B (3:53)

Luis Mendo, welcome to Design Better.

A (3:57)

Thank you for having me.

B (3:58)

We're extremely excited to have you here. This is one of those episodes where a guest approaches us and I didn't really know of you before, but the more I dove into what you're working on, I just really love it. And you sent us these lovely little books, which I've got a bunch of notes pasted into. And I just really love your creative philosophy and the things that you're interested in. And I think we're going to talk a lot about that. But as a starting point, I thought it might be good to talk a little bit about just it's topical and we do cover it a lot, so hopefully people aren't tired of it. But I think your perspective on it is especially interesting. So there's this idea right now of AI challenging or taking over so many different creative disciplines. And there's a little section towards the end of your book where you're having a dialogue with a little bird character. It's kind of about your muse. And one of the panels says, what's the point of being human if we're on the brink of AI replacing all of us? And the response to it is a quote from a woman named Anu Athluru, which says AI will flood the Zone with intelligence, but as intelligence gets cheaper, presence gets more expensive, real earned interpersonal trust will become the rarest currency. When tech is everywhere, people are the new edge. So maybe we could start there and talk a little bit about that and your perspectives on the world we are right now living in.

A (5:18)

That's interesting. It's already a field that you can talk about for hours now. Yeah, no it's interesting to see how nowadays we are talking about AI all the time. And I've been looking from the fence for a while. It feels so scary and overwhelming and all we are going to be replaced. But actually, once I dove into it and I started using it a bit more, I realized that, oh, this thing is just a glorified calculator. It's nothing else. And also, I think we should stop saying AI. We should say LLMs. The AI, the artificial intelligence, still doesn't exist. What you have is LLMs, very clever systems learning models, and they are language learning models. And they are just trying to guess things and connecting things with each other. And they're very good talking to each other, like in the machines between them. They're very good at that. So yesterday I was trying to set up in a way that whenever somebody buys my book, I will just get an email with their data so I know where to send it, and then fill Excel sheet with their address and their phone number, et cetera, so that I don't have to do it by hand, which I was doing for, you know, 500 books. And it's a lot of work. So I thought, okay, why am I doing this thing? It's taking my time from drawing, it's taking my time from writing poetry, it's taking my time from smelling the flowers. I don't want to do this thing. And that's what these LLMs are very good for. And I think we should stop being so panicky about it. They are just a tool, a glorified calculator, as I say. And as we go on, what they have to find out is a way of doing this work in a more environmentally friendly. I think that this is the big conundrum. And what. I don't like to use them because every time I'm conscious, like, oh, I'm polluting the earth more every time I make a question or I do something with it. So I try to use it very carefully and for things I think, okay, it's going to save me time and it's going to make my life richer. I'm trying not to pollute the world too much, see it as a tool. I would never ask a paperclip to make a drawing. For me, a paperclip is a paperclip. It's just to put some papers together. I heard yesterday, Rick Rubin, he was saying that if you give the same question to five different LLMs, they will give you more or less the same answer. But if you give the same question or the Same sentence to. To five different filmmakers that will make five different movies. The machine will never be able to do that.

C (7:39)

Does AI fit into your workflow in any way, shape or form? I mean, is it useful in your life?

A (7:45)

I use it for all this boring stuff because I'm not a native English and I write everything in English. English is not my mother tongue, so I do use it for a final grammar check or search for synonyms or. How do you say this again? And I have like three different translators in my cloth. One that goes from Spanish to English and one that goes from English to Japanese, and one that goes from Dutch to English. Because Spanish and Dutch are my first languages. So for me, sometimes I know the word, but I only remember it in Spanish or only in Dutch. That's how I use it. More like a translator friend.

C (8:23)

Yeah, you're truly a citizen of the world. You spent 20 years in Europe as a creative director, working on magazines, and then you kind of hit a wall and you found yourself wanting to rethink your life, reevaluate some things. Take us into that moment where you realize that you had this career. By all intents and purposes, you were very successful. But you had this moment where you felt like you needed to rebuild your career. And not just your career, but your life. And now you're living in Japan, so you kind of hit the reset button. Take us into that in those moments.

