Von Glitschka - Illustrative Designer / Teacher / Brand Strategist

Gamma Brainwaves: The Secret to Creative Breakthroughs

Von Glitschka, a master of illustrative design, shares his journey from early digital design tools to becoming a sought-after logo creator and educator. He discusses overcoming creative fears, the importance of sketching, and the science behind creative breakthroughs, offering invaluable insights for designers at all levels.

Many designers struggle with creative blocks, fear of the blank screen, and difficulty merging traditional illustration skills with modern digital design techniques.

Imagine confidently tackling any design challenge, seamlessly blending illustration and design to create iconic brand identities. Picture yourself with a systematic approach that consistently produces creative breakthroughs, making you a go-to designer for high-profile projects.

In this episode, Von Glitschka shares his journey from early digital design tools to becoming a sought-after logo creator. He reveals his secrets for overcoming creative fear, harnessing the power of sketching, and understanding the science behind creative breakthroughs. Stick around to learn how to elevate your design game and become the illustrative designer clients can't resist!

Key Takeaways:

1. The importance of continuous drawing in design
2. How to integrate feedback to improve products and services
3. Developing a unique style through observation and practice
4. Balancing creativity with practicality in design projects
5. The evolution of design tools and their impact on creativity

Free Vector Basic Training

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Paul Povolni (06:31.927)

Hey, welcome to the Headsmack Podcast. My name is Paul Povolni So excited to have Von Glitchka with me. Von Glitchka is the creator of this cool Voppa logo. I call it the Voppa tattoo. I still haven't tattooed it on myself, but he created that for me a few years ago. He is the owner of Glitchka Studios, a small boutique design firm in the Pacific Northwest.

and they creatively collaborate with ad agencies, design firms, in -house corporate art and marketing departments in small businesses to produce engaging visual narratives. He's an amazing illustrator, he's an amazing designer, and you've probably seen his work at some point. Von so glad to have you on, man.

Von Glitschka (07:24.046)
Well, thanks for having me. It's nice talking to you. It's been too long.

Paul Povolni (07:27.543)
It's been too long. It's been too long. Well, Von and I actually met, man, it's been over a decade, if not more. Yeah, probably almost like 15 years ago or so. And we had met and Von had come and spoken to a creative team that I was leading and a part of. And we got to have some cool pizza and chat and get to know each other. And we've worked together on several projects since then. And then it created the cool Voppa tattoo logo.

that I love putting everywhere that I can. And I appreciate you being on man. How are things going?

Von Glitschka (08:02.894)
pretty good. It's a little crazy. It started off slow this year, but now it's like almost too busy, but I can manage it.

Paul Povolni (08:09.943)
Yeah. Well, Von, you know, I absolutely love your work. I've always loved your work. I think even before we met each other and got to work on some projects, just admired your skill and your creativity and the solutions that you came up with. Very unique, very creative. And, you know, you've talked about the merger of design and illustration. And I do want to get to that. But before we get to that, I just kind of want to hear a little bit about your origin story, man. Where did Von...

start what, what was, what was the beginning? Like you can go as far back as you want, to get it, give us a good context of who you, who you were and what you become.

Von Glitschka (08:49.23)
Well, growing up, my big influence on me was my mom. She's an artist, and she's still, she's in her 80s now, but she's still, when she can, will pull out the paint and start painting stuff. So she always encouraged me. My dad, he can't really draw, but he always encouraged me too. And then just growing up, I was in high school when,

like a representative of at the time it was the Burnley School of Art in Seattle came by and showed a student portfolio from their school. And that's when I first thought, whoa, like I don't have to go to traditional college. I can go to this like art school. And I go, okay, that's interesting. Told my parents and we scheduled the time to drive up there. And other than I didn't understand a lot,

Paul Povolni (09:32.919)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (09:45.518)
of what I was seeing, like mechanicals and production and typesetting kind of intimidated me because back at that time, this would have, I started school in September of 1984. So it was, they were doing typeset, they were still doing typesetting manually. And within five years, it all changed once the first Mac started rolling out and stuff.

Paul Povolni (09:47.487)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (10:07.959)
yeah.

Right.

Von Glitschka (10:14.862)
Well, Mac was out before that, the first professional -grade Macintosh that a designer could use. So that's where I started.

Paul Povolni (10:20.663)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of remember that time because when I went to college, they had computers, they had like a computer lab, but they had no idea what to do with them because there wasn't a way to output out of the computer, the things that you were creating, like that hadn't been figured out quite yet. And so, yeah, I remember that we had the labs and we were just like figuring stuff out like ourselves and then writing the manuals on it.

Von Glitschka (10:34.542)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (10:49.111)
and taken photographs of the screen to capture the artwork that we had created. So it's kind of interesting.

Von Glitschka (10:54.83)
Yeah, it was, it was interesting because at the time me and my friend, John, we had a common friend. He was older than us by about four or five years, but he was in, he was a designer and he, he called us up one day and he said, Hey, come to my studio. It's in the Smith tower building, downtown Seattle. We go there and we walk into his studio. It's pretty small studio, but he hands us.

They didn't even, nobody knew what a color printout was at that time. He handed me a color printout and he said, look at this. And I'm looking at it and it was an illustration of a jukebox. And I understood it as an illustration. I go, what is this? That's like, nobody had color printers at that time. And he goes, well, that's a color print. And I go, how can you afford to, I didn't even know they had those, you know? And he goes, well, Adobe bought it.

Paul Povolni (11:27.255)
Right, yeah.

Paul Povolni (11:42.167)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (11:48.983)
Yeah, yeah.

Von Glitschka (11:53.422)
for me, and he was a beta tester for the very first version of Illustrator. So I kind of interacted with Vector before I ever knew what Vector was. But I kind of quickly realized that day that I'm probably going to be doing stuff like that, because that seems to be the next generation of creativity, I guess.

Paul Povolni (11:58.775)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (12:04.791)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:13.463)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (12:19.479)
So that was kind of your big moment, I guess, head smack, of course, of, of realizing that what you do, that there's, there's a need for what you do and what you like doing.

Von Glitschka (12:30.99)
Yeah, at the time I did traditional illustration, mostly acrylic and gouache and colored pencil and a combination of the two with gouache and colored pencil. But and that was fun. Yeah, right. It was cool, though. I liked it because you could always is it was like oil in the sense that it dried really fast. But as long as you you wet it again, it could be pliable and you could move stuff around or edit. But.

Paul Povolni (12:40.727)
There's a word I haven't heard in a while. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:55.767)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (13:00.206)
The thing I didn't like about illustration traditionally was just it just took so long. And we had a couple of teachers and they'd show us something and I go, how long did that take you? I did it in like 12 hours. I'm going, it took me 12 days at that point. And so, yeah, but actually the first vector app I ever used was at a hole in the wall screen print shop where,

Paul Povolni (13:06.071)
Ryan.

