Christian Solorzano [00:05]

Hey there, you are listening to Underscore, a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. I am your host, Christian Solorzano, and I am thrilled to be launching this first episode of 2024 with our guest, Sharlene King, a designer, that is funny, kind, generous, and overall just a great human being.

She spoke at the Chicago Graphic Design Club's Confronting Design panel at one Design last year in 2023, and several people came up to me and they just expressed how much they enjoyed her perspective on artificial intelligence and a wide range of different topics. So today's conversation is no exception. With Sharlene, we talk about the art of listening, ways to find your voice, generosity, accessibility.

She walks us through her introduction into the world of design and art through a security job that she had at a museum here in Chicago. We talk about art school, design school, and the lessons learned along the way. And Sharlene shares with us her passion for taxidermy and what that entails and some of the commonalities between that and design. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. And as always, thank you so much for listening and for your support. Enjoy. Good morning, Charlene. How's it going? Good.

Sharlene King [01:51]

How are you, Christian?

Christian Solorzano [01:52]

Good. Thank you for being on our show. So I want to start this conversation by getting the first question out of the way. It's not design related. Do you still have your 1989 Honda Civic?

Sharlene King [02:06]

In my garage right now.

Christian Solorzano [02:07]

That's one of the things that I gathered from looking through your social media is that you're a very— you're a Honda Civic enthusiast.

Sharlene King [02:16]

Oh yeah, I love my little shitbox.

Christian Solorzano [02:18]

Can you talk to us a little bit about your car?

Sharlene King [02:21]

Yeah, sure. I grew up during that time. I think people just like glom onto the cars that they grew up around. And so now this car being 30 years old is technically considered vintage, which is hilarious to me because, you, if you watch a lot of TV shows, right, it doesn't matter if it's Criminal Minds or New Girl, this is the car that represents poverty. This is Nick Miller's car, right?

The car you see him like asking like 5 random skateboard kids to help cover up in cardboard is a 1989 maroon Honda Civic. And that's the car I own. But if you watch Criminal Minds or other procedurals where there's a lot of car crashes, this is the car they use when the criminal is driving something recklessly and they need to blow it up. So that's my car.

Christian Solorzano [03:21]

So because it's a vintage car now, does it, does it qualify for those vintage license plates that I sometimes see?

Sharlene King [03:29]

It does. I've looked into it. But the problem is in order to get one of those licenses, you're not actually allowed to drive the car on the road.

Christian Solorzano [03:38]

Huh, really?

Sharlene King [03:38]

Yeah, it's a car you can drive it from show to show, but it's not meant for daily use. So it has different criteria when it comes to things like emissions or, just a clean title, what it means to have a clean title for it.

Christian Solorzano [03:55]

Yeah, I had a 2003 Honda Civic myself. Great car. It like just never failed. It made a lot of noises and the windows wouldn't go down. And there was like all these cosmetic issues with it, but it was Bulletproof.

Sharlene King [04:10]

I mean, that's the thing, I'm a big believer in the buy it once club. I don't like buying things repeatedly.

Christian Solorzano [04:17]

So what's the mileage on your car?

Sharlene King [04:19]

I would say it's like 120,000 now because when I bought it was actually under 80,000. It was someone's grandma's car, and that's why it was just in very good condition, especially for a car that's in a snowy part of the country. Usually those cars you see a lot more rust, especially in the undercarriage. And this car just had no rust because she kept it in the garage and wouldn't drive it in winter or any bad weather.

Always look for the grandma car owners if you're buying used and vintage.

Christian Solorzano [04:56]

When I was younger, we used to drive in the suburbs and just like see if there was any cars for sale, like on the front lawns, to like, some, some— Elderly person's home.

Sharlene King [05:06]

That's the way to do it. They take very good care of their cars. Yeah, I have so many receipts from all her oil changes.

Christian Solorzano [05:14]

So you and I have something in common, and that's that we— well, the first thing is that we both dropped out of high school. And I love— not that I encourage or endorse dropping out of high school, but I do like to see people that did drop out of high school do well and succeed and have careers and just, because I feel like there's a stigma to the high school dropout.

Sharlene King [05:39]

Oh, totally. And I think it's interesting because this industry especially is unique in that you don't need a traditional career or education path to succeed. I think there are way more like leaders in our industry that came up designing just like using like Tumblr, LiveJournal, MySpace, just random shit. Just by luck of the draw, they were the first people experimenting in those arenas.

