And I was actually talk about kind of a
theme that it's a theme that I really
enjoy speaking on I've been a
designer for these 25 years and I
realized that I'm a pretty good
designer but a much better teacher so if
I come off as a business popping things
pedantic just bear with me "Howdy", you know?
I would love to go through my long and
beautiful career and all the work that
I've done in my life but let's just
suffice it to say that I'm in the moment
and the ways that you can keep in touch
with me is we do very groovy Instagram
and the best thing to do would be to
subscribe at jamesvictore.com and we
will send you the newsletter,
our newsletter goes out to
MailChimp and our numbers
are off the hook
the read rate, the open rate are nuts
we keep the national averages AS so
we do a good job. So, when I was a child I was full of
wordplay and I was always drawing on
everything and I, in school I drew on the
books which I was not
supposed to do and I talk out of water which you're
not supposed to do I was called "creative"
and this was not, I learned, it was not a
compliment. Something I learned very
early on that my creativity was not
condoned, was not fostered, was not
encouraged in school or in my own house
and it's funny because if I had let that
dampen my spirits I don't know
what track I would be on right now.
I'm very curious. I've never really
thought about what I would be
doing if I gave up. Right? So actually
here, here is actually picture of me when I was a kid.
I've changed a bit, I've changed a bit
[laugh from the audience] I think you guys are familiar
with this idea of growing up creative or
or or as I call it growing up being the
weird kid, right? And the one, the thing
that we hear all the time is this
why can't you be normal? Right? It's funny
because Malcolm Gladwell had this
idea, that he liked to talk about it like
the 10,000 hours to become an expert at
something, to become a considered an
expert. My 10,000 hours
fewer 10,000 hours started very early my
10,000 hours started when I was five years old
My mother would take me shopping with
her, I was small enough to walk
underneath the dress racks, right?
And we would leave the store and she'd
look down
Oh Jimmy, because I would have a handful
of tags that I ripped, and I was curating,
I was collecting,
I was testing my visual acuity I
was collecting things because of their
color or because of I did not
know what it was, the typography or
imagery, right? My earliest, earliest
creative memories is when I think I must
have been like three or four I just had
a long conversation with my mom another today and
she's like "Oh, I remember that" and
we lived in the Air Force, near the Air
Force. We traveled a lot in,
I think, New Mexico and there was a
backyard about this
big and it was all concrete and
my older sisters had left out their
crayons. Earliest visual memory was
seeing this puddle of melted crayons and
it's funny because I'm not really going
to show one project, I am not going
to show a lot of work but that's
what I do for a living. The word play
that's what I do for a living, the puns
that's why I do for a living. The drawing
on everything that's what I do for a
living. Why can't I be normal? Because
this is what fucking normal looks like
I don't want fucking normal, you don't
want normal. Normal is lifeless, normal DISCOUNTS. [on the picture]
So the idea that I've been out
teaching these days is called the
things that made you weird as a kid make
you great today
right? [claps] The idea is. I love it. Tapped clap. You know, we all born wildly creative,
wildly creative, full of word play,
full of ideas.
George [Wheelwright] & [Edwin H.] Land, I don't know if you guys
know George [Edwin H.] Land in the late 50s
he invented the land camera. Early smart guy
He was taking pictures
with brownie and his daughter said
"Opening scene" and he thought: "Oh, shit so he
invented the land camera that became
Polaroid, right? He was a
jack-of-all-trades interested in
creativity he did a test and he found
a group of fifteen hundred
five-year-olds and he measured them for
15 years and at five years old
93% were highly creative at ten years
old 45 percent were highly creative, at fifteen years old
it's down to like 15% are
highly creative and he didn't have any
answers but you have to think the most
important question in the world. He says: "Where goes it go?"
You guys know, you guys know
where it goes it's not taught in school
it's not fostered as I said before but
the biggest reason the biggest reason
that we give away our creativity is
to fit in, to find our tribe,
the reason we lack creativity in our culture
is we're just afraid to be wrong, afraid
to make a fool of ourselves, right?
I like this idea and I talk about it
For the last year I've been the I've
written a column regularly for the
entrepreneur magazine, the last page of
entrepreneur magazine I write and I
illustrate it and we used this idea of
the things that make you weird
as a kid will make you great tomorrow.
because when I wrote this literally in
the gutter of my sketchbooks and just
photographed it within the magazine I
was working on I was working on
a new book and I was literally thinking
about me as a kid being creative and the
response to a little lack of response to it,
you know? I had an assistant last
year, my last year in New York we had an
assistant from Moscow. She was
working for an Internet company, huge
company that made tons of money but she
had a very uncreative job and she knew
about us and she came to New York to
work with us and after she got
comfortable with us we were having
the drinks and she told me this story,
she says: James, when I was a little
girl I loved my parents so much
and I was an artist
I wanted to show my parents how
much I loved them so I drew the best
picture I could of them on the wall in
my bedroom. You guys know what's going on up, right?
