POSTED December 14, 2020
About our guest
David Conrad is a Principal Design Manager at Microsoft, but a lot of you probably know him from his many years as the former chapter organizer of CreativeMornings Seattle.
He spoke with Tim Yeadon, Principal & Creative Director of Clyde Golden.
Dave and Tim Talked About
How David helped found CreativeMornings Seattle and the agency Design Commission, and why he walked away from both. [00:59]
David’s memory of Design Commission. [6:33]
How the death of Flash changed storytelling and web design. [8:06]
What is CreativeMornings Seattle. [13:54]
How to create community, and how CreativeMornings prioritized community building over finding the perfect speaker [17:29]
Volunteers at CreativeMornings, and the power of the microphone [20:08]
David’s favorite talks from CreativeMornings, and what makes a great talk [22:52]
What David learned about decision-making, process, procedure, and consistency from working at CreativeMornings [25:35]
Building a business, and balancing making money with doing the work you want to do. [29:12]
What talk David Conrad would give at CreativeMornings [32:25]
People and Groups
Jay Dokken (Design Commission Co-Founder)
Tina Roth-Eisenberg (CreativeMornings Founder)
Bootstrapper Studios (CreativeMornings Videographer)
Jeremy Wheat (CreativeMornings Seattle organizer)
Marc Barros’ talk on “Finding Success through Failure” (CreativeMornings Seattle)
Podcast Transcript
Tim Yeadon (00:13):
I can confirm it is Dave Conrad.
David Conrad (00:14):
It is actually me. I don't have a stunt double standing in for me today. He's off today so...
Tim (00:22):
Maybe I am talking to the stunt double.
David (00:24):
That's true. He's just a really good stunt double.
Tim (00:24):
Yeah
David (00:27):
Highly possible.
Tim (00:29):
Cool. Well, thanks for doing this today.
David (00:30):
Yeah, my pleasure.
Tim (00:32):
Where are you right now?
David (00:33):
I'm in my basement.
Tim (00:35):
Awesome. Same here.
David (00:36):
In beautiful Burien, Washington.
Tim (00:39):
Hey Burien's nice. It's near the water.
David (00:39):
Yeah it is.
Tim (00:41):
Let's see here. I have a little bit of an intro and I think we just - off we go, we give it a shot.
David (00:46):
Sounds good.
Tim (00:48):
Dave Conrad is a Principal Design Manager at Microsoft, but a lot of you probably know him from his many years as chapter organizer of CreativeMornings Seattle. That's how we met, you and I.
David (00:59):
Correct. Yes.
Tim (00:59):
In doing a little bit of research, before the show, I came to the conclusion that you've had a lot of change in your life over the past few years.
David (01:08):
Yes
Tim (01:08):
Yeah, and it's an interesting moment to chat with you because... How many years have you been out of school?
David (01:14):
I graduated college in 1997, so awhile, 23-ish years or so. Certainly the last 3-5 years have been pretty dynamic in terms of changes. Generally speaking, all good changes, fortunately.
Tim (01:40):
We all have this moment of wondering, "what's next?" And, in looking through I saw that you started a creative agency in 2004 and you had it for 12, 13, 14 years, and then you went over to Microsoft and then you were also organizing CreativeMornings for a number of years and had a shift.
David (02:00):
Yeah, I think the shift with CreativeMornings, and by shift I mean, stepping down from CreativeMornings, was sort of driven by similar motivations or similar thinking to closing the agency down. So the firm was called Design Commission.
Tim (02:22):
That's a fantastic name, by the way.
David (02:26):
Thanks! It was a really wonderful period of time in my life. The firm got started with myself and Jay Dokken. And if you look at the advice for starting a business they say, "never start a business with a friend, never rent office space before you've got clients," there's all these sort of conventional wisdom things. And we, of course, did the opposite of all of that stuff.
Tim (02:56):
Right.
David (02:56):
Jay and I were roommates in college, and after school Jay went to New York and worked at Frog and MTV and a bunch of places like that. And I moved out to the West Coast. Then we both sort of ended up back in Seattle around the same time. And just had our daughter. And so I thought, why not start a business with my best friend in an expensive studio space with a brand new child, seems like a great idea. But somehow it worked, largely due to the sheer talent that Jay had from a design perspective. He is an incredibly talented, not only designer, but just thinker. So for whatever reason, it ended up working out okay.