And, a lot of times they're actually more nimble and able to experiment in those arenas because they're not attached to conventional jobs and careers. Like one of the hardest things to do when you're in a traditional design job is to keep upskilling. Like it is very hard to dedicate time to experimenting in programming language if you're stuck on a campaign for, Pfizer or Procter & Gamble. It's really hard. And so when you have less conventional paths, you have that room to do that.

Christian Solorzano [07:00]

I feel like the unconventional path sometimes forces you to almost have to prove yourself or to make your voice heard. Because I know that, I mean, I got, I got my GED and I went through the whole like education system afterwards, which I'm glad that I did. There's still times where like that imposter syndrome kicks in of like, I didn't, I don't even have like a high school diploma. So I wonder Do you feel that way at all?

Sharlene King [07:27]

I do, but not around the things that are pertaining to the actual, academic education. I think what people take for granted is the socialization that comes from going, through a conventional path, right? Like the internship, the mentorship, the going to college, going to finish high school. We take that a lot of those social that social experience for granted? And that's probably where I have the most imposter syndrome?

And I think these things are— when you're in a situation like, let's say you go to like the AIGA Annual Awards Ceremony, Right? It becomes very clear. Or like specialized arts education. They were always encouraged to be in a creative industry. Like the language they use, just the movements through the social space. It's very clear, and it takes a lot of confidence to not have access to those things and think, well, it's fine. I belong here. There's a reason I was invited.

But because the other stuff, you can always learn the history of design, you can learn the language of designers, you can learn about the industries and in and outs of the industry. But there's no book that says like, okay, these are the things designers joke about, these are the things that matter to designers in their off time. These are the annoyances throughout their career that we all— that test your mettle. There's no book about that. People aren't writing about that.

That's a weird thing to write about.

Christian Solorzano [09:38]

I remember when I was in college, because growing up in— I mean, just growing up in the education system, I thought that in college, to be a successful graphic designer, you had to know the history of design and you had to be an expert and master all of those things. And it used to stress me out so much because I would get these design history books and they were so boring, so academic.

And then it's not until I finished school that I just realized no one's talking about the history of anything ever. It doesn't come up in meetings. No one's really even talking about typography. It's just, this is what looks nice and we like it and that's pretty much it.

Sharlene King [10:19]

But that's what I mean. If you grew up surrounded by professional designers, right, they're more likely to talk about Nike than they are about, Paul Rand or, I mean, it's just yeah, we respect that stuff. There's a certain reverence you're always going to have, but it's not a day-to-day thing?

Christian Solorzano [10:41]

So you drop out of high school, you get your GED, and then for a while you worked as a in security, which is another thing that I share in common with you, although I only did it maybe for less than a year. And it wasn't— and security is like exaggerating because the title was security, but it was really just—

Sharlene King [11:02]

You just stand like as a security guard in museum. People are always shocked that like I was 16 and doing that. But the reality is like you just stand there and make sure people don't physically touch art. And unless it's like, they're— you're not getting like bank robbers in a museum during the day. You're not. It's like, it's goofy people who are just like really like, oh my God, is that real? And then their nose blinks the painting or something.

Christian Solorzano [11:36]

So you're working at the museum and that leads to your— from what I gathered from my research was that was the— that was your foot into creativity, into art, and into like a potential career in design.

Sharlene King [11:51]

Yeah, I mean, you gotta understand, when I was a kid, I was like a really far-left kind of like communist type of— oh man, it was, it was very hardcore. And I saw art as a complete waste of time. I thought it was like an obstruction to the proletariat revolution.

It was really something. And so working at the museum, it was just like another job. And, but I was bored. So I would read all the placards and all the different materials that they gave out. And I started talking to patrons about the pieces. And, the director of education, Bill Byrne, overheard me. And he was just oh man, do you want to be a docent instead? The pay is a little better.

And he was like, he was so insistent on like, he started having me go to these figure drawing classes. They were free at the museum and they were geared towards kids. So I took them. It turned out I was pretty decent at it? And then like he helped me apply for a summer course at Cooper Union. That was like around educating kids about art. And yeah, I mean, it still didn't stick yet.

I was still like, this is so dumb, but at least I'm— I have something to do in the summer. And then, I— he had me apply to colleges. And when the scholarships started rolling in, I think that's when I really started taking it seriously, because I didn't think I was going to college. I was concurrently applying for the Army. I was thinking, okay, I just want a stable job. I mean, this is— this sucks. What I'm doing sucks.

