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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I look for when I’m hiring designers or what’s the experience of encountering a stranger on the internet. I like this phrase proof of curiosity. Is this person curious about the world, but curious in a way where they take action on that curiosity, and that can manifest itself in lots of ways. One way is, you tweet about it, right? Like you learn something, you tweet about it. 00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by Brian Lovin. Hello. Brian, you are a designer at GitHub, a prolific podcaster with design details, but before we talk about all that, I know you made a move recently and you’re getting to design a new home office space. What are some of your goals in building out that workspace? 00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, where we’re moving from, my girlfriend and I, we both work from home and we were in separate rooms, and it always felt pretty isolating. Where, you know, you’re working for most of the day, so you’re in separate rooms most of the day, but also those rooms were the bedroom and the living room, so the office and living space and sleeping space always felt intermingled. So, with our new home office, it’s actually a bigger room where we decided to put both of our desks, which is great cause we see each other throughout the day. The problem is You have video calls and you’re always interrupting each other, so we’re swapping in and out. So one of the big goals that I have for the space is there’s like this tiny little closet off the edge of the office space, and we want to convert that into like a little phone booth, you know, soundproof it, put a little monitor in there so you can just carry your laptop in, plug in and go. So I’d say that’s the biggest goal, but honestly, we haven’t even started cause I don’t know about you both, but post move, you get unpacked and you’re motivated to fix stuff, and then as soon as you’re settled in, you’re like, yeah, it is what it is. You just got to live with it for a while, you know. 00:02:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a dangerous valley in there where you have unpacked enough to live, but you’re not fully unpacked and settled, and sure enough people have boxes for months and years, if they’re not careful. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Which is also a useful little rule, you know, it’s like whatever is in the box for more than a month, you probably can just get rid of. So just take that box away, don’t even open it. 00:02:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I call this moves as copying garbage collectors, you know, and copy everything once and some stuff goes. 00:02:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I first started seriously doing work from home, remote work, and lots of video calls and so forth, I didn’t move, but I realized how important it was to have a separate space. I think I had a desk kind of shoved off the corner of my living room, which was fine when I had an office, but once I was working from home, there wasn’t enough separation for me between those spaces. But actually the insight that someone gave me was I had sort of a very small room and a big beautiful one with big windows and you naturally think of the big room as well, that’s the master bedroom, but actually you don’t spend that much time in there. And eventually I converted the biggest room in the house with the nicest windows and all that into a home office. And that was an absolute game changer. I had a big workbench where I could do kind of stand up and do kind of more physical tasks with the hands and I had a big desk. I had a Pin board on the wall for keeping all my stuff up, could also even think about and now always in my mind is what’s going to be behind me on video calls and what lighting is going to be in there. So for example, my current space, I kind of arranged it so that there’s some nice windows right in front of me, so I’ll get, you know, sunlight on the face and then behind me is not facing, I don’t know, out over the whole house so that when the partner walks by, she like suddenly panics because she realized she’s, you know, on camera in the background on the camera, yeah. 00:04:03 - Speaker 1: I did the exact same thing as you. So when we moved this big office space was staged as the primary bedroom cause it has the big windows, it’s the most beautifully lit. And then there’s this other room which was intended to be the office, which isn’t well lit, it’s a lot smaller. We’re like, you know what, we just sleep in the bedroom. 99% of the time the lights are off, so we might as well take the space where we’re gonna spend most of our time and make that the most beautiful and inviting and warm. And enjoyable, right? Like this is where we’re gonna spend all of our time. So yeah, very much with you on that idea, swap the bedroom in the office to match time spent, I suppose. 00:04:44 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I also take a bit of inspiration from there’s a couple of subreddits, one that I like is Battle stations, yeah, slash slash battle stations where people do these beautiful setups. It’s obviously their computing devices and desks and things, but they also get the aesthetic element and yeah, the carpet and the chair and all this sort of thing and. I don’t quite have the time or inclination to go to that level, but we do spend so much of our lives now in a home office in front of one or more computing devices, spending some time to make that aesthetic and pleasing and good vibes just seems to make sense. 