Tim (03:49):
Yeah.
David (03:49):
It was a really great time and in, I guess, 2015 or so, Jay had - he had two kids and his family was back in Colorado and he really wanted to be closer to family. And so we had that tough discussion about breaking up. And he moved back to Colorado and I continued to sort of run Design Commission for a couple of years after that on my own, with the rest of the team in place. So the point of all the story is at some point, it started to feel like the studio had become what it was going to be. For it to really change, fundamentally, was going to require either some big sort of capital investment or, a major change in how we approached the work. And I just felt like I didn't want to keep doing the same thing. I was sort of on autopilot a little bit.
And I think with CreativeMornings, it started to feel a little bit like that for me as well. First of all, I should say that me starting CreativeMornings in Seattle is a vast overstatement. Tina Roth-Eisenberg who started CreativeMornings in New York, was a friend of mine. So she announced we were starting CreativeMornings in Seattle, on Twitter or something. And within three hours we had videography support, we had a venue, we had sponsorship, we had people lining up to volunteer to help, we had speakers asking to get involved, without me really doing anything. So I sort of stood there and facilitated everything kind of coming together. But it was largely just a reflection on the strength of the community I think, that it was the right time in the right place for that kind of thing that happened in Seattle.
So we kind of got the program up and running and it was going well and I sort of felt like I had given it what I had to give really. The community needed a new influence on it and needed somebody to step in and provide, just sort of an injection of a different point of view or a different perspective. So it was time to kind of hand things off. It was this similar kind of motivation with both decisions. So we closed the studio in 2017 and then I stepped down from CreativeMornings in 2019.
Tim (06:33):
I mean, that's quite an arc, though. You started an agency. You did lots of interesting work over time. I imagine that some of it was hell and some of it was wonderful, you know?
David (06:42):
Yeah. But you forget about the hell. I know there were clients that... There's a couple that stand out still as being painful. And they were... The vast majority of those were painful because of us, not because of the client. Either we had some misunderstanding or like we weren't giving the client the level of attention that their problem needed or whatever. But there were a couple that were just like... You know, we had a company close because their CFO was embezzling funds and got kind of stood up with the bill. We had one just kind of ghost on us. Stuff like that.
But the vast majority of memories are all positive and an incredible learning experience. I didn't go to school for design. I studied communications and media theory. I sort of entered the world of design as kind of a hobbyist in a way. But what I learned over the course of running the studio and being there with my partner in the firm was certainly not something I would have learned by going to school. It was kind of a lifetime's worth of learning. But really great, a really great experience all around.
Tim (08:06):
In the beginning, what type of services did you offer?
David (08:10):
So we entered into the space at a kind of an interesting time. We got our first few gigs kind of doing Flash work. And I still lament the death of Flash.
Tim (08:28):
How come?
David (08:28):
It was the last point in time when interaction designers could really effectively and efficiently build the things they were designing. To look at what's involved right now in standing up a front end environment. Just to build a client experience, an experience in a web browser, is a non-trivial task. There are people who just do front end development work and struggle to keep up with that. But when Flash was around, like you could design effectively in an application and build it yourself without having to know how to write code. You didn't have to learn syntax to do that. And we built some really cool, engaging, interactive stuff. It was 2007 or so iPhone kind of comes around and that effectively kills Flash. It's since then, like if we wanted to build something... At that point, we had to start hiring engineers to work for the firm if we wanted to be able to build what we were designing for clients, which was really important.
Tim (09:35):
We used to make little videos, intro videos, out front of a website. I remember that. I once worked on a rebrand for Gardenburger and we sketched out - it was a free range freezer in a field, you know? Just goofy little stuff like that that came up, you'd click the freezer, it'd opened up and took you into the site, based on where you'd click on the freezer.
David (09:59):
Yeah and, I guess a couple of thoughts on that. One is that there is of course the whole skip intro thing, where like Flash as a sort of a piece of technology and an experience got abused because it was too easy to build out these elaborate long kind of animations. And a lot of people engaging in that, they weren't necessarily looking at it from the storytelling perspective. So it just wasn't interesting, right? Like, it's important to acknowledge that as much as some of us really loved it as a platform, it certainly had its flaws for sure.
