Talking Drupal #375 - Being A Creative Director

Nic L  
This is talking Drupal, a weekly chat about website development for a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 375. Being creative director. Welcome to talk in Drupal. Today we're talking about being a creative director with Randy Oast when his goal as a creative director is to make the online world as approachable, understandable and delightful as the real world. As the product lead for emulsify, Randy's creating a design token based theme for designers and developers to better work together by using shared tools. Randy, welcome to the show. And thank you for joining us.

Randy O  
Thanks for having me.

Nic L  
I'm Nick Laffan, founder at enlightened development. And today my co host is John Picozzi a Solution Architect at EPAM.

John P  
Hello, internet friends. If you happen to be watching the video, you may notice I'm wearing a New England DrupalCamp shirt with a brand new logo on it. This past weekend. I was in Providence, Rhode Island helping to run the New England DrupalCamp. And we had a great time. Friday was a training day Saturday was a session day. Session videos are up online. If you're interested, we'll put a link in the show notes to that highlights. I recommend the keynote by our friend Colleen Clarkson. And Nick is partial to the web component videos. So there were two or three sessions about web components. So I recommend checking those out.

Nic L  
Absolutely good to see everybody. In news this week, Drupal 10 RC one was released. So if you're looking forward to 10, check that out. I've been tinkering with a bit and working on upgrading some modules to Drupal 10, or at least providing merge requests for that. So that definitely keep tabs on that we're getting pretty close to release.

John P  
Have a question on Merge requests are you using? You're using the new merge request workflow? Are you still like producing patches?

Nic L  
Actually, usually both I usually do the merge request because it's easier for the maintainer to like merge that in and get it into a release. But the patches easier for including in a project like if it's a longer running patch, it's going to take some you know that you need to use for project it's just easier to specify that because if you if you specify the diff from the merge request, anytime somebody makes a change to that your build will change. So I was credited static patch.

John P  
All right, there you go.

Nic L  
And now we're going to talk about the module of the week. So let's bring in Martin Anderson-Clutz,  Senior Solutions Engineer at Acquia ,maintainer of a large number of Drupal modules of his own. Martin, what do you have for us this week?

Martin A  
So this week, we're going to be talking about a module called event condition action, also known as ECA, which provides a powerful, versatile and user friendly rules engine was created in July of 2021. And currently has two versions available a 1.06 release and a 1.10 Alpha 2 release both support Drupal nine and 10. And both were released November 18. So quite recently, and I think that's that's one thing anybody who's interested will find about ECA is that it's very actively maintained. There's there's actually, a team of developers who all seem to be quite involved have bi weekly meetings in Slack. Currently only used by 302 sites. But but as I say, it seems like the the issue queue moves pretty fast on that that module. The team of maintainers is led by Juergen Haas, who's a longtime Drupal contributor and himself a maintainer of quite a variety of modules. I think for anybody who has used let's say, the rule module either in Drupal nine or in earlier versions of Drupal, one of the big things that sets ECA apart is its use of Business Process Modeling Notation, or BPM n, you can either use that sort of built directly into the website as sort of a visual workflow editor, or you can also use like desktop software. There's, there's a application called comanda that that they mentioned on the actual ECA project page. So a variety of different ways to sort of integrate that with I would say, you know, very robust, you know, kind of business workflow software. So really allows a site to develop a very complex set of rules, but but in a way that you know, because it's visually built, can be easier to to work with sort of other business stakeholders. And the other thing that I think is really interesting about ECA is there's also a pretty rich ecosystem of modules in terms of integrations with a variety of other sort of Drupal contrib modules. So I need to kind of open this up to the group, you know, talk a little bit cases where you've needed to implement complex Rules in Drupal and maybe in particular cases where that kind of visual approach to building out the rules would have been helpful.

John P  
Can I ask a question before we dive into that question? And this might be like an old, old, old time dribbly question. So I apologize. Is this like a rules replacement? Like a Rules module replacement? Or is it in addition to like, how does this kind of fit in?

Martin A  
I would say it's, it's an alternative to so the Rules module is available for Drupal nine, I'm not sure if it's ready for 10 yet, but I think last time I checked, it was still in an alpha state. And so ECA was really developed, I think, to to provide a rich set of rules that that's a little bit more stable. And then also has this sort of, you know, BPM N notation feature to, you know, add a new layer of capability there.

Nic L  
I have to say, I, I'm really excited about this module, not so much, because I would use it on on every single site right. Now that I'm a much more proficient coder or developer, you know, I probably would do a lot of the stuff that you can do with a module like this in a custom module. Right. But I think I think there's two huge advantages. One is, if you I think that the Rules module is special in Drupal seven and before was was a critical part of the Drupal training pipeline of like up leveling kind of junior developers or site builders into more the developer space, because rules gave you a way to really like, how do you think about a problem? How do you think about, you know, If This Then That, and how do you think through what that workflow looks like, but gives them a kind of point and click interface, it also gives the websites kind of the ability to the on the other side, it gives the websites the ability to grow. So another thing that triple seven did great is, if you're a really small business, just starting out, you didn't have a huge budget, you could hire a site builder and get a lot of this stuff into rules. And then as the business grows, maybe a lot of those rules gets replaced with a custom module once you once you get bigger, but there's a big base of, you know, simpler Drupal sites that get this semi tech can grow organically from very simple to very complex. And without that kind of point and click adventure portion of it, it's hard to have both the site builder, you know, the complex site builder role, as well as have the simpler site with slightly more complex functionality. So I'm, like I said, there, there might not be now that I am more familiar with coding, I might not use this on every project, it might be useful for those types of rules, kind of like web form, where you want the end, you have an end user with a slightly technical person who wants them to be able to tweak things, you know, maybe change thresholds or things like that, it might be great for that situation, too. Because then you don't have to build out that whole interface, you don't have to build out all the configuration for it. So I'm really excited to start looking at this. Again, I think it's really been one of those things that the Drupal community, it really stood out rules really stood out in the Drupal community and has been missing for a long time.

