the eighth magazine

Carrie Fisher once said “Stay afraid but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”

And while growth encompasses more than just confidence and personal achievements – there’s no progress without branching out, no change without trying new things, and no innovation without taking risks. In this issue of the Eighth, we dive into the concept of growth and what it means to some of us here. We hope it will inspire, spark new thinking and ideas.

And act as a reminder of the opportunities we’re all given here every week, as we grow together. As people, coworkers, and friends.

theighthmag

BY ROBYN YEH

THIS IS MUMU.

I adopted him when he was a kitten, yet somehow the one who has done the most growing in our relationship is me.

He’s learned that he has a forever home where he will be loved no matter what. I had to learn patience and to be okay with chaos.

THIS THAT I’VE REGRETTABLE OF WATCHING

HAD IS MY

HAD THE UNDOPEY CAT

REGRETTABLE

PLEASURE GROW UP.

NO CATS WERE HURT, EVER. JUST A LOT OF PLANTS AND MY FEELINGS. PLEASE CONSIDER ADOPTING BLACK PETS AS THEY ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE ADOPTED.

10 LESSONS IN GROWTH FROM SOMEONE WHO GREW UP IN

WRITTEN BY ANDERS GUSTAFSSON

Growth is everything. Personal, professional, mind and spirit. This is the “CliffsNotes version” of my personal journey in ad land. But more importantly, it’s a story about growing as a person, as a creative and professional in general. Some random ramblings in here, but hopefully you’ll find some of my findings useful.

When I got accepted to ad school in Sweden 1999, I didn’t know what an ad agency was. I had seen funny ads. I had seen clever ads. And ever since I was a kid, I loved writing. D&D adventures, short stories, music. But I had no idea that there was this magical industry where you got paid to make things up and write stuff… for anything and everything. Mind blowing. I got freakishly obsessed with advertising right away. And I realized that there was just one agency in my city that I really wanted to work for. So, I got a job there. Growth lesson #1: Go get it And always remember how great this is

That agency went belly up. (Not because of me.) I went on to work for some other agencies, won some awards and yada yada, but then I got bored and left to live with a friend in Los Angeles. To clear my mind, sleep in, play Xbox, and go to art galleries. One morning in LA, I got a call from a digital agency back home and accepted their offer on the spot. I stepped into an area of total incompetence. Became a sponge. And quickly understood that there is no “digital media”. There’s one-way communication and there’s interactive. Understanding the difference, back in 2008-something, was a pivotal moment of growth for me. I got it! And implemented it. We won a ton of awards, and then CP+B bought us, and we won “Interactive Agency of the Year” in Cannes. Good times. Growth lesson #2: Embrace your area of incompetence. Become a sponge. (And go to art galleries.)

At the time, CP+B was the best agency in the world. Everyone was knocking on the door. And we did whatever we wanted. I turned into a mad workaholic advertising scientist. And experienced growth on a level I never thought possible. I admittedly became a bit of an asshole (my coworker Jeff Benjamin named me “Angry Anders”), but I also learned an invaluable lesson

for any creative who wants to become a Creative Director: Ideas are not yours. It doesn’t matter where they come from or who came up with them. They are useless unless you make them real, and you can always come up with more. I reviewed 25 ideas from 4 teams every 2 days. 100 ideas per review. Yes. It was literally a factory. Growth lesson #3: Don’t fall in love with your ideas. You can always come up with more (and better) ones. Always.

One day I got a phone call. Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein wanted to meet me. We immediately got along. So, just do the same thing we’ve been doing at CP+B Europe but in the US, right? Wrong. The learning experience of stepping into US advertising was brutal. Deer in the headlights. I managed to get some stuff out and won some awards and yada yada, but the three years I spent at 720 California Street were eye opening. I learned a hundred million things. But more importantly, I became part of a family that I still love and talk to every week in some way, shape, or form. And this is where I first met Molly, Kirsten, and Jen who are my coworkers here at Deloitte today. Growth lesson #4: Burn no bridges. Always stay in touch with good eggs

While at GS&P, I met a person that I’ve been with every day since. My best friend. A magical person from LA that I somehow convinced to marry me. Coming back from our honeymoon, the first text I read landing at SFO was from Media Arts Lab (MAL) asking me to move to LA to work for Apple. Magical person said “yes”. So, I said yes.

I look at my time at MAL the way people describe being in the army. It sucked, but you wouldn’t want to not have done it. Everyone worked. Titles were just for pay grade and seniority. Lee Clow would stand up and yell across the office to my ECD: “Copywriter! Come here!”. We were all perfecting our craft, every day.