A (9:00)

So originally I went to Holland to study one year, graphic design, art school, and I stayed there for 20 years. And what you say, you know, I was a graphic designer, mainly in the editorial design. I was creating magazines from the ground up. I was redesigning magazines. I was doing also some design work, and that went very well. I was good at it, it seems, and I liked it. But I have a problem that I looked a lot like my dad. My dad has three jobs, very unhappy. Life at home and always working, working, working. And I seem to do the same. So when my father passed away, I stopped and I thought, okay, why did my father pass away? He passed away because of stress and unhappiness, mainly, which created health issues. And I thought, damn, I'm doing the same thing. Absolutely the same thing. I'm unhappy. I am, you know, working too hard. I have so many things in my head. I'm always in meetings and emails. I'm not really enjoying what I'm doing. Yes, design is nice, but most of the time it happened after 5 or 6pm when everyone would stop calling and we had no meetings. And then finally I had come to Design. So what am I, a designer or a caller? I'm a meeting person, I'm a manager. What am I? And I thought, no, no, no, this is not good. So I took a three month sabbatical in Japan, in Tokyo. And I can tell you, from the moment I step into the plane, which was a Japan Airlines plane, in a Schiphol in Amsterdam, from the moment I stepped in, I thought, I love Japan. It was like everything, the music they had, the smell in the plane, the flight attendant uniforms, everything looked great.

C (10:38)

It's wonderful.

A (10:39)

This is wonderful. What a great country. And I was still in Amsterdam, you know, like, physically, I was still not. I didn't leave yet. When I arrived, it was only a confirmation. It was like, this is a great country. So calm, so clean, everything works. I loved it so much that I spent another four years trying to come back as much as possible. And at the end of the four years, I said to my wife, listen, I'm not happy in Amsterdam anymore. I would really love to live in Japan. And that's what I did. I just moved, first for a year, but after six months I realized I'm not coming back to Europe. And then I stick around for another 14th almost now. So I'm here now for 14. But of course, you know, I was kind of burned out. My father had died. I was kind of like, what do I do with my life? And when I arrived in Japan, I could not work as an art director and as a designer anymore because I couldn't speak the language. So I thought, well, let's take a break. Let's have one year, just do nothing, just do drawing and discovering Japan and whatnot. So I met this friend of mine who is called Adrian, Adrian Hogan, who is an Australian. And he was drawing all the time. Like all the time. In the cafes, on the street, even walking, he was drawing. And I thought, oh, this guy, I would love to be like that. So I just stick around with him, you know, like, oh, can I tag along and draw with you? And I started to draw more and more and more without thinking, this is going to be my job another day. But then a friend of ours, she said to me, luis, you're drawing all the time, but you don't have a job. What are you doing? Why don't you become an illustrator? And I said, well, you know, one thing is drawing and another thing is becoming an illustrator. They're two different things. And she said, well, you should go to my agent and maybe they want to take you and then you do some projects. So I did just for fun, you know, like Stephan Zack Meister, when he moved to Hong Kong and he showed his portfolio just for fun. He was like, oh, can you want to watch my portfolio? And then he stayed in Hong Kong for years, but it was a bit the same. I thought, I'll do the same thing. I would just go to the agent and show my work and see what they say. And to my surprise, they signed me on the spot. They were like, yeah, we love it. And I thought, okay, so you love it, but I don't think clients will like it. And yes, in a week I had my first job for a Japanese client, some wine label, and then a second job and then a third. And then the thing started rolling and all of a sudden I was an illustrator. It was a big surprise. First because the money is much lower than a designer. So when you're a designer just used to some certain level of money and comfortability that in illustration is a different thing. You have to fight a lot and you have to work a lot in order to get there. So at the beginning it was like, well, okay, I'm getting less money, but I'm happier, you know, and it's just drawings fine. So as you go, you learn and you grow. And it became really my thing throwing. And now I don't do any design anymore already for years, except, you know, occasional logo for some friend or something. I don't do any design work anymore. And I'm loving it, to be honest. And yes, the money is less, but I'm so much happier.

B (13:47)

So you were just talking about how this language barrier was in some sense a constraint that might have liberated your creativity. Could you talk a bit more about that, how that part of it happened?

