19: Doing Design with Sam Gwilt

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Today we are joined by Sam Gwilt, he’s an Industrial Designer based in Great Britain, currently working at LAYER Design. As an advocate for the industry, Sam is dedicated to promoting the value of industrial design and encouraging the next generation of designers; but you may know him best for; ‘Hi I’m Sam & I do design.’

Hosted by Lucy Bishop and Fraser Greenfield with guest Sam Gwilt

Sam Does Design
Sam Does Design - YouTube
The Industrial Design Portfolio That Landed My Dream Job!
Follow Sam on Instagram | @sam_does_design
Follow Sam on Twitter | @sam_does_design
Sam Gwilt - Industrial Designer - Layer_design | LinkedIn
LAYER Design
​​REDACTED: Episode 10 - Chasing the Dragon with Jon Marshall
REDACTED: Episode 15 - Adding Value with Anson Cheung

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To follow the show, get in contact with us via email & more head to:

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Transcript

(REDACTED) Episode 19 - Draft 2

[00:00:00] Sam Gwilt: Please hold whilst we connect you to
[00:00:07] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: redacted.
[00:00:21] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: This is Fraser Greenfield.
[00:00:22] Sam Gwilt: Lucy Bishop. Hey, I'm Sam IU Design and you're
listening to Red, productive Protective, protective.
[00:00:29] Lucy Bishop: Today we're joined by Sam Quilt. He's an industrial
designer based in Great Britain working at Leer Design. As an advocate for the
industry, Sam is dedicated to promoting the value of industrial design,
encouraging the next generation of designers.
[00:00:45] Lucy Bishop: How did you first discover the field of industrial
design?
[00:00:48] Sam Gwilt: All designers have very similar stories. It's like one of
two. One is like you wanted to go into architecture or graphics and then found
design afterwards. But then the other category is like [00:01:00] I just carried on
doing design at school. I was lucky to have lessons at school about it.
[00:01:05] Sam Gwilt: I just carried on doing those subjects and I fall into that
category really early on at my GCSEs, which is I think when you're like 13 or
14 in the uk. I think my school was a technology. And they offered product
design. They offered graphics, they offered textiles, and they also offered
resistant materials, which is like getting into the workshop and making things
outta wood and metal.
[00:01:28] Sam Gwilt: And I enjoyed that and I had a great teacher there. And
with every year that you just sort of slowly get more niche with your subject
selections, you know, you do your GCSEs and you might have nine or 10 and
you go into your A Levels and you have three or four. I just stopped doing the
subjects. I wasn't interested.
[00:01:45] Sam Gwilt: And I just carried on doing the subjects that I quite
enjoyed, never to have this like grand vision. And then throughout university I
get there and then all of a sudden here I am. So I've just sort of pursued the
enjoyment of [00:02:00] design throughout that time and it's landed me here. So
I feel quite fortunate to have locked into that.
[00:02:04] Sam Gwilt: Really. You could say you fell into it. Yeah, I fell into
it, but slowly over the course of 10 to 15 years and quite deliberately, Followed
the path. Yeah. Yeah. In my family, we have some engineers in like
grandparents' generation, and then on my dad's side there are some like artists
and whether it's watercolor or glass artists.
[00:02:26] Sam Gwilt: So I was always in that creative world of art meets
engineering. If you talk about nature versus nurture, I was definitely in that
space to begin with. So I feel quite fortunate for that. And then it's just brought
me to where I am. Did
[00:02:39] Fraser Greenfield: you do G CCC art or design
[00:02:41] Sam Gwilt: Technology? So I did both G C SCC art and Resistant
Materials.
[00:02:47] Sam Gwilt: So the art was all about the painting and the watercolors
and the, the guash, and then resistant materials was making CD shelves out of
wood and then even forward to A Levels. I chose product [00:03:00] design i c t
and fine. A bit of computing skills, a little bit of HTML coding in there, and
maybe showing my age a little bit.
[00:03:08] Sam Gwilt: We were still using H T M L coding in tables, so
websites used to be like an Excel spreadsheet that you would fill in with either
an image or a piece of text. I dunno what methods of website building they're
using now, but that's my background there. I actually took a maths a level
because I thought that was needed in.
[00:03:28] Sam Gwilt: And I turned up to this new class, new college to do
maths cuz I did fairly well in GS se. But I turned up and realized, okay, A level
math is not the class for me. I am way in over my head here. I told the math
teacher, I was like, Hey, I think I've chosen the wrong thing. I might swap
classes. And she said, well actually we've already put your name forward to the
exam board at the end of the.
[00:03:56] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, she was like, if you don't turn up to that exam,
then we'll have to charge you the [00:04:00] submission cost. Come along, do
your best and see how it goes. But by that point, I was like, I don't need that
class to get into university. I know that I don't. So I'll just turn up at the back of
class with my notebook for design, and I'd just be doing the design work in the
maths class.
[00:04:14] Sam Gwilt: I turned up to the exam just so I didn't get charged, sat
there, wrote my name down, and then just sat there for an hour and a half or
whatever it was, and I failed that math class. Didn't even get a seat ungraded
[00:04:30] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: redacted after that.
[00:04:32] Lucy Bishop: So Sam, it's really interesting. Your background from
school sounds quite similar to mine.
[00:04:37] Lucy Bishop: I went to a school that was previously focused around
technology, so we had a lot of those similar resources that you said. We had a
really big music department. We had a huge arts department. We did the
textiles. We had a big home ec department. We used to have a lot of schools
come to use those facilities as well, because we.
[00:04:56] Lucy Bishop: Everything already there, so it was easier for them to
keep it relevant. [00:05:00] And it's really interesting cuz a lot of the people I
went to uni with or went to private schools and I'd gone to like a government
fund school. Really interestingly, it didn't seem to really make that much of an
impact on where people have ended up.
[00:05:12] Lucy Bishop: I went to school with a guide who's now a rocket
scientist at SpaceX. It's just really interesting how people perceive schools this
way and subjects like maybe you're not as smart as if you do design or you're
gonna do really well if you study all the sciencey courses. And it really depends
on the individual and like your motivation and what you're looking
[00:05:35] Sam Gwilt: for.
