The Fingerprints Are The Work (Maggie Fost, VP of Design at Shopify)

Todd Henry [00:00:00]:

Hey friends, welcome to Daily Creative. My name is Todd Henry. If you are of a certain age, you will be familiar with the animated films and shorts Wallace and Gromit. The next time you watch a Wallace and Gromit film, freeze it on a single frame and look closely at the characters' faces, and you will see ridges and whorls. It's the unmistakable pattern of a human thumb pressed into the clay. These are not Defects, by the way, those are the most deliberate thing in the entire film. Nick Park is the animator behind Wallace and Gromit. He and the team at Aardman Animations have won awards by the armful for films that are built one frame at a time.

Todd Henry [00:00:40]:

It's an arduous process. The process is excruciatingly slow because somewhere between 12 and 24 photos are required to produce a single second of finished film. This means that a feature film is a mountain of small physical acts, each one performed by a person leaning over a table, And moving a figure a fraction of an inch with their hands. And when you push clay with your thumb, it leaves an impression on the clay. So every character in every Aardman film carries the fingerprints of the animator's hands. If you look closely at any frame, you can see them. Now, the obvious instinct here for those of us who lean toward perfection is to sand out the fingerprints. Fingerprints look like evidence of carelessness.

Todd Henry [00:01:26]:

They look like imperfection. Any studio aiming for perfection would smooth them away, but Aardman went the other direction. Nick Park gave the quality a name. I love this. He called it thumbiness. I think that's fantastic. He has said he likes seeing the animators' fingerprints in the clay and that he would often push his animators to be rougher because he did not want the films To look too smooth or too slick. He wanted the audience reminded that behind every frame was a craft.

Todd Henry [00:01:59]:

There was a human in the loop. As Aardman scaled from shorts to features, computer assistance and digital tools arrived. So hooray, now you have 3D printing. Now perfection is a real possibility. But Park insisted that the fingerprints stay. He believed that audiences appreciated human effort and human imperfection, and the visible fingerprints are what tell you that the characters are real. Funny enough, when Wallace and Gromit were later rebuilt as computer-animated figures for a series of video games, everything was being done on a computer. The developers deliberately recreated the trademark fingerprints on the digital models.

Todd Henry [00:02:39]:

They had a medium capable of perfect surfaces, yet they spent time and money simulating flaws because without the flaws, the characters stopped feeling like themselves. Now let's be careful here because there's a simplistic version of what we're talking about. And there's a much more nuanced, mature one for those of us who are aspiring to do great work. The simplistic version is that perfection— that imperfection is charming, right? So relax your standards. That's not remotely what happened with Wallace and Gromit. The films are obsessive. They take years. This is not about just loosening your standards.

Todd Henry [00:03:15]:

The fingerprints didn't survive because nobody was paying attention. They survived A process of extraordinary rigor because one person kept defending them on purpose. Nick Park wasn't lowering the bar. He was protecting the humanness of the work from a process that would've sanded off the soul of the work. Listen, every one of us is tempted to remove the evidence that a person was here in the work, in the loop, laboring away. The draft comes back and it's better, and it's also somehow less Yours. The rough edges you were proud of are gone. The odd analogy that only made sense because of something that happened to you in 2011 has been replaced with something cleaner and more sterile.

Todd Henry [00:03:59]:

And you think it's more universal, but by making it more universal, you actually make it less connective. The memo sounds like a memo. The strategy sounds like a strategy. Nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing particularly right about it So the question for all of us right now, especially in an age where we are able to use machines to create things for us to supplant the human in the loop, the question for all of us is whether we know which marks in our work are actually ours and whether we are willing to defend them the moment a tool or a manager offers to smooth them away. You can't protect what you never bothered to identify. And this scales past your work. If you lead people, Every time you take a piece of your team's work and you plane off the idiosyncrasy, uh, in a review or in a conversation, you are teaching them that sterile perfection is the goal, not soul-filled resonance. Do this for long enough and you will have a body of work that nobody can sign their name to, produced by people who have stopped bringing anything worth signing.

