Overlay

Liam (00:01)
Hello and welcome to episode number four of the official Layers podcast overlay. I'm the founder of Layers, Lee McCabe.

Reijo (00:07)
and I'm a designer and illustrator, Ryo Palmiste.

Liam (00:12)
And just before we get started, if you're looking to support layers or the overlay podcast, then you can join LayersPlus today and gain access to additional features such as analytics, scheduling, profile customization and more. Overlay listeners can also get a 10% discount off the annual plan using the code OVERLAY10. And now on with the episode. And today we have... it's a very special episode because we have our first guest. We're hoping to get a lot more guests on.

to overlay, especially layers community members themselves. And yeah, we basically started messaging on layers and talking a bit deeply about layers itself, the platform communities and where we hope it will go and all the pitfalls of all the other communities. And yeah, the layers messaging feature is pretty rudimentary. So I was like, why don't we do this in a much better form? So we brought.

Tatiana onto overlay HD is here with us now, so do you just want to introduce yourself Tatiana?

Tatiana O'Toole (01:19)
Hi, I'm Tatiana O'Toole. I also went by Tatiana Bischak for a while, then I got married. I'm an American, I moved to Ireland. I've been in the design industry, God, probably since about 2011. I'm self-taught and I've been involved actively in the design community since probably right around 2016, 2017. I'm a huge advocate for ethics in design and strategy in design.

Reijo (01:43)
and

Tatiana O'Toole (01:50)
And sorry, you're going to say something?

Liam (01:54)
Right, jumping in already, what's going on?

Tatiana O'Toole (01:58)
Um, yes, um.

Reijo (01:58)
mmm No, it was a it was a there was a glitch like everything froze for me for a second

Tatiana O'Toole (02:01)
Is there a delay?

Oh!

Liam (02:07)
Oh dear. We're doing it live.

Reijo (02:08)
That's... I'm sorry if I stumbled in. That was just... I was looking at the frozen screen and I was like, Ah, what's going on? I'm sorry.

Tatiana O'Toole (02:09)
All fun.

Liam (02:16)
No, no, it's fine.

Tatiana O'Toole (02:17)
I'm so sorry. I didn't even get that. I didn't even see you cut in. So I was just like, wait, what's happening? So sorry. But yeah, where do we?

Liam (02:25)
Yeah, I think we got it Tatiana and you're a pretty incredible illustrator. I loved all your work and I loved everything you've posted on layers so far. And I've checked out your Instagram and your website and yeah, super love your style.

Reijo (02:29)
Yeah.

Yes, 100%.

Tatiana O'Toole (02:32)
Thank you.

Reijo (02:39)
Yeah, yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (02:40)
Yeah, I made the mistake of, well, I met another illustrator. His name is Razvan Vesatou. Absolutely fantastic human being. And he's really well known for his 365s, which is basically design something a day for a year. And he's done them back to back. He's an absolute mad man. But we formed this community group, and we got really drunk one night over a video call. And he like,

bullied us into doing a 365 with them. And I was like, fine, I'll do it. And at the time, I was really into identity and logo design. So I was like, okay, so I'm gonna really, cause self-taught, I'm gonna teach myself how to use Illustrator. So I did the easiest thing, which was illustration, and not necessarily logo design, because logo design, you have to think about like, what kind of business you're doing, like what is the strategy, like what audience are you designing for? And if I was gonna rapid fire these for like a year,

Reijo (03:34)
Mmm. Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (03:39)
I need to just illustrate, wham bam, done, go. And I accidentally became an illustrator because think about it, you just do illustrations for your portfolio and you don't have any guidance and suddenly you'll become an illustrator if you're just doing illustrations. So pro tip, build things for your portfolio that you want to do. So that's how I came to that. It's the.

Reijo (03:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Liam (03:57)
Mmm, yes.

Reijo (04:03)
Yeah, for sure.

Liam (04:05)
Oh, interesting. So illustration is your primary skill, but you're interested in just design overall?

Tatiana O'Toole (04:13)
Yeah, I'm very, very emotionally invested in the ethics of design. For me, that's very personal. I came from a really dark place. I don't know if we want to get that dark on this podcast, but becoming part of the design community basically saved my life. And seeing the connection between ethics and what we build is very important for me.

Liam (04:19)
Right.

Tatiana O'Toole (04:43)
is a very interesting thing to get hired for because you're working with people that don't understand art, but they need it for their business. And so you kind of have to be this babysitter to explain to them why they need this art. And you need to like make everything objective when they're coming at a very subjective standpoint. And so doing that over and over, I ended up

Liam (05:05)
Mmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (05:09)
building out strategy to try to help my clients to understand like, okay, I am not an illustrator puppet. I have experience. I know what we're trying to do here. Please stop telling me to change the color and tell me why we want the color change. Cause if you don't know why, then why am I doing it? And, um, I, I sometimes get very vocal in the design industry about, um,

Liam (05:24)
Mmm.

Hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (05:35)
kind of a stance where you need to lead with ethics, you need to lead with strategy. And I'm kind of disappointed where the design community is at with that right now. It feels like a lot of people have kind of sold out for money, which fair play. I mean, it's hard out there right now, but design impacts a lot of industries.

Liam (05:51)
It kind of sounds like the opposite of the latest podcast that I listened to, which was kind of, kind of about these design subscription services. And there's the process behind those. A lot of them, there is no strategy at all. They just go straight to high fidelity. They do a design and the client's like, Oh, I like it or I hate it. And it's just like, Oh, can you just change this? Can you just change this to red? Can you just change this element to whatever? There's no.

Tatiana O'Toole (06:17)
Oh god.

Liam (06:19)
There's no real thought behind it, but weirdly these... well not all of them, but some of them seem very profitable. They seem to be doing very well. So there's definitely some sort of need with these clients that don't necessarily care about the whole design process. They just want something... I don't know, maybe they just devalue the whole process.

Reijo (06:43)
on

I think on the subscription design services, I think what made it sort of blow up or what made it so lucrative for certain type of designer, I think, was that they figured out that if they lean into what the general perception of clients of design is, it's just like a very simple transactional thing. Like, hey, I need this.

I need a website design, right? But that's the extent of my thought or my plan around this. I just need a website design. So this is a simple task. I need somebody to do the task. So they lead into that simple perception of design and that ends up being sort of then culturally reinforcing that perception that design is a simple thing, which it can be, I think.

in instances, but it also can be very

Liam (07:42)
There's also the point of... Go on, sorry.

Reijo (07:48)
But it also can be very, very complicated at times, I think. That was that. And that's it.

Liam (07:53)
Hmm.

Yeah, I guess there was another point that was like, um, they were so experienced or they've done so many different design projects over like 10, 15 years. He had such a range, uh, from graphic print to website app and all that different industries sectors that he kind of understood, um, what, uh, clients were looking for, whether, whether or not they did so he could give them a general idea, like

Reijo (08:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Liam (08:25)
50, 60% of what they know. And so he, yeah, he's able to create these designs and it's kind of skipping a lot of the process because he's already done the process before with X amount of clients. And yeah, you have to tailor it, but I guess there is a lot of overlap with a lot of clients and perhaps that's what they're making the most of.

Um, it's like, oh, I've just got another branding project with a restaurant. I've done 10, 20 other restaurant projects, branding wise, visual identity wise. Um, I kind of know the strategy that's behind a lot of those. I'll just apply that. If I apply it directly, I think I actually, they call it assumption design, right? They, they take all these assumptions and they just roll with it and they create it, create a high fidelity design. And typically.

Reijo (09:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That's true. Yeah.

Liam (09:22)
It's quicker to create a high fidelity design and then get some feedback for that rather than going through the whole process, which is obviously quite controversial when it comes to design in general.

Tatiana O'Toole (09:34)
Yeah, I believe that the client should be walked through that strategy because you guys have worked with a lot of clients. They don't know they're asking their elbow and they're in the short term financial trauma where they're just constantly trying to obtain capital and they're making really bad short-term decisions like they make sense in the short term, but they're not going to pay out in the long run because they're screwing over their audience. And it's really important that those people are walked through that process. You can't just...

Reijo (09:47)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (10:02)
do it for them, what use is that? Right now I'm helping set up an outdoor school here, it's a primary school, and the woman came to me and she didn't even know how to write a business plan, and I sat down with her and I helped her write a business plan. I had never written a business plan before, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. And we figured it out together. Yeah, exactly, we figured it out. We have Google, I'm notion in Google, what else do I need? We got through it and what we found is that we were building safety double.

Reijo (10:21)
But you can figure it out, right? Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (10:31)
documents and getting information before we knew we needed it. And because of that, she can run her business better because she understands her audience better. We were outlining the problems her audiences had and taking what we could to instruct our design. But also she was able to take it and understand how to run our business better, how to connect better with her clients, where she markets, where, uh, how she crafts her services, where are the emotional pain points for her clients. And forgoing that.

