Overlay

Liam (00:02)
Welcome to episode number five of the official layers podcast overlay. I'm the founder of layers, Lee McCabe.

Reijo (00:08)
and I'm designer and illustrator Reo 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 the layers. You can join layers plus today and gain access to additional features such as analytics, scheduling, profile customization, and more. And overlay listeners also get a 10% discount off the annual plan using the code overlay 10 and now on with the episode. And today is a

Part two, a continuation of the previous podcast with our guest Tatiana. So in case no one's listened to the previous episode, Tatiana, do you just want to introduce yourself again?

Tatiana O'Toole (00:51)
Tatiana O'Toole. I live in South Dublin, Ireland. I work in strategy for companies. My origins start in brand identity and brand-centric illustration, and I advocate strongly for ethics and design and ethical treatment of designers.

Liam (01:13)
Great. Yeah. So previously in the previous episode, we talked a lot about a range of topics. The title I kind of put in design ethics there. I think we touched design ethics in multiple different ways. But overall, the topics we discussed like range from design subscription services to... Guys, help me up. AI.

Reijo (01:40)
Yeah, of course.

Tatiana O'Toole (01:40)
AI. We talked about the fall of Dribbble. We talked about things that bother us about Dribbble. It was all, we want to talk more about it because we can keep going. Well, since then, Dribbble has gotten a new CEO.

Reijo (01:47)
Yes.

Liam (01:47)
Did we? I thought that we didn't, that was the point. Hahaha.

So,

Indeed, yes. Zac has stepped down after how many years? I thought I read seven, I can't remember.

Reijo (02:00)
That is true.

lot a lot

Liam (02:11)
But yeah, basically we wanted to bring Tatiana on because we started a conversation with her on the layers platform and she was asking a lot of very good questions about layers and how to maintain the community and try to avoid a lot of the pitfalls and issues that existing design communities such as Dribbble has suffered in recent years. And we didn't actually manage to touch on a lot of them.

So I'm hoping we can do that in this episode. So yeah, we'll move straight into those. So the first one, I'll posit them as like questions, I guess, because that's probably easier. And then you guys can answer and I can obviously join in as well. So Layers has a direct messaging feature. So you can just message other users for...

Reijo (02:37)
Yeah.

Liam (03:03)
connection purposes or maybe if you're a client for hiring purposes. And one thing I've always thought about is whether or not there should be a hire button or a message button. So I think it's actually quite divided in the existing platforms.

one or the other or both. And there's also actually a middle ground, which was having both of the buttons, but clicking higher would open a little modal with all the usual fields that you see, like project title, budget, timeline, et cetera. But then it would send it as a message in the messaging service. So like in a pretty card or whatever.

Reijo (03:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Liam (04:03)
And so you're still using the messaging service, but the hired messages are distinguished somehow. So yeah, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on, because Tatiana, you mentioned in your document, that's basically what we're discussing, that...

Dribble discouraged direct messaging. Um, actually, I don't think they really had direct messaging. It was always just hiring people, right?

Tatiana O'Toole (04:35)
Yeah, the way you messaged on Dribbble, going back deep in my memories here when I first got on there, there was a lot of times, because I spent a long time reaching out to designers, because I would stumble across stolen work, and I'd take the time to reach out to them and be like, hey, your work's being used here, just so you know, or it's being stolen. And I tried to reach out to them on Dribbble, but Dribbble had this really kind of intimidating language around that, where it was basically memory serves. It was essentially...

if you are messaging this person for any other reason than a legit work inquiry, then your account will come into question, basically. And so for a lot of people, a lot of people did connect through Dribbble, but they couldn't continue to connect through Dribbble. So they went through Instagram or Twitter to continue those conversations, because those facilitated DMs so much better, especially Instagram. So it's really a question of like,

What kind of users do you foresee coming to layers, right? Because you do have your client audience coming in looking to hire designers. You have your designer audience coming in. You have agency audiences coming in. They're not going to be necessarily conducting like, hey, what's up? What are you working on? They're not going to really be sending messages. So it really comes down to how you've outlined your audiences and which ones you prioritize to the top.

I certainly would like to see a DM feature installed because it's, I mean, not that it is there, but just the ease of communication between designers is so important. And you see that happen in the background a lot on Instagram and Twitter, but it never really got to take root and dribble. And I think that was a mistake on their part.

Liam (06:22)
Yeah, I mean, since a lot of people started using Twitter more for design, I also started using the messaging a lot more. And I was like, it's a shame that this just doesn't really exist. I can't speak for Hans or the others. I'm not sure if they have a messaging system. And the way I contacted Rail was very...

Reijo (06:28)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (06:44)
They do.

Liam (06:48)
It was also very informal and the way we worked together was also very informal. So I was like, this worked perfectly. So I'm going to implement that on layers. But then I do understand. I do understand there is a more formal route and yet layers does have, uh, an audience of designers, but also clients, um, and agencies. And I do want all of them to come to layers because I want people to be hired from, from layers and get work from layers, but also to connect.

Reijo (06:56)
Yeah.

Liam (07:18)
with other designers. So it, it kind of has to do everything. Um, I'm wondering if, um, like a separate, does it need a separate system for messaging and tiring, do you think?

Tatiana O'Toole (07:34)
I have lots of opinions, but I don't want to speak over you. Do you have any thoughts?

Are you thinking still?

Reijo (07:43)
I feel like...

This is a problem that sounds simple on the surface, but when you get down into it, it's quite intricate. I feel like...

My personal experience with DMs on whatever design platforms have been such that 95% of their work inquiries, and maybe 5% somebody either asking a question of how did I do something or what tools am I using, et cetera, et cetera. But specifically in the layers case, I feel like people who are on the layer

come to join Layers are already connected in some way on other platforms on which they are already using DMs, like Twitter, for example. So like we connected with Liam over Twitter, I joined Layers, and we continue to speak over Twitter because there is no reason to move that conversation anywhere else other than Discord, of course.

But I feel like there's a, there's a other platforms are doing a lot, a lot of the work right now. And I don't know how do you, how do you either going to start to fix that or what the better option for that would be having the EMS having a very, having a very easy way to DM somebody would be good, but mostly I think people expect clients to DM them, not other designers, but that's just my.

my opinion I think.

Liam (09:31)
And do you think the DM, the sort of informal messaging approach is fine? Works?

Reijo (09:40)
I think as in like, you can always make it more formal, but it's difficult to make it informal back, I think. So just having a simple way to DM somebody, you don't even need to write a title, just send them a message. That's it, I think. No need to overcomplicate it, I think.

Tatiana O'Toole (10:05)
Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that, I don't like when people contact me for work over Instagram, because you can unsend messages. And it's too informal and they're often encouraged to be like, hi, how much for a logo? And if I get another one of those messages, I'm going to harm myself or somebody else because it's really exhausting. So I would like some structure. God, stop.

Liam (10:31)
What's your Instagram?

Reijo (10:39)
HAHA

Tatiana O'Toole (10:41)
locks. But so because I find them very informal and I find them very I've gotten some really good customers. I got Zappos through Instagram, which was very cool. But I also got a message. I got a message once asking like they said they would accept nudes and they would feature me like I there's a there's a wide discrepancy between those.

Reijo (10:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Liam (10:58)
Wow, that's crazy.

Reijo (11:07)
WHAT?!

Liam (11:09)
Also good.

Tatiana O'Toole (11:11)
Yeah, and I would like to point out, just for my own sake, that I had more followers than that page, and they were asking to feature me. And like, anyway.

Reijo (11:23)
Wow, that took some mental gymnastics.

Tatiana O'Toole (11:25)
So what I'm

Liam (11:27)
Hahaha

Tatiana O'Toole (11:27)
It was exhausting. But anyway, I had a guy reach out to me once on Instagram, where he asked if he could purchase a logo that I had made. And I gave him the price, and he said it was too much. And we were like, fine, thank you. That's fine. We don't align good luck with your business. He said, good luck. No hard feelings. I found later that he had taken and used my logo anyway.

Reijo (11:44)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (11:57)
and I had to contact a lawyer and to get it taken down. It was really difficult. But what I found was that because we had carried off that information in DMs where he could have unsent messages, thank God he didn't, he wasn't, I don't know, he might've been a few light bulbs stored in package, you know, like it wasn't, mm. I had all the receipts, if you will, I had the DMs and everything.

Reijo (12:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (12:26)
But it always made me nervous since then to work with clients and carry out conversation in somewhere where you could delete messages. Where in more informal DMs, it would be a higher call to delete messages. So I think that we can only answer based on our own personal experience. I think we're all very social here, and we reach out over DMs, and we can't assume that about the users. So I would say moving forward layers, best interest would be to kind of.

start talking to designers, see how they use DMs, what do they prefer, what do they hate about other DM systems, like Dribbble, in all of its wisdom, lets people choose ASAP for a timeline, what do I do with that? Why, why would you do that? I have to...

Reijo (13:12)
There's the... I think...

Liam (13:18)
If layers had that, it would have a budget thing and then the budget would go really high as well. The shorter you want it, the bigger the budget.

Reijo (13:23)
That's true. That would be clever. That would be clever.

Tatiana O'Toole (13:24)
Please, okay, acceptable. If you choose ASAP, it's like 10,000 minimum. Like, good luck. Like, it's, oh no, but, so I think that at the end of the day, we can only answer based on like our personal experience with communication. And honestly, the majority of mine, you said the majority of yours were clients, the majority of mine have been other designers on Instagram because I've spent a long time connecting and reaching out to designers.

Reijo (13:31)
Yeah.

That's very interesting.

Tatiana O'Toole (13:53)
I use that a lot for that reason.

Reijo (13:56)
That now makes me think, why am I less approachable? Like, why do I have less friends? Ha ha ha!

Tatiana O'Toole (14:01)
Well, it's also thinking making.

Liam (14:01)
Hehehehehehe

I'm praying.

Tatiana O'Toole (14:05)
making me think why am I less hireable so there's two sides to that coin

Liam (14:08)
Do you message people, Reo? You need to be proactive. Can't just wait for them to come.