Paul Povolni (13:15.127)
Yeah, yeah.

Von Glitschka (13:29.102)
I had sold, he was a former boss. It was my first job out of art school was at the screen printing place. Then I moved on to a sportswear company and did designs for lines for Target and stuff like that. But he, I decided to leave that job and kind of tour the country, take a break from design or anything and tour the country for a year.

with a company out of California called Motivational Media. And at the time they did multimedia presentations with like projectors, slideshows, and it was all like drug prevention stuff. So it was like way outside of what I had ever done. But in the process of trying to get there and buy a ticket, I went and sold my boss all these old sketches I had and to get my plane ticket, but while I was waiting him.

for him to get there, I saw he had a computer and it was a PC. And so the first vector app I actually played around with was CorelDRAW. And once I did that, I go, this is really interesting. I'm going to have to jump into this at some point. And it was about...

Paul Povolni (14:34.263)
yeah, yeah I remember that.

Von Glitschka (14:46.126)
years after that that I first started using my first, well, not the first time I used Mac. I used to program in Apple Basic in high school, but the first time I used the interface with the mouse and software, and that was at a design studio.

Paul Povolni (14:59.287)
Yeah, yeah.

What was that moment like? What was that moment like?

Von Glitschka (15:06.158)
It was cool and that was freehand. So I was using it, but it was Here's what a lot of people don't realize is freehand Adobe a lot of their beta was going on at Seattle freehand was founded by Aldous originally in Seattle and so My friend used illustrator when he first started I use freehand and it was

Paul Povolni (15:23.223)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (15:33.998)
In Illustrator at that time, you couldn't work in preview mode. You had to work in key line mode. And then if you wanted to see it, you had to render it. Well, freehand from day one was always you work in preview. And so I really liked that. I used that for approximately 15 years. I remember when Adobe first tried to buy Illustrator from Aldis, the Federal Trade Commission says, no, you can't own your number two.

Paul Povolni (15:37.911)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (15:41.655)
Yeah, wow.

Paul Povolni (15:52.951)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (16:03.822)
product in the industry. And they quashed it. And then years later, they all just sold it to Macromedia. They developed Flash. And so they bought it for Macromedia and then quickly turned around and killed it. And that's when I had to learn new software. That, yeah.

Paul Povolni (16:04.887)
Right.

Paul Povolni (16:23.383)
Yeah, I loved, I loved Freehand. There's some things about Freehand that I still miss. Like Freehand was my go -to as well. And, and, and, you know, then of course Illustrator came out and then we all hated CorralDraw. Like CorralDraw was the, the, the one that we liked hating on, at least I did. And the people I knew did.

Von Glitschka (16:39.086)
If you think of like the the cola battles you have coke cola number one Pepsi number two sometimes those go back and forth and then RC Cola is like number three So so corral draws like RC Cola of vector apps Yeah

Paul Povolni (16:50.391)
hahahaha

Paul Povolni (16:55.639)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that, but yeah, freehand was my go -to as well. That's what I learned on. And then, of course, Adobe came out with InDesign. And so I had kind of jumped in on that because I was using Quark at the time. I don't know whether you use Quark at all, but it was clunky industrial workhorse that created Time Magazine. I mean, it was what everything was built on. And then after Adobe...

you know, launched InDesign, I moved into InDesign away from Quark. And then of course they bought Freehand and I was like, the writing's on the wall, they're going to kill it. You know, I might as well move over to Illustrator because I knew, you know, they're going to, they're going to kill it. They're going to kill Freehand now that they bought it. And sure enough.

Von Glitschka (17:41.902)
So after using Freehand for 15 years, I was just thinking to myself, well, it's a vector app, so it can't be that different. And I started using it. And after a year of using it, it wasn't getting any easier. And I kept getting frustrated. And so I wrote a blog post. And I don't know who, but somebody read that at Adobe. And it was a great blog post. a great blog post.

Paul Povolni (18:08.055)
well.

Von Glitschka (18:09.006)
printed it out and put it on the marketing director's chair for Illustrator. His name is Terry Hempel. He emails me back at that time, this 2002 or something like that. He said, well, I read your post on your blog and I agree with almost everything you say.

Paul Povolni (18:14.199)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:33.431)
wow.

Von Glitschka (18:34.126)
And he asked me if I'd be on the beta team. And so I've been on the beta team ever since, but I don't really spend a lot of time actually beta testing. I just complain if they break something.

Paul Povolni (18:44.727)
just wine, wine when appropriate. Just flag anything and just move on. Just tell them this sucks.

Von Glitschka (18:53.326)
Yeah. Well, yeah, they get, they actually get, it's like a love hate relationship for me. It's like, like when, intertwined came out and there's Adobe as a hype machine now with all these real publishers and they hype the latest features. If it's, you know, you know, the new thing, like it's awesome. And it's not always awesome. I think most of their new features are kind of half bake intertwines. One of them.

Paul Povolni (19:16.119)
Yeah.

Hahaha.

Von Glitschka (19:23.758)
Yeah, you can mock stuff up and it looks okay, but you still have to build it. You still have to build it clean because you can't deliver, let's say a brand asset monogram you put together. You can't deliver it with intertwine. It won't print right. It'll, it'll, it'll break. And, and so I said, you know, intertwines half baked and this head engineer at illustrator, this was last year. He goes,

Paul Povolni (19:29.783)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (19:40.183)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (19:51.694)
What do you mean by half baked? And I go, well, I can explain it to you, but how about if I send you a DM and do it that way so we're not breaking the feed here? And he said, okay. So I did. And I said, look, if you're going to have intertwine, you can mock it up, but you still have to build it. Meaning you still have to spend all that time to actually create it. So.

Paul Povolni (20:00.279)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:10.423)
Right.

Von Glitschka (20:14.702)
Couldn't you make it so you can do intertwines so it's visually looking the way you want? And then a button appears on the property panel that says expand intertwine. And it does exactly what you have mocked up. But it builds it clean. And I explained what I meant by that. And I go, I don't know if it's possible, but that would have been actually useful. And he goes, well, yeah, we could do that. And I go, well, then that's what you should do.

Paul Povolni (20:25.079)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (20:41.902)
And then it's like, well, I don't know if I can convince them to invest the time into doing it. So it became like this political thing that their higher ups dictate all the developers what to work on. So, yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:50.327)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:55.895)
So I wonder, like, who are they then creating it for if they're not creating it for it to be, you know, buildable, usable, practical? Like, who are they building it for with that kind of a feature then?