[00:05:35] Sam Gwilt: I guess I could do a whole podcast on how I think these
traditional classes and courses, they teach you how to do an exam really. And
you go there, you sit there for two hours, you do that exam and that is the skill
that you learn. You learn how to do the exam, whereas design, when you have
coursework and you have, you know, uh, pieces of work that get marked over a
term [00:06:00] that teaches you more critical thinking skills and how it works
in the industry more, we could go into so much detail about my thoughts on
that, but it is interesting how schools weight the classics more highly than
design.
[00:06:16] Sam Gwilt: This is Sound Guit Sound. Guit sound. Guit sound. Guit
sound. T Sound, TT sound. We're listening to Redact Redact. Redact redact.
Red.
[00:06:25] Fraser Greenfield: Let's skip forward in time. What inspired you to
start a YouTube
[00:06:28] Sam Gwilt: channel? That's a long story. It all started on Instagram
long,
[00:06:35] Lucy Bishop: long time ago when Instagram was new.
[00:06:39] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, I was around when Instagram was.
[00:06:41] Sam Gwilt: You went for a coffee in the morning, you put a
seventies filter over the top of it to make it like warm and orange, and then you
post that coffee, that was what Instagram was, and uh, became this sort of
communal design forum type space where people were uploading [00:07:00]
sketches, either asking for help or saying, look what I've done.
[00:07:02] Sam Gwilt: That's on like design communities part. You know,
Instagram didn't encourage that we did. So I was posting sketches saying, Hey
everyone, how can I improve? And I was trying to do daily posts. This is while I
was at university in 20 15, 20 16. Over the course of six or seven months, the
comments while I was still uploading, became less about how to improve and
more about, Hey, how did you do that?
[00:07:27] Sam Gwilt: That's pretty, that's pretty cool. And that progression, it
took me a while to realize, but I was like, oh, maybe I could flip this and start
to. Other people in what I'm learning. When I was at uni, I didn't have a lot to
teach. I wasn't like an expert in anything by any means, but I thought if I could
teach something that I learned today and somebody else can learn it tomorrow,
that distance time-wise of learning and passing on information I thought was
really interesting.
[00:07:56] Sam Gwilt: Anyway, so then Instagram launched a bunch of new
features. They launched carousels, [00:08:00] they launched short form video,
and at that point I was just experimenting, playing around, and I thought, you
know what? This is doing well. I'm enjoying this. Let's take it up a notch and
see what I can do on YouTube just to see what it's like to post.
[00:08:15] Sam Gwilt: I always say that social media's an experiment. It's like a
playground. You're just trying things out. You're just doing posts that worked
for you. I'm like, what would I like to see? And at the time, you know, there was
the big hitters on YouTube, Spencer Nugent Esbe, who was doing key shot
videos, and I really appreciated their work.
[00:08:35] Sam Gwilt: And I thought, well, I wonder what their upload process
is like, what's their planning process like? And it went from there. I haven't
really looked back. What was the plan
[00:08:44] Fraser Greenfield: for the first video?
[00:08:46] Sam Gwilt: Uh, was there a plan? No, absolutely not. At my last
company, they were really nice in letting me use their studio space.
[00:08:54] Sam Gwilt: After work, everyone would leave and go home and I
would quickly get my camera out, sit at a table, and I looked really [00:09:00]
professional. I made an intro video saying, Hey everyone, welcome to my
channel. I promised a lot of things in that first video. Posted it, I could funnel
people from my Instagram page. It grew quite quickly.
[00:09:12] Sam Gwilt: And then I was like, ah, I've gotta do what I just
promised now. And that was it. That was no plan. I was just stumbling into it,
seeing what makes sense, what feels right to pose next. And after six or seven
months of that, you can see what does well, what do people interact with. And
then it's not about tailoring to that.
[00:09:31] Sam Gwilt: It's still about doing what I want to do, but you can start
to guess what's going to do well as you make that video.
[00:09:37] Fraser Greenfield: Would you say there's been any big challenges
in illustrating design through video Medium compared to in an office setting?
[00:09:45] Sam Gwilt: YouTube and Instagram get a bad rap for showing
design as a process, and I'm guilty of this particularly on Instagram.
[00:09:53] Sam Gwilt: This community that I said that disregarded coffee
posting and started posting sketches. Now all of a sudden after a [00:10:00] year
of that and it's progressed, Everybody posting, Hey, I've just done a quick
afternoon sketch. Isn't this nice? And it's this hyperrealistic detailed artist
representation of a product.
[00:10:12] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, they spent three weeks doing Exactly, and that
got really bad, really quick for highlighting what design is, and I was caught up
in that. And some of my most highly regarded, most well received posts on
Instagram were hyper detailed sketches. And that is not what design is at. That's
a fan art drawing of a design.
[00:10:35] Sam Gwilt: But I do think that that was valuable in my own learning
because I was sketching existing products that I enjoyed, that I appreciated, and
doing this artist's rendition of it and what it was allowing me to do as a student
was analyze why I enjoyed that form. Why do I like these colors, finishes and
materials together?
[00:10:53] Sam Gwilt: What is it about this design that works for. It looks great
there, but I've drawn it here and it's not quite right. [00:11:00] Why? Why is it
not quite right? So for me, it was valuable. I did a lecture at a university in the
UK where I'm trying to encourage students to post on social media, build their
brand, become this online presence in an authentic way, and students are
petrified of posting because everything they see online is this hyper perfect,
elevated reality curated design process.
[00:11:24] Sam Gwilt: And they think, oh, well, I've just been sketching little
thumbnails in my notebook. That's not enough. But that's true design.
[00:11:31] Lucy Bishop: You also kind of mix it with cancel culture, right?
And then you're just petrified.
[00:11:35] Sam Gwilt: And this whole idea of anything online is permanent
and everything is set in stone. And once it's online, you've lost rights to it, like
it's out there.