And the idea that, oh my God, I could go to this college, this place that's charging 40 grand a year. For free because, and this is how he explained it to me, was that like the scholarships are a bet because you are a walking advertisement for the school. Like if you are expected to pay full tuition, it's unlikely they— the school itself believes that you will do something with the education, which is kind of— it's scary.

To think about, but it's true. Every kid that gets a scholarship to a college is expected to do something with that education to further represent and enhance that reputation of that school. And so the idea that multiple colleges wanted to give me money to do this, it struck a chord in me. I was a little asshole in college though.

So in hindsight, maybe he shouldn't have told me that because then I would, I would yell at kids in school like, dude, you're— what the fuck do you think you're gonna do after school? You can meet— like, because at SAIC, it wasn't that hard to get at least a partial scholarship.

And if you couldn't even get that, it was saying a lot because, to be a professional artist after school, not to just make art, but to sustain yourself by making art is incredibly competitive, and it really hurts the soul too.

Christian Solorzano [15:36]

If present Charlene could have a conversation with Charlene then, what would you talk about? Is there anything you would tell Charlene then?

Sharlene King [15:46]

Oh yeah, just be kinder. Being a little shit is not like gonna win you any favors or make you a better Person, creative, it doesn't really matter. And you're just so angry all the time, and it keeps you from doing the things that you actually value. And it's just so learn to let go of things that make you angry and be kinder?

Christian Solorzano [16:11]

And what do you, what do you think she would say back to you?

Sharlene King [16:13]

Oh, fuck off. She would absolutely 100% say fuck off. You don't know me.

Christian Solorzano [16:24]

So you mentioned that for much of your career, for much of your professional life, and for much of what you've been doing within design, something that's played a big role in that has been the generosity of others and people willing to mentor and to be there for you and to answer your questions and whatnot. So can you speak a little bit about maybe some of those experiences and what they did for you?

Sharlene King [16:53]

It's an interesting thing because like if we go back a little bit to the social aspect of education, right? That is a part that you can't really fake having. You can walk confidently through it and not have it, but you can't fake it? And so that's where a lot of the mentors really come in, because a lot of the mentors, they've either walked the path that I've been on, or they've had experiences that I don't have access to.

And that's— it's really helpful, just being in the watch, shadowing someone who has had experiences you don't have. Is illuminating. You will glean so much if you're just open to the novelty of other people's experiences. There are definitely a lot of things that overlap, and you'll just be like, oh yeah, I've done that before. But if you look for the moments in someone else's experience that you're just oh yeah, that's totally new to me.

That's where a lot of the generosity can really be hopeful for you. That's how you can grow as a person, because the older you get, the smaller those moments are. But, I think you would be pressed to find someone older who isn't constantly growing, who isn't saying that— who doesn't say that they're open to new experiences.

Christian Solorzano [18:34]

At what point do you feel like you started to maybe have a little bit more, a bigger sense of your voice and who you were within the context of the spaces that you were occupying?

Sharlene King [18:47]

I think that's the thing about me and why I was such a little shit when I was younger is that I've never had a shortage of that.

I'm neurodivergent and I feel like one of the things that's both a gift and a curse of it is that I'm not very shy about my voice. It is very rare for me to be apologetic about my opinions. It is even rarer for me to stand back if I think something is wrong. I will just speak up. And it's not always socially appropriate. It's sometimes socially necessary.

But it's the kind of thing where, I think maybe I was around— I won't say, late, like 26 or somewhere between 26 and 30— where I found that, it's not about being the voice. It's not about being— you can have conviction and still make people feel like they're being listened to. Instead of just yelling my opinion, it's really about like a conversation.

Christian Solorzano [20:04]

And how do you, how do you do that?

Sharlene King [20:06]

It's active listening, something that I read once and it stuck with me was that there are 4 types of listening, right? There's active support, passive support, Active negative, passive negative, right? So let's say you know I walk into a room, my friends there, and I tell them, "Oh, I got a promotion at my job.", active support would be like, "Oh my God, that's so awesome! Tell me about it." Blah blah, right? Like very engaged, wants to know more, makes me feel like they care.

Passive support would be just like. Oh, that's cool, and moves on. They're not disparaging you, but they are not interested, right? An active negative is just like it sounds. It's like it would be like actively disparaging that news. Passive would be, kind of like maybe a backhanded compliment, or just, immediately changing the subject. And, that's something to think about. When we think about, it doesn't even matter if it's a first date or job interview, active listening makes a huge difference in people feeling heard.

