Lisa Mazur & Jonathan Safir
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LISA: Hi, I’m Lisa Mazur, and this is What a Rebel {https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-a-rebel/id1615838192}.
JONATHAN: Hello, everybody.
LISA: Today’s guest is Jonathan Safir, who I’ve known since our days at Parsons School of Design {https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/} back in the late 80s, where Jonathan graduated as a photography major, and he professionally took photos for over 20 years. I love how his career path has followed some of his other interests in math and hospitality, and now he’s the founder of No Panic Design {https://www.nopanicdesign.com/team/}, a web development studio that delivers projects that are clean, innovative, and creative. I love working with this company because I appreciate his attention to design details and also his geeky tech talk knowledge that I know nothing about. So today we’ll be talking with Jonathan about my favorite topic of career pivots, as well as creative identity and what happens when art meets code. Welcome, Jonathan.
JONATHAN: Thank you. Yeah, so good to see you.
LISA: A little nod there to our crowd.
JONATHAN: Yeah.
LISA: Yeah. So let’s start the conversation with a little reminiscing and talk about our time at Parsons.
JONATHAN: Well, you know, I mean, we were really young in college, starting out in college. It was actually my second college — I started as a math major.
JONATHAN: …and it wasn’t really my thing. The world was kind of a little too fake and postured.
JONATHAN: They pushed us, and it was so good for me. That was the beginning of the real thing for me.
LISA: Yeah, I think it was such an eye-opening experience. I mean, just being in New York — I came from western New York, and you came from the East Bay.
JONATHAN: Yeah.
LISA: It was really, really fun.
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LISA: So, okay. So, you know, it’s funny —
JONATHAN: I did photography.
LISA: Yeah.
JONATHAN: Say that again?
LISA: I stayed in photography.
JONATHAN: You stayed in photography, right.
LISA: And you did that, but it wasn’t in fashion photography. You did —
JONATHAN: No, so mostly out of school I was assisting, and I got to, you know — I got to try out a lot of different stuff, you know, everything from traveling with Len Jenshel {https://www.cookjenshel.com}, doing stuff for Connoisseur and doing all these great stories all over the place.
JONATHAN: So largely I didn’t, to be honest. I loved the life more than I loved the idea of having to negotiate the business of being a commercial photographer.
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LISA: …you went to school for math initially?
JONATHAN: I did, yeah. I started out at Cal {https://math.berkeley.edu/} as a math major. In high school I loved math — my mind took to it, it was like, you know, like good chocolate or something. I loved it. I loved the puzzle. But you know, I was thinking about it earlier today — what I loved about it was the puzzle of it and the problem solving and the elegant solutions. A lot of what I love is being a creative director at a design firm now — like, how do we figure out interesting ways of solving puzzles that apply to the real world?
JONATHAN: That’s what I was good at about math. I actually competed. I don’t know if you ever knew this, Lisa.
LISA: Oh, my gosh.
LISA: Well, that makes sense to me now. I’m so nerdy about it.
JONATHAN: Now my mind doesn’t move quite as fast, but deeper, I guess.
LISA: Yeah. Moves in other ways you didn’t even know about back then.
JONATHAN: It’s funny when you say that because I always — I was actually interested in math, and I was really good at geometry, which kind of makes sense because the way that I design, it’s very, you know, it’s like putting — as you said — like putting together puzzles in a way.
JONATHAN: Yeah, because we’re building blocks out of the client’s content and story.
JONATHAN: And then when I went back to Cal to do math, I was just like, oh, gosh. This is — New York was way more — I was way more engaged.
LISA: Sure, yeah.
JONATHAN: I found myself sort of spacing out back here. I was like, this isn’t, no, I want to do that. I got a job at a camera store and took a couple credits at California College of Arts and Crafts, now CCA, unless it’s closed. I’m not sure. But I took photography there so that I could use the darkroom and start working on a portfolio and to apply to go back to Parsons.
JONATHAN: That was my plan.
LISA: Amazing.
JONATHAN: Amazing. I had no idea.
