Episode 75: Designing Dignity In New York City Probation Offices

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They stepped out of the elevator, looked around the newly redesigned probation office, and quietly backed up as if they were in the wrong building. That one detail says more about the power of design than a thousand trend reports, and it’s where this story begins.

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Transcript

Trust Over Transaction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're lucky in your career, you get to work with a few good clients. And by good client, I mean someone whose ethos and direction and mission you're aligned with. The kind that you can make real change with. Here is a story of one such client I had the pleasure of working with. So let's do this. Boom. I actually don't like the word client. I prefer comrade. I need trust and a relationship if I'm going to do good work. Then we both grow creatively and in business. Trust is the lifeblood of my business, of any business, really. If you trust me, I will do my best work. But if there's no trust, then no amount of money will ensure that good work is going to happen. But I got a phone call to contribute to a project that would change my life. It would change my client and even their audience's lives. And it was for someone you'd never think that you could do good work for. It was the City of New York Department of Probation. In case you don't know what the Department of Probation or the DOP is, it's like this. Let's say you're in New York and you commit a crime. And if it's serious, you'll serve jail time and probation afterwards. If it's not as serious or a misdemeanor, you'll go directly into probation, where you report to your local DOP office, of which there are 33 around the city. You sit around a lot, you wait a lot, you'll talk to your probation officer, fill out some papers, promise that you're not hitting your wife or doing something stupid, promise you're looking for work, possibly submit to a drug test. The purpose of probation is for monitoring your rehabilitation. In New York City, it's one of the hellhole offices. It's worse than the DMV. We're talking pea-soaked carpets, missing ceiling tiles, torn-up written on graffitied furniture, really scary places that no one would want to be, not even the staff, quite frankly. So I got a call from Jim Bieber, an architect at Pentagram. And Jim had just gotten tagged to redesign the interiors of the 33 DOP offices throughout the five boroughs, from the floor to the furniture to the ceiling. And for me, he wanted that pentimento of graphic design that we can bring to a project, you know, surface treatment of color and typography, for restroom signs, sign-up sheets, you know, the user experience basics. It was still relatively a large project with a very small budget. But I was interested because I wanted to do work that real people see and use. I thought there was a worthy audience here, and an opportunity to add what I know creativity can bring to a project humor, boldness, and inspiration. I saw an opportunity to add some level of humanity to a deserving audience and possibly bring art into people's lives. Hell, I bemoan the lack of art in our everyday lives and in the public sphere altogether. We are pummeled every day with lackluster advertising, shitty bottom feeder marketing, and graphic design that looks like fuck, graphic design. Any of the real good stuff is hidden away in museums behind a ticket price. Blah. It was one of those lazy, motivational posters. You know, a photo of an eagle, and underneath it it read vision. Presumably because, you know, eagles have good eyesight. I suggested it would be cool to recreate those classic piece of shit mantra-based posters, but make them work this time. Not only for the job, but just as a personal challenge. So besides the eagle, we included the jets, you know, the ones that read teamwork. And also the um the classic footprints in the sand that usually carries like the Desdorada poem. And my own version of the you are here map that you find in the mall, you know, when you're lost. But my favorite is the remake of the classic hang in there kitty poster. You know, the kitty that's hanging from a rope, right? With his with his little teeny claws. That kitty poster hung in my sister's bedroom when I was 10, and I have fond memories of it. And I think even Lisa Simpson from The Simpsons has it in her bedroom too. To bring the point home on each poster, we added a small descriptive paragraph. For example, on the kitty poster, I think telling the DOP client to hang in there sends the wrong message. So we changed that. Ours is called let go kitty. And the little text on it reads like this letting go is hard. It takes faith and bravery. But if you can let go of your expectations, your fears, and trying to control every detail, you open yourself up to everything. You'll be open to the rare beauty of unexpected solutions that are only found by stumbling upon them. Open to the playful answers that are more meaningful and personal than practical. And most importantly, you'll have the freedom to approach each challenge in a way that's true to you. It's all there waiting for you. Just let go. Damn, damn, that's good stuff right there. And I aimed to write these descriptions in a stern, cool dad tone. And you know, quite frankly, I don't know where I came up with that, but uh. And by the way, I don't know if you can sense it already, but these posters, this series of prints, were directly on the runway for me to make my my my classic book, Feck Perfection. These were these were a big inspiration for me to write that book. Okay, mind you, we were not asked to make art or make posters for this job. But none of my clients ask for posters. They all get them anyway. Otherwise, the job was just to make signs, right? A sign that says sign up here or an arrow that points to the bathroom. And for that work, we just chose the font Din and we were done. There were no additional monies in this project for prints. But large, self-adhesive one-offs were cheap. So we presented the idea anyway. Beautiful things happen when you work like that. When you just assume greatness and acceptance. When you put yourself in the work and make it personal, it takes on a life of its own and then even has meaning for others. I could go on for hours about the crazy meetings we endured to get this work published. Like uh like all the concerns about using gang colors, for example. Or how my assistant left all the goofy doodles from the original sketches and didn't clean them up for the final pieces because he liked them. And they made it into the final work. He left in the little doodles that say no smoking, or on one, there's a little goofy sun and moon drawing. I will share this one meeting story because it's really important. In the first meeting, we met with the new director of