A lot of times when people are angry, and I'm not saying you never encounter people who are purely jerks, but a lot of times we're angry as an expression of our anxieties being unmet. Especially in a professional atmosphere. Someone just doesn't trust you to get something done. Something doesn't— someone is more concerned about the ramifications of a project failing, or, things like that.

And so to actually listen and identify those things and then assuage someone of those things makes your ability to push your ideas further it heightens it. You're much more likely to be heard if you make sure other people feel supported and cared for, especially around their anxieties.

Christian Solorzano [22:21]

You're a huge advocate for accessibility and inclusion within the design process, and it's— and it seems to be something that just runs through the thread of a lot of the work that you do. And I had a chance to listen to some of those talks. And I think when it comes to accessibility, inclusion, it's definitely been something that more and more companies are talking about.

But I'm always really skeptical about which of them are actually doing it from the heart as opposed to doing it from the lens of, it's going to make us money and it's profitable and these are the KPIs. So how do you advocate for— maybe not advocate, but how do you see how can designers be better advocates of things like DEI, accessibility, within the design process?

And maybe even more so, how did you manage to be an advocate and to be a proponent for a lot of the things that you're passionate about today?

Sharlene King [23:25]

Yeah, this is something I've actually been thinking about a lot because, especially as scientists kind of like uncover how certain learning disabilities work or other disabilities, what especially like mental ones, like how they impact you. Something I read was that with dyslexia, the reason why the words look all jumbled is because we're trying to parse the letters into the visual representations of space, right? So for instance, a V, where our brain is reading it as the same shadows you might read like around a cube, right?

And so that changes how the letter forms are interacting with our processing. And so, like one of the things I've always had really good handwriting. I've always advocated for minimal, clean type, and it just— it finally hit me the other day in the shower that maybe I'm really great at that stuff because I'm dyslexic. One of the things that I've always been very good about is designing in bright, high dynamic colors, and oh, maybe that's related to me being colorblind. I'm not completely colorblind.

I'm partially colorblind. So when I see like terrible infographics where everything is just like 20% gradients, it's like very hard for me to parse. But, so that's that, like in a selfish way, that's how I got into it. Probably I, even without being able to articulate the language. But, maybe I think it was because I just saw a lot of bad design. I'm like, I can do this better. And all I really was doing was making it more usable for myself.

Christian Solorzano [25:33]

And is there anything in particular about the design process or the work that you're doing today that excites you the most? What is it about design that maybe when you were just getting into it, or maybe today, what about it keeps you, keeps you engaged? Is it the research? Is it the execution theory?

Sharlene King [25:53]

I think it's just how it's a facet in so many parts of my life. I think when I was younger, I would have probably been more someone who says like, hey, design should consume you. It's a lifestyle. But in reality, I think I'm more successful because I have an interesting life where design can influence the different parts of it. It's a, it's a nuanced distinction, but I think it's important.

Like right now, one of the more exciting things I'm doing is I'm helping out this group called the Chicago Roleplayers Guild. They're a really cool group that hosts Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games for free. And their website is atrocious. It's just really bad. They don't have a logo. So I was like, look, man, I'm using your website and I hate it. Can you like let me make some changes for you? They're like, oh my God, we would love it.

So, I had them sign up for Squarespace. I'm like doing little experimentations on logos and stuff, and it's just, this is something easy to do. I tell— I told them, I can only commit 10 hours a week to this, and I'm not gonna charge you, but we are gonna be very strict about the 10 hours a week, and I am going to teach you how to do a lot of this stuff on your own. That's why Squarespace, right?

Because I, I'm not gonna be your fucking webmaster. You, no one wants me to do that, and once I give you the logo files and other, branding guideline, you're gonna do all this stuff on your own, you know and they're just really pumped about it and it's just like something where I can coach them. I'm not get— just, selling them assets.

I'm coaching them on how design works a little bit, like I'm when I was just showing them the original site audit I did for them, and then here's the recommended, site architecture. I was explaining to them why the lang— why I changed the language, why we're structuring certain things this way, why we're adding other things here, and they're just it's clicking. Because like, once you can relate it back to someone's personal experience as they move through this world, design's pretty easy to grasp.

No, it's not about, oh, what's super cool looking. It's really about like, oh, that's how it would function for me. You don't just do a minimalist logo because you hate details. You do it because a lot of times, oh, I have to reproduce this thing as 2 millimeters on a metal bottle. I need to make sure this works on a phone app. I need to make sure it works on a billboard.

