We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Austin Woods a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Austin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I’m happy to have a career that I absolutely love. I’m fortunate enough to have started work at a young age and found the value of a dollar as a kid. My parent’s both worked hard and taught my brother and I that if we want something we have to work for it, nothing is just handed to you. I’ve worked tons of jobs since I was a kid. I’ve done everything from landscaping, car wash, bartending, starving artists, retail, manual labor, all the way to corporate jobs. I’ve found that if you want to connect with all audiences you need to understand people to a core and be able to communicate with all types of people and backgrounds.

I’m extremely thankful to have a wife and family that has always supported me and my business adventures. I’ve played guitar and sang since I was about 12 and over the years it has put me through school and always been the best outlet and something I’ll do till I die. My dad has played guitar his whole life and he taught me at 12 in which I immediately fell in love with it. During college music helped me pay my way and live while working a part time retail job and being a full time student. I can still remember going to college, setting my gear up on stage over my lunch break, going back to school till 9 at night, going straight to a gig, playing till midnight and then having class at 7 so I could pay rent.

Thankfully now I’m able to marry my passion for music, art, and design as a full time career. I founded and own a design studio Syfer Design where I get to create graphics, branding, experiential design, and wayfinding during the day and play music at nights and weekends with my band Northwoods in Denver, CO. Playing music is now something I get to do and not something I have to do to live. It’s now so much more fun and allows me to access another creative part of my mind.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started my professional career out as a Project Manager and Operations Manager but quickly found that I wanted something more creative and challenging in life when the company I worked for closed their doors. I went back to school for Graphic Design and started a job at an architecture and interior design firm right out of school. It was a challenge starting out in a non-traditional graphic design space but found a massive passion for combining graphics from a digital side to a physical space. This is when I started getting into Experiential Graphic Design, 3D modeling, and way-finding.

In 2020 I founded Syfer Design, with my long time colleague Andy. Andy and I worked together developing EGD (Experiential Graphic Design) projects at previous design studios and joked years back that if we were to ever start our own studio it no doubt would be with each other. In 2020 that dream came to reality and Syfer Design was built.

Syfer Design is a full service design, build, and creative agency located in Dallas, TX and Denver, CO. We specialize in helping people make connections with the places they visit and inhabit. We do this by creating visceral relationships that belong to the place. We are experts in taking a brand and expressing it into the physical environment through experiential graphic design.

Our main goal is to illustrate our clients values and individuality through design. We have over 29 years of experience in exhibit design, graphic design, architecture, wayfinding, signage, branding, construction documentation, project management, 3D modeling, and rendering.

Any advice for managing a team?

I would say the best way to manage a team and keep everyone’s spirits high is to get everyone on the same page from day one and communicate all milestones and expectations from day one. In graphic design, architecture, and EGD most people get burned out very quickly because you are expected to work on very tight deadlines and a lot of “oh could you just do this real quick” come up often. If you have milestones in place, open lines of communication, a team that knows they can count on one another, and a genuine respect for team members time and skills then you will have a successful project and team. If someone has to work a bit later on a project, give them a day off, leave early, put out a bonus incentive, anything to let them know you are acknowledging their hard work and dedication. At the end of the day you want your team to be happy and words of affirmation are great but they don’t pay the bills. Giving team members extra time off, and bonuses are what they want.

I would say knowing each person’s strengths and weaknesses are a massive aspect of laying out the proper groundwork for success. If you have a junior designer on a project, you must have your expectations set at a lower level, build in the time and energy to make sure that person is taken care of, trained, and understands how to properly design a project. This will help them not feel so overwhelmed, doomed, and like they actually have someone that supports them, their career, and is there to help them succeed at their profession.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Syfer Design started with 2 designers eager and ready to change the way a company operates and designs for the better of the world and people around. Unfortunately this dream started in the middle of the Covid pandemic. I had just bought a house and was ready to hit the ground running in Denver. I thrive in a social setting where I can meet people in person and get to know them in a genuine way but that wasn’t an option due to Covid at the time. Andy and I had a handful of clients already set to work with and quickly they started putting projects on hold and eventually we had no clients at all and all our projects went on hold. We decided to get other jobs until the world settled down and went “back to normal” for a little over a year.

Fast forward a little over a year and the world was slowly coming back to life. I finished up some of the projects I was working on or got them to a space where I could hand off. I decided that if we wanted to really bring this dream to life we had to put all our chips on the table. Andy and I both quit our “pandemic” jobs and put all our money into Syfer Design. Nothing sets a fire under you more than emptying all savings and retirement funds. With the support from our amazing families having our backs and moral support we set out to change the world of design again. We chased projects all over the world and put in more proposals in 2 years than I ever have in my life. After multiple failed project pursuits, we stuck it out and finally started winning some projects. We pour our hearts and souls into every project and have continued to be genuine and dedicated to delivering the best to our clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://syferdesign.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/syfer_design/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SyferDesignLLC
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/syfer-design-llc
• Other: https://www.northwoodsband.com/