You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown

We had once an awesome unknown band from Belgium coming to play in our local club. I was the only person that came to the concert. For an hour they didn't start to wait for more listeners and they invited me to their table. No one showed up so they played for me and my brother whom I have summoned in the meantime. The best concert I have ever attended.

The band was L.T.D.M.S. (https://thomasturine.com/bands/ltdms/)

Music is subjective, of course, but I know a lot of people who dedicated an extreme amount of their lives to it. Went to conservatory, practiced for literally hours a day since they were young children into their now late 30s, write music constantly for decades, etc. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life has come from these people and they’re all unknown. They teach music, they gig, they work in other career paths, some still do part time stuff hoping it will eventually pan out, but none of them have any kind of fanbase or recognition really. I think the biggest one has like 800 streams a month on Spotify with 2k listeners? It’s nothing, like a few dollars a month

The world is filled with brilliant people.

My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.

Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band name or whatever.

I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters, and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.

So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public information. They're hardly household names.

If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.

And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps the show running.

We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of this blindside.

As someone who has played a fair amount of music with different people in different places, and who has attended quite a few odd little gigs and band practices and playing-in-your-friend's-house type things, as well as other types of mad musical moments, this is to be expected.

The idea of album sales or concert sales or youtube views or whatever being indicitave of music "quality" is a horrid historical perversion which is antithetical to the role music has played and still could maybe play in human life.

The worst thing about the modern commercial music industry, from my perspective, isn't the music that gets produced, but rather this made-up binary of professional music-salespeople ("musicians") on the one hand, and music-consuming plebs on the other.

The professional musician is measured by their album sales and ticket sales and spotify/chart success and their views on the big platforms, and that's it, end of story. The public is allowed an "opinion" on which "superstar" is "better", i.e., they pick kendrick or drake, or one k-pop band or the other, and that's it, you vibe to your type of playlist on spotify and fork over the money for the big shows and that's your musical existence.

I'm not sure how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like stale traditionalism or toothless hippie nostalgia, but I mean it in a real hard sense: "real music" happens when real people express themselves musically, on their own or in a communal setting.

It can be a kid doing her fifth piano class and you play two chords repeatedly and ask her to pick something in the room and say something about it and then you both take turns throwing out a melody and see where you end up. It can be three people hungover around a kitchen table who swap instruments for a few tunes, 5 friends in a garage screaming about their feelings, 10 friends in a cacophonous and smoky practice studio somewhere.

Your friend who never played any instrument who came along to hang out who starts chanting melodically and repetitively into a spare microphone at some stage can be the one who pushes the thing to some new level no one saw coming, and then there you all are, in this new musical moment.

Anyway. I didn't mean to rant there, but maybe you get my point.

Fred Armisen wrote the forward to Jason Lamb’s “NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion: An Oral History” (PM Press 2024)

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1505

> There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice...

That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.

I learned recently that Tony Robbins set out to be a motivational speaker in his teens. I was connected to someone on LinkedIn who listed himself as a "thought leader" one year into his career!

How can you be either of those without any experience under your belt?

But, of course, at least for the motivational speaker, a back of experience doesn't matter, because that's not what people are paying for. They're paying for a few hours where they can get pumped up, and give them an energy which will carry them until the next session, not requiring them to actually do any of the hard work to change their lives.

It happens, but it's rare.

Bell curve meme

Neanderthal: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"

Midwit: "If I tweet enough I'll get well known and become great"

Monk: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"

This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like

> you're not going to get rich

which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.

Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria.

I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.

Advertising is easy, making the best program is hard. If you have the best program already, solving the advertising problem is a non issue.

I read an interesting thread about this in relation to game dev. Development is ugly, so a lot of audience building and investor potential comes from creating visually appealing gameplay demos and mechanics. Often they are made separate from the core of the game. All that time spent making engaging content ends up compromising the development process and turning it into more of a show reel, rather than a fully functioning holistic game.

I’d rather do the thing than talk about it.