Tatiana O'Toole (14:14)
Are you just really thinking about why no one's asked for your nudes in exchange for being shared?

Liam (14:17)
Yeah

Tatiana O'Toole (14:22)
Oh my god, I'm st-

Reijo (14:26)
It will be an interesting conversation to have for sure.

Tatiana O'Toole (14:30)
You know what's... You know what's so annoying?

Liam (14:31)
Well, Listis, you're a listing to rare right now.

Reijo (14:36)
Hehehehe

Tatiana O'Toole (14:36)
It was so annoying as I got that message early in the morning, so I'm half asleep in bed and I have a message from a rando, and I check it and it's one of those disappearing messages. It just, I read it and I'm so shocked and then it goes away and I can't open it again. So I have no proof, I can't screenshot it and it had, he used the peach emoji. It was on a rainbow gradient background. It was, oh God, anyway. But yes,

Reijo (14:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liam (14:53)
ahead.

Reijo (14:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liam (14:57)
Oh dear.

Reijo (15:00)
Amazing.

Amazing. Yeah.

Liam (15:04)
But anyway, Tatiana, you mentioned theft and stealing designs and messaging people to warn them that their work had been stolen. So there's another thing, obviously that's another point. And obviously we want to try and discourage that on layers or prevent it if possible. So obviously there'll be some sort of reporting system and moderation system that's going to be introduced. You'll be able to...

Report people, report designs, etc. Report anything that you need for whatever reason. Would that be sufficient? It's probably not sufficient. That's just like the basis, but how do you proactively try and stop and prevent this kind of theft? Is it even possible?

Tatiana O'Toole (15:54)
That is really difficult because I mean, I think we talked about this a little in the last, excuse me, the last podcast where the very nature of copyright is kind of a forced construct on like the natural way we share information, right? Because art design are really.

Reijo (15:55)
Thanks for watching!

Tatiana O'Toole (16:18)
Predominantly art, especially graphics, those are, it's information you share with another person. And it's human nature to iterate and to build off of that and to take those ideas and to build something more. We're constantly in growth. We're constantly asking and questioning things. And when you apply that to copyrighted materials, it would dictate that, you know, I can take the Mona Lisa and then redraw it as a doxin.

with like a gerbil on its lap, you know? Like I am expressing my creativity by taking this piece and expressing myself. So I think that it kind of subdues a lot of natural human creativity. However, I protect my art. I need to get paid. I need for scarcity and I need what I create to remain with me and profiting me. So that's like, first off, just all that to say.

This is hard because it is a broken construct and it's really hard to navigate all the answers. So we're not gonna find an absolute solution. It's going to be flawed. It's going to be problematic. There is a guy I've known for a while. We chat on and off his names. I couldn't put your name. It's Juan Felipe. Felipe, he's wonderful, fantastic. Yeah, yeah, he's on layers. I saw him on there and we were chatting a little bit.

Reijo (17:36)
Oh, I know his work.

Tatiana O'Toole (17:44)
And I sent him my Dribbble document that I wrote about all the issues. And he was like, this is it. Um, he, he brought up a solution that I thought was fascinating. I'm not going to credit this as my idea. It was his idea, uh, where he said you could, uh, for art that becomes subject to like a copyright, uh, like is this their work? Did they copy, um, put it through like a gauntlet where the users decide what it was on who posted first and who is right.

Liam (18:16)
Hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (18:18)
I have, okay, so I thought.

Reijo (18:18)
That sounds... Go ahead.

Liam (18:22)
So showing the original and then a slightly altered original and giving the users try to figure out the original.

Tatiana O'Toole (18:22)
Yeah, I think...

Yeah.

I want to try to represent this as best as possible, and I may not be representing it the way he wanted it to, but essentially spam posts, copyright infringement, any sort of material that needs to be reported, it goes through a community vetting process where they vote and be like, yes, this is spam, yes, this is a... So that kind of a thing, and the same for copyright. However, I have been stolen from.

Reijo (18:49)
Hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (18:57)
And I had some little fucking pipsqueak come up to me and be like, you are being way too sensitive. This is anyone can draw a cabin. How do you know it's your cabin? And I was, oh my God, I could have like, okay. Oh my God, this guy. I got so angry at him because essentially this woman had taken mine and I think it was Matt Carlson's work and like merged them together, but he had flipped my cabin that I had illustrated. And I could see it because my cabin,

Liam (19:08)
Mwah

Reijo (19:10)
hahahaha

Tatiana O'Toole (19:26)
I don't have children, I have art, and I know them down to their very pixel. And it's, it infuriated me. So I would hate that designers who know that their work's been stolen face abuse from a community that can't see it. So that would be my concern with that, but I don't think it's necessarily bad to rely on your community for that. And then kind of encouraging them to join in. I'm just hoping it doesn't start a witch hunt or misplace some anger.

Reijo (19:55)
Yeah, I feel like, I feel like, go ahead. I feel like every time, every time I've had this happen to me as well. Uh, and I, I take great solace in the notion that every time it has happened, somebody else has pointed it out to me. They've reached out to me and they've been like, Hey, this looks fucking familiar to me. Like, is it yours?

Liam (19:56)
I mean, it, gone, right?

Reijo (20:23)
And turns out, of course, it was either directly they were just taking the asset or it was like remade in a very, very similar fashion. So there's a community aspect to it that I think can be leveraged, but it won't obviously won't work out in every case. What I think would be the simplest thing.

Liam (20:47)
I wonder-

Reijo (20:51)
Because I don't think this can be avoided. And whatever can be done is only going to be reactive, not proactive. So the simplest way to report a post for either stolen assets or stolen IP or reporting just the spam as simply as possible, I think, would be a good start.

Liam (21:14)
Hmm. Yeah. You mentioned, yeah, you mentioned reactive. I was thinking, yeah, could you do it before? And I guess, I guess that you could technically speaking, well, I don't know how quick you could do it, but you could check, you could check layers database if the image already exists or a similar image percentage wise, and you could, you could add like a little checkbox that says

Reijo (21:28)
It's a...

But... yes.

Liam (21:40)
Are you sure this is your work? If it's not your work, you may be subject to blah, blah. So that potentially could dissuade a few people.

Reijo (21:46)
But yes, but I feel like that's an invitation to an arms race and you will always lose. Like the human ingenuity to steal stuff will always win. I don't think there's a way around it.

Liam (22:01)
That's the spirit.

Tatiana O'Toole (22:05)
Were you guys aware of when Ivan, I'm gonna butcher his last name, Ivan Bobrov, but he's a logo designer. He did a Lightrix logos with like the owl and he's an absolutely wonderful identity designer. His logo he did for a small, I believe it was a Russian town, was stolen and used by the Dominican Republic.

Reijo (22:24)
Okay.

Tatiana O'Toole (22:34)
the country, the Dominican Republic, not that Dominican Republic at.

Reijo (22:37)
Damn.

Liam (22:39)
It's a great anecdote. I'd like to say that. Yeah, a country stole my logo.

Reijo (22:41)
He is a great actor, right? Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (22:44)
But it was really such a fascinating story because Ivan obviously is not paying attention to the Dominican Republic, but designers in the Dominican Republic knew of Ivan's work and they saw this and they reached out to him and they were like, hi, my country has stolen your logo.

Reijo (23:04)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (23:07)
Do you want to do something about it? Then it became this huge uproar because obviously, it's very scandalous of an entire country steals a logo from somebody. What had happened was they had hired, I believe, a studio out of Mexico who then contracted the logo design work out to some freelancers. I could be getting this wrong, but I understand that was the relationship. So they were so hands-off from it that

Reijo (23:13)
Yeah.

Wow.

Tatiana O'Toole (23:36)
Couple of things happened there. Well, obviously embarrassed the Dominican Republic. Embarrassed the government. The studio was finished. That was a death blow to their studio. They did a logo for a country and it was stolen. I don't know what happened to the contractors, but it was really interesting hearing from Ivan throughout the whole process of how sweet and everyone was about it.

Reijo (23:54)
RIP

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (24:04)
He was actually so kindhearted because Ivan is a fantastic human being. He actually ended up doing a logo in his free time for the Dominican Republic. I had a love for the people that reached out to him. Um, but it was, it was a fascinating story. Um, yeah, he, he would have a lot of.

Reijo (24:17)
Yeah.

Liam (24:19)
So it feels like there is no solution or even a methodology at this stage. So maybe it's a case of how it's handled after the fact. And like at scale, you're probably going to get a lot of messages on social media like, oh, layers sucks. Look at all these designs they've been stolen by my profile. So is it just a case of...

Tatiana O'Toole (24:31)
Mm.

Reijo (24:31)
Well...

Liam (24:46)
to react to those as quick as possible I guess.

Tatiana O'Toole (24:53)
I don't know man, that's hard. That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. Oh yeah, now you wanna talk community.

Reijo (24:53)
I would like, yeah, right, right. I think there's two definite things that Dribble has done wrong, that anger both the person who was stolen from and offend the community at the same time, which was A.

Liam (24:58)
It's a community problem, Tatiana.

Reijo (25:22)
Restricting feed giving an option to restrict feedback or restrict comments. That's an easy. No And to making the report the reporting system Incredibly convoluted as much as possible and incredibly inefficient at the same time Just streamlining

Liam (25:41)
Devil's advocate, I imagine the reporting system is also another thing that can be completely gamed and brutalized.

Reijo (25:48)
100% it can 100% so everything. Yeah. So you cannot trust like a machine to make the decision. Somebody has to sit there and like evaluate the data and say, yes, no, yes. No.

Tatiana O'Toole (25:51)
Oh, you see that with YouTube all the time.

Liam (25:54)
Hmm.

And your volunteering row. Ah, cheers buddy.

Reijo (26:07)
No I'm not! But I am pointing out that somebody should!

Tatiana O'Toole (26:13)
I mean, hang on, hang on, how much does that job pay? Cause I could just sit on my ass all day drinking wine and doing whatever and just seeing like, yep, that's stolen, nope, that's not. Like, let's talk, like.

