’ll figure out how to tell me how to letter under that scenario because I need some help.

But they also are going to show you some drawing techniques, give you reference models, and exercises galore. So, you know, standard workshop-y workbook kind of situation. But I think it’s extra spectacular because it’s not only beautiful, but it’s taught by an expert in this field. And so, if you’re a big fan of House Industries’ juicy, juicy letters, I think it’ll be really fun. I’m planning on buying it because I’m a garbage hand lettering artist and I think it’s really good to get various perspectives and teachings from different people. So, I will keep buying more books telling me how to do it until I learn how to do it because none of them are clicking with my brain yet.

So, Ken and House Industries, I hope you can do it for me. But generally, I like to support fellow creatives and I like it when they are teaching other people how to do their jobs. I think that’s a very supportive and inclusive thing to do, and I like that. So, I want to support House Industries. I love Ken Barber, so I’m super excited to see what he has to say.

Yo, yo, yo, so they released the trailer for the new Wes Anderson thing, the film, called The French Dispatch. I’m amazed that I didn’t just butcher that. I kept practicing: “The French Dispatch, The French Dispatch, The French Dispatch.” I kept doing that. And I was murdering it every time.

But it’s out. The trailer is out, and people are doing their thing and saying, “Ooh, ooh, ooh, Wes Anderson.” And look, I’m very white, I’m very millennial and I’m very much a designer. So, you know, I have a Wes Anderson tattoo on my arm that I got when I was a little baby. But I love it. I have drank the Kool Aid. I’m onboard always and forever. You know, I feel like, and especially The French Dispatch’s trailer feels very much like Wes is playing the hits, doubling down on the style, which is what we want, I guess. You know, I do.

Watching his movies feels kind of like a cool cousin that I only get to see every few years at the family reunion. And the cool cousin shows me cool new things, influences my style, and it’s a little edgy, but also safe and makes me happy. It makes me happy to see my sweet little cousin that I love so much. And that’s what watching Wes Anderson movies feels like to me. But I think in assessing why I like them, and I’m sure a lot of other people might have different opinions or similar opinions, but I love adventure stories of any kind. And I specifically like his movies, because they are almost always adventure stories. But the environmental design looks kind of like a realistic world that’s amped up. So, it’s more stylized, it’s more beautiful and colorful, but it’s realistic. And it’s a realistic version of the existing world I see.

So, even though there’s a little bit of some fantasy involved, I like his movies because it feels real, and like we were talking about last episode, about how we can design with nostalgia in mind and how rosy everything looks in the past and how just imagining what things used to feel like and look like, it always looks better in your imagination than actually does. And I feel like Wes Anderson’s worlds look like that. And you know, it’s a lot of thanks to Annie Atkins, who we all know is an incredible designer and artist, who creates all the graphics for the props. And the worlds that she creates with Wes are just absolutely incredible and beautiful. And of course, yes, you can see I’m a fan and poopin’ my little pants with excitement. But also, you know, it’s hard for me to get overwhelmingly excited about them anymore because I know exactly what to expect, and they’re always exactly what I expect.

So yes, I’m like, “This is exactly good, exactly how I was expecting.” And I think that’s nice. I would like to see more extremely stylized directors and people making movies and cinematographers that are making these things beautiful. I’d like to see other Wes Andersons come about creating worlds in their own style. And of course, there are. Please, recommend me others that are similar that are extremely stylized because I would love to see it. And I’m looking forward to seeing this movie. I think it’s going to be really great. And it’s going to make me feel really comfortable. But you know, if the excitement around Wes Anderson is off-putting to you for whatever reasons, it’s okay. It’s okay if you don’t like it, but I think it’s good that you let other people like it. And I think it’s okay to look at everything critically and see everything from all sides. So, feel free to not poop on somebody’s parade that is loving the Wes Anderson stuff, but you can challenge them with also supporting them at the same time and I think that’s great.

Meg: Now, I don’t know about you, but I feel like a sack of potatoes rotting away in a pantry while the rest of the world outside burns around me. So, today I brought in a couple of experts in the world of busting out of your sad potato sack and actually using your design skills to make the world a better place. It’s illustrator Fanny Luor and designer/illustrator Sean Suchara. Hi, friends.