Von Glitschka (21:04.846)
Yeah.

The world's largest ad agencies, that's who basically steers development in my point of view. WPP, the world's largest agency out of London. I know this goes back five years. So I know somebody that worked at Adobe and was an account manager. And he told me a story that he had to re -sign WPP to the contract that they were

signed on to, which was for $40 million to license Creative Cloud for all their employees globally. So that's just one agency, 40 million, but he signed them up for 42 million, and that was five years ago, so it's probably higher now. And that's who they listen to. So you can be an independent and...

I complained about the snapping bug for 12 years. They just finally fixed it, but it took 12 years, so.

Paul Povolni (22:06.967)
Yeah. Well, but, but it's still interesting even for a huge organization, huge agency like that. Like if they're not able to take this feature, this cool trick and actually use it practically, like why even create it? Like I know that to me would be confusing because it has no practical purpose. It's cool. It's a neat trick. It makes it, it makes a great reel on Instagram for people to be like, wow, that's a really cool thing to do.

Von Glitschka (22:24.59)
I know. Yeah.

Von Glitschka (22:36.11)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (22:36.215)
But then if it practically cannot be used, it doesn't make sense. It's almost like adding something just to wow, but it's actually zero practicality.

Von Glitschka (22:47.374)
Yeah, I agree with that. It's like one of their newest features is called mockup. And so it's in Illustrator, in my opinion, it should have been something they add to Photoshop because Photoshop has 3D capabilities. So they could use AI to analyze a photo, map the 3D, whatever it's called. I don't do 3D, but map that surface. And then so when it interacts with it, it actually looks photorealistic. But

Paul Povolni (23:15.575)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (23:15.95)
They don't think that way. They just think kind of cheap. So that's another feature. I go, your mock -up, somebody at Adobe needs to go to yellowimages .com, download one of their PSD files that's created by a 3D artist, but it allows you to do photographic real mock -ups and it looks like photo shoots. And so agencies use that all the time.

Paul Povolni (23:42.999)
Yeah.

Right.

Von Glitschka (23:46.126)
That's how I found out about it. A friend of mine who had worked for an agency was telling me about it. And I've been using them ever since to do vehicle mockups, apparel mockups, everything. And it looks like a photo shoot. And that's, Adobe could have done that, but they just kind of half bake features and shove it out and then hype it. And...

Paul Povolni (23:56.727)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (24:01.655)
Yeah.

Right.

Von Glitschka (24:11.502)
Very rarely do they go back and improve something. It usually takes quite a while for them to actually improve a feature.

Paul Povolni (24:18.583)
Yeah. Do you think that software like Adobe now is getting a little bloated similar to Microsoft products? Like Microsoft products have features that 99 .9 % of people will never use, you know, in Word, in PowerPoint and things like that. There are power users, of course, but you know, most of the features people will never use. You think Adobe is kind of getting to that place? Cause personally I feel I can't keep up. Like I, I'm, I'm at a point where I'm just kind of sticking to what I know.

It seems like there's new features, half -baked, not quite there, that they seem to be rolling out consistently that aren't really practical for people that use it on a regular basis.

Von Glitschka (24:59.63)
Yeah, and they do all that just because they're trying to get more subscribers and new features are what marketing can use to push their narrative. But I think much like you, whenever I do workshops, I always start off by saying, look, there's at last count 88 tools and even more features in Adobe Illustrator.

Paul Povolni (25:04.887)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (25:28.206)
You don't need to know all of them. I don't know all of them. I know people who pretty much know all of them, but they don't really have a portfolio you can go to and admire a body of work. So they just know tools. And it's like, and so what I try to reinforce with people when I teach is, if you get these core tools down, and for me, it's about 18 tools that I use.

Paul Povolni (25:41.399)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (25:57.294)
Maybe about eight of them I use on a daily basis over and over and over again. And then there's secondary tools that I might jump to every few days or whatever when needed. But if you look at the body of my work on my website, those are all the tools I've used. I don't need new features and I don't need new tools. I'd rather they invest more time in taking...

Paul Povolni (26:02.615)
Right.

Paul Povolni (26:17.175)
Right.

Von Glitschka (26:25.39)
existing tools or features like vector brushes, for example. They've never updated it. It's like, and they've actually in their Adobe, what do they call it? Fresco app on the iPad. It's a hybrid app. So you can actually use Photoshop and vector brushes together.

Paul Povolni (26:31.511)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (26:40.663)
Fresco, yeah, yeah.

Von Glitschka (26:48.654)
And I've always wondered, well, why don't they integrate that technology into Illustrator so I can use Photoshop brushes to do certain kind of granular texturing or shading? Because to try to pull that off with the scatter brush in Illustrator, you just bloat a file in a matter of minutes.

Paul Povolni (27:04.983)
Right, right. So all the features that they have come out with, you know, you're a power user. I mean, you're, you know, you live and breathe it and it's part of your key workflow. What's, what's some of the new features that they've come out with that you actually like?

Von Glitschka (27:20.846)
They've really improved pattern creation. So you can take an element and you can go to the menu, Object, pull down to Pattern, and then you can immediately start creating a pattern that actually creates a swatch. Now, that came out after they came out with a feature called Repeat Grid.

And repeat grid, you can mock up a pattern. And this was another half -baked thing I pointed out. This goes back three years, I think. I said, OK, yeah, I can mock up a text or a pattern, and it looks pretty good. So if it's doing the math, why is there no button again that appears anywhere that says, create pattern swatch? So it shows up in your swatches, and you can apply it to anything. Because you can't do anything other than that rectangle controller they have.

Paul Povolni (28:18.423)
Right, right. Yeah.

Von Glitschka (28:20.142)
So that was another example. And they kind of, that's why they don't push grid repeat so much anymore, because they've added, they've taken some of those aspects and pushed it into that feature where you can pull down. So I think they've done a good job doing that. Should have been what they did to begin with and not do the grid repeat, because once you create something that looks nice, well, you can't create.

You can't use it as a repeatable asset in any other way because you can't save a graphic style from it. It doesn't create a pattern swatch. So how do you apply it in a context where maybe you have an irregular shape? Well, you can't. And so that's kind of, and I think most of that kind of happens because their team doesn't have somebody who actually creates on a daily basis on their team. I've been telling them that for years too.

Paul Povolni (29:03.543)
Right.

Paul Povolni (29:13.687)
Right, right.

Von Glitschka (29:17.613)
Actually in 2019, when they flew 14 creative professionals to New Delhi, India, and we got to have just our own little summit there, they assigned each of us like four or five engineers. So we had to bring any questions we had. So I had a list. One of them was the snapping bug where I worked on my laptop until it happened. Then I had them all come over and they're all.