You know, the other part of it is as Flash started to die away, a lot of the conventions that we're sort of stuck with right now on the web, really gained a stronghold. You know, you have a navigation bar at the top of the page and you have a footer at the bottom of the page and you have a three column grid and, you know all this kind of common conventions now that certainly make it easier to find information that you're looking for, also really kind of homogenized a lot of the experiences online. And you know, that's not all, that's not all bad. To be clear, I think that there's certainly pros and cons to it.
Being able to sort of work in an environment like Flash allowed us to think about different kinds of dimensions. So like temporal dimensions and time became a really important part of interaction design in Flash, because it was easy to reveal information or reveal steps in a process because of that technology. Thinking about multi kind of dimensional experiences and things like that were a lot more reasonable to build when you have an environment like Flash. So we've lost, I think some of the creativity. It was really kind of thriving in the early web. With the current kind of web technologies, just because it's gotten to be very complex to build things that don't map to that convention.
Tim (12:14):
Yeah. That's interesting. There's a generational shift that happens there.
David (12:18):
Yeah.
Tim (12:18):
And I noticed that too. When I started off as a copywriter, it was that world that we were storyboarding for. Then when I worked in email for a number of years, where you can do email in 18 modules or less, and it's pure performance. It's story hierarchy, and being succinct, and quick, and on tone, and you are interpreting to a brand. You're interpreting a brand onto a channel is probably more accurate. And so I guess four years ago, when I went back out and opened this agency, I was suddenly in the world that you're describing now. And it was a content story world more than it was this interactive world that I was bringing people into or dreamscapes, you know?
David (13:00):
Yeah. Yeah.
Tim (13:01):
That's interesting.
David (13:02):
Yeah. The craft of storytelling, I think, is something that doesn't get enough attention and there are certainly a number of reasons that are influencing that. And probably like the 'attention economy' being the biggest one, this sort of pervasive response that's like, "I don't have time to listen to your story, just tell me where I can get the thing, like where's the buy button?" So you lose a little bit of the kind of richness that is really critical for a lot of products and brands to be successful. It's hard to get people to engage in really deep kinds of ways without getting them to take the time to listen to your story.
Tim (13:54):
I hadn't considered- but CreativeMornings is a bit of a protest against that.
David (13:57):
I think so. I mean, CreativeMornings is a fascinating organization for a lot of reasons.
Tim (14:06):
Maybe you can define for somebody who hasn't heard of CreativeMornings, we've talked about it endlessly so far, but-
David (14:13):
What is that thing?
Tim (14:14):
Yeah.
David (14:14):
So CreativeMornings is, depending on who you ask, which is part of the interesting aspect of the story. It is a breakfast lecture series that is hosted by local communities. When I stepped down, it was over 200 cities around the globe. And the format is the same almost universally. Which is, the events occur on a Friday morning, and they consist of coffee and a light breakfast, and then an hour long presentation and QA session by a member of the community. And each community curates their speakers, there's one speaker a month. All of the events are recorded and available to watch online on the CreativeMornings website for free. So all the content that is there is free.
None of the speakers are paid. None of the volunteers are paid. It's an entirely volunteer run organization. There's a small team of kind of global organizers and administrators based out of New York City that do get paid to do it. All of their kind of salary and overhead is funded by global-level sponsors. And the rest of it just runs on in-kind charity and donations.
We ran CreativeMornings, I think for the first five years without a bank account, like we never touched a check. We basically just said, "this bakery is gonna give us a deal on pastries. You, sponsor A, will you pay the bakery? And you, sponsor B, will you pay the coffee people?" Most of the venues that we went to were donated in-kind, the videography services were donated in-kind. Thank you, Bootstrapper Studios for doing that. It's remarkable in that regard.
In terms of the format and the speaker, there's a theme each month that's shared globally. And the themes are sort of ambiguous enough that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. So they might be like serendipity or surprise or fear or color. So then each chapter basically picks a speaker that they think has some association with that theme. You get a broad range of speakers. So in Seattle here, we had architects, we had of course designers and artists, we had musicians, we had doctors, we had entrepreneurs, business owners, founders. So a huge range of types of professions, kind of coming in to talk a little bit about their work, or to tell a story about their experience. So they'll come in and talk for 30 minutes or so, and then do a Q&A session afterwards.
