This past HOW Conference I was able to present on a subject that I’m always pondering: How in the world do I run our design firm, still have a balanced life and do great work? With four kids, eightish employees and trying to not work 70 hours a week always seems tough. I constantly write down ideas, read about how others strive and succeed to have balance and try different things at Rule29. Some have worked, some have not. So when HOW wanted me to talk about things we have learned while running our business my biggest challenge was what subjects/tips do I talk about? I had 30-plus tips to wade through so I took the approach of looking at the ones that worked together. That way, I thought, would be most helpful to the attendees.
While reviewing the steps I thought of different people/firms around the country that reminded me of that specific topic. They are balancing all that life throws at you and still turning out great work, so I asked them if they would help me by giving a quick video intro of the topic I thought they best represented. I was excited that they all said yes and their videos took the presentation to the next level and illustrated to the audience that these ideas were bigger than Rule29. Some of my fellow contributors were Sean Adams, Stefan Bucher, Pash, People Design, Terry Marks and, yes, our Speak Up’s host Armin Vit. Here are a few sample videos, you can see the rest on Vimeo.
Tip #1: No matter what, do this only if you love it, both the good and the bad.
Tip #9: Work where it makes you happy.
Tip #10: Be a link in the love chain. Be a part of your community and create, support and promote your local network.
All in all, owning and running a firm isn’t for everyone, but for those who want to manage the ups and downs we should all talk more on how we do it. It will only make the community better and help the industry as a whole. The concept of the title was from an inner office joke that we always have a bottle of Grey Goose in the freezer for those challenging days and some days it feels like we should crack that open at about 9:30am.
From the response of the talk we have quickly created a separate site, Designer Sobriety, to highlight some of the points, show the videos and hopefully create a conversation about how to have balance and reduce frustrations. You also can follow the twitter feed as we publish more ideas and collect other peoples thoughts on the topic as well. We hope that a conversation will start about great business practices and offer helpful tips and we will make the site more responsive to publish all the content.
Justin Ahrens is the creative director and cofounder of Rule29, a strategic creative firm making creative matter™ in Geneva, IL. Designer, dad, husband and wanna be Tour de France winner.
Since Geneva, IL is where I grew up, I was just sorta hoping that those videos would have been from around town. Great idea none the less, just hoping for some easy workday nostalgia.
On Jun.05.2008 at 02:11 PM