[00:11:46] Sam Gwilt: And I get that. I understand that. So it's difficult to even
encourage students these days to. And then there's people like me who have
been posting a lot in the past, but might not have that same output. Now, my
[00:12:00] YouTube and Instagram output is lower as I move up the seniority
level at work. The perfect opportunity is right now to grow that space.
[00:12:09] Sam Gwilt: You've got a few years
[00:12:10] Lucy Bishop: under your belt now. What do you think separates a
good junior designer from a bad one? When it comes to getting a job,
[00:12:17] Sam Gwilt: I know how hard it is to get your foot in the door. That's
the biggest barrier. Your skills have to be fairly decent. That's a prerequisite.
We can't skate around that.
[00:12:27] Sam Gwilt: You have to be good. Now, what makes you good? The
skillset that you have in terms of programs, you need to at least know what all
the buttons do or what some other buttons do. You need to know your way
around. And most importantly, it's the attitude. Once you have that foundation
of you can open up a program, you know how to sketch, maybe orthographic
views, maybe some.
[00:12:48] Sam Gwilt: The basic skill level of flat, like that's your baseline.
Anything on top of that is just, you need to be hungry to learn more. And that is
the key. If you turn up and you say, oh, you know, I can sketch a [00:13:00] bit
and I can do a bit of Photoshop, I can do a bit of SolidWorks, and you're
complacent in that, that's the killer.
[00:13:06] Sam Gwilt: You need to turn up and say, Hey, I've got these skills.
They're like, foundation, please teach me more. And it's that attitude of being
hungry that needs to come. That's what sets a lot of people apart, being hungry
in a way that says that you want to learn more, and that happens less often than
you might think.
[00:13:27] Sam Gwilt: Let's say you
[00:13:27] Fraser Greenfield: have got your foot in the door. Mm-hmm. And
you've made that first step. What advice would you give to those people who
made it to step one? How do they get to
[00:13:36] Sam Gwilt: step two? Start doing bits at the company that you're
working at that will influence your next. If you're looking for a new job and you
want to go up in, you know, one step, you sort of already have to be doing that
part of the job before you get promoted into that new role.
[00:13:53] Sam Gwilt: So if you can start picking out little elements of what
you might find useful in next job, then that would be great. [00:14:00] Whether
that's slightly more client contact or sending an email here and there to like put
your name in front of contacts and saying, Hey, I've got this under control.
Would you like a meeting?
[00:14:10] Sam Gwilt: When you're a junior, maybe not so much, but there will
be certain elements throughout the design process that you can pick up on and
try to volunteer for, and then that will hopefully lead into the proof that you can
do that next job. You sort of have to do the job already.
[00:14:25] Lucy Bishop: My favorite thing is getting paid to learn new skills at
work.
[00:14:28] Lucy Bishop: That's always a good one as well. Right? Especially
like you said, when it's coming to applying for your next job. Another thing that
I would add is a lot of junior level positions really detail orientated. Cause a lot
of the time they're not necessarily looking for you to come up with the winning
concept.
[00:14:44] Lucy Bishop: They're looking for you to be doing the backup work,
assisting people. So if there's a way that you could show that you're really detail
orientated or that you can really keep an eye out for those things, I think that
would help a lot as well. What if we
[00:14:58] Fraser Greenfield: also took on our gray head [00:15:00] wig for a
moment. What advice would you give to designers who are a lot more
experienced than you?
[00:15:05] Fraser Greenfield: What do the veterans need to hear, but they
don't really necessarily
[00:15:08] Sam Gwilt: want to give the new guys a chance. In some ways,
design is such a new world, new money profession, where in other ways design
is such an old world, old money profession, particularly when you get older,
more senior. You might have your way of doing things that works and it works
well.
[00:15:30] Sam Gwilt: But over the past, even five or 10 years, Wow,
everything has changed so much and you need to be open for that. So whether
it's new softwares, whether it's new ways of thinking, branching out into UX ui.
As much as we don't like to admit, that's where we're going. That's where we're
going. If you are managing a team that we're super specialized in one area, like
Lucy said, I think it's great to teach new skills to that.
[00:15:59] Sam Gwilt: That [00:16:00] might not be designed specific. It might
be design adjacent graphics, branding, ux, ui. That'll be great to learn and to
facilitate a team that learns that, that will futureproof design teams as a whole,
or even
[00:16:17] Fraser Greenfield: just letting the junior know how to talk
[00:16:19] Sam Gwilt: to the client. We've missed some of that throughout the
last two or three.
[00:16:24] Sam Gwilt: For me, myself, I give presentations to clients at every
opportunity, now, every phase of a project that I work on, but it's all through
Google meets. It's all through Zoom, and I have only done one presentation with
a client physically in person. Now I'm missing out on that over the past two or
three years, I think everyone has, so even people more junior than me, they're
missing out so much on that client interaction.
[00:16:50] Sam Gwilt: We've got a lot of catching up to do in that. What's the
process
[00:16:53] Fraser Greenfield: for delivering bad news to the client that you've
been exposed
[00:16:56] Sam Gwilt: to so far? You have to have this frank conversation,
[00:17:00] and you have to be quite pragmatic and say, this is what's happened.
This is a potential reason for that. We think it might be X, Y, and Z.
[00:17:08] Sam Gwilt: Here's how we're going to fix it, or let's work together
To fix this, you have to become super pragmatic. No egos involved, no name
calling, finger Point. And just hope that the client understands that these things
happen. Sometimes we're sorry. Yeah, we we're Sorry.
[00:17:28] Lucy Bishop: I mean, that's also hard too, right? Because if you are
working at a design consultancy, maybe these companies don't interact with
designers very often and they're expecting one thing and they're getting
something else, and maybe they think this is some big catastrophe when really
on our end we can fix it pretty easily.
[00:17:44] Lucy Bishop: Mm. So I guess it's all managing those expectations,
right? And taking the client along for the ride.
[00:17:51] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: Yeah.
[00:17:54] Sam Gwilt: This is sound Guit Sound. Guit sound. Guit sound. Guit
sound. Guit sound. Tt. [00:18:00] We're listening to redactor Red, red, red, red.