Reijo (26:21)
Hahaha

Liam (26:24)
I'd imagine not a lot Tatyana, I'd imagine not a lot.

Reijo (26:26)
like a warm handshake i think at this point but maybe more at a later date

Liam (26:30)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (26:30)
Warm hand. Okay. Um, one thing I think, one thing I think is really important is that the language, um, around filing a DMCA, right? And asking for a takedown due to copyright is so intimidating and scary for people. And they, they're already in a very emotional state because it is very emotionally violating to be stolen from.

Liam (26:36)
Warm handshake.

Reijo (26:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (26:58)
You put a lot of hard work into something. Your livelihood isn't always stable. It's very, it's, it's a labor of love. We're not in it for extreme amounts of money. Right. And some dickhead somewhere in the world just decided to trace your thing, flip it, change the colors and then sell it. And it's very violating. And I think that there needs to be more care to the user at that point when it comes to reporting because they're in an emotional state.

Reijo (26:58)
Yeah.

100%. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (27:28)
And legal text is not fun for anyone. But I think especially designers, because we're abstract thinkers, and you have to like, in such a concrete way of speaking, that they're just like, have you ever tried to read your own contracts? You fall into depression. Like it's very rough trying to imagine that. But so when you're in an emotional state, your work's been stolen.

Reijo (27:32)
100%

Tatiana O'Toole (27:53)
You go to file a report and you're just like, oh, I have to do a DMC, what? I don't know what the hell that is. I can get sued if I'm wrong. Okay, I think that system could be a little more streamlined.

Liam (28:05)
Mm.

Reijo (28:06)
for sure.

Liam (28:08)
I've never actually, I've never actually filed a DMCA and I wonder why they can't just be generated. I mean, it sounds like if they're asking you to fill one in, they're just trying to dissuade you for even doing it right. Then they don't necessarily believe you. Oh, really?

Tatiana O'Toole (28:09)
the lake.

Oh, I've filed so many.

Oh god it's so much fun. I live for it. Are you kidding me? Oh my god. It got to the point where Instagram just like, I used to wait a couple of days, it was instant. It was instant that it got taken down. Like I could be like, take that down and they'd be like, okay.

Liam (28:30)
Uh, haha!

Reijo (28:43)
Nice! That's a good working relationship!

Liam (28:44)
Such power, I am a god!

Tatiana O'Toole (28:49)
Oh God, I got, I, I have qualms with Instagram. I got banned from Instagram because I used a laptop and a phone at the same time. I had like, I had around 13,000 followers at the time and all of a sudden I was banned. Couldn't use it. I was in Ireland too. So like, I'm pretty sure they're jankity ass like system. Like just, just like, oh, this is clearly a hack. Ban her.

Reijo (28:51)
Yeah.

What?

Liam (29:14)
Suspicious activity.

Reijo (29:16)
What like the deeper question here is why are you using both at the same time? Like that's a higher level of addiction. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (29:17)
The only-

desktop and mobile? Oh shh. I was coming out of the pandemic. How else? Why did you guys cope? I'm sorry, I couldn't touch another human for like a year and like I went on Instagram on my desktop and phone. You might have had your families. I didn't have anyone. I didn't have a-

Liam (29:37)
Yeah

That's what I got, a pet.

Reijo (29:46)
Yeah, okay, that... yeah. Yeah. Same! Two! Hahahaha!

Tatiana O'Toole (29:48)
I'm sorry.

Liam (29:50)
Yeah, that's pretty much what I did.

Tatiana O'Toole (29:55)
My rent would have gone up if I got a pet. But anyway, the only way I got back out of being unbanned was I knew the senior product designer at Facebook. And so I just messaged him and was like, hey, Can you unban me? And they have an internal system where,

Reijo (30:04)
Nice.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (30:10)
they can fast-track unbanning people. And I was able to get unbanned through his endeavors. And then I got banned again. And then he had to unban me again. There is something broken. I don't use Instagram on desktop anymore. I'm too scared.

Reijo (30:27)
So there's like an automatic system that sort of saw something pop up and then it just whacked it immediately without questioning.

Liam (30:37)
Mate, yeah, these systems are flipping huge. They're trying to combat spam and hackers, right? They're vast. They have to try and detect like 90% of the time, they might actually prevent a lot of bad shit, right? And like 10% of the time, 10% of the time it goes wrong.

Tatiana O'Toole (30:37)
I guess I'd...

Reijo (30:43)
Yeah, I imagine so. I imagine so. But banning an account?

I understand, yeah.

Yeah, but if you have an account with a not insignificant following, like over 10k, that sort of should signal something like a higher level of care from a machine. I don't know what that means. But you know that there's more checks in place to make sure you don't get screwed? I don't know.

Liam (31:18)
Yeah. But maybe, maybe banning is just a way of, I don't know why I'm defending them, but maybe banning is just a way to deactivate, deactivate the account. So the account is somewhat safe and can't be continuous, continue to be maliciously be used, you know?

Reijo (31:33)
Okay, that's a good point

Tatiana O'Toole (31:33)
Liam?

Liam living long enough to see himself change from the hero to the villain right now in real time.

Liam (31:45)
It's gonna happen, right?

Tatiana O'Toole (31:47)
The, but I heard of it, when I got banned, I went on like a tirade to find out other people who had gotten banned and how they got out of it. The process was insane. Like I had to find a form to fill out and it was impossible to find. When you did find it, if you entered the information too fast, a window would pop up saying like, you're behaving in a hazardous manner. And if you continue, it will be permanently blocked from, I have screenshots, I have the receipts. It was insane. And then, okay.

Liam (32:15)
Ah, that's funny.

Tatiana O'Toole (32:17)
So I had to email some, I sent out the form, I got an email back that said I had to take a photo of myself holding up a hand drawn note with a number on it and they would get back to me. And I did that, it was like, I don't know what's going on. And then I got an email back, it wasn't in English, but it was a response, it was in fucking French or like German or something and like.

Liam (32:37)
Hehe

Tatiana O'Toole (32:41)
I still didn't get unbanned. And it was like, I went on YouTube because like find other people had experienced this. And it was like, there was like a PhD student who had got banned for no reason. And she had gone through the same thing. Like her email was in German. Like it was ridiculous. And like, I heard stories about there was a guy who ran a Kanye West fan account. And it was so big that Kanye actually followed him. He got banned and he was never able to recover his account. Like, and Meadow's just like.

If you play now, they're like, well, it wasn't them, but now they're like, if you pay for a blue checkmark, you get customer service. And it's like, what? I got that like that awoke some deep past drama. I'm sorry, I had to get that out. That was horrible.

Liam (33:13)
Hehe hehehe

Reijo (33:15)
Wow.

Yeah.

Talk about being in the trenches.

Liam (33:25)
Anyway, you're both making it impossible to segue, but...

Reijo (33:31)
Let's, yeah. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (33:31)
Okay, let me look. Okay, okay, hey, Leah!

Liam (33:32)
Previously, previously, you mentioned audiences. It's all right, I got this. You mentioned audiences. We'll move on from the messaging. And obviously there's multiple audiences.

Tatiana O'Toole (33:48)
Yeah.

Reijo (33:48)
Yes.

Liam (33:50)
Designers might be more interested to share work in progress because they want feedback and I don't think they necessarily are, but clients don't really care for work in progress work. They want to see the best stuff. Is it possible to have both on the platform? And currently, I'd say tackling this, it's done very little.

Reijo (33:56)
Yes?

Liam (34:17)
but it basically puts all the work in progress posts in its own little hub and the main feeds, if you will, trending recent, the completed works. So is having a hub enough for designers? Like do designers share a lot of work in progress work? Should we be encouraging it? Should we be leaving a lot more feedback? Thoughts.

Reijo (34:24)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (34:47)
Do you want to start or shall I? Well, I think it's imperative to show the process personally. It's part of being human, it's part of the process. I think one of the most beautiful things about being in the creative field is understanding the creative process and how that applies personally to your life. You are an unfinished work. You keep going, you keep trying, you keep reiterating, you keep building and cutting that out of the creative process really kind of...

Reijo (34:47)
Go ahead Tatiana.

Tatiana O'Toole (35:17)
I feel like not only do other designers need to see it, but I feel like clients need to see it as well. I understand that there's a lot of context that needs to be added to it. Dribble was meant to be something where you passed work back and forth between designers, but it was for kind of this walled garden, right? Where all these people had all the benefits of being in this community and people could only really watch what happened on the inside. And...

Reijo (35:38)
Hmm

Tatiana O'Toole (35:46)
As a result, there was a lot of things driving that, right? The audience shift of people potentially seeing your profile. And they would judge whether or not they'd hire you based on the quality of your work. But I think there was also trying to fit in with the dribble elitism, right? You wanted to be one of the design slubs. And how could you possibly even touch a fraction of their talent if you're posting pencil sketches that look like a small child who.

Reijo (35:51)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (36:14)
gotten to their mom's wine, drank them, you know, like it, I mean, through them, it's, there's a lot going on there. And I think it really does speak to the nature of our society where we are scared to show our in work self, where we're scared to show the wrong parts of ourselves. We're scared of being wrong. We're scared of saying, I don't know. So in that, I will say, I don't know, I would really like to see works in progress. I think that

Reijo (36:14)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (36:42)
potentially with the proper labeling or I see you have a whip feed. I didn't know how you get on the whip feed. Is it just search or scan for whip anywhere in the description or tag or how does that work?

Liam (36:57)
I believe it says on the page. Layers tagged. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (37:02)
Okay, we're a community Liam.

Liam (37:03)
Layers tagged with work in progress will only appear here and under following. So it basically, if it's tagged with work in progress, which a lot of the times I don't think people realize, but they don't seem to complain about it. So they must, they must know that it's going in the, on that page and not the recent feed. Actually, people are still, people are still commenting. It seems like people actually use it and they understand it.

Tatiana O'Toole (37:22)
Well, I'm...