Randy O  
I can say that rules really helped me a lot I was I do a lot of development work for tabletop role playing games. And I built a website called or bits and mortar, where like, if you buy the physical book, you can the store that sold to you can send you the PDF. And I used rules a lot to like, do like download counts, to provide to publishers to lock down downloads, like after five downloads, they were done. I'm not I'm not the engineer that everybody else on the call is. And so I was able to like, put my logic in and point and click adventure sort of way, like you said, Nick. And so this particular module like giving that that capability to Drupal nine and Drupal 10 is going to be awesome. I'm I'm probably going to explore it too, because bits and mortars get a little bit long in the tooth and could use an update.

Martin A  
Yeah, I think I would echo some of the other comments here and just say that, you know, I haven't personally had a chance to play around with this a lot, but but I'm excited for the opportunity when I eventually have the right project.

Nic L  
Thank you, Martin. I would like to mention too, that this is probably the most requested module of the week. I think it's been required. It was requested even before you started taking over the correspondence piece of this, but it's been requested a few times and since you started so on that note, if somebody does have a suggestion, feel free to ping us in the talking tuple channel of the triple slack. And Martin we'll take a look and get on the schedule I think So thank you, Martin and unto our primary topic. Okay, so we all think that we know in the back of our mind, maybe what a creative director is, but can you give us a description, Randy of what is the creative director? What is the day to day look like?

Randy O  
Sure. So, um, so creative director is one of those titles that the meaning changes based on the context, like the Creative Director for a fashion company is different from a magazine company from an advertising agency for a website development shop. So there's a lot of different like context that goes into it. I'm going to speak from the point of view of a digital agency that creates websites and experiences. So my job as a creative director, is to make sure that I am overseeing the visual design, the user experience, the information architecture and the content that goes into a site and how that is managed. So everything that is like kind of comes before engineering is generally like what I'm overseeing and what my team is overseeing. So I'm working with clients to uncover problems, trying to well, my team is doing these things, and I'm helping my team. But what I'm doing is I'm trying to keep a big vision when it comes to projects. Sometimes whenever when my team gets into the weeds with a client, like there are a lot of like concerns, and thoughts that go into things. And it's my job to kind of push and pull a little bit to try and get a little bit more get something a little bit special out of it. For instance, we just launched a site about a month ago for the Wu Tsai Institute, at Yale University. And the like, the main page of it has a wealth of animation that is like really awesome. It's wti.yale.edu. The the menu is like the whole design of it was centered around circles and these colored circles. And so the menu has this pop out circle, that's really awesome that I challenged the front end engineers to build and they loved it. And it turned out great. So like, part of my job as a creative director is to try and, like bring those experiences to life in a large way.

John P  
So not a creative director, like Steven Spielberg. That's yeah, that's what I was thinking. Originally, when we started this, this show.

Randy O  
I was just gonna say like, in a way it there are parallels with what Steven Spielberg does, although I'm not saying that I'm a Steven Spielberg. But it is about making sure that there is a vision from start to finish and what gets done. You know, Steven Spielberg works with film and works with actors and works with script writers. And all of that to produce a movie, that's part of what I do as a creative director is make sure that the team is executing a consistent vision and puts together something that at the end of the project is something that we can be proud of something that will get results for the client, and just generally improves in some small or large way, you know, life on Earth.

John P  
So with that said, and that was, that was a great way to say that, how is a creative director at a technical company, which, you know, I mean, I would say four kitchens is a is a tech tech company, right? Different from those other types of creative directors, you kind of you kind of brought up earlier.

Randy O  
Sure. So, being a creative director at a an engineering heavy agency has particular challenges, like in the like, last 10 years four kitchens, has been going from being engineering lead to being more project results lead. And that brings challenges because we want to maintain our engineering superiority. But we also want to, like bring about the end, develop reputations in these other areas. And we've done an excellent job of bringing in user experience and bringing in visual design. The the challenges are kind of using the materials that you have going back to that Steven Spielberg example that you mentioned, you know, there are like certain teams that he can use, and there are certain teams that he can't use, maybe for budget reasons, maybe for planning reasons, like maybe somebody's booked. The same is true being at an agency like for kitchens. You know, I have to work within the circumstances that I have. And so what I do as a creative director is I engage with the other team seems apt for kitchen. So the back end engineers, the front end engineers, are technical strategy team and the project managers. And I talk about what are the things that interest them? What are the things that they are pursuing? And what to do. And I try to lean into that. For instance, we have a front end engineer who right now is doing a lot of I think it's called d3, like real, like JavaScript, like three dimensional rendering, like does a lot of like complex stuff with Canvas. And I have told this engineer, I said, I want to 100% lean into that. And I said, Do not be surprised, you know, when I come to you, and I asked you a lot of questions about what you can and cannot do, because I want to lean into the strengths of what people want to do. And I also want to lean away from things that are maybe like not possible to do. So. So that's, those are some of the challenges there and the ways that like they are addressed.

Nic L  
So one of the things that I'm curious about is do you think that the underlying technology matters? Like does it do being a creative director? Do you have to worry if something is in Drupal versus something else? Whereas your overall project guidance like the same? Like you're about the look, the feel the experience? Or does the technology really have any say in that?

Randy O  
Well, every every decision within a project is going to impact the project. The reality is, is that if you choose Drupal, it's going to be different than if you chose WordPress than if you chose Joomla. Versus if you chose, like sanity, okay, so like all of those different choices, impact how things get done, what things are easier to do, what things are harder to do, and what possibilities exist. So for instance, like being within the Drupal space, I know that the experience can be highly customized, which means that we can tailor an experience to exactly what it means to be. I know that when we work on WordPress projects, we can also do that kind of tailoring. But we also have the ability to save costs by using pre made plugins and making those recommendations and having us bend a little bit and use something that's off the shelf as opposed to custom and then customizing in other places. And so like there are a wealth of these, like trade offs that happen as a result of the technology choice.