Tim (17:29):
And they aren't professional speakers.
David (17:31):
Correct. For the most part. We had some people that were professional speakers, but part of the problem with professional speakers is they typically get paid to speak. And so they don't want to come and do that for free. Yeah. We had a few that came.
Tim (17:44):
I feel like there's an authenticity to some of the people that you would find in that it was just as big of a mystery to them about what they were going to talk about as it was to us.
David (17:54):
One of the things I think that we dug into early on was, it's about community. You're facilitating discussions with people around a shared interest and encouraging them to engage. Some might define that as community building. Part of the deal with being in a community is that you can't be in the community if you don't show up for it. So as much as everybody talks about wanting to have more community, unless you're willing to put the work in and come and participate, you can't have it. You're not a part of it. And what goes along with that is you get the bad with the good.
So one month you'd have a speaker that would just nail it, and it was emotional talk, it was super engaging and informative, and people could walk away from the event with some knowledge or some sort of growth that had happened. And the next month you would have somebody that clearly hadn't prepared. Didn't really know what they were doing and just sort of got up on stage and rambled around a bit, and then tried to answer some questions, and that was it. Well, that's part of the agreement, right?
Tim (19:08):
Yeah.
David (19:08):
There's a fundamental part of that, which is we're here to shine a light on the members of our community and the work that they're doing and the way that they think about the world. And that means that you can get perspectives that you don't agree with. You get perspectives that don't make sense. You get a lack of perspective sometimes. But you have to keep showing up if you're going to be a part of the community. And certainly not having the requirement for public speaking experience contributes to sometimes lackluster performances. And we tried to account for that in our selection criteria that like, if somebody had never spoken before we might still give them a chance. But if we knew that they had spoken before and they were really strong, that would be a big plus. But it wasn't that if you didn't have that experience, it was a negative, it just was something that looked for to just help advocate for certain speakers.
Tim (20:08):
I chatted the other day with Jeremy Wheat, who's a volunteer with CreativeMornings.
David (20:13):
Absolutely.
Tim (20:13):
And he had said that you're a firm believer in 'the power of the microphone'.
David (20:17):
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, to classify Jeremy as a volunteer for CreativeMornings is an understatement. You know, certainly towards the end of my tenure there I was definitely standing on his shoulders.
Tim (20:31):
Would he be closer to the Prime Minister of CreativeMornings?
David (20:36):
That's the right way to think about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And all of that on top of being just like the most amazing person, generous person.
Tim (20:46):
Oh yeah.
David (20:46):
Kind, friendly, I could spend the rest of our time today bestowing praise on Jeremy. He is one of my most favorite people in the whole world for sure.
Tim (20:55):
That was something that struck me about the organization was there were a handful of people who gave their own time. And then from it, this interesting sort of community dynamic came out of it.
David (21:05):
Yeah. Running an entirely volunteer staffed team was certainly not something that I had any experience with when I started doing that. One of the things that we learned was, it's really easy for people to sort of speak up and say they want to help, but you can't force them to do it. So you have to kind of make space for people to have impact in ways that they feel like they want to, and look for opportunities where people can do more. And you know, this isn't really any different than leading or managing a team in a for-profit organization. You look for opportunities to kind of cultivate the talents on the team and help people sort of grow and have impacts. And for people who are part-timing it, or in it for reasons that maybe don't align with the mission of the organization, you don't give them as much attention.
And this is a little bit of that, 'power of the microphone,' if you give people a platform, whether that's a platform to tell their story on stage or a platform to volunteer and help support an organization. It's up to them to take advantage of that. We give them the opportunity and then you sort of step back and see what happens. If what happens is positive we encourage that and try and continue to have that engagement. And if it's not then sort of move on. Trying to force something there was never very successful for me. And it usually just led to everybody being frustrated.
Tim (22:52):
Over the years did you have a favorite speaker or a favorite talk that stuck with you?
David (22:56):
I think one of the things that I sort of precisely identify with is, if the speaker can get people to cry without it feeling awkward, that was a win. Because there was some emotional resonance going on there.
Tim (23:14):
Did you guys have speaker bingo on which: do they make them cry? Did they make them laugh?
