Side Projects

This is the written script of Halftime, episode 38 of the Makers of Sport® podcast. Halftime was a short show on the off weeks between interviews where I wrote and read on topics in professionalism, entrepreneurship and business for creatives in sport. The episode aired May 26, 2015; the audio is on SoundCloud and the show notes live at makersofsport.com. The show's opening and closing announcements are trimmed here.

I’m going to be discussing side projects. What are they? How do they affect what we do professionally and how can the aid in our growth or potentially grow into sustainable businesses?

First of all, what are side projects? They are endeavors we as creative people take on that differ from our usual day-to-day. You can have a full-time job and pursue a side project at home at night or you can be a full-time freelance or agency professional and still pursue a side project. In fact, many of the best creatives do. Think about some of the guests on this show for example, Matt Stevens was grinding away at some agency working on manufacturing-based creative he was not passionate about. He began the MAX100 project as a passion project. He was passionate about sneakers, specifically the Airmax 1. And his dream client was Nike. So early in the mornings Matt would head to work and create the work he actually wanted to make, for fun. He decided to quit posting the work he was making in his day to day to his portfolio and instead tailored his outside work to the style of work he wanted to create in the future for clients. This eventually lead Matt to create a Kickstarter which became his MAX100 Project, a book of 100 Airmax 1 illustrations created in different visual styles. The Kickstarter was successfully funded and eventually lead to him getting work from Nike and having Tinker Hatfield himself owning a copy of Matt’s book, a side project. In this instance, Matt’s side work lead to him not only develop and hone a new style, but to land work from some of the biggest brands today such as Facebook, Nike, Pinterest and more.

Consider for a second your favorite designer. The majority of those designers are known for something other than just being a designer working for clients. If you remember in Fraser Davidson’s episode, he mentioned wanting to work on sports branding so what did he do? He started making fake logos for completely made up teams. This eventually enabled him to become known for a particular style of sports branding and landed him a contract gig working with one of the best in our industry, Joe Bosack & Company.

Side projects can help you become known for something. Let’s take an example outside of the sports industry. Some of you may have heard of Jessica Hische. If you haven’t, you have been living in a cave because she is only one of the most popular hand letterers out there today. Back in 2009, Jessica was not well-known although she was working for one of the top lettering shops in the industry, Louis Filie Ltd. Jessica was passionate about lettering and was wanting to embark on a freelance career, but she had no clients and no one really knew who she was. So she started a little fun side project called daily drop cap – a project in which she drew a new illustrative letter of the alphabet daily in a different visual style in order to practice and experiment with her designs. She eventually ended up creating 13 alphabets and in the peak of the project, her site was getting over 100,000 hits per month. This project basically put her on the proverbial design map and landed her speaking gigs and clients such as Starbucks, Tiffany & Co., Wired Magazine, The New York Times and many more. There are thousands of letterers out there. It has almost become cliche. But Jessica was known for something. She was no longer just a letterer, an industry where fame didn’t even come to her by doing lettering work at the top shop in the country, but rather she was the Daily Drop Cap girl. There was something tangible people could point to when they talked to her. Because of this, she has since been named to Forbes 30 under 30, The Art Director’s Club Young Guns and been featured in many popular business and creative industry publications.

Hische has also coined the term “procrastiworking”, it’s the type of work you do while you are supposed to be doing something. For Jessica, it helps her exercise parts of her brain that otherwise go unused during the repetitive lettering work she gets requests for.

Side projects should always scratch your own itch so to speak. Although they certainly can become viable businesses (Gmail, Craigslist and even Uber trace their roots back to work being created on the side), they should never begin with the idea that you will make money from them. That can muddy things up real quick as the passion will soon fade. It is rare (at least for a long time) that side projects make money. And even if they do bring in revenue, it is unlikely that the revenue is enough to sustain you full-time. In fact, many of the most highly successful businesses born out of side projects were never meant to be anything more than creative experiments. Google’s 20% time rule has become famous because out of it have come some of their best products. This is where they allow employees to spend 20% of their time as a Google employee working on their own projects. Companies like this want folks that are so passionate they will experiment. And sometimes those experiments become actual products. Many technology companies, including those in sports such as ESPN will do things like Hackathons where they will get beer and pizza and spend a weekend hacking away on fun side ideas that might possibly be able to be implemented into their every day business models eventually.

