(2017-01-03) Craig Mod On Great Design And Long Journeys

Transcript: Craig Mod on Great Design and Long Journeys interviewed by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade

let’s respond to a very interesting email that we received from a listener.

he described a situation where he was being asked to develop a potentially privacy-violating internet product.

And he asked us three questions, and the three questions he asked were: how do your Values guide the work you take on, when you have doubts about whether your clients value the same things you do? How do you raise concerns with them? And as someone with a little influence but no real decision-making Power, how do I navigate the difference in values between my boss and me.

One of the thing you figure out as time goes on is that giant organizations have a kind of like multiplicity of functions

For instance, we work for Goldman Sachs. It’s on our website.

“Look. The NyTimes contains multitudes. It’s bigger than any one specific position.”

The second thing they can do is you put a case that is actually a business case, which is, look, if this gets out, it’s bad. Put aside your values and your ethics here: this is bad PR.

I have profound ethical differences with almost every client that we have, except that the product that we are developing in collaboration with that client does not embody those ethical differences, it embodies something that we share

If you need everyone to be perfect, and if you need things to align with a set of ethics, you are probably not going to be doing that great at product work. It’s complicated, it’s driven by business, it’s driven by revenue

I think that’s the third question there, is I don’t have, you know, this is a person without a lot of influence, and no real decision-making power, how do you navigate the different values between your boss and yourself?

Craig Mod, who is here in the studio with us today.

There are selfish motivations here, because I pretty much want this guy’s life, and I’m just trying to probe into how he’s pulling it off

I think you did work for Flipboard at one point.

Craig: Yeah. For 15 months.

I went to UPenn, in the States

The Digital Media Design program, so it was like a fine arts and computer science degree.

And I helped co-found a publishing company at the same time. Rich: In Japan.

I was sort of the art director. I was just focused on making beautiful books, that was it. I was just working with Japanese printers

So I got, I had this private one-on-one Jiro sushi thing, but I’m, like, you know, I’m 26 years old, I grew up eating friend bologna on Wonder Bread and macaroni and cheese and SpaghettiOs — let’s just say it was lost on my palate

Part 2

you went and you started a writing community around travel

So me and Wilson Minor and like 10 other people got an email that said come to this thing, you may or may not have won this thing. We went to this thing and they gave us a $100,000 each.

You could only use it to invest in things.

Some of that I invested in Mandy’s company. Rich: Mandy? Craig: Mandy Brown. Paul: Editorially.

You know, and the thing, a lot of what I do is not commercially viable

interesting about it, is that the community was so tight. All these friendships were kind of born on it

So I was talking with Kevin Kelly

But you can’t print a book with tens of thousands of posts

Well we were going to do that

he said there’s a technology that lets you print stuff on little nickel plates

So anyway, so one was how do we respect the contributions? And then two, how do we make something that’s interesting from this, that’s not totally trivial? Then three, how do we create an archetype for an actual long-term archive?

You have a book? Craig: New book... called Koya Bound

Well we said, well we’re going to do a walk. I, you know…let’s just make an artifact. An artifact from an experience, right?

we realized that we only shot the book with Leica cameras, so we went to, we talked to Leica people and they’re like oh, great, let’s support that

So and then, the pricing of it is it’s a $100 bucks a copy, right? So it’s pricey, and the reason you have to do that is if you’ve if made books, you realize there is no money to be made at the scale most people can do books. Like books become interestingly profitable at about 10,000 copies. Chances are you’re not going to sell 10,000 copies. So what you have to do is you have to kind of mitigate that lack of real profits by making it the special.

Well, it’s like a bat signal

did Leica give you money?

No,

And a lot of Instagram love

and the other thing we made was a website

I love Brother laser printers... classic $80 Brother laser