Designer Interview: Brice Bunner
Designer Profiles, Innovators & Creators, Uncategorized
From a small home office in Columbus, Ohio, Brice Bunner provides product design services for clients around the U.S. With a few products set to launch this spring in stores such as Kmart and Walgreens, Brice is making it happen with little more than a 0.7 mechanical pencil, Adobe CS3 and a flatbed scanner. Bunner shares some of the everyday things he has done to make himself a better designer.
1. What was your first impressionable moment that involved design? When I was about 8 years old, I remember having taken a camping trip and seeing a two-sided salt and pepper shaker. I was jazzed, it triggered all kinds of ideas for better camping utensils. So many thoughts stemmed from that experience.
2. Design school prepares you for many things, but share one thing that you had to learn through experience in the design world to fully understand. No matter how much you are paid, or how much you know, the opinion of some people can, for no logical reason, trump whatever design solution you may offer. I have had the uneducated opinion of a non-designer sink a design idea of mine when the person who contracted me was doing some Q & A at the water cooler. Thoroughly unprofessional, and ridiculous, my educated expertise was forfeited to the office banter of some business savvy co-worker.
3. Name one person who has influenced how you see things through a “designer’s eye,” whether it be an instructor from school or the author of your favorite blog or book. Chris Sickels of Red Nose Studios lectured once about how failures lead to great success. I had the chance to listen to Chris speak about four years ago, and that experience was an awakening for me. He talked about rapid failure and the idea that you can succeed mathematically, if you fail so many times. Hearing that was a great influence on me and reaffirmed the idea of perseverance.
4. As a consumer you observe products while inspecting price and branding. As a designer you observe products while paying attention to aesthetics and functionality. Which of those roles is it harder to relax from when you see the “next best thing” on store shelves? I can relax from neither. I constantly shop, if that’s what you want to call it. As a consumer I’m a spendthrift, but as a designer I approach every product with a close eye for design. Few things meet that standard to where money is of no consequence; the iPhone, the Flip camera. Both are satisfying to me as a consumer and as a designer.
5. Is there any one product you see on the market that needs to be redesigned with a new material, perhaps a better interface or even a more green-conscious approach to the design as a whole? It is cliché, but: the car as we know it. There is no reason we cannot harness the power of water to fuel our vehicles. Car companies are in the dark ages. Green design is everywhere, some of it genuine, some of it not. But now there is a challenge for us to design a means of transportation without knowingly committing to a destructive cycle of energy. Water should fuel our cars.
6. The touchstone of any inventor/designer/entrepreneur is to see their idea on store shelves. What keeps your creative juices flowing in order to reach that goal? So many opportunities arrive from running into problems. I have had sleep interrupted by my mind churning solutions to problems I encounter. A good cycle to maintain is: address a problem, create a solution, and get feedback from others. By hitting problems head on you can better assess what it is you are trying to solve. Not only is it healthy to run into problems, it is to the benefit of what you are designing.
7. Everyone has their secret to great design. Reveal your sources of influence without which you cannot design, without stating the obvious, Davisoncreators.com. My shopping cart. I seriously find window shopping to be a great mind exercise when doing design work. I love going to Wal-Mart or CVS and sorting through bad designs while thinking to myself, “that is a horrible design, I need to fix that.” Another influence for me, from when I was younger, were “The Never-Ending Story” and “The Dark Crystal.” These two movies were honest, creative productions that, to this day, remind me that anything is possible. As whimsical as they may be, the production really carried the stories through intense, old-school special effects.
8. Working as an independent designer, how much do you rely on networking for information and the resources needed for the work you do? As an independent designer, I do a lot of fishing and baiting. I will look for work then find myself having to manage other people that I outsource with to complete a project. In a way, I am the buffer between the outsourced designer and the clients I work with.
I have to reach out and have other people help to do package design, graphics, model making and research. Not that I am not capable; by reaching out I can expedite the tasks to designers who specialize in those respective tasks.
I tend to network with more of the business/ legal types. Going to an IDSA meeting, I find myself surrounded by “designers” shaking hands and mingling with the same people they work 40 hours a week with, which is no benefit to me. At a local level, BNI events or Kiwanis meetings are saturated with business savvy people, leaving me as the lone designer.
9. What should the ideal designer do every single day, with the intention of becoming a better designer through habit? Make whatever it is you are doing simpler. I won’t recommend drawing each day or any of the sage advice you might get from other designers, but I will say this: simplify what you do. It doesn’t matter if you are organizing your work station, completing a task at hand or modifying your daily rituals, make it simpler, pare it down to its smallest possible parts. I have found that innovation comes through simplification.
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