John P  
So just out of curiosity, how much like content modeling is your team doing? Randy versus like, you know, an architect or or more more of the folks on the engineering side?

Randy O  
Sure. So that's basically my user experience strategists and the technical strategists generally get into fistfights and whoever is the last person standing wins. That's not true at all. The technical strategists and my user experience strategists work together during the discovery process and during our design process to, to come to a point where we have information architecture that then feeds into the wireframes that are done. And it's a collaborative process. So for for some things that are maybe more technical in nature, we lean more on the technical strategist. And for things that like are more like user facing, maybe the user experience strategist is defining that. And they're working together to define what that content architecture looks like. We also on our team have a content strategist, whose job it is to worry about content, and they contribute to that as well. Now, that's a new position on my team, and it's growing very quickly. And we're still like figuring out exactly how that goes in. So it might be like a three way fight in the future. But generally, like everybody collaborates together to make the best thing that we can.

John P  
So there. So you're basically bringing in subject matter experts. So first, you know, going back to Nick's original question like how familiar do you have to be with the you know, the underlying technology, you're basically bringing in subject matter experts for those technologies to ensure that you're not, you're not creating something that's completely outside of the realm of possibility or making things more difficult? It sounds like,

Randy O  
Oh, absolutely, we we involve a technical strategist from the start of a project and a technical lead from the start of a project. So the technical strategist is kind of like looking at the forest. And the tech lead is looking at the trees. And my team is like doing all the creative work, and we're checking it against everybody to make sure that like, you know, are we designing or building or planning something that's going to like blow the scope out of the water? Is it going to be difficult to do? And in fact, like, you know, this is You know, we have a very good process for doing this. But recently, we had a, there was a slide show that we were putting together, we had these beautiful designs for it, it was very complicated. And I routed it through like two or three individuals, like people on the team and people outside of the team, because I wanted to make sure that it could be built, and I do some front end engineering myself, and I thought that it could be built. And then we pass the ticket off into the build phase. And we realized that just couldn't be built. So we run across stuff like that, sometimes where, you know, we have to kind of back away and recover. But we do our due diligence to make sure that like, we don't run into that problem very often. In fact, that's the only example that I have, in the like seven years that I've been at four kitchens, where something was designed that we couldn't actually build.

Nic L  
So I just want to clarify something to like when we're this is something that came up as I was reading the show notes in thinking specifically about being a creative director. And I'm curious about your perspective on this, that you're a creative director, generally, when somebody says somebody is a creative, it's like, they're talking about visual creative, right? They're talking about visual designs or interactions. But, you know, I, when I was looking at this, I was thinking like, well, I'm still creative. It's just my creative is more on the engineering side, or the development side. So I wonder if there's like a language thing here that can be like, you know, visually creative or visually designed, or something that can be used because like it, it I think it's interesting, that creative is always pinned on like the visual, what you can see and isn't always thought about, like what's going on behind the scenes, because there's, you know, people that can make the most performance site or the most cash site, like, that's creative, too. It's just maybe not immediately visible. And I'm curious if that's, you know, if there's ever been any discussion internally about that.

Randy O  
Yeah, there's, uh, so I'm, I'm a big fan of using, like appropriate language and appropriate words, you know, for what the meaning is. And so, three years ago, I got the opportunity to change my title. And so they're like, hey, what do you want the title to be? And what do you want the team name to be? And so I was just, I thought about it. And like, it's like, oh, it could be the design and UX team. But then like, what happens if I like broaden what I offer? I could call it design ops. But design ops just really sounds like real kind of businessy. And like, you know, I didn't care for that plus the word design, it's like, well, design has a lot of visual connotations. And so like, I was just like, creative. For me, the choice of the word creative was because I want to focus on a word that that wasn't part of the process. So like, we have like design and UX and content strategy, and information architecture as part of what my team does. And I didn't want to call us to like design ops, when we did all of these other things. And I wanted a term that was going to be a little bit more inspirational, like, I want my team to be creative. I want them to come up with good solutions. And so that's why I chose the term creative for my team, which is the creative team and went with creative director to kind of circle back around to something that you said, Nick, I believe like you do that creativity isn't just like what people think of as art or visual, like design. Creativity exists. And in every endeavor that people do, you know, the Legos that behind you are a creative endeavor. You know, whatever John's got in that closet behind them is a creative expression. So like, you know, this is yeah,

John P  
my dream is face right there. Is that retiring?

Randy O  
Oh, yes, that's exactly what I'm talking to you about. And so, like, we need to like us that we all have creative energy. And if I could, I, I welcome everyone at four kitchens into the creative team, because we are all creative, but I needed to demarcate like my role and my team somehow and that's kind of the reasoning behind my choice.

John P  
It's interesting because like, you know, I think of like creative solutioning right creative solution and can come in a variety of different mediums like, like Nick said, right? It can be designed can be development. So I think like, Creative Director is just a a person who is guiding those creative solutions and So those creative things going, let's go back to kind of the relationship between design designers and developers, right. So like, sure, that's probably a big part of the process is kind of the the handoff there. And you talked about it a little bit right with with bringing in subject matter experts to make sure you guys are kind of kind of staying true to what is possible. But sometimes things still get lost in translation, right between the design team and the development team. I'm wondering if you can give us any insights, tips, tips or tricks into how you guys bridge that gap, and how you how you ensure like, kind of that that handoff is as, without bumps as possible.