Writing scripts, designing, editing, casting, scrambling, thinking. We only got Wednesdays off (yeah kids, that’s right) and on my last project I worked for six months straight without any weekends off. But at the end of that run, my little baby idea from a depressing tiny secret war room got propelled into the world onto every TV channel, every billboard, every website on the planet for the next four months. It wasn’t fun. But it was amazing. Growth lesson #5: Lean into your craft Even when you get to lead

Back to the bay. My former ECD from GS&P had started a new agency and for some reason (see Growth lesson #4) wanted me to come help. I met Kirsten Finkas, again. Growth lesson #6: Work with Kirsten Finkas

Things were good. But after three years, I realized I wasn’t learning. I wasn’t growing. I was just working. Then one day on set shooting a commercial for a tiny miniature bakery, this creative leader who wanted to hire me at 72&Sunny ages ago (see Growth lesson #4, again) suddenly calls me, asking me to join his new agency, offering to help me grow. The exact thing I needed to hear at that moment. Serendipitous perhaps. I grew more in 4 months than I’d grown in the previous 4 years. I learned how to manage my time. How to deal with internal conflicts. How to really partner with account and strategy. How optics are way more important than you think. How to find the right people. How to let go of the wrong people (never easy, no matter the situation). And how to pay attention to clients on a whole new level. Great! Growth! But it was a tiny independent agency and every time there was a budget cut there was a people cut. I got promoted but felt very lonely. And during all this, a big metal band called me and asked if I could do some tour duties (I’m

also a musician, but that’s a different story). So, I quit and went freelance. In early 2020, one month before the pandemic hit. Bad idea jeans. No touring. Very little freelance. Very sad face. Growth lesson #7: Always seek growth. (Don’t go freelance.)

Then this energetic Brazilian from Deloitte Digital called me. He wanted me to write some big TV spot for NYU Langone Health. So, I did. And they loved it. And they kept me on for months. But eventually they ran out of money. I felt sad. I’d gotten emotionally connected to the team and the whole “Deloitte Nice” thing. Not to mention the realistic timelines. The structure. The good eggs. And this new CCO who just joined and seemed amazing. Infectious energy. True creative force. I didn’t want to leave. Freelance often leads to heartbreak. Growth lesson #8: It’s people (Don’t go freelance.)

Magically, Deloitte Digital needed someone like me in SF. I got to interview with the people I just worked for. It felt like a summer camp reunion. But I also got to talk to Jen from my GS&P days again. And she just went on about all these entrepreneurial opportunities within Deloitte. How the consultancy side offered up things that were never available to us when we were back in agency land. I’m thinking “yeah, ok, consultancy consultanschmy”. But then it hit me. This is what I need to embrace. This is where I can learn something new. Where I can grow. Deloitte Digital wasn’t defined yet. It wasn’t a CP+B, GS&P or Apple. It could become anything. And I could help build it.

And that’s what we’re doing. All of us. Right now. Growth lesson #9: It’s what we make of it. And again, always remember how great this is.

Where the Lilacs Grow

BY MEGAN LEE

I created these paintings based on a few photos that my grandpa took of his family in 1977 at the Lilac Festival in Rochester, NY. The film or camera must have been slightly damaged, as the images came out discolored. They have a red tint, creating shades of burnt sienna, pink and orange. I love how the altered colors create an abstracted and almost psychedelic feel, and wanted to capture them in my paintings. My grandpa was always taking and printing pictures, which I now use as inspiration for my work. It’s meaningful to me to see how his artform can grow and evolve with mine.

TO SEE MORE ARTWORKS, VISIT Website: meganjlee.art/ Instagram: @meganjlee.art

Growth Mindset

BY AMANDA JORDAN POETRY BY AMY POSEY

Growth mindset describes a way of viewing challenges and setbacks. People who have a growth mindset believe that even if they struggle with certain skills, their abilities aren’t set in stone. They think that with work, their skills can improve over time.

People with the opposite belief — that abilities are what they are and won’t change — have a fixed mindset. They think their skills won’t improve no matter how hard they try.

Having a growth mindset can have real benefits. It helps people reframe their approach to challenges and stay motivated to work to improve skills. Instead of thinking “I can’t do this,” they think “I can’t do it yet.”

THIS BIOLOGY OF GROWTH IS UNIVERSAL.

LIMITLESS ABILITY TO EXPAND AND GROW

IT STARTS IN THE BRAIN

The brain is constantly creating and destroying neural pathways, forming the thought and behavior patterns our brain uses to make decisions, choose actions and present us to the outside world. They’re always looking for new and better ways to grow.

Dendrites are branching treelike figures that bring in information from the cell body. They are brain cells that connect like tree roots. Their job is to communicate and connect!

