way. Welcome back to the hustle podcast. I'm your host, Anthony Armendariz. And today I'm gonna sit down with my friend Travis Skirts, a designer and developer in Vancouver, and talk about a lot of interesting things. Like product and project management processes. The design systems will use how to design things that stretch beyond the bounds of current constraints of our tools, the vegetation of our culture and even designing for Western and Eastern cultures. Here's Travis. I hope you enjoy the show. What's up, Travis?

Not much.

How you doing? I'm doing good. It's been a long time since we talked. Well, except for preparing

for this. Yeah, has a trap.

Skirts is a friend of mine, and we met a few years back. I think were originally introduced from D Keith Robinson. And we met. We had a conference, and then we've kept in touch Sense.

That's right for the DPM summit.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Now Keith is here, and I get to hang out with them jelly. Yeah, he's always a good time. Uh, for those of you guys that don't know Travis, when I just point out a couple of things here he is a certified hard worker and, um, has was awarded a perfect attendance from hard work solutions. Incorporated. Ah, And it was also once awarded employee of the decade. So we're we're honored to have Travis here today. Travis, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you've been doing?

Yeah. So aside from owner and operator of Hard Work Solutions, Inc. Um, I'm a partner at louder than 10 and we are a school for project management. Up until now, we've also been doing design working client work over the years, but slowly but surely transitioning to project management, training and helping with helping teams get the processes in order and things like that. So I helped do the design work of the development work and help develop the curriculum and things like that with my wife, Rachel, and the rest of our awesome little team here in Canada.

So Rachel was on episode 42 which is titled Empathetic Project Management. You guys should check that out. Um, Travis, have a question for you. That is that it hasn't been a big shift for you going from doing mostly design and development into doing things like writing, critic, curriculum and training. What has that been like?

Um, it's been really interesting for me. It's, uh it's sort of solving a lot of the same problems that I would be doing in a in a design project. Except it's more about its sort of designing a new organization in some ways or its organizing a course, which, to me is, uh, it's a fun new challenge. There's things that I haven't done before that I'm learning a lot about. Rachel has a teaching backgrounds of. She's teaching me a lot of this stuff and then also internally. So much of it is designed based books that we still consider ourselves very much a design company. So whether it's our website in our magazine that we run or whether it's the the actual course materials, there's a lot of design work involved in that that I still get to do. So it's a good mix

mix. So, um, can you tell me a little bit about what kinds of organizations companies that you work with on the training side, I'm I'm curious how, Ah, you know, I've talked with Rachel little bit, but from you know, there's someone is out there. That's a freelancer running their own solo show. Or maybe growing or, you know, smaller, Larger, you know, agencies out there. How How does someone engage with you guys and what is What does it look like when you guys were working together with someone?

Yeah, so, typically, on the small side, we start the smallest size of agents. We work with digital agencies usually, and those can range from about five people up to 20 or 30 year, 50 people. Even. UM, a lot of times it's Sometimes it's when a company is hiring their first project manager. You know they get to that size or it's a bunch of designers and developers and they decide. Holy crap. Things were getting a little out of hand. We're dropping the ball here. How do we how do we do this? A lot of the times that answer is,

have a project manager or some kind of project management, a process in place, and then that goes up to sometimes there's companies that have a few project managers on their staff, but it's getting everybody in line, having getting all the processes and order and and sort of more modernized towards more, more modern digital workflow. We work with some print companies that are transitioning to Dio. We work with a lot of companies that are maybe have more of a waterfall process, and they're finding that they have to work with product companies more often, and so they have to fit in with the more agile process. So, like, you guys kind of do that yourselves. I know and I've been doing that. Wow, I'm sure you you've seen the challenges of doing that.

So really, that's one part of it. And the other part is that we're actually actually trained project managers from scratch. So whether they're a developer or a designer or something else completely not even related to tech or design, we will help them get the skills they need for maybe a career change in our industry. That's a non technical position or something that's a little bit different. So

that's interesting. So So I assume that means that you're building a in house training program to produce produce talent for the local area and then potentially working with companies to help people have a career changer move into new positions at their existing organizations.

