When the Carnegie Mellon freshman design major opens his eyes, the sunlight shining through his dorm room window seems a tad too bright. And he feels too well rested for just six hours of sleep—especially after getting practically no shut eye for most of the week. He looks at the time displayed on his phone. It’s not morning; it’s 6 pm. His mid-term critique for his Design Studio class was nine hours ago, meaning he missed his chance to expound upon his project with his professor, which is expected from each of the students. He had already been struggling in the class. Now this. If that’s not enough, his flight home for spring break departed two hours ago.
When Justin Edmund gets his assignment back a few weeks later, it’s accompanied by a yellow sticky note that reads: Set up a meeting with me.
“Oh my God,” he thinks. “I’m getting kicked out of school.”
He had seen this coming, but not because he hasn’t worked hard. If anything, he has overworked himself to compensate for having never taken so much as a drawing class before enrolling at CMU. He did have plenty of experience growing up, just not in design. By the time he was just six years old, he was a successful actor, both in commercials and TV shows. Then, in 1994, he landed the role of the son of Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston in “The Preacher’s Wife” motion picture.
But when it came time to apply to college, Edmund realized his passions lay elsewhere—namely video games, sketching, and the Internet. He applied to several top design schools with a portfolio comprised mostly of roughly sketched logos and Web site ideas. Evidently, by getting accepted to Carnegie Mellon, he showed promise. But the potential he demonstrated in his application portfolio is—by his own admission—lacking in his school work. His design classes mystified him, and his grades weren’t good.
For some, it might be hard to comprehend why studying design is difficult. “It’s not just about making pretty things,” explains Dan Boyarski, a professor of design. “It’s about understanding human nature, understanding other people.” And preparing students to be able to design everything from furniture to Web sites is no easy task. Good designers, says Boyarski, possess not only sharp intuition and a creative mind, but also a grasp of psychology and form.
And it’s exactly those traits that Edmund’s Design Studio professor isn’t convinced his student can master.
When the wary student steps into the conference room for his meeting, he scans the table, where professors are seated. His Design Studio professor isn’t there. “Why are you here?” one of them asks. Not sure what to do, Edmund is about to leave. Then, a voice stops him. “I asked him to be here.” His Design Studio professor has just entered the room. “Sit down, Justin.”
Edmund is clearly told that if he plans on making it to his sophomore year—let alone graduating from the College of Fine Arts’ School of Design—he needs to start grasping the concepts he’s being taught. The stern words make the student reevaluate why he chose to pursue design. He was an avid video gamer growing up, and technology piqued his interest in studying design. He hacked into video game servers in middle school, and by high school he taught himself rudimentary Internet programming and designed basic Web sites for his friends. Some form of communication design was in his future, or so he thought.
Edmund’s mother couldn’t offer much advice: “I would see the other students’ work, and I thought, ‘That’s such a pretty chair. Why can’t Justin make a chair? Why can’t he study industrial design?’ Instead, he had his computer set up with all these buttons you could push. I didn’t understand it at all.”
Edmund makes it through his freshman year, and as a sophomore, he’s determined to avoid another sticky note. It becomes commonplace for him to lug pillows into his design studio, where he often spends upwards of 70 hours a week. His grades improve; by spring, he applies for a coveted paid summer internship at the social media giant Facebook, hoping to hone his Web design skills. Facebook rejects him without explanation. Not that he needs one: “I still wasn’t up to par. I didn’t have anything they wanted.” He needs a portfolio of something.
During the summer, he starts designing, Visually—a Web site that would let users share images they find on the Internet with other users within a social media setting. For instance, say you discover a breathtaking shot of the Grand Canyon. Visually could save that image to your profile and you could share it with your friends, whose images would be available for you to browse through and collect as well.
The concept requires complex coding ability, which Edmund attempts to slog through. After two months of 16-hour days, Visually goes live—just in time for junior year. His friends join, and they use it! He tweaks it as the year goes on, and when spring arrives, Edmund decides to give Facebook another shot. This time, he has a well-designed—and very cool—Web site under his belt. And this time, Facebook accepts him.
On the first day of his internship, he chats with Facebook product designer Evan Sharp, who praises Edmund’s crafty work on Visually. Sharp mentions that just before coming to Facebook, he also co-founded and designed a Web site that combined image sharing with social media. Edmund’s ears perk up. Could he be talking to his future competition?
For his intern project, he helps redesign how Facebook users complete their profiles. It’s not a “glamorous project,” says Edmund, but the work fascinates him. The Bay Area and Facebook’s headquarters soon feel like home, and his days become consumed by “nerdy discourse” with colleagues like Sharp, who evolve from coworkers to friends.
After wandering through the design desert for three years at CMU, he finally figures it out. Not just what design is, but where he fits: interaction design, a field in which designers sculpt digital interfaces—like video games, computer operating systems, and Web sites—for people’s use. But he doesn’t just want to work in interaction design; he wants to work in interaction design at Facebook.