Paul Povolni (29:44.919)
Hahaha.

Von Glitschka (29:46.542)
They're all like huddling over each other on my laptop going, that, well, that shouldn't happen. I go, that's why I've been telling you for last, like at that point is eight years, you know, but that, that was cool because we got to see, they did kind of like a shark tank thing for us where we were the, well, we were sharks, but they gave us these tokens. And then all these engineers came out and presented.

Paul Povolni (29:50.615)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (29:58.135)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (30:13.143)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (30:16.43)
features that they were considering in their development roadmap. And one of them they showed, I was just going, that's a great feature. It felt like something Astute Graphics would have done. And it's about creating vector shapes, but it was amazing, like how it worked. And I'm going, okay, that gets all my tokens.

Paul Povolni (30:31.191)
Heheheheh

Paul Povolni (30:42.423)
Yeah, yeah.

Von Glitschka (30:46.094)
That's the one you guys need to do, but they still haven't done anything with that. They bring, they brought some of the other things out, but not that one.

Paul Povolni (30:46.359)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (30:53.431)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's a really good lesson in that. And I think, I think a good head smack moment for somebody that might be producing a product or a service or something is, you know, you can create it in your own brain. You can create it in your own store and your own workshop in your own offices or whatever, but UX and user experience, is so key to making something go to the next level is actually talking to the people that use.

your product, your service on a daily basis, practically not that play around with it. I mean, there's probably people online that, you know, they've got time. They play around with Adobe. Hey, look, they intertwine. Hey, look, you know, we've got all these cool features, but they're not actually practical users that have to take it all the way to print or production or t -shirts or brochures or signage, whatever that they're playing with it. And so I think finding, I'm fi I think finding the actual users.

Von Glitschka (31:40.782)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (31:47.31)
Exactly.

Paul Povolni (31:51.703)
daily in the grind in the trenches users of your product or service and talking to them and listening to them could really take your business to the next level.

Von Glitschka (32:00.622)
So that makes me think of a feature I was thinking about yesterday again. And I might get the name wrong, but it's the 3D one where it takes flat art and it kind of bubbles it and brings. And I was going, well, that's interesting, but I'd like to see a real world case where you'd use it for anything. It's like, I just don't think it's very useful. It's kind of interesting and unique, but.

Paul Povolni (32:14.263)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (32:28.919)
Right.

Von Glitschka (32:29.39)
Like how often do you need to do that? So.

Paul Povolni (32:32.087)
Right. Well, and if it's, and if the market is like, if, if a bunch of young designers are like super cool bubble texts, you know, bubble, whatever, I mean, it's going to have a life span of a fly. Like it's going to, it's going to be cool for a moment and then it's over and you've spent all this time in engineering and, and development and programming to create this feature that has very limited.

Von Glitschka (32:46.158)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (32:56.023)
If it becomes a trend, if it becomes a thing, it has a very short lifespan and then it's over. And then it's just bloated. It's just stuff that's in the code that now makes it a bloated software. And I think you're absolutely right on.

Von Glitschka (33:09.39)
Yeah, that's, I admit it, I tried it, but I couldn't get over, I can't think of one, like usually when I'm doing a course and I'm showing some methodology or approach, it's in context of how it could be utilized in a real world. It might be a fake client because it's just a course I'm demonstrating something in, but I always try to put it in that context of,

Well, this is why you could use this feature to do this type of work. I couldn't think of one thing I'd use that for.

Paul Povolni (33:40.823)
Right. Well, it's kind of like, you know, in the, I guess in the nineties or early two thousands, if Adobe created a plugin to create the glass buttons, that suddenly was the hip thing with Apple products. Like everything suddenly started being the glass buttons. Yeah. Liquid. Yeah. Yeah. Like imagine they spend all this time just creating the lickable button.

Von Glitschka (33:58.67)
Like the the liquor like Steve Jobs said they're lickable. Yeah

Paul Povolni (34:08.439)
You know, option that you could create easily and that, you know, and then it's like, well, yeah, everybody was doing that for a short time. Like everything suddenly looked like it was made out of glass or liquid or whatever. And then that disappeared and people moved on. But if that was still part of your software, it's just bloat. It's just stuff that doesn't need to be there. And so I do want to go back a little bit to a little bit of your story. And so, you know, you, you went to the agency, you saw the guy printing the cool stuff. You started.

Von Glitschka (34:18.382)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (34:36.695)
diving into free hand, was that your first job? Was that like, you know, once you realized that you had kind of a place with your artistic ability in graphic design, it wasn't painting like your mom, it wasn't doing that. What was that experience like in learning that what you did had a place in this world?

Von Glitschka (34:49.87)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (34:59.246)
Yeah, that didn't happen until my second job. My first job was at a sportswear company and it was fun, but it was just screen print. So my next job, I was hired by a design firm here in Salem, Oregon. And we did everything from print collateral, logo design. We did t -shirts for Nike and a bunch of stuff. So.

It was more variety, but there's a lot of print production stuff that I had to do. So we would get something, a project that had come in and I knew it would need like illustration. But up until that point, you know, when I was working at the sportswear company, if I wanted to do a design, it had the character, whatever in it. Yeah, I had to create it. So we didn't have the budget to hire illustrators. So that's where I started.

really kind of cut my teeth in the early 90s on doing my own illustration and working with clients and everything involved with that. So, and that whole period of time in the 90s was all freehand. And then it was the end of the 90s. I was offered a...

assistant art director position at Adidas American Portland, interviewed with them for three hours, but then I turned the job down. It just didn't feel like the right move. And then for that next year, I was second guessing myself. Should I have done that? And then at the end of the second year, I was talking to my brother and he sent me, and this shows you kind of the time period,

Paul Povolni (36:32.055)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (36:40.023)
Ha ha ha ha.

Von Glitschka (36:50.958)
1990s, the end of 96, going into 97. He sends me a letter with all these classified ads for designers from the San Diego area. And I'm looking through them and I saw one for Upper Deck first. And I'm going, Upper Deck? I go, well, that's interesting. I think I'm going to apply to this. So I applied. I got a phone interview.

Paul Povolni (37:08.215)
well, yeah, I remember that.

Von Glitschka (37:19.47)
We did a phone interview and then they said, well, we'd like to fly you down to do a personal interview. And this just shows you before 9 -11 because I show up at work one day, it was, I think it was a Thursday or Friday, I think it was Friday. And I said, I have something I need to do this afternoon. Okay, that's fine.

take the rest of the day off. And then I just drove up to Portland, jumped on a plane, flew down. I got to the interview like 35 minutes late because of traffic. So I get there about 5 .45 PM. And I should not have gotten this job because I was in the way I dressed when I went to work, which was shorts, a t -shirt. I was wearing flip -flops.

