How I Work: Meta Director Product Creative, Arianna Orland
Arianna Orland has led a wonderfully creative life. Design by Barbara Cadorna.
Arianna Orland’s creative career has taken her down many interesting roads — launching the design conference In/Visible Talks and the investment syndicate In/Visible Ventures, serving as the board president of the non-profit Creativity Explored and, most recently in her role as Meta’s Director of Product Creative, bringing the Meta brand to billions.
At each stop, she has used the power of design to telegraph trust, bring joy, solve problems, and build connections between products and the people who use them. And her to-do list for the year ahead is filling up quickly — speaking and writing about the intersection of product and brand, and finding a new board position once her current one ends. (If you’re in the Bay Area now through January 21st 2024, Creativity Explored is part of a wonderful group show, Into the Brightness, at the Oakland Museum of California recently covered by The New York Times.)
Here, she shares how she works, including how her exacting eye can tell if things are off (even if by just a pixel); the dream studio in her San Francisco backyard; and why she listens to a mix of old school hip hop and yacht rock.
This Marilyn Wong work is one of those featured in Into the Brightness, dynamic perspectives from the Creativity Explored artists’ personal experiences of the world. Image: Creativity Explored.
1. Rise and Shine
I usually wake up between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. and pour a big glass of something caffeinated with extra ice regardless of the temperature outside. I’m working on a mindfulness practice so I’ve been trying to make space to mediate before I start my workday.
I check my personal email, check my work email to make sure nothing’s on fire, skim the day’s headlines, and then I feed the bluejays. We started feeding the birds in the backyard during the pandemic and have kept it up. We can’t let LL Cool Jay and Jam Master Jay down, ya know?
If Laura Olin’s newsletter is in my inbox, I know it’s going to be a great day.
2. Work Uniform
Jeans, clogs, glasses, hoop earrings, hair half up half down or in a bun.
3. How I Structure My Day
Things don’t heat up at work until about 9 a.m. so I spend the morning heads down on projects. From 9 a.m. until about 4 p.m. I’m usually in back-to-back meetings. At the end of the day I like to make a list of the things I need to focus on for the next day. In the evenings I check on the garden and try to squeeze in a walk.
4. Playlist Favorites
Old school hip hop with a side of Yacht Rock. Wow…what an odd assortment, but the heart wants what it wants.
5. Tools of the Trade
Laptop, external monitor, iPhone, notebook and a pencil. I love writing things down on paper and doodling in the margins.
Orland’s dream studio in her San Francisco back yard and, wow, it does look dreamy. Image: Orland.
6. Dream Studio
I have at least one dream studio in my backyard. My partner Steve built it during the pandemic and it’s a real oasis.
My other dream studio is a warehouse, flooded with light, space for friends, and tons of wall space to hang prints — with an artist-in-residence, preferably a cellist, who likes to play Talking Heads music, and takes requests.
7. One Unique Thing About My Work Process…
I can tell just by looking at a layout if things are off even by a single pixel.
8. Mantra
“Honor thy error as hidden intention.”
It’s one of the phrases from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, originally created as a deck of letterpress cards to help musicians break though creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. There are something like 50 phrases in the deck, all of them great. Some examples of them are:
Is it finished?
You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas
Water
Design systems work can be very constrained. I think of Oblique Strategies often as it reminds me that there are always ways to access new thinking.
9. My Brightest Idea that Never Saw the Light of Day
I’ve wanted to host a podcast for a long time about creative people and creative process. I even have a name, We Who Design.
Any aspiring podcast producers out there want to partner? Get in touch!
Orland purchased this work on the street in Willamsburg Brooklyn, Artist Unknown. Image: Orland.
10. To-Do List Item that Keeps Me Up at Night
“All that will never be known.” There are just so many talented folks making incredible art and designing incredible things all over the world at any given moment. Most of the time I feel happy about that, occasionally I feel a pang deep inside my heart because I know no matter how hard I try to drink it all in, there will always be multitudes beyond my grasp.
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