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JONATHAN: Back in the day when we dipped our hands in photochemistry — yeah, no, totally yeah, it was…
LISA: …at Parsons after we graduated, that was like the first beginning of scanning film in the early 90s, yeah —
JONATHAN: Yeah, um, we were already out in the world. No, I remember having to take classes in design and computers — digital, digital, you know, Photoshop, things like that, and more.
JONATHAN: Having to turn in a thing where we requested a font and it would print onto a transfer paper.
JONATHAN: And I’m like, oh, it was just, it was a lot.
LISA: I know. It’s so funny. And it really makes you appreciate, you know, all the designers from way back when — that’s how it was done.
JONATHAN: I mean, because, yeah.
JONATHAN: Well, there’s some people who design. That’s what they do. This one guy, he said he’ll work on a font for two years.
LISA: Oh, yeah.
JONATHAN: Getting all the elegance of how it works, how it fits together, and what’s occurring and all that. Yeah.
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JONATHAN: So, you know, I mean, I think, you know, doubling back to this question of like — what did we think it was going to be like to be a professional artist when we were at Parsons?
JONATHAN: I had no idea how many different areas I would find interest in applying my creative direction — well, sensibility — to the different kinds of work. I mean, I lived a life somewhat less ordinary in that I moved a lot over the years.
JONATHAN: …started traveling actually, on a job to Bar Harbor, Maine, for Conrans, which was like Ikea back in the day — yeah, yeah, big catalog shoot, and we were up there for a month. Oh, that’s fun.
JONATHAN: You look at them and you kind of — it makes you feel a little, almost a little, not seasick, but you feel the motion. It takes you on a ride.
LISA: They’re all digitized, though, right?
JONATHAN: They’re all in there.
LISA: Oh, okay.
JONATHAN: They are.
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JONATHAN: I got some good stuff in New York, with a stack of my own prints that I printed to sell on occasion, you know, with some prints that I printed to sell on paper, paper prints.
JONATHAN: And I’d rent a darkroom space and buy a box or like eight boxes of printing paper, color printing paper, and just go full on a week or five days in the darkroom and print out volumes of work.
JONATHAN: …and then I’d order mats and I’d order frames from Queens and go out to work the holiday market — the Union Square holiday market. And, oh, that’s funny.
JONATHAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, one month I was — some years I was supporting my entire year on one month of working the art market. Oh wow, that’s incredible — which included travel and back to…
JONATHAN: The skin would come off. Just a mild prospect. For a month.
LISA: Wow.
LISA: Those are the good days of like, you know, cutting her teeth.
JONATHAN: Yeah, yeah.
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LISA: But then, okay, so after you did all that amazing photography, what led you to switch into web development?
JONATHAN: Well, I built — well, I didn’t build.
JONATHAN: I remember my friends, my two friends and I — that we were talking about this stuff a lot. We’re like, this is a thing. And that’s when it kind of started, the interest from there.
JONATHAN: I started with that, and then we started talking about, let’s make a content management system, my two friends and I.
JONATHAN: …and I was like, I’m just going to plunge in and learn that.
JONATHAN: That was about five years ago only. It was right when we moved back to the Bay Area at the beginning of COVID. And I met a guy who has a company, a non-profit, that I thought sounded really great. It’s called In Advance, and they do social justice work, and I said, hey, on your website? I noticed it’s got some areas that could be improved. He was like, absolutely, we would love…
JONATHAN: It’s not a job listing on all. It’s about teaching each other and figuring stuff out together, and I love that collaborative approach.
JONATHAN: Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: I guess. I mean, I only kind of know the little sub-worlds that I’m in.
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JONATHAN: …switchboard between everyone to make sure that you’re — you know, if you’re designing and Salman is writing code and Shahzaib and I are doing the page building and we’re sort of integrating all these…
JONATHAN: …or we show it to the clients. I mean, you and I with Dance Notation {https://www.dancenotation.org/}, there was a lot of parts where we’d ask them questions. They would give us what they’re thinking.
LISA: Right.
LISA: We were imagining probably more completely as far as visual, because that’s what we do, but we mean you and I and the rest of the team.
JONATHAN: …but still the client then says, oh, well, actually we kind of want our visitors to have a different experience.