Reijo (10:35)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm

Tatiana O'Toole (11:00)
is really asinine in my opinion. I mean, if it gets things done quickly, then sure. But like at this point, like if you, if you're setting up a business to make money, you completely change how you run that business versus if you're setting up to make a difference in the world. And we as designers, I believe have an ethical obligation to make sure that our designs are tied into ethics. And I feel like we've lost that. We've lost that and you can see it with the products being designed that they're piss poor.

Reijo (11:18)
That's true.

So do you think when we, yeah, we're going to predict the future here. But do you think in a five-year time span, you think having that many design subscriptions or having the design process be that simplified and popularized, do you think it will be a net negative or a net positive for design in general?

Tatiana O'Toole (11:52)
Well, I think we're already pretty bad with design because it's... Yeah, I mean, like, from my stance right now, how I see things, God, I did not wanna talk about AI. But here we are. Yeah, this is...

Reijo (11:57)
Yeah?

Liam (12:06)
Oh, it's all right. We inevitably do. It always ends up talking about AI, especially on this podcast.

Reijo (12:06)
That's another thing! That's another can of worms! Yeah, we end up talking about it anyway.

Tatiana O'Toole (12:15)
I mean, I don't think that's really gonna be a question because I hate making predictions, but I do not believe that our financial system is going to take the hit very well. We're getting increasing amount of people entering the job market and then increasing amounts of jobs disappearing. And I think that paired with other sorts of issues happening that we're going to experience something a little traumatic. So I wouldn't.

Reijo (12:34)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (12:41)
I wouldn't know how to make that assumption because there's so many other plays in this, right? Like, design subscription services? Farthest thing from my mind right now, because it's just like, it's not looking great for us. Like if we had a report card, we'd be getting asked right now. It's not, we're not doing well. It's...

Reijo (12:45)
That's true, that's true.

Mm.

Liam (13:00)
Mm-mm.

Reijo (13:01)
Yeah, yeah, I see where you're coming from. I see where you're coming from.

Liam (13:06)
I think the part you were talking about earlier, the whole education, I think that is mostly the design process. You're not just designing something and taking them through a process, you're actually educating them and informing them of how their brand is going to function, how their business will work in some regard. And that's usually why it costs so much. But at the same time, these design subscription services, some of them are quite, well, they can be quite pricey. And I think...

Tatiana O'Toole (13:06)
Yeah.

Liam (13:35)
They seem to be profiting because half the time they're not doing the work, right? They manage to have like 20 or 30 clients and that's only possible because only seven or eight of them are active at a time, right? They only like the other 22 are in a dormant state, but they're still paying the subscription fee. So it's kind of like taking advantage, kind of, of...

Reijo (13:54)
That's true. That's true. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (13:56)
Hmm.

Liam (14:02)
I don't know the uneducated and they don't really know what the benefit of knowing the whole process of design and the, the identity, like stuff behind it and the branding. And yeah, I did, I don't know. I don't know.

Tatiana O'Toole (14:19)
And there is something to be said. Like, what a lot of these people are up against, what you're up against with layers is that you're trying to build a system that exists in an imperfect system. So it doesn't matter how level you make your ground, you're still going to be uneven. Like it's not, you're going to be constantly fighting back symptoms of a system outside your control. Because you can, that's one of the most difficult things with

Reijo (14:33)
Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (14:46)
like helping somebody with strategy in their business is that you have to prepare them for a lot of scenarios so that when they come to them, they have an idea of what they're going to do or at least how to approach it. And the idea is that you're creating construct, right? And you wanna make it as following like nature's law as much as possible so that there's little hiccups as possible. And you can only do so much, which is fine because you can reuse your reserve energy to

address any outliers, but when that system is constantly getting increasingly more out of whack, it's hard to build a system that solves a problem.

Liam (15:26)
What would you say are the current imperfections with the current system?

Tatiana O'Toole (15:31)
You're talking about it as like the planet and like capitalism and gender and social like

Reijo (15:36)
Hahaha!

Liam (15:37)
Let's try and keep it somewhat design related. Or were you thinking broader in much broader terms?

Reijo (15:43)
narrow down the scope.

Tatiana O'Toole (15:43)
Oh god.

Much broader. The way I see it, society lives in a skyscraper that's inherently flawed, and the only way to fix it would be to dismantle the entire thing, but that would involve displacing like a billion people. Billion plus. That's just the nature of things, and it's difficult because we as a society, we don't know what to do with the bad. So when we begin to look at problems, people point at each other, but it's always with kind of spite. It's always spiteful.

Liam (15:49)
Hehehe

Ha ha

Reijo (16:01)
Yes, yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (16:16)
and they take it personally because we don't have a sense of self-esteem, self-value. We take it personally, but we're all flawed. We're all part of this broken system, and the only thing you can really do is address the issues with yourself.

Liam (16:17)
Mm.

But in our time...

Reijo (16:32)
me? No, I like I caught I caught I caught something I caught thinking caught myself thinking about something when you described. So when you described how you went through like what the process was when you went through with the with the school and how you help them sort of understand what the question is and trying to figure out what the answer there might be that I feel like

Tatiana O'Toole (16:32)
You look like you disagree.

Reijo (17:01)
I feel like I went through like a small eureka moment for myself where that process signifies like strong emotional maturity, I feel like, in the professional way. Whereas a lot of the design subscriptions lack that specific thing, is emotional maturity. Like they, how they want to process work is, here's a shovel, we need a hole here.

like take the whole. That's it. That's the extent of the that's the extent of the conversation. Why do we need the whole? Maybe we do not need the whole there at all. Like that is that that's like I feel like that's the plethora of design subscriptions available right now is a sign of is a sign of like missing emotional maturity. And I'm not saying I'm an emotionally mature at all. Like I'm the least.

Tatiana O'Toole (17:29)
Mm.

Exactly.

Reijo (17:58)
But I feel like that's... I just now realized that this is a problem.

Tatiana O'Toole (18:04)
Yeah, no, but it's like we're forced to be in this. We're forced to ask, where do you want the whole dog? Because we need our paycheck to survive. And then it's like, are you going to sacrifice your survival in order to meet some ethical standard? And it's a broken system because we can't really upset that. And actually, I have a Dutch friend. She's an identity designer. Her name's Lisa Jacobs. She's phenomenal. We are, I love her.

Reijo (18:08)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (18:31)
We argue all the time because she's very much in the I'm just trying to survive dude and I'm like we need to burn the system down and destroy everything and rebuild and

Liam (18:40)
Thanks for watching!

Reijo (18:40)
But also, at the same time, I feel like it's very hard for me to judge somebody who is making ends meet. Like, rent needs to be paid, I need food to survive.

Tatiana O'Toole (18:49)
Right, no, like...

Yeah, and that was our, we kind of had a, well, we didn't really have an argument. We had a Dutch conversation, right? Where everyone's very open and no one gets offended this morning. And she, we were talking about like, I brought up a clip that Sinead O'Connor said a ways back, I think it was in like 1990 something, but she said that creatives have sold out to greed, greed essentially, that we don't design with ethics anymore. And she was referring to a war.

And she said, well, they're just trying to make ends meet. And my point to her was like, it's still greed. You've just discovered what it's like to be inside of greed. It's the bad we don't talk about, right? We would rather label people as evil than actually talk about what forces them to do the actions that make society a little more difficult for one another. They make short-term decisions that screw over the long-term. And it's...

Liam (19:50)
Sometimes it's hard to know the longterm. The short term is usually can have a good intention, but it ends up being quite detrimental overall. For example, a lot of Facebook's original implementations, the like count being one or the liking a post being one, right? It's such a nothing action. It's very tiny.

Tatiana O'Toole (20:02)
Mm.

Reijo (20:03)
That's fair.

Yeah.

Liam (20:17)
Um, liking your content, but as soon as you put, um, some sort of count, people start looking at the counts more than the content itself, uh, they make a judgment call, um, posts that are just completely ridiculous and propaganda. If they've got tons of likes, they'll get promoted, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so, but, but it comes from a very somewhat good intent, good intention, not bad intention, right? It's not, it's not evil. I don't think.

Reijo (20:18)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (20:47)
Yeah, evil is a religious construct, right? It's...

Reijo (20:52)
That's a difficult thing to assume, I feel like. Or difficult thing to... Because good intentions for some could be bad intentions for others, I feel like.

Liam (21:04)
Hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (21:06)
Do you, sorry, were you responding to his comment or mine? Sorry, I may have lagged out.

Liam (21:15)
in general.

Reijo (21:16)
I was responding to Liam's last point about the Facebook.