Yeah, so yeah, in the in the new year, where we're starting Thio were wanting to partner with with some good agencies that we know have solid processes in place and then start Thio nest some new PM so we can train them and they have, ah, nice, safe place to kind of grow their skills almost like an apprenticeship. That's that's sort of our next new frontier for the new year that we're that we're building out. So, yeah,

that's that's really cool. And you mentioned, um, waterfall and agile and some of those things that I think that's interesting in any no project management product management. Those a lot of those terms are still just like all the design terms. Still kind of vague company to company when you're doing, you know, client service. It is. It is interesting when you're working with someone to sort of figure out howto how to do this, especially if you've never done it before. Whether you're a Web design shop, that's, you know, transitioning into working in digital products or ah, you know, print company that's moving into the digital space for the first time.

How, um, how do? How do you guys look at this? These these general principles that have been developed over time and some of the minimum or formalized within ingrain in studio culture? How How? How are you guys bridging that divide between, um which of these sort of methodologies air useful or or how to build your own methodology somewhere in between, that's gonna make sense.

Yeah, So, you know, ah, lot of these processes that we use in our in our studios and companies. They come from the industrial age of light, working with iron and steel and, you know, from the 18 hundreds and things like that. So a lot of waterfall processes come from that and and even agile came before software development was even a thing. And so a lot of those things were dealing with materials that had to be. You know, you had to order like millions of dollars of materials. And there you had these hard deadlines that you had to meet. Otherwise you could build something. If you screw up, a bridge would fall.

Software development is totally different, as you know, right, Like it's very dynamic. There's a lot of changes. Even the way we build APS now, compared to like 5 10 years ago is completely different. So we we try to look at it. Uh, we kind of try and tear that apart and see what the purpose of all those traditional methods were and see how we can adapt them for new processes. And usually it's not just waterfall or just agile. It's somewhere in between using boring principles from each of those. But, um, kind of thinking on a more systemic level of you know, what are the what are the new ways of thinking about how,

what what are the characteristics of software risks, for instance, or doesn't risk within design? There are much different than they were a long time ago. So that's one thing you really look at. It have been kind of studying internally for a little while.

So is your vision to help organizations come up with their own way of doing it, or learning about all the different variations of the different models and knowing when and how to use each or how to combine them.

Um, it's a little bit of both for sure. Definitely, our approach isn't too go in and just change everything. Like a bunch of cowboys. It's really looking at what's working and what isn't in every organization. Because even if there are overall bad practices, a lot of times there is some kind of silver lining, or there's some habits that people are already using. Thio accomplish that work, and so for us to just go in and change everything, it's gonna be a really hard, chaotic thing for the organization to adopt and change with. And then it's It's no good, right? And so we really work hard to think about how people are doing things and how weaken slowly adapt things over time. So our engagements actually usually last a long time,

like often, often a year and then, uh, but smaller chunks throughout that year. Just because you know any change you do make often takes like 6 to 8 months to see on the books takes that long to see within your company. So really, it's ah, it's a marathon in our in our industry for sure. So yeah, it depends. And so all of those things we look at what works for suffer development, what doesn't and kind of mash it with whatever your company's doing at that at that point, what the habits are,

it's It could get really challenging it for us. Um, you know, like you said, we pretty much started out right at the gate knowing that we were gonna work with product companies and that we needed to have a process that was more like what they're used to internally. Like what the engineering team is in design team were already deploying. And as we've grown and we were as we realized, Well, crap, You know, like, if we want to actually be responsible for not just helping helping with design, but actually putting things in the in the marketplace, we're gonna have to think a little bit deeper about how to do that. And in that approach doesn't always work. So recently, we've been for the first time in four years.

Over the last six months, we've been open to doing projects that were not agile, and it's challenging because our team for four years has perfected that way of working, and this new way of working is really hard. And, um, we try, you know, we try really hard when we're doing one of these engagements to make sure that it's defined correctly, but with the right spirit, like maybe it's a fixed scope waterfall project. But the engagement cadences in the spirit of agile you know in it. And sometimes those things are hard to negotiate, and sometimes they're easier. But, um, it's it's definitely challenging.