[00:18:03] Fraser Greenfield: When it comes to design, what really grinds
your gears
[00:18:06] Sam Gwilt: right now? Every podcast, every single episode has been
like AI and NFTs in. But I
[00:18:13] Fraser Greenfield: can make you a millionaire by selling this bored
ape video game, treading card.
[00:18:19] Sam Gwilt: You'll be a millionaire as long as you then sell it to
someone else and then you are covered. You are the millionaire. It's like
[00:18:24] Lucy Bishop: a little pyramid scheme.
[00:18:26] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, yeah,
[00:18:27] Fraser Greenfield: yeah. It's the dream. Think of all the things we
could achieve with NFTs. All we need is just someone else to buy it.
[00:18:35] Lucy Bishop: I mean, I did hear someone say that they were
interested if there was some sort.
[00:18:40] Lucy Bishop: Positive to NFTs flipping the patent system around.
I've not in depth enough to understand how that might look or what it might be,
but I think anything that could take a step closer to making the patent system
more fair and equitable. Right. The younger people or inventors who don't have
much capital behind them [00:19:00] really feels like a positive thing to me.
[00:19:01] Lucy Bishop: I think the way that NFTs are currently jumping
around, gaining notoriety isn't the best, but I won't sit here and hate on them
[00:19:09] Sam Gwilt: entirely. My girlfriend is a lawyer and she's talking
about smart contracts that are logged on the blockchain and it knows that it's
been signed and this PC at this date and everything gets signed, automat.
[00:19:23] Sam Gwilt: When you think about patents, like you said, that can be
really useful as a example of what is good about the blockchain. When you're
selling 180 by 180 PNG of a monkey, that's not a good use case. NFTs by this
point. They're so, last year the hype came, the hype's gone.
[00:19:41] Lucy Bishop: I did feel even in the art world, they're good though
because of the royalties that you can bake in, right?
[00:19:47] Sam Gwilt: As long as people keep buying them. But I dunno if
anyone is. When it
[00:19:51] Fraser Greenfield: comes to NFTs, my last word would be hard
drives, maybe last 10 years, right? Cassette tapes can last 25 years if they're kept
in a [00:20:00] beautifully air conditioned room. And to this day, most
governments still write a copy of all their laws on vem, which is basically paper
made from animal skin because it lasts thousands
[00:20:11] Lucy Bishop: of years.
[00:20:12] Lucy Bishop: Look, I guess it's true. I feel like everyone knows
someone who's lost a couple of million in a Bitcoin wallet.
[00:20:18] Fraser Greenfield: You may not even lose it. You might just find
that you put in their blast drive and it just doesn't work anymore. Cause it's
reached its shelf life. That's why I'm just not about NFTs. I'm all about veers.
[00:20:29] Fraser Greenfield: Yeah,
[00:20:30] Sam Gwilt: it's the future. One of Leah's clients has been Ledger
over the past few years in Ledger make Cryptocurrency wallet. We did the
Stacks project. I can't say that I hate NFTs too much cuz they're a client that
paid our wages for a while, are not out there to go and start buying NFTs, that's
for sure.
[00:20:48] Sam Gwilt: Great. Look,
[00:20:49] Fraser Greenfield: you've already got an idea for the next project.
Sell them some Vem.
[00:20:52] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, a Vem wallet.
[00:20:54] Fraser Greenfield: You can record everything on Parchment now.
Yeah.[00:21:00]
[00:21:01] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: Redacted.
[00:21:02] Fraser Greenfield: Maybe going back to our original topic, for
those who've made it in and they wanna move to bigger and better things,
whether that's escaping point of sale, getting a job, a big firm, or just getting to
be the senior designer, what should everyone be looking
[00:21:15] Sam Gwilt: to bring to the table? I think that links back to what we
spoke about earlier when we said you have to already be doing that job, but
particularly for younger people who want to move on to bigger and better
things, so, The job that you are at can't facilitate those skills.
[00:21:31] Sam Gwilt: They don't give you the opportunity to talk to clients or
work on this rockstar project. And at that point you sort of have to do some
passion projects. That's not passion projects in the sense of burning yourself out
or putting in extra time at every waking moment, but finding something that
you're really passionate.
[00:21:50] Sam Gwilt: I've had passion projects in the past where I'm at work
and it's like five to six, and I'm excited about getting home, not because I wanna
relax, but like, oh, I wanna work on this other thing. Like I'm super [00:22:00]
excited about that. Have you
[00:22:01] Lucy Bishop: had that thing where you like go to bed and you're
like, oh my gosh, I can't wait for it to be morning so that I can start
[00:22:06] Sam Gwilt: working again?
[00:22:07] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, yeah. Although I'm really bad for that, where I
just won't log off the pc. I can get to the end of the day and I have to have
something that I'm proud of and I can look at that and think, oh, I did. And if I
leave that for tomorrow morning, no. I'll, I'll just work through, I'll just carry on.
That's not healthy.
[00:22:25] Sam Gwilt: I'm not saying do that. Exhaustion is not a badge of
honor. Rest is important, but finding something that makes your, uh, let's your
soul and file. Exactly. Yeah. And if you can then turn that into a portfolio piece,
that goes a long way when you want to go to the new. You might not be able to
show much from your past job because of NDAs or whatever, but you have this
shiny cool thing, but
[00:22:49] Lucy Bishop: you're so excited to share as well and give that
positive attitude that helps so
[00:22:54] Sam Gwilt: much.
[00:22:55] Sam Gwilt: Yeah, and I think that passion shines through. It's quite
contagious. That passion for a project [00:23:00] I said about going to this
university lecture and sometimes when students present their. They say, here's
my work. I'm really sorry I didn't get to do much about it. I wish I could have
done this better. I know this feature's not great, and they're super apologetic
about it, and that rubs off on you looking at this work.
[00:23:17] Sam Gwilt: Whereas if someone comes up to you with a passion
project and they're like, I'm really proud of this, that is contagious. That aspect
of it, that passion comes across For someone starting out that's great for
someone who's looking to move on once you have a few years of experie.
They're still great, but maybe bringing in some element of a team in there is
ideal.