That is fine if you're doing it for yourself, but rather unhelpful if you hope to make a living out of doing the thing. The people I know who make a living off their art are those who sink a lot of time into selling their art (and themselves). Those who sit and home and just make (often much better) art languish in obscurity.

Of course you'd have to pay 700k if you're basically rejecting anyone who's ever been online. The candidate pool is, like, three people.

Uhh... having a LinkedIn takes like 10 minutes spent once. For most industries it's a pretty obvious investment to make yourself reachable by anyone who might be looking for you and to have an added data point of legitimacy (as in simply "is this a real human being emailing me")

Your heuristic is extremely bad.

I use LinkedIn to find jobs; and to troll the self applauding, back patting influencer crowd for fun.

The right way is never the shortest path. So the right way will still make people stay late.

Do you have any recommendations for where we could read more about the soviet originals/western derivatives? I’ve never heard that before (born after the collapse) and that sounds like a fascinating story.

Noether was one of a kind communicator and scientist and she should be more widely known because she is a role model for everyone.

Einstein was just not a random person doing something, it was an academically trained person, still in contact with people from academia, with extreme talent and found himself in a situation with a lot more free time and in an environment that was promoting his thinking. Mind you it does not take anything away from the achievements because the overall work was astounding, but it is disingenuous to present him as "a random outside of academia".

Noether was just not correctly widely recognized outside of the field, as much as she should have been at the time, because, let's face it, she was a woman. Her achievements are on par with Einstein's in term of scope and range. Noether's theorem alone is a huge cornerstone of modern physics and guiding the design of Quantum Field Theory and pinning symmetries as the way to tackle the building of physical Lagrangians that lead to the expression of the current standard model.

Her work on algebra is so massive, it is hard to wrap your head around it, the contributions especially to rings and topology are to be mentioned. She has shaped so many parts of mathematics that it boggles the mind and her achievements are well within the once in a several centuries type of scope.

I will not try to compare people because it is pointless because circumstances and "importance of achievements" is a difficult to measure metric, especially for people working outside of the fields where those achievements have been made, but subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things.

She was known to be gentle and gracious and always there to offer help and or advice or explanations, sharing her knowledge, and wisdom. She is one of those model scientist that any scientist, regardless of gender or ethnicity, should look up to as a role model, and she embodies what most of us think that science could and should be.

It certainly can be (I'm obviously not the expert on the traits), but arrogance (think Steve Jobs) means that there's less self-doubt, and less openness to outside counsel, which is normally a Very Bad Thing, but, if your own counsel [vision?] is very good, then maybe not so bad.

In my time, I've worked with some top-shelf folks, who had many -but not enough- of the combination, to be mildly successful.

Most of the best were extremely ... er ... confident. Some, it came across as rudeness, but others, would politely accept your counsel, and then instantly feed it to the shredder, without you ever knowing.

I preferred the rude ones.

There is a very fine line between all of these. When you look at famous people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk or Gates they have all these attributes. Another example would be Michael Jordan in basketball or Michael Schumacher in racing.

And contrarywise fairly mid-level professional athletes in a lot of sports are known at some level by a lot of people. Likely actors too. I assume if you look at Wikipedia you’ll find a lot more articles about journeyman actors than you’ll find about CEOs of major companies.

But at least it's not boring. I'd even call it audacious. Most of today's SUVs, you wouldn't be able to guess the brand/model if you took the badges away.

I call it the trash compactor

Cybertruck looks that way because of compromises. They didn't think the shape would sell, they thought stainless steel would sell. The shape is a function of how hard it is to shape stainless steel. Likewise gluing panels on is required because stainless steel can't be welded. Because they refused to compromise on stainless steel they were forced to compromise elsewhere.

> Cybertrucks have been designed to look this way because someone thinks it sells

No, I think it's to get the cost of an electric truck down. I've never heard anyone from Tesla say it looks that way because it'll sell better. It doesn't look like the other Teslas, which all look really nice, but are more expensive.