Yeah, it was definitely requires a bit of dynamic thinking on those parts. And I find that a lot of times, even if you are a little bit stuck in one way or another, as if you do have the kind of skills and abilities to work within either side, you can kind of you kind of budget a little bit and take some of the what you know, works well say in an agile process and still apply it to waterfall. You know, depending on we might be how you build an estimate. Or it might be how you know, how you look at it, labored like time and labor and things like that. So, really, in the end, it comes down Thio. What we're doing is,

uh it's sort of us if we look at it. Sorry. We've been studying that. Ah, a lot of General systems dynamics lately. And so basically all that is is a way of looking at any kind of closed system whether you know the universe is a system. But also our projects are system also the way our company's work, our system and oh, it is is a series of feedback loops, really, And so whether it's waterfall or it's agile, all of these things produce these loops, right? So you do something and then there's an action that follows. Not now, the hard part with that.

It's usually the thing that gets us tripped up in either of those scenarios is there's always a delay A lot of times, and where those delays happen is usually where the problems come from, whether it is water fallen, agile and and so for us. The big thing is to kind of figure out where those, uh, pieces are and howto kind of adapt it for an anticipate those those weird challenges that kind of go with in either one. Well, you you guys super No, no, that's

that's That's really cool. That's that's right. You know, you're absolutely right. Um, sorry to put you on the spot here, but if you if you're open to it. I'm curious because you guys work with a lot of different organizations. What? What do you think that the industry is expecting these days when they're buying like a website redesigned vs and I found it in terms of their expectations. How the how the project's gonna be managed in in the overall style of of working together?

Well, I think definitely. Like if if we're talking like, uh, like a marketing website, things like that, I think those naturally tend to follow, like that waterfall style of like, Here's your design. Now we're gonna develop it, everything else like that you can bring that back into a natural thing. But I think the difference really for me is that typically what we see is coming at it from the website point of view. It's typically a start and end to the project, right? Like you, there's a clear defined timeline. Where is more than the product side and this is with Web products to in IOS products is it's generally more they can see it easier as,

ah, work in progress that maybe you can do a better kind of agile layout where you do a sprint rate, and maybe you work for several months and you visit the product later on that kind of thing. Or maybe it's just a non going relationship. So I think those two things have very different characteristics. Also, Web itself, I think, is getting really commoditized. And there has been commoditized broke for a long time, and we'll continue to go that way. Justus. There's more tools that make it easier to make simple sites. I think you know, products just naturally. Well,

they can be commoditized. They just naturally have a much more, uh, dynamic nature to them where they're gonna. They just require a longer engagement and a lot more, a lot more process thinking towards him.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with these product tools like Fig, MMA and what it is like some of the like sketch add ons and stuff that are really lowering the bar to letting more people to participate in the process of designing an application. Sure, it's more complex from the, you know, the engineering perspective, but I'm starting to feel that way about some of these new tools as well.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think there's definitely It's like a democratization almost of tools, which you know. It's kind of like the photography industry, too, and similar things. But, you know, I think it it pushes companies like ours to really focus on that kind of bigger picture, sometimes beyond just what is the product. But what what are we actually doing for the business, right? Thinking of it as you know, you know, how is the strategy of everything working into the product itself?

What does it look like outside of the screen? And how does it interact with the world that those kinds of things, I think help, but and you know, that's not easy to commoditize on that part. But yeah, it's Yeah, it's an interesting time. I think we're gonna see a lot of shops, and people kind of get crunched a little bit by that.

And it seems like to me, aside from all of that, still, the underlying most important thing is the way that the project has produced the product management, the project management, the style, the the feeling of what it feels like to work with another human being in our studio.