Sean: Hi, there.

Fanny: Hello!

Meg: Hello! It’s nice to have two people talking to me for once. Very exciting. So, Fanny, you’re in San Francisco and Sean, you’re in New York, right?

Sean: Yes.

Fanny: Correct.

Meg: Very cool. Excited to have you. So, I brought both of you in here because you recently did a campaign, it was at the height of when the Australian wildfires, which is still going on, and was so terrible. You were doing a wonderful promotion on Twitter, where you were doing original illustrations for anybody who could provide proof of receipt for donating to a specific set of organizations. And I thought that was really incredible and very exciting to see some people using their skill set to get me to do something. It totally worked for me, because I got a really cool illustration afterwards. So, how did that idea come to mind and how did you two collaborate on that?

Sean: Ooh, so, a lot of it came very responsively. It was a very in-the-moment kind of decision. We saw what was going on and we were kind of just, more or less flabbergasted and needed something to really do to vent out our frustrations and feel like, you know, as two people on the other side of the world whose main skill is in imagery, what are we going to do about this? How are we going to impact this? How can we do more than just like, donate a little of our little salary in order to make a small impact?

And we started talking, and I think at first, we were both thinking of doing our own kind of illustration situation, but we had already started working together because of the newsletter. And I just have to give a proper shout out to my girlfriend, Kim Tierney, because when we were talking about ideas, we were like, do we want to do flora, do we want to do fauna? Do you want to do flora and I’ll do fauna? And my girlfriend came along and basically did the “Why not both?” meme to us, and it was just like, “Okay.”

Fanny: Yeah, and to add on to that, you know, I think the original idea, at least for me was, we talked about how social media can be a very bad place sometimes. But this was kind of a format that I had seen a lot of artists do before. So, there’s this sort of call to action, and they kind of use the format of Twitter, for example, to deliver a personal illustration to someone who, you know, proved that they donated to a cause. And so, I personally had seen that floating around and I just thought, you know, why not take advantage of this kind of medium and do what we can.

Meg: Totally I love that so much. And you, Sean, also alluded to the newsletter, but you also have a newsletter that seems like it’s kind of in its infancy right now called “But What Can I Do?” What’s inside of that newsletter?

Sean: So, “But What Can I Do?” is kind of, as the title says, a newsletter responding to the question that people have when they’re facing the dread and despair of the climate crisis, which is, you know, “In the scale of all of this, what can I even do?” And this newsletter is kind of meant to be in response to that and say “This, you know, here’s things you can actually do. You don’t have to feel like you have no power, here is just an email full of things to do.”

Meg: That’s amazing. So, is it stuff that’s outside of monetary prompts, because I’m sure I’m like a lot of other creatives to where I have this skill set, that’s great and very useful, but I also know that money is helpful. Sometimes I don’t have extra money to give. So, I think, when it comes to “But what can I do?” and that question that I’m asking myself all the time, I’m always wondering how can I, if I don’t have money right now to donate, what can I actually do with my skill set?

Fanny: Yeah, I guess I could speak to that a little bit. I think we were trying to sort of make it very actionable. And you’re right, sort of moving beyond just donating money. Obviously, it can be very impactful, but that’s obviously not the case for everyone. We kind of wanted to sort of consider everything from a very high level, like how do we hold companies to account down to sort of something you could do on a daily basis, something that’s actionable, that is a little maybe more bite sized or digestible. And our hope is that, you know, a lot of little actions can sort of add up and they can maybe help you overcome these barriers to doing something that’s maybe more dramatic.

Sean: Yeah, one of the major things with the newsletter has been bringing awareness, and we’re trying to not just talk about you know, every other site is like, “Oh, remove single use plastics, recycle.” Well, we just released our technically second issue, but our first issue where we’ve been getting a prompt, and in this first issue, we’re talking about, in response to “But what can I do?” we’re saying, “Have hope.” And we’re having a very important conversation about what it means in the face of dread, in the face of crisis, in the face of despair, to be able to imagine a future and be able to look ahead and say, “This is possible.”