Randy O  
Sure, so it's, it can be a rocky road between designers and developers, the way the tools that those two different groups use are dramatically different. You know, the, the mental model that I kind of use is that designers are working in a medium where when they put something down on the page or the canvas, it stays, okay. And developers are working within a medium that flows and flows, you know, just from top to bottom, or from left to right, if you decide to change the way that it goes. But they're working in two separate mediums that have two separate languages and to separate, like, kind of everything. And the trick is is to make what tools that they're using speak more and more similar languages. And we're in an era right now, where a lot of our tools are allowing us to to speak the same language or at least get close. So for instance, like, I remember doing design work in Photoshop and handing it off to an engineer. That engineer then had to use like color pickers and rulers to figure out like what sizing everything was. Now with tools like figma, and Zeplin. You know, developers can actually see what the values are, and read that. And designers are getting tools to create like color palettes and consistent typography. And as long as they like use them, then that information goes to the to the developer. So like, if my blue is like an aqua blue, then the front end engineer just needs to pull that. And anytime they see that color and a cop, they just apply that variable. And we're in a time right now, where design tokens are taking off, which are designed tokens are small, little like design decisions, like this is the primary color. This is the secondary color, you know, this is the primary font, this is the headline font. And these decisions can be communicated from design to front end. So like that's, that's one of the things that I'm working on right now is being able to export from figma directly into a codebase. And have it capture all of those design decisions, allowing front end engineers to focus on the more challenging aspects and more interesting aspects of the work that they have to do.

John P  
So sorry, I have one aside here that I want to ask because you are a creative director working with a creative team probably using figma. Right. Currently Adobe acquisition, good thing, bad thing or prefer not to say,

Randy O  
oh, you know, this is one of those areas where it's kind of like, we have to wait and see what's going to happen. I mean, you know, if we look at acquisitions that have happened in the past, from Adobe, Adobe tends to like absorb and reinvent a lot of things. However, the person who led this acquisition for Adobe, I don't remember the specifics of like, who did what, but the person who oversees like Creative Cloud, and generally does acquisitions is not the person who led the figma acquisition, it was a more business oriented person who led the acquisition of figma. And so, you know, that, to me, is a like, it's like, okay, so this is gonna go differently than what other acquisitions have done. I also think that figma has such success doing what they're doing right now. That if Adobe tried to, like, I don't know, if Adobe, like messed it up at any way. It's a fragile thing, because tools like figma are getting easier and easier to make. In fact, there's an open source alternative. I think it's called pen pot that is being worked on that like, you know, I know when Adobe acquired figma, a lot of people kind of started checking out pen pot. But I think that ultimately it's probably going to be a good thing. My example that I tell people for acquisitions and my thoughts on figma is like when Disney acquired Pixar. Okay, when Disney acquired Pixar, the leadership from Pixar basically took over Disney. And all of the the prior to that acquisition, Disney was producing a lot of like direct video like Beauty and the Beast three, like the be stunning. And as soon as Pixar was acquired, the new leadership was like we're done with these dumb movies, we're only going to produce quality content. And Disney got better as a result of it. So I'm crossing my fingers that this figma acquisition is going to be like the Pixar acquisition.

John P  
So an aside to my aside, and then I'll let Nick ask his actual question. If you have not yet look into the origin story of figma, it is very interesting and worth worth some some time.

Nic L  
I will say to the client UX, I think it's another open source figma alternative that I think has built in heat maps and things that I've tinkered with a bit. So it might be worth looking into too, if you're, you're interested. So shifting gears a bit, I'm curious about how you mentor your team. And I'm curious about kind of two aspects of it. One is like individually, like individuals need mentoring and specific things, but you mentioned like changing how the tide changes, sometimes in the design world, things are going more towards design tokens in your organization. How do you mentor your team kind of as a whole, in keeping up with things and adopting this type of technologies?

Randy O  
Sure. So you know, when you build a team, the very start of that process is hiring. And so like there's, there's hiring, there's mentoring and maintaining, and then they're saying goodbye, like there's an entire lifecycle to a member of your team. And we have to acknowledge that entire lifecycle, the start of it, when hiring, one of the questions that I always ask is, how do you stay current? Like, you know, with what's going on? You know, like, and I'll get responses like, listen to podcasts, I read veniam, I do this, I do that. And I asked that question, because I just want to know that they are doing that sort of thing. Because that is a priority for me is this idea of constantly improving. So, so whenever they become a team member, at four kitchens, we have, we have hours that are not billable, so we have a billable expectation for everybody. And then outside that bill will expectation we give hours for people to attend internal meetings, and also do professional development. I actively encourage professional development, I if I find something interesting that I think someone likes, I say, hey, why don't you try out this or watch this video, or like, for instance, the clarity, design systems conference was just last week, I bought the video package. And I, you know, don't tell anyone, but I shared the link with my team so that they could watch the videos. And we could have discussions around some of the topics. And so like, you know, I'm trying to I try to encourage it that way. We also have quarterly goals that we try to achieve like, like people generally pick like one quarterly goal or two. And sometimes I encourage people on like, Hey, there's this new thing. Why don't you check out this new thing. And so it's, you know, getting people to stay current is one of those things where like it's multipronged. It's, you have to hire for it. You have to encourage and maintain it, and try to like, build a culture around like staying current.

John P  
Interesting. So let's, let's dig into that a little bit more. From the interview perspective. I'm always I'm always interested to hear about kind of, you know, how how other managers you know, kind of interview folks you just mentioned, obviously, you ask people like how they stay current, right, which is pretty common, pretty common question. I would I would imagine. Is there anything kind of outside of that outside of the box that you do when you're interviewing for creative position?