JONATHAN: And they approached us to recreate their website because it was basically outdated and ready to go offline, I think, right?
LISA: Yeah.
JONATHAN: So you can find what you’re looking for. And still it’s deep.
JONATHAN: So that’s, you know, something you touched on before, I think, Lisa, is like a big piece of some of these projects.
JONATHAN: …because we get to go much deeper with our design and with our structure and with our, the whole storytelling is a much deeper arc.
JONATHAN: But it involves more discovery time of working with the client generally, either continuously or intermittently as they go off and do the homework on their own, helping…
JONATHAN: I like that. You know, like the better plan you are with, you know, measure twice, build once.
LISA: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s true.
LISA: So for the dance notation bureau, we had such a huge spreadsheet of content.
JONATHAN: A few, a few spreadsheets.
JONATHAN: You know, I mean, it’s important to me that there, that they find us and work with us and we work with them and in the end they’re happy and we’re proud of the work we did and their board is happy and their website visitors are happy.
JONATHAN: Yeah. You know, that’s to me the big reward — there is when the whole project is everybody’s excited at the end and happy that we did it all together.
LISA: Yeah.
LISA: Because a lot of people worked on that project.
JONATHAN: Both on their side and on ours.
LISA: …how did you first come up with the name No Panic Design?
JONATHAN: That was Shazaib, actually.
LISA: Oh, yeah.
JONATHAN: As I do, I get passionate and I get loud and I express myself if I’m frustrated or confused. And he’d go, “oh, no panic.” I think Jen was in the office at the time and, you know, reading or something on her phone on the sofa.
JONATHAN: And I said, “oh, that’s it!” And I said, “yeah, it looks good to me, it really does.” And Jen was like, “oh, that’s awesome.” And Shazaib started laughing. He was like, “really?” And I said, “yeah, really.” And we get really great response, you know. People, it’s so easy to remember.
LISA: Sure, yeah.
LISA: It makes sense.
JONATHAN: Yeah.
JONATHAN: People smile, and they’re like, oh, great. I’m like, you know, I mean, we don’t want to panic. We don’t want you to panic. We want to work at a healthy pace. We want to, you know, we try and always do excellent work, but, you know, prioritize — sometimes people say, oh, this is, oh, it has to happen right now. And other times it’s like, well, okay. Sometimes it really does.
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JONATHAN: I had a sort of similar story with someone where her whole business of coaching is organizational business coaching. That’s pretty much all of her clients are in that one arena.
LISA: Oh, my gosh.
JONATHAN: Oh, totally. Not anymore.
LISA: I wonder, was that easier?
JONATHAN: But that’s when you and I connected again after college — was when you shared an office with Matthew. And I was in New York those years running my portfolio around town looking for book cover jobs and sports photography jobs.
JONATHAN: And then I started getting some sports work as well, which — but I would go to New York and hustle my book around.
LISA: Yeah.
JONATHAN: Every year I’d go out. And, you know, I know I had an opportunity to be in New York and to see my dad, who was still alive there for a few years at least, and just run into people I knew from Parsons like you and see what you were doing and see Matthew.
LISA: Right.
LISA: That’s our friend Matthew Septimus {https://www.matthewseptimus.com}, who is a photographer, and we’ll be seeing in a couple of weeks.
JONATHAN: And Matthew was doing, you know, something really great and growing. And Matthew is always…
JONATHAN: And they said, would you consider tutoring our son and maybe a couple of his friends who could really use some help in eighth grade pre-algebra?
JONATHAN: …concurrently in my brain and you know teaching all that math…
JONATHAN: But that’s this, you know, there’s already been a sort of precedence for kids not wanting to go to school to learn. They’re like, why do I have to go to school also if I just get lost or confused or bored there? I’m learning the material with you anyway. Can you just?
JONATHAN: But I was like, no, I’m not a certified teacher. I’m like your trainer.
LISA: Yeah, right.
LISA: You got to get the credit yourself.
JONATHAN: So they had to petition to the school to get the credit for the learning that they had achieved, not for the classes.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I mean, we are kind of that kind of small team of doing it in life.
LISA: Sure, sure.