00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the last thing I really want to get in here at some point is the couch. I’ve never had a couch in an office and there’s something very attractive to me about. Going and having a sit or a lie down in the middle of the day, where you might be sketching or reading a blog post or catching up on email, but just having that short break from, you know, sitting upright in your office chair. Sounds really attractive. I don’t know, we’ll see. I don’t know if I’d actually end up spending time on it, but there’s an idea of kind of mixing the feeling of what kind of work can be done in there, right? It doesn’t just have to be upright desk keyboard kind of thing. It could also be a little bit more lounging, reading, that kind of stuff. 00:06:02 - Speaker 2: Relaxed posture, reading and thinking. Now you’re very on brand for me. Thank you for that. 00:06:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. 00:06:09 - Speaker 2: Well, tell us a little bit about your background. 00:06:13 - Speaker 1: So like you mentioned, I’m a product designer. I’m currently working at GitHub. I’m working on the mobile apps there, and GitHubb is an interesting place because there’s a lot of different kinds of jobs that it solves for people in the world, you know, you have, of course, developers who come there to code and review code and merge code, and there’s the whole DevOpsy side of things. Then there’s this whole other side, which is like the social productivity side, organizing work and in my case, like taking work on the go. And so I’m interested in that part, that’s what I’m working on and get with the mobile apps. On the side I podcast, I host the Design Details podcast. I’ve been doing that for, I think, 7.5, almost 8 years. So that’s the thing. 00:06:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah you something 400 some odd episodes in. 00:07:02 - Speaker 1: 429. 00:07:03 - Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, and then you were nice enough to invite Mark and I on there recently. I’ll link that episode in the show notes. Very interesting to be on the other side of the conversation there, but it definitely provides me inspiration, which is, I worry sometimes that we’ll sort of run out of things to say, you know, we’re 50 some odd episodes in here, but you’ve managed to keep going this long, keep it fresh and relevant, so maybe there’s hope for us too. 00:07:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the nice thing about what you’re doing is if you do interviews most weeks, you’ll never run out of people to talk to. There’s just too many interesting people in the world to learn from. 00:07:37 - Speaker 2: We’re outsourcing the problem of being interesting to someone else. 00:07:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like, yeah, just extract that from other people. Our problem is we stopped interviewing, you know, my co-hosts and I just chat back and forth every week and try and mix it up with things like listener questions or talk about industry news. But there are weeks where we just look at each other like, have we talked about this? Have we answered this exact question already and you just can’t really remember, so you answer it again. So I do worry about that, like going in circles a little bit. So that’s the podcast, I guess before that, I started a company it was called Spectrum.chat, and that was myself and two other people, Bryn Jackson and Max Stoiber. The three of us were trying to build large public asynchronous forum software, really ended up gravitating towards like open source communities and design communities. That company was acquired by GitHub, which is how I ended up at GitHub. And before that, I was a product designer at Facebook, and before that at a company called Buffer. And then I guess throughout all of this, I’m a side project, tinkerer kind of person. I like writing, I like building websites, I like the podcast. I really enjoy interviewing people. I’ve launched a couple of interview projects. And I would say my most long lasting side project besides the podcast now has just been my personal website where I have all these random subpages that tickle my brain in different ways. So one of them is like a security checklist, how to be safe online, and the other is A better, more readable version of hacker news, and another is my personal bookmarks and an AMA and my blog and on and on and on. And so that’s really where I find a lot of joy and fun outside of my day job. 00:09:27 - Speaker 2: We’ll link that site in the show notes. I think it is an inspiration. We’ll talk about personal websites here a little, a little later on, but I think Mark and I, for example, both have incredibly minimalist personal websites that we update pretty infrequently. I think you have a pretty comprehensive design. It’s, I think it’s a full web app you wrote about the technology stack there, you use it to kind of. Explore interesting new front end and back end technologies, yeah, tons of writing, that’s obviously the podcast, you’ve got a newsletter now, so yeah, really, I don’t know how you find the time, but I guess the answer is that these are your hobbies and as you say, they tickle your brain, so it’s less of uh finding the time and more of a following your nose to your interests. 