A (13:58)

The thing with language is that we think that language, it's important, and it is actually much more important than we think. But you know, many people that say, oh, I would love to live in Japan, but I would never be able to speak the language, therefore I would never be able to move. I've been living here 14 years. My Japanese is really bad. It's very limited. It's like very elementary. And I live here and I don't rely on my wife for everything. Most of the things, I do it on my own. I use Google Translate, I use Handsome feet, and I use a lot of drawing. And I also learn to read the air. So people talk to me and I just kind of guess what they are saying and I hear, okay, I understand four words. And by the face expression, I get the message. So it works really well, but it's liberating not knowing the language, because factually, you live in a bubble. And this bubble, you know, because you are isolated from all this talking and people talking about movie stars and about their problems at home or whatever their boss said to them or something. And I don't hear all that. So I have more time to look inside and go inside myself, and then about my drawings and about my projects. And I learn also to observe much better. So I look a lot and I observe how people move, how they dress, their actions. And that helps a lot in my career as an illustrator because I learn a lot about body positions, but also I learn a lot about clothing, language. I don't know. I think I have a more fulfilling life because I don't understand the language than when I was living in Amsterdam. And I understood absolutely everything. And it's mostly noise, politics and whatever. People are talking on the street and the conversation of the person next to you in the cafe. So I really enjoy this kind of living in an island that I think more people should experience at least once in their life. It's a kind of introspection, but also at the same time, you are very much involved with your surroundings because you're not distracted by the talking points of the people around you.

C (16:02)

That's interesting. I would think that that would be fun for a while, and then it would sort of be like a constraint. That would be a burden. But I'm curious what living in Japan and being immersed in Japanese culture and history has taught you about life and

A (16:18)

creativity, mostly Japan has taught me about being intentional. What do I mean by this? If you would see my daughter, she's 6 years old. When she was even 3, she had to fold a towel. And the way she did that, it was a shock to me, the amount of attention and the perfection that she was trying to flatten the towel while folding it. So, you know, the amount of attention that she put into the folding the towel was, for me, like eye opening, because if you do something, you do it well, and that's very Japanese. So I remember the very first, second month of living here, I went to a bookshop, and I had bought a book for my son, and I was in a hurry, and I said, well, can you wrap it for gift wrapping? And the guy started doing it, but very slowly, and I was in a hurry, and I was like, I'm so sorry. Can you please hurry up? And the guy stopped, look at me, super serious, and he said, do you want to give wrapping or not? He didn't understand making it quick. He didn't want to make it quick, and it didn't fit in his head. Like, what do you mean? You want it or not? If you want it, I need to take my time to do it. Well, these kind of details I can tell you, like thousands of these. This kind of details is what affects your life as a foreigner living here, that you understand and learn from the way they do things, and it's very enjoyable and also, you know, broadens your mind. I'm a Spanish guy. I moved to the Netherlands when I was 19, so I broadened my mind going to the Netherlands, and then now I broadened my mind living here again. I have the feeling that I have, like, three lives and three moments where I had to learn from zero, and I love it. Maybe one day I will move out of here, I don't know, because nothing beats Japan. But it would be nice to go somewhere else and then discover something completely new at the same time. It's so comfortable and my life feels so great that I don't think I will ever live.

C (18:20)

It's interesting, Luis, the speed thing. I missed a train with my family three times in a row not far from where you live in Nagano.

A (18:28)

Okay.

C (18:29)

We were at the train station and we missed our train by a couple minutes. Even though we were right there, they would not let us in because they had already closed the doors. And so I went back to the ticket station and talked to a lady and she's like, oh, okay. So she gets out a very lovely, well designed little page where she's going to write out all the details about the next train that I could take, which took about 30 minutes. And so by the time I got down to the platform, I had missed the train yet again. So I went back to her and she's like, oh, okay, well, let's adjust that. And she got out the same piece of paper and took another 30 minutes and I missed the train yet again.

A (19:09)

Are you kidding?

C (19:10)

There's, like, no sense of urgency of what we're trying to do here. I don't know if we have to fill out a spreadsheet to get a train ticket.