And we feel that just talking about this stuff, and just bringing awareness really makes a difference. Because the more people who are concerned, the more people who are going to start making these little actions in their life that are going to add up to things. And we don’t always have to take the weight on our shoulders of saving the entire world when the entire world is having this conversation together and we can kind of come together as a community.

Meg: That’s incredible. I like the message of hope because I’m sure, like most people, sometimes whenever I read too much or know too much information, it can become absolutely terrifying to where I feel like I can’t do anything at all because I don’t matter. And it sounds like you’ve found a really great way to call people to action and get them excited about what they can do.

Sean: Yeah, and that’s something we also really wanted to address, which is like, we’ve all been there. You know, when the IPCC report came out last year, I was in shambles. I was torn apart. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself. And there’s just so many news organizations where the only way they know how to talk about this is to scare you. And yeah, maybe that gets the clicks, maybe it gets the share on Facebook, but there’s a part of the brain that when we’re confronted with this information is either going to get angry or is going to run away. So, in response to that, we wanted to make it more like, everyone’s in this conversation. Here is actual good news that’s going to enlighten and empower you. And yeah, it’s scary. But there’s so many things in life that are scary, and the only way to confront them is to just confront them.

Meg: So, do you have any advice to creatives like me or a lot of the listeners that have a really useful skill set of how they can use their abilities as a designer, Illustrator, or fine artist to go out there and make good happen?

Fanny: I mean, I think that’s certainly always a difficult question. I mean, I guess, you know, I can speak just from my personal experience, I found that I’m the kind of person that, I like to bounce ideas off people. And so that was kind of my first step was like, I sort of reached out to Sean because I saw that he seemed to also be grappling with a similar kind of question. And we were just like, you know, “What can I do? What can we do?” And it was just a really good conversation starter. So, I think talking about it with someone else and coming up with ideas, I think you can help each other too, because I’m sure you could find many like-minded people who are struggling with “What can I do?”

And some, you know, oftentimes, the best work comes from multiple talents and efforts coming together anyway. So, I think, you know, naturally you’ll find a project that could align with your skills and interests and somebody else’s. So, that’s kind of I guess how this started.

Sean: Yeah, to add on to that, working with Fanny has just been, honestly a dream because we both have the same kind of mindset to want to tackle this stuff, but we’re able to fill in the nooks and crannies of where we feel we’re not our best. Overall though, I think that as designers, as illustrators, as artists, we need to kind of step back and look at the basis of what our skill is. And the basis of what our skill is, is figuring out and strategizing the best way to communicate with each other and the best way to solve these individual problems together. So, I think that any skill, once you take yourself out of the equation and make the focus of that skill other people, it can be a skill that’s used for the sake of change.

I was visiting an old Professor sometime last year, and I had a really wonderful conversation with a bunch of students who were trying to confront these capstone style projects centered around really personal ideas like loneliness in our generation, and like, climate change. And they were all wonderful issues. But I saw this really interesting thing where the students felt that all their solutions to it had to be some kind of tangible physical thing. Like one of the students who was talking about the loneliness issue was like, oh, maybe I’ll make a fill-in style workbook to deal with the issue. And not that there’s like an issue with that, but there’s a lot of those and you know, maybe the issue is: you have an entire class with you. You have an entire group of students around you, you have this community. Maybe design can start switching into this position where instead of making a book, we form a support group of the people around us. We learn how to use those communication skills to start pulling people in and Stop worrying about it being some kind of tangible, physical product.

Meg: Absolutely. I like that a lot. And you’ve found a way working together to find a way to work, not with somebody in the same city as you, like you’ve really found somebody across the country, which has been really nice. And I think it’s a really great opportunity to stop being frustrated with the parts of your skill set that aren’t as good. That normally would be frustrating for you and you found somebody to collaborate with that kind of fills all those gaps that you have, which is really neat. And I think a wonderful part of collaboration.