Yeah, I agree like the reason we like were so passionate about project management, which seems like a really weird thing to be heat passionate about. But honestly, uh, I think it's It's almost like a Trojan horse for a lot of agencies and companies. Um, you know, the project manager is the customer service agent because that's who the client most often interacts with during a project. So they're gonna come away. That's gonna be what their experiences like working with your company on the other side. It's there is sort of that cheerleader for the team that make sure everybody's buttoned up. Things are being delivered on time qualities up there, that kind of thing, and make sure everybody's protected from from the client. If they're a little bit unruly or, you know,

they pump up the client little bit if they need that and then also in larger companies, even the kind of our that linchpin between, like agency owners, the team, the client, that's kind of like that weird fulcrum where I think you can. They have, like, the most impact on the profitability of a company, right, so they control, you know, projects going over budget, whether it's staying in scope, all of those things. And so you know,

it helps with everything. It helps the team, huh? Helps the team stay happy because they're not working. Weekends helps the company have because they're making a profit they could find at on it. A shell phases so many, so many great benefits to it. So, yeah, we go crazy over that.

I did, but I do, too. But it took me a long time to get there. You know it. It took me a little while to realize Okay, well, there's tons of people out there that can sell design and and that's not as special as it as it once was. And I used to think that are sort of art. The fun sized flavor of Agile was unique, but I'm seeing studio after studio after studio adopting some flavor of that. That's not really special anymore. What is is really the employees experience in the customer experience, and it really comes down to the project manager and aside from all of the actually management of the project, it's, you know, for a studio like ours,

it's that person actually has the ability to grow an engagement there, you know, build build real relationships and optimized for real success in and like you said, um, and I'll add on to it. I think when um when a customer or employee is done working with studio, they're probably gonna forget the work. What the project was, what they're gonna remember is what it felt like working with that team.

Yeah, totally.

So let's get back to Ah, let's get back to a design tools because that's that was interesting to, um, and correct me from wrong here. But a while back a while back now you wrote an article called Design Machines, and I think that's what you meant by designing systems that anticipate variation. Maybe I'm wrong, but, um,

yeah, yeah,

that's exactly yeah. So my summary of this, and in one sentence is that a lot of the tools that we have right now are easy. It's easy to scope out how long it's gonna take to build like a website, for example, because all the tools that we've been using for the last five years are very cut and dry. Right? You got this, You got this. Get a temple in its gun. It's composed of these elements, and it's easy to produce this stuff. So it's Ah, it's kind of easy to scope, but but but everything is kind of looking the same when you think about it that way. Um, can you elaborate on that? Um I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, and you know how I set that up and tell us what your thoughts are on that?

Yeah, I know. I think he I think you've got it. I think if you look at the history of the web and where it sort of started out, typically it was always the when it started. It was kind of like the fun, weird project that kind of sat on the sidelines. Well, the print and marketing, you know, initiatives got the gut priority. And so, typically, websites started off is like, you know, the HTML Deke would make it on the side. And then,

you know, you have thio make it as quickly as possible and you didn't get a lot of budget, and then maybe you'd get you know, when blog's came around, you'd hire like an intern or something about the sales person might just, you know, keep pumping out block post things like that to get traffic, and so there's no not really any money or time priorities put on it. So we developed tools that sort of accommodated. That's so weird press and truthful things like that. They're very much template based, right? You have the article template or the page templates, and we kind of had to do that at a necessity. We didn't have the the programming tools that we do now, and even the design tools themselves right?

We're making things in photo shop, and so you had sort of the static UID thing and you didn't want to have to change a whole bunch of cops to accommodate different content every week and things like that. And so it's sort of evolved from that, I think. But even though our technology has gotten better, CMS is are now a lot more powerful, and there's even products that are hosted that are a lot more powerful. We have We have more opportunities to change and adapt that stuff. And now that websites are a bigger priority in cos you know, it's kind of like the extension of their Sometimes it's the only public facing part of their their company. And so, um, now that there is time, and now that we have technology, we're just not really taking advantage of those things. Thio use the full expressive potential of the Web,

I think. And so I guess the closest thing I can, uh related choose. I came from the magazine industry, went to school to design magazines and and a lot of ways There's a lot of parallels and how he set up those systems, right. Initially, we set up a magazine kind of framework at the beginning. When we create that right, we have set up a grid system that follows along it. We might set up templates that get repeated depending on the type of article, not just article. So it'll be like interview template. Or it'll be like what happens when we have three giant feature images and a paragraph taxed or vice versa. Right? So those kinds of things,

it's always been you designed, like your type styles and your grids and all those things, so that you can rapidly put together your product and then every month because they're publishing monthly, sometimes weekly, right. Yet they're still filled with art direction, and they still have to coordinate with printers and everything else like that. So there's still a lot of work involved. But because of the priority on expression in our direction afterwards, the system really takes him up to a level of Let's just get something acceptable. Then we can have fun. So that's where I'd like to see the Web go a little more. It's just borrowing from those concepts of keeping getting us to the point where we're really good. Actually, at this party is just getting us up to an acceptable standard. But then what do we do beyond that? How could be? How can we have fun with our layouts in our in our imagery?