Todd Henry [00:05:02]:

What you see as polish, they experience as identity washing. So here are a few things to consider. First, name a fingerprint in your own work. What is something specific that signals that you have made the thing yourself? What are the marks of your own authenticity, your uniqueness, your precision, your empathy, the things I wrote about in my book, Louder Than Words? Second, where is smoothing happening? Where are the best parts of you, your intuition, your judgment, your taste, your drive being sanded off? Third, and this is the hard one, where are you sanding down the work of others? Is there any place in which you are removing the fingerprints in order to make something more perfect, but in the process you're removing its soul? Perfection was always available to Nick Park and Armin. It always was. But what couldn't be manufactured is the evidence that a person had been there. Remember, the fingerprints are not a mistake in the work. The fingerprints are the work.

Todd Henry [00:06:04]:

And that's what we're going to talk about this week with Maggie Faust. She's the VP of Design at the e-commerce giant Shopify. We're going to talk about how she has encouraged her team to include what she calls grace notes in their work to prove that there is a human in the loop. She has a ton of wisdom to share with us for anyone who wants to do great work, who wants to lead others in doing great work. So I'm very excited to share this conversation with you. This is Daily Creative. Since Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:06:38]:

Welcome to the show.

Maggie Fost [00:06:44]:

So I studied fine art as an undergrad, and I think I immediately knew that I actually was a designer because I was constantly putting type and text into my paintings and prints, much to the chagrin of my teachers and mentors.

Todd Henry [00:06:57]:

That's Maggie Faust, VP of Design at Shopify.

Maggie Fost [00:07:00]:

But right out of school, I came up in the old-fashioned way, which was a job out of the newspaper, the Seattle Stranger. I got a job as a receptionist in a design studio because I just wanted to be around it, and I knew that I didn't have the chops yet. And slowly began to learn just by being around it and by being around a lot of amazing people. I actually— one of my first jobs in Seattle was at Heckler Associates, which was formerly Heckler and Bowker. Gordon Bowker left to start Starbucks, so this was the tiny little agency that designed the Starbucks logo and identity and name and a lot of other iconic brands, K2 and Panera. And so I was around those folks who were doing it really by hand, like unbelievable craftspeople. And then I transitioned to tech. I moved to San Francisco in the height of the dot-com boom and worked for Shockwave.com, which was a spinoff of Macromedia showcasing Flash and Shockwave sites before I then got my first job actually working as a designer, which was at the Exploratorium, hands-on science museum in San Francisco, and eventually went back to grad school because I realized that I needed to learn the craft a little bit more diligently.

Maggie Fost [00:08:15]:

So I did that at California College of the Arts, which very sadly is closing next year, and then worked a decade in the music industry. And that's, I would say, where I really earned my stripes and came to be the designer that I am today. Super incredible experience working directly with artists and for a small indie label with just integrity like nothing else. And then came back to tech about 10 years ago. I went to what was then Facebook, now Meta, and spent 5 years working in the creative shop there, which was an incredible opportunity to work with brands outside of Facebook to help them succeed on Facebook and Instagram and also do really interesting creative things. And then I came to Shopify 5 years ago and just celebrating 5 years this year.

Todd Henry [00:09:09]:

You said that the, your time in the music business was a formative time for you. What kind of work were you doing? What, why do you say that was the formative time for you in terms of your perspective on design and also just developing your chops as a designer?

Maggie Fost [00:09:20]:

Yeah, I was the in-house creative director for a tiny record label, but who had global artists. So Arcade Fire, Spoon, Sheeran, and Him, Wyoke, like incredible bands, but we never had more than 14 people that worked there. And so everything was done with, what can I do with a Sharpie and a photocopier? It was very scrappy. And I still go into every project like that of just what can we do with our own hands and the tools at hand, which obviously those tools have gotten incredible in terms of what we can make. But I think that mentality— is still informs everything that I do. The other thing that was beautiful about that work, I did everything from album cover design to festivals to merch to advertising. But that particular label and the leadership of that label was so genuine about being artist first. So I collaborated with these artists who truly were just like, we— I wanted to realize their vision, right? Something that they'd been working on.

Maggie Fost [00:10:24]:

for years of their life, often, right? Writing these songs, recording them. None of them came into that experience not having imagined already something about how it's gonna be presented visually. So it truly was collaborating with something that was so deeply important to them and making it sing and also hopefully making it sell.