Paul Povolni (37:54.391)
wow. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:05.367)
hahahaha

Paul Povolni (38:13.463)
Yeah, very Portland vibe, right?

Von Glitschka (38:14.062)
And my portfolio wasn't a nice pristine portfolio. It was just colored printouts shoved in a binder. And I walk in, the creative director looks at everything, and this senior designer comes in, his name's Vincent, and he looks at everything, and they offer me the job. So I knew things were gonna change, and...

Paul Povolni (38:37.911)
Wow.

Von Glitschka (38:42.894)
Vince now is a really good friend of mine. We worked together for basically the whole time I was there on the baseball team. So that was a great job. I learned so much about, and I was the only one that used Freehand in the whole office. Everybody used Illustrator. But because Freehand had like, with.

Paul Povolni (38:45.591)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:03.767)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (39:08.334)
trading cards, you have your regular set, then you have all these parallel sets, and they could be gold, bronze, or silver. And so I could do those parallel card mechanicals in seconds, because in freehand, I could tell it to switch all these colors to this, and at that time in Illustrator, you had to do it manually. So I was getting all this work done, and...

Paul Povolni (39:12.727)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:31.095)
Yeah, yeah.

hahahaha

Von Glitschka (39:35.566)
And then they said, well, Von's done with the baseball line. He has two weeks with nothing. So they started giving me all the special projects. And so at the time, no other card company had done this. At the time, they bought a Babe Ruth bat off of Sotheby's for like 25 ,000. And they're going to cut it up and put it on cards. I'm going, look, if you're going to destroy it,

Paul Povolni (40:00.951)
Man.

Von Glitschka (40:02.126)
You're calling the card a piece of history. So if you're going to destroy a piece of history, we need to take a photo shoot of it. So on the back of the card, we can show where this piece came from. And so we did that, but being able to hold Babe Ruth's bat with notches on it and like swing it, you know, when nobody's looking, of course, that was fun. And then after that, they did a signature series where they were going to do signatures.

Paul Povolni (40:13.623)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:18.089)
Wow!

Paul Povolni (40:24.471)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (40:31.854)
cards of Babe Ruth and I said, how are you going to do that? He's dead. Well, they bought like 300 canceled checks from the Ruth estate. And so I was heading up that project and those came in one day. It's just a Ziploc bag full of old checks from the 1920s and stuff. And we pull them out and we're just going through it, seeing what Babe Ruth spent money on. And...

Paul Povolni (40:58.583)
Hahaha.

Von Glitschka (41:00.046)
It was, it was so fun. Like, but the one I remember the most was is called is park city liquor store. And he paid $300 for booze. And I'm going this 1920. And so I had to go over to the computer and look up like how much was the equivalent of $300 from 1920. It was like $15 ,000 in booze equivalent. So yeah.

Paul Povolni (41:12.951)
Wha?

Paul Povolni (41:27.287)
I'm sure that was quite the party. And so is this, you know, you've got a very unique style. Is this when you developed your style or did you already come into this with the style that you're known for?

Von Glitschka (41:37.23)
At my previous job at the small agency in Salem, we would get mailings from an art rep and I always liked what he did. And so I always had a plan to try to contact him and see if I could get him to rep me. But then I saw another one, it was a company called, do you remember Dynamic Graphics?

Paul Povolni (42:01.431)
yeah, yeah I do.

Von Glitschka (42:02.83)
I saw an ad they had a publication. They're looking for freelancers who could do freelance illustration. So they would basically assign me, give me assignments like, well, we want, it was like doing spot illustration. And so I did, that's kind of where I cut my teeth on developing, developing my style and how I approach things. And then when I moved to,

Paul Povolni (42:18.135)
Right, right.

Von Glitschka (42:32.11)
Upper Deck and I work with them. I worked at Upper Deck for about four years. Then I moved back to Oregon and got an art director's position, a small little studio. And a friend of mine I met because I had signed a rep right before I moved to Upper Deck called Three in a Box based out of Toronto. And when I moved back to Oregon, I was leaving

that rap and looking for a new rap and I saw another artist coming in who I liked his work and That's how I met Paul whole wall who's still a really really good friend. Yeah, Paul's awesome and so later that this was It would be right after I started my business in 2002

Paul Povolni (43:13.431)
Yeah, yeah. I've worked with Paul.

Von Glitschka (43:27.918)
I left the agency I was working at and started my, well, I didn't leave, I got fired. I got, that's a whole nother story. Long story short, I got my daughter's cold, called in sick on a Monday. It came in really early Tuesday and my boxes were packed. I'm like, what's going on? Well, he had read an old deleted email that another agency in town had sent me asking if I'd want to work with them. And I had already turned it down, but he like overreacted. So.

Paul Povolni (43:33.323)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:56.823)
my goodness, wow.

Von Glitschka (43:58.222)
It all worked out though. So.

Paul Povolni (44:01.271)
Well, yeah, and obviously if he's looking back through deleted emails, then it's like, yeah, that's probably a good thing to go anyway.

Von Glitschka (44:05.152)
Yeah. Yeah. And so when I started my business, that's when I had to learn like how to run a business, you know, how to get, how to generate leads, how to connect with people. And luckily I met one of my clients was a little cafe and they suggested to me that you should enroll in the local small business program.

Paul Povolni (44:16.151)
Yeah, yeah.

Von Glitschka (44:35.406)
And the guy who runs it's really good. He meets with you every month, gets to know your business, and then he consults with you on how to improve, you know, how to operate a business. I'm going, well, that sounds good. So I did it and it's only a one year course. I ended up staying in it six years because I became friends with the guy who ran it. His name was Jim Colby house and he's a former VP of Gala wine and Coca -Cola.

Paul Povolni (44:46.039)
Yeah, yeah.

Von Glitschka (45:03.246)
So he had a lot of really good experience and knowledge and he would just literally audit my whole process, how I do things, how do you get jobs? How do you, you sign contracts? And then he'd tell me, no, you can't do this. You need to do this to protect yourself. And so he got all my ducks in a row and really helped me. So I really appreciated that because I didn't know how to do any of that. He ended up dying of.

Paul Povolni (45:23.287)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (45:33.134)
Lou Gehrig disease, which was kind of sad, but he was a good guy. So a lot of what I learned, I kind of learned from him, from the business side of things. And so that's when I just started working on my own. Paul invited me, he is still at Three in a Box. He invited me to go to the illustration conference and that was 2003. And then I saw Scott Holder, who's my rep now.

and I started stalking him because I wanted to talk to him. And I remind him of this every now and then is he totally blew me off. Wasn't, wouldn't give me a time day. And then I just purposely would always email him whatever I had just done for about a year. And then at the end of that year, he calls me and asks if he could rep me. And so we...