There are so many considerations, when you're mocking up logos, you are testing all those things out. You can't just simply say like, go into Illustrator, set some text and go, oh yeah, this is beautiful. Perfect. Chef's kiss. That's not how it works.

Christian Solorzano [29:14]

When you were growing up, when you were younger, let's say before I asked a previous guest about life before graphic design. And for you, before you knew that design was a thing, were there any experiences or any media that really captured your interests?

Sharlene King [29:40]

Writing. I wanted to be a writer. Yeah.

That was definitely my version of it. And that relates back to my political views because it's like, you think like the debates and the Being an orator, those are things that will get you further down a political path. Or like, my mom was still convinced I can become a lawyer if I wanted to, and it's just no, Ma, I don't want to hate myself. I think I would hate myself if I became a lawyer. But yeah, that was it.

I didn't— I really wasn't a visual person because like, in hindsight I think about it a lot of that stuff wasn't geared to be consumable by someone like me. Whether it's access, like museums and an arts education get expensive, right? Art appreciation itself is an expensive hobby, or it can be. And it's just is this stuff even easy to read for me? Is this stuff even easy to discern the details for me? I don't get it.

I think it's expecting a lot for someone without any access to art culture to, understand the point of a Mondrian or Pollock.

Christian Solorzano [31:02]

But I mean, were you, were you listening to, what were you listening to? Were you watching anything? Was there any commercial content that you were perhaps moved by?

Sharlene King [31:12]

Not really. I mean, I was even the PC person up until I'm still a PC person because I like the idea of being able to make your own computer. I didn't like the idea of like this closed ecosystem. I still have never bought myself a Mac product. All my computers at home for personal purchase have been PCs, and I've usually built them myself, like I am not your traditional consumer of design products. I build my own furniture. Well, the taxidermy has become pretty popular with designers.

I taxidermy my own animals.

Christian Solorzano [31:58]

Can you talk about that? I've never met anyone that has personal taxidermy experience.

Sharlene King [32:06]

I mean, so that started in college, right? We had a scientific illustration class that was like part of the Field Museum. You could go to the Field Museum and check out specimens and draw them, and, it was just a huge privilege. I loved it so much. And, I would get talking to the people who worked the collections, and I started learning little bits here and there about taxidermy. They have an entire team there just dedicated to creating mounts.

Some of my friends graduated from Northeastern and actually they got jobs there doing just that. But on the way to the train from the Columbus building of SAIC, they— there's this part that's attached to the museum that's just all windows. Now, in the fall, when it's migratory season, birds are really prone to hitting the windows. They even used to have like these giant owl stickers up on the windows to prevent it, but it didn't really work, and I just started collecting all the dead birds.

And I started experimenting at home. It's really just removing the skin. It's— there's a lot of weird chemical things they call, if you— when you— when you— it's just borax. So the same chemical you can get for laundry at Jewel, right? When you put your specimen in there to dry it out, it's called soaking the skin in poison, which is very ominous sounding, but it's—

Christian Solorzano [33:53]

That's gonna be like the quote for this, for this episode. Soaking the skin. And poisoned Sharlene King.

Sharlene King [34:01]

I mean, it's very meticulous. It's something I can do. It's not as hard as people would think. I could show— I mean, this is an audio thing, so it won't really help if I show you, but I'm working right now on a jackalope for a friend, and it's kind of a chimera too. It's a brown and black rabbit 2 rabbits that I've combined into a jackalope. It's very fun.

It's just, I mean, it's just, so I get the skins from Etsy, and then I get the form. I make the forms myself. Some people buy forms, but I use a combination of like air dry clay and Styrofoam to make my forms. You can also, because they're so, because of the migratory bird law in the US, you can't really just go out and hunt birds anymore. You have to collect them. So in the fall, I'll just walk around Chicago looking for dead birds on easements.

And, like right now I got a freezer full of dead birds. Man, I sound like a serial killer.

Christian Solorzano [35:12]

No, I think, I think, I think that's interesting. And I, and I, and I love the just the how that intersects with design, because that's essentially what it is. I feel like it's a design process.

Sharlene King [35:27]

I definitely think like being a designer has made me a better taxidermist because you just, you, there's certain details you look for. Like if you go to Etsy, there's no shortage of people doing taxidermy now. But, and this is why a lot of taxidermists refuse to do pets. It's very difficult to take something dead and capture the energy of when it's alive.