Randy O  
I don't know if there's anything that I would do that's like out of the box. But I think honestly, I think I've got a pretty sensible approach. And a lot of it has been inherited by our awesome like admin team at four kitchens. And what we do is we have everyone we have a series of questions for a position to for Have people to be able to demonstrate that they have knowledge and in that role, so like, we have, like, here's a question. And then there's helper text for the CO interviewers that says, if they say these things good, if they don't, then that's bad, you know, like, you know, if they give a generic that way, some of the other people who maybe don't do as much hiring as I do, as the creative director, they can give their input and understand what kind of input to give to that to make sure that those questions are being answered. And in addition to that, one of the things that I look for, is I want to know, a person's ability to like, solve problems, like one of the things that I look for in people is I don't want to have to put a quarter in to to, like play a game, I want you to know, or pick up on what you're supposed to do and be independently active on what needs to happen. Like I, you know, I look for people who can independently accomplish things and don't need to be like handheld through

John P  
self starters, basically, someone who's gonna take a task and kind of run with it.

Randy O  
Exactly. And I'm not looking for like, you know, like, entrepreneurs who need a job for a little bit. I'm just looking for someone who like, if the client says, if the scope of work says x, and then they talk to the client, and it says X plus Y, they know to like, talk to the project manager and say, hey, the scope is pushing. What are we going to do about this, as opposed to like, just assuming that they should do x and y, because that's the conversation they had. I just am looking for people who think a little bit more independently

John P  
or more negatively coming back to you and asking, like, Randy, this change from x to x plus y, what should I do, right? Yeah, exactly. So you guys aren't asking like, Hey, what's your favorite Pantone color or anything like?

Randy O  
Well, I mean, I would, but we're running Pantone is actually a pretty hot topic in the Adobe circles right now. Because Pantone is Pantone wanted to up what they charged Adobe. And Adobe said, No, thank you. And so Adobe, is cutting out Pantone colors from the Creative Suite. Wow. And you need a subscription to Pantone for $20 a month to get Pantone colors and the Creative Suite here. And now that that's all one thing, but here's what's happening to if you've defined Pantone colors in the Creative Suite, they're all going to turn to black once. Deal with Pantone. That is so great. Yes, yeah. I'm not I'm not going to ask favorite Pantone colors. But um, you know, I do evaluate portfolios, like, one of the nice things about the work that we do is you can actually demonstrate the work that you do, whether that's like UX, or visual design, or content marketing, or content strategy, like these are all things that you can say, hey, I did this thing. Here's the thinking behind this thing. And I can get a sense of, of the quality of their work. That's another factor that goes into it, in addition to the questions. Yeah,

Nic L  
I'm always curious about more visually creative interviews, because like, I'm a freelancer. So I don't go through a lot of traditional interviews, but I have, and a lot of times, they'll be like, here's the coding challenge, build this thing. And I'm just imagining craters are like, Okay, you need to make a logo, you have you have 30 minutes, make a logo, here's the Photoshop, here's the laptop. And just like that, in general, that type of enduring, I think is thankfully finally falling away in some spheres. But I can't imagine that that would be very helpful. Others shouldn't be

John P  
falling away, in all spheres. Doing work. Free is is awful. Even if

Randy O  
you're even if you're paid to do that. There's a lot of like those tests. First, I will say unequivocally those tests are bullshit. There's no context. There's no like, all all you're getting out of that is like if you if you say, hey, designer, you know, make me a landing page and six hours, let's see what you can do. Like, all you're getting one like is six hours, what it's going to like, what it's going to take for them to do that design work. Maybe there's someone who like it takes them three days to come up with perfect work, but they need that time to process it. And like, you're just going to get a pretty page, you're not going to get a page that has all of the constraints that are needed on a project. And if we provide them with all of those constraints on a project, you're really hiring them to do freelance project and like no, it's yeah, it's it's terrible all around

Nic L  
it. and you don't get to see how they collaborate. I mean, there's a whole lot more there too. So And just one more coming up Pantone before before we move on, just because I've only used Pantone colors once in my life. And that's actually if you see the blue on the wall here, if you're watching the video little bit, that's there, that's the Pantone color for my logo. And the only way to get that was to go to some paint shop and order that, but that's the only time I've ever used it. And I'm worried in a couple of months, it's gonna turn black,

Randy O  
it's probably is probably gonna have to subscribe

Nic L  
$20 a month to keep my wall blue. Yes. So So one thing that I'm curious about is kind of going back to an earlier question that I kind of had is do you have developers directly on your team that you hire as well?

Randy O  
Sadly, no, I've been one of the things that I've been doing as a creative director is, is bringing together front end engineers and designers and bringing that workflow tighter, because I believe that that like by making a tighter workflow, it provides better work. So for instance, like a classic is like do the design work, throw it over, you know, the wall to the front end engineer with like, maybe a meeting, and then the front end engineer, you know, will occasionally ask questions from the designer. And that, you know, that's two people using two different like technologies and languages to do things. And that's not successful. What I've been doing is trying to bring front end engineering in as early as possible, so that we can start bringing that along. So for instance, like we have a, well, okay, I hate working on visual design and sprints, but I'm going to use Sprint's as an example, like, so the first sprint, the designer is going to like design the event page, okay. And then in the second sprint, the front end engineer is going to build out the event page. And in that second sprint, the designers working on the news page. All right, so what that means is that both of them are on the project full time and they can collaborate. So the front end engineer can like every day posted a new link saying, hey, how does this look and the designer can weigh in, because they're still in the mindset of the project. And so the front end engineers, always a sprint, behind the design, and we move forward in a way that allows both of them to collaborate and do what they need to do. And we've had a great deal of success with that. I have made snarky remarks in meetings that I would be happy to have the front end engineering team on my team. But, you know, I'm sure our Director of Technology wouldn't care for that.

Nic L  
I also think that storybook really helps with that too, because you can, as a front end engineer, you can give a lot of controls to the designer, like if they're not quite sure. On a color palette and a particular component for example, rather than you can just give that access in the controls in storybook and collaborate together on on page.