David (23:18):
(laughs) I wasn't a part of that if it happened, but it's not a bad idea actually. You know, some of my favorite talks where Marc Barros, who is the founder of Moment lenses. Came and talked about, prior to starting Moment, he had a camera company called Contour, which was sort of a very early precursor to the GoPro. He came and talked about - the theme for that month was “Failure.” Which, talk about a fun speaker ask, calling up Marc and asking him if he would come and talk about failure was an interesting moment. But I'd known Marc because Contour had been a client of ours at the studio.
And so I asked him, and I knew like the backstory was basically that like things happened with the funding of the organization and he was kind of forced out of the leadership of this company that he had built. And so he came and talked about what that was like. In very transparent terms. Like there was no trying to sugar coat it. He talked about sort of spiraling after that happened and all sort of challenges that he faced and he still has kind of emerged as this success story with Moment. So I think those kinds of stories were really great.
You know, one of the things that I always felt like was a good marker for a talk was, you wanted people to be able to take something away from it without being too prescriptive about it. If you came in with the 10 Tips for Writing Better Copy or something, that was fine, and that would be really great for the copywriters in the audience. But if you were able to sort of come in and talk about like, "what I learned from failure", that's a lot more transferable and it applies to everybody in the audience. And what everybody takes away from that might be something completely different. When you're speaking to an audience as diverse as CreativeMornings attracted, finding a way to communicate with those people so that they got something out of it. But you wanted them to figure out what they were going to take away from it and not be prescriptive about that.
Tim (25:35):
So you probably put in thousands of hours and you did this over a number of years. What is it that you got out of it? Why didn't you do it?
David (25:41):
Well, I mean, I don't know... Just being a part of something like that was pretty amazing. It led me in intangible ways to have benefits. It certainly cost financially and cost time and all of those things. I met a ton of really amazing people. Many of whom I still have contact with. I think more so than that, just having that experience of being a part of something like that organization was a gift that you sort of carry with you. I think probably for the rest of my life.
I think I learned a lot about decision-making and process and procedure. You know, one of the things that we did very early on was we said, every month we're going to put on an event, every month we're going to serve at least coffee, every month we're going to have a speaker, and it's always going to be, I forget if it was the second Friday of the month. Those are the fundamentals we're going to do that every single month. Everything else is extra curricular. So if we want to give away swag at the event, if we want to have a musician come and play as part of the event, if we want to have a cocktail hour in the afternoon or whatever. Like all of those things are on the table as far as things that we can do as a team, but only after we'd guaranteed that we're going to meet the minimum criteria. And I think the reason that that sticks with me as something that I learned from that was, that kind of consistency was really instrumental in helping us build an audience or a following.
It took maybe two years of doing that before we kind of turned the corner. And then at some point, we went from, we're getting 75 to a hundred registrations each month and it's a free event, so 50% of them are going to show up. And at some point it turned into 200-300 a month and it stayed there. Like very consistent. We could count on, we're going to get 300 registrations, we're going to get 150 people showing up. And the cool thing was that a lot of those 150 people that showed up were the same people, but there was also a portion of our audience that was new every month. I would always ask the question, "how many people are here for the first time?" And there was always 20 people in the audience that were there for the first time. And the joke was like, "where the hell have you been, we've been doing this for seven years. Like, how is this the first time you're coming?"
I think our kind of consistency there was really important just in trying to kind of carve out mind space in the community. They knew second Friday of the month, I go to CreativeMornings. And that was something where I think getting the chance to sort of experiment with what are our fundamental principles that we're operating on? What are the decisions we know we have to make every month? It benefits the sort of outcome, but it also lightens the load of a bit. It means that we have a checklist and every month we go down the checklist and do the things on the checklist and we don't have to worry about anything else. No further discussion is necessary. And that was good, I think that was a good lesson.
Tim (29:12):
Did you find common threads in that with building a business? It taking time?
David (29:16):
Yeah, absolutely. I would say with the business, it's harder. I'm not entirely sure why it was harder. I think in part with the business, it may have been a little harder because money entered the picture and those decisions that you make when you're a business owner are really hard to plan for until you're faced with making those decisions.
Tim (29:38):
What's an example of that?
David (29:40):
Without naming names, there's a company that you really want to work with. And you think you can really do great things for them. And you get this opportunity to work with them, only it's not doing the kind of thing that you want to be doing for them. Do you take that job or not? And there are a number of things that factor into that. There is, of course, the decision of taking this on, will it be able to get our foot in the door and that will enable us to do the kind of work for them that we want to do?