Tobias Van Scheider, whom I referenced before in one of the Halftime episodes, is an art director at Spotify. He is responsible for Spotify’s most recent interface design. He is notorious for side projects such as the Authentic Weather app, Semplice (a wordpress portfolio template) and most notably .Mail, an effort to redesign email. Tobias believes and states that side projects should be stupid. He states in a talk “Side projects are great because you don’t to know anything. You get to be a beginner again because no one is watching you and there are no expectations. If you don’t have an idea, don’t stress about it, just go do something else. It’s this attitude that it doesn’t matter that allows us to be inspired and work on only the things we truly want to work on.” If you are doing a side project for any other reason than for yourself, you should stop.

I’ll use this podcast as an example. Years ago I was talking to my pals Dan Simon of Studio Simon and Joe Bosack of Joe Bosack & Company when I brought them into Lexington to speak about starting a website, an interview website or blog dedicated to the intersection of sports and design and possibly interviewing folks making things in this industry. Selfishly, as I’ve mentioned before, the project was for me. It’s for me to sit at the table with some of my mentors, colleagues and friends and discuss what we do. The beauty is, I decided after being such an avid podcast listener to pursue this idea as a podcast instead of a written interview blog in order to practice getting better at publicly speaking and pushing myself to be uncomfortable. The tradeoff is I can share this with other people who can learn from myself and my colleagues that I interview. A fun passion project for me at this time that inspires me in my day-to-day sports design work. I have turned down numerous interview simply because I’m not personally interested in the suggested guest, marketing person that emails me to try to get one of their designers on the show or I just don’t want to do it. This is my show, my side project. I’m not the media. l don’t have to interview anyone. Now, I’m not saying this to be a jerk at all because I love being able to provide value to others through this show and drive the conversations of sports and creativity forward, but I can assure the day I get tired of doing this and am no longer doing it for myself, I’ll stop. Because the passion will be gone and my passion is what helps me be able to ask the tough questions, do loads of research and have insightful conversations with talented guests.

Oftentimes in our niche of design we see these football helmets designed as X brand or see fake rebrands of teams. There is a lot of playful banter in the twitter community about this stuff but truthfully I do not feel these projects are bad to do. They can be challenging, allowing you to experiment with different styles or techniques that you may no otherwise do. But keep in mind that what those particular personal projects are for are just that, practice. Those of us that work in this industry and are familiar with it know that many times designers don’t get to exactly what they want in big team rebrands due to at the amount of marketing or financial stakeholders weighing in on the decisions. Anyone stating their new NFL team logo is better is than some actual NFL team rebrand is making a subjective assumption. There was literally no one you had to answer to. No one to tell you they don’t like it or that you have to satisfy some NBA rule or big NCAA booster. But that’s part of the beauty of it, right? You got to experiment on your own accord in order to produce something you personally wanted to produce and learn while doing it. Just don’t get it twisted and fall into the trap of thinking your idea is the best one because maybe you executed it better typographically or didn’t do a roundel logo, which seems to be the trend of the NBA right now.

The other day I had a Skype conversation catching up with my pal and former guest, Ben Jenkins of Onefastbuffalo. Because Ben isn’t a part of the traditional sports design world working for a team or making sports branding, his episode is quite underrated but I highly recommend you go back and revisit episode 10 after this show. Ben started Warstic Bat Company, a Texas based wooden bat company, as a side project born from his love of baseball. The products he created out of passion took off and were featured on Uncrate and a few other cool stuff-type blogs. Now the company has taken on a life of its own and Warstic Bat Company is has major league stars using their bats. Ben even shuts down his office OneFastBuffalo from June to September to live in an airstream trailer traveling the country with his family. The revenue he is bringing in from his side project supports this.

To stay in the baseball conversation, Bethany Heck who was on episode 27 founded her passion project, The Eephus League as a school project turned full-time side project. She spends many nights consuming her favorite sport while working on a brand that deals with her favorite sport in The Eephus League. This side project raised funding 2 times on Kickstarter, something nearly unheard of.

An article on Lifehacker written last summer mentions that side projects can help us psychologically as well. A study by San Francisco State psychology professor Dr. Kevin Eschleman and his colleagues studied the effect of creative hobbies on over 400 employees in different companies and put them in 2 groups, asking them about their creative hobbies outside of work such as photography, cooking, writing, etc. The results showed that those who had creative passions going on outside of their work felt a greater sense of control and mastery. The study even mentions the word recovery. People with creative side projects are able to recover from their work. Think about that, doing work that you are passionate about can help you recover from the work perform most of the time in your day-to-day. The study also concludes that this creative recovery outside of work can positively influence your performance outside of work.

So to add to the encouragement I provided in the Halftime episode 34, Just Start, the next time you have an idea for something and feel passionate about it. Pursue it as a side project. Make it for yourself, not for other people. Do it to heal your mind and challenge yourself to discover new talents. Who knows, if you keep pushing forward with that project out of passion, it may become your full-time gig one day.