We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Russell Shaw. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Russell below.

Russell, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I have been thinking a lot about the gulf between “taste” and “craft” lately—the gap between the work that you envision and aspire to in your mind, and the reality of how it measures up to your original idea once it is tangible, executed, and right there in front of you. In school and starting out, you learn all of these amazing things and are exposed to a whole world of great art and design, and it sets your mind on fire to create things and join in that chorus. But what you are able to actually produce often misses the full vision of grandeur. Even if other people love it and think it’s perfect! As the craftsperson, the clarity of hindsight makes you intimately aware of how something could have been pushed further, tightened up, or made even stronger. I used to find this to be a hard reality, but I now believe it is a really healthy tension for a creative person: your craft should always chase after your taste. A good balance lies in a constant unrest that drives you to make the next project better; to learn from the ways that the project you just finished may have come up a little short, and apply that learning to the next one. Each project hones your craft further like trial by fire; you are refined by the thing that you make so that, when you finish it, you see that it could have been even better because the very process of making it shaped you along the way as well. Taste requires vision; craft requires skill. If your taste stops advancing, then you become myopic and closed off. If your craft stops advancing, then you become complacent to recreate the same things in the same ways. I learned the craft itself through tons of books, tons of classes and workshops, tons of hours spent on online courses and poring over articles—but those are just the technical skills. In an era where AI could soon replace the craftsperson on a technical level, learning the skill is not what will turn a competent creative professional into a great one. But (so far) AI seems incapable of understanding taste, broader cultural contexts, and deeper abstraction. That level of thought is what makes work feel human. So while I never want to stop layering on more skills and learning new things, the things I’m most interested in lately are broadening my imagination of what’s possible, trying to make things in new ways, injecting humanity and playfulness, and being exposed to culture and conversation from contexts outside of my own industry. This requires getting offline, not taking in the same inspiration as everyone else, and having room to breathe, think, and reflect. Push your vision to keep expanding and never plateau or “arrive,” and then train your craft to always chase after it.

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’m an independent creative director, brand designer, and illustrator. I like to think about brands and design work from the 30,000 foot view down to the finest details—working on the strategy, the systems, and the “Big Idea,” but then also creating, building, and refining it into reality. Sometimes that looks like helping a new business owner craft a brand from the ground up; sometimes that looks like helping larger organizations establish brand guidelines or launch a campaign; sometimes that looks like designing and illustrating new books, media, or products. I enjoy working with a wide range of project types across a wide range of industries. The work is always changing, but the creative processes applied stay relatively the same. I think that being able to bring the strategic side and the creative side together have been a competitive advantage. Illustration and graphic design weave into a lot of the brand design work because businesses and organizations are always looking for a fresh, distinct, and ownable style and library of assets in a rapidly-changing, increasingly-visual landscape. And visual design as “art” needs a communication vehicle in order for it to be functional and usable by real people. I’m not really interested in designing work for my own sake. I like making things that people will engage with, use, touch, react to—and hopefully it adds some delight to their day. Most recently, I designed and illustrated a children’s book for The HISTORY Channel called This Day in History for Kids, which is a daily visual journey through time to teach kids about major events, inventions, and ideas. I also recently consulted as a creative director and designer for Docusign’s rebrand alongside their amazing internal brand team, and created work to help this huge organization tell a new story as they expand what it is that they do. I’ve worked with Slack, Loom, Figma, LinkedIn, Pentagram, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Walgreens, New York Magazine, The National World War II Museum, HarperCollins, Hearst Communications, The Village Voice, and more. I wear a lot of different hats, but to me it’s all the same practice—“practice” being the operative word: it’s a craft, a trade, a discipline, and an orientation. Whatever it is that we are creating, I love figuring it out, making it beautiful, and setting it into the wild for others to interact with.