At the AIGA Bright Lights event in April, I was fortunate to see my long-time mentor and friend Steve Frykholm receive THE most important honor that a designer can get.

The event was a star-studded affair in a room filled with very important design people. Debbie Millman sang and she was fantastic (more guts than I have). I got to sit next to Ralph Caplan, one of my heroes and a living legend. Not to brag, but he wanted to sit next to me.

Back to the other living legend, the one this post is really about. Over the 10 years that we collaborated, I learned so much from Steve. He’s a huge contributor to who I am as a designer.

Here are a few of the lessons Steve taught me over our 10-year collaboration.

Lesson #1: Take Chances

After graduation, I had a secure job offer from Ethel Kessler in Washington, DC, where I had interned for two years. Steve offered me a one-year internship that paid less money, and meant moving to the middle of nowhere. (It’s better now, but in 1991, truly nowhere.) Steve told me it would just be for one year, and that Ethel will always be. Good points. So, I took a chance.

Lesson #2: Drills

Steve ran his unit like the Marines. So of course, there were drills. As many ideas as possible and as fast as possible. Don’t refine. Just concentrate on volume. Think about big moves, not small increments. As a young designer who really doesn’t know jack, producing volume is a key learning experience. How can you evaluate your work, when you’ve had zero experience in producing anything? You don’t become an editor without being a writer first. And you don’t become a writer before you’ve been a fact-checker.

Lesson #3: Just Try It

You’d think that with all those years of experience that Steve has, he would immediately know what works and what doesn’t work. The truth—maybe the secret truth—is that no matter who you are, you don’t know until you try it. Every situation is unique. An idea that hasn’t worked even though you’ve it tried a million times before on other projects might be just the thing for this one, so don’t rule it out because you “know” it doesn’t work. You don’t know unless you try it.

Lesson #4: Yes, And…

You learned early on with Steve that “no” is not an option. Remember, he runs his unit like the Marines. He would never accept that you couldn’t do something because the computer wouldn’t let you. It’s true. Use your mind and don’t let the tools rule you. Let the ideas come and then figure out how to realize them.

Lesson #5: Cropping Images

When I started at Herman Miller in 1991, computers were just starting to be used for design and layout. We didn’t trust them as far as we could throw them, but we knew they were the future, so we learned. A perfect crop is important to every designer worth his salt, and so it is with Steve as well. In those early days of technology, Steve would put Post-it notes on my monitor and say, “Lock ‘er in.” 

Lesson #6: Be Naive

Nothing great ever came from the sentiment of “We’ve done that before,” or “We tried that five years ago,” or “The market research says…” Keep your mind a clean slate and be ready for new ideas. Rather than thinking that because of your age, experience, or just plain awesomeness that you know everything about everything, be naive. Look at everything as though you’re seeing it for the first time. Nothing is the same all the time.

Lesson #7: The Pursuit of Perfection

For 10 years, I never saw summer. The Herman Miller annual reports were mailed out in August, so we worked every day from March through August—five straight months. We worked it and worked it until it couldn’t be worked any more. Well, truth is, we continued to design on the way to the printer and the party continued once we got to the printer. We ragged each line of the financials, tucked every comma into place, and you know the rest. Each page, each word, each punctuation mark got some love. And it was worth every minute to have been involved in such iconic pieces.

Lesson #8: The Ridiculous

The easy road is, well… easy. Steve never took the easy road. You don’t learn anything from easy. We often cooked up just completely ridiculous ways to solve problems. Things that we hadn’t seen before. We pushed the boundaries of what Quark and Freehand (Oh, yeah. Quark AND Freehand) could do. I remember one night at the printer working on typesetting 7,000 employee names, all separated by a rotating star in five different colors. Baseline shifts, kerning, word spacing, leading, ragging, and all those West Michigan names of Dutch ancestry with that extra “Van” that had to have a half space. This one was truly ridiculous, but definitely worth trying. Otherwise how does one learn that something is ridiculous?

Lesson #9: Get Distracted

Steve and I would often drive together to and from meetings through country roads, and every now and then we’d have to pull over quickly in front of a random farm… you know, if there happened to be a used Kubota tracker for sale! I’m a very focused person and I used to get annoyed whenever this happened. I realized later that it’s important to allow yourself to get distracted. Get your mind off the project, and you might come up with a better idea.

Lesson #10: Mickey D’s Ice Cream Sundaes

And finally, the most important lesson: Take a break and enjoy yourself, even if you’re busy—or you think you’re busy.