Right, like a lot of taxidermists will 100% refuse to do pets because you have a very clear idea of what your pet looks like in your mind. What taxidermists do don't necessarily make it look like that. It looks like an animal and it— we try to give it some motion. But it's often not gonna— it's not gonna feel the same. I don't know what your dog looked like in real life.

And so, as I fill up its skin with, things like wood stuffing, it's gonna feel off. Eyes are always an interesting thing. It's one thing when it's a deer and you can just get a glass eye, pop it in. It's another thing when it's a dog you've been hanging out with for like 15 years and the eye looks off.

Christian Solorzano [36:46]

Interesting. Well, yeah, we'd love to see some pictures at some point because really interested.

Sharlene King [36:52]

Oh man. Yeah.

Christian Solorzano [36:54]

So you and I, we were exchanging emails before this episode, and one of the things that we are potentially discussing for this episode was to talk about Logo redesigns and sort of like the state of design today and maybe the discourse that the internet is— what people are talking about. I think we don't need to talk about AI. There's plenty of AI talk and you were on an AI panel with us.

But when you think about the state of design today, what's your assessment of design as it stands today? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it?

Sharlene King [37:33]

Yeah. So we're going to talk about AI for a little bit because I think it's going to really impact how our aesthetics change, right? Right now we're at a certain climax of minimalism, and a lot of it has to do with the vast array of media we have to prepare designs for, right? Like a logo has to work on a billboard and in an app. Those are 2 very different spectrums, and it has to look good in pixels.

Even with things like Retina display and, high density, high-def things, there's still a finite amount of pixelization that will occur. And so you can't— there's certain— you can't do certain rounded edges without seeing things. That's why you'll see a lot more angular minimalism too, on top of that, right? And then you just have like AI.

AI, what AI is gonna do is it's gonna kind of take a lot of the generic things that we believe designers are too lazy to produce well, but it's gonna put that access right into the hands of a lot of customers. And Anyone who's ever spoken to a client about what they want can tell you that's not going to go well. People have a really hard time expressing what it is they want.

And anyone who jumps into Midjourney or any other prompt generator can tell you that, people are bad at writing. People do not know what to tell you what they want. And even, as sophisticated as those apps are now, it's still kind of clumsy. So all that to say, right now design is going to become a very generic age of average.

And I think the next— what I'm excited to see is what that next stage is, because I think, I think we're gonna have a reversion to crazy gradients and grungy shit, and it's gonna be People are gonna go nuts. At some point, people are gonna go fucking nuts. And the thing is, now we have the technology too to make those dreams realize. They may not look good at every scale, but they're possible. I remember when we did websites and you wanted crazy backgrounds, it was tough.

You didn't want to make someone slog through a 1-megabyte background image because that would take hours to load. Now that's not an issue, so you can do some weird, wacky stuff.

Christian Solorzano [40:23]

Yeah, I was talking with a friend about how when we look, when we look back in time, so let's say we look back into like the early '90s or early 2000s, like there's a very clear visual timestamp. And a lot of what I see a lot happening on social media is that people tend to have like a sense of nostalgia for the past.

Sharlene King [40:45]

Oh, absolutely. That's why I have an '89 Civic.

Christian Solorzano [40:48]

And I wonder if, let's say 20 years from now, when I see AI, I see it poorly do hands and like certain facial features. And I think it's only a matter of time before it like, it's just gonna get really good at doing those type of things. So I'm curious if in the future people are gonna like try to reverse engineer and maybe do those like terrible hands as like Hey, this is like an ode to when Midjourney was—

Sharlene King [41:14]

Oh, 100%. I mean, we can see it in illustrations, the more Pixar and other large studios produce these high-fidelity 3D animation type of works, right? The more the rest of us started reverting back to things like stylized 2D animation, right? Your Triplets of Belleville or Steven Universe, it doesn't really matter. Because we just want to— what we're gravitating towards is a good-looking story time. And the storytelling doesn't require technology, just the animation part.

One of the cooler things I'm seeing is— so Procreate is gonna do a drag-and-drop style of AI-fueled animation in their next app and it looks so awesome. Because to me, for a lot of what makes animators very different than other types of artists is that they are about storytelling in a way that you don't have to worry about in a static image.

And sometimes the technological barriers get in the way of that storytelling, like it takes a lot to draw, 30 seconds of a story. But if AI can help you do that, and we care less about the fidelity because the lower fidelity is gonna become very nostalgic for us soon. That's gonna be really awesome to see. But yeah, I think we're gonna see people who throw back to like weird, like 6-armed people. That's nostalgic.

Christian Solorzano [43:03]

I, that's exciting. I cannot wait for that to happen.