As August approaches, he wonders whether they’ll offer him a full-time job. It’s not arrogance—good designers who can program are hard to find; many companies lock in future employees before they graduate. At the end of his last day, though, he heads home empty-handed.
He’s crushed. Determined to make himself more marketable, he enrolls in another programming class his senior year and teaches himself more code in his free time. Simultaneously, the design faculty unleashes a monster project on the senior class: revamp the School of Design’s communications with the world, everything from its Web site to its copywriting. The massive undertaking is further complicated when Edmund and his teammate realize that the Web site has received only minor updates since its initial launch in 1992. Essentially, they’ll have to start from scratch.
They spend two months creating a sleek, easy-to-navigate prototype. When the faculty reviews what Edmund and his teammate did, there are no sticky notes. It’s so good that the school buys it from them to use as the foundation for the school’s actual Web site.
In the spring, recruiters from the world’s largest Internet, technology, and design firms arrive on campus. The explosion in popularity of social media Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter has skyrocketed demand for interaction designers—leading to a scarcity of qualified talent. After nearly four years of very hard work, Edmund is one of those talents; not only can he design a beautiful layout, but he can also write the code to create that layout—and craft a superb user experience. He’s both an architect and a construction company.
He spends the last few months of his senior year checking in and out of Silicon Valley and New York City hotels—all on the dime of prospective employers—taking interviews with nearly 20 companies. But Edmund’s primary interest remains with just one company: Facebook. They’re interested.
Flown out to Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters, he’s pleased with how well the interview goes. Before heading back to CMU for his 2011 graduation, he makes a point to contact his old friend Sharp, who just left Facebook to return to the start-up company he co-founded. Sharp, who believed in Edmund’s talents since he first laid eyes on Visually, suggests Edmund swing by his company’s offices.
When Sharp opens the front door, Edmund gets a taste of what Facebook might have looked like before its $100 billion valuation. Whereas Facebook’s headquarters occupy multiple buildings, Sharp’s office amounts to six employees crouched over laptops in the living room of a ground-level apartment. He introduces Edmund to another company co-founder, Ben Silbermann, who asks Edmund to join him and Sharp in another room. They close the door.
“Listen. We want to hire you.”
What? Edmund thinks.
“You’re a natural fit. You understand the product. … Would you be interested?”
Edmund is baffled. I was just coming to say, “Hi.”
“Um … sure,” he replies.
Just two years after getting rejected for a Facebook internship, Edmund is now entertaining offers from his dream company and some of the biggest names in the business. If all he wants is a six-figure salary, it can happen. But he didn’t crack Internet game servers in middle school because he thought he could make good money at it. He did it because it was the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night.
Perhaps that’s why Sharp’s company entices him. Although the start-up has to offer Edmund stock options to try to make up for what it can’t in salary, it offers him perks that feel right. He would have the chance to be one of just a handful of employees. The chance to design a product he loves. The chance to help craft the look, feel, and vision of an entire Web site that Edmund believes could be really successful if designed well.
Edmund calls Sharp and Silbermann. He’s in. By the time he moves to Palo Alto in August 2011, his new employer, Pinterest, has nearly outgrown its living room workplace and is about to move into an actual office. Pinterest is similar to Edmund’s Visually Web site, but broader—users can save not just images, but anything from videos to airplane tickets to shoes—and “pin” them to a virtual community pin-board.
As product designer, his first challenge is to design Pinterest’s mobile Web site. Its importance can’t be overstated. Although the company does have an iPhone application, most Pinterest users own another type of smartphone. After Edmund works on it for more than a month, the mobile site goes live in September 2011.
By December 2011, Pinterest is one of the top 10 social networking sites in the world. By January 2012, it’s the fastest Web site in history to break the 10 million mark in unique visitors. Today, it enjoys nearly 5 million visitors per day, making it the third most visited social media site, after Facebook and Twitter.
That much user traffic means big bucks. In May 2012, Pinterest had an estimated value of nearly $1.5 billion. That’s good news for the company—and the 22-year-old designer’s stock options, now worth several million dollars. Pinterest has also enjoyed critical acclaim, winning two Webby awards—regarded as the Oscars of the Internet—for Best Social Media App and for Best Visual Design/Function.
The two-year-old company now works out of 55,000-square-foot office in San Francisco and boasts more than 50 employees—including two new hires made by Edmund himself: Tartans Ash Huang (A’09) and Victor Ng (A’12). Edmund will need all the help he can get. Since starting at Pinterest, he’s also redesigned the site’s user profiles and its iPad application.
Good thing, he laughs, that he didn’t flunk out.
Nicholas Ducassi (A’10) of New York City is an actor, writer, and filmmaker and has been a regular contributor to this magazine since his senior year.
Related Links:
How to Use Pinterest Pin Board's for the Web