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but these don't really look like whips or am I just missing something?

Liam (37:37)
Well, I don't know, one person's whip is another person's finished product.

Reijo (37:42)
Yeah, exactly. I think it's a very valuable section to have for people who want to share very raw cuts of what they're making right now. But I feel like it's incredibly individualistic and personal. For me personally.

Tatiana O'Toole (37:43)
Okay, okay fair. But, wisdom!

Liam (37:49)
Ha ha!

Reijo (38:11)
I'm not going to share anything work in progress. I'm also not interested in seeing others work in progress. I'm not interested in how the sausage is made. I want to have that mystery. I want to sort of think about it myself, figure it out if I want to. I'm not interested in getting the answer for it.

Liam (38:34)
Hmm. I mean, looking at the layers work in progress feed. Yeah, like you say, Tatiana, a lot of these, a lot of these aren't work in progress at all, are they? So, which suggests it would require even more moderation to ensure that it's work in progress and... Hmm.

Reijo (38:35)
But that's my tech.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (38:54)
Well, here's a good question, right? So.

I don't know. I was going to ask, would it be beneficial if the design slubs shared whips? I think that a lot of people do appreciate works in progress. I mean, I personally love pencil sketches because I feel there's so much more raw emotion in pencil sketches than the final product. So I love those. And I think that it tells a lot more of the story and the intention.

Reijo (39:21)
For sure.

Tatiana O'Toole (39:30)
working strategizing with some people about starting a Dribbble alternative way back. One of the things we did talk about a lot was WIP and feedback. Like how do you facilitate that? Bubble House, have you ever heard of Bubble House? Bubble House was an app that came up, I think during the pandemic, it devolved into this NFT selling marketplace, which was really unfortunate.

Liam (39:48)
Nope.

Tatiana O'Toole (39:59)
but they had a option to upload the art in different stages. And you had a slider that went across that showed it. It was fascinating. It was wonderful. I probably have a video of it somewhere, if you guys want to see it in action. But it was brilliant. And I thought that was such a wonderful thing, because not only would it demonstrate to clients what processes look like, right? Because

Reijo (40:07)
Oh, okay.

Tatiana O'Toole (40:23)
How many times I've sent this goddamn picture of an octopus to a client to explain the difference between thumbnail, rough sketch, final sketch, color work and texture, I'm over it. It would be so great if they could actually physically see that and I do keep copies of those things. And it would be very beneficial for me. Plus, I am all for the education and the next generation of designers and so many of them are browsing our portfolios with a sense of awe and terror that they...

Reijo (40:23)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (40:51)
Like they're overwhelmed. Like how am I going to get to be this way? I'm struggling to pay off my debt. AI is going to take my job. What am I doing? And it's just kind of nice to be able to hand them a little bit of a bone and be like, hey, here's my shitty pencil sketches that I really love. And it's okay if you draw something like this because iterate enough and you'll get to where you need to be. I think there's a really important role in that.

Liam (41:16)
Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (41:20)
So.

Reijo (41:20)
I agree with that. I agree with that.

Liam (41:22)
Yeah, I agree. I think it's, it's more of an issue of how do you encourage people to share work in progress? How do you, how do you try and tell them that it's, it's not all about the finished product. It's not about the pixel perfection or whatever, like sharing work in progress isn't about sharing it necessarily for yourself, but for everyone else on the platform and them asking you questions about how, how did you end up with this?

Tatiana O'Toole (41:29)
Mm.

Liam (41:50)
result, like what's your process. But yeah, it does require a lot more effort to an extent and engagement with the platform, maybe.

Tatiana O'Toole (42:02)
I think the nature of the people posting as well, like a lot of designers are struggling right now. It is a very difficult time for design. A lot of illustrators are having a hard time finding work. It is tight and scary right now. And for a lot of people who have families to support while freelancing, it's a do or die. So a lot of times they don't have time to post whips. They don't have time to...

Reijo (42:28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (42:28)
look at other people's whips, they don't have time to give feedback, they don't have time to network outside of will it get them a job. And so I think I do see a lot of that on a lot of platforms, including layers, a lot of people looking for work and desperately needing it. And I think that when you reach an area where people are no longer struggling to survive, and when they have survival and they're coming up to thriving, or they are thriving,

Reijo (42:33)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (42:57)
I think that offers a lot more space for reflection and deep thinking. And I'm not sure that we have that right now. And I don't know if it's one of those chicken and egg things where it's like to get back to that, you need to reintroduce concepts like whip, conversation, discussion, banning together. I don't know. Sorry, go on.

Reijo (43:04)
That's true.

But I feel like it's very...

it's the biggest value it will offer is education, right? To both to the client and both to the, to younger, younger members of the community or less experience, I think. And that's incredibly valuable. But to make that decision to say, hey, this is how, this is my messable process. Like this is how I do things. That,

I feel like inevitably puts the person who shares it puts, I don't know how to say this, like a pressure or, you know, sort of like a now they're being in a position where they're a teacher almost, or sharing how this is, they're not, they might not even literally say like, this is how it needs to be done. They say, this is how I do it. Then the logical jump to this is how it should be done.

is very simple to make, whereas that's not how they wanted to present it. They just want to say, this is how I do it, and this is not necessarily the most right way to do it, but this is how I do it. And to avoid all of that, they just won't post it, which is the much, much more simpler way to go.

Liam (44:41)
Hmm. Yes, it does seem very plausible.

Tatiana O'Toole (44:41)
Mm. It's, you know, it's, you know, also really funny is that, um, meanwhile, Instagram has encouraged artists to very much throw their process because they've encouraged reels. And one of the only ways that static designers, people who don't animate can really share their work is showing the process by which they make their work. So it's kind of this obtuse way to getting whips back into the thing, but at the same time, it's just, it's also.

Artists hate it. I'm not gonna lie. Illustrators hate recording their process. Like it's hard enough to get like motivated enough to create art and now I gotta set up a camera and then I gotta like add a soundtrack to it and I gotta edit? Fuck, I'm so tired.

Reijo (45:23)
Like, I-

Liam (45:25)
All I heard was layers needs reels, is that right?

Reijo (45:30)
If you need an app first, then you can talk about Reels. Let's temper the expectations.

Liam (45:37)
You know when every platform was adding stories to their app? Behance did it as well, but they're still there, so they must be decent.

Reijo (45:43)
Yeah.

LinkedIn did it as well.

Tatiana O'Toole (45:48)
say that I really love my stories. I rarely post on Instagram anymore, but I connect with everyone on stories. I post things that I'm working on when I'm reading. I normally post a daily office view with the song I'm listening to, and I try to share artists that deserve more eyes on their work and my story. So I really love stories, honestly, even though for a time it was the thing to be like, they stole it from Snapchat.

Reijo (45:52)
Yeah?

Nice.

Nice.

Tatiana O'Toole (46:17)
You know, everyone wants to be Snapchat.

Reijo (46:20)
Yeah, they stole reels from TikTok. So that's how they operate.

Liam (46:21)
Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (46:24)
Mm.

Liam (46:28)
Yes, theft. Thefting is the way forward. Originality is dead.

Reijo (46:31)
Yeah. That.

Tatiana O'Toole (46:36)
See, that's a whole copyright thing, right? We just iterate on ideas, so we keep going further and further.

Liam (46:42)
Yeah. But for work in progress, let's say we want to encourage feedback, but how do you encourage feedback, but also prevent people from just leaving shitty non-useful comments? And I guess this also applies to the whole platform. Obviously, I think we... What?

Tatiana O'Toole (46:47)
Mm.

Reijo (47:03)
Have they been leaving? Have they been leaving, shitting comments?

Liam (47:09)
Maybe this is subjective. Uh, but, but yeah, I think we talked about it in the last podcast. Like sometimes, sometimes a like isn't enough. You want to say, love it, or you want to say, ah, this looks really great. Blah, blah, blah. It can, it can be legitimate, but I've often found if you leave 10 of them or multiple of them in a period of time, then it soon becomes spammy. Um, and obviously, obviously there is a, um,

Tatiana O'Toole (47:11)
Nice colors. Love it.

Reijo (47:13)
Oh wow.

That's true.

Liam (47:38)
An inkling for specific types of people to leave comments just so it puts their link, their username on that layer. So potentially someone might click through. So is there a way we can discourage such quote unquote spammy comments if you can determine when they're spammy?

Reijo (47:53)
I feel like...

You know what you could do? And this is, I think, a borderline stupid idea, but I think it would be an interesting solution. Is to, like, we know we can sort out the top, let's say, 25 most spammiest comments that people leave. Nice, cool, very cool, very nice, nice colors. You can make the comment box...

Liam (48:07)
I love stupid ideas.

Reijo (48:27)
understand when such a comment is being written and then it pops up a little tag that says for fuck's sake like you're a creative person you can do better than this like believe in yourself for a minute for a minute you can do better than this yeah and you can and you can still leave that comment you can still leave that comment but then you will be sort of

Liam (48:35)
Ha ha

Oh, mate.

Tatiana O'Toole (48:44)
believe in yourself. I think that's the winner right there.

Liam (48:49)
Mate, I'm gonna implement that. I'm gonna implement that tomorrow.

You can still leave it, surely not? No, you wouldn't, really? No.

Reijo (48:58)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (48:59)
Do you like the little comment with a little dunce hat on it? Where it's like you answer like, it's like a really like...

Reijo (49:05)
A little clown emoji. Hehehehe.

Tatiana O'Toole (49:08)
Yes! Oh my God. There was, because I'm on layers right now and I'm looking through the comments and they're just like,

It's, there's, they're interesting. The kind of the spammy comments I'm getting. I like, all right, so how to end spam comments. I guess you have to look at like why people are leaving them in the first place, right? To link them back to their profile so they get more sites on their own work. And then, so it's really, it's really based on the concept that more followers equals more chance at getting hired for projects. So they're financially motivated to leave these comments.

Reijo (49:35)
Yeah.

self-serving.