Sharlene King [43:07]

I mean, look at David Carson. I don't know how many people remember David Carson, but his whole thing was like in the era of like Swiss cleanly minimalism. He was like, fuck that, let's just like collage weird shit together.

Christian Solorzano [43:21]

And you recently had, you had some art at an exhibition not too long ago. Can you talk a little bit about that? And maybe outside of work, you're doing your taxidermy, you're doing website redesigns, you're doing art now. What other, what other things are you, are you up to lately?

Sharlene King [43:43]

So something I've been doing is now at 8 PM, I turn off, I put down my phone, no more social media. Right? I'll plug it in and I'll turn on the ringer, right? So if someone calls me or texts me, I can check that. But I largely ignore my phone after 8 PM. And I've switched it out with a traditional alarm clock in my bedroom.

So I can play music, like I have my iPad set up to play music in the bedroom. But if, I just use my alarm clock, it's the kind with the low bells and goes, it really wakes you up because it sounds horrible. It's so horrible, the noise it makes. But yeah, that's given me 4 hours a night of mental space. So now I'm screen printing. I'm reading a lot.

Christian Solorzano [44:45]

I'm a—

Sharlene King [44:46]

For I think people are always surprised by this because I have pretty bad dyslexia, but I read like 1,800 words a minute. Fun fact, the technique you learn as a dyslexic to read better is actually the same technique they charge money for to teach normal people how to speed read.

Christian Solorzano [45:08]

Is it reading like the first— only reading the first parts of every word, or what's the technique?

Sharlene King [45:13]

That's part of it, but you learn to scan in blocks. So for me, I'll do like multiple pass-throughs. I'll scan really quick, scan really quick, scan really quick, and then like, I've absorbed most of the page. So yeah, and then I'll just punch through it. So for a minute there, I was reading like 2 or 3 books a night. I've made my Goodreads goal. I've read, I think, 56 or 57 books this year, mostly in the past 2 months.

Christian Solorzano [45:50]

And what, what's— what do you like reading? What's your genre?

Sharlene King [45:55]

Oh, I oscillate between things. I like a lot of literary fiction then I like goofy science fiction, and then I read a lot of nonfiction. And usually in the nonfiction, it's stuff like food history, or science of specific animals. A lot of memoirs and biographies. I just read this one called All the President's Men. And it was about the Watergate scandal. And, the journalists behind it. It's a, it's a pretty good book.

Right now, I'm— I just finished up this I think it was called I Hide My Exoskeletons, but it's about a woman in the future or some dystopian scenario where, we instead of sending people to prison, we give them an extra shadow.

Christian Solorzano [46:56]

An extra shadow.

Sharlene King [46:58]

Yeah, they're called Shadesters, and, they go through life with this extra shadow, and it talks about the stigma and what that means. And, her child was born with an extra shadow because the mom died during birth. And it's just like this horrible thing. And it's just wow.

Christian Solorzano [47:18]

But is this like a, like a Jungian shadow? Like a—

Sharlene King [47:22]

No, it's a physical shadow you can see.

Christian Solorzano [47:24]

You had some art on display not too long ago. Or is there more of that happening in the future?

Sharlene King [47:32]

I'm gonna try. I mean, I don't know, because like, for me, the goal isn't to actually like, make art that sustains me. The goal now is to make art that's interesting to me and share with other people who might find it interesting. One of the things that I don't get to do a lot in my day job is drawing, like sometimes I do, but most of the time I don't.

And it's been very nice for me to like get back into it, like I really like drawing faces because it's really, it's really cool to me that like just like a quarter inch of a line can change someone's expression from like sarcastic smirk to genuine love. And it's, I'm sticking, I'm, as far as this series is concerned, I'm sticking to just pure black and white, no shading, nothing like that.

Because I want to see where I can go visually with just that, ever since I learned the thing about dyslexic people not being able to parse letter forms because your brain is trying to make it into space. Definitions. That's what I've been doing. I'm just so excited to see what I can do with faces just with black and white.

Christian Solorzano [48:59]

So we're almost at time, but I want to ask you just maybe one last question. When it comes to the Chicago design community, which you've participated in, I mean, I remember before I ever spoke with you, I just remember seeing you everywhere. All the time. And I'm always interested in, as a Chicago Graphic Design Club, what we want to know is, what does Chicago need more of? And what can we do to make the Chicago design community better?

And yeah, so I want to ask you that.