And we're ridiculously optimistic, and the answer to that question is almost always yes. Well, yeah, it feels like some progress, we'll build the relationship and work our way in that way. Do we need the business? Like, do we have time to take this on and give it the attention that it deserves? How are we doing on cash? When money starts to enter the picture, that really influences the kinds of decisions that you make. Sticking to your process is fine until you have payroll coming up and you realize that you're going to have to borrow money to cover payroll or something.
So those checklists work really great when the stakes don't necessarily impact other people's lives in very personal ways. The moment you're looking at, like, am I going to be able to pay this person? Are they going to be able to make their rent because we decided this project didn't fit our criteria? And that's a very dangerous position to be in as a business because from a positioning standpoint, you are the work that you do. And so if the work that you're doing is not aligned to what you want your position to be, you're starting to head down a path that can be really difficult to come back from.
Tim (31:24):
It sounds like over the last 20 years you've been a builder of various things, of organizations, products, community.
David (31:32):
I enjoy being around that, for sure. Again, like so much of what I've been fortunate enough to be a part of, has been the result of me making good decisions about who to spend my time with. Finding the right collaborators, conspirators, there's a lot of power in being able to do that. And I'm certainly appreciative of the people who have been willing to commit their valuable time and intelligence to letting me be a part of all of that, for sure. Like, I love starting things, like most creatives, it's a lot more interesting to start it, then sometimes it is to finish it or to continue to run it. But, I think I've done a good job of finding ways to keep that part of it interesting. So that I'm able to kind of see things through for the most part.
Tim (32:25):
I think I had one last question I was going to ask you. If you were to give a talk at CreativeMornings, what would your talk be?
David (32:32):
Hmm. That's a good question. I think I could certainly come to CreativeMornings and talk about like running a CreativeMornings chapter. That would certainly fit the bill or whatever. But I don't know if that's the thing that I'm most passionate about talking about now anymore. I'm not sure like, what is, really at this point, given the pandemic and the political environment and everything. It's hard to think about anything other than that these days. But I guess, maybe this concept of trying to adopt a perspective of curiosity and interest in growing and changing and like understanding the world. To me, that is the thing that is largely missing from most of what's happening with humanity right now. Is just a general lack of interest in understanding how the world can be perceived differently by different people.
We see this in design and in product design a lot where you think, you know, how something should work. And so you design some experience a certain way, or you write copy a certain way. And then what you realize after it gets tested, or you get feedback from the customer is that like, you had it wrong. Like, you misunderstood some really fundamental point of view or perspective. It's not like a functional requirement or something. It's just that there was a different intent that initiated the need for that product to exist. We run into that a lot in design and it's great cause it's a signal and we can adapt and learn from that.
We don't have those usability tests in the real world that give us that kind of signal. All we have is, the headlines that we read, or the tweets that come out or whatever. And they don't really dig into the points of view about like, why does somebody think that it's a good idea to drill for oil in the Arctic National (Wildlife) Refuge? Like, I don't understand why, like how could that possibly seem like a good idea to somebody? And yet there's a bunch of people who are highly educated, well-informed, and they're fighting for this thing. Right? I can dismiss that out of hand and say, Oh, they're just greedy and motivated by money. But you know, a lot of those people are probably doing just fine, like the financial upside for them isn't a material concern. It is some other part of it.
So we don't have a very good way of understanding what's driving other people's thinking. And I think that that's a big challenge ahead of us, for sure. So that might be one direction.
Tim (35:16):
That's a great talk!
David (35:16):
Yeah.
Tim (35:16):
Well, thanks, Dave. I really appreciate you-
David (35:18):
Hey, thank you-
Tim (35:19):
Joining me today to chat.
David (35:20):
I appreciate the invitation and congratulations on getting this going. This is exciting.
Tim (35:24):
Oh yeah. This is the start of my CreativeMornings, in which I go out and I learn from people and let's see if it changes me 17 years later. (laughs)
David (35:35):
Yeah. Well, I wish you all the best with it, and of course anything I can do to help, please be sure to let me know.
Tim (35:40):
Wonderful.
David (35:43):
Alright.
Tim (35:43):
Talk to you soon.