A (19:19)

I don't know. Actually, you know, in fact, you could have taken the next train and your ticket would have been valid only your chair, your seat wouldn't be reserved. But it's interesting. I had something recently also that I thought, oh, am I in Japan? Like, if I have to pay my taxes, I can only do it on the office, in the bank office. I Have to go to the bank office in person. And I'm like, come on, it's just transferring, you know, from me to the irs, to the tax office. But still, no, it has to be you. And it's very much like that. But, you know, I enjoy it in a way. And I love it when they say, oh, can you fax this to me? I'm like, yes, someone who still uses a fax, that's fantastic. You know, let's go for the fax. And then I can go to the Conbini, which is, you know, the 24 hour supermarkets. And they all have a fax machine. So I can fax anytime, whenever I want. I could probably the digital, but I prefer to go to the shop because it's fun. It's this guy, and if you have a problem, you can ask him like, oh, how do I fax this thing? It's much more rich. My life here is richer because of these things. And I know, yes, there are more convenient ways of doing everything, but I was talking to my friend Matthew the other day about friction, and he was saying that he would like to write a book about friction. And I think friction is something that is so underrated. It's a good thing. And I'm missing it. I miss it all the time. With friction, you have happy accidents, you have serendipity, you have unexpected moments and encounters that you wouldn't have if everything went smooth. My son, he takes the Uber everywhere. I'm like, why don't you take the bus off the train? You know, it's so much more fun that you can sit next to someone that you don't know, start a conversation or bump into the love of his life. Like, please take the train, man. We are getting used to this frictionless life, which is actually too cold and it doesn't give you anything new.

B (21:08)

There's a great little essay by Kurt Vonnegut about this topic about friction. And it's just about buying an envelope. And he tells his wife, I'm going

A (21:15)

to go, oh, yeah, that one.

B (21:15)

Yeah, that's like, why don't you order a stack of envelopes? And then he's like, nope. He says, I pretend not to hear, go out and get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. And he talks about the people he sees and interacts with and things he runs into. And I think that whole idea of creative friction plays into what we were talking about earlier too, where now you can essentially prompt something into existence, but you didn't go through the process of making it. And often that process of making you end up with something much better and more interesting than what you had initially envisioned or might have prompted the computer to do. So I'm curious how that friction plays into your process and work.

A (21:52)

It all starts because many people talk about this and, oh, we should do this because it takes shorter or is more efficient. But all of us, we have to understand that friction is actually a good thing, that they have sold us. This idea of friction being bad and doing things in a convoluted, slow way is bad. And I think, why is it bad? Tell me, please, how is it bad? Because it takes me longer to get there. Is it bad in which way? For other reasons? It's actually as good as it is bad. So in fact, we shouldn't take a stance on it. And productivity shouldn't be a goal in the first place. I heard the other day, I was very shocked by it because this is a realization that, you know, there was. The idea of employees being an employee is actually quite recent. It's only like 2, 300 years old. It's not that long before we had craftsmen, it were only craftsmen. So you were blacksmith or you were a horse keeper or whatever. Everybody had a job and a craft. And nowadays we are all employees and most of people is employees. And to me, I think that this is why we are so obsessed with efficiency, because we are borrowing time from somebody else. We are in the service of somebody else. And he's telling us, well, oh, if you do half a minute quicker, that will give me more money or we will make more money in the company. And I think this is kind of a sickness of our society that we have bought into this narrative. We should actually reject it and think more like in terms of, okay, how do we think better? Better in the meanings of the result is better, but also the production, the making of this thing made me a better person. And that's something that is not very valued nowadays, or maybe not as much as it should. And I would like to change at least in my life, like, okay, you guys hurry, you do everything fast. I will go slow, I will do my way. And then again, you know, it doesn't mean that I don't use LLMs for something because it's work that I hate to do, like programming my website or filling spreadsheets. That's fine. And everybody should pick their fights and choose their ways. But I think that is more enriching to do things slow and to do Things analog and to do it with friction.