All right, so there's two things. They're the first thing. The first thing is taking advantage of the opportunities we have to go a bit further. I'm curious to hear what your thought is on that how can people, you know use the tools or the technology available to go to go a bit further and in second, like if we can, Maybe this is partly back to the project management theme. How can we convince our customers that it's worth the extra time to innovate and drive it further.

Um, yeah. So the 1st 1 with the tools and things that I'd like to see Uh, really, uh, it doesn't even have to be crazy. Like I know like our website ourselves. We go really crazy with the art direction we have, like, every single page is very much styled around the content. In there. We have a magazine called Cokes on their Each of those articles is is designed. We actually designed them right in the CMS. It it looks crazy, but a lot of the times it's just changing the background color. It's maybe switching between the two brand fonts that we use and then using things like images that actually work exclusively with the content. So,

you know, not just throwing in like a coffee cup stock photo, but something that actually speaks to the content and couldn't go anywhere else. And so those kinds of things just thinking a little bit extra special about it, Um, and the reason we do that the reason we like to do that is for a couple of reasons On DSO number one. It is good for clients like those articles that we do that are that are art directed and things like that. They tend to do a lot better in our. In our experience, we get lots of readers, and we got lots of shares on them. Things like that. A lot of people read the entire article or even at least scroll through mus faras I, um so that's always a plus. We put a little more care into. It also forces us to put more care into the content itself,

like the words were not just blasting out, uh, just marketing garbage. We actually want to write something that deserves the the extra attention. And so for us, that means maybe we don't post as often. But when we do, we try and get a lot more mileage out of out of that work. And so that's one thing that we talked to our clients a little bit about is like instead of, you know, just ramming a bunch of Google keywords into some block post like let's take our time and write something that's useful for people or something that means something in the long run. In the end, like for us, it's really important to create a culture of education and entertainment and an intelligence on the Web, not just not just marketing initiatives. And so that's really what it is for us personally.

So okay, yeah, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. So that's awesome. I mean, your website is freaking amazing. It's probably one of the best ones I've seen in a long time. But if you were selling that to a customer, right, and you know you'd already agreed on a time frame and in a cost and all that and how How would how does the project manager or the design team are convinced someone that it's worth going above and beyond rather than just using the templates that are available, or the just getting the table stakes of what the competitive competitive were doing where we end up where everything's a carousel and everything structure the sanity? Because that's that was the easiest thing to accomplish.

Yeah, so there's a couple things, and sometimes it can be a challenge, and it really depends on the client, right? Um, these days we find that ah, lot more companies are hiring in house teams or they have some sort of in house talent that can work with this stuff a little bit, and so we'll definitely try and figure out what they're, uh, what their internal capabilities are. And sometimes we'll even help them, like hire an internal person that can manage the site and things like that if they want to go that far. So on the on the extreme on the higher extremes, it's really about knowing the client in their capabilities and being able to accommodate that. The ones with designers in house are often all for that kind of control, especially if they don't code,

but they want to be able to do something extra special with the work. And so with them, um, it's really understanding that we're not actually building something all that different from the traditional website to get it up to that system. Really, a lot of that work has to come afterwards, while after we might go away, right? And so the designer has to kind of carry the torch and do some things now if they don't have a designer. Sometimes we still like to throw in a little bit of capability, but really limited it, so maybe we give them like they have their brand colors and they could just change their header area or something of their block post between those three, depending on the mood, will give him some guidelines and things like that. And other times it's be given full control over their grid type sizes and things like that if they're really savvy with that. So it's really a judgment on a their capabilities and be there. You know, not everyone wants to go that far, but it's it's kind of just trying to encourage little bits at a time and try and try and start small and build from there.