So she invites her parents in and they
flip, they flip and she's telling me the
story with tears in her eyes because she
knows right that in there they killed her
creatively, just [pop] like a cigarette butt,
right? So the reason that this idea is
important a reason I know we can fact
check everything we find precedent for
everything if we're going to put it down
in the world we have to find a precedent
for it
it sounds very funny to say things I made
as a kid make me great today
but there's precedent for it and the
president is the thing that says in the
particular lies the universal that
means your hopes and fears and the
things that you love are important to
other people as well and the more you
can access and the more authentic and
more vulnerable you can be, the more
meaning it'll have for other people and
when I first heard about this idea
it was from this very charming chap
named James Joyce and I was reading a
old copy of 'Dubliners' and in
'Dubliners' there's like I don't know
what's the number of chapters. Each
chapter is a part of his life from birth.
The last chapter is called Death and
I'm reading it foreword and James Joyce
is saying: In each chapter I'm describing
people in my life, the people I loved
and the people I hated
It's called 'Dubliners' because it is his hometown
he said, I can describe my hometown I
will be describing everywhere
because in the particular lies the
universal, right? I've never noticed. Have you
seen this picture before, right? How do you
ever know that, that is his head is going
one way and his hat is going another
like they said, hey we're
....., lets go
and his head just sat.
So recently, oddly enough, recently I was
reading another book another something
else that someone wants to read
very often, someone I was talking to, and I was
reading one of my favorite poets from
nine hundred years ago - Rumi, and
there's a line inside one of Rumi's poems
that James Joyce must have
seen but Rumi says it even in a more
beautiful way, of course, he said: "In the
particular glows the universal, it doesn't
just lie there it glows, right? So that's
your particular, your sense of the
Macao, your sense of sexuality, your sense
of who you are. That's the best, most
important tool you have, like I'm the
last guy people will come to for
practical or responsible advice
but this is the best business advice I can
give you because this is how you find
your audience, not an audience, you don't wanna
sell to everybody because they don't
care, you wanna find your audience.
Somebody writes me recently and they were
afraid, cause he said, I'm afraid my audience
is going to dry up. If someone
buys Toulouse-Lautrec posters they don't
have one,
they've got as many as they can get don't
worry about that. Just be you.
Just put it out there.
So this idea in a particular lies
universal is important but and that's a
fussy but, out of focus, but it only
works if you put it in your work, it only
works if you put it in your work, if you
hoard it if you keep it close to your
chest if you don't let people know who
you are and this gift that you happen to
have in you, it's a sin.
it's just a sin because you've got
to put it out in the world you've got to
test it, you've got to let it go
I mean that, Jesus Christ, we're freaking
awesome. People are wearing
shirts that says what? Keep Austin what?
Weird. [Austin's slogan] So I'll take you
through a
project that we did two years ago
it's kind of fitting to do it right now
because this project all the work
in this project is now hanging in the
exhibition of Cooper Hewitt [museum] in New York
right now. And it's a project for a
client that you would never think that
you could do good work for or that you
never think that you could do your work
for, right? So the thing about the things
that make you weird as a kid or in the
particular lies universal here's the
thing. One. When you understand this and
you accept this in your life,
you never have to make anything up,
you never have to make anything up. My answer,
any time any project comes in, it's very
simple I say, hmm what do I think? What do
I want have to say here. Two.
And this is the biggest, it allows you
to be you, right? 'cause you don't have to try
to be somebody you don't have to change.
I had this assistant before the
Russian girl, I had an assistant and
every time a job came in I became like
an old school one, I was working
with the ruler basically all the time
because every time a job came in, you
know, you go: Oh what do they want?
I'm like what they, I don't know what
they want. They want us. Just put your
knuckles out, right? They want us, get to
know this. They come to you because they
want you already, right? So the DOP I
don't know if you know this, it is the
Department of
Probation. I don't know if you know what
that means because you're all good
people, outstanding but it means
you're in New York City having a really
good time maybe too good and you do
something kind of dumb and you get
arrested but it's not so bad that you
have to go to jail but you have to go to
the DOP and you probably have to go to the
DOP depending on the severity of your
stupidity, you have to go to DOP once a month,
twice a month, whatever and when you go
there it's just a big ugly office like
like, like I don't even know like a DOP
I would like to say the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]
but I've been to the DMV
and it is quite nice [laughs from the audience]
If it was like in Dante's vision of hell,
right? It would be below the French and
maybe above I don't know ...
