We were lucky to catch up with Bryan Maddock recently and have shared our conversation below.

Bryan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happy a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

Even as someone who has worked professionally as an architect in leading design practices around the world, I always wondered “could my time be used better than this?” As artists, I think there is still some mental pre-programming that our work is only as good as what we can charge for it, and this conceit got even stranger when you work a structured 60 hour work week for clients that don’t necessarily know what it takes to be ‘creative’ or to deliver the results they expect. I always think about daily work-life anecdotes from the lives of some of my favorite writers, such as Haruki Murakami, where a 4-5 hour creative morning session was the maximum they could spend on work for it to be productive or useful. The rest of the day could then be whatever it needed to be—ultimately reserving it for other aspects of life.

While teaching at ASU, my mornings were reserved for pursuing new experiments such as Dimensions. Eventually those creative mornings replaced the teaching side gig and became the primary focus of my day—a day that was completely generated by my own interests and energies rather than a day structured by the deadlines of others. Now, the Dimensions project continues to grow and evolve, but that idea of building something creative that puts the hours and priorities of each day back in my own hands hasn’t gone away.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an architect and the founder of dimensions.com which is a visual database of the dimensions of everything. Dimensions started back in 2018 as a side project launched by my architectural thinktank, Fantastic Offense, but during the pandemic it became the primary focus of our team. Everyday, we research, draw, and publish new topics to the database across all aspects of life from furniture, fixtures, and objects to animals, sports, and pop culture. While we started the effort to support designers with these basic 2D and 3D building blocks of the world around us, the audience that organically discovered the site through Google searching has really expanded the scope and the ambitions of the project. We are now essentially building a visual Wikipedia of the world piece by piece for users of all backgrounds and interests.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Design education is one of the most critical forms of needed knowledge for our world that is graduating more ‘content creators’ than ever before. As more jobs are automated and more children are raised on social platforms and digital technologies, we are obviously entering into a future that will have more ‘freelancers’ than ever before. While freelancing was traditionally a term used for creatives from writers, illustrators, and web designers, I think we are going to increasingly see other industries escaping traditional work schedules and adopting business models where we are ‘designing’ our own companies and brands. These skills and critical thinking exercises should begin being taught earlier in our lives and should be part of the core skills of upcoming generations.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

For my own personal breakthrough regarding design as a business, I laid down the rule that ‘design is not a service industry.’ This is a little bit of a head scratcher to explain as a business model, but I believe that intrinsically the best designers and creatives are essentially inventors or have the desire to invent and innovate. Finding a way to invent and experiment on your own dime is absolutely essential in breaking from the expectations of the typical gigs. It took me multiple years of credit cards and minimal savings to float Dimensions before it become self sustaining. For anything creative I think the decisions should be in the hands of the artists and now we are in a situation where Dimensions can continue to evolve in the way we want it to as opposed to a way that would be influenced by a client or investors. It keeps the work unique and authentic and this is something that our users can feel.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dimensions.com
• Instagram: dimensionscom
• Twitter: dimensionscom