Yeah, um, the way that I think about that and the digit in those software world is is moving away from the the concept of a viable product into, like a delightful product, a minimum delightful product. Um, it's really it's, you know, I don't know. I mean, I know that some people have have to time box things, but I do agree that I think, um and maybe it's just because you and I actually remember that. Remember designing for the Web in the nineties when everything did. It was a unique piece of art. But I really do wish that we pushed things further sometimes.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I like. Yeah, it's it's a hard thing. We've started developing tools internally, just like oiler plates for sites that we could start with, and that helps us a little bit, but yeah, it's a, uh yeah, I know. I know what you mean. It's getting better, though, Like even some of those,

uh, I find a lot of the news sites and magazine sites out there starting to get much more flexible with that, whether it's propublica or New York Times, like they have a lot more art directed features things like that. So it's cool to see. Nice

to hear the shout out to ProPublica. One of my best friends is a creative director there.

Oh, no way. That's awesome.

And rob way Kurt works there, too. Problem? Oh, David and Robert. Probably responsible for that. And the team. That box is doing some cool stuff, too.

Yeah, Yeah, they are. Yeah, such great work. So it's just awesome to see that stuff, so I mean, it shows you you can do that stuff in it, but it does take definitely and I think it does take some internal talent to be able to sustain that for a while. And, you know, we do. We do it all the time here. Once you have that system set up, it doesn't necessarily have to take a lot of time. But it's it is sometimes. So we probably spend,

like, collectively a few hours on each one of our articles just after it's been written. Just tow just a design it out and dress it up, depending on how complicated we want to get. So it's an investment

for sure. Absolutely. So I have a question for you. Um, you mentioned earlier that the organization is going into more into amping up the training even more potentially, doing things like, um, apprentice programs and stuff like that. I mean, where do you see your career going anyway? I mean, traditionally have been a graphic designer, Web designer, engineer of some sorts, some shape or another army. Where do you see your career going? What do you think you're gonna be? What do you think you're gonna be doing two or three years now?

Um, I think most of my time has been really uh, I think really interested in systems design in general. And so that comes from a lot of design systems stuff. And so for me personally, I see, uh, me and also Anna who? Aniko, who is our other designer and helps us with marketing. And she lives in Calgary. Both of us have been really tackling marketing of our company, but also developing, like, we're developing books and, uh, all kinds of internal features for educational.

Like our educational software that goes along with it are things. So I see myself still designing and developing for sure, for the as long as I can see. But it will be just much more internal than external. And then on the flip side, a lot more, uh, a little bit more, A lot more. Still developing curriculum with Rachel and Bill, who's our other trainer and just just, uh, you know, helping still defecting Web processes and how we build things in product process is in that kind of stuff. It all just interesting. I just you know,

you know how it is running a small company. You just tend to wear 100 hats at all times. So, you know, trying to keep a few going still. Hopefully, don't you know, have to go entirely into Thio just administration and things like that. But I still want to be having a

lot of these things. Air, like you said, still designed just different kind. Just a different kind of design. And people need to be, you know, people need people to train them to. I mean, it's a big theme lately. You know, I was a bit on the phone a lot. Lately, people are thinking about mentor ships and, ah, collaboration. An apprenticeship. I mean, this is really important to make sure that people are prepared for today and tomorrow.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, yeah, One thing I see that I don't know. I don't know how you feel about this, but like, one thing I always I think about is, you know, in traditional graphic design, you kind of see these old school design it. They'll be like, 80 years old and they're still designing. It still might be on paper, and they got other people that kind of bring it into more modern formats and things like that. But I don't you know, like I don't know how many people in our industry stick it out for more than you know more than their forties,

maybe, or something like that, actually doing design work still, and you know, a lot of them end up going into management or leadership, but it's cool to see when when those positions kind of can continue in it. I kind of hoped to keep doing this stuff later, but I don't know, maybe it's just really I e think just like anything

else is just, you know, variety and flexibility, you know? Ah, the timeto you know, as long as you have the time to learn and explore and whatever you care about at that moment in time and it's always gonna change that's true. I got really bummed out for a while because I wasn't, you know, making things and photo shop and sketch anymore. And then I was like, I was stupid to think that only making all these other stuff like I'm doing a podcast, you know, teaching apprentices and stuff like that, you know? But yeah, I think on the last steps of the podcast,