So we got the gig
along with a pal of mine who's an
architect to redesign the 33 hubs,
33 offices of inner city Department
of Probation and from the ceiling tiles
that were falling down to the
in urine soaked carpets. The whole thing.
We got rid of everything.
It was just a horrible place to be in
basically when you go to the DOP you
better have your afternoon free,
there not anything going on
because you're going to sit and wait
you're going to sign some papers and then
you're going to sit down again,
you're going to talk to somebody
then you will sit down again, right?
So let me give you an idea.
When we first got there this was their,
their, what's called, how guys you call it?
UI/UX? Is that right?
This was their user experience, right?
The signage, the signage, all this different signs.
They were glass in cases,
with those locks
like they have them in gun shops, right?
or like art stores where they have
nice ..., right? So, we finally got,
We were touring some of these early offices and
we got in and we said, we have to open
it up and see what's inside there,
They were like: Oh, we have no key,
Wow. So we get in there and there were
literally documents from the 80-s, just
dust covers. They haven't been
updated any of their paperwork.
Nobody cared, basically, nobody cared
and when you went in, you talk to people
through a, through a hole in the glass
like you were buying booze in Russia or
you know, and these big huge wooden benches,
massive wooden benches, just big enough
that you couldn't stab anybody with
So this huge wooden benches and
you're saying: Well, would it look sweet in
my house, right? Do you know how much sage
you have to burn to get karma out of
that? So here I'll give you a tour,
a quick tour of the old DOP.
Welcome! Have a seat.
Shut the hell up, right? but this is the
signage, this is their signage, it basically says you have
no friends, you have no enemies, I mean
there's no family, no nothing, right?
It says, NO EATING, NO DRINKING, NO SMOKING,
and someone had to foresight and said:
"I think they should sit back straight
in there", you know, their wisdom.
I am not like a designer's Designer, like the space between words this way, the space between that, I don't really care about,
like I'm not one of those guys but
when it says NO SLEEPING IS
ALLOWED IN THIS AREA I don't know if you can see,
the only only thing they did correctly
in this thing was that they said THANK YOU on the bottom. That's important.
That's important. So we're, we're
I know, I wish I had that
So we get the job to redesign the
basically the, this another like fancy
word for, basically the signs that say
TO THE BATHROOM and
the way find it, and, you know, update their paperwork
they didn't even have a logo,
like every New York city office has a logo
they didn't even have one. So we're in
the studio and we're thinking about this
gig and we've just been asked for that
thin elemental of design,
color and typography that's like the
first thing we can do and it does
a lot, just color and typography is
important. They had neither at this
point but I said, listen there's, there's
not a lot of room in the budget and
there's not a lot of time we had like
literally two weeks because basically
the way it worked is City Hall is
they get your money you have to use it
in a very short time frame where you
don't get the next allotment of money
and working with the city in that way
was really tricky, not fun
but we didn't have a lot of time and we
didn't even have much of a budget but
I said you know what we should do and
here's the test of your
"In a particular lies universal" Here's
when you know you have a good idea and
it goes like this. You're hanging out
with some friends and you're thinking
about a job or you're saying, Oh, what are
you working on your job? You
looked up this thing and you have maybe a beer or two
or you're chatting and
at some point you go like this, you know, you know
would be really good, right?
Whatever you're thinking let's just do it,
just do it. So we've got to that point and I said,
You know what would be really good? When I was a child, there was
a poster that said
"Hanging there, Kitty" and I said, that's
what I think that's what this client
would like. They have nothing but time.
They going to just walk around and look
out the window or read something they
should sit up straight or whatever.
Let's make some inspirational,
motivational posters. So we did.
We suggested them and they said, fine
because there wasn't a lot of time
and we were working with the
boss, working with the guy,
Vince Shiraldi, real sweetie, real genius and
he was the perfect client and I hope
that you guys get an option to have
a client like this who just says, there's a
lot of kickback on a lot of what we did
but a lot got through, it is pretty
surprising. So what we did is we just
move forward and we made motivational
posters based on these things.
You know well how these things work, right?
So this guy was in the gym at
where I used to live and
in the men's room as I walked out
to go to go into the gym I would look at
this eagle and I would say, oh thank you.
For you I'm going to do ten more push-ups. Eagle.
You know eagle it's just so funny the eagle
just says VISION, right, cause
eagles have good eyesight, so we started
making our posters and
our Eagle says THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS
and we basically wrote these blocks
of text underneath these posters to kind
of reaffirms because this client
has nothing but time they can read, right?
So someone says "do the work,
the process is everything if you cheat,
you compromise your
transformation and come out of the other
side unchanged." Still a knucklehead.