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I actually started out as a freelance designer. That wasn’t what I thought would happen, but it’s the way things worked out. By my junior and senior year of college, I was attending classes and keeping up with schoolwork, but then staying up late and building a steady amount of client work on the side. Honestly, by the time I graduated, I was mostly doing client work rather than class assignments anymore. I had a job lined up at a great agency, but I was graduating into the Great Recession and that job evaporated quickly (and hiring really stalled just about everywhere else too). In the spring semester before graduation, I talked with a mentor whom I had interned with in the past and expressed to him that I was really unsure of what to do next. He offered a simple response: “It seems like you’re already doing it. So just keep doing it.” I hadn’t really considered graduating and going freelance full-time right out of the gate, but it did make sense—I could keep overhead costs pretty low, join a shared studio space in Atlanta with a few clients I was already working with, and strike out on my own. So that’s what I did. In the beginning, it was definitely tough and required a lot of late nights, long hours, and endless hustle. But seven years or so passed like that, and I had the privilege to work with some truly amazing companies and agencies on everything from national campaigns to a New York Times best-selling children’s book to a live, on-stage design competition at a national conference. I even got to teach design courses, which I loved. Somewhere along the way, I had a truly inspiring conversation with one of my favorite designers, Stefan Sagmeister. He said that it sounded like I had been on a similar trajectory to him so he wanted to give me some advice he wished he had received earlier on when he was in my shoes: pick a place that resembles the type of company or studio that I would want to someday open, go work there for a little while, and consider it as a sort of real-world “graduate school.” He said that there is a business side to the design industry that has nothing to do with theories or aesthetics, and it can only be learned by seeing it in practice by others. I’m stubborn, and didn’t take it to heart right away, but soon enough I did feel that I was ready to act on this advice. A recruiter from Slack reached out to me around the same time to see if I would join as a founding member of their newly-forming brand design team in San Francisco. I know that, for most people, taking the leap to work for yourself is the biggest and scariest risk. But for me, I’d had the opposite path: all I had ever known was working for myself, and changing lanes to working in-house seemed terrifying. But I also remembered Sagmeister’s advice, and really wanted to learn the ins-and-outs of one brand very closely, at a huge scale, for this creative rocket ship of a company. For me, moving in-house was the big pivot and required a whole lot of re-wiring. But the result was exactly right: I got to work closely on a whole other side of the equation, and it was like the pieces of the puzzle all fell into place. I was there for a few years, worked as Brand Design Lead, and got to art direct some amazing illustrators on a company magazine, walk through the rebrand process with Pentagram, design pieces around the IPO, and work on an international ad campaign. The learning was non-stop. After a while, though, I was struck by the fact that: it wasn’t for me! And honestly, that was just as important a lesson as anything else. If I had continued to freelance forever, I think I would have been eaten up by “what ifs” around the idea of joining a traditional career track and always wondered about it. I now knew definitively because I tried it out, and knew still that it was time to pivot again. I rallied a list of new relationships as well as some former clients, and went back to working for myself—but this time, equipped with the knowledge of what work looks like for internal creative teams, working with well-known illustrators and design consultants, huge agencies, marketing departments and sales teams, what competitive pricing and pitches really look like, and what branding really is: less about a logo design, and more about consistent, committed storytelling to the right audience. That was a little over five years ago. It transformed my practice and increased the scale and quality of my work in so many ways.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Again, I think that, for me, it’s about making things for people. One of the all-time greats, Saul Bass, once said, “I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” I love that; I admire that. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the premise. But I do think that pursuing creative work has the power to influence culture in the right direction if it is done well. Beauty can propel movement in others. So I’d propose a little twist: I want to make beautiful things that make people care. The world around us is being designed whether we like it or not—these systems and decisions are not arbitrary. They are deliberate choices made my someone. We get to ask ourselves the question: are we designing the world we want? I want more beauty; more intentionality; more joy; more delight; more thoughtfulness; more soul. Let’s make it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.russellshawdesign.com