Tatiana O'Toole (21:22)
Oh yeah, sorry. That's one of the things that when you're building strategy, one of the things you really do have to list out is what assumptions you've made about the user. Because when you go look down the line at the design decisions you made and how they've been justified by these assumptions, you need to tie it back to why you've made that assumption. And that if you are speaking to your users down the line and you find out, you know,

This is actually a massive pain point for them. You didn't realize how big of a problem it was. You can go back and make changes. I mean, it's very human to make mistakes, but it's a very smart thing to actually track what your intentions were. Because I think, well, for the most part, most people are very well-intended, but they may not understand the whole shape of everything.

Liam (22:12)
Yeah, yes. Um, I was going to say a point. It reminds me of, um, I think recently YouTube, cause they used to have like and dislikes, but they recently removed the dislike count. Do you remember that? They used to show the dislike count, but now it's just, they just show the button. And I can't remember the actual reason. Um, it might've been spam related. I can't recall, but yeah, a lot of people obviously complained.

Reijo (22:27)
Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (22:31)
Yeah!

I believe it was because they wanted to remove a lot of the negativity from YouTube, and that was a big part of it because you could spam dislike a video like a Justin Bieber video. But at the same time, I think that's really important to have that dislike button because it informs the user how good the information is. If you get onto a video of how to replace the spark plugs in your car,

Liam (22:46)
Hmm

Yep.

Reijo (22:58)
For sure.

Tatiana O'Toole (23:05)
and you can only see all the likes to it and not all the dislikes, like it would have been a massive red flag to like let people know like this, the guy installs them backwards or something. I think it's important.

Reijo (23:09)
That's true. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liam (23:17)
But then how do you verify that the genuine, that the dislikes are actually appropriate?

Reijo (23:25)
So this, and now, this is the million dollar question. Do you think layers should have a downvote button?

Tatiana O'Toole (23:31)
Oh man. Well, I think that I would have to understand a lot more of your guys' strategy before I start making assumptions about what you should do.

Liam (23:33)
Oh, it does.

Reijo (23:40)
But as a user, do you want one?

Tatiana O'Toole (23:42)
God, do I want, why would I need that? Why would I need to go shit on someone? Why would I need that? Why? It's like, maybe I would downvote AIR because it was generated using my intellectual property with no compensation to me and no consent given. You know, it could be that. Ideally, if you're looking for something where I can cast eyes a post, I would prefer if I could report a post for being inappropriate.

Liam (23:46)
Mm.

Reijo (23:58)
Yes, yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (24:10)
for having a copyright infringing materials on it, for any sort of like hate speech or violence, that's really what I would like. But you would have to.

Liam (24:20)
It's probably more than that, right? Because you, you visit, you visit layers for a certain quality of content that you like, you want to see a certain type of content, it's not necessarily bad or harassment or whatever like that. You kind of want to, like if it's full of spam posts, for example, or just some kind of click bait or some, it's not like that's trying to game the system, but you can recognize it, but the system can't, you kind of want to, I don't want to see this, I want to see more stuff that I'm interested in.

Reijo (24:20)
That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah, like.

Tatiana O'Toole (24:52)
Well, okay, so if you're talking about it in a way where it's going to remain private to me, it's going to customize the way I see things, that's really difficult, right? Because I think one of the biggest problems with the way social medias have gone, and you'll hear this cry from a lot of users, is the loss of the chronological feed, the loss of the natural feed. And I think that we shouldn't deviate too far by what you naturally see.

that people post. I think that it's important to keep people from being inside of an echo chamber. I think it's important that they see a diverse range of content. But

Reijo (25:25)
Mmm.

Liam (25:28)
Chronological doesn't fix that though. Groups of people can still post hundreds at a time, or they can just completely take over the feed because they're organized. It's tricky, the recent thing. Especially on layers it will eventually just turn into an assessable of spam and shitty content. There'll be diamonds in the rough there.

Tatiana O'Toole (25:36)
Mm.

Yeah. Well, I mean-

Liam (25:58)
You have to, you have to be able to create that and put it in a feed that's digestible to most people, the majority of people on the platform.

Tatiana O'Toole (26:06)
So I got on Dribbble in about 2016. I got an invite from Hayden Obey, who I'd met through Skillshare. He was one of the top Skillshare teachers there. And he found out that essentially, I was a very isolated designer in a really abusive work situation. And I had just gotten...

Reijo (26:12)
Hmm

Oh!

Tatiana O'Toole (26:32)
I just got essayed basically, and I was agoraphobic and hiding in my house. I couldn't go outside and lost all my friends. It was a very bad situation. And I was in this work environment where it was very much like, you know, they're letting store managers give feedback on design and everything's due ASAP or yesterday and...

I realized that's our brand color blue, but can we change it just for this one thing? You know, like that type of stuff. And I was isolated and I was vulnerable and I was not doing well. And in this agoraphobic period of my life, I got on Skillshare, I connected with Hayden, Hayden got me in a group and I started to reach out to people and this is connected, I swear. I got on Dribble.

Reijo (26:56)
Uhhh...

Mm-hmm.

Liam (27:23)
Hehehehehehe

Tatiana O'Toole (27:25)
I started posting things and I went to the recent page because I didn't want to talk to design celebrities. I didn't want to see their stuff. I wanted to see what everyday people like me were posting. And I found some of my best friends in Dribble Recent because it was an even playing field. It didn't matter if you had 600,000 followers or if you just joined the platform.

Reijo (27:38)
YES!

Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (27:54)
your shit showed up right next to the next person's shit. And I found amazing people like Laura Porat, Nick Brito, Leon Ingram, just people who have changed my life for the better. And because I was able to make those connections, I got out of a really shitty job situation. I started leaving the house again. I started to grow. And because of our shared passion of design and being like that open place for us to talk, I started to heal as a person. I started to get better because

Reijo (27:56)
Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (28:23)
I had a community again. So for me, this is a very emotional thing. Like I am alive today because platforms were designed with intention and with ethics and it breaks my heart that today it becomes, they become financially centric because I know that there are so many people out there that are in similar or even worse situations than I was that do not have a community because these platforms have failed them and that's fucked up. And so when you ask recent, will you get spammed? Can you just like fuck?

Reijo (28:27)
Mm.

Tatiana O'Toole (28:52)
and find a way like capture everything. I don't care like figure it out like I would love to see something recent. Yeah, like I don't know.

Reijo (28:56)
Figuring out!

Liam (29:00)
Well, Elon can launch rockets to Mars, but he can't figure out spam, right? You're fighting other humans. It's a tricky problem.

Reijo (29:07)
Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. Ha ha ha.

Tatiana O'Toole (29:11)
Yeah, it's I want. And no matter what you build, it's like you build a mouse trap, they're gonna build a better mouse, right? So it's.

Reijo (29:20)
That's true.

Liam (29:21)
And surely, and surely when you're browsing recent, the people that you met, if you would have found those quicker browsing a similar feed, that would probably be better, no, you'd spend less time of less time looking at loads of other stuff that you're not interested in, but you're actually finding the people that you are interested in.

Tatiana O'Toole (29:39)
I'm very hesitant about algorithms because obviously we're all very jaded from them at this point. You know, if anyone with an Instagram probably understands how algorithms kind of suck. But

Liam (29:51)
Oh, I had to delete it. I can't, I can't.

Reijo (29:51)
That's... Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (29:54)
It's bad. I mean, like, I would love to see a more even playing field with a recent. I understand that Dribble removed it so that they didn't show the spam. Because like, we used to go on there and we'd like find the spam, like the cock fighting, the porn sites, the gambling sites, the drugs. But I would be like, hey, Dribble, did you see this cock fighting site? And they're just like. And eventually they stopped it.

Reijo (30:10)
Yeah.

Liam (30:15)
Yep. Like.

Nope, nope.

Tatiana O'Toole (30:23)
Which was really sad because.

Liam (30:23)
At scale, it's very, it's a very difficult problem, right? If you have thousands of posts being posted, like a second, I'm not saying jibble got to that point, but it might be at that point, but it's, it's like, how do you browse that stuff? How you, it's fine when it's small, like you can find some good people. Um, but as soon as you're at a large enough scale, uh, and you refresh and you just get 10,000 new posts, you're like, Oh man. Um.

Tatiana O'Toole (30:33)
still get spit.

Reijo (30:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (30:53)
Yeah.

Liam (30:54)
Is this useful? I'm sure, yeah, there are, there are great people in here, but it's going to take a lot of work on my side, on the member side to actually find these people. Um, but yeah, if you can reduce the spam and reduce the low quality content, but then that's another question of what determines what's low quality. Um, yeah, it's, it's recent is, is tricky. I can leave it up there.

Tatiana O'Toole (31:00)
Yeah.

There...

Liam (31:21)
And I can do tests, right? And I can be like, oh, see if people are using it the same amount month on month. But if it goes down, it's, it's going to be hard to be like, should I keep this up? If very few people are using it. Um, I mean, at the same time, is there a reason for even removing it? The thing is other things might take priority, right? Some new features might come in that are far more valuable or useful and they might be, uh, have a bit more problem.