JONATHAN: But in terms of work, I’ve always wanted to just be a freelance, always. You know, I’m not a freelance anymore. I run an agency.
JONATHAN: It’s always been my preference. The brainstorm {https://www.brainstormforeducation.com/site/page/about_b4e} — the math program became what we called the field course, and kids actually got two credits or up to two credits.
JONATHAN: Yeah.
LISA: Social studies and all that.
JONATHAN: Students were earning credit in social studies, or audio or video.
JONATHAN: And so they were recording themselves and taking notes in their notebooks and drawing the food.
JONATHAN: And I got to be the wizard in the center of the room.
LISA: That’s fun.
LISA: Who knew?
LISA: I didn’t know you did that. Every time I talk to you, I feel like I learn something that you’ve done.
JONATHAN: You know, I mean, I read a lot. My two primary partners, Shahzaib and Salman — they’re, they, we research stuff together all the time.
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JONATHAN: I mean, yeah, at the moment I absolutely am. And I put heart and soul into it as well as a lot of attention and discipline and outreach and all this other stuff.
JONATHAN: But if, you know, I mean, to me, what’s the future? Like, or, you know, one of the things you asked me before our session today was, like, if you were going to go back to Parsons, you know, if you were going to go back to college now, what would you say?
JONATHAN: It’s only going on a certain bulk of content in its own memory.
LISA: Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: So I have it write prompts for itself and say, okay, Claude, summarize everything we did today and where we’re leaving off and what our next steps are. Also, I want you to summarize what you learned about me as a human part of this process and what you’ve learned about working with me as the director of this process. And it writes this beautiful nine — it’s about 900 lines of code generally in this one project I’m working on — where it’s the first thing the next day when I open a new chat, that’s what I feed it and say…
JONATHAN: I know you don’t have memory.
JONATHAN: I had you write your own prompt for today to get you up to speed. I give you that first. And I feed it that, and then it says, oh, hey, Jonathan, what are we working on today?
JONATHAN: …or what do you want to work on?
JONATHAN: And we jump right back into the flow. It’s like having a — it’s like you have to retrain your robot every day.
JONATHAN: …but this is that, like, so is it like that, or is it like that, you know, putting your hands into it, like, well, that thing isn’t meant to be, and I don’t know what to do anymore.
LISA: I have an answer for you for that.
JONATHAN: I spent a month on a farm in Costa Rica back in the early 2000s.
LISA: Yeah, sure.
JONATHAN: In some ways it’s a lot easier to turn up your surf stat than it is to make a fire in your wood stove.
LISA: Sure, sure, sure.
JONATHAN: So to me, AI is no different.
JONATHAN: I want to make the art.
LISA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
LISA: Yeah, I agree.
LISA: I mean, I think I’ve said this before in my conversations with people on this podcast.
JONATHAN: I mean, maybe technology can learn to become a human passion activity.
LISA: Sure, sure.
LISA: And, you know, and have a…
JONATHAN: I mean, who knows what’s really going on in our own creative idea making.
JONATHAN: You know, but actually expressing my perspectives, or creating, creating a — like a score, like anything is, you know, like a — I mean, that’s so fascinating to me — that project with Dance Notation, that it was — Labanotation is a system for…
JONATHAN: But I find it more and more, it’s a lot easier to work in a small different studio with his design, so it is his design the way you design, not the way I design.
JONATHAN: And so I get to stretch my development concept around your design, which is very different.
LISA: Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: Or around Daniel’s design {https://www.starkdesignny.com/}.
LISA: Right.
JONATHAN: Yeah, because another designer works with us on projects.
JONATHAN: Also a friend of ours from Parsons.
LISA: …which is awesome. Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: It does. Funny, some years ago it was. We didn’t know how, which people that we knew back then were going to still be in our creative and French. No, not at all. Not at all. And I do, I mean, for you and I, I think just because I moved to the East Bay and then you had roots here, so you’d come.
JONATHAN: …Long story, I mean. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was like, what are you doing in Berkeley?
JONATHAN: You didn’t even know that. I totally forgot. No, I didn’t even know that I’d grown up here. And I was like, I’m coming there next week to visit my family.