[00:23:38] Sam Gwilt: Whether that's leading a team, being part of a team, it's
less about the individual doing the project, and then it needs to be more about
teamwork, project management. Team management, thinking about things more
holistically. Maybe the passion project could be more about branding and
business strategy for this company you've come up with, and then a product to
go along with it.
[00:23:59] Sam Gwilt: That'll be. [00:24:00] Obviously the work exponentially
grows when you start adding in that, passing on your passion is a great way to
kickstart that.
[00:24:09] Lucy Bishop: What do you see that people are missing when they're
trying to move up across or just into the industry in general?
[00:24:15] Sam Gwilt: I'm in a very fortunate position, particularly with the
stuff that I do on YouTube.
[00:24:20] Sam Gwilt: A whole bunch of people send me their portfolios
because on YouTube I do portfolio reviews and I just candidly, This is good.
This is fine. You need to work on this. And I think universities or students need
to do more work to separate a portfolio from a project submission at university.
This goes out to like junior designers again, but a project submission at
university is literally there to tick off the mark.
[00:24:48] Sam Gwilt: Have you shown proficient skills in X, Y, Z and you did
show, yes, I have. Here is my sketching page. Here is my rendering page. When
it comes to a portfolio [00:25:00] that needs to be the slickest story journey I
have ever read, you really need to sell that and big that up being slightly timid
in your page layout with.
[00:25:14] Sam Gwilt: Here's the model making I've done in cardboard and I've
just put that in the corner. But then here's some sketching up in a different
corner and you're quite timid about that. Celebrate it story. Tell. That's the key
difference. Give them the cocktail party version. The cocktail party version
story. Tell full stop.
[00:25:32] Sam Gwilt: You need to story tell.
[00:25:34] Lucy Bishop: I feel like there also needs to be a reason for why you
include those items. I made this model because I was trying to see what this part
would do when I connected it with this part and if it would be strong enough for
if those pieces actually flow together properly. Not just, like you said, I made
some models because I was required to make a model.
[00:25:54] Lucy Bishop: What were you making that model
[00:25:56] Sam Gwilt: for? Exactly? What did you. [00:26:00]
[00:26:00] Lucy Bishop: Not, is this model lifelike or perfect? It's was this a
quick, nasty model that answered these questions that I needed to know so I
could get to the next
[00:26:09] Sam Gwilt: stage? What did you learn? What are the next steps after
this model? What did you have to change as a result of this model?
[00:26:16] Sam Gwilt: Exactly. Decision making based on iteration, that is the
design process and people miss out on that, so. And it just becomes, you're just
flicking through a university hand in document. And I even had someone at the
end of portfolio that I reviewed where their last page was a references page.
That's interesting.
[00:26:40] Sam Gwilt: Now, I never even thought of that, but actually I want
your last page to be an amazing project that makes me pick up the phone. What
is your best image ever? And then your phone number and email address that
needs to be your last page or last two page. Not like a Wikipedia links to your
references, because that's what the university required [00:27:00] links to other
people.
[00:27:01] Sam Gwilt: Yeah. Here's all the Pinterest images that I've found of
all my inspiration,
[00:27:05] Lucy Bishop: here's the people you can call instead of me.
[00:27:07] Sam Gwilt: Yeah. Yeah. Would you say
[00:27:10] Fraser Greenfield: that some of this timidness, when it comes to
like presenting yourself ultimately comes from perhaps social media's
influence? I graduated just before Instagram is taking off, and I feel like it was
full of people showing off how good they were designing at cars.
[00:27:27] Fraser Greenfield: And like you'd go through their portfolio and
there wasn't a single good circle in any of those drawings or chicken scratching.
Yeah. On those lines. And then suddenly it was like a switch was flipped within
two years, whereas the polar.
[00:27:42] Sam Gwilt: Exactly, and I do think maybe students are looking at
these crazy sketches and then thinking, oh, well, I have to be more pragmatic or
more matter of fact in my portfolio because that's where my skills are.
[00:27:54] Sam Gwilt: My skills must be in the engineering side or the factual
side, rather than this [00:28:00] cool emotive, evocative design that everyone
else is doing. Honestly the difference between that pragmatic matter of fact
design versus the evocative fancy one is just the quality of the sketch. I always
see students like, oh, I've taken a photograph of this cardboard model.
[00:28:16] Sam Gwilt: Great love cardboard models, but maybe turn on a light
in your university dorm room at least, cuz I can tell it's 2:00 AM and you're
working through the submission and you just snap this on your phone.
[00:28:28] Lucy Bishop: And just like some breathing space with some like
paper, paper backdrop goes a long.
[00:28:33] Sam Gwilt: Yeah. Yeah. If you spend some time art directing your
portfolio, that will go a long way.
[00:28:41] Sam Gwilt: Don't be afraid to
[00:28:41] Fraser Greenfield: redo entire projects.
[00:28:43] Sam Gwilt: Exactly. Yeah. Just because you've handed it in, just
because it's launched on the market, maybe go back and tweak things, make it
better. Would you say there's been
[00:28:54] Fraser Greenfield: any like positive impacts from social
[00:28:57] Sam Gwilt: media on. I have met people in [00:29:00] the street
who say, Hey, you sound like, yeah, why?
[00:29:02] Sam Gwilt: And they say, oh, I know you're from YouTube. I
watched your stuff. I'm like, oh, thank you very much. Are you a designer? And
they say, no, no, not designer. Just enjoy watching your videos. And that is like
the highest level of flattery I've ever gotten. Somebody who's not a designer has
appreciated a video about.
[00:29:22] Sam Gwilt: Wow, that's amazing that through everyone's
collaborative input into social media design is known now, not just me posting,
but everybody collectively posting and sharing work and all coming together.
We've sort of become this beehive mind of design, and that's really quite special
to share that it is more than sketching and coloring.
[00:29:47] Sam Gwilt: We think about things and we decision make, and we
have all these prototype things and we talk about what should be made instead
of what could be made. We have all these in-depth conversations and people are
realizing [00:30:00] that publicly that aren't designers, and that can only be
beneficial when these people might go and work at their companies and say, oh,
we make products, but we haven't really considered design as a tangible input
that we should be doing.
