Behance Cofounder’s Design Secret: Ignore the Internet
Matias Corea opens up about the Adobe acquisition, the beauty of analog inspiration, and why designers need to stop scrolling.
Matias Corea has lived the entrepreneurial designer’s dream. In 2006, he, along with Scott Belsky, founded Behance, an online portfolio platform that became the place for creatives to showcase their work. Six years later, they sold the company to Adobe for a reported $150 million.
The union seemed like a perfect match: Adobe builds much of the software, such as Photoshop and Acrobat, that designers use to make stuff; Behance provides a place to promote that stuff. But two years after the acquisition, Corea left Adobe, citing cultural differences: “It’s an engineering company,” he says. “There’s not one executive who’s a designer. I was tired of being in meetings having to ask permission to do something from people who know very little about design.”
The Barcelona-born designer now spends most of his time on pursuits outside of design — learning to repair motorcycles, make films, and write stories. But he remains opinionated about the right and wrong ways to stoke a designer’s creativity, the best places to find inspiration (not online!), and what companies should do to make creative employees happy—knife-making, anyone?
Wakeup call
I get up around 7:30. I always set my alarm at odd times. It’s never 7:15; it’s usually more like 7:23 or 8:17. Today, I woke up at 7:27. I think we train our brains to think that we’re waking up at a real time, but we’re always making it up. Rather than getting out of bed four minutes after the alarm goes off, I sit up in bed and let myself wake up. I don’t look at email or Facebook. I look at images on Instagram. Then, I work out for 45 minutes at home and have a coffee and, if I eat breakfast, an avocado toast.
Workspace
My desk is fucking beautiful. It’s a 10-foot-by-3-foot floating walnut desk built into my library. I have a 22-inch Mac, a little triangular linen lamp, and a few design objects, including a little tape measure made of wood, a copper ruler, a model of a motorcycle I own, a rare Danish pepper shaker from 1956 (a present from a friend), and a plate that says, “Forbidden to Lie.” I also recently discovered a love of writing with a typewriter, so I have a stack of 50 typed pages, organized by day.
To-Do List
I like checking things off. I’m a fan of paper lists, but they get lost, so instead I have a very simple Excel sheet. I just move things up and down depending on their urgency.
Sketching
The computer is becoming less and less important to me as a design tool. I can design faster and more clearly in my head, with my hands, because I don’t get caught up in the details — alignment, the thickness of the lines, the background color.
Stop Scrolling
I had a very young designer for two years. When I would give her a print design project, the first thing she would do is Google. You have to see the way she scrolled: She went through 40 images in ten seconds. I thought, You’re not looking. Your brain isn’t that powerful. No one’s brain is that powerful. I said, “Why don’t you try something? Here are ten books. Go through as many pages as fast as you can.” She could do maybe six pages in ten seconds. Finding inspiration isn’t looking for a nice soup recipe. Inspiration comes from the smallest places — a corner, a combination of colors, an overlapping structure, something that you can make your own.
For website design, I don’t look at other websites. That’s a terrible thing. That’s why we’re making the same website over and over and over. In 2007, when designing Behance, there was nothing else like it on the Internet. I had to make it up, so I used my common sense based on all of my previous experience. We made a lot of mistakes, but slowly we polished it. Designers need to trust their potential to create more. Having so much information available is not good.
Tunes, No Words
In the loud office we had at Behance, I found noise very distracting, so I played instrumental jazz on my headphones. I can’t play things that have words, and I will never play the radio, ever. I choose what I listen to. There’s one album that I’ve been returning to since I was 18: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It was also the first modal album, which means that it was based on just one scale. When you combine piano, drums, base, saxophone, tenor and alto, and trumpet, there’s more texture than just one scale. I also get audio and creative input from my own music. I play saxophone, flute, and guitar, but I don’t play for anyone else. And I don’t play cool songs. I love finding harmony, tones, and moods more than playing something that’s coherent. It’s liberating, because I don’t have to play from start to end; I just play.
All Work and No Play
I know this isn’t easy for anyone who’s paying people to understand. But when you don’t build in enough time to make good stuff — to find the one day when you’re more inspired than during the others — what happens is shit. You cannot be designing eight hours a day, five days a week. That is impossible. Designers probably do their best work two hours a day — on a good day, when they feel like nobody’s looking over their shoulder. Painters who paint two weeks straight go crazy. They kill themselves or their wife.
Places of Inspiration
I love Dia:Beacon. Even the drive there relaxes me. In the last year, I’ve probably gone 12 times. You discover new things all the time. There’s also Walter de Maria’s Earth Room in Soho. If you haven’t been, it’ll blow your mind.
Client Give and Take
I don’t do work for clients. They think they know what they want, but in fact, they know nothing. They often want to change details just for the sake of giving input. They don’t ask questions like, “Why is this like that? Would it work if it were this way instead?” They say, “I don’t like this.” Buddy, this is just one piece of a puzzle. Do you not buy a car because you don’t like the rev counter? No, it’s a full thing — a system.
Mentors
There are two people I look up to and respect profoundly. Simon Endres, the founder and co-creative director at Red Antler, gave me my first job and taught me how to loosen up the edges of how we think about brands. And Michael Ian Kaye, who was my biggest mentor at AR Media and is now the creative director of Mother. He infused a higher-level attention to detail in my work. He also taught me about how to create systems that allowed brands to be flexible, dynamic, and self-evolutionary.
Alone Together
I used to be an extrovert and the life of the party. But more and more I create my alone time — this thing called “alone together.” If you’re in a relationship, you can be in the same space for a day or a week and feel both alone and like you’re with someone. That said, the isolation of a designer is never a good thing. If I had a design team again, I would have them start separate, then work together, because they’d get more inspiration from each other’s ideas.
Continuing Ed
I’m sort of constantly creatively blocked. I think you always have to unlock creativity. There are some exceptional days, mainly because I had just learned something new like rebuilding a carburetor or finishing a scene in a film editing course. I think companies should be promoting learning, but not so you can do a better job at your work. When you invest in human happiness, you’ll get a better designer or account manager or developer. So if someone wants to learn how to mountain climb, why not pay for it, within limits. Why not go learn how to make a knife? I’m sure something will come out of it, because you’ll have a more textured, nuanced, detailed approach to everything in life.