Todd Henry [00:10:45]:

Yes.

Maggie Fost [00:10:46]:

So yeah, yeah. So balancing those things, but it's, it connects to what I do at Shopify, I think, because it's so personal. People starting these businesses and entrepreneur going out on their own, hanging up their shingle, like the stakes of what we do in supporting them on that journey to me really originated from working together with artists.

Todd Henry [00:11:07]:

It is a, it's an interesting, you're right. There's an interesting parallel there I'd not considered, which is that in some ways, when you're the designer of the label, you're cut, in some ways you're like stewarding somebody's dream or you're like helping them present it to the world. This thing that for them is probably, like you said, it's music, but they've imagined what it will be like to present it to the world. And then to be the one who's helping visually present that, or not even visually, just from a design aesthetic perspective, how are we gonna present this to the world? And then similarly with Shopify, right? People who go to Shopify are people who have an idea, they have a dream, they have something they wanna build, and you're doing— it's an interesting parallel. I'd never really considered that before, but in some ways there's like individual, like rock stars that kind of want to like start their thing and get their message out to the world. It's a really cool path. that you've been on.

Maggie Fost [00:11:54]:

Absolutely. And you hope you can help them make it their full-time job.

Todd Henry [00:11:57]:

Yeah.

Maggie Fost [00:11:58]:

Yes. It's— and with Merge, the label that I worked at, it was amazing to watch artists grow through multiple albums and hopefully be able to quit their day job. Not always, but it was fulfilling either way. Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:12:13]:

Yeah. So every creative leader, like now, obviously you're VP Design at Shopify, but every leader has to go through a transition point where they stop being valued for maybe their hands or their technical skill of the design work, and they start being valued for their judgment, right? They have to move from being a maker to being maybe a manager of makers. Even if you're still doing some design, you're mostly leading other people who are doing the design. What was that shift like for you? Can you remember a moment when you realized, oh, this is fundamentally different from what I was doing before? And what's been easy for you to let go of? What's been hard for you to let go of in making that transition?

Maggie Fost [00:12:53]:

I love that question. I became a manager in the first real way at Facebook, which I am pleased to report was an amazing place to learn how to be a manager. They really support people in that craft. And in many ways it came naturally to me because I always had approached creative problems from trying to define the brief. I'm a huge interrogator of every brief. Which is the first keystone of helping a creative team be successful is understanding what the problem is that they're gonna solve. So I always had approached creative work that way and do it now all the time. And I also knew the circumstances that I needed to be successful as a designer and what kind of habitat and conditions and collaborators and time and space and framing and all of that stuff.

Maggie Fost [00:13:48]:

So it's very gratifying to be on the other side of that and try to make that possible for the folks who work on my team. The— I miss making stuff for sure, and I feel like there's a piece of that has become very abstract now in, in my role, but I'm still eliciting that stuff from a chorus. It's so gratifying and so satisfying to see what a group of people can make together. I just— nothing comes close.

Todd Henry [00:14:14]:

Yeah, it's, I've heard several creative leaders articulate something similar, which is, I really, I love having my hands in the work, but also I recognize that the more I get my hands involved in the work, especially the more authority you have organizationally, the more other people are gonna back off and they're going to let you do whatever you do as opposed to bringing their perspective. And to your point about playing, playing the orchestra, right? I know that's the, a little bit of the cliché, but that's, I think, That's the job of a leader in the role is to ensure that every, like the oboist is playing the oboe to the best of their ability and the clarinetist is, that's your job, right? Is to ensure that everybody's hitting their notes in the right way and they only, they can.

Maggie Fost [00:14:57]:

Totally. And giving the oboist a chance to play the drums if that's something that they're curious about. So I'm like, that's something that I feel like really within the past year in my team at Shopify, I gave up on very rigid role descriptions for people. Even people still live in teams, and we have teams that look after a certain part of the business. But I used to believe that the thing I should value above all else was like a really stable relationship between a manager and a crafter. And about a year ago, I was like, you know what, I'm gonna let that go because I think this person assigned to that project where their superpowers can shine, or it scratches an itch of something that they've been really wanting to try, like this person who typically designs websites really wants to work on events. Great. Go do that on this project for a number of months.