ENTANGLING CONNECTING UNSTOPPABLE MOVING OBSTACLES IN ITS ROOTS CRACKING SIDEWALKS IN CITIES

UNEARTHING DIRT ON THE FOREST

REFRAMING OBSTACLES INTO POSSIBILITIES PUSHING SEEKING EXTENDING UNENDING

VISUALIZING EMOTIONS

BY ANNA WIEDERKEHR PUBLISHED ON MEDIUM.COM

EMOTIONS

INTRODUCTION

Emotions are based on abstract phenomena, making them difficult to define and quantify. Though our experiences of emotion are subjective, we have a deep need to understand and communicate their complexities and effects on our lives. Visualization of this data brings tangibility, reveals patterns, and provides a visual language for expression.

This work is an attempt to encourage the community of data visualization to embrace the challenge of visualizing flexible and unpredictable data in the work that we do. It is also an effort to reconsider the languages we’re using to communicate our experiences.

Often, emotions are our impetus for communication, the heart of our exchanges with one another. Yet just as often, we are unaware of them and unable to control them. Natural spoken language is an innate human capability, but it falls short as a medium for emotion expression. Emotion itself is a shared human experience, but the task to communicate it coherently is enormous.

So if it cannot be said, can it be shown?

Emotion experiences can be thought of as our “data” and our emotion history as one of our natural datasets. Because this data is soft, maybe our articulation of it should be a creative interpretation. It is information that perhaps, is better off envisioned. According to statistician and data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte, to envision information, is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, and art. Data visualization, with its fluency in graphics, is a tool for conveying large amounts of information. It is often used to reach a wider audience that previously would be excluded because of the information’s complexity.

BUT FIRST, HOW DO FEEL EMOTIONS?

Often in colloquial speech we interchange the terms emotion, feeling, and mood. These, although blurry and often related, represent different phenomena. With this in mind, we will assume the following about emotion: Our emotions arise from, and are based on, evolutionary history. They occur as a feedback loop in an organism as an attempt to regain equilibrium after encountering a stimulus.

Feelings are part of the emotion experience in that they occur when a stimulus is encountered and are inwardly directed. Examples of feelings include tense, sick, energetic, or unstable. Moods, in contrast to emotion and feeling, are less specific and often times less intense. They do not arise from one specific event or stimulus, nor are they always rational or justified. Moods seem to color everything and we often describe ourselves as being either in a positive or negative mood.

Disclosing emotion requires that we use language to express a phenomenon that occurs at a nonlinguistic level of consciousness. The same problems discussed in the measurement of emotions also apply here. First, the only the most articulate are able to put experiences into precise words. That is of course, only when the experience can be realized by language. Second, how the patient describes their thoughts, feelings and experiences is influenced by the vocabulary available at the time and the need to construct a coherent sentence.

Despite the complexity of emotion, we choose a relatively straight-forward, yet limiting, approach to communicate it.

DO WE

The feedback loop of how we process emotions. If the organism, or we, are not brought back to equilibrium after the first loop, the loop restarts (or partially so) until we achieve it.

Depending on your cultural experiences, you choose one of two lenses: objective or subjective to view the world. A pure objective stance requires a scientific account of reality and the use of language to express our experiences clearly and precisely. As we already pointed out, that becomes a complicated task in the context of emotion. It is difficult to only use words for rational, objective truth because it is a characteristic of human language to be made up of metaphors and analogies. Because we find our own truths based on what we individually experience, an experiential lens allows us to be objective with the parts that we understand and use tools like metaphor to make sense of the things we can’t quite grasp. We create an “imaginative rationality” for our feelings, aesthetic experiences and moral practices in order to comprehend them.

With emotion awareness comes the battle against emotion avoidance. As humans we have a strong tendency to avoid painful emotions. Normal cognitive processes often deny, distort, or interrupt emotion and transform adaptive but unpleasant emotions into dysfunctional behaviors designed to avoid feeling. So even though we have, through evolution, adjusted to experiencing necessary unpleasant emotions, we mentally override them.

Emotion awareness is not about thinking about feeling. It’s about feeling our feelings.

Simply thinking can lead to obsession and ruminative thoughts, reinforcing our tendencies to avoid. Enduring an emotion, pleasant or unpleasant, gives us a full picture and thus a richer narrative to explain our experiences.

THE DATA

The Atlas of Emotion

In 2016, psychologist and emotion researcher Paul Ekman conducted a survey of emotion researchers to gather data on what they all agree about. His findings, combined with an idea from no other than the Dalai Lama was the basis for Stamen’s project, Atlas of Emotion.

The project utilizes a fairly loose definition of “atlas” but still gives a viewer the possibility to “explore the landscape of emotions.”