Paul Povolni (46:04.919)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (46:29.107)
Did you casually tell him, no, I don't think so. Just to mess with him.

Von Glitschka (46:35.31)
No, we've been, we've become pretty good friends over the years. So he's been repping me for a long time, like 16 years, something like that now.

Paul Povolni (46:44.503)
Yeah, I think I've actually contacted Scott when working with different illustrators as well. And Paul and I are still connected. And I think I even worked with him on several projects as well around the same time that I worked with you on some illustration projects. So a great, great team there. So as you've progressed in your career and the things that you've produced, I mean, really, really amazing. The creative process can sometimes bring fear. What are you?

Like, do you ever face that fear? Like, what are your thoughts on just looking at a blank screen and creating?

Von Glitschka (47:15.694)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (47:21.694)
Well, yeah, I faced that fear this week. I can't get too specific since nothing's out yet, but we had developed some packaging design for a company, and we did that last year. And now they're working on kind of their entire system of how they promote it and brand it to the public.

beyond their packaging. And they asked me to do some illustrations. I didn't really know the specifics. I didn't get those until, well, I didn't read those until yesterday morning. And they need six illustrations. And it's almost like they wrote out what they want for each one as it was really specific, like.

I can't talk much about the specifics, but like a vehicle from this perspective and this is happening in this, and it's like, normally it's never that specific. And so once I saw that, I go, there's no way I can get six illustrations done by, this is supposed to be next Wednesday. And so I had to tell Scott, can you contact him and say, how about I do one illustration?

Paul Povolni (48:17.943)
Hahaha!

Paul Povolni (48:29.111)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:36.951)
Wow.

Von Glitschka (48:43.054)
I'll sketch out the other five so you can show them this is how these would be rendered to get them because it was just a pitch. It wasn't any, nothing was official or approved yet. And that's been, that makes me kind of fearful because one, I'm just not sure I can pull it off in that timeline.

Paul Povolni (48:48.663)
Right.

Paul Povolni (48:55.767)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (49:07.438)
and it's a lot of work and it's not the type of illustration I do a lot just because if I had a choice, I always like doing illustration in context of branding in general. This is more almost editorial illustration and...

If I had a preference, I just wouldn't do that type of work.

Paul Povolni (49:31.447)
It's more like an infographic you type thing. Less, less.

Von Glitschka (49:34.99)
Well, it's more of a, it's more of almost like a visual, it's very complex. Most of the branding illustration I do is, you know, it's isolated or it's characters or it's, it's not a scene with trees and mountains and vehicles and this and that.

Paul Povolni (49:41.591)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:49.015)
Right.

Paul Povolni (49:56.087)
Right. Well, and your design is very bold with, you know, very, you know, you know, thick lines and, and, and fields of color and things like that. It's not into in the minutiae tiny, you know, technical type stuff. Yeah.

Von Glitschka (50:07.918)
Yeah, I've done a few of those things and I like it, but I have to be in like the right mood to do it or otherwise it feels like a burden. But I think in the context of whatever creative thing you're doing, there should be some fear to it because if it's so easy for you to pull off, I almost think you're...

Paul Povolni (50:13.527)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (50:35.022)
You're not trying hard enough if you're not a little bit intimidated. And it goes that way for logos. Like I have the brand, a zoological entity. And so it's all about animals. It's all about the four classifications of animals and the services they provide for them. But their primary brand, they don't want any animals on it.

Paul Povolni (50:39.127)
Yeah, interesting.

Von Glitschka (51:04.558)
And so I'm going, okay. But all the samples they show have animals in it. And so, so for me, there, there's some fear there because I'm going, okay, am I going to be able to solve this? Am I, I always view branding is kind of like you're solving a graphic mystery. And I don't always know where it's going to go until I dive into it and I take in all the information.

Paul Povolni (51:08.759)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (51:14.519)
hahahaha

Paul Povolni (51:22.775)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (51:28.119)
Right.

Von Glitschka (51:34.446)
And I just start thinking about it. And then that's when I'll make some kind of connection or something will click and I go, that's how I could pull this off. And a lot of that happens to, they had a brief. Usually a client takes my brief. These people provided a multi -page brief with all these examples. And so I had to ask them a few more questions. And one of the questions I asked them, what about animal?

attributes, not like you can look at and say that's a zebra or that's this, but like you can see attributes of animals. Is that okay? Because I might be able to do something with that. And I haven't had a chance to read their response yet. They sent it this morning, but I'm hoping.

Paul Povolni (52:06.231)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (52:17.719)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

So like that solution, I think fear does have some value because if it comes too easy, it might not be the best solution. Like you, you, you haven't wrestled with the solution yet. And so, so I think, yeah, I think, I think the fear creates a wrestling with it. And so you don't go into default easy solution, like, you know, and so I, so I think that there is value in a little bit of.

Von Glitschka (52:26.958)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (52:36.59)
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Paul Povolni (52:50.583)
fear and anxiety. I think even that haven't happens with public speaking. It happens with whatever is if, if you don't have any fear, then maybe you're not, you know, you're, you're, you're going to be too self -confident in that self -confidence. It doesn't feel authentic or real or, or, or the best that you could produce. So, so what do you, what is your process when you do hit the blank screen of death? You know, I think, I think creatives face that. And so, you know, when, when you, when you open up your illustrator and you've got a project.

And do you start on screen? Do you start sketching? What's your process like?

Von Glitschka (53:23.886)
No.

Von Glitschka (53:27.47)
Well, let's take the context of a logo design. So I have a systematic process where I ask certain questions, I provide a brief, and then that brief has questions that I've derived over the years from agencies who I've read their briefs that they provide me for creative direction. And I see the questions that...

why they give their rationale to why we're thinking this way. And I realized, wow, that's a good question. I'm going to add that to my brief. And so, yeah, it's like, I think the one thing about creativity is we're all kind of, we all amalgamate from influences, good or bad, but if you're trying to get better, you see how somebody did something and you say, wow,

Paul Povolni (53:58.263)
Right.

Paul Povolni (54:03.543)
Still from the best, right?

Von Glitschka (54:23.63)
I like what they did, that's a smart way to handle things. And so you start doing that, or like with Photoshop or Illustrator, I've seen certain ways people approach certain things. I go, that's smart, why have I been doing it the way I've been doing it all these years? And then.

Paul Povolni (54:38.167)
Right, right. That's that's that just saved me hours. Yeah.

Von Glitschka (54:42.542)
Yeah, so that's how I learn is by observation. So I take in all the information, follow it up with any more questions, take that information in, and then I tell the client, OK, I have everything I need. And I give them a timeline when they can see design directions. And in their mind, they're probably thinking, well, Von's working on it. Well, I'm not. I have to let that kind of steep.