I was talking to Charlie about this. Like I think a lot of people like us, not all of us, but but a lot of us are scared of leadership roles or creating companies or management because we're scared of that transformation from doing all the work to observing all the work. But I don't think it's necessarily true that, you know, by training someone and that you're not gonna design anymore, you know,

that's true. And that's the one thing I'm sure you experience to is just Yeah, in sort of designing an organization in itself, like your company, it a lot of those skills are still so transferrable especially, you know, especially with the clients. We typically work with that. If you are doing more of, ah strategic role with them, a lot of that still transfers back into your own organization. So there I think a lot of those things it might just be in a different form. So are you gonna be coming

down to Texas with Rachel for the DPM summit?

No, I am not. She is heading down on our on our own this time. So I am gonna miss out on all the fun for the first time. So I'm I'm a little bit sad about well, but I know you're coming to Vancouver. So that's that's

pretty unfortunately commensurate, Rachel. We were planning on hanging out, but then we scheduled this trip up to the Northwest, so I'm glad I'll be able to see the both of you guys. Hopefully guess can make time to hang out.

Yeah, definitely, Definitely.

Well, what else is on your mind these days?

Uh, what else is on my mind? Well, aside from design systems and things like that, uh, one of the biggest things. I mean, we've been talking about internally, and it kind of has to do with all this stuff. It's sort of how we what does expression sort of look like in our digital culture and in how we work, right? Like we a lot of times we build these acts and products, and it's sort of from the singular point of view. And I think there's, like, a good awareness in our industry about, uh,

diversity and sort of that. But I don't think we're really good yet at actually kind of like taking this meat space very diverse culture that surrounds us in everyday life and representing that properly on the web and in our products and just giving that platform Thio. Other people toe be able to express themselves in their own unique ways of it. So that's something we think about a lot. I don't know if it's something you guys do any real listeners new, but it's fascinating to

me. I don't know if it's exactly the same thing, but one of things that I have been thinking about in terms of, you know, we have a small team in Manila now. So now now we're thinking about you know, things in Asia. And so one of the things that we have been talking a lot about is the difference in the designing from an individualistic standpoint, how most Western cultures do versus an aging cultures where their collective ists. So I mean, it's when you compare like design patterns of, ah, of some of the more popular like you know, Google and the you know, like, say, the Korean equivalent of that are like the big e commerce stuff like hell.

There's a lot of big differences in the way that people design with the, uh, senator, I'm thinking about that kind of stuff. I mean, not exactly what you said, but similar, I guess.

Oh, that's cool. So I'm curious. What did the head of those differences come out for? You. What have you What are some of the things you guys sort of notice?

Um, well, I recently went to a conference, and there was, Ah, I'll have toe. I can't remember what her name was. But she gave this really interesting presentation on this topic, and she pointed out just it was such a short, ah, quickfire presentation. But she pointed out a few things that I thought were interesting. Um, so she's she started out by pointing out how, like a western culture of someone is creating a piece of art like a painting. Um, the artist typically paints it from their perspective,

like a singular perspective on a landscape, for example, Like what? This was the way that I think this bridge looked like at night when I was there. And if you look at a lot of Eastern, um, landscape art, for example, they'll be mixed interpretations in one piece, providing a collective view of how that community thinks about that place. Um, so that was interesting. And then there was a couple of things that were, like noticeably different and design patterns like, uh, in in Western culture.

Um, yeah, In Western culture, we respond really well. Thio content that's organized and lists, you know, like you know. And I think that shows And like our editorial design layouts and our grid layouts like list layouts and in the Eastern culture, most of the patterns were grids just allowing someone eyes to just freeform flow around the page. However they want versus, like, a prescribed editorial order. Um, and then there was a few ah, few different case studies. What a shock.