LISA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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JONATHAN: Now we call it three second cinema.
LISA: Yeah, it’s great. Well, it’s always a pleasure working with you.
JONATHAN: …and you are, I mean, you also just have just a really good design aesthetic. So for me, as a designer who’s picky with the details, and you look at spacing and how things interact with each other. And it’s just a pleasure always working with you.
LISA: Yeah, we’re always member building.
JONATHAN: And we are like, oh, let’s go. There’s a tiny, tiny little bit of dread’s too strong of a word. But there’s a little bit of, oh, gosh, what kind of crazy.
JONATHAN: It’s much better. A little bit.
LISA: You always figure it out.
JONATHAN: …How do we do it? Let’s take an hour and do it.
JONATHAN: And that’s, you know, that sort of obsessive creative nature of things.
JONATHAN: Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: Even if no one else notices, we notice and we feel much more complete in our work because we went the extra mile to just tidy up the last little details.
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LISA: Regardless of what they do and how you keep track of it and how you can make sense of it and how you can make progress.
JONATHAN: I like that. I like that storytelling.
LISA: One last question for you, and it sort of kind of goes back to us as younger creatives.
JONATHAN: I mean, the good examples mostly make Mary Casale. We’re seeing a large percentage of her work. Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: And on the backside, it was in this clear display case. So you could see the front with the frame, you know, this beautiful portrait that everybody knows. But then you go to the backside. So on the back of the canvas, there was like the sketch sort of thing of this woman. I think she was like holding something. Totally not done. It was like on the back.
JONATHAN: And I’m like, I always have a mixed feeling about like that because it’s like obviously he didn’t want it. Nobody was supposed to see this.
LISA: Or when they use infrared technology to see like underneath a painting that, you know, was something else was there.
JONATHAN: It would be like publishing a book or like a transcript or something — or like the beginning, you know, sort of like outline of a book of somebody.
LISA: You mean by showing the sketch on the back when he didn’t mean for that to be shown?
JONATHAN: Yeah, yeah. I guess. For me, he was like, I would turn this canvas over and I would have it be done. And I would have another.
JONATHAN: You know, I don’t have to buy a new one. Right, totally.
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JONATHAN: We’re still recording it in some way. We’re still displaying it in some way, whether it’s on a screen or on a canvas.
JONATHAN: …except that we can’t not look at a screen.
JONATHAN: I might be a psychotherapist by the time I’m ready to not look at a screen all day and just talk to people.
JONATHAN: …and that’s what she said.
LISA: She was like, oh, a lot of what I’m doing here is helping people figure out what they really want to do.
LISA: For it is pretty cool.
LISA: Yeah, you just never know.
LISA: And then they do overlap.
JONATHAN: I mean, one thing that’s missing for me in web design is my love of food. And, you know, when I worked in restaurants and hotels, that was a big creative force, you know.
JONATHAN: And, you know, each project can sort of kind of take on some ways that it’s sort of like — whether it is in web design or other pursuits.
JONATHAN: I think, you know, a lot of it, like you said, it’s not so much therapy that I’m talking about, but more like organizational training or, you know, a lot of it, you know, like I used to say to my math students, like, I’m not your teacher, I’m your trainer.
LISA: I like that.
LISA: That’s a good visual.
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LISA: Well, Jonathan, it was great to talk to you. Can you tell everybody where they can find information on you and your company?
JONATHAN: More of me — the businesses are somewhat placeholders on social because we are more one-to-one for our projects. But you can find me on Facebook {https://www.facebook.com/jonsafir/} or on LinkedIn {https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-safir-2175b45/}, Jonathan Safir, based in California.
LISA: Yep.
LISA: I’ll put that all in the show notes, too, so people can connect.
LISA: So, Jonathan, what a rebel.
LISA: Thank you for being here.
JONATHAN: Thanks, Lisa.
LISA: Thanks, everyone.
LISA: Thanks for listening to What a Rebel. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Lisa Mazur_Art_Design {https://www.instagram.com/lisamazur_art_design/}. And my website is LisaMazerStudio.com {https://lisamazurdesign.com}.