the DOP, Vincent Giraldi, a really great guy and a really great leader for the organization. So we met with him and his one assistant, and we showed the work, and they loved it. And Vincent assured me that there would not be a lot of decision makers in the process. I would work directly with him, which again, that's the only way you can do good work. He's his assistant in that first meeting did have a question about the kitty poster. And her question was whether it was a vagina reference. I was a little taken aback. And honestly, that is right up my alley, but no, I had never thought about that. And it really points out, as Anayas Nin once wrote, we don't see the world the way it is. We see it the way we are. Vincent didn't see that reference, and I didn't see it. So we got out of that meeting and set off to finalize the work. The next week, Vincent got in touch with me and said, Hey, really sorry about this, but and it ends up we had to show the work to the entire DOP staff because budgets were getting cut all over the place, and he wanted his people to feel included in the decisions. I told him meeting with the entire staff was fine, but here's the thing. My work, or any good work, will not withstand a committee. Someone has to be in charge. And he agreed and he told me there he would be there to shepherd the work through. He said, There will be no questions. This is merely a show and tell. There will be, you know, no questions, you we're gonna be fine. I said good because with this deadline and that tiny budget, if anything is killed, there will be an empty space on the wall saying art goes here. Because there was no time or no money for changes or additions. So we met with the group of about 30 people, and about halfway through my presentation, Vincent taps on my shoulder and said, You're doing great. Keep going. I have another another meeting to attend. And I had this meeting that was like right out of a movie. It was this kind of slow motion response, like I was going, no. So we get through the meeting, and I'm wrapping up quickly to get out of there. And then Vincent's assistant opens the floor and says, Are there any questions? Right now, you're thinking, Oh man, I wish James Victory could be my mentor, my guru. Hell, I wish he was my coach. Well, you can make that happen. Go to your workisagift.com. There's a questionnaire that will probably help you out, but it'll also give you access to a free call. So let's talk. Let's free you from overwhelm and creative frustration. Let's build your business and help you get paid to do what you love. Again, go to your workoft.com. Let's talk. Fuck. So here's the thing. I learned this from working in publishing for years and witnessing the quote unquote creative meetings when you they showed cover designs. Everybody that's in the room feels like they have an obligation to say something, to add to the work. It's like they're standing in a circle and they're all allowed to pee on the work. So with her boss Vincent away, the assistant felt it her duty to take charge and open the floor and my work to discussion. And the first question was from a young woman in the back who said, I think the kitten poster would inspire our clients to suicide. And other people started nodding their heads and agreeing. All that kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I see it too. Now, professionally, I have no I have no way to shoot that down. I didn't and still do not know how to soothe that answer, right? But as I said before, my work or any good work will never survive a committee because there is no committee in the world that is interested in beauty or greatness or growth. And with that, the kitty was killed. So there were a number of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the different offices. And the first one was in downtown Manhattan. And at the first ribbon-cutting ceremony, Vince Giraldi told a number of stories of the effects and reactions to the new spaces. And he told about one probationer, intently reading the small text on one of my prints, then looking at his probation officer and saying, That's what I think. And of course it is. Because the more honest I could be in writing those texts, as if I were speaking to myself or my children, then the more clearly I was speaking to them. Because of, as I say before, in the particular lies the universal. But the one story that struck me most is this. When the probationers first walked out of the elevator, they looked around the room and then slowly walked backwards back into the elevator, thinking they were in the wrong place. And the reason they did this is because they were not used to showing up at nice places. They were exp they always expect ugly places with ugly furniture. They had never been treated this well. They didn't expect someone to take the time to see them, to listen to them, to love them. Now, this story points to what's missing in design education, as I see it, and what's missing in our field right now, because we make shit for clients. Designers design for other designers' approval and not for real human beings. We make so much work that has been scrubbed so clean that'll pa it'll pass through a critic's anus unscathed. We spend our time teaching Adobe skills so people can assemble their own handcuffs. So much of the work we make is for commercialism. It's not made with the human being in mind. The directive of our work should be to entertain, to educate, to delight. Not only to sell. Selling is important, I get it, because we live in a material world, right? But listen, when you think past that, beautiful things can happen. Beautiful, unexpected things. Here's an unexpected thing that happened. Inspired by these prints, the probationers themselves formed a poetry group. And the DOP got wind of that and even started to publish a book of their work. And then they got the designer, the incredibly talented Karen Goldberg, to design the book for them. Then they started hiring more artists to bring murals and more art into these people's lives. That's what this work, what our work, what graphic design is really about. It isn't about color or typography or clever clever subversion of bad motivational art. It's about dignity. It's about saying, I see you. You matter. Your thoughts count. That's the job. Not selling or decorating, but being honest. And when you give from that place, when you trust people and share honesty instead of quote unquote design, you can move people. Hey, just as a side note, these prints, like I said, I've I've actually hated these prints for years because they only exist on the walls in the DOP. But now I've made them available to the public using the same exact files that we created for the DOP. And they're available through the um the link in my bio on Instagram. And they're called Classic Prints. Take a look at it. I'm James Victory. I love you, and I believe in you even when you don't. Thank you.