Examining our Experience: The Creative Realms of Graphic Design with CEO David Lai, Part I

This is the first half of the full interview conducted with David Lai, CEO and Creative Director at Hello Design; read Part II here.

Since founding Hello in 1999, David Lai has been leading the strategy and creative for the agency. Clients include Herman Miller, Nike, Sonos, Samsung, Speedo, MoMA, and Facebook. David has won numerous awards and recognition for his work including Cannes Cyber Lion, Clio, One Show Pencil, Pixel Awards, and Webby Awards. His designs have also been featured in Communication Arts, I.D., HOW, Print, and Graphis, as well as numerous other publications and books. David has been invited to speak at numerous events and conferences including Creative Mornings, AIGA, and SXSW. He has taught at ArtCenter and was on the Advisory Board of the AIGA Los Angeles. A graduate from Cornell University, David never lost his love of bikes. He has cycled across the French Alps and ridden from San Francisco to Los Angeles three times.



Ashleigh Fields (BT): What sparked your interest in design and how did this interest grow over time? 

David Lai (DL): School, because I think that actually is a pretty pivotal time for me… as a little kid, like even when I was five, I loved creating, I loved drawing, and my parents used to say I'd always bring scissors and glue and paper with me everywhere. I think that in high school, there was a moment when computers were becoming more prevalent, it was a time when you could start to tinker or play around with design with the Macintosh, and I got really interested in designing. I was so inspired because it was one of the first computer systems that was graphical; up to that point, a lot of computers were just text only. You can imagine moving from that to something that was very visual was a huge shift. In that transition, I just started tinkering. I just started to do things that I thought were interesting.

BT: How did this hobby of creating grow into a profitable career for you?

DL: I started designing these little icons and it started there. There weren't really classes on this. The internet was really in its infancy, and so that meant it was harder to have community, it was harder to have connections with people, but it was the start. I did connect with somebody actually, at Berkeley who had similar passions in Macintosh and things like that; long story short is, I basically designed these icons and a friend said, why don't you write a tutorial so you can share that knowledge with other people because they want to know how to do it? So I wrote a book in high school called Icons for the Masses. There was a balance of both creativity and entrepreneurship from an early age.

BT: How did your first book propel you into pioneering during the new age of the Internet?

DL: That age wasn't really a factor because at the end of the day they were sold on the book and they wanted to publish it. In that process I realized that maybe there was an opportunity to do more. I remember there's a piece of software that I really liked using, and yet the interface wasn't the most usable. It wasn't as beautiful as it could be, it wasn't as functional in my eyes. So I actually redesigned all the icons for the interface just for fun and mailed them to the company, sort of saying, I love your software, here's some new icons, feel free to use them. It was very idealistic, you know, in that sense. They actually wrote back and said thank you, we really liked your icons; can we use them? And they did. The next time they called me up and said, we've got a new program coming out, can you design the icons for that software? I said, of course, but you know, this time I'm going to have to charge you because it's going to take time, and they said, sure, how much? As a kid in high school, I was like, wow, like I could actually make a business doing this. I think I charged maybe like $400 or something like that, which seemed like a lot of money to me, and they said, of course, so they became one of my first clients actually. 

BT: I would like to speak about your time in high school and college. What type of student were you inside and outside of the classroom? Were you in any special programs that you feel helped develop you into the person you are today?

DL: Fast forward to college, I reluctantly entered in as a pre-med biology major headed on the medical school path. My parents thought that was the path to success. I think that was a big wake up call for me: just because you might be good at something like math or science or whatever, it maybe didn't necessarily mean that my passion was really there. I actually wrote another book in college on Photoshop and it was also an experiment because I didn't know Photoshop when I started writing the book; I taught myself Photoshop. My junior year I went abroad. In that experience, I went to Japan for a year, and in that I really rethought what I would do after I graduated: where did I want to go? The conclusion was that I didn't really want to go into medicine. My passion really was design and yet I hadn't gone to design school. I actually got an internship, and so really what that did is it let me go and get hands-on experience at a design studio that I really respected, and I could see for myself, like, is this something I was capable of? Is this something I could enjoy? I had a really great experience there; I worked for a creative director who had come out of Apple and started his own firm. I remember we were doing some of the first websites for companies, and I remember working on Nintendo.com. My design ultimately was selected, and that was very exciting for me. It proved to me, you know, that I could do this.

BT: What venture sparked the birth of your company and how did it come to be named Hello Design?