Maggie Fost [00:15:52]:

And guess what? Your work is going to be overseen by another creative director over there. So there's a little bit of chaos that I've introduced there, but on the balance, I've found it to be really energizing for this team of letting people step out of the rigidity of roles and team assignments in order to really more fluidly match talent to projects and assemble these micro teams at a project level. It's maybe a little bit more of an agency model, but that's been an unlock for me and for the team.

Todd Henry [00:16:25]:

Yeah, that, that also, I would think, increases the resilience of the team as well, right? Because you have people who are getting all of these experiences they wouldn't have otherwise. So when something, when the challenge comes along, you know that you can assemble a team because you've got people who have been performing cross-functionally or performing on different kinds of projects. And when you have that situation, people have to, people have to figure it out as they go. They have to become resourceful, right? When you do that. So I love that you've, I love that you've worked your way into that as a methodology because it does feel like it, that's probably a more appropriate way to think about team structure given the world that we're very quickly speeding into.

Maggie Fost [00:17:03]:

Yeah, absolutely. The other thing it does is it makes our whole team way more efficient. And my director of design ops is the most important person on my team in making sure that those assignments happen fluidly. And she's in any ask that comes in, she's just, she knows what every person is working on across the studio. And if they have a little piece of time confetti to make a beautiful social asset for a launch that we hadn't planned, Great. She's gonna mix and match and put people on that. So it's given us way more capacity because people aren't sitting there waiting for the next, having that downtime of, we're not gonna get that brief till Monday.

Todd Henry [00:17:41]:

I think you have just unintentionally given us the name of this episode, by the way, which is Time Confetti. I've never heard that. This is fantastic.

Maggie Fost [00:17:47]:

I stole that. I stole that from someone, borrowed from someone else. I have to remember who it was, but I'll come back to you with it when I remember.

Todd Henry [00:17:54]:

It's such a, it's such a descriptive term though. It's so perfect, right? Okay. Speaking of descriptive terms, you use this beautiful phrase called— it's, you call them grace notes to describe moments of humanity injected into design. Where did that idea come from? And can you give an example of a grace note that people might not consciously notice, but that changes how an entire product or an experience feels?

Maggie Fost [00:18:17]:

Absolutely. In the introduction, we talked about Shopify editions a little bit, and Editions are these care packages that we make for merchants on Shopify every 6 months, and each one is ephemeral. It's only meant to last until the next one is released in 6 months. And so much care and love goes into these. Above all, it has to contain a whole lot of really important information for merchants about what's new on Shopify. But we have had the creative freedom and actually the mandate from the CEO of Shopify, Tobi, To inject them with some love and humanity and delight. And so that's part of the brief for us with every one of those projects. Now, that's unusual, but what it has done is made it an unspoken part of every other brief of things that we work on.

Maggie Fost [00:19:12]:

Why should that only be relegated to this thing where it was called out? And the way that shows up is often it's in Easter eggs and things that people might discover. Often it's in that extra love in a micro animation or a loader or a humorous 404. It comes through writing a lot as well. And one thing that I— a piece of design that has stuck in my mind since I first saw it in probably the year 2000 was the bud vase that was built into the new Volkswagen Beetle.

Todd Henry [00:19:47]:

Yes.

Maggie Fost [00:19:48]:

When I think that actually, like, the concept car came out in 1993. I think it went into production in 1997, something like that. And I remember seeing that and thinking, how did this get all the way through to production? Like, it's wild at a global automobile manufacturer. And I was thinking about that recently, and it really gave me sort of encouragement that, yeah, why not? And actually, more than why not, I think it's more important and urgent in 2026. that we infuse those moments of humanity or grace notes into our work and show that this stuff was made. There's somebody on the other side. For Shopify, that's extremely important, right? And it's so genuine because some— this, this company was started by entrepreneurs. It's filled with entrepreneurs.

Maggie Fost [00:20:41]:

We know the journey of entrepreneurs so much better than anybody. And that is infused into our product. And therefore I'm like, we need to be greeting them with those moments of, we see you, we understand you. There's a human on the other side of this. That doesn't always look like the way that we design it. It shows up in our product, but especially in our marketing when we're talking directly to them. So that's how I think about it. And I try to make sure that we are paying attention to making room for them, defending them.