Tatiana O'Toole (31:53)
Just one thing, there was a app, because there's been several apps that have tried to become like the epicenter of art and design since the fall of Dribbble. God, I can't remember, it wasn't Bubble House, it was a different one. I was in with one of the stars, because I got in with Lerk and a couple other NFP bros, and they started this platform where

Reijo (32:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liam (32:21)
Already red flags.

Tatiana O'Toole (32:23)
God stop. I was the only one who was like, guys, this is a pyramid scheme, like guys, and like, oh god, we get so I got my first NFT. I was like, guys, did you like, we're shilling like this? Have you not? Have you not read about any sort of anyway? But, oh god. Oh, god. In the D, what is it? DNKG joined the party late, like they're like one of the biggest illustration like celebrity.

Liam (32:39)
Shut up, I'm making loads of money!

Reijo (32:41)
Yeah, exactly!

Liam (32:43)
I'm sorry.

Tatiana O'Toole (32:52)
duo in the States, and they're like, hey, guys, we launched NFTs, and everyone's like, where have you been? Are you OK? But sorry, anyway, there was this platform that they were one of the things that they were trying to do was to, how do they handle the recent? And they ended up selecting key members of their community to actually be the people to pick what would go into the recent to be discoverable. And it was kind of.

Reijo (32:52)
Yeah.

Liam (32:59)
It's dead.

Reijo (32:59)
Yeah.

Oooo

Tatiana O'Toole (33:20)
And it was kind of like a Tinder setup in the app. You swipe, right? If you like it, you swipe. I don't know, I haven't done Tinder, but like it's a swipey thing with the art and it came up on your thing. And I didn't, okay, so art is subjective, right? Design is objective. If you're like putting people in that position where they're like very quickly supposed to make a very subjective decision about design,

Reijo (33:27)
Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (33:49)
when they don't have the strategy, they don't understand the audiences, they don't understand what like it's, that's not really a healthy habit you wanna instill on your users. So I would be against that. But that I also wanted to bring that up because that is one platform solution. I don't know how they're doing. I got away from them because then they started to get into NFTs more and I just backed away kind of like, God, I wish I can remember the name of it.

Reijo (33:52)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Liam (34:12)
Yeah, I think there needs to be a criteria if you're doing that, but I do like that idea. Because like you say, people are tired of algorithms and I do feel you do need algorithms to remove a lot of the shit and to try and tailor some content. Because basically people browse websites and apps based on the content. And if they like the content, they'll use the Apple website more. If they don't like the content they see, they'll be...

Reijo (34:37)
Yeah.

Liam (34:41)
I probably use it less. Um, so, um, go, I just immediately, immediately lost my train of thought. Um, uh, what was it? What was I saying? Remind me. Yes. It's a very difficult problem. Yeah, that's it. But, um, but I do like the human aspect of it. Um, uh, I think it's worth, uh, I think it's worth trying to combine.

Reijo (34:54)
It's a very difficult problem to solve.

Liam (35:11)
an algorithm type feed mixed with some sort of human level creation. So you might have a popular feed like Layers does now, but you also have an option of having a select few. I mean, you kind of have it now because it's open to all the disliking that essentially is leaving it to humans.

group of people, maybe it's like a jury, like an awards that have X amount of experience. They know what they're looking at and Les has kind of agreed on maybe what type of content they want to try and promote. It's difficult to try and choose which content you want to display and ignore everything else, but kind of have a criteria that these people can work towards.

Reijo (35:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Liam (36:06)
Um, and then, and then they can use that to give a boost to the post or, or dislike posts that don't fit that agenda. But at the same time, does that, does that make it subjectively better? Uh, maybe not, but it might appeal to generally what's fashionable at the end of the day, I guess.

Reijo (36:23)
Well, yeah.

Yeah, I'm interested. When did your relationship with Tribble change? Or when did you sort of realize, ah, maybe this is not going in the right direction anymore?

Tatiana O'Toole (36:40)
God, so, God, so I was.

Reijo (36:45)
What did they do that put you over the edge?

Tatiana O'Toole (36:48)
What did they do? Exactly. Take the stallion. This, okay, so as Liam here has experienced, I'm vocal when I see issues on platforms. I believe it's users should use their voice. I believe they should be speaking to companies and I think they should be calling them out when something's not working right. Yes.

Liam (36:48)
Just lie down on this sofa.

Reijo (36:50)
hahahaha

which should be celebrated, which is a very good thing. I think this needs to be stressed, which is incredibly good. More people should be as vocal as you are. I think it's gonna lead to a better solution.

Tatiana O'Toole (37:17)
Yeah, it's.

Exactly, yeah. And it's certainly more conversation. And I understand that from a designer's standpoint, where I'm like, I'm dying for users to reach out to me. So I'm like, if they're built right, they want users to reach out to them. So, God, where do I pinpoint it? So my relationship with Dribbble is pretty good. I mean, I was getting leads. I was getting jobs through them. I was in their top 100 designers of 2017.

Reijo (37:34)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (37:53)
a year on the site with no degree and that was from my 365 of posting every day if you work hard you can achieve your dreams uh but

Reijo (37:55)
Nice.

And that's like given how little experience you had on the platform for them to single you out. I think is a... I would have been proud. I would have been proud.

Tatiana O'Toole (38:19)
It was it was like space so how many likes you got so it's kind of the thing that's okay So you guys watch golf you your white middle-aged men you have to watch golf. I'm sure you do

Reijo (38:23)
UGH

Liam (38:33)
Oh, ugh.

Reijo (38:34)
I know what golf is? Ayy! Fuck, Liam, we're... God. This is gonna... I'm gonna think about this for a while. No, I know what golf is. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (38:46)
Do you watch golf? It's a very simple question.

Liam (38:49)
I do not watch golf, no.

Tatiana O'Toole (38:51)
Okay, wait, no. Yeah, okay. So you know, okay, so the Ryder Cup, the Ryder Cup is, or the Ryder Cup is the US versus Europe. 12 players, best of the best, going head to head. And the way they pick the teams, you can imagine, is quite controversial because everyone wants a spot because it happens every two years. And...

Liam (38:56)
But I know the rules and I can play it.

Reijo (38:59)
I don't even know those. No, I don't know what this is.

Tatiana O'Toole (39:20)
Everyone loves it. It's one of the most fun events in golf. Everyone just gets so excited cheering on their continent. And I suppose the US, whatever. Anyway, so the way they pick the teams is that you, one is based off, six people are based off of how many thousands of dollars they've won in tournaments. They get like a half a point or a point for every thousand they've won in a tournament. And that builds until they rank. So like top ones,

Reijo (39:44)
What?

Tatiana O'Toole (39:50)
get the spot. The other six are up to the captain to pick. So you can imagine this is where a lot of nepotism comes in. And both systems are kind of unfair, where a lot of people get really jaded because it's like, you know, there shouldn't have been somebody picked over somebody else and nepotism came in. Or it's like, how are we gauging golfers based on how many thousands of dollars they won because you're basing it based off a

Reijo (39:59)
Yes, very strange.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (40:18)
you're basing it off a merit system. So it's a merit system based off a merit system, right? So it's not great. But like I was watching full swing the other day and that hit me that there's like, both systems are broken. So it's like almost like random and spontaneous is almost the best way to go and then you're leaving it to chance. That was connected somehow. I cannot remember how, what was the pre, okay.

Liam (40:45)
Hehe

Tatiana O'Toole (40:47)
We were talking about how things got bad with Dribble. So.

Reijo (40:50)
Okay, okay, yeah, let's go back to that. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Liam (40:51)
Originally it was promoting all the pros dribble, but they changed that rate. They changed that very quickly

Tatiana O'Toole (40:57)
Yes. So there was the elitism of the invite system that really created the dribble celebrities that people know and love. That was a huge problem, but it also kind of like, you know, we talked about building a system and an imperfect system, you're going to be fighting symptoms from the other system that kind of protected them from that, right? It was like this little Nirvana of safety for these chosen few designers where they could bask in this fair market.

Reijo (41:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's?

That's the thing that people reference when they talk about the old Dribbble. I think that's the thing that they are talking about when they talk about the feeling of the old Dribbble. It's a very tightly knit, to be honest, very highly skilled community. But at some point they got the scale and then it sort of fell through.

Tatiana O'Toole (41:48)
Mm-hmm.

Reijo (41:56)
due to their own actions as well, I think.

Tatiana O'Toole (41:58)
I mean, like, it was a walled garden. They didn't see the poverty outside the city. It was strife outside of Dribble and designers shockingly responsible for trying to see privilege and make an even playing field for everyone missed that privilege. And so Dribble was safe for a lot of people, including myself. Which again, goes back to me wanting to burn down everything because everything's unfair, but here we are anyway.