I think there’s a lot of talk, especially on the internet, when it comes to brands specifically, but sometimes designers of creating something that’s in support of a cause, it can often look like you’re being a little too self-promotional or like you’re not doing it for the right reasons. Or maybe it just comes across gross. And I think you’ve done this really nicely because it comes from such a selfless place. But do you have any tips for other creatives as to how to not seem gross when making something for social change?

Sean: Oh, jeez.

Fanny: Yeah, we kind of discussed this, I think as well. Obviously, there are some issues where that is definitely more of a sensitivity and concern where you really have to examine where you’re coming from, what privileges you have, you know, and are you the right person to be sort of promoting this cause or in this way? So, I think for us, climate change, in a way, it’s easy, because it affects literally everyone in some, you know, you are alive on this earth. And so, I think we have that sort of privilege to be able to say, “Hey, we think we can do something, we have some skills, we can change this.” And we’re coming from a place of genuine care.

And I think this is just sort of a side effect of the collaboration but, maybe it comes off less gross, so to speak, because it’s less about us as personalities or as individuals like, I don’t that’s totally like the, you know, what drives people to do this at all, I would think. But it’s sort of this product that we kind of created together and then it’s more about that thing. So, I think it is a little, quote unquote, like, maybe we try to remove it from us as individuals and we’re just sort of facilitators of this cause and this project. Not really sure about tactical ways of making it seem less gross. I don’t know if Sean has any thoughts on that or –

Sean: Yeah, to kind of add on, I think it has a lot to do with where in relation to the cause you have positioned yourself. Like, are you doing this cause because it looks good for you, or because it’s genuinely the right thing to do? I mean, I personally really love the Australian illustrations that we did because it helped us find a closer community to the people we care about. It helped us get the word out there about a real legitimate issue. But it was never about us. It was about the things we were drawing, because we were drawing the native animals and plants of Australia. We were trying to document what was going to be lost. It was never about me, it was never about Fanny.

You know, I feel like it’s really easy for people to worry about kind of putting out there that they’re doing something good. Me and Fanny are really lucky because since there’s two of us, it kind of dissipates that sense of self within the conversation. We’re doing something as a collective, we’re doing something for a cause and coming together for it. But like, let’s say like me, and for the listeners, I’m a white male, so there’s a certain level of privilege I have in my life and because of that, I am measuring heavily how much the things I’m doing are truly affecting people like, if brands, and if people want a tactical thing to do, measure, when’s the time to be the one talking and when’s the time to be the one listening. Figure out where in the conversation is your voice right and where in the conversation should you just be a support and figure out who your actions are affecting, because no matter how good intentions you have, you might hurt someone if you aren’t paying attention.

Meg: Absolutely. And that was really well said. Thank you both so much for being here. You’re doing such great work. Where can everybody go to sign up for your newsletter, “But What Can I Do?”

Sean: Well, so we are on Instagram @But_What_Can_I_Do.

Meg: I thought you’re starting to spell it because you thought maybe people thought it was butt – “B-U-T-T. What Can I do?” Well, maybe for April Fool’s Day. Do either of you have anything else you’d like to plug?

Sean: I mean, I don’t mind saying this, just because you’ve asked us but, me and Fanny have been working so well together and this whole relationship and collaboration has just meshed so insanely organically. It’s honestly been a dream the last two months working together that we decided we’re going to turn this into a collective.

Meg: Ohhh, yes!

Sean: Yeah. So, we are going to be going by the name, ‘Playground’ and you can find us at play-ground.space.

Meg: I feel honored to be hearing this information right now.

Fanny: You got the drop.

Meg: Alright, thank you so much, Sean and Fanny.

Fanny: Thank you so much.

Sean: Thank you.

Meg: That’s it for this week’s episode of Overtime. Let’s continue the conversation on the internet with #DribbbleOvertime. And you know what to do if you love this episode: touch that subscribe button and leave a review. And don’t forget to tweet me, tag me, poke me, boot me, scoot me, slap me. I’m on the Internet @DarnGooood with four “O’s.” Bye. Hear me next week.

[Music plays:] “Soooo tag me, and tweet me, and poke me, and boot me, and slap me, and scoot me, and yeaahhh.”