Randy O  
You can stress test things to and storybook because then you can see like, what happens if you like put in the word like antidisestablishmentarianism into the button, like, you know, how is it going to wrap and what's going to happen? And so you can you can plan for that button.

Nic L  
One of the things that I'm curious about too, with with the question they asked about having a developer on the team wasn't so much having, it wasn't so much having the whole front end development team under your purview, for example, I mean, more specifically, like, I'm wondering if it's useful in some of these situations to have just have a developer on your team to, for two reasons, one call out, like, hey, the direction you're going in here, is probably going to be problematic. So not even like them just prototyping stuff. But also like building tooling to make it easier for for your more visual creative side to like, explore things like I think sometimes when things are siloed there, there's not cross pollination and tooling. Right. And so if you have a when you when you cross when you have somebody from a different discipline on a team, and they see that whole workflow, there's I think there can be some inspiration sometimes in of how people think about and solve problems. But I think it's also hard I heard sell, sometimes you'd be like, Hey, you should have a visual designer trying to do some some of this front end design, or you should have a front end designer trying to do some of the design because just seeing the problem from that perspective can really be like, Oh, this is why we keep getting designs this way. Because there's, you know, there's a button in Photoshop, you click this button, and I'll put that design and it's just really easy. And then and maybe that is maybe that becomes like well that design is really hard. To implement as the front end designer, so maybe we build a plugin for Photoshop or whatever you use that output something similar, it's easier to do in the front end, but still makes that workflow easy for generating whatever they're generating.

Randy O  
Yeah, so. So along those lines, all of our projects have a technical strategist and a tech lead that are involved in the project. So while they're not on the creative team, they're part of our creative process. So they're on like, typically like a few hours a week, sometimes a little bit more, depending on what they're doing. To give us that feedback to make sure that like, into, like, you know, the crazy stuff that we come up with is crazy stuff that we can build or crazy stuff that we can't build. And so that's, that's, that's built into our project process.

John P  
As a solution architects, my favorite thing is to crush the hopes and dreams of design teams to say like, Guys, this, this is out of control. Like there are so many possibilities and permutations here, like, what are you doing? Yeah.

Randy O  
Yeah, see, one of the things that I try to, to encourage my team to do is to check out places like code pen, where people post like cool, crazy front end stuff that people do, so that they can understand, like, what the front end can do that their design tools like figma, or Adobe XD can't do. And as a result, like if I go to a front end engineer, and they're like, Oh, well, you know, we totally can't do this thing. And then I pull up a code pen, and I say, This guy did it, or this girl did it. And I'm just like, why don't you just steal this code? And so like, I'm just like, I have proven that it is possible. Let's talk about why it's not possible for this project. Or maybe that'll change an opinion on this.

John P  
And to be clear, as a solutions architect, I like to work with the design team to ensure that we are creating something that is manageable, and not. We are mortal enemies are mortal. I don't agree with that at all. So

Nic L  
I just before we move on, I just want to say that went down a rabbit hole in code pen the other day on finding CSS only carousel,

John P  
and now you want to bring that rabbit hole to the talking Drupal podcast. Okay.

Nic L  
Absolutely. It's one of the most fascinating things, I felt like the way that people get like, like, generally what you expect from a JavaScript carousel to work with CSS only. It's just fascinating to me. And I, I thought, like, I was just like, Ha, I wonder if you can do that. And then I found like all that. Like, there's 20 3040 different solutions for doing that. None of them really great, and something that you would actually want to implement on the site, I think. But to your point, Randy, it's one of those things where it really pushes boundaries, and lets you see like, this is what's possible with what's the latest in CSS or JavaScript or whatever you're looking at. And maybe you can convert that into something that's useful for a project.

John P  
Okay, another another aside from lightning question to the creative director. carousels on websites. Great. I love them. No, I would prefer they go off into the ether and never be seen again. Or maybe something else.

Randy O  
Well, I was I was being nice that I wasn't going to bring up my opinion on carousels, but they can die in a fire. Yes, the reason that they can die in a fire is that they the the only problem that carousel solve is an issue of like, like internal, like discussions and problems. Like you've got a lot of content that you want to feature. You don't want anything to feel second string. And so if you put it in the carousel, everything gets a big picture. And in theory, that's great. But in practice, your users the people who are coming to the site only see like one of the carousels and interact with one of the carousels notre DOM or Notre Dame, pick your poison, did a study into carousels that prove that like only like 2% of people interacted with a second carousel, and then an even steeper drop off for a third carousel. And so as a result, like carousels for featuring content is a bad idea. Now, there are like places where carousel like behavior can work. One example of that is like the Netflix app. Netflix like shows you a bunch of TV shows and a carousel that you navigate through. And so for things like that, a you know a carousel is good because you're looking through options. That's a good use of a carousel but a carousel as like a hero. I'm very sorry, but it can die in a fire.

John P  
That's that's interesting because I always thought that like carousels were invented to appease the various units of a company that needed space on a homepage, right? Like the marketing teams like all of these really important people need space on our homepage. Okay, well, let's put it in a carousel, your stuffs on the homepage now, except nobody can ever see it.

Randy O  
And, you know, the reality is, is that some some companies, that's a good solution, like it's not a good solution for the users. But it's a good solution for the the internal struggle that the company has. And like, I know that whenever I have clients who ask for carousels, I tell them no. And then we talk about why they need a carousel. And sometimes I yield because I don't want to cause problems for my clients, because of something that's a bad idea for the users. But I also want to make sure that we're putting it there. When we put it there. We understand why we're doing it.

John P  
Yeah, I think we could probably have a whole show on overcoming organizational politics and internal issues. But let's not go down that rabbit hole instead. Let's talk about makeup. And what I mean by that is the makeup of a creative team. So how's that segue? Yeah, yeah, that was good. Anyway. I'm curious, what is as the creative director, right, you are the figurehead of this team? And I'm curious what you think a optimal makeup is of a of a creative team?