00:10:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, hobbies and many, many years, you know, I think there is an incorrect perception that I work all the time. People like, how do you have time for all these different things like, I don’t, these have just accumulated in the dustbin over, you know, a decade. And so with a decade in hindsight, it looks like a lot and it looks like I’m busy, but really it’s quite incremental. 00:10:31 - Speaker 2: That leads nicely to our topic today, which is personal brand. So, I’ll ask first what that means for both of you. Actually, Mark, maybe you wanna start us off there. 00:10:41 - Speaker 3: So two things come to mind when I think of personal brand. The first is the brand in the more pervasive, thicker sense like Coca-Cola is a brand, and I think that some people have such a personal brand, they invest a lot in building it up, and the other more general sense is like information theoretic in the sense of people having Knowledge about other people on the internet or being able to obtain that knowledge if they if they want to, versus the base prior of you’re a random person on the internet and could be, you know, a dog or whatever. I think both of those are interesting and we can talk about them. 00:11:17 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note on the company brand side we did an episode on that some time back because some I have pretty strong feelings about about how to kind of intentionally build a company brand. We ended up describing it as the character and what you know the company for, and you know, if the company has a personality, what is that personality? And so you can imagine that mapping to a person as well, not in the real sense of a fully fledged human with many interests and many dimensions and so forth, but maybe a little bit more narrowly defined as how you’re representing yourself to a field or on the internet or to some target audience. 00:11:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose my personal definition of personal brand maybe skews that direction. I’m stealing this. I can’t remember who said this, but at one point I heard someone say that a personal brand was really just how someone would describe you if you weren’t in the room, which I guess could apply to a company, but for a person, I think you get to capture a little bit more of the nuance there. Like, how would somebody describe you? And the thing is, you’ll never really know. I think that’s kind of the ideas. You can try and influence that, but really people will describe you however they want to describe you and when you’re not in the room, they can be a little bit more open in that description. So that’s how I’ve thought about personal brand and I don’t know, adjectives come to mind like curious, fun, kind, excited, and then maybe some negative personal brand characteristics would be like complains a lot or rants a lot, or is an asshole, right? Like those all fit under the personal brand vibe for me is those kinds of adjectives. 00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess there’s also the, you know, if I think of looking at your website, for example, to get a feel, you know, let’s say I had somehow come across you and was interested in learning who is this Brian fellow, maybe in the context of I’d like to hire you, maybe in the context of like to have you on my podcast, or maybe something a little more general, which is just you said something interesting, and I’m just curious to know the person behind that. And there’s the very practical element of, you know, you say off the bat, I’m a designer, podcaster, writer, and even the order there, I think tells me something. It’s like you may have a long running and a pretty successful podcast, but that’s not the first thing you list, you consider yourself a designer first. So, you know, there’s that sort of pragmatic aspect of just what do you want to be known for in your career, but then yeah, you’re talking about maybe the softer side of it as well. I think aesthetic conveys a lot, maybe this is a medium is the message sort of thing, but right, you have a website that says you are a person that likes clean, modern design, whereas you can imagine there’s this, what is it called, the professor style website. Just these kind of like very bare bones, HTML, you know, not only is it not responsive design, but it’s like barely even styled at all, but you come to associate it with often busy and successful professors who are very erudite and accomplished in their field, and they do have a representation online, but it would almost be confusing or maybe feel wrong in some way. had a sleek, well designed site like a designer would that conveys maybe the wrong idea. 00:14:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it would feel like they were trying to sell you something. 00:14:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s an aesthetic, maybe some of that is almost like tribal affiliation to some degree, you know, you go to the punk rock band’s website and there’s going to be a very different color palette, for example, then you go to the designer’s websi…
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