Reijo (42:03)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Liam (42:24)
Hehehe

Tatiana O'Toole (42:26)
I started pointing out issues to Dribbble. I really disliked it when they removed, well, they didn't remove the search function. They put it behind a paywall because I was fine. He knows. What an insult. What an insult to designers, people trying to meet up. It was like, I remember I was starting to climb the ranks of followers. And for me, it was a very fun game to see how close I get to being the top in Michigan.

Reijo (42:34)
Oh that was... OOOOOO That was... Yeah.

What an insult!

Tatiana O'Toole (42:54)
like my home state. And that's how I met Noah Jacobus, who I adore. He is a wonderful icon designer. He is from Grand Rapids. And I used to like stare at him, fucker, I'm going to get above you and follows. And I think I did eventually. But I ended up messaging him instead. And now I love that man. He is just one of the most perfect human beings on the planet and I adore him.

Reijo (43:10)
Ha ha ha!

Liam (43:12)
Hehehe

Reijo (43:13)
Nice!

Nice.

Liam (43:22)
But let's talk on. Are you still?

Tatiana O'Toole (43:25)
But yeah, there was the removal of the search and the removal of recent, which is we've discussed why that's a very difficult decision and we can kind of understand what was going on there. There was a pay to play aspect, which I'm sure you guys have talked about. My buddy, I mentioned him before, as he was doing the 365s, he had worked his ass off. He had basically rewired his brain to be able to.

Reijo (43:47)
Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (43:49)
creative on demand because he was doing it daily. He had a kid while he did this. The man's insane. And he was just like devastated. He was like all my hard works for nothing because now you can just pay to rank. Now you can just pay. And it was hard. Sorry, I'm gonna.

Reijo (43:56)
Hehehehe

Well... Yeah, I understand.

Liam (44:08)
It's tricky. Like if you don't, if you don't give that any thought, you can, you can do it with a, yeah, obviously a good intent. It's like, oh, people are, people are paying layers plus premium subscriptions. They're supporting layers. So I'd love to support them back, but obviously I can't do that by ranking them higher because that's, that's unfair.

Reijo (44:27)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (44:29)
Can I quantify the pay to play? Sorry, can I quantify that? Boosted posts. We get that it takes money to run a platform. Designers get and respect that. And it sucks for a lot of people in poverty. And some of them, for the most part, they wanna see that they're getting their money's worth. Advocating for the bad, if you will. But the boosted post was a big thing. Like...

Liam (44:41)
Some of them.

Tatiana O'Toole (44:56)
And I think that there does need to be a free option for people because you were going to get people who are financially devastated. They cannot get their work. And that's where the unfairness comes from, where it's that kind of pay to play. But I'm talking about boosted posts mainly. Sorry, clarifying that.

Liam (45:11)
Actually, I think, I don't think boosted posts are as bad. I think the main issue was that, uh, pro members and also teams were just promoted to the front page, right? There was, there was no other people who like people who hadn't subscribed. You'd have to scroll for awhile, but boosted posts, like they're probably one every, I don't know what it is now, but like one every 20, one every 30. So if you compare that one boosted post and then let's say 20, 30.

Reijo (45:29)
Oof.

Liam (45:40)
Uh, people that aren't unsubscribed, that's probably fairer than, uh, 30 people subscribe, for example, cause you're at least you're, you're promoting one person who's supporting you and paying you and the rest you're just, uh, promoting it regardless of if they're supporting layers or whatever.

Reijo (45:43)
Hmm

This is indicative of how little I use Dribbble nowadays. Can you tell which is a boosted post and which is not?

Liam (46:07)
Yeah.

Reijo (46:09)
Yeah?

Tatiana O'Toole (46:10)
I don't know. I don't, I haven't, now that I think of it, I couldn't tell you what the UI looks like around a boosted post. So I think that they kind of look similar. I was really annoyed when people go to my, this was a big controversial thing that I just remembered. People going to your profile to do your work and they would advertise other competing designers under your work.

Liam (46:10)
I'm pretty sure they label it, right?

Reijo (46:19)
Right?

Yeah.

What?

Liam (46:34)
Uh.

Tatiana O'Toole (46:34)
I remember that, oh yeah, no, like there's your image and it's like, you like this, you might also like, and then it would just be like a ton of people. I, that was, that was bad. I got into a conversation with Michael Saka. He was, God, I can't remember what his position at Dribble was, but he was like one of the, like the people that branched it. Yeah, he,

Reijo (46:41)
Motherfuckers. This is like that's...

Like management? Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (47:03)
I got, one of the things I advocate for is in, in promotions by individuals to social media platforms like Dribbble, I advocate for the equal sharing of men and women because design tends to be a bit of a boys club. I mean, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Like you can go through like design podcasts where you can just see male, male. And then there's like,

Reijo (47:32)
Case in point.

Tatiana O'Toole (47:34)
100 down like there's like combo breaker one woman and then it just keeps going and One of the things I was having with the new search is that they allowed for about I think it was about 50 designers you could toggle between individuals and teams Out of those designers, I think it was it showed like 25 at a time it was like 23 of them would be men and two would be women and those that was just like the sample they would show to give you a taste of what the

Reijo (47:49)
Mm-hmm.

Oof.

Tatiana O'Toole (48:03)
results would be. And I brought this up to Michael and I was like, Hey, did you know that the, that these designers are going to get a disproportionate amount of job inquiries and they're all met. Can you like, shake your little bottle up a little bit more before pouring out a sample? And they all happen to be design celebs because like, you know, there's like, one of the women would only like be the hood sisters and no hate to the hood sisters. They're fantastic. But like,

that's like the token female designer people think of. They're like panicked and they're like, oh, the Hood Sisters. Anyway, but I brought that up to Michael and he told me that they wouldn't be able to control that because they didn't gather that data about their users. And I was like, well, how are you going to address it? And I don't know if I fully believe you. I feel like this is a very cop-out excuse.

Reijo (48:45)
Ah.

Tatiana O'Toole (48:51)
So that was one of my biggest issues with Drupal, and I called them out publicly, which you have to be very careful about doing, or you'll end up like Timothy, oh my God, Reynolds?

Reijo (49:01)
Well, like, you say that, but I've been bullying Dribbble on Twitter for a long time. And so far, like so far I haven't done maybe... Yeah?

Liam (49:01)
Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (49:09)
Hmm. Well, say, you're a-

Liam (49:13)
Yeah, but you do it politely, Raya, trust me.

Yeah, compared to some people.

Reijo (49:20)
Okay, maybe. Maybe!

Tatiana O'Toole (49:21)
But Timothy does not pull his punches and they, just for the people listening, Timothy said some very choice things about Dribble. It was a very fair statement, to be fair. I think he said something in line with them circling the drain, which he was not wrong in retrospect. But then, weirdly enough, his Dribble profile got suspended, which was really fascinating for people like myself who would spend countless hours like reporting.

Reijo (49:38)
But yeah, I would say.

Tatiana O'Toole (49:50)
copyright infringing material and never see a count suspended. But very strangely, this one just got mistakenly suspended. The CEO of Dribbble hates... Hates... Yeah.

Reijo (49:56)
Yes.

Liam (49:59)
It's very coincidental, yes, I remember.

Reijo (50:05)
Did he get an actual reason for the suspension?

Tatiana O'Toole (50:09)
They said it was an error, I believe.

Reijo (50:12)
and they reinstated him.

Tatiana O'Toole (50:14)
Yes, he's back. I mean, and he had like, he had like 50,000 followers at the time. So he wasn't like a small fry. Like he, that was something. Yeah, right. He's been I know he's been calling Dribble out for not upholding their terms and conditions of AI generated material. And they have been taking down AI content. But I believe it looks like they're not taking down

Liam (50:16)
Yes.

Reijo (50:16)
Okay.

Okay.

Mmm, mmm.

Ooh, okay.

Tatiana O'Toole (50:44)
AI content of paid platforms. So if the platform's paid, they let them stay. So it's just some, yeah. So it's.

Liam (50:51)
Yeah.

Reijo (50:51)
Yikes.

Liam (50:55)
Should layers allow AI-generated content?

Tatiana O'Toole (50:58)
not until it's ethical and I don't think it ever can be ethical. Cause like what it, what are we doing with design? If, if we just throw ethics to the wind, we're making a satirical art of what makes money. Like there has to be a line.

Reijo (51:15)
Yeah, it's become or it is becoming a shell of itself. It's very... I remember having conversations with people like a year ago, a year and a half ago, when the NFTs were the biggest, newest hype on various platforms. And I remember telling people like...

You're worried about NFTs right now. Like you're worried about people producing a lot of like what you could call garbage or like whatever, just throw away trash. That's the thing you're worried about. You're worried about getting wet in the rain when there's a hurricane coming. Like we're going to have an artificially generated art very soon. That's the thing you should be worried about. NFTs are like, that's just road science now. That's we don't have to worry about that anymore. We're allowed the genie is out of the bottle.

