POV: Humility is seemingly in short supply in the design industry. What’s really behind this?

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The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter has increasingly begun to feel like a haunted house of content, full of ghouls and ghosts, and somehow still standing despite visible signs of decay. Yet, while scrolling in the app a couple of weeks ago, I came across a vanishingly rare thing on there: an interesting idea. Frank Bach, a Los Angeles-based staff product designer at Instagram, made a suggestion: “I was thinking it would be fun for established designers to start posting old (kind of embarrassing) work from their past portfolios.” His hope was that up-and-coming designers would see “that everyone started somewhere and there’s lots of work that never makes it to the highlight reel”. He concluded his Tweet by asking: “What should we call it? #humblemonday?”

Since then, Frank has opted to change the preferred hashtag to #howitbegan, which he has borrowed from his friend, the designer Joe Salowitz, and which allows people to participate on any day of the week. The initial idea for the campaign grew out of a coping mechanism Frank adopts when he’s feeling particularly uninspired. “When I’m feeling low or in a creative rut, looking back at past work gives me a sense of accomplishment and progression,” he tells It’s Nice That. “I wondered, what could that look like at a larger scale?”

As someone who has been a designer since 2005 and who has heard a lot of the questions that regularly preoccupy designers, Frank has a good sense of our industry’s prevailing mood. “Designers are known to be bad at sharing their work, especially stuff that’s not top-tier and has an amateur feeling to it,” he explains. “At my seniority, I figure, who cares! Let’s open things right up and show the next generation of designers that we all started somewhere and all have slightly embarrassing work that never made the awards or highlight reels.”

This isn’t an entirely new idea. Every now and then, a designer or creative comes forward and makes a valiant effort to create a more humble, honest creative community. A couple of years ago, for instance, animation director Harry Butt spoke to our Nicer Tuesdays audience about the importance of failure and showcased a project that he said he initially “hated”. Similarly, our staff writer Olivia Hingley has explored the idea of rejection and spoken to artists and designers looking to bring more honesty to the creative industry. So, if this idea isn’t exactly new, why has it struggled to take off in the past?

One argument is that designers and creatives are simply too egotistical. Our industry has a tendency to idolise the individual creative and to subscribe to the notion of the singular creative genius. Certain individuals seem to view themselves in this light, too. And if you want to be revered as a genius, you can’t reveal work that looks amateurish and shoddy now, can you?

For Frank, egotism isn’t the right word. “I think it’s less complicated than that,” he says. “We’re afraid of judgement. Why else do you think it’s so hard for designers to launch their portfolios? Why is it like pulling teeth to get a team to consistently show up for weekly critique?” It comes down to a very understandable desire for self-preservation. “We can sometimes see ourselves as artists who keep their work close to them until it’s ‘ready’, and with this campaign, we can show that even when it’s ‘ready’, it may still not be so great after a period of time.”

I’m inclined to agree with Frank. Yes, of course I’ve come across a few designers with massive egos (my tell-all exposé will have to wait, I’m afraid), but the vast majority of people I’ve met in the industry have been thoughtful and generous people. That said, there is definitely a clear tendency to only publicly show the very best projects, the completed work, the perfect and the polished, while at the same time omitting the challenges, the sleepless nights and the projects that didn’t come off.

I’ve always been struck by the openness found in the developer community, where vast amounts of work, hours and hours of labour, are often made open source, available for anyone to see free of charge. It’s hard to imagine this happening in the design community, perhaps partly because there is that degree of caginess, as Frank suggests. I think there’s potentially also a sense of scarcity and competition in the design world that exists less in the developer community, which makes it harder to build such a radically supportive community.

Of course, social media has made both the fear of judgement and the need to seem perfect even more intense over the past decade (the irony isn’t lost on me that Frank works for Instagram, a platform that has played its own part in this). I spoke to an established photographer recently, who lamented the way that young people entering the field feel the need to be perfect, to be masters of their craft, from the very moment they pick up a camera. Striking out as a photographer in the pre-Instagram world, he noted, you felt you had time to hone your skills, to experiment and explore, and to be, well, a bit shit. This is a perspective Frank subscribes to as well. “We all start somewhere,” he says, “and a great creative career is built slowly over time. It's worth sticking it out for the long-run.”

And this is also why Frank’s idea is so exciting: because it promises to flip our social-media behaviours on their head. After all, Frank isn’t saying that we should get together in secretive, smoke-filled rooms and share our portfolios only with trusted friends. He’s arguing that this transparency and vulnerability needs to be out in the open, on the very platforms that have tended in the past to engender feelings of inadequacy. “I think it’s kind of hilarious to poke fun at ourselves and show off our worst work,” he says. “It’s humbling, especially when there’s so much pressure to always show up polished.”