Design was there all along

Subtext: how life after a layoff uncovered something authentic but buried.

The reckoning

Not too long ago, I was laid off from a job that I really enjoyed. I didn’t like the industry (like, at all), but I loved the people I got to interact with day to day. Let’s be honest, I also loved the stability of a recurring paycheck. When I got the highly unexpected and impersonal call, I was completely caught off guard. I went straight to Home Depot in a stupor, bought a gallon of pink paint, and painted my kids walls with a delicate and precise mix of focus and fury.

I realize this experience is not unique, and probably rings true for many. But it’s important, because it shook me awake and pushed me out of the life I was not meant to be living day in and day out.

When I went through the layoff, I was lucky. Not just in the sense of being freed from work I wasn’t passionate about, but because I also had saved money over the years and was allowed to take a sabbatical and figure out what TF I was going to do next. I had worked since I was 16, to suddenly have no daily professional responsibility was just plain eerie.

I also had the luck of a prepaid travel in my immediate future that I believe pushed me to where I am today, and set me in motion to the launch this passion project, Design Storytellers. Let’s go back to how that took shape.

First, and I cannot express the value of this simple thing that I did: I deleted Teams and Outlook off of my phone. What a massive emotional victory that was! 10/10 recommend.

Ciao, Roma

Feeling small inside the Vatican museum and remembering how hard it was to paint our bedroom ceiling.

Then, I went with my husband to Italy for a wedding. We spent 7 days throughout Rome and Tuscany, staring with awe at some of the architecture I had seen decades before, but now appreciated with a different lens on life. After years of leading creative and brand design teams, I stared for hours at vintage newspapers with unique fonts and design elements on display at the Uffizi. If there was a place to be professionally lost, Italy was a turbo boost on my path to being found. My eyes opened with clarity and devoured the visual feast around me. I loved design and its ability to awake the senses. I loved our hotel tremendously. I loved the tiles, the details, the windows in shops, the colors, the violins in the street, the perfume factories, the food.

I was waking up.

Home Sweet Home

We came home and a few short weeks later we were on a plane to my hometown of Pensacola, Florida, to celebrate my brother’s 40th birthday. It was the first time I had flown in a while without juggling the responsibility of work. I was present in a way that just fed my soul. Walking behind my kids through the sugar white sand dunes behind our beach house, a Taylor Swift lyric looped in my brain (“and I don’t know how it gets better than this”) as my kids scurried between the same sand dunes that I walked as a child. I photographed the sand, the sunsets, and people, the surfers. I smelled the wind that carried sunscreen and salt.

I remembered as a child, I wanted to be an architect. I remembered how I used to snatch Domestications catalogues from the mailbox and try to redesign my own bedroom to look like something from those pages, how I used to drag my furniture across the room at all hours of the night alone, with a vision.

More core memories, awakened.

The sunset surfing is at Pensacola Beach, Florida. A symphony of visual elements.

Florida Georgia Line

Next, it was a road trip up to Jekyll Island, Georgia, discovering the historic marshlands and low country along the coast. I spent the drive up reading a novel instead of frantically refreshing and replying to emails. Once again, I found myself snapping photos of the built world around us. The historic clubhouse converted into a hotel. The parlor games, my oldest playing a new friend in chess. The terrariums, the wooden armoires, the fringe details. My kids played croquet in pajamas. We drove up and over the bridge to Saint Simon’s Island and watched swampy sunsets dance off the live oaks and thick Spanish moss. I breathed deeply and felt peace.

The next day, we drove a few hours back into Florida to spend Thanksgiving in Palm Coast. More moments of calm, more nature, and more time spent disconnected from work and plugged into the people in front of me.

Something was stirring.

Buenos dias

The last trip of the year, and it was a big one in terms of my a-ha moment. We flew to Colombia to spend the winter holidays, first to Bogota, then flew to Cartagena, popped into La Mesa, drove down to Neiva, and drove back to Bogota again. If you know Colombia, you know those are all very different places.

In Bogota, I enjoyed the design driven commercial plazas and modern restaurants expected in any capital city. But Colombian architects and designers really develop some unique and gorgeous concepts. I sat in a restaurant in Bogota and told my husband, I would love to design places like this. This is what I enjoy. Once again, lots of photos, from facades to vignettes to food plating. In Cartagena, we enjoyed the sand, the sun, the beach and pool, and the Colonial Caribbean history that floods the streets and the people. In La Mesa and Neiva, we focused on family and ways to beat the heat. It was actually in Neiva on New Year’s Eve that I said to my husband: I am going to go to start design school in January. I rushed to enroll in the Interior Design for Hospitality program at Parsons online.

Shadow play while waiting for our table at Cande, in Cartagena, Colombia

When in doubt, keep learning

I went to sign up before midnight and was given an error message: two required courses needed to be completed before I could enroll in the program. A hiccup, but not a dream killer. I started Basic Drafting in January 2024.

It was in this course that I remembered how hard and exact floor plans and drafting were. I had fun with the renderings, but felt restricted by line weights and other methodical techniques. But, I kept learning.

I signed up for countless design newsletters, started to position myself as an emerging interior designer, had the right conversations, got into great meetings, and took some project opportunities for interior styling.

Then I started Drawing Perspectives. If I thought line weights were hard, two and three point perspectives were going to be the death of me. But, I kept learning.

In one of the meetings I was in, I started to look around the room and realize how many talented creatives and designers exist across the design process. So many talented, unsung heroes that work tirelessly on perfecting projects that people love, in professional roles I really didn’t even know existed before. Then, I thought of all the newsletters I was getting, the top publications covering the usual suspects. The people I saw didn’t the attention or appreciation the big names on the door at the firms where they work. In fact, from what I saw, they hardly got coverage any at all.

To me, this was something that needed to be fixed.

Young people need to know there are careers they can grow up and have that allow them to be methodical, creative, and build our world. Companies looking to hire talented creatives need a place to discover them. So, in the midst of taking my classes, being present for family, staying healthy, and freelance writing, I thought: I need to launch a design website and cover the people and professions that need to be shared with the world. Design was in me, but more than that, design appreciation is a part of who I am.

It’s all happening

Once I started building the site map, skills I had used at jobs over the years all started to come in handy. I was adding SEO to pages, resizing images and making logos in Canva, formatting pages and adjusting layouts, reserving social handles, developing our PR story, and of course, doing thorough research on creative people I was going to build this site around. Design was there all along, but it wasn’t until all of these co-existing factors came together that I realized what I wanted to do and what I wanted to share with all of you.

So, as the site goes live and creators are featured, I hope you find their insights to be inspiring. I hope you realize the labor of love that goes into everything they do. These are the creators, they are living proof of what humans can build, design, dream, and bring to life.

These are the Design Storytellers.

x

Erika

PS - I hope you also remember nothing is perfect and neither am I. If you have feedback for me about the site, please share it. DMs are always open @DesignStorytellers