Maggie Fost [00:21:12]:

designing them, and that enlists people outside of design as well.

Todd Henry [00:21:17]:

Those moments of serendipity that we often have when we're in the midst of a process and we're thinking really hard about something, we're playing around with something, and often that's where those grace notes come from, right? Probably somebody was just like, they had an idea for the bud vase, right? And it was like, and reality is, as we're using these artificial intelligence tools more and more, I feel like some of that serendipity is being squeezed out of the process because There was, there's not really a historical precedent for AI to draw from in thinking that would be a good idea necessarily, right? For that, it was a human being thinking, what would surprise and delight me? And when I hear Grace Notes, that, those are really the 2 words that come to mind for me is surprise and delight. There's something that you experience and you go, whoa. And then you just have this immediate feeling of warmth. That's just so cool. That's so neat. And when you experience that, you realize— I think you're right— you realize that you are dealing with a human being on the other end of this. Somebody crafted that for me in this moment. And that's a very powerful thing.

Maggie Fost [00:22:19]:

And you feel them. I think it's that you feel it when it's not there, even though it's not written into a brief in the same way that it's not written into a song, right? Or it's indicated— I'm not a musician, so I'm actually out of my depth in talking too much technicality around grace notes. But if you listen to a piece of music where somebody's playing them or not playing them, the difference is profound. It's like the song is still correct, but it feels dead flat. So I feel the same. You see it in design, right? You see it in objects and products and experiences that we create. If somebody poured a little bit of heart and care, like that comes through and it's not yet replicable by robots.

Todd Henry [00:23:04]:

Yeah.

Maggie Fost [00:23:05]:

It's not to say that it won't be.

Todd Henry [00:23:07]:

There was an interesting, well, we could talk about that as well. There, there was an interesting article in The New Yorker. I think it was yesterday. The title was, Why Do All the Websites Suddenly Look the Same? And the, the point was basically as Claude Design or some of these tools have become more prevalent, basically it's using the exact same library of symbols and ideas and color palettes and whatever, it's basically like feeding on itself. And so the net result is you get a really good looking website that looks exactly like every other website. And when I went to your editions, I went and looked at some of the past editions. They are all so unique and you could so very clearly see that there was a human perspective, a human point of view through which like there was a design ethic that went into what was created. And it, but it was fun, right?

Maggie Fost [00:23:56]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:23:56]:

So I think right now a lot of leaders are treating AI purely as an efficiency play. And I think you have talked about how to inoculate organizations against that pull toward mimicry. And like you said, not yet, it can't yet mimic completely what humans do. What does that look like in practice? How do we use these tools responsibly? Because they are very valuable, they're very helpful without being pulled into that mimicry that could make everything feel and look the same.

Maggie Fost [00:24:23]:

Yeah, it's such a great question. And I also wanna acknowledge it's existed for a long time, right? We have mimicked other designers. We have used mood boards in order to, as the genesis of new work. And that's something that I've tried to persuade my teams against starting with mood boards for a really long time, because you don't even realize it, that you're copying other people's styles. I did this way back when. When I was designing records and before Pinterest, certainly before any kind of AI tools, I was designing an original album cover for an artist. And I came up with something, 4 or 5 different covers for the album. And I had a meeting with him where I had, we didn't have Zoom or Google Meet even.

Maggie Fost [00:25:08]:

I sent it to him as a PDF and I was like, okay, so the first one, and he opens it up and he was like, have you seen the band that I'm going on tour with? Their latest record? I was like, no, who is it? He tells me who it is. I look it up. I had basically designed the same album cover. That's the truth. And I wasn't even looking at it. I'd probably seen it, right? But we just reached for the same references. It was probably some Popular Mechanics-inspired retro, I don't know what, but I was of course mortified. But that continues.

Maggie Fost [00:25:44]:

Even before, even before AI, right? We have a tendency to make things similar to things that we have seen before. Now, AI does that naturally because it's trained on all of those things. And it also, though, can be a powerful disruptor of those typical pathways that we go down and break us out of our usual patterns of how we make things. I think it's important. I'm not casting it one way or the other. It's not that you cannot get to original. work at all. And I do think it's a lot more than just an efficiency play, but all— it's not that fun if you're not injecting your own creativity and humanity and thought into a project.