[00:30:12] Sam Gwilt: Maybe let's hire some. This idea of investing in design
as a design-led company that's growing, and I wonder if social media and the
impact of that might have something to do with it. Would you say that your
[00:30:25] Fraser Greenfield: own excavators and social media have helped
you
[00:30:27] Sam Gwilt: personally? I'm where I am today because of one post I
made on social media in 2016, and it snowballed from there.
[00:30:37] Sam Gwilt: I actually got my job at Leer where I work now. I think
because of, I. I applied to them in late 2019, and the story is, you always hope
that they say, great portfolio, start on Monday. That's the dream, right?
[00:30:52] Lucy Bishop: Yeah. They call you at the end of the portfolio and
they're like, I can't even look at the next one.
[00:30:56] Lucy Bishop: I've gotta call Sam. I need him.
[00:30:59] Sam Gwilt: [00:31:00] Yeah. But that is not the case of how I got
the job at Le. They actually send you a design task and they send you away for a
week and at the end of the week you submit your work and you build them and
then you build them. Yeah. I wish we can go into a whole story of what I think
about design challenges as well.
[00:31:17] Sam Gwilt: I'm not for them, I'm against them, but at the time when
I was applying for the job, I thought, why not? But anyway, I sent this project
and it was awful and they said, ah, that's not what we had in mind. That's not
great design, is it really? It's pretty. Why don't you have another, go do another
week and send us your work then.
[00:31:38] Sam Gwilt: So I'm like, okay, I'll do one more week and send it off.
Send them the second task. And that was awful as well. And the hiring manager
was sort of like, well, you know, thanks for your time. We'll be in touch. And at
that point I'm like, all right, it's gone. It's. A day or so later, that same hiring
manager said, Hey, Sam, we've [00:32:00] just seen that you've done a model in
SolidWorks where you've modeled an EAMS chair just for fun, and we're quite
interested in how you might use Solidwork to model chairs.
[00:32:09] Sam Gwilt: We've seen that you've posted a solidwork screenshot,
we've seen that you've posted a KeyShot rendering of it afterwards. Let's have
another go, and you should now model one of our chairs. So for one more week
model, one of our. And at the end of the week we'll have a call and we'll go
through your feature tree.
[00:32:28] Sam Gwilt: As I'm saying this out loud, that's a lot of design tasks.
But what that post on social media allowed was it took the pressure off my
portfolio, took the pressure off my other design tasks, and that one Instagram
post that I was just posting, saying, Hey, I'm enjoying doing this fun thing in
Solar Works.
[00:32:49] Sam Gwilt: Cause I thought it'd be hard to do and I wanna see how
to. That is what got me the job at lea, and I'm really appreciative of that. What
we used to do way back when [00:33:00] was all of those design challenges that
we did as a team. We had a huge whiteboard in the kitchen and we'd pin up all
the successful design challenges.
[00:33:09] Sam Gwilt: Like anyone who's got a job, here's that design
challenge. And everyone's done the same design challenge. And then we are
looking through like, oh, that's really nice. That one's really nice. And then we
get to mine and it was like, that's awful. How is this guy here? Well, luckily we
took that down. We don't use that wall of shame anymore.
[00:33:26] Sam Gwilt: Long story short, Instagram got me the job at Leer.
That's the saving grace.
[00:33:32] Lucy Bishop: I think about it pretty often. How much one click can
completely change your life trajectory? Kind of similar, but not with Instagram.
I got really lucky it spent a really long time applying for jobs and not really
making any progress, not really understanding why.
[00:33:47] Lucy Bishop: Because until you start making a little bit of progress,
you can't even ab. Right. You're putting all this stuff into the universe. You're
getting nothing back. No one will talk to you. Your friends are all hush hush
about their folios. I got [00:34:00] really lucky. I connected with one of my old
lecturers. I never expected anything.
[00:34:05] Lucy Bishop: Just messaged him saying that I really appreciated all
of the skills that he taught me and how that's really helped me moving forward.
And he was just so generous that it completely changed my trajectory and I
actually finally had someone to AB test with them. It's amazing what the
internet can. And all these little things that you're doing in your spare time, like
you said, whether it's a passion project or just connecting to the online global
community of industrial designers keeps pushing that needle further and further.
[00:34:38] Sam Gwilt: This is sound Guit Sound. Guit sound. Welt sound. Guit
sound. Guit sound. T Sound. T sound. We're listening to Redactor, redactor,
redactor. Redact, redact,
[00:34:47] Lucy Bishop: redact. Do you include a CV when you apply and do
you read people's
[00:34:50] Sam Gwilt: cvs? That's a great question. What I'm noticing with
new grad is actually they're putting their cvs within the portfolio.
[00:34:58] Sam Gwilt: The first two or three [00:35:00] pages is like a photo of
them, I don't know, like rock climbing or something saying, Hey, this is me, and
then a list of their graduation and like a list of their skills, and then it goes into
the projects. I'm quite proud of my CV where it's like a single page document,
my personal outlook.
[00:35:18] Sam Gwilt: I think there are still companies out there that print off
CVS and pass them around. I think maybe, but mine's still an A four format that
I'm quite proud of how it looks, but I've definitely seen this trend of putting it all
in this one document. They're definitely not nice to print out because everyone's
using bold color blocks, full color pictures, so maybe no one's printing things
out anymore.
[00:35:41] Sam Gwilt: I don.
[00:35:42] Lucy Bishop: Maybe I have a radical approach. I love a quick apply
and some quick applies. Won't let you apply unless you've got a cv. So my CV
is just a bunch of sexy pictures of things I've worked on that has either a QR
code or a link to my portfolio that I sent [00:36:00] you in the other application.
[00:36:01] Sam Gwilt: Press that with these online forms, they make you type
out all of your project.
[00:36:06] Sam Gwilt: And then they make you upload the CV with those
projects in, and then they make you upload a portfolio with those same projects
in. And I don't think any of that is necessary.
[00:36:16] Lucy Bishop: If I'm looking at jobs online and I see something that
looks interesting and I press apply and it takes me to an external website that's
like the company's own HR portal, I'm like, oh, no, absolutely none of this.
