Welcome to my latest Blog Series – Explain Yourself. In which I try to explain the more nuanced and difficult parts of being inside of the jewelry industry.

From how to be a designer, to why I choose not to work with newly-mined diamonds, to why your healing crystals are a problem, and why sizing a ring is an art and a science. I’ll be here to explain and discuss and answer any questions.

Conflicting Advice for Jewelry Designers

Explaining to a new jewelry designer how to design a piece of jewelry usually looks something like this: Design every last detail! Leave nothing to chance! Be true to your vision! Be open to change! Be flexible! Be precise! Adapt! Measure to the millimeter how the piece will look in the end! Follow your heart! Don’t worry! Worry over every detail! Learn every skill first! Experiment! Be perfect! Be imperfect!

That’s…a lot of advice. And not all of it is good, or more to the point, not all advice is right for every designer. Learning which practices work for you is part of the art and experience of designing a piece of jewelry.

Consider this bit of advice:

“So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you re-evaluate it. This is what you are doing all the time.” ~ Paul Rand

In design – are you a planner or a pantser?

This kind of back and forth, and iteration is part and parcel of the design process. There is this idea in writing that you might be a planner or a pantser* that you either carefully plan every last detail or that you fly by the seat of your pants—or that you do both.

The same idea applies to designing jewelry. That you might plan a piece that is carefully laid out, with exacting measurements and the perfect stone arrangement or that you allow spontaneity and serendipity to guide and inform you, making up some of the design as you go along.

Personally, I fall into both camps—a plantser. Sometimes I plan something out to the millimeter—I’m looking at you platinum and 18 karat gold! Other times, I let intuition and playfulness take over and experiment right in the metal—hellooooo silver!

What Inspires You? Mistakes!

At a show, presenting my jewelry with the best displays I can afford, dressed in sleek black, a smile slapped on my face to show how approachable I am (real talk – I am in fact very approachable). I get the dreaded question – “What inspires you?”

I choke on the answer to this question all the time.

How do I tell them in a single sentence that one of my favorite and most popular designs began as a mistake? It’s true. I carefully and cautiously set up a very specific shape on my solder board. The process was painstaking and I was being a deliberate designer, as I had been taught to be. I turned away for a moment to pick up one more tool.

In the process, I bumped the table and a single piece of silver on my board turned 90 degrees and there it was – the gyroscope that would go on to comprise one of my most popular series, a design that I only retired a year ago.

The original sketch on the left shows what it was going to look like – an even circle intersecting and creating a small even cage. The final version on the right shows that one of those even circles got flipped 90 degrees, creating a shape that looks more like a gyroscope. I was happier with the mistake.

It was only recently that I figured out why this question made me itch. In my head, I thought that I should provide answers that the questioner was expecting – “Nature!” I heard myself say. “The galaxy!” I also heard slip out of my mouth once. “Math! Geometry!”

The truth is that there isn’t a single inspiration point for me, that when I am designing, I am not conscious of any single object or idea that is influencing me. I let ideas stew in my head until they feel right, and this is an ephemeral and altogether weird process to parse out and explain in an elevator pitch, or even on social media.

I have come up with reasons for my inspiration for my designs. I can say that it comes from seeing architecture, or nature, a leaf, a branch, a flower, a rock, but most of the time it comes from seeing amorphous shapes or textures in my head and asking “what if this, but jewelry?”

The process from initial spark to design on paper is a short one. I do my best not to complicate or belabor it, and this is a process that works for me. It is a process that taught me not to doubt myself, to give myself space to explore and express my creative voice. To let it grow.

Trust yourself and trust the process

I design based on instinct. In many parts of my life, I plan, control, add boundaries, and confine myself. In the design process, I do none of that.

I draw every idea, no matter how good or valuable it is, I don’t say no, I only say yes in the drawing process. This method was learned through trial and error, and the skills learned from a creative writing teacher that I was lucky enough to have had in High School. (Hi Mr. Mitsui!) Namely, that you can begin by creating without judgment and then edit yourself later.

But that initial spark, that instinct needs to be trusted, developed, and nurtured in order to stay open to it.

After the idea stage, I edit – heavily. The word “editing” often connotes subtraction, the way you would slice and dice a sentence to whittle it down to an essence or a thought. The same can be true for the design process.

Often though, editing for me means teasing out an idea until it is fuller, more complete – editing becomes an additive process. I was also taught never to design in the metal itself. I was taught to map out your idea to the millimeter and then execute. Turns out, this was terrible advice for me.

Playing with the metal has resulted in joyful and spontaneous designs that have served me well over the years, and these have been designs that I can be proud of. I tell you this because maybe you were taught the same method and feel stifled by it.

You don’t have to be if you don’t want to be.

Sometimes a piece doesn’t turn out how I thought it would look in my head or on paper. I have to decide if I like the results anyway, or if I am going to turn into a stubborn originalist and make a piece look more like it’s paper representation.

This can mean adapting the piece to be closer to the original idea, or it can mean looking at and evaluating the piece and asking myself the most important question that I can – Do I like it?

Do I Like It?

I have learned that this is the only question worth answering when it comes to my designs.

After all, I have to reproduce them, photograph them, sell them, write about them, and talk about them. If I don’t like my designs if I am not proud, happy, and enthusiastic about my own designs, how can I expect anyone else to love them too? On a deeply personal level, I would never want to sell any piece of jewelry that I didn’t feel 100% enthusiastic about. It is why I discontinue even popular styles sometimes.

If the spark goes away for me, how can I expect it to be there for others? I have also found through experience that this is the number one question that my customers ask too – Do I like it? Do I connect with it?

This is my design process, and I do like it.