design
Hi I’m Ryan. I am a graphic designer. But I’ve also designed video games, sermons, books, live events, podcasts, and a lot of other stuff.
I’m also obsessed with the designs of societies, politics, cultures, art, belief, the human brain, spirituality, advertising, and eels.
create
There is a line in The New Look - the story of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel during the Nazi occupation - that goes like this: “Creation, perhaps, cannot stop the bullets, but creation is our way forward. Our survival. Our salvation.”
Our salvation. I grew up in the church and spent 10 years speaking in it too - that word salvation has some toxins with it now but, damn, creation is our salvation. I know it’s yours too.
words
I love to write words. I love to read the words that others have spoken. I love to speak words. I love to listen to the words of others: the words that have been carefull planned and the ones that pop out in a conversation.
Words make up our stories. As in the stories we use to describe ourselves, our friends, our enemies, and our communities. Words themselves are endlessly crazy, as in where do they come from and why some are okay to say and some are not and the fact that words like lagom, ikigai, and sisu exist in other languages with one word and they take us a paragraph to describe.
shapes
Rectangles, squares, and circles are cool. I mean I’m a graphic designer so I’m constantly messing around with literal shapes.
But, there are also all the things that shape us, including our own shapes. Some Cambridge math guys once said a hip to waist ratio of 70% was pretty much the perfect sexy ratio. Others have said the more symmetrical a face shape the more beautiful we find it. I love thinking about what has shaped me to find certain shapes beautiful and good and others to be ugly and evil.
evolve
Evolution encapsulates it all. The constant moving in the direction of better. If the universe is constantly expanding, I feel like I’d better get busy myself.
I believe we can all get better. Me, you, society, and the world. I also believe if I’m not contributing to the evolution effort, then I’m contributing to the stale, stuck, and mediocre effort. No thanks.