Who Grabbed the Designs

You make something and put it out there, and then you forget about it. That’s how it works. You finish, you release, you move on to the next thing. Years later someone tags you in a photo, or you’re looking at something completely unrelated and suddenly there it is—your work, somewhere you didn’t put it, doing something you didn’t plan for.

The people who ended up using my designs were impossible to predict. Models from Shanghai and Vienna. Photographers in Milan and Los Angeles. An indie rock band from India. A Canadian gossip blog. A site dedicated entirely to candy. Japanese photo blogs. American musicians I actually recognized. Someone named Jan who—honestly, I’m still not totally sure what Jan does. A pile of strangers from everywhere, connected by nothing except that they all saw the work and thought, yeah, I can use this.

It’s funny because you can’t predict what catches on or where. You could build something meant for a specific audience and have nobody notice. Then you make something off-the-cuff and it ends up on a photoblog in Tokyo or in the header of some music blog you’ve never heard of. The internet doesn’t respect your intentions.

There’s a particular feeling when you see your work in someone else’s context. It’s not pride—or it’s not just pride. And it’s not loss, though there’s something of that too. It’s more like recognizing a jacket you made years ago on someone at a bus stop. You know the seams, the weight of it, how it should sit. But they’ve worn it enough that it hangs differently now, shaped by their body, their life. It’s still the jacket you made but it’s not yours anymore. It was never really yours once it left your hands.

That’s the deal, I guess. You make something so you can let it go. You don’t get to control what happens next. All you can do is notice when it turns up somewhere, take a weird pride in the fact that it worked, that someone found it useful, and then move on to the next thing.