Tatiana O'Toole (49:50)
And even further back, they're surviving by leaving these comments, by making sure that people are, they stay relevant. A lot of them are getting their egos fed off this as well, because a lot of designers want to be a celebrity designer. They want to be the guru, the one that people go to. That's why there's so many goddamn idiots saying, like telling you like, this is how you design a logo. I don't like, we get it. We get it. The logo has to be scalable. I don't.

Reijo (50:17)
Three new colors you must use in your next design. Yeah, honestly.

Tatiana O'Toole (50:21)
Kill me, I don't want to know, I'm so over it. But like, I think that there's, that is a problem that originates from outside of a system that you can control, so it's really a matter of like, how do you change the tone within layers? And can you do that? Because people are coming to your site for money. They're not coming to the site right now.

They may be coming to the site for community, but at the end of the day, people want to get paid. Like Rayo said, 95% of his messages are work. He wants to get paid. He doesn't want to see whips. He wants to get paid. How do you address that? And I think that designers are in a state of survival right now, and I don't think that they can really pull out of it, which I think begs the question of like, how do we protect designers then? So I don't know.

Reijo (51:00)
Straight to the point.

What is a non-survival state in your opinion?

Tatiana O'Toole (51:21)
on survival state, I mean, not having to worry about like, I think living paycheck to paycheck is just barely surviving. Right?

Reijo (51:29)
Do you think that's possible even?

Tatiana O'Toole (51:34)
What do you mean? Sorry, what?

Reijo (51:36)
like for the design community at whole. I understand your opinion is that we're sort of like in a survival state or like it feels like things are just going downhill, right? Is that correct? What do you... Yeah? Okay.

Tatiana O'Toole (51:49)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a broad statement, but I do believe that a lot of designers are feeling sorry. I work a lot in broad statements because I'm moving fast.

Liam (51:59)
Rayo is doing really well. He's just being polite. I've got loads of work.

Tatiana O'Toole (52:04)
Hehehehe!

Reijo (52:05)
I'm trying to understand. I think I have a gathering of what you think about how things are now, but I want to understand what do you feel like we should get to? How does the world then look like?

Tatiana O'Toole (52:18)
Mm.

Reijo (52:21)
for designers.

Tatiana O'Toole (52:21)
That's a good question. It's one of those things where it's like, I don't know what it is, but I know this ain't it. It's not great here. I know that a lot of people kind of resort to being design puppets for their clients, and it's exhausting. It's demoralizing. They're very tired of not being able to be.

Reijo (52:30)
That's true.

But yes, I agree with you. But I also what I just what I realized over like a past year, I think, is that people have a lot of very, I don't want to say the word like inflammatory, but people have a lot of strong opinions about design. But the disconnect between the opinions starts from the fact that people treat.

Tatiana O'Toole (52:50)
Mm-hmm.

Reijo (53:13)
design in their lives in very different ways. What design to some people is just a way to feel like feel better than others. Just I'm a better designer than X, Y or Z. For some it's just a 9 to 5 job. For some it's just a creative outlet that they happen to get paid for. And there's like there's such a huge variance in personal commitment to the design. And through that the opinions vary as much as well. I think that's...

Tatiana O'Toole (53:32)
Mm.

Reijo (53:43)
partially why the design subscriptions are as sort of polarizing as they are because some people Literally treat it like a night like a like a like a very simple I have a I have a shovel here. I need a hole here Please let's dig the hole kind of a job, which is not I don't think there's anything wrong with that per se if that's the connection you want to have and if you're great at it like more power to you, but there are other people who feel like

Fuck, like he's doing that and that's absolutely depressing to me, which means he's wrong. Which I don't think is the case. I think like design has like room for everybody to find kind of find where their power is. I had a point too, but I don't know where I wanted to go with that. I'm sorry. I forgot.

Liam (54:38)
I don't know, they're all valid points. Yeah, the audience is... Gone.

Tatiana O'Toole (54:42)
We were talking about stopping people from leaving shit comments. And that's where we're at. Does that help you?

Reijo (54:57)
Not significantly. HAHA

Liam (54:58)
Yeah

Tatiana O'Toole (55:01)
Okay.

Liam (55:02)
No, it was...

It was, it was, it was more than that. It was more than that. I guess, I guess in, in any market, there are going to be some people that are struggling, there are going to be some people that are doing okay and there are going to be some people that are doing well and, uh, better than most. And maybe it's a minority, but yeah, like a community such as layers kind of. Doesn't have to appeal to all of these people, but it should maybe try to.

Reijo (55:21)
Mmm.

I agree.

Liam (55:35)
Um...

But yeah, how you make that...

Tatiana O'Toole (55:39)
when.

Liam (55:45)
Is there a word appropriate or managed to meet each use case? I mean, there's so many different use cases. If you really think about it, it's, it's hard to find a middle ground to everything.

Reijo (55:55)
That's true.

Tatiana O'Toole (56:02)
When, to Rhea's point, when I struggle to think about the design as a whole, how it works, how it should work, I have to remind myself that I'm working in an abstract space, and we don't really prioritize education and how to think in abstract spaces, right? We're very well versed in working in the physical space. If I grab this glass and throw it and smash it, then I have to pick up all the broken pieces.

Reijo (56:09)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (56:31)
in a abstract space, I can mentally throw this glass and break it, but I don't have to pick up the pieces that fall on the ground. So we're very detached from the consequences of our actions in abstract spaces. And so design, when you are hired by a company to create a design and they want to forego any sort of user research because they claim to understand their user, we don't feel.

Reijo (56:37)
100%

Tatiana O'Toole (56:58)
the consequences of that because it's in an abstract space. And if there are any physical consequences of it, we won't witness them because it's far away because the digital space can reach a lot of different places. So I would argue, and this is something I'm working on right now, trying to avoid talking about it because I'm currently obsessed with it, but I'm arguing the point for

Reijo (57:11)
Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (57:25)
as much as architects and building creators, builders are responsible for safety evaluations and standards in buildings, we should be doing that with design. And I think that people try, but at the same time, it's not always financially beneficial to be ethical.

Reijo (57:41)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (57:55)
follow guidelines like that?

Reijo (57:57)
I would argue this is never financially beneficial.

Tatiana O'Toole (58:01)
Yeah, go stream. I'm fine with that. Um, but... Yeah. The thing I'm writing...

Reijo (58:03)
Yeah, does that make sense? I feel like it's... That's the majority of the cases.

Tatiana O'Toole (58:10)
The thing I'm writing is literally called design ethics and the impact of capitalism. So please join me in my extremism. But essentially we don't connect those consequences with our actions, so we think that it's fine doing that. But in reality, so many bad design decisions ruin people's lives, you know?

Reijo (58:33)
That's... yes. I think that, I think with that, the problem is the barrier of entry. You can, you can essentially get Figma for free and you can, if you're, if you're, if you put your mind to it, you can get a job next week as a designer of some sort, it is within the realm of possibility as an architect, it's like learning to become a doctor. That takes.

Tatiana O'Toole (58:56)
Mm.

Reijo (59:03)
a lot of funding and that takes years of effort. So that sort of supports the regulations I think that are in place. Whereas when you essentially have an increasingly large free for all that's happening in digital design or in design in general, it's going to be very difficult to regulate this because this is essentially the wild west. You can do what you want.

But you can always count on the better product will survive more likely. It's more likely that the better product will survive, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the better product is better designed. It just does the thing it's supposed to for the business better. That doesn't mean that the user will find it better, I think.

Tatiana O'Toole (59:44)
Mm.

Oh, OK, sorry. Better is a very subjective term. And I thought for a second you meant better designed. Yes. You mean.

Reijo (1:00:05)
Correct. It doesn't mean that it's better designed, it just serves the purpose better.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:00:10)
So you basically mean that the most financially viable product is most likely the one that will survive versus the one that meets its users' needs the most.

Reijo (1:00:22)
I think there's always what digital products are doing or striking the balance between this is a good decision for the business, this is a bad decision for the user. And they're sort of riding the wave of like, okay, this is a good decision for the user, let's do this. We'll lose a little bit of money on that, but we'll make it up later.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:00:33)
Hmm.

the trolley problem.

I'm sorry.

Reijo (1:00:49)
Design doesn't necessarily even have to enter that conversation. That's just the, that's like a tactics and strategy kind of thing.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:01:01)
that strategy is imperative for any sort of design, because if you don't understand what you're building and why, then how do you know if you've successfully built the thing? Yeah.

Reijo (1:01:07)
I for sure, for sure. Like I think you either the strategy is written, the strategy is written or you or like beforehand, or you write the strategy as you do it one way or the other, it's going to happen, but you get to choose.

Liam (1:01:12)
Is layers a success?

Reijo (1:01:26)
I think.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:01:26)
that Liam, what did you say there? I'm so sorry.

Liam (1:01:30)
I was just stirring the pot. I was gonna say is layers a success?

Reijo (1:01:33)
Ah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:01:35)
I mean...

Reijo (1:01:38)
So far, yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:01:40)
I mean, you haven't died. Like, I think that's really successful, Liam. Like, you haven't died. You haven't killed anyone.

Reijo (1:01:42)
That's true. Yeah, that's true and the site is still online.

Liam (1:01:47)
He's saying my life is dependent on layers.

Reijo (1:01:49)
Yes, yes, yes. But to be real, like...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:01:52)
No, I mean like, I mean, what's your definition of success?

Liam (1:01:57)
God, if layers fails, I'm going to be very worried. Ha ha ha.

Reijo (1:02:00)
How long do you think layers will stay operational if you die tomorrow?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:02:09)
That's so mean!

Liam (1:02:10)
Uh, uh, I don't know. I think AWS stops, turns it off after like two months. You haven't paid your bills two months.

Reijo (1:02:21)
But if the bills are paid, then it keeps on trucking.

Liam (1:02:27)
Actually, my partner might take over. She'd be like, oh, got to keep this going. I'd have to write a will. Christ. I'm not that prepared.

Reijo (1:02:29)
Ah, it goes in the will, yeah.