Like shopping on H and M versus a product called some S S u M. You know, like when we look at a typical e com e commerce app Now it's like, yeah, like, hero. And you got, like, three photos and you got reviews and you got the typical buttons in the same place, right? Like they all kind of look the same in a lot of the the Eastern, uh, popular, highly popular e commerce sites. When you look at photos, it's an endless squirrel,

like it goes on forever and ever and ever like just hundreds of photos and buttons in completely different places. And there's just a lot of, ah, really interesting things like that where it seems to be apparent that it's designing with the, well, the collective culture mindset versus an individual perspective.

Wow. Fascinating. So do you. Where do you think do you think this is like a transition into digital from, like, previous, previous sort of mediums as well, like is this is it, like, pure ground up from the culture? Like I know for us. I know a lot of our stuff is informed from. Yeah, obviously Western English based. Left to right, reading things like that. Had any idea kind of wife. Why, that might be over there. I don't

know. I've talked to Natalie, my wife, Natalie, about this just to kind of see what her per perspective is. And she, you know, we didn't get into a deep conversation, but she, you know, chimed in that a lot of these assumptions air Probably true, like Lisa and her Vietnamese culture. But, you know, um I think like, if I had to just make some assumptions, I think does a lot of like designers in North America.

We design what we think is a good design, you know, like, what's popular? Uh, what we you know what's trending on dribble? You know what those kind of things, But it, uh, it it seems to me like the designer perspective and some not all but some of these Asian cultures are is more about what How is how is everyone going to feel about this more, you know, creating design languages that allow everyone to feel welcome versus, like, you know? Ah, yeah, you know that highly skewed one way or the other.

That's interesting. I've been thinking about this a lot, too. In terms of like our Western culture, we tend to We kind of have, like that. Idolize this, the sort of modernist aesthetic a lot of times, especially in our industry. But it's, I think, more and more. And I I mean, you're starting to see some rejection of this. I think on the Web, in certain places. But I'm really starting to appreciate,

like, a little bit of, ah, messy, more democratic, sort of approach to design. Like now I kind of miss some of the craziness that my speed through the original days, you know, Some of it was, like super ugly and unreadable, but it was fun. It was like a really expression of just what every day people could do and other people Doug things that, you know. Maybe it wasn't aesthetically pleasing. But why does everything have to be aesthetically pleasing, right?

It can still be a good design or or make some kind of some kind of impact on you without being necessarily just appealing or delightful. Maybe it's supposed to be, you know, a little bit jarring or just like crazier or barfing ley cute or something that I don't know, I'd love to see. Maybe. Maybe it's just got to get a little more messy. And in that over here, it's just nice to see a range of that kind of perspective.

Yeah, um, you're right. I mean, like, ah, one of the quotes that she said it was a great design isn't universal, you know, like, you know something, that something you do. I may not like something I like. I do. You may not like, and every it's still it's still very, you know, so subjective.

Yeah, exactly. It's that whole idea of neutral is really only neutral to like a small sub sect of, Of even even in Western culture, like it's a lot of times, it's, you know, Silicon Valley white guys. This is definition of what New girl is, but that's not. There's nothing actually neutral about it. It's neutral for that certain kind of privileged perspective. And so I think it's it's cool to see what other people would consider neutral. Whether it is, you know, more of a collective neutral in Manila or things like that. That stuff kind of fascinates me a lot,

too. It's like people using Helvetica because it's neutral. But it actually says using that face just just like having a pure white interface with, you know, standard text seems neutral or a medium post seems neutral. It actually says something about it, and I think I think it's so easy to gloss over that sometimes.

But, um, Travis, it's been great talking today, and I'm really looking forward to seeing you. And in your hometown of Vancouver, um, towards the 20th?

Yeah, I'm excited.

Planned some cool spots

for us to hang out at. We will. All right. Definitely. Well, okay. Uh,

thank you so much for taking the time out of your data, hop on the show and have a chat and spend the been a pleasure.

Uh, yeah. It's been great for me to thank you very moment. Cool.

See you next time. Okay. Sounds good thing. Episode of Hustle is brought to you by envision Designed better, faster together Learn more at in vision app dot com Hustle is brought to you by fun Size, a digital product design studio that crafts delightful digital user experiences with inspiring product companies. Follow us at hustle cast and fun size on Twitter.