We're fucked.

Tatiana O'Toole (52:09)
was one of the first people to figure out where they trained their data. I grabbed one of my buddies, who's more on the developer side of things, and I had gotten an argument with an AI bro on Twitter, God, September, I think it was last year, as you do, and he had just set up a platform to sell AI-generated stock photography, and I asked him a simple question. I said, hi there, where did you get your training data? And he was like, I don't know. Depends on what stability.ai did.

Reijo (52:17)
Mm-hmm.

As you do.

Hahaha!

Oh, beautiful.

Tatiana O'Toole (52:39)
So I trotted over to their little Twitter account and I saw stuff by Warner Brothers and Fox and Lucas Films all there. And I was like, so a lot of their content seems to have IP, like protected stuff in it. Are you concerned about this at all? He blocked me and I am petty. I am petty. And so I made it my life goal for about a week.

Reijo (52:47)
Yeah.

Yes!

Liam (53:03)
Mm-mm.

Tatiana O'Toole (53:08)
to figure out where the fuck they were getting the training data because it was very hidden. And I fell down the rabbit hole, I stumbled across Layion and I was like, what the hell is this? And I kept reading things about the common crawl. I'm like, there's no way they would have used the common crawl. There's no way. There's no way they would have trained it off of the common crawl. And I brought my developer buddy and I was like, please make it make sense because I am just an illustrator. Please make this make sense. And he came in.

Reijo (53:17)
Mm-hmm.

I'm out.

Tatiana O'Toole (53:34)
And he was like, yeah, they turned it off the common crawl between 2014 and 2021. And then we were able to look at like the 5 billion image database. All of my images were scraped from Dribbble because I used very unique hashtags for Dribbble because the hashtags used for Dribbble are going to be different than Instagram because on Instagram, you need to tell it's illustration. You need to say it's design. You need to say it's art to like really niche it down, but on Dribbble, you don't necessarily need to do that. So those hashtags were unique to Dribbble.

Reijo (53:50)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (54:03)
And I found a lot of my work had been used in the training data and a lot of my friends work. And it was painful. It was devastating. I had I told what people I could. I had a small breakdown and then I ended up doing like a like a post about it, like explaining where they got their training data, like the ones that were safe because they scraped like B hands, they scraped Shutterstock. And it brought up so many ethical questions, like if Shutterstock

Reijo (54:09)
Oooo

Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (54:30)
product, where do you even begin with the lawsuits, right?

Reijo (54:35)
Well, yeah, exactly. There's gonna be, there's gonna be, the air is gonna be filled with lawsuits. Ha ha.

Tatiana O'Toole (54:41)
Yeah, we've entered a new dimension of what it means to steal. And Copyright Office, well, I contacted my lawyer, who's like in Travers and back in Michigan. And I'm like, hey, do you have a second to talk about AI-generated stuff? And I was like explaining to him, he's like, there's no way they would have used the common crawl. And I'm like, that's what I said. And we just sat there and was like, wow, the Copyright Office is going to take about 10 to 15 years to catch up to this.

Reijo (54:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (55:12)
Cool. Um, we're fucked. Uh, yeah.

Reijo (55:14)
Wow. 100%.

Liam (55:16)
But how far from the original art does it have to go to be something, quote unquote, original or new?

Tatiana O'Toole (55:25)
Okay, so remember how we were talking about imperfect systems? Copyright is one of them because capitalism is flawed because art and education shouldn't have a price on them. Education should flow freely between humans because it is helping us grow and have a better society. But that doesn't work for art and capitalism because I need to get paid. So I need to force scarcity on my artwork. So I need to copyright it so people can't copy it so I can...

Reijo (55:38)
Mmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (55:54)
force people to give me money if they want to use my art, right? So it's hard to say exactly how do you approach this and how many degrees away it has to be, right? Because art should be derivative. I should be able to make a statue of liberty out of hot dogs, right? And I shouldn't be in copyright infringing. I should be able to take what's something really protected right now, Mickey Mouse, not Steamboat Willie, and I don't know, make a full-blown porno.

Reijo (56:07)
Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (56:22)
Like I should be able to do that because we're humans and we're connecting and we're talking about communication and language and growth and education. Like you can't stop that. So anyway, when you get to copyright, it's a little more complicated, but what the rub is on AI is that it has to be human made. A computer can't make it. This started with the monkeys making the art. They couldn't copyright it or protect it because a human hadn't made it.

Reijo (56:43)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (56:51)
So the real question is when will they get editing down enough to where it can be called like an artistic tool where people create? That's the question. Where will they draw that line? And if there's enough money going into AI, I would say they would find a really good spot for them, not artists. So anyway, that's my thoughts on that.

Reijo (56:52)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Yeah, and looking at what the acceleration is right now, it feels like that's going to happen tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow.

Tatiana O'Toole (57:25)
Dust stop, oh my God. Okay, so like, oh God, I love poking fun at design bros. It's one of my favorite pastimes. I have a little comic called Design Boy, and it's my favorite thing. And these wonderful Design Boys I follow, just like when AI started kicking off, they were like making the reels, making fun of it, because they really desperately needed that dopamine hit of people looking at their shit, so they started getting into their reels phase, like little skits. And they were all doing like this, AI is gonna replace me.

Liam (57:27)
Nnnn

Reijo (57:48)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (57:55)
And then they showed the skewed hands that are horrifying and like, yeah, it's gonna replace me. I don't know if you're an idiot because you haven't tracked how tech has advanced or if you deliberately know that you were wrong and just are catering to your audience and therefore misinforming them of how worried they should be. I don't, I still don't know. I think it's a mix. Anyway, yeah.

Reijo (58:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and which one of those is worse?

Tatiana O'Toole (58:24)
No.

Right, exactly, is it spiteful or ignorance? Pick which one you want. Like, and, it's exhausting out here. So.

Reijo (58:37)
It is. I agree.

Liam (58:37)
Are you concerned at all about AI, Tatiana, or are you more with RAO and believe there's always... No, but RAO always believes there's going to be a human aspect to this service. And people always will want a human aspect. They won't want an AI quality, no matter how high quality it is or well-made it is, it's always going to missing a human touch that it's going to have.

Tatiana O'Toole (58:42)
No, I'm fine with it!

Liam (59:06)
I don't know, some sort of intuition that's behind it, some sort of longer, like a bigger connection that is inexplicable to, well, who knows how, how advanced robots become, but certainly in the, in the next five, 10 years, it's, it's never gonna completely replace, um, that, like I say, inexplicable human element to...

the strategy behind it, the meaning behind it, the reason behind the whole final piece.

Tatiana O'Toole (59:41)
like to think that, but we're in late stage capitalism. And that means that companies are trying to streamline their expenses as much as possible. And they don't give a shit about their employees anymore. In fact, they're trying to cut as many employees possible.

Liam (59:53)
Rayo, are you listening to this?

Reijo (59:55)
I like my It's very interesting like I generally I think I generally agree with a lot of your points I feel like we do inhabit a system. That's not ideal We it has a lot of very I think severe flaws but also I'm

Tatiana O'Toole (59:55)
I think he's trapped and has to.

Liam (59:56)
Eh.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:00:16)
Mm.

Reijo (1:00:20)
I'm sort of dead inside and in not having that belief anymore that anything will change So my understanding or like the piece that i've made with the world is that it's only going to get worse Unless something significant happens. Maybe a gi is the significant thing. I don't know but that's my understanding

Tatiana O'Toole (1:00:28)
Mm.

Liam (1:00:45)
get worse for human.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:00:46)
100% agree.

Reijo (1:00:48)
Oh nice.

Liam (1:00:50)
Robots will flourish.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:00:50)
I 100% it was the weirdest thing moving to Ireland and being called positive. Because I'm not a positive person, I'm a very realistic person. And I came here and these people were like, wow, it's so nice to have this American positivity. And I was like, are you okay?

Liam (1:00:57)
Hehehe

Reijo (1:01:00)
What?

Liam (1:01:09)
Hmm

Reijo (1:01:09)
This is the perception of what we have of Americans in general, I think in Europe. Yeah, that's the ballpark.

Liam (1:01:14)
Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:01:17)
Dumb and happy and fat, perfect. Okay, but.

I do have to say that companies won't care about the quality of the output, only if it really affects the bottom line. So this will continue to get good. They will use it to streamline their teams so they don't have to pay people as much because that's very expensive and they will continue to increase the amount of money their shareholders get.

Liam (1:01:45)
Yes, I think I agree. These design subscriptions are evident of the fact and that's pre-AI.

Reijo (1:01:47)
So here's my small...