Paul Povolni (55:07.959)
Hahaha.

Von Glitschka (55:12.302)
and think about it. And then your mind wants to make connections and patterns. And that's when ideas will start coming to mind. And when that happens, that's when I know I need to start doing thumbnail sketches and just capturing ideas. And in the process of just doing thumbnails and working out how you could handle this or that,

Paul Povolni (55:12.599)
Yeah, they marinate for a little bit, yeah.

Von Glitschka (55:39.662)
You stumble upon ideas that you wouldn't have thought of if you would have just jumped into it and just kind of go with the low hanging fruit idea, which comes easy. It's, it's that what you said is so true is it has to be a little bit of a struggle because that's where you, you purge the bad ideas and then something emerges that you know is going to probably be a good direction to show.

Paul Povolni (56:07.063)
Now with the sketching, do you start once you have inspiration or do you start before you have inspiration?

Von Glitschka (56:14.702)
It's one of the same for me, so it's all part of the process. If I'm thinking of a certain thing, I'll use reference. Because I know what a zebra is in general in my mind's eye, but if I'm drawing something and I know it has to be a certain thing, then I look at reference. And it doesn't matter if it's really iconic. That's where you can look at complex photography.

Paul Povolni (56:28.759)
Ryan.

Von Glitschka (56:43.054)
and deduce it down into a simple form and shape. And so that's what I try to do when I'm working on a branding project specifically. But yeah, it's just struggling with the process. And some projects, it's not as a struggle as other projects. Or.

Like I was designing some, I'm working on it, and as I'm working on my own projects for clients and like this illustration one I'm doing today, I always have something on the side burner that I'm working on. So when I have spare time, I jump back onto it and work on it. That's kind of how I develop my courses. And so in the course, I'm doing something on like,

how you can expand a brand beyond just a logo. So all the brand assets you can create. And off the top of my head, I can't remember what we named the course now. But I was working on iconography as one way. And not every company or brand identity project needs iconography. But if the company has services, they might. And so I'm kind of using that to show,

Paul Povolni (57:39.159)
Yeah. Right.

Paul Povolni (57:45.719)
Heheheheh

Paul Povolni (57:59.575)
Right, right, yeah.

Von Glitschka (58:04.27)
developing iconography, but even in the process of creating a course, my mind keeps thinking about something. And I realized yesterday, I wasn't even working on that, I was working on these illustration things and it popped in my mind, I need to change that icon. Cause my mind said, you know, it wouldn't really look like that. He should be leaning forward. And I'm like, what? And I go back and I look at it and I go like,

Paul Povolni (58:23.895)
Hahaha.

Von Glitschka (58:33.55)
Yeah, that does look better. So I think that, no, I just think that that's, it's kind of like you develop a sixth sense at times and the more you develop your own systematic approach to design, you can augment it at any time with new things you see that could improve it. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:35.383)
Yeah, well I think that's really interesting. Go ahead.

Paul Povolni (58:47.351)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:57.111)
Right. Right. You said several things there that I think people have probably written down. And I think they, if you haven't written down, you need to take note of, you know, the first thing or one of the things that you said is, you know, you, you take all the information, you take all the inspiration and, and as creatives, and I've shared this before is, you know, I consider myself like a sponge and I'm constantly absorbing. I look at a menu, I look at a sign, I look at a magazine, I look at the TV show. I look.

I'm always absorbing. And then when it comes time to create, it's like I squeeze the sponge of everything that I've absorbed. And then something, hopefully original comes out of it. but you know, sometimes when, when the project comes along as you shared, you take in all the information and then you let it marinate and sometimes even just like forget about it, like move on to something else. And.

It's amazing how many times for me, and it sounds like it happens to you as well, is when you stop thinking about it, that you actually get ideas about it. When you stop like angsting over it, you suddenly have this inspiration. I've had, you know, brilliant ideas in the shower and just driving silently in the car, suddenly an idea pops in and I was like, I wasn't even thinking about that, but my goodness, that's a great solution. That's a great direction to go in. And you find that too, right?

Von Glitschka (59:57.678)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (01:00:15.502)
Absolutely. Years ago, I was asked to do a talk at the How Design Conference, and it was going to be on drawing, but in the process of putting together the talk, I was thinking of the question, why is it so hard to come up with good ideas at times? And I'm going, somebody has had to have done some study or something on this, and I found this.

Paul Povolni (01:00:43.831)
Right.

Von Glitschka (01:00:44.558)
a study and it was about the brain waves and the the the hertz for each brain wave and there's one called gamma and it's a higher mental activity and it's associated like with

see, I haven't even done this talk in such a long time. But basically, gamma state of thinking, everybody in their alpha state of thinking, that's normal. Then you have beta, and there's things associated to certain ones like subliminal advertising and stuff. But gamma is the state of thinking that idea formation happens in, but it's a higher level of thinking than normal consciousness. So...

Paul Povolni (01:01:11.927)
Ha ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (01:01:19.095)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:01:38.231)
Wow.

Von Glitschka (01:01:38.35)
The reason why brainstorming works, where you have all these people in a group and you're just throwing out ideas is because that works is because, and it has to work with certain ground rules such as there are no bad ideas when you're brainstorming because you're not refining, you're just mining. And if you're looking for gold, yeah, if you're mining for gold, you don't stop because you keep hitting rocks, you just keep going.

Paul Povolni (01:01:58.231)
Yeah. Yeah. You're shutting down the governor. Yeah.

Von Glitschka (01:02:08.046)
And so with brainstorming, things will be thrown out there ridiculous. It might even make some people laugh. But then eventually somebody will say something that they're thinking that nobody else would have thought of, but that triggers their idea. And they go, we could do this. And then all of a sudden you have these ideas that wouldn't have existed if it was just an individual on their own. And there's a reason why.

Paul Povolni (01:02:08.279)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:02:26.583)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:02:32.567)
Right.

Von Glitschka (01:02:35.47)
A good example of gamma level thinking is when you're driving or you're in a shower and that eureka moment hits and you realize, this is what I could do or this is how I could fix this or whatever. And it applies to anybody in any context of trying to solve something. And that was always my favorite thing to share in that talk because it demystifies.

Paul Povolni (01:02:47.703)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (01:03:04.366)
why it's hard to come up with ideas because you have to work through all the bad ideas like in a brainstorm in order to push them aside and then your mind starts discovering these ideas that have potential.