C (24:05)

Yeah, this is definitely a lesson that Japan has to offer, whether you're ready for that lesson or not. But there's a dedication to craft and duty and taking time as you described. Like if it's raining outside and you make a purchase in a shop, they're going to package it up in a very particular way and put a little plastic bag over that so the things that you've purchased don't get damaged or you know. My wife took a Kintsugi class, that's the art of a broken pot and fixing it with the gold leaf. Her teacher, the sensei, was teaching her that you have to mix the gold solution 100 times this way and 100 times the other way. And she was like, does I really have to stir it 100 times? He's like, yeah, uh huh. You gotta do it that way. There's a dedication to that. And it occurs to me that in Western culture, our mentality about how we do things, whether that's our work things, these are the things we're doing professionally or things in our personal time. It's often about efficiency and productivity. Productivity is a concept and a notion that comes from industrialization. And Japan entered industrialization later than the UK and the Western world. It's very much innovated in industrialization in the 20th century. But there's a separation in the culture from productivity. It's not quite as ingrained in the culture in, I think, a healthy way. I'm curious how you think about productivity at this point in your life and in this place in Japan. And what's the difference between being productive, where you're making things and putting them into the world and being creative? How do you see a distinction or what's the relationship there?

A (25:57)

Well, first in Japan, I think that yes, they weren't hyper productive after the war because they understood that technology was the only thing that could save them. Technology had given them the H bomb and the horrors of that. And they thought, okay, technology is so powerful that we have to master it. What they did was embrace technology in a crazy way. They go all the way in.

C (26:20)

There's no half measures.

A (26:22)

No, if they love Alfa Romeo cars from the 60s, they will go all the way in and buy all of them and know all the parts and they go really in this Otako culture is very ingrained into the Japanese mind. So yes, they adopted the technology. They became very good at it. We all bought VCRs in the 80s and we all bought the cameras. And that was very Good. But they always kept this craftsmanship approach to it, which I think is a different angle. The west embraced technology in this production kind of way, like, okay, let's be efficient, let's save money, let's cut corners. And the Japanese said, no, no, no, we're going to do the best products, and we are going to do it in the craftsmanship way. Like the shokunin. It's called. The shokunin is artisan. So the shocking way is that you spend 300 hours or, you know, you steer the gold leaves 100 times on one direction, hundred on the other. That's the shocking way. There is no other way to do things well, but the way that it's been done through ages before you. Creativity and productivity are the same thing. Like, I don't see this division. And many people say that it exists a division between life and work. I never saw the difference. I was always working. I was always enjoying my time. And here in Japan, like, if you go to a cafe in the middle of the day, as a man, they always ask you, do you have a free day today? Why are you in the cafe? You know, it's a Thursday at 4 in the afternoon. Are you free? I'm like, no, I'm always free. I'm always working. And they don't understand that because people tend to do this division. Again, what we were saying before is that we are all employees. And then the boss tells you, okay, you have to come this and this day, and those days are your free days. But for the rest of us who are not work for a boss, we have this freedom to take our time whenever we want. I very often am having dinner with my family and I have ideas or thinking about my work, and I see something that happens in the sauce on my plate, and that gives me an idea for a drawing. Also, when I'm drawing, I'm actually maybe thinking about my daughter and, oh, did she get the right shoes to school or, you know, for me, I'm very blurred, the two of them. And I've always been in my life, like I've always haven't seen really a division between, oh, this is free time and this is work time. And I think in Japan, if I see how, for instance, like, people clean the street in front of their houses and they clean with a toothbrush. You see people doing it other way, workplace and cleaning the front of the shop, for instance. But also they're doing it in their house. I don't know. I see a blur constantly a blur between the two. Maybe it's because it's me looking and I'm seeing what I want to see. Maybe, But I want to believe that we shouldn't differentiate the two and that work should be part of your life and make you feel realized and valid as a person and as a human. Rather than oh, is this thing that I have to do between nine and five because someone is paying me to do? If I don't do that, I won't make bread or I can put bread on the table. I think that we should step out of that thinking frame.

B (29:28)

Related to that, maybe you could talk a little bit about personal projects and there's a little section in the book about that because as you may know, it's a pretty tough world out there. In the world of tech employment, people are laid off or worried about their jobs, and many in our audience are curious about shifting over to more independent creative practice. And if you are thinking about that, you might not think it's wise to invest time in stuff that you're just interested in or personal projects, but you actually, for your own story, it helped you kind of make that transition in some ways to more paid illustration work.

A (29:59)

There are two things. Like one thing is changing totally your life. Like you are working in an office and then, oh, I would like to be making leather wallets in my living room. That's one thing. But I think what you're talking more about is about personal project.

C (30:13)

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