Maggie Fost [00:26:29]:

I'm like, I also really believe that the best work comes from people who have fun making it.

Todd Henry [00:26:34]:

Part of the problem, it feels like, is that you have stakeholders at different levels of the organization, and it almost feels like The stakeholders who are pushing for efficiency, and you're you're sounds like you're very fortunate not to have that at Shopify. But a lot of the organizations I work with are pushing for efficiency to the point where it really becomes a very short time horizon. They want results in a very short time horizon, and in so doing, they might be compromising the very soul of the organization that that allowed the organization to get to where it is. Right? The voice and the soul and the creative ethic and the talent and the people who. are passionate about the brand and all of these things that are— I was working with an organization not long ago, an auto manufacturer, and the chief of staff of design, I'd said the phrase, creativity is inefficient, but it doesn't waste anything. And she said, it's not inefficient, it's invisibly efficient. And I thought, that's a great way to put it. There are all of these invisible efficiencies that are part of the creative process that look like inefficiency to the outside, but they're necessary to get to those ahas, those breakthroughs.

Todd Henry [00:27:43]:

And I feel like there is a push to squeeze those invisible efficiencies out because they look inefficient. And AI, I think, is the primary strategy for doing that. But in doing that, like you just said, we are also sidelining the people who are uniquely capable of inserting these grace notes, these moments that make people love the brand, that make them fall in love with what we're doing in the world.

Maggie Fost [00:28:05]:

Absolutely. Oh, I love the way that you phrase that, or that This person that you were collaborating with phrased that. It's beautiful.

Todd Henry [00:28:11]:

Yes.

Maggie Fost [00:28:11]:

Yes. The, and it's not black and white. Look, we gain a lot of efficiency from AI and that's awesome, right? If we're versioning ads into 15 different languages and 20 different formats, nobody is getting a lot of joy out of doing that work. And we now have incredible AI tools and workflows that allow us to take care of all of that work. So I love AI in reducing toil of the work that people don't want to do.

Todd Henry [00:28:39]:

Yes.

Maggie Fost [00:28:39]:

Um, but you're absolutely right that we have to continue to afford that space to not only inject grace notes into the work that we're doing, but also to figure out what the work should be. Like, I deeply believe that you have to make a whole lot of stuff in order to figure out what you need to make. Right. So we have a lot of stuff that with each of the editions, for example, that ends up on the cutting room floor. Sometimes it shows up in a future edition. Sometimes it shows up in another project, but we wouldn't get to the gold without going through those cycles and learning through the things that we end up throwing away.

Todd Henry [00:29:22]:

Given all that we've just talked about, there are a lot of people coming up right now, a lot of young leaders who are or young designers, young writers, young entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out their development curve. How do I get to where I want to be? From your perspective, what are the capacities they should be focusing on right now? What are the, the types of instincts that they should be developing or the talents or capacities that they should be developing in order to position them to be able to thrive in the company?

Maggie Fost [00:29:54]:

I certainly think ignoring AI is a mistake. And I do, there are a lot of purists who I talk to who are just like, oh, it's not for me. And that's fine. It's gonna be limiting. It's gonna be limiting.

Todd Henry [00:30:09]:

Yeah.

Maggie Fost [00:30:09]:

So I do think you have to figure out your relationship to AI tools. And I just, I wanna be clear that in no way am I saying there's not a really important role for those tools now, and we have no idea where it's going. So I would start there and it's, If designers are not already playing with the tools directly and design leaders, you have to be in there playing with them, then you're going to be behind. So I would start there. The second thing is, I think, not new, but it's more true than ever, which is there will always be people who have the same set of skills and capacity. So this applies to both leaders and crafters. And the people who end up, I think, being successful and having the kinds of careers that they find personally rewarding are the ones who are a pleasure to work with, right? And who bring curiosity and joy and optimism. And so I think that piece of like how you show up is so important.

Maggie Fost [00:31:11]:

I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine about— and we were talking about being hard graders and the relationship of that to design work. And you have to continue to hold a relentlessly high bar for the work, but I think have a lot of grace for the humans who are making it, especially in 2026, and make sure that you don't conflate the two. That's not new advice probably for creative leaders, but I think it's more relevant than ever.