Paul Povolni (01:03:11.767)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:03:18.359)
Right. Those, well, dare I say it, those head smack moments, right? And, and you know, another thing that you shared about the, the drawing and the sketching. And for me, you know, sometimes when I feel stuck, when it comes to doing a logo or brand or whatever, I find that if I just, just start drawing the things that I do know, you know, start, start writing out the words, start, you know, writing out the elements, start.

Von Glitschka (01:03:22.126)
Yes, exactly.

Paul Povolni (01:03:43.415)
sketching stuff, even when I feel stuck, even when I feel like I have no ideas yet. sometimes just that simple act of doing something can suddenly trigger something else. And then even if you do that and then step aside and, and, and move away from it. but at least you've kind of set that seed in your mind that at, at that gamma moment, suddenly it comes back to you and you're like, my goodness, you know, that is the solution. That's the direction I need to go.

And so, yeah, I love that. What are some other things that you do in your creative process in prompting creative ideas?

Von Glitschka (01:04:19.79)
Well, you kind of brought it up, is that I'll get to a point, and I've stared at something so long, I know now it's best if I just set it aside, jump to something else, if I don't have a deadline, of course. But even if, I tell people to say, but what if I, they need it really quick, I go, okay, well, make it 15 minutes, doesn't have to be a day, just don't.

Paul Povolni (01:04:47.959)
Yeah.

Von Glitschka (01:04:48.11)
Focus on it, don't pay attention to it. Move to something else, switch gears, and then come back to it. And you can almost always with the fresh eyes see something that you didn't notice because you're too close to it. And I, it frustrates me when I do that and I'm looking at an old project and I go, why did I do it that way? And, and I'm just going, it would have looked so much better if I would have done this.

Paul Povolni (01:05:01.335)
Right. Right.

Paul Povolni (01:05:09.687)
You

Von Glitschka (01:05:17.55)
And it's like, but that's all part of you grow and you learn and you improve.

Paul Povolni (01:05:17.943)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (01:05:22.327)
creative process. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I'm the same way. Sometimes I just go have a shower to reset or I clean my office, you know, just like even, even think on a different level or thinking on a different part of your brain. And so for me, sometimes it's just, I'm just going to clean up my office desk. You know, it's, you know, sometimes in the middle of projects or whatever things get scattered, you've got books and references and sketches and whatever. And sometimes it's just that simple act of let me clean up my office a little bit.

that gets you to a place where you can think freshly in it and jump back in, even with a deadline, you know, taking 15 minutes, like you said, to do something different makes a big difference.

Von Glitschka (01:06:02.127)
Yeah, I do that quite a bit.

Paul Povolni (01:06:03.813)
So, Von, this has been amazing and I do want to honor your time with this. An hour has gone by very quickly. And so, you know, now of course you're teaching, you're creating courses, you know, and that's absolutely amazing, the stuff that you're doing. You're doing it with LinkedIn, right? And...

Von Glitschka (01:06:25.934)
I, ever since 2011, I've been, back then they were lynda .com and then LinkedIn bottom and then Microsoft bought LinkedIn. So it's still LinkedIn learning. It's just Microsoft kind of does the backend thing.

Paul Povolni (01:06:43.223)
Yeah. Yeah. And so I definitely encourage you to follow Von and all his adventures. And if you need inspiration for the work that you're doing, definitely follow him across all the social media channels and, you know, be sure to check out his website. Also, definitely look at the LinkedIn training and the courses, you know, follow him on LinkedIn, to find out what's happening, where, and when he's doing stuff, you know, check out his website, glitchcoastudios .com.

And I know you even create brushes as well now. You're creating brushes and things like that.

Von Glitschka (01:07:17.87)
Yeah, actually my first course called Logo Design Process outside of LinkedIn was through Retro Supply Company. And I'm going to let you figure out how to award it, but I'll give somebody free access to that. But you get to pick who that is, and then I'll provide that to them.

Paul Povolni (01:07:41.623)
Awesome. Well, yeah, if you want to leave a comment on this podcast, whatever channel it is, if you want to leave a comment, let me know about it and I'll choose somebody out of the comments for this and choose them to get that great package. It's the logo design process from Retro Supply Company. If you're a designer of any kind or if you're an illustrator, you've heard of Retro Supply Company. You're probably a fan of it. You probably get their newsletter. You probably have your link to their...

the social graphics. So this is going to be a great resource. And so I will choose somebody, you know, after we launched this podcast from the comments and they'll get that free free access to that full course as well. And,

Von Glitschka (01:08:22.542)
Is it? I have a question. You publish these on YouTube, right? Okay. So anybody who's watching this on YouTube, once you're done, just type into search on YouTube PPLUV, People Love Process, and that'll bring up my YouTube channel and that content's all free.

Paul Povolni (01:08:28.951)
yeah, yeah, I'll be publishing videos as well, video versions.

Paul Povolni (01:08:49.527)
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. So for somebody that's, that is an illustrator, that is a designer, and I love, I think you call yourself an illustrative designer or what's the, what's the term that you use?

Von Glitschka (01:08:59.438)
illustrative designer would fit. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:09:01.451)
Yeah, absolutely love what you do. And, you know, if somebody wants to follow along, definitely check out those channels. But for somebody that is at a place that you once were, you know, what would you tell them? Like what would you, how would you encourage them moving forward?

Von Glitschka (01:09:19.31)
Never stop drawing. It doesn't matter if you ever become an illustrator. You don't need to. Drawing facilitates ideation. You're going to end up loving it. You're going to produce a wider range of ideas the more you develop it. Because when people ask me, well, what do you mean by illustrative designer? What does that mean?

I teach in a Master of Fine Arts program on the East Coast. They're all traditional illustrators, but they asked me to do a talk on Illustrative Design. And so the first example I give is I show the Target logo. I go, this is quintessential graphic design, elliptical shapes. You could probably build this in 30 seconds in Illustrator. Then I bring up the Starbucks logo. I go, this is also vector art. It's a...

Paul Povolni (01:10:06.743)
Right.

Von Glitschka (01:10:13.806)
the Starbucks logo, but you know just by looking at it that at some point somebody had to draw this out to figure it out before they created it. So that would be the difference. And if you just do drawing in general, not that you once again, you have to become an illustrator, it's going to expand your offering. You're going to be able to pull off certain visual contexts that otherwise are really hard to do if you don't do any drawing.

Paul Povolni (01:10:23.127)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:10:42.199)
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Von. This has been a great discussion. Thank you once again for the cool Voppa tattoo logo. It still looks amazing. Still love putting it everywhere. And for those of you that don't know what that is, I'll post it somewhere associated with this podcast episode. Von, thank you so much, man. That's been awesome.

Von Glitschka (01:11:02.734)
Well, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Paul Povolni (01:11:05.751)
All right, have a great day. Take care.

Von Glitschka (01:11:07.598)
Bye.