If you don't... I recently found out that if you don't ride a wheel for IP, King gets half of your shit over in the UK. Is that true?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:02:38)
You haven't written a will!

Liam (1:02:48)
Uh, yes. I don't know. Ha ha ha.

Reijo (1:02:53)
Motherfucker.

Liam (1:02:54)
I mean...

I love the Royals, I'm sure they'll do a bang up job.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:03:02)
too much.

Reijo (1:03:02)
That is the correct opinion. I applaud you.

Liam (1:03:07)
They'll ban all the foreigners, they'll be fine. Wait a minute.

Reijo (1:03:10)
Hahahaha

Tatiana O'Toole (1:03:13)
I almost made a joke about Kate Middleton and her Photoshop skills on layers, but I um, and I remember there was horrible news about that, that we just, yeah. Um, yeah. Yes.

Reijo (1:03:24)
OHHHHH UGH I now- I- I only now connected to dots

Liam (1:03:24)
Yes, there were reasons for that.

And when does this recording go out Tatiana? What are you saying? Who knows where she'll be?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:03:32)
welcome. God, that's horrible. But okay, so back layers. What was our question? What were we initially? Okay, we were talking about

Reijo (1:03:38)
Woo!

Liam (1:03:47)
Well, we've deviated spectacularly, like in a spectacular fashion, but I can segue to something.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:03:59)
Hang on, there was like a really important point there. Okay, we were talking about whips.

Reijo (1:04:04)
Yes?

Liam (1:04:05)
That was half an hour ago.

Reijo (1:04:07)
Poor quality comments. Yes.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:07)
B A S H

Liam (1:04:10)
Yeah, the last thing we were talking about was poor quality comments.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:10)
Poor quality content. Thriving. Oh, we were talking about the ethical obligation of a designer to basically kind of guide the client or to let the client guide them, essentially. Yes. And I am arguing that design needs to step up more and put their foot down more and be like, no, that's unethical. No, that is, yes, that is ethical. We need to come together because.

Reijo (1:04:19)
Ah yes, yes.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:04:38)
What we do is in a very abstract space most of the time, and we don't recognize how that impacts people. And it has very problematic results.

Reijo (1:04:49)
Yes, yes, but it's also, it's a difficult decision to make when they're paying, they're calling the shots. So people of various levels of experience, I think will find it hard to say, no, this is a stupid idea, we should do X, Y or Z. Or, you know, this is, I think this is a skill of communication that needs to be learned in somehow. But you have to be even interested in learning this.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:05:00)
Mm.

Mm.

Reijo (1:05:19)
skill of negotiating and communicating or understanding that maybe I should say no or maybe should I suggest to them a more ethically appropriate solution.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:05:33)
Mm.

Speaking of community care, can I try segue?

Liam (1:05:39)
Please. It's already great so far.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:05:43)
The bar is very high, I recognize.

Speaking of community, how do we handle such a large community that spans internationally and has different markets, different cost of living? How does that impact pricing on layers? It's certainly impacted a bit of pricing on Dribbble from my opinion. And I think that at the end of the day, it's really important to recognize that this is a problem that doesn't exist because of layers, it exists outside of layers and it's student.

capitalism and then inequality in the world. How do you write that as a platform? Liam, solve the problem now.

Reijo (1:06:21)
Yeah.

Liam (1:06:28)
I've got another question. Should you have a, well, it's similar, but should you have general salaries across the world or should they be location dependent? I guess this applies to a lot of digital roles, maybe not graphic design roles per se, but things that can be done remotely, well, graphic design can be done remotely.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:06:42)
Oh

Reijo (1:06:51)
I think it's definitely good for you to understand what people in remote roles are being paid for this job that you are doing. That doesn't speak to your level of skill or experience, but I think it would be good for you to understand at least what the bulk part is. That's a good starting point. Whether you can negotiate to that, that's on your own. That's up to you.

Liam (1:07:18)
As in from the employee side or the contractor.

Reijo (1:07:20)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Liam (1:07:25)
Hmm.

Reijo (1:07:26)
Or whether you want to, that's a question altogether, I think as well.

Liam (1:07:31)
So it's not unfair that someone in India or South Africa is earning twice or three times less than someone in San Francisco.

for the same job.

Reijo (1:07:46)
No, I think it's globally unfair because then you're comparing, literally comparing numbers. Like one is a much bigger number than the other. Sounds pretty unfair to me. But when you niche it down to like, okay, what's the situation in South Africa? Like when you reduce the sort of... I don't have a...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:08:02)
Mm.

Reijo (1:08:14)
vocabulary good enough to explain this, I think. But what I'm trying to get at is, does the same, does the pay that is being provided to let's say a South African person equate to as much purchasing power as a person in San Francisco with a substantially larger pay?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:08:41)
I think that that's a really hard topic to talk about because you're talking about different costs of living. And a lot of times this can be, God, how do you, it can.

It really sucks that a designer in New York City is on the same platform that somebody can like charge half of what they need to charge and still make more than anyone around them where they're currently living. Like it pulls down the costs that designer in New York City can charge. But it also pulls up the, what the other person can charge. There are some positives to it for sure.

Reijo (1:09:12)
That's true.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:09:24)
It's just a matter of where do you find the equilibrium? Do you think clients from both locations could come to the same place? But that sucks from that end too. Like you have a client from let's say South Africa that has a smaller budget than someone who is living in New York city and they're coming here and like, I need a logo design and hell yeah, they need a logo design. And they go and contact a logo designer and they're like $50,000. And the guy's like, excuse you? I can't afford that.

So it's, I don't know, it is really difficult because you're having a global market meet unfiltered against each other and there's not a great solution and I wish there was so badly for both sides.

Reijo (1:10:02)
Yes.

Yeah, to be honest, one of the reasons I have liked Tribble for a long time was the remote-only approach to actually how they run their own business. They did it before the pandemic happened. They're one of the companies who had the strong remote culture beforehand. And I think that from a very early on...

put my sights on, okay, this is what I want to do. Like I don't want to move. I don't want to go to fucking San Francisco. I want to stay where I am, but I want to work in a global team. Like I want to work with people all around the world. And I think that was important. I like money didn't even enter the conversation for me for a long time. I just wanted to work like on a remote team with a lot of people from a lot of different cultures, a lot of different backgrounds. That was the thing I...

I wanted to do and this thing I still want to do. But money always complicates the conversation in some sense. It may or it may not.

Liam (1:11:22)
It's to me, it sounds like it's more just of an awareness issue. It's like making it clear that this person is coming from a location. I mean, like anything, it requires more data from the user. You need to know where they are to implement this, but it's, it's like this. This person comes from a location where the cost of living is a percentage difference from.

Reijo (1:11:28)
Yes.

Yeah.

Liam (1:11:52)
where you are currently living. And this is why their budget is X. You can choose to reduce your rate for this location or pass, it's up to you.

Reijo (1:12:14)
I feel like this is a topic that somebody who's been in design for at least 30 years will have a good take on it. I've only been here for such a short time, I feel, that I'm not experienced enough in how the culture has changed. Yeah, how the culture has changed from the 90s to now. Because there's been several significant shifts.

Liam (1:12:33)
Just 29 years.

Hmm.

Reijo (1:12:44)
And also in the worth, not only that we're more globalized, there's more remote opportunities, but also design is being constantly valued either more or less.

Liam (1:13:01)
Also, the trouble is you can't reach middle ground because people on the upper tier will be missing out. So you can't just be like, this is the design currency or the layers currency or whatever. This is how much rates are depending on skills, experience, blah, blah.

Reijo (1:13:11)
Yeah. All right.

Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:13:22)
But the solution is to create your own crypto and everyone gets paid in layers crypto, obviously.

Liam (1:13:24)
communist.

I've actually...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:13:34)
You looked so dead inside when I was saying that, Ray.

Liam (1:13:39)
I've actually thought about that for crowdfunding.

Reijo (1:13:44)
You know, fuck it. Fuck it. Why not? Like I've had this, I've had this, I have a lot of clients in crypto. And like every time I have a new client in crypto or a new project in crypto, I'm constantly reminded of how little I understand how that sphere of technology works at all and how they find their like little niches, how to make money.

Liam (1:13:48)
Lez coin.

Reijo (1:14:15)
It feels like a completely separate world that doesn't exist, that operates on its own rules basically. Yeah, it's the Wild West, right? I don't know.

Liam (1:14:24)
just creating it right they're making it out of nothing

Tatiana O'Toole (1:14:32)
Do you guys like little video editorials, like little video essays on topics?

Reijo (1:14:42)
Oh, I loved them.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:14:43)
Okay, have you watched Folding Ideas? Have you watched his thing?

Reijo (1:14:47)
I know the channel, I know the channel but I don't think so.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:14:53)
It's fantastic. It's about three hours long and I think I've watched it about four times. It's so good. It's, God, what is it called? The Line Goes Up. And it equates the rise of NFTs and crypto with the housing market bubble of 2008. I highly recommend it. I think he's a brilliant human. I absolutely love his video essays.

Reijo (1:14:55)
Yeah.

Oh nice. Nice.

I've... Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:15:21)
Um, especially that one. He also did one of on toxic masculinity and fight club. That is absolutely fantastic. Um, I highly recommend that one as well, but, uh, the, uh, the NFT one is very good. And I'm not, you know, in the, in light of, you know, making sure this is an inclusive space, I'm not going to say what I really think of crypto and NFTs, but.

Reijo (1:15:27)
Oooooooh

Liam (1:15:44)
Ugh, what a cop out. Boo!

Reijo (1:15:44)
Is it an inclusive space then? Because you're excluding yourself from it

Tatiana O'Toole (1:15:55)
If y'all want to buy it, it's on foundation. If you buy it, it is a scam. You are buying the concept of a JPEG, but you will give me money and I will be happy. So if anyone wants to buy my NFT, it's of my black widow spider and it's on foundation. I have a four letter username that surely is valuable.