Todd Henry [00:31:39]:

Yeah, I think it is. And I think that's part of the— we, we— I think the, the human element of it is gonna become so much more important. Even the technical skills are always gonna need to be there, but just being a delightful person to be around, just being a good collab— my, my friend, Amos plays bass for Taylor Swift. And when he was first breaking into the music business in Nashville, he said somebody told him, be a bro, be a pro, and be apropos, right? Those are the 3 bits of advice. He's like, everybody here is talented. Everybody here can do the job.

Maggie Fost [00:32:07]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:32:07]:

But be a bro, meaning, hey, have somebody's back. Just make sure you're protected, looking out for everybody. Be a pro, show up ready, have the top-notch gear, whatever. And be apropos. Just understand you're gonna be entering rooms with people who you have to be appropriate in these rooms because there are people in these rooms that don't want you fawning over them, or just be a perp— he's like, that is what causes 90% of people to lose their job is not doing those things. 'Cause they're technically able to do the work. It's just that nobody wants to be around them.

Maggie Fost [00:32:36]:

Right?

Todd Henry [00:32:37]:

So, I think that advice that you give is really important. Be hard on yourself, be a pro, know your skills, but also just be a delight to work with. And if you do that, it's gonna be increasingly important in the coming years. Yeah.

Maggie Fost [00:32:49]:

Oh, I love that. I'm definitely taking that one with me from this conversation. That's so good.

Todd Henry [00:32:54]:

Good.

Maggie Fost [00:32:54]:

Yeah, I'm just, it's, I think Shopify's remote also, so it becomes even more important. And I think as we move faster, my team moves so fast, making time to just get to know people and get to know what's going on with them. And you end up making better work. The relationships with your collaborators shows up in the work that we make. You see it on the page, on the screen, in the pixels. So yeah, just be a good human.

Todd Henry [00:33:29]:

That was Maggie Faust, VP of Design at Shopify. Maggie said that when the grace notes are missing from a piece of music, the song is still correct. It's technically correct, but it feels dead. It feels flat. Sit with that word for a second: correct. Correct is about becoming the cheapest commodity We are entering a season where anyone can generate work that is technically right. It's technically correct. The right structure, the right palette, the right cadence.

Todd Henry [00:33:56]:

All of it is right, and none of it is capable of moving a single person. That's the future that you are competing against, and you do not win it by being more correct. The bud vase in the Volkswagen Beetle Was not correct. It wasn't efficient. Nobody needed a flower in their dashboard. Somebody fought that thing through a global automobile manufacturer all the way to production. Somebody fought for it. Nearly 30 years later, a design executive is still talking about it on a podcast.

Todd Henry [00:34:29]:

It's crazy. That is the actual return on a grace note. It doesn't show up in this quarter. It shows up in— The memory. Notice what Maggie did not say, by the way. She didn't tell you to reject the tools. She uses them herself to strip out the toil of the work, the friction that's in the way of the work. The 15 languages, the 20 formats— nobody finds joy in doing all of that translation.

Todd Henry [00:34:54]:

That's not the danger. The danger is the moment you hand over the question of what the work should be. Remember the phrase that the chief of staff I mentioned in the interview gave me. Creativity isn't inefficient, it's invisibly efficient. The wandering and the discarded versions and the pile of stuff on the cutting room floor are not waste. They are the price of admission to anything worth signing your name to. So cut them and you'll get your time back. You'll just have nothing left to say.

Todd Henry [00:35:26]:

So here's what I want you to take from this week. Before you ship the next thing, find one way to press your thumb into the clay. One detail that no brief asked for. One line, one joke, one Small act of care that a machine would never have thought to include because it never needed anything. Then defend it. Defend it in the review when someone asks reasonable questions about why it's necessary, because necessary was never the standard for things people love. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoy these conversations, you can find our full interviews at dailycreativeplus.com, absolutely free.

Todd Henry [00:36:02]:

Just enter your name and email address and you'll get a private feed where you can listen to all of our interviews in full. My name is Todd Henry. You can find my books and my speaking events at toddhenry.com. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant. We'll see you then.