That's true. But I don't know how this fits into the capitalism argument. But I feel like there's never going to be a moment in time where people don't want to pay other people, human, specifically, a lot of money for something very specific. There's always going to be that desire to say,

I bought this Van Gogh, I bought this whatever DaVinci painting. There's always going to be this very narcissistic desire to have something someone else made.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:02:29)
Oh, I can't hear you. I'm so sorry you broke up.

Liam (1:02:31)
Yeah, Ray, you dropped.

Reijo (1:02:33)
Does that make sense?

Liam (1:02:35)
Say it again, Ryo. Say the last bit again.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:02:35)
Okay, you ended at Van Gogh and then it made kind of a roar noise and then you went silent for a little bit.

Reijo (1:02:43)
Okay, so my point is that there's always going to be people that want to pay other people a lot of money for something very specific, something that person specifically created for them. There's never going to be like, you cannot replace that.

Liam (1:02:58)
That might be more down the R avenue, not the design.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:03:01)
That's not.

That's not sustainable on a mass scale because you're talking about celebrity individuals that get paid a lot of money for art. We need an economy. That's something that Americans have really struggled with because we have been forced into really unhealthy work practices by companies hanging this carrot that will make it, that will be wealthy and will be able to take care of our families, will be able to provide for ourselves if we just work a little bit harder, which is why so many people look like...

Reijo (1:03:08)
No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Yeah, absolutely not.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:03:34)
and Americans, like they have some sort of like meth addiction because they're so ingrained in work. And it's, it's been really unhealthy. And I think that it's, I think having that kind of like celebrity status, like, well, you know, they're all these celebrity artists. I think that that's not scalable. That's not practical. We need an economy. We need people paid real things.

Reijo (1:03:49)
No, no, but I agree with you totally. That's not a scalable solution. However, I think, first of all, I'm glad. But at the same time, I think that's going to be the status quo when you have that many powerful tools to create powerful imagery without having a human.

Liam (1:03:59)
I'll buy your work, Rae, don't worry. I'll buy it.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:04)
NFT though, NFT only though.

Liam (1:04:07)
Yes, the only NSD.

Oh no.

Reijo (1:04:19)
be a part of this process, that's gonna be how it's gonna be, I think. Maybe that's just incredibly cynical and narcissistic, like pessimistic, but I feel like that's how it's gonna be.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:24)
Mm.

Liam (1:04:29)
Oh, that's optimistic.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:33)
Could you repeat that point again? Cause I think you broke up for your entire point. Like you led up to your point and then disappeared and then came back in. And I need to hear this point because you're like, and that's how I think it'll be. And I don't.

Liam (1:04:37)
I'm sorry.

It's clear that the AI is listening already, and it's just trying to sense you, Ro. Ha ha ha.

Reijo (1:04:44)
I feel like...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:46)
Yeah, exactly, like silence him.

Reijo (1:04:47)
It's messy. Yeah. So, so I feel I agree with your point that it's not scalable at all. That's sort of like celebrity status transaction. That's not scalable. But that's how it's going to be if you want to make art. Because there will be too simple to have to have like a replacement or you know, like a placeholder image.

placeholder image or placeholder art created by something that's not human. You have to be a celebrity to make a living in this, whatever the next stage of the economy is.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:05:30)
That's heartbreak. That's fucked up.

Reijo (1:05:32)
Yes, it is! It's miserable! But I think that's where we're going.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:05:38)
Yeah, no. I mean, what does that do to a culture, right? Because I think, are you guys passionate about what you do? Do you actually like what you do? Are you fulfilled by it? Don't lie, tell me the truth. How do you feel about the jobs you have?

Reijo (1:05:52)
I don't have a job. Liam, do you have a job?

Liam (1:05:53)
Wait, wait, let me light up. Let me light up.

Reijo (1:05:55)
I mean, I mean...

Liam (1:05:58)
I am more fulfilled than I have ever been. That doesn't mean I'm completely fulfilled, but I'm certainly getting there.

Reijo (1:05:58)
Go ahead.

I would do... yeah, yeah. I agree with that.

I-

Tatiana O'Toole (1:06:09)
and that's starting layers.

Liam (1:06:12)
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Cause it's a combination of everything I've learned and releasing it so that people can use it. So it's like, yeah, I'm kind of at a touch point, I think.

Reijo (1:06:21)
Yes.

Yeah, for me, I feel like I am fulfilled at the moment, even though I feel like I'm extremely burned out, but I feel fulfilled at the moment. And I feel like the trajectory for me is only going upwards. So I feel like I only need to hold on to the moment I've created for myself or the emotion that I've created for myself. And I'm gonna only do better for myself for what I want out of life, I feel.

Liam (1:06:36)
Hehehehe

And yourself, Tatiana.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:06:55)
Do you think, am I fulfilled? I'm broken fulfilled, right? I have no fucking money, right? And I am the happiest I've ever been working with clients because what I do, I feel like really matters. And when I did this strategy with Louise with the school, oh my God, like it's scratch and edge. Like I watched this woman, she was scared to write a business plan.

Liam (1:07:01)
You can't just ask us the deep questions.

Reijo (1:07:15)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:07:26)
Now she's contacting politicians and bothering them because she's trying and like the transformation is insane and like walking her through that strategy and having her understand what she's doing. Like I watched her imposter syndrome disappear. I watched her develop better boundaries in her life. It like hit me that like you know what is work like therapy for humans if we do it right? Like as if we see like the how the fruits of our labor and like how systems help us and our boundaries. Like is this how we like get therapy?

Reijo (1:07:30)
Nice.

Exactly.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:07:55)
naturally. But it was, I don't know how what I do is sustainable because I don't like what like a company's gonna hire me that is so money centric they want to learn all their ethics like no they don't give a shit. It's really frustrating. So it's like simultaneously I am incredibly fulfilled, but I'm in pain.

Reijo (1:07:57)
100%.

Well...

Liam (1:08:16)
You could do a non-profit charity type work.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:08:20)
Yes, that's what, yeah, I've donated my time to working with Louise. I've built out her identity framework or strategy. I designed her logo and picked out all of her stuff. And I did it honestly for 500 euro because I wanted to test out my strategy to see what an impact it did because I developed it on my own and I wanted to see it work. And I'm really happy with how it turned out for her. And now I got to figure out

Reijo (1:08:20)
Oh, that's also true. That's also true.

Liam (1:08:49)
No, I think, yeah, I think there are, I mean, there are sustainable companies out there that are trying to do better things, I think. I mean, there's certainly a lot of e-corp these days and there's certainly a lot of nonprofits that they're trying to spend money in decent ways and they're not just revolved around growth and trying to grow the company. They have a set amount of money funds each year and they're just trying to spend that money.

Reijo (1:08:59)
But...

That's also true. But I think what I think I'm thinking about this problem, like in the same company, I think is making it seem scarier than it is, I think, because you only need to convince somebody like one person, maybe two people in the company that has to believe that what you can provide is actually very valuable.

Liam (1:09:18)
Yeah, they're very rare, but they do exist.

Reijo (1:09:48)
Like you don't need to convince the entire 150,000 staff of Microsoft for it. Just a couple of people, I think. I think that sort of helps me think about it and helps me to sort of humanize the problem.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:10:03)
Yeah, there is that train of thought. However, there is, we're kind of in a different game now where it's about making as much capital as possible, not being the best product on the market, but being the most backed product on the market. And that's putting...

Taking an ethical approach now actually puts you at a disadvantage against other companies that are too busy doing everything they can to streamline themselves to make as much capital as possible because they can afford the marketing, they can afford to reduce their prices to like bare minimum to get all the customers out. And I mean, Luke, we saw the rug pull that happened with like...

Reijo (1:10:35)
That's true.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:10:44)
all the online platforms. Like remember when YouTube used to be free and ad free and then they rolled in the ads and I get YouTube premium and that was like $7.99 a month and now it's $14.99 a month. And like, like I pay for a family plan because I cannot watch another goddamn ad on that. I hate it so.

Reijo (1:10:54)
Is it?

Liam (1:10:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Reijo (1:10:59)
Ah.

Liam (1:10:59)
Yeah, they got me in the end as well, God.

Reijo (1:11:02)
Well, no, but I pay for U-Tune premium as well, but I didn't realize that it was like a... Okay, maybe I'm not on a family plan. Maybe that's the difference, but... That's true, that's true.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:11:10)
Maybe we should all get on the family plan and save money, guys. I think that's our problem.

Liam (1:11:10)
You don't know how much you were playing.

But I have one question which we might have to end on, but it's can you grow a company in this example, layers? Can I grow layers in a ethical way in this system? Is that possible?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:11:31)
I don't know, you have to hire me. Um, thank you. I'm horrible at selling myself, so that was, but no, um, I, but no, but genuinely, I, um, I haven't sat down with you to see what your goals are. I don't like, I, I'm a blind man feeling an elephant. You have this elephant, anyone who isn't you and your vision of your company is like,

Reijo (1:11:33)
Nice!