[00:36:27] Lucy Bishop: Yeah. I will not be partaking in this questionnaire of
nightmares.
[00:36:33] Fraser Greenfield: Do you ever wonder why design firms aren't
more often partnerships like in all those TV law firms? Surely this would give
people a, a pathway up beyond senior designer and always working for
someone else, more personal growth, so to speak.
[00:36:47] Sam Gwilt: There are very few that do that, and the one single
company I can think of that does that is pentagram where they're using
partnerships as different fields of design. So you have [00:37:00] your branding,
you have your graphics, you have your, I. Being a designer, everybody makes it
their personality. We don't do design.
[00:37:07] Sam Gwilt: We are designers. That's sort of how it is.
[00:37:12] Lucy Bishop: You heard it here first. Sam's changed his cat phrase,
hi, I'm Sam and I am Design.
[00:37:18] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: That's the next video.
[00:37:20] Lucy Bishop: But I mean, it is this all consuming profession. It's
inescapable.
[00:37:24] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: Yeah.
[00:37:25] Sam Gwilt: You mean it's like a cult? Yeah. Potentially. There's this
cluster of design consultancies in acne and shortage in London where I work,
and we are so close together geographically that we'll bump into each other at
lunch or we'll bump into each other at drinks when we go to the bar or
something afterwards.
[00:37:43] Sam Gwilt: Is it a friendly bump in? Sometimes you walk past
people and pretend not to see them, and I'm sure they're pretending not to see
you as well. But then other times, because we're all so close-knit, we are like,
oh, here's so-and-so good to see you. You know it. It is friendly. I wanna see
[00:37:57] Lucy Bishop: like an epic Pictionary Showdown [00:38:00]
consultancy.
[00:38:00] Lucy Bishop: V consultancy.
[00:38:03] Sam Gwilt: Well, the amount of pub quizzes that are in our area,
when we go on a night out, maybe we should do, each consultancy has its own
team. That would be. Oh, I'm, I'm getting nervous just thinking about that.
Would you
[00:38:17] Fraser Greenfield: be a valuable team member in the
[00:38:19] Sam Gwilt: trivia? I think I remember everything 80% correctly.
[00:38:23] Sam Gwilt: Every fact is just a little bit wrong, like it's there
somewhere, but don't write it down. I dunno. I'd, I'd be awful at that.
[00:38:29] Lucy Bishop: I know all sorts of stupid facts, but they're not the
kind of stupid facts that you find in trivia. I dunno any of
[00:38:34] Sam Gwilt: those. Yeah, exactly. Would
[00:38:37] Fraser Greenfield: you summarize like the pentagram model isn't
more common because the people owning the business identify too much with it
themselves?
[00:38:45] Sam Gwilt: Potentially. Think of like ages of design where you start
off in the fifties and sixties. You've got Charles and Ray Eames, they are the
designers, and you move forward and you've got like the superstar designers
like Ron Ad and Ross Lovegrove. Then you move [00:39:00] forward again and
we are in this sort of half and half where people like Eve's.
[00:39:05] Sam Gwilt: Or Bjork Engels or Benjamin Hubert, they are the name,
but they create this company around them to grow that company. But they're
caught in this weird space of, in all the press releases, it's like Eves Baha Refuse
project has designed this. Or Benjamin Hubert and Leia Design have designed
this. It's an odd mix and match.
[00:39:25] Sam Gwilt: And I think now we're at a time when these smaller
companies are starting up with coherent branding in like a company and it's one
or two people behind it, but you don't know who are behind it. We're at that sort
of age now, I think where anyone can start a company and it's beneficial instead
of being this superstar designer, if you wanna call it that.
[00:39:46] Sam Gwilt: So maybe we're at the time when the company's less
connected to that person,
[00:39:51] Lucy Bishop: like the gorilla's age of industrial.
[00:39:54] Sam Gwilt: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:56] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: Oh, like the
[00:39:56] Sam Gwilt: do punk. Yeah. We're all wearing masks now.
[00:39:59] Lucy Bishop: [00:40:00] Exactly. I think it's really interesting that
you mentioned how pentagram, how the different design disciplines that work
together and it almost sounds like it's mirroring the big four accounting firms
cuz they all kind of work in a similar way.
[00:40:13] Lucy Bishop: They're like a little tiny city in a skyscraper where
there's all these different businesses inside it. People aren't necessarily doing the
same job and they're offering different. To all those other partners. So maybe
there's a way forward in the partnership in an industrial design, actually
collaborating within other disciplines to show our value.
[00:40:34] Lucy Bishop: It's
[00:40:35] Fraser Greenfield: probably worth doning that a lot of the Big four
bought out, big design consulting firms, I D O and Frog and Luna have all been
purchased by Big four
[00:40:42] Sam Gwilt: consulting groups. When you're in a place like
Pentagram or IDO where it's multidisciplinary to the point where people from
different backgrounds, graphics U.
[00:40:53] Sam Gwilt: Business, everything come together and you learn from
that in like this hot pot, this collaborative [00:41:00] approach. I do think when
you've learned industrial design as a process, we really enjoy saying that we can
do any type of design that you want. Almost like a
[00:41:09] Lucy Bishop: personal challenge, right? Yeah.
[00:41:12] Sam Gwilt: The amount of family members who have asked me for
a logo and I'm like, yeah, I'd do that absolutely for
[00:41:17] Fraser Greenfield: money.
[00:41:20] Lucy Bishop: You're a cutthroat
[00:41:22] Fraser Greenfield: look, I'm just saying it's against my religion to
work
[00:41:24] Sam Gwilt: for free. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because if
you're at a partnership based company, you tend to be a bigger company. You're
talking hundreds of staff where each team is its own business. Like you say,
Lucy, do you get lost as a cog in that?
[00:41:39] Sam Gwilt: I've always worked in these small, tiny consultancies
where everybody's input is big and. The smallest company I worked at was Paul
Cox, edge Studio, more of an artist installation type design, but there was like
seven people up there. And as an intern, I felt like I had an impact and I was
valued. [00:42:00] The structure and the infrastructure of that company meant
that I had to learn quickly on my feet and maybe with these larger.