We didn't write a knucklehead,
ours said asshole.
They didn't like that. And if you don't
like doing the work the first time
you're going to hate doing it again.
Do the work. And the way we came up with
this tone was I have a 19 year old son
this way I'd like to talk to him.
because I felt quite frankly that this client had not
been spoken to directly like that for a
while, right? So we did the bunch of goofy
things. We added a bunch of logos
because I think the poster without a
logo just doesn't look that good.
I put a logo on that it's just
like, damn, someone spending money on that.
It must mean something, right? So we we
made a bunch of goofy logos. And this one
also says "Stop smoking", I just thought it
was good idea. Now we have to jet a team
work so we used jets and our jets say
ASK FOR HELP
This is the place to ask for help
you don't want to come back here, they
don't want you back here, ask for help
the hardest thing to do in the world,
right? I won't even tell you about that
the farting moon. We don't have long
enough here to talk about these things. So we did
the footprints in the sand. Classic.
So we did footprints, we turned our
footprints upside down. It says
DOES IMPROVE YOURSELF. CHANGE THE WORLD.
START HERE START SMALL, pretty good advice
Just start. Starting is the hardest part,
right? And momentum is your fact,
once you start, don't stop.
Then, of course, the beach scene, it says VISION
underneath, cause beaches have good vision [laughs]
So we used the beach scene and we turned it
sideways we called it LESSON IN
PERSPECTIVE. Our lesson in
perspective is that you have no friends
you have no enemies you only have
teachers. This is straight out of Viktor Frankl.
Like if you can understand,
you could possibly with the right
attitude and the right perspective learn from your
worst tormentor, right? Then you're a
genius. Then you have self-knowledge.
So this is what the stuff looks like, we get, they all
have little fake cigarette warning.
This warning says
THIS TOO SHALL PASS
little hero logo, a victim logo but we
cross that one out. Little thumbs up
that's what the place looks like now
this what looks like now. Really quickly
I know that time is running out really
quickly. Picking colors for the
furniture was like showing them the
screens and they were like, oh no we can't
agree, like oh that's okay this
furniture comes in orange, too, ,oh no we
cannot have orange. Why? They're both
gang colors.
Can we go backwards and you can tell us what gang colors are?
and we can, you know, I said ok, what is it?
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
indigo, violet, brown, you know,
this shit don't come seen through.
So again this is what it looks like and I said
it started with the kitty poster and
this Kitty poster has a whole
long story too but what happened is,
you know, we presented our change
It'll get better, hold on. So it's not getting better. Oh, well.
We started with this, we started
with Let Go Kitty, let go everything
you've come from the past that brought you to
this point so just let go, hanging in there is
not good advice, keep doing what you're
doing [laughs]
run faster but the problem is and I
wanted to tell you the huge long story
but in the final meeting where we had to
meet 40 other people in the DOP there
was a voice in the back at the very end
of the meeting after Vince Shiraldi had left
the meeting I was like, no stay, he's like it's okay,
you know. The floor was
opened up for questions and a little
girl in the back raise your hand, she said
I think the Kitty poster will inspire some
people to commit suicide.
So we lost the kitty, lost the kitty and
replaced it with the universe and
there's one little planet circled over
there and it says this is your anus [laughs], so if you're like
10 years old and you go with DOP
that's the funny shit [laughs]
So again, this idea of the things that made you as a kid
make you great today, if you put it in
your work if you put it in your life
I have adult mentees, people I train
through Skype, and why not, we talk to
every month and they're just trying to
be themselves. I have a gal [girl] who
has been, she's been LGBT her whole life
and nobody knows and I'm like, that must
be a horrible burden. She's like, yes it is,
the next time we've talked she said I
came out to my mother and everything's
cool. I like Ahh. And the funny thing
she has this other things, she've got this
duality in her work and she's
like but I go to these LGBT parties and I
write poetry on these beautiful
naked bodies but for a living I can't tell
anybody I do that. I said here's a new
website. You've got a new website
You've got two buttons.
you've got good girl and bad girl
And she is, I love this! The second time we
talked she said I've got the new website
it's a good girl and a bad girl and If you
click on good girl it says "Nothing to
see here go to bad girl" [laughs]
Just own it. This is how you find your people.
The true audience. Listen, it's about
celebrating yourself, celebrating your
creativity and it's so hard to do.
I know. I know. I'm trying every day and I mean
it's like privileged atmosphere
when I am freaking white male middle
class whatever but you know what, as far
as what happened two days ago [Trump's election] our
creativity is going to be threatened
your ability to be just who the fuck you
are is going to be threatened. So own up to it,
live up to it, celebrated it. Thank you!
You guys are awesome! [clapping]
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