Yesterday, in a conversation that started in me asking my mentor how he got into the business of creativity, I began to figure out both what I want to do with my career and how am going to do it. First, Jack told me his story, how he got a job as a "runner" at a Minneapolis advertising agency, how he landed an internship at that company, and how his insight on a project for Harley Davidson ended up in the hands of Harley's CEO. Eventually, as our conversation moved to lunch at DragonWell downtown, the two of us talked about the creative industry more broadly. During the past two weeks, I had came up with a definition for design and was happy to hear Jack reiterate a lot of the same concepts that I had thought of. Design, in Jack and my shared perspective, is the balance of creativity and productivity. Jack says that design without direction is decoration and thus not design at all. Design achieves a specific purpose though creativity; it lives where the left and right brian lobes intersect, in between art and science. Art allows for an audience to come to their own individual conclusions, science directly presents specific conclusions, design allows an audience to come to a specific conclusion on their own. For example, consider the work that Sandstrom did for St. Germain, a liquor producer.

Inside the bottle is an Edelflower liquor, but the branding makes the product more then just a liquor. The naming, bottling, and labeling all tell a story, but not overtly. Sandstrom could have just named it Edelflower liquor; that would have been the mathematical solution. Or they could have given it a more obscure name, a name that would allow the consumer to interpret the product how ever they want; that would have been the artistic solution. Neither of those methods would sell the product. Instead, Sandstrom design the bottle to tell a specific story: a Parisian lifestyle. Now, a consumer isn't just buying the liquor, they are buying a complete expierence.Sandstrom has applied this same methodology to a multitude of different brands:

Each of let the consumer come their a conclusion about the product. That conclusion is the brand indentity, which Sandstrom creates and describes through packaging design. 

I think you can compare brand design to writing an essay; both exist in between art and fact. When you write a paper, you are trying to convey meaning or a specific message to your audience. You use evidence to support your claims and eventually lead your reader to the conclusion you want them to make. Brand design is simular. You use packaging, labeling, naming, as your tools to convey a message or some meaning. Through the appearance of a product, a customer should understand what the brand represents. In my earlier blog post I made the connection between the rhetorical triangle and the triangular nature of brand indentity. Here again, the two different methods of storytelling parallel each other.

After pinning down exactly what design is, I asked Jack what skills are needed to be successful in the industry of design. Jack answered that there aren't any actual skills you need, but rather, that you have to have talent. We talked about how in an increasingly fractionalized world that people have become very skilled, but how those trade skills don't translate into creativity. Instead, the world needs great "generalizers", people who are able to look at problems from a broad perspective and look for solutions in unique ways. It takes out creativity and leadership; they have to direct the highly specialized tradesmen towards the broader goal. The more I learn about Jack's job, the more I want it, and luckily he wants me to go for it. Jack is starting to encourage me to continue to build my experience in the design world so I can eventually find a job in it.

I'm having a great time working at Sandstrom. I've learned tons about what the company does, but more importantly, I've learned about myself and the oppertunity that this industry has for me.