But a map about the human experience is as interesting to us to the extent of how empathetic we are. What might be more engaging, would be putting emotion into a context matters more to us: ourselves.

THE PROBLEM WITH DATA VISUALIZATION

Visualization

Data is sometimes slow, blurry and too complex for objective inspection. As we are the sole experiencers of our own lives, we shouldn’t expect machines to tell us something revealing about ourselves.

At this point we know that emotions are hard to measure and communicate, which inevitably makes them difficult to quantify and visualize. Even if we are able to identify the emotion label for an experiences, we would be hard-pressed to determine every possible stimulus that would trigger it. For example, sadness can be rooted in neglect, when we are feeling left out or alienated. It could also be rooted in sympathy, when we are confronted with the hardships of others. This is one of the many reasons why our experiences cannot be rated and compared evenly across one arbitrary value scale. In order to approach these types of datasets, we need a new set of guidelines.

Data visualization needs to move past methodologies that encourage a one-size-fitsall approach to visualization because each entry, bar or number is an individual story.

By using visualization, we can see things in a new way. Because when we put things into graphic form, we liberate further potential for action. Nevertheless, we designers are also bound. We rely on the ability to quantify information before we can construct a useful visualization. If we could find a way to mix these two languages, that of numbers and concepts with that of shape, color and pattern, then we could really begin to visually depict “softer” data.

Data that is more than just about facts. Data that is often ambiguous. This type of visualization must embrace inexact interpretation. Interpretation as a creative construction as opposed to a precise reconstruction.

THE RESULT

The Iceberg

The visualization of emotion is meant to be an attempt to make visible a process that is in large part invisible and only partially perceived by the one experiencing it. It must reflect the narrative quality of our personal histories, even if only as a visual metaphor. In order to do that, the visualization must be engaging. What we make of our emotion experiences helps us create our identity. If we are able to express our emotionality through a visualization, we able to connect with, engage with and reflect upon it

I used Freud’s iceberg metaphor to start experimenting with more detailed visualizations that took into consideration visual metaphors that we recognize because we see them in reality. We are familiar with the sleek, rigid structure of an iceberg. We understand its multi-dimensionality. It has a base which both stabilizes it and has the power to shift its weight.

The increase in the collection of emotion data is a welcome challenge in the visualization practice. Visual representation of emotion is the enrichment to our written records of self-realization. We only need to develop better processes for flexible and unpredictable datasets. Within the data visualization community, there are stirrings of the need to “humanize” these datasets.

To being designing ways to connect numbers to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors, and people. If this is the second wave of visualization, then I think there is still space for a middle ground. The same deep and thoughtful approach known for in this field, but to softer data sets, with the intention of designing systematic visual patterns for them. It will take quite some time to build widely accepted tools to even generate the data. And, as is natural to an iterative design process, these tools will probably break.

Out of unavoidable necessity, advancements will be made individually in visualization and in the social sciences. But we are set up for these fields of research to influence, complement and improve one another. Together, we only need to accept that perhaps numbers and objectivity are not, in fact, truth. Collaborative discovery will take it from there.

NEW growing up in jersey

BY ANNIE LEE

I’m from a small-ish town in New Jersey called Plainsboro. I mostly tell people I’m from Princeton (I’m only 10 min away!). My house was built on what was a famous dairy milk farm. Random fact: Elsie the cow grew up on this farm (think Elmer’s glue and Borden Diary) and her tombstone rests at a nearby park in my neighborhood.

PHOTO BY: OLD POSTCARD ON EBAY

WITHERSPOON ST

I typically visit Princeton to see friends when I am home. Growing up, it was pretty much the only interesting area to hang out. We often had to stop for ice cream at Halo Pub.

PHOTO BY: DAVID SCHURE

BAGELS BAGELS BAGELS

My absolute favorite bagels are from a local shop called The Bagel Hole. My go-to order is an everything bagel with chicken salad.

This large landscape painting was my first acrylic painting I did in high school. I’m reminded of all my old art projects scattered around my old bedroom.

HOME-COOKED MEAL

Coming home, to a home-cooked Chinese meal is always so comforting. A special family dinner can be steamed fish, soy sauce chicken with ginger, braised pork and oyster mushrooms with veggies.

JUST SOME THINGS THAT REMIND ME OF HOME

DOO

OODLESFROM MY JOURNA L

@MEGANJLEE.ART @ANNIELEE.CO

@SUPER.MEGA.BOSS

@_SALAMANDERZDOODLEZ

CONTRIBUTORS

Megan Lee Robyn Yeh Amanda Jordan Nicole Lewis

Anders Gustafsson Kirsten Finkas

Annie Vuong

Annie Lee PRINTER

All digital for this issue!

TYPOGRAPHY

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