[00:42:07] Sam Gwilt: Partnerships where everything's slightly more
automated. I don't know if I would enjoy that so much as being like this cowboy
of design, running about trying new things. We had Anson
[00:42:19] Fraser Greenfield: Chung on recently and he used to work at Bold
Design where he was a partner very early on in his career, and it was not a big
company at that time.
[00:42:28] Fraser Greenfield: It was less than 10 people I believe. He taught
us. I think for me, you know, when I look at a partnership doesn't necessarily
have to be large, even though there is the ability for it to scale that way. It's
more, there's a pathway in that business that's more than just being the senior
designer. You can be a co-owner.
[00:42:43] Fraser Greenfield: There's not a glass ceiling in that small consult. I
worked at consultancies where someone described it overwork drinks as Hotel
California. And when I dug into him, while he called it that, he's like, oh, well,
you know, I'll be senior designer maybe, but I'll never own this. I'll never take a
[00:43:00] profit share.
[00:43:00] Fraser Greenfield: I'll never get more than the bonus. And to me,
it's one thing to work for a very big company, but when you work in a small
firm, if you don't have any ownership in that stake and you're good at what you
do, I don't understand why you wouldn't leave eventually and try and start your
own competing business.
[00:43:16] Fraser Greenfield: And I think if you are owning the business,
that's a problem that you can solve by offering a share, assuming that you're
growing the business,
[00:43:23] Sam Gwilt: a buy-in partner. System where if the company does
well, you do well and then you are super invested, literally invested, literally
invested in the company. I should
[00:43:34] Fraser Greenfield: stress that these law firms that exist as
partnerships don't exist out of altruism.
[00:43:39] Fraser Greenfield: They exist to prevent people from leaving and
starting competing businesses.
[00:43:43] Lucy Bishop: Back to what you said about the big company, I
totally understand your position of where you are coming from with that point
of view. I also wonder if maybe. Business models set up like that might actually
help solve a few of the teething issues coming through industrial.
[00:43:59] Lucy Bishop: Because if there are those [00:44:00] larger, more
siloed businesses, like you said, that have maybe more areas where people are
kind of sticking to their own thing or could open up more opportunity for
juniors, or even just the idea of working with these disciplines and showing
them what industrial design can actually be and what it can.
[00:44:20] Lucy Bishop: Is going to potentially leave a much larger impact
while you are working there, rather than just working at a couple of brands, like
you said, that A or design led and design forward thinking, you have the
opportunity to introduce it to places that aren't currently experiencing that type
of design. And I think that would be quite interesting as well.
[00:44:40] Sam Gwilt: We're designing a product that fits within a business and
potentially when you have these larger companies that somebody comes to for
branding, for UX product. That's in the realm of business design. Now you are
creating companies and when you are that holistic and when you take that
bigger picture in the value that you add can be so much [00:45:00] more than
coloring in a square radius and saying, oh, well we've radius this corner cuz it's
nice.
[00:45:06] Sam Gwilt: Which is an oversimplification, but still. It's
[00:45:09] Fraser Greenfield: a good jumping point compared to these other
fields, let's say ui ux, business design. Engineering is the industrial design
component of a project. Undervalued is the skillset we bring undervalued,
[00:45:23] Lucy Bishop: and I don't know how you make people see the value
of design unless they're almost really involved in the process.
[00:45:30] Lucy Bishop: Surely there has to be a correlation between people.
With industrial designers and being able to clearly see the value that's being
brought to the table. I think in the UK it's a lot more common for people to
actually know what people do as industrial designers at In Australia, it's almost
unheard of.
[00:45:47] Lucy Bishop: So I just feel like the more we can interact with the
outer ecosystem better for industrial design as a whole, it can pick
[00:45:57] Sam Gwilt: up. I think we [00:46:00] have an issue with industrial
design. We have this reputation for coloring in squares with radiuses. But
actually when you look at why a product does well on the market, it's because
one, it has to work well, full stop.
[00:46:14] Sam Gwilt: It does have to work well, but two, it needs to form an
emotional connection with whoever's buying it. The market is always so
saturated in whatever field you're in. What is the product that someone relates to
the. And when you start talking about industrial design, about crafting
emotional experiences and crafting stories that pinpoint individual attributes of
what someone might look for, what someone might appreciate, then that is
incredibly important because it's make or break for the company.
[00:46:47] Sam Gwilt: Without getting stereotypical, I would enjoy one type of
product, whereas someone else might enjoy a different aesthetic. As, as basic as
it might be, different aesthetics attract different [00:47:00] people. And when
you can craft that in such a way that it's purposeful and considered and targeted
versus you leave it up to lock and you don't think about who might enjoy your
product, you just say, oh, you know, make it bland and make it beige, white, or
whatever, make it.
[00:47:17] Sam Gwilt: You don't target anyone. One size fits no one. It really is
that simple, and you have to understand people in order to do that, and with all
the love in the world, engineers do not understand people. If an engineer is
designing the product, it's not going to hit that emotional. Visceral connection
that industrial designers do now, can you put a value on that?
[00:47:43] Sam Gwilt: Can you put a figure on that and say, our design has
attributed to an extra 14% in sales, or an extra 50% in sales? Well, no, not
really, but you don't know how it would've performed if you didn't consider the
design in such a coherent. [00:48:00] We are painted with this brush of just
coloring in when actually we are forming the product and we are forming the
personal connection with that product.
[00:48:11] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: Redacted.
[00:48:14] Lucy Bishop: Thanks for sharing your story with us today, Sam.
We've thoroughly enjoyed it and I'm sure that audience will as well the, the
listeners. Be sure to check the show notes for links to everything we've mention.
Until next time, this has been redacted
[00:48:26] Sam Gwilt: with Sound gui. Sound. Gui. Sound, guill sound.
[00:48:31] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: Thanks, PHIS.
[00:48:37] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: The
[00:48:37] Sam Gwilt: number you have dialed has not been recognized. Please
check
[00:48:41] Intro-Outro-Sweeper: and try again. The number you have dialed.