FIELD NOTES 003: Where you catch fire

It is just past eleven at night. The laptop is the only light in the room, and I have been sitting for hours over a layout nobody asked me for.

For the first time in my life I am writing a chapter for a book. It tells a story from my years in Australia, about a team we called the Wolfpack back then. The task was simple: contribute a text.

A text turned into a layout job without anyone asking for it. What could sit in Word has been happening in Adobe InDesign for two weeks. With no idea whether anyone outside me and my inner circle will ever see it.

Since dinner I have been pushing letters around. Which typeface carries a story like this? What colour does it have? How much room does a headline need to breathe? I am building chapter openers that probably nobody will ever see in this form.

At some point I look at the clock and cannot work out where the evening went.

I know this feeling. It shows up every time design is involved. Branding, visual language, colour, form, aesthetics. The moment when something that only existed in your head is suddenly lying in front of you. It is more a feeling than a passion. The kind where you lose track of the time around you.

And I know the sentence that usually follows:

Nice, but you cannot make a living from that. Art does not pay the rent. For a long time I believed that sentence more than I believed the feeling.

Design and layout were always there. Over the last months something else joined them: writing. I would not have thought it could feel the same. It does.

That is the information I kept walking past. Not what sounds sensible. Not what adds up.

But where you catch fire.

The difference in the end is not who makes the better design. Not the lower price, not the better education, not who knows more. All of that can be learned, compared and eventually copied.

The difference is that in you, in exactly this mix, it catches fire. And nobody can copy that.

And it does not stay inside you. It ends up in what you make. You can tell when somebody lost track of time over a thing. In a text, in a layout, in the way somebody runs a meeting.

The longer you give yourself permission to follow it, the more often you land at exactly this point.

Right in these weeks the algorithm washes a reel by Bella Solanot into my feed. From a completely different direction, onto the same point. She writes on Instagram about how people get back to what actually makes them who they are. She calls it Genius Activation, and she says that this kind of enthusiasm reaches people more than the work itself. The reel that confirmed the thought, by @bellasolanot: www.instagram.com/reel/DYGcAD7Rycp

Good to notice you are not alone with it.