Parker Jacobs says, “Make Rad Stuff”

Parker Jacobs, wearing a Yo Gabba Gabba! t-shirt, was wildly animated at his lecture Wednesday night at Chapman University.

Parker Jacobs gave a fun, light-hearted, and entertaining talk at Chapman University last Wednesday night. Here is a summary of his advice for design students, but I have to admit, if you weren’t there you really missed a show. My translation of his performance into a few textual bullets here is like designing in a Word document. The good news – the picture I took with my cell phone does seem to capture, at least, some of his energy.

“Make rad stuff.”

This is Parker’s professional tenet for his work as a creative professional. In support of this, he laid out the following:

• Don’t use technology as a crutch. Sometimes you will find a better solution to a design problem by drawing, picking up the paper and turning it upside down.

• Draw all of your display fonts. You don’t really have to draw all of them, and if drawing isn’t one of your strengths, this may not be for you. The most important concept here is to see headlines and display typography as an illustration in the layout.

• Embrace chaos. This relates to not relying on technology as a crutch because technology stifles chaos. The creative process is disorganized and random.

• Put your heart into everything you do, but keep your ego out of it. Hear, hear!

• Effectiveness always wins: whatever is more effective beats out awesome. I might reword this as concept over form, or, I guess we’re going to end up here: form follows function.

• When you’re gonna do something, know that someone else has probably already done that thing, probably awesomer. Research is vital. I was just thinking last night at the Art Institute’s panel (the next DE post, coming soon) how closely related the research process is for journalists and creatives.

At the end of the talk he took questions, so I asked my favorite question – one I never tire of hearing or talking about, “What was the biggest mistake you made [at Paul Frank Industries]?” This question always baffles the responder for a short moment – we all make so many mistakes it is difficult to choose just one. Here’s his story:

The first time he sent work to China in order to have a toy made he sent the disk with a partial print out. The entire design was not represented on the print out. The manufacturer never looked at the disk. They simply made up the rest of the toy (the stuff not represented on the print out). The immediate lesson he learned was to always include the whole print out when sending a print along with a CD. Another lesson is that communication is essential during every step of the creative process.

Technical mistakes happen frequently if you forget to expand patterns, create outlines for fonts, use strokes (strokes could expand if moved), group your objects, and so on. Always send a clean file to your printer, whether they are down the street or on the other side of the globe.