Reijo (1:16:14)
To some people, I think just supporting the artist, that's already enough. They can get something back from it, I think that's a bonus.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:16:22)
Mm.

Reijo (1:16:24)
And also money laundering. But that's a separate topic.

Liam (1:16:26)
Hahaha!

Tatiana O'Toole (1:16:32)
Yes. It's interesting still seeing designs with NFTs and them showing up on layers. It was like, I thought the gig was up. I thought we were done with this. Maybe I missed something. Maybe there's something there.

Reijo (1:16:47)
This is exactly what I feel all the time. I thought that it was up, but there's so much money still going around in coins and in crypto in general that unless the money is somehow siphoned out of it finally through a massive

Liam (1:16:51)
Is that all Rayo's work?

Mm.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:17:15)
really fucked up story and like can I just say like if you want to cut right here like the

Reijo (1:17:18)
Please do.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Liam (1:17:24)
This is this has already reached my editing limit of none.

Reijo (1:17:29)
None, yeah. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:17:29)
It's okay, you got one. The only person to have sent me an unsolicited dick pic is the only person I know now who is still into crypto and NFTs.

Liam (1:17:32)
Go ahead.

There's no correlation.

Reijo (1:17:45)
That's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. And his bio reads entrepreneur. That's the thing that's still missing. Right. So.

Liam (1:17:48)
strictly a coincidence.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:17:53)
I think not. No, it's like I use a buddy of mine.

Oh god yeah. Oh god. He, he said it was over, it was over Snapchat and he put like, you know the text that comes across in the line? It just said vibes over. It was horrible. Oh yeah.

Liam (1:18:07)
Multi-printer

Oh man, he sounds so cool.

Reijo (1:18:17)
What sort of fucking vibes?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:18:26)
I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? He's like, sorry, dude, I'm so high right now. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? But we got into it on Facebook about NFTs. And I was like, buddy, just so you know, it's a scam. Just letting you know. He's like, I see that's where you're wrong. And a lot of people don't understand NFTs. And I was like, great, I'm going to get mansplained. This is what it feels like to be mansplained. I'm so excited for this.

Reijo (1:18:31)
Eh.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:18:55)
that someone's going to explain NFTs to me. Thank God, especially the man who is so high, he sent me a picture of his dick with vibes captioned across it.

Reijo (1:18:58)
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Truly a work of art.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:19:08)
Jesus Christ! Oh my god!

Liam (1:19:11)
Rao and I can only dream to be such man.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:19:15)
Oh God, like, and I think there's certain people, I think everyone should admit to this, you guys can admit to this, this is a safe space. There were friends of certain people on social media, just so we, we're only friends with people on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, whatever, just so we can watch the dumpster fire. Just so that we can like watch them

Reijo (1:19:15)
Oh, right, right?

Liam (1:19:18)
What a god.

Reijo (1:19:20)
Shut.

Liam (1:19:28)
It's not.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:19:43)
just really be like there is somebody I'm not even going to use.

Liam (1:19:47)
I'm gonna need to know names here. What are the names? I need to follow these people.

Reijo (1:19:49)
HAHAHAHA

Tatiana O'Toole (1:19:51)
Only- only- the names will come when we're not being recorded, and then the receipts will come.

Reijo (1:19:56)
Nice.

Liam (1:19:56)
Friend request from Liam. This is all getting cut, you said.

Reijo (1:20:03)
Oh god.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:03)
God, um, be fair, I'm sorry.

Reijo (1:20:07)
I feel like I'm running to my mental Rolodex of people who I follow on Instagram, which is I think...

Which is the tool I would use the most for this but I follow like I think four thousand people on Instagram So my feed is just an ocean of ocean of content just constant updating I don't see shit like I don't see my friends getting married. They have them having a baby. No, none of that exists It just gets washed away immediately

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:23)
Mm.

Okay. Okay, okay buddy. You're gonna, okay, you're gonna come at me for having my desktop, Instagram, and my phone Instagram open at the same time, but you follow so many people that you can just like.

Reijo (1:20:53)
Yeah, I screwed myself with this one. Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. There's so many interesting accounts to follow. That's the problem. I can never get enough.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:20:58)
There you go.

True, I miss the days of like old Instagram and Dribbble when it really was just about finding people that you really resonated with and like getting really passionate about what you've created. I miss that so much. I miss finding and.

Reijo (1:21:21)
And now to exactly, let's now beautifully segue back into how to take that and put it into layers.

Liam (1:21:23)
The thing is with Dribbble, people want to go back to the original Dribbble.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:21:29)
You are bull talking!

Liam (1:21:32)
It's all right, this is still in the edit. But people go on about like, oh, I want the nice dribble back. I want it when it was good. It's like, it still had its fucking issues, you guys. You were just more deluded back then. This was new to you. You were like, this is exciting. I'm starting my design career. This is the only platform. It's so great. It's so good. You've got like two likes, and no one's

Tatiana O'Toole (1:21:33)
Hehehe

Reijo (1:21:42)
What was it then?

Yeah, it was just smaller scale.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:21:46)
Yen, you're right! You were right!

Well... Well, okay.

Reijo (1:21:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, you have irrational nostalgia for it.

Liam (1:22:01)
Oh, I love it. I've had such good memories. Do you actually, if you went back 10 years ago, I suspect a lot of you people, myself included, I was there. Trust me.

Reijo (1:22:06)
Yeah.

This is the real take.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:22:18)
of Dribbble, I was there. Well, I mean, well, okay, so the thing about Dribbble was it was really good for a very select few. And that was it. And everyone saw it be really good, and they remember it being really good, and they remember maybe even experiencing a part of that, but it wasn't great. And if we're still in the edit, are we still in the edit?

Liam (1:22:18)
To be fair, it was great.

Reijo (1:22:40)
Who knows? Liam will figure.

Liam (1:22:40)
know when we can cut this in. Well, now we're talking. The thing is, you talk about it and we can't cut it in.

Reijo (1:22:48)
Well, no, I think it's fair to say, listen, we said some things that shouldn't have been said. We're going to cut this out for the sake of our careers.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:22:48)
It's like, do you guys remember the game?

Liam (1:23:02)
You have to have some sort of continuity route.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:23:05)
I'm so sorry.

Reijo (1:23:06)
Fucking... Your sense of continuity will be beautifully messed with by the light that's dying outside right now. It used to be daylight when we started this, now it's night outside.

Liam (1:23:18)
Oh for fuck's sake, stop! That's true, that's true. Why is it just cut to Rayo in his... Dark room!

Tatiana O'Toole (1:23:26)
Just a disclaimer, just cut to a disclaimer that says we found it really difficult to stay on topics, so I did cut some parts where we went off on a rant about perfectly normal and innocent things where we definitely didn't insult anyone.

Reijo (1:23:38)
That's a good excuse. I like that excuse. Yeah, I like that excuse.

Liam (1:23:43)
Sure. Okay, it's been six minutes or seven minutes since I made a note of the cut. So shall we, we can, to be honest, there's only a couple of things that I'm interested to address and then we can kind of call it a day there because it's already been about, yeah, it's almost two hours, which is quite long.

Reijo (1:23:58)
Yeah.

Let's try to get through it.

Liam (1:24:06)
How the fuck do we start this?

Tatiana O'Toole (1:24:07)
Yeah, yeah, speaking of which, I think you might have to turn a light on where you're at, Rao. It's starting to like get that computer screen glow.

Liam (1:24:16)
Oh yeah. Yeah. That yellow hue is way better. It's even more obvious. It's fine. I don't, I don't care. If anything, people will tweet, we'll be like, why did Rayo get darker? Well, I don't know. Who knows?

Reijo (1:24:20)
Oh yeah, it's fucked either way.

Welcome to the Northern Hemisphere!

Liam (1:24:37)
Welcome to episode number five of the Official Layers Podcast.

Reijo (1:24:41)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:24:44)
Okay, so do you want to go back in? Is everyone ready?

Reijo (1:24:46)
All right. Yes.

Liam (1:24:48)
Yeah, yeah. The thing is, I wish I knew where it kind of ended so I could kind of try a segue, but oh well.

Okay, so the other thing I kind of wanted to address was curation of a front page. Like currently Layers doesn't really have a front page, it's just like the Explore trending page. And I was hoping one day it would have like some sort of home page. I always thought it could be a bit more customized, not just feeds, but designers, popular designers at the time or new designers, yada yada.

Reijo (1:25:13)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Liam (1:25:32)
But I'm curious to hear of the dreaded algorithm. What is the best way to curate what you see on the front page? Is it simply based on likes, views? Is there some sort of human creation? What do you think is the best way? To appease everyone, which is impossible. So that's why I'm asking you.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:26:00)
What if you had a mathematical handicap for people like golf? Back to golf. You guys love golf, remember? What happens if they, like people with a lot of followers had a handicap where they had to perform over a certain number in order to start trending and where if people started doing, and then you ruin the follow for likes thing, right?

Reijo (1:26:07)
Back to Gov. Right?

Liam (1:26:08)
apparently.

Interesting.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:26:27)
because your handicap will go up. And that would be an interesting way of tackling that. I don't know what the math would be.

Liam (1:26:34)
So it would have to be based on followers, right? It would have to be based on followers. So the more followers you have, the less the likes that you get mean, the less value they have.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:26:42)
Yeah.

Reijo (1:26:44)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:26:46)
Would that encourage fake profiles being built?

so that they could start fresh, no followers, get posts jetted to the front page.

Reijo (1:26:55)
Well, whatever they do, it's going to be an uphill battle for them every time, I think.

Like you can start from scratch but...

Liam (1:27:06)
The other point is you want to reward good work and great work. And if it just so happens to be coming from the same people, it's like, well...

Reijo (1:27:12)
Mm, that's true.

Are you gonna stop talented people from posting?

Liam (1:27:23)
Yes. Band.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:27:23)
Like, I mean, there's certain designers that I've unfollowed because it doesn't matter if I'm following them or not. I'm gonna see their work reposted about 30 times every time they drop something because they have like this. Yes, because I'm gonna see it anyway. I'm gonna see it so much. Like, I'm so tired of it. Why is that messed up?

