Design Playgrounds

Playground Rules

• Fail publicly.
• Fail at the medium in which you hope to improve.
• Fail anonymously.
• Fail early.
• Fail often.
• Fail compulsively.
• Fail with fun content.
• Fail ephemerally.
• Fail cryptically.
• Fail unobligatedly.
• Archive success.

Playground Advantages

• Instill boldness.
• Allow you to amass a catalog of successful design approaches.
• Allow you to develop and advance your own design style.
• Allow you to track your growth as a designer.
• Allow you to receive critical feedback from the online design community.
• Can lead to interesting commercial work.
• Keep you passionate about design.

Playground Examples [+Commercial Portfolios]

• prate [sans nom, jemmahostetler.com]
• upsod [upso, dustinhostetler.com]
• playdamage [lab404]
• oculart [geofflillemon.oculart.com]
• true is true [we work for them]
• hell media [baskew.com]
• once upon a forest [joshuadavis.com]
• re-mov [lia.sil.at]
• presstube [insert silence]

Milton Glaser and Kenneth Clark Get the Last Word

"What is required in our field, more than anything else, is continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal."
- Milton Glaser, London AIGA talk, 2001.

"It's only in a court that a man may do something extravagant for its own sake, because he wants to, because it seems worth doing... and it is sometimes through such willful, superfluous actions that men discover their powers."
- Kenneth Clark, in reference to the northern Italian courts of the late fifteenth century

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