Sharlene King [49:34]

Well, I think you all are doing a great job in fulfilling a void in Chicago's design scene because what people really want is a sense of community and a— not guardrail, but we want the concept that was in Bill Withers' Lean on Me song? The idea that if I fall, someone can help me. Or I can— what I've learned can prevent someone else's downfall.

It's really, we are a very social species and that a lot of times we take for granted, especially with the easy access of social media. I think it creates a false— the phenomenon is called parasocial, like where you feel a false connection through media, but it's not the same thing as in-person stuff. The conversations we have in person, even if, you're just there to listen to someone talk, is very different than, consuming it through social media or on Netflix, or it doesn't really matter.

There's a human connection that's we need, and it doesn't have to get much more complicated than that. I think a lot of, especially organizations as they get bigger, overthink it. But people just want to connect. A lot of designers work in isolation, teams are small. And even on those teams, let's say you do have a big design team, even then you are still isolated in your work, like when I was at Morningstar, we had over 100 different designers.

But I only on a day-to-day worked with one other, if even that. I can't imagine what it's like at a smaller company. Well, I mean, I can because I've done it, but it's tough.

Christian Solorzano [51:43]

And when it comes to your, what I would consider, or maybe how you were describing it, this rebellious attitude that you once have and whether you still have it or not, how do you how does that exist within this very corporate setting, like a Morningstar, like a Salesforce? I work in consulting and it's taken me a few years to get comfortable. To get comfortable, I don't wanna say being myself, but to get comfortable on knowing the boundaries of how far I could push things.

Sharlene King [52:18]

I mean, this is the thing. It's hard for me to give advice on that because everyone— only the individual can assess what the situation is. There's a lot of dangerous advice that's floating around that can't be applied. We want to believe it's evergreen and universal, but it's not, right? But I will say this. I've always been a person of ask forgiveness, not permission.

And one of the things that my hiring manager at Salesforce told me that's— that made a lot of sense at the time was that, don't be the designer we have, be the designer we hired for, because often if you're being hired, right, you're being hired to fill some kind of hole.

It could be situational, like, oh, our in-house letterer quit, please make more letters for us. But a lot of times it's also like, we're growing and we need to expand. And we don't quite— we're having a lot of pains doing that. Can you add some leadership to our team or support our team? But, when you look at the goals of a business, right? You don't want to just fit what they're doing now.

You want to anticipate just a little bit out front what they will want from your team. It's very rare that if you solve a problem for today that it's what the future— that's all that's gonna be. Oh, you need a— it's really easy to say that you need to anticipate things, but true.

Christian Solorzano [54:12]

I think about it as like just like speculating or forecasting, like—

Sharlene King [54:16]

If you're a designer and you're talking to other designers on your team, let's say you have a 20-person team and you just talk with each one of those people for half an hour for a month, right? That's like, that's just one month. You got to talk to everyone. That's still more than I promise you a lot of the management, the leadership, right? And so you can gain a perspective on what is making the design team work or what's failing them.

And you can start looking at ways to improve it within your organization. Now you don't have to be a manager to start improving things. I think that's what a lot of people mistake, is that in order to effect changes, you must be— you must have some organizational power. And that's just not true. You have to have power, but not necessarily a title.

Christian Solorzano [55:11]

So pretty much don't ask for permission, just go do it.

Sharlene King [55:16]

And, this is where I think you are more likely to succeed, is always be asking feedback. Not necessarily from the people in power, but from the people it would affect. So if you have an idea for how to improve the design org, right, talk to the other designers like, hey, I have this idea, what do you think? Do you think if we tried this it would work?

That will get you further than organization, like talking to your manager, because you know what, the manager does not Fucking know, or they would have done it.

Christian Solorzano [55:50]

Well, thank you so much for your time. This was a great conversation. It flew by, but definitely looking forward to staying in touch and seeing, just keeping up with all that you're doing. And hopefully we could do another collaboration or you could participate in something else in the coming year. So thank you for, thank you for everything.

Sharlene King [56:13]

All right. I'll talk to you later, Christian. It's chatting with you. Bye.

Christian Solorzano [56:20]

As always, thank you for sticking around until the end. I really appreciate it. And I have some news. The Chicago Graphic Design Club is going to be launching its first publication called Faculty, which is going to be a publication about all things Chicago graphic design. So head on over to our website and you will see a link there that will take you to our shop, and you will be able to find a copy there.

It's available for pre-order right now, shipments scheduled to occur in early February. So pick up a copy, and once again, thank you so much. Talk to you soon.