Randy O  
Sure. So originally, when I talked about what a creative director, does it vary by like, what kind of industry it is. And so what I'm going to talk about for the makeup of the creative team is for creating content rich website experiences. And for me, my, the way that I have my team right now, we have a UX strategist who just does deep dives into UX strategy only. And I have three UX slash UI designers. So user experience slash user interface designers. And I also have a content strategist. And on this team, right now, the reason that I have three UX slash UI people is that I wanted people who could do basic user experience work basic to medium. Okay, my team is really good at UX work. And I wanted to make sure that I had people who could do visual design, because we have a lot of like requests for visual design. But I need to spread that out, I can't just have one visual designer, because then it would be a bottleneck. And so I've hired these three roles that are explicitly kind of like crossing boundaries, to be able to move them around and keep them busy as an agency works. So on a like, on a typical creative team, if you have people that are dedicated, a small team like ours that's dedicated to like visual design UX. It's hard to keep everybody busy at the same time. And we had that problem at four kitchens a long time ago, were like, we have what we kind of call the restaurant problem where like at lunch and dinner, the tables are all full. But at like three o'clock in the afternoon, you've got a mostly empty restaurant. And so we would have gaps in people's work. And so by hiring people who have diverse skill sets, I'm able to have coverage on all of the work that I need. So, so I added a UX strategist to my team, a dedicated UX strategist to do specific deep dive work. In fact, he used to be a librarian. So I know he's good. Because librarians are very smart people. And they're also very, very fun people. And he does the deep research that we need to have done on things not that my UX UI designers can't do deep research. It's just that whenever we have like a project, like we, there's a university in Texas, that we've been doing, like a lot of deep research for over the years, and he gets assigned that project, because that's like user interviews, writing reports. You know, it never turned like that doesn't turn into like visual design and a project. It's just refining the user experience of some key things. So I hired him so that I could specifically have someone who had deep talents. And then I hired a content strategist, because every website needs content. And I firmly believe that content is the reason that people come to websites. And I want us to make sure that we are helping our clients in the best way possible. Like I don't just want it to be like, we create a design system and we create a component library and then they pour, like really bad content into it. And then they don't get the results that they need. And so I have a content strategist. Again, my UX SIRs could do can do content strategy, but I wanted someone who was dedicated to it, so that we could focus on that. And so in my opinion, like, this is the best team makeup right now, my my eye towards the future, and like the next couple of years, I want to get like a second content strategist, because I really want to focus on that work. And our clients are responding very well to that. And I want to hire a visual designer, just like an explicit like visual designer, to, to focus on some of the like, crazier aspects of design, like our UI designers right now are very, very good at their job. And they understand like the web, and they designed towards that, I kind of want to hire a visual designer who has no idea anything about the web, and so creates crazy gorgeous stuff that we then have to like kind of backpedal a little bit and start producing like real, like, crazy things.

Nic L  
And we push pushing limits is good. I mean, that's what are the questions was, how do you keep up to speed and one of the ways to do that is push your limits and find out. So you need to find out what the new technology is. I was talking to a colleague the other day about that, like, sometimes you will, at least as a developer, you get used to a solution. Once you have a solved problem, you solve it that way. And sometimes when you're looking to solve another problem, you realize, oh, this thing that I've had solved for 10 years, there's now an easier way to solve that, that if I had looked for it five years ago, would have found, and it's not the real world, because it's a solved problem. But it's like, Hey, if you can, if you can save, you know, for example, this happens in CSS all the time, like when flux came out it, you know, it made a lot of float stuff, not necessary anymore. And grid is, you know, making a lot of things way easier, right. So if you're, if you're pushing boundaries on the design side, then it's definitely going to be it's definitely something that can help you keep up to speed to. So one of your responsibilities that for kitchens is to kind of craft and get the team as we've been talking about. And there's been some pretty significant challenges to managing teams over the last couple of years with the pandemic. I'm curious how you approach that, and you know, what kind of full kitchens is doing around managing that for their team?

Randy O  
Sure, so. So I'll start with four kitchens, and then I'll talk about the creative team. So four kitchens weathered the pandemic very well. I mean, not not perfectly, but it was, it was much better than we thought it was going to be. And a lot of that is because we put a lot of like thoughtful planning into, like, what we want to ensure that we're stable, and so we like sock, you know, money away for a rainy day. And the pandemic was a long, long, rainy day, you know, and so for kitchens was able to weather it with a like minimal amount of like, what would be considered like negative action from the leadership team, I think that like, we had to let go of a couple of people, but it was fairly minimum, minimal. And for the creative team, it was, it was a sea change. Prior to prior to the pandemic, I was not in a leadership position at four kitchens. And during the pandemic, the the team that was there, it was called the design and UX team or UX and design team. Those individuals, like a lot of people during the pandemic decided to like look for greener pastures, and I ended up leaving for other jobs. And those people are all dear friends of mine, I stay in touch with them. But they decided that they were going to go to like, larger, more stable companies during the pandemic, that they, they figured would weather it better, because there was a lot of uncertainty during the pandemic, especially in the early days. Looking back, you know, you know, we sometimes think like, Oh, it wasn't too bad. No, it was it was it was really nerve wracking. I think everybody had like one foot out of the door. All right. So um, so when those individuals left for kitchens during the pandemic, this was an opportunity to reinvent what the what the creative team would be at for kitchens. And so, so I was promoted. And I was told, hey, what do you want this team to be what you want it to look like? How do you want it to be formatted? And so that's when I made the change. From calling it the UX and design team to the creative team, I began hiring for the positions that I talked at length about earlier, and began, like executing my vision and hiring for the types of people and the skills that I wanted. And so honestly, I think that it was, it was a blessing. Because I think that the creative work that for kitchens has been doing in the last couple of years, has been really stellar and top notch. I know that seems a lot like I'm kind of patting myself on the back. But the reality is, is that my team has done some really great work. And I don't, I'm not shy to talk about the great work that they've done.