Reijo (1:27:38)
That's made you unfollow them?

That's messed up.

I'm trying to think through it. I understand. Yeah, yeah, I understand. But it feels like you're doing the...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:27:53)
Okay, let me...

They don't follow me! It's not like I'm polling a-

Reijo (1:28:03)
I understand, I understand. But then you're rewarding the people who didn't do the work, who just reposted it. And even worse, if they're one of those who show the work and then hide the link in the replies, that's even worse. And then those people get rewarded, you know.

Liam (1:28:22)
Oh, don't like that.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:28:24)
Oh God, I wrote a whole thing on that, like how inspiration pages steal your work on Instagram. And I, so many of them, I got, no, well, I'm not talking about inspiration pages. I'm talking about like the people who like have a cult following to like some design sluts. Yeah, genuine. Like, but they're like, oh my God, can't believe this new thing by so and so. Thanks.

Liam (1:28:25)
I don't like that.

Reijo (1:28:33)
So your reward? Yeah.

Like genuine. Like genuinely, yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:28:52)
oh my god, I can breathe again, nowadays post it again, and I can share this work. And then there's like 75 more of them sharing like the same work, and I'm just like, it's flooding my feed, and it's just like, okay, I got it, I got it, I see their work, thank you. But I did post.

Liam (1:29:09)
Are those reposts? How does that work? Are they just sharing the same art, the same design? And not say... and reference something? Alright. I didn't use Instagram, sorry.

Reijo (1:29:15)
Like, read tweets.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:29:15)
Yeah, like retweets or... Yeah.

Yeah. I'm talking about Twitter, Instagram, like Instagram you can share, post your stories. Yeah. It just, yeah. But I ended up writing a thing about how the inspiration pages use your work and post tons of people's work, constantly bury their username and then use that as kind of like a...

Liam (1:29:25)
All right. Right.

Reijo (1:29:31)
Okay.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:29:44)
fake portfolio where it's like look at all this inspiration and then they bury the person who's writing it who has made the artwork and then use their artwork just yeah and it

Reijo (1:29:51)
Yeah, it's scamy. Yeah. It's garbage.

Liam (1:29:54)
Yeah. I think it's an, it's an algorithm play though, right? I think Twitter's, Twitter's algorithm for whatever, will give you less reach if you put an external link. So it's like, if, if layers was to do it, layers account would maybe grow and layers itself would grow at the same time. It's not necessarily that ethical, right? It's not as good as just sourcing them immediately. Yeah.

Reijo (1:29:58)
Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:29:59)
Oh yeah.

Reijo (1:30:05)
Dude.

I think there are...

Yeah.

Yeah, at what cost?

And I think there are what we call inspiration pages. I think there are genuine examples of people starting, like people starting like almost like a public collection of bookmarks. You know, they just wanted to start a page where they, through which they share things that only they find cool, which is I think an interesting, and could be a very useful tool for taste-making, I think.

But most likely that's not the case in general. It's a way to find leverage on creators, on selling them a spot in the posting. Like, hey, we now have, let's say, 10,000 followers. We want to sell you like $20. Give me $20, I'll post you next. Stuff like that, I think.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:31:26)
Yeah, and what a lot of times they do is they would end up doing posts for free for design celebs, artists, and things like that. So it looked like they were paying for it, or it would just be, that was the good stuff, you know, that was the good stuff that we get the clients in. And it's so frustrating because so many of these problems originate from outside of this community. Like, I mean, well, within. But like,

Reijo (1:31:38)
Yeah. Let's just imagine it. Yeah.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:31:55)
It's things that are going to be forever outside of your control. And how are you going to ever find that balance of building a product that achieves what you want, which is design community, right?

Reijo (1:32:08)
Liam just wants to make it sell it off to the VCs. There's no design community involved here.

Liam (1:32:13)
Yeah, I'm just here for the money. I just want a massive exit.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:32:16)
Hehehehehe!

Reijo (1:32:18)
Great!

Liam (1:32:23)
No, I think, I think community in general, though, you have to learn to have quite a thick skin because whatever you do is obviously going to be controversial and you're going to have haters and you're going to have people that are on board. But, uh, yeah, I'm slowly learning that one. And I think it's only going to get worse or better, whatever your perspective.

Reijo (1:32:30)
Yeah.

I think it will get worse but I think you will get better at dealing with it.

Liam (1:32:52)
Yes, I like to think so.

Reijo (1:32:53)
which I don't know if there's any solace to be found in that. But I don't think this is a business that somebody who is ultra sensitive can stay in for a long time, I think. Design in general, I think, is such.

Liam (1:33:06)
Mmm.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:33:10)
Mm.

Liam (1:33:10)
We shall see. If it correlates with money that might help.

Reijo (1:33:13)
That might help, right? That might help.

Liam (1:33:18)
But yeah, I don't, I don't seriously, I don't envy people who run and try and maintain or manage communities. It's a, uh, it's, it's well, no, it's, it's just more, uh, it's a controversial in every sense on almost every topic and almost every change you make, um, even no matter how long the team has thought about it, like for, for the users, for the members, it's just an instant change. It's, uh,

Reijo (1:33:26)
It was a thankless job.

Liam (1:33:48)
Yeah, it's tough. I'm curious to see what the changes will be to layers. That'll be so controversial. It's like, oh, we thought about this for months and we thought it was a great idea. What? You've just ruined our lives. What?

Reijo (1:33:59)
Well, I think...

Yeah, I think the case with layers is a little bit less constrained because you've come out the gate with already restricting gamifying behaviors that work on other platforms. You took away the likes, you took away the following. This is a topic that you're actively investigating and trying to make better all the time to avoid the same pitfalls that other platforms have made.

And I think that gives you a bit more leeway in sort of rolling out features that could be, could be in other instances called controversial, but they would make sense in layers because layers has, has it sort of groundwork in, in a different place than like, let's say Drupal or Behance or Instagram for the worst.

Liam (1:34:55)
Yeah, I think honestly right now it's very easy and safe because it's just me, but as soon as you have a team, as soon as you have employees, it becomes very difficult.

Reijo (1:35:03)
As soon as there's somebody else doubting you or making you doubt yourself, then where it goes downhill

Liam (1:35:12)
Not even that, but having people that are responsible for a salary month to month. They have families, you have 20, 30 people on the payroll. It starts to become, how do you value the community compared to the actual company? For example, like you want to obviously retain everyone and you want to please the community as well. It's like.

Reijo (1:35:41)
and be a net positive on the community.

Liam (1:35:42)
That's why I want to try and keep the team as small as possible and give the community ownership, basically. So it's like, it's partly on the community.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:35:53)
Okay, not to sound like a complete socialist here, right? Okay, I realized that we've crossed that threshold. What would it look like to set up a community that's outside of capitalism? Say we live in a perfect utopian state where it's just a constant exchange of goods and services based on how people present their needs. And we focus more on the ethics and the reasoning of why we build products.

and why we provide services and why are we doing this thing? Like, what is a platform like that even begin to look like? I mean, like, you could say, well, there goes your design inquiries. But I'm talking about people being like, I'm starting a fish business and I would like packaging.

Liam (1:36:46)
Well, in capitalism, it relies on donations to actually run. It's like Wikipedia, right?

Reijo (1:36:52)
That's true.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:36:52)
I'm talking about building this platform in a world that doesn't have capitalism.

Liam (1:36:59)
I mean, it's a world that we don't know about and can't comprehend, so I will not have an opinion.

Reijo (1:37:07)
I would say the same, I think.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:37:08)
I mean like but...

Liam (1:37:10)
current system is the best one we have at the moment. Otherwise, it would be another system.

Reijo (1:37:12)
Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:37:15)
But think about it, like you're designing for ethics, because there's no more reason to design for money, right? Say we don't have money in the system, right? You're designing for purpose. So if someone comes to you and is like, I wanna build a platform that helps hospital.

Reijo (1:37:33)
When you take money out of at least... Yeah, you sound a little... Like I understand fully what you say, there's nothing... But there's a little bit of gargling.

Liam (1:37:34)
It's tweaking mic.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:37:41)
Mm? Oh.

Liam (1:37:43)
You need to move your mic or something.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:37:46)
Hello? I don't know what to do.

Liam (1:37:48)
You sound like a robot and I'm suspecting you are one.

Reijo (1:37:52)
Uhhhhhh...

Tatiana O'Toole (1:37:54)
I am AI.

Reijo (1:37:55)
Okay, so but to answer your question if you take if you if you if you take the if you take the money out of it Then I'm not gonna do anything else. I'm not gonna do anything for anybody else. I'm just gonna do the things I want

Liam (1:37:58)
You need a new system. An ordered system.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:38:11)
That's a good point. 100%. I respect that. What I'm trying to basically do is remove a lot of the problems, but you can't really do that, because then you've changed the absolute nature of the system.

Liam (1:38:24)
And on that note...

Reijo (1:38:25)
I think you're... yeah, beautiful.

Liam (1:38:29)
Thank you very much for listening.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:38:29)
God, sweetly say...

Reijo (1:38:33)
Hahaha

Liam (1:38:36)
That is episode five of Overlay. If you have any questions or feedback for us here on Overlay, then please send us an email to overlay at layers.to. Also, Overlay is now available on every podcasting, streaming app, service, whatever. So if you want to subscribe or like or review, that would be incredibly helpful for all of us.

Reijo (1:38:39)
Five!

Yes.

Please do.

Yes.

Liam (1:39:06)
and I am Liam P McCabe on X.

Reijo (1:39:09)
I'm Ray of Rites on X.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:39:14)
I'm Dharma Creative on Axe Twitter, whatever it is now, Instagram, all that. You can follow me there or you can follow someone else.

Reijo (1:39:19)
Nice.

Liam (1:39:23)
Thanks so much.

Sweet. Ciao.

Reijo (1:39:27)
All right. Take care.

Tatiana O'Toole (1:39:28)
Bye.