DL: One day I got a call from a client: it was the Getty museum and there was an opportunity to pitch them on a new website. I did that with another designer who used to work with me. It was just two of us and we didn't even have a name; we were working out of an apartment. I remember we wrote this proposal in big letters, “Hello, Meet David'“ and so forth, and they thought that was the name of our company. We liked it because “hello” was about simplicity, it's universal. If there's one English word you probably know, it’s “hello.” “Hello” is also relationship-based. You don't say “hello” to somebody you're not trying to build a relationship with, and if you think about design and communication, it's all about building a relationship. That was really the foundation of our business. Our studio was this idea of building relationships with people, and that's how we started.

BT: Your company is undoubtedly multi-dimensional. Over the years, what have you used to create a universal standard for projects?

DL: When we first started, we had this very simple philosophy of just focusing on doing good work and knowing that everything else would happen, and our second focus was working for diverse and interesting clients. To us, this meant being open-minded in the kind of projects we'd take on, not saying we only specialize in entertainment work, or we only specialize in a website or whatever it may be. That was really the foundation for our business. To be able to do a project repeatedly for a client over many years is really about building trust and delivering on every single thing, regardless of scale; it can be a small project, medium-sized project, a large project. Why we choose to work with these clients is because we believe in their mission, we believe in the importance of what they're trying to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we don't just take on clients because of their size, or whatever it is; we take them on because there's an opportunity to create value.

BT: The website also says you only have 2 founding rules, I’d like you to expand on the first one, which is “Do good work.” From your creators, designers, to builders, how do you quantitatively measure that?

DL: When I talk about good work the focus is whose point of view are we talking about: are we talking about the client's point of view of what's good work? Is it the world at large deciding if it's good work, is it about yourself looking at it and saying if it's good work? Is it about your boss sort of saying it's good or is it your peers? There's a lot of different perspectives. When you think about that, I think the simple answer in my mind, at least as I feel it's internal, like meaning for yourself; what I mean by that is, I feel like we all know when we've given something our all, you know what I mean? There's two different things that we talk about. We always talk about how you feel about a project, you know, are you proud of it? Do you feel like you've brought the best ideas to the table? Of course there's limitations with everything; there could be limitations of time, money, or resources, so you've got to weigh those things in there too.

BT: When first presented with a company to brand, what are some of your first steps or questions you ask to begin the project?

DL: We always say we have to be empowered to do good work by our clients. So it's not a one way street; it is a partnership, it's a relationship. There is trust that goes both ways. It's not us just doing whatever we feel like it is us listening and understanding and absorbing and having a point of view. I think for the designer there's a balance in the first part of really listening and understanding. That's really important. But if you just do what you're told to do, then what value do you add? You know what I mean? Like what if you're like this isn't the right solution? We start with understanding your challenges— I want to understand your bigger business challenges, not just your tactical challenges. Then that really leads us into a conversation I think is really important, and one of our core things we talk about is really understanding ‘why’ before we talk about ‘what,’ before we talk about ‘how.’

I think that launching and learning is another thing that we've learned over time, that whatever you do today may change tomorrow, so don't get too hung up by saying you’ve mastered something because whatever we did last year may not work this year. We're in an industry that changes so rapidly, new things come in. Even our definition of good changes, you know, meaning that I look back 10 years ago and sometimes I go it could have been better, and I always think that's a good thing because it means you're improving.

BT: How much individual and collective freedom is each person or team for a project allowed? Is there one sole designer that everyone models their work after or is there a collective level of brainstorming like a hive?

DL: That's a good question. The company has grown a little bit since when we first started, but the philosophy hasn't. So even though we've become a little bigger, we're about 30-40 people, depending on, you know, if we add in freelancers. But the model that we've sort of taken on now is to break ourselves out into smaller teams. The first part is your team structure. Instead of having everybody in the company on a project, we try to create teams around projects and clients. We'd rather be more like a smaller special forces unit or something, then like a big army; we're not trying to just throw a lot of people into a project. The team is pretty diverse, meaning you might have a strategist, you might have a designer. Of course, you might have a writer, you might have a project manager, you might have an account person, you might have a developer. So you can see already there's a lot of different roles. I think there's a value in having a focus and working as a team to amplify individual strengths. Even on our creative team, nobody's a cookie cutter; we've hired creatives that have very diverse backgrounds. Even one of our account people was a composer and was able to compose music. So we don't even pigeonhole people that are not in the “creative group.” Your question about where did these ideas come from? They come from everyone. When we brainstorm, we often try to bring the whole team to the table and those ideas can come from anyone that can come from the creative team, they could come from the development team. We try to bring them in early in that process because functionality and an interaction can be part of the idea.