Liam (1:11:40)
The log... the log card!

Reijo (1:11:54)
Mmm, that's a good analogy.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:11:59)
If anyone assumes to tell you what to do with your company, besides like basic logical user needs, they're telling you your business. So if you tell me like what you wanna do with this site, you tell me how you wanna impact the world, you tell me how you see yourself sitting in with the other social media platforms, you wanna tell me what you want your users to feel when they use your product and how you want their lives to be better, I can give you a better answer to that.

but I can't make those assumptions. It's an insult to you and it's wasted breath on for me.

Liam (1:12:34)
I'll try and give a short answer. So I, starting layers, I never thought of it to be necessarily a moneymaker because I see it more as a community rather than a product in itself. So I've already mentioned that I want layers to eventually be owned by its members, however possible that is. I feel communities should be owned.

by their community members, they should be somewhat democratic or trying to reach a fair way to run the system. So whilst I'd love layers to eventually pay for all the effort that I've put into it, and I hope it does, ultimately I think I do want to give up a huge percentage of it and

turn it into, well, it's already shares, but people can buy shares. That opens the questions of pay to win and all that stuff. But ultimately it becomes not a problem for me. It becomes a problem for the design community and how they would solve it. So yeah, I, what I value most now with layers is just the people I've met, the relationships I've made and the project itself has been great designing and building something.

and releasing it to the world and people actually using it is incredibly fulfilling. Um, uh, it's potentially short term. Um, but I, I see the relationships that I've made hopefully a bit more long longer term and I'm trying to instill that into the actual community as well. It's not, it's not, you shouldn't think of, um, posting day to day, uh, things that people want to see, um, getting those likes, um, whilst it can be good.

Reijo (1:14:28)
Getting those likes.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:14:31)
Honey, where am I supposed to get... Where am I supposed to get my Adorphin Rush?

Liam (1:14:35)
Whilst it can be good growing your reputation, somewhere else.

Reijo (1:14:38)
Right?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:14:39)
God damn it!

problem. Like you outlined a problem somewhere else. Sorry, keep going.

Liam (1:14:44)
Yeah.

Reijo (1:14:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Liam (1:14:48)
But it's been a challenge and so far it continues to grow. So I'm quite interested to see if it will still grow in its current state. Like a lot of people seem to think that you need these things, but currently Layers is proving them wrong, whether...

I don't know. I don't know why.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:15:12)
The like removal, I would like to address this. Also labeling comments as feedback. I don't know if my.

Liam (1:15:21)
I don't even like comments, you know, the comments, they're just pointless, I think. Unless you actually encourage proper feedback, the current system that's in place now is pretty pointless, I think. Although it does emphasize engagement and people want to use something that's being used. So it's like if they see comments, they're like, oh, this platform is actually active. Maybe I'll be active on it.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:15:29)
Okay, so if.

So the nice colors.

So we didn't get to talk about this part of things. And I know that we're getting close to our time. And honestly, I keep talking for another five hours because I have lots of thoughts on this, but.

Liam (1:15:56)
We're gonna have to do a part two. You're gonna have to come back, Tatiana.

Reijo (1:15:58)
Yes, we have to do a part two because it's been super fun

Tatiana O'Toole (1:16:02)
Well, I think that one thing we don't really talk about is the shift of audience on Dribbble because Dribbble was initially meant to be a community between designers. And then when you interject clients who will pay money, that changed everything about how people post it because people were initially supposed to post works in progress, right? And when you're trying to get hired by clients, that's the last thing you wanna post. You want everything to be like beautiful and the likes thing. I don't...

Liam (1:16:02)
Mmmm

Reijo (1:16:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:16:30)
I genuinely do not know if I'm right or wrong. And I need lots of time to think about this because mama wants her endorphin rush. Okay. I want to feel good. I want to go viral. I want to get like, I want to like have my phone keep buzzing back in the old days of Instagram where it's just like after like.

Liam (1:16:45)
No, you don't. You don't. You don't need that. Honestly.

Reijo (1:16:49)
Like if that's what keeps you working and keeps you fulfilled in the motion of working, that's fine I think. If that keeps you producing work that you love, that's excellent.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:17:03)
I think that there is some, you're onto something though. No, I think you're onto something. No, I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying what I feel. Just because I feel something doesn't mean I'm right. It's very complicated for humans there, but you're not wrong because it's validation, right? And then when I'm not getting that, I fall into a depressed state and become like one of those people that like stares out a window and cries. Like it's...

Liam (1:17:05)
Shouldn't you just be doing it because you love it?

Reijo (1:17:08)
Yeah, there are

Liam (1:17:16)
Yeah.

Reijo (1:17:19)
Hahaha!

Tatiana O'Toole (1:17:33)
bad to set your value on other people's actions, right? How much they say. But at the same time, I think that engagement is a really nice way for people to nod at each other. But the thing is, is it's been used in disingenuous ways for so long. Because nice colors isn't mean nice colors. It means come check out my profile because I left you feedback in that small endorphin rush and please follow me. Thank you. And...

Reijo (1:17:39)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yes!

Yes.

Liam (1:18:02)
It can also be nice colors, 1% of the time.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:18:02)
That's difficult.

I mean, God, oh my God, I have, there is, there.

Reijo (1:18:06)
That's true.

Liam (1:18:09)
Trust me, I've been close to writing that. I'm like, oh damn, nice palette. Wait a minute.

Reijo (1:18:12)
Yeah, same, same.

Wait a fucking minute, right? Right?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:18:18)
Oh, no. Whenever I leave feedback, oh, feedback, God, I'm saying feedback now. Whenever I leave comments on stuff now, I make sure that it is specific, it is directed, it cannot be copy and pasted to another thing. And it, yeah, God, I have so much to talk about. I didn't even address any of the questions I had written down for you guys. Like, I have a Notion document that I've written out.

Reijo (1:18:30)
Yes.

Liam (1:18:46)
It's good. No, we'll call it there. We'll call this hopefully a part one, Tatiana, and you'll join us for a part two. Yeah, we do this every two weeks. We do this every two weeks. So we'll happily, we'd love to bring you back. But yeah, we'll end it there now. That's about an hour and 20. Yeah, so that's been amazing. If you do have any questions or feedback for us here on Overlay, then please, we've got an email, it's overlay at layers.to.

Reijo (1:18:46)
Oh, beautiful.

Yes. Please do.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:18:53)
soon. Yeah.

Liam (1:19:10)
Uh, yeah, we'd actually love to hear your thoughts. I mean, overlay is still pretty small now, so it's like, but if you share it on Twitter, people are, people are downloading it.

Reijo (1:19:16)
But there are people downloading and listening, so we appreciate it.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:19:19)
dozens of us.

Reijo (1:19:22)
Better? Like, one is good for me. One is good for me.

Liam (1:19:26)
That's me. But yeah, I'd love to, I'd love, love to actually get some responses and feedback on this. Um, it's probably best to share on Twitter. I think I'll share on X. Um, and yeah, overlay is available everywhere now. Uh, we publish on Transistor so it gets posted on, uh, Apple podcasts, uh, Spotify, yeah, your favorite service, uh, or whatever. So any, uh, um, if you can review us, that'd be great.

Reijo (1:19:34)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

everywhere.

Liam (1:19:54)
uh, Raidus, uh, leave any comments and yeah, we're also posting on YouTube now. And hopefully, uh, the future episodes I'll try and improve my production. Uh, we'll try and get it. Tip top.

4k resolution and all that jazz. Cool. And I'm... yes. And actually have somewhat decent background just in case you get bored.

Reijo (1:20:10)
Beautiful, beautiful.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:12)
He said through a pixel.

Reijo (1:20:17)
Yeah, the iron is not lost. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like looking through a water painting.

Liam (1:20:23)
Cool. I'm Liam P. I need something nice and distractive.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:28)
like a Photoshop filter from 2001.

Reijo (1:20:33)
But at least I hear him good, at least I hear him good, that's enough for me.

Liam (1:20:34)
Exactly.

That's actually good inspiration. I will do that. Yep. I'm Liam P. McCabe on X.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:39)
AirPods?

Reijo (1:20:45)
I'm Radio of Rights Onyx and...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:49)
Tatyana O'Toole, I'm pretty much Dharma creative on everything. And you can follow me there or like go follow somebody who looks different than you, different gender, different ability, different skin tone, whatever. Go follow somebody. If you follow me, very cool. But go diversify your following and learn from people that are different from you so that your design scales to multiple people from different walks of life. Thank you.

Reijo (1:20:53)
Nice scoot.

Oh, that's a beautiful call, yeah. Yeah, that's a better quote, yeah.

Liam (1:21:17)
Perfect. Thank you all. See you later.

Reijo (1:21:18)
Beautiful. Thank you. Bye-bye.