John P  
That's awesome. I think it's, it's interesting to see that perspective and to see that see that change. And, you know, shifting as we kind of come to a close here on this conversation, I'm wondering, as a creative director, what inspires you what kind of motivates you?

Randy O  
My, honestly, my motivation as a creative director is to improve the world. I want to make the world a better place, I want to make the way that people interact with the world easier, and more like friendly and delightful. And when I say interact with the world, like the technology that we use, like our phones, our laptops, or tablets, you know, these are other ways that we are engaging with the world. And so I want to make sure that the work that I'm doing, and the work that my team is doing is something I call like nutritious work, like work that feeds the soul, I want to make sure that whenever like we have a project that launches, you know that that project that's launching is in some small or large way, improving the world, I want to make sure that the contributions that we make to open source and other communities are improving the lives of others, I want to try and make people feel good about themselves. I want them to understand that like if a website is broken, or technology doesn't work, that the technology or the website is bad, not you. And so like, like, these are things that inspire me as a creative director.

Nic L  
So I've got the same question. But as a manager, what inspires you, you know, where do you look when you're trying to figure out how to manage the team.

Randy O  
I view management as building a community, like the the reality is that like, my team is a community. And I want to make sure that everybody in my community is contributing, I want to make sure that they feel respected, I want to make sure that they are appropriately challenged in ways that invigorate them. And I want to make sure that they are growing as well. Like, earlier I had mentioned like how like, you know, you hire someone, you mentor someone and go through it. And then at some point, they leave part of what I do with my community with my team. During like one of our very first meetings, I tell them, someday you will leave four kitchens. And when you are ready to leave for kitchens, I said talk to me, I will help you leave for kitchens for whatever you need. Because I know from personal experience, sometimes a company goes left and you want to go right. And no one has ever taken me up on that. And the like 20 years I've been a manager, that's fine. I understand that, like, that's kind of a scary thing. I don't hold any ill will towards anyone. But I want to make sure that people are are happy and vibrant where they are. And if they aren't, I want to get them to where they are.

John P  
I will tell you, Randy from personal experience, I think that you are probably a great manager, because the managers that I've had in the past that have shared that philosophy or helped me with with those changes have been have been great managers. You know, I used to have a manager and this was this was years ago, that kind it would basically say like, listen, the company is a brand and then you are your own brand. So like you have to you have to build your own brand as much as you're building the company brand, right? So like absolutely same sort of thing like you one day, we may, you know, go our separate ways and that's fine, but like my goal is the managers to make sure I'm building your, your personal brand. And in in conjunction with that helping helping the company brands to grow. So, you know, I think I think that's great. And yeah, I think that's, that's a good way to look at it. So the big final question As for kitchens, hiring

Randy O  
for kitchens is always hiring. We're always looking at people and I know, listen, I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, and it kind of is. But the reality, okay, so the reality is, is that for kitchens, we have job posting all the time for a bunch of different roles. Right now, my team is not hiring. However, I want to make anyone who's listening to this aware, like, if you want to have a conversation with me about like future prospects, I'm always open to chatting with people who want to move into a different position or want to carry on a conversation. In fact, that's how we ended up with the content strategists that we ended up with. My UX strategist said, Hey, I've got a friend who wants to, like, leave where she is, wants to do content strategy, you've been talking about wanting to do content strategy. Do you wanna have a conversation with her? And I said, Absolutely. And I had a conversation with her, and it was great. And then months later, when the position opened up, she was still looking, she came in, she interviewed, we had had that conversation previously. And she ended up getting hired. I can't guarantee that everyone who has a private conversation with me is going to get hired. That's not how it works. But I'm open to talking to people because we're a small community. Like and, you know, honestly, like there's a lot of crosstalk I'm always happy to carry on a conversation with someone,

John P  
you can't you can't hire somebody if you're not aware of them. Right. And the first way of being aware is having that conversation.

Randy O  
Exactly like it's like, hey, you know, we had a conversation like nine months ago that you were, you know, a little bit unhappy, or I said something that you really appreciated. You know, when I get a job opportunity open up, I will send you an email or LinkedIn message or the Facebook chat or whatever, and say, Hey, this is open, if you'd like to apply rock on.

Nic L  
Well, Randy, thank you for joining us for these last few weeks. It's been a blast having you on the show.

Randy O  
I've enjoyed it. It has been the highlight of my week.

John P  
Do you have questions or feedback, reach out to talking Drupal on Twitter with the handle talking Drupal or by email at show at talking drupal.com You can connect with you our hosts and our other listeners on Drupal slack in the talking Drupal channel.

Nic L  
You can promote your Drupal community event and token Drupal Learn more at talkingdrupal.com/tvpromo,

John P  
get the talking Drupal newsletter for show news, upcoming Drupal camps, local meetups, and much more. Sign up for the newsletter at talking drupal.com/newsletter

Nic L  
And thank YOU patrons for supporting talking Drupal your support is greatly appreciated. You can learn more about becoming a patron at talkingdrupal.com and choosing to become a patron button. And Randy if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you with the best way to do that.

Randy O  
Probably Twitter, as long as it hasn't broken yet. My handle on Twitter is amazingRando all one word. You can also get a hold of me through amazing rando.com And honestly just about every social network as amazingRando, including drupal.org

Nic L  
and John, how about you?

John P  
You can find me on all the social networks and drupal.org at JohnPicozzi and you can find out about EPAM at epam.com.

Nic L  
And I'm @nixcan and pretty much everywhere. I did create a mastodon account, but I haven't quite figured out how it works. So and I'm running servers so good luck finding me there.

Randy O  
Well, if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. See you Thanks, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai