An Interview with Luke Williams
For our fourth interview of the BOSSES series, we sat down with friend and creator, Luke Williams.
Luke is a creative director, entrepreneur, and design educator in NYC. He is the founder of Bone, a design studio that builds inspired identities for young brands. Previously the Brand Creative Director at Paperless Post, Luke guided new approaches to design and brand marketing for the online invitation startup. As senior designer at the Museum of Modern Art, Luke contributed to elevating the Museum's standards for design, advertising, and exhibition identity.
How would you describe what do you do? What makes Bone unique?
When I consider a brief to be particularly interesting, it often has to do with the expansion of an existing brand. Bone cares a lot about support, structure, and iterative growth. When we’re hired by an existing company to build out an interactive environment, imagine a new marketing campaign, or design a system for an email drip series to engage a niche audience, there’s this quiet obligation to carry the torch of accountability for the forefathers of the brand, while also adding a new ingredient from our perspective. It’s an opportunity to introduce something new or surprising to an otherwise established entity. There’s joy in that. It’s like learning a new language and then using it to tell a joke. You learn the rules first, and then you put a unique spin on it to inspire alternative thought.
That said, we also do a lot of ground-up brand work that focuses on creative invention. I think this is the sort of work that is the most attractive to a lot of designers, especially younger ones, because it’s a designer’s chance to explore their own ideas in uncharted territory. And while there’s delight in seeing your gestures represent a new company, there still must be a period of time where we have the opportunity to monitor growth. How does the work hold up? What problems need fixing? How can we iterate on the work over time to adjust and accommodate company goals more successfully? Even when you’re the forefather of the branding, the iterative growth stage of the project is always more interesting than the start.
Metaphorically speaking, Bone Design likes building fast cars, but we like driving them much more.
Why did you start your own business? What were you doing before opening up shop?
Starting my own design business felt like a natural next step on the course I was navigating. I feel lucky that I genuinely like what I do, and that I don’t consider it burdensome or chore-like. I spent 10 years working for businesses that could scratch many different itches, but never all of them. Often I would find myself exploring freelance work in my spare time, to give myself the chance to try out alternative modes of working with different people using different tools in more adventurous ways.
I was always aware that opening a design studio of my own would be the answer to addressing this in a more consolidated way, it was just a matter of when. I wanted to make sure I was prepared with a responsible amount of experience so that I would have the best odds of succeeding when I finally decided to begin. I navigated my way through the design ranks at various spots across a range of categories, including Under Armour, Leo Burnett, and MoMA, which gave my work diversity.
After that, I switched gears for a management role at Paperless Post where I was Creative Director of the brand department. It was a team that I had the opportunity to establish and legitimize within the company’s corporate ecosystem. Over the course of 3 years, I learned to manage and lead a talented team of 10. This helped me build my confidence as a goal-oriented director, an experience which I hoped would instill in me traits of a good business owner. Maybe it did.
What’s your favorite part of being your own BOSS?
Do you ever let your car coast downhill and see how long you can go without pumping the breaks? What a rush. I think being your own boss is like that. You choose the road, the speed, and how reckless you want to drive. You're gonna pump the breaks, but at least you get to decide when.
What is frustrating you right now?
I think my basic frustration is when something non-creative stands in the way of creativity. Like not enough time, or not enough money, or the studio is too cold, or the developer misinterpreted my notes again...
Right now, I’m uniquely frustrated that I don’t have a regular team to work with. It’s a big part of my goals for the new year. To honor the theme of this interview, I want to work with a team with regularity—not just a project-based team, but a Bone Design based team. And not to be the boss of others, but to enrich the creative process with constructive dialogue, design critiques, new perspectives, and team celebrations. Not having that is frustrating.
Your work covers such a spectrum of aesthetics — How do you uncover what’s best for each client?
There is fluidity between the designer and client. I find that my clients are attracted to the work I've done for other brands and consider it of a quality consistent with their aesthetic goals from the start. I prefer not to let style lead my projects, it's actually not until later stages of actualization that the 'look’ of the work reveals itself. I begin each scope with some amount of strategy and research to establish objective buy-in on both sides first. That helps us to reduce subjectivity. Opinions of taste tend to get in the way of the critical process, which is why showing something stylish too soon can sometimes neuter the work before it has the chance to find itself.
Due to this approach, we actually seem to have moved away from ‘moodboarding’ with our clients. As aesthetic professionals, I've found there's a fundamental irony in asking the client what ‘look’ they want before first taking the journey to discover and define it ourselves.
Squarespace was a game changer for us — Is there a tool that changed how you approach your work?
“Show Baseline Grid”
What have you learned since opening the studio?
The value of relationships. The best projects come from referrals from people in high places who carry respect for you. So it’s become increasingly more important to me to always be thankful and generous to anyone who brings work our way, and to try to only put positivity into the universe for very similar reasons.
If you could hire someone right now, what would you have them do to make your day easier?
I would hire a business manager to tell me what I’m doing wrong, and to show me how to do it right.
What projects are you most proud of since opening up shop?
Early on, I was called in to support the 2018 marketing campaign for Tribeca Film Festival. That project should have been a disaster, based on the absurdity of hand-tearing literally every single element of the campaign. We were really excited about the purity of such a reductive visual solution, but we sold the idea through before we learned how exhaustive the media buy was. Lots of late nights and a few grumpy art directors on that one, but the hard work paid off.
I am so proud of how successful this campaign was for the festival, as well as the overwhelming applause it received in the design industry. We have a working theory that ‘ripped paper’ became a bit of a visual trend in 2018 following our work, and we consider it a compliment.
What does the next year have in store for Bone?
We’re looking to attract more branded environments projects this year. It’s a unique category that fell into our lap in 2018 with Dropbox, and after working on more environments in 2019 for Google and Classpass, we think it may be time to realize this form of work in a more committed manner moving forward.