An Artsy Interview with Jacob Campbell '15

On November 15th, I was given the opportunity to interview Ridley alum and designer, Jacob Campbell ’15. A strong example of how versatile the arts can be, Mr. Campbell has worked in many different areas of design, from freelance graphic design to civil engineering. To gain some insight into his career in the arts, I conducted a quick Q&A session. 

Can you walk me through your career journey so far? How did you get from IB design tech in high school to where you are now? 

I worked at Salus Marine [specialty life jacket company]. I started off designing life jackets, and I met my at-the-time business partner there. I was doing some different projects with the Canadian special forces, doing tanker uniforms and Olympic whitewater kayaking jackets. That was a lot of fun! From that, I started working on a project that took a few years, and we released that in 2020. Also, during and since then, I’ve taken a lot of odd jobs, both in and around design, I’ve also been freelancing in graphic design and worked at Fil-Trek [industrial filtration company] as a mechanical designer. I designed water filtration plants, basically different water arrays, and it was really cool! I even did a design quote for Tesla, which was kind of a funny one, for one of their factories. Then I worked in medical devices designing hearing aid testing machines at Audioscan [designs and manufactures the world's leading hearing instrument verification equipment], which is part of a larger business called Demant which sponsors an F1 team! Now in the last 8 months, I’ve taken a job in civil engineering. I’m designing waste-water treatment plants, but designing the buildings and roads around them. Definitely a pretty wild career as it goes, but I’ve been doing OPEONGO [Mr. Jacob Campbell’s tent company, started with a design created during his IB Design Tech IA] since I started my career. 

The thing they don’t tell you is that you’re more than qualified to work in engineering too. It’s funny, because once you get the title ‘product designer,’ you can quite easily work in job roles like mechanical design. To be honest, that’s where a lot of the jobs are unless you live in the city. 

What do you love most about your career, and what do you find most challenging?  

I love the creating part. The design part of the job is pretty awesome and doesn’t really have any downsides. I think the hard part is when you run your own business. Customers, accounting, paying for things, but also that’s just part of it and part of life too. Another challenge is when you’re working for a company, sort of realizing that when you have your ideas, it doesn’t necessarily mean your manager or the customer will think the same thing. 

Do you create art/designs as a hobby on the side, and if so, where do you get your inspiration?  

Definitely, I do, especially since I find my freelancing in graphics as a hobby. I do a lot of different aesthetic-type projects, like right now I’m designing some laser-cuttable ornaments. My partner and I love to do crafts, so we’re looking into doing stained glass. We’ve been doing a lot of clay. It does become a lot of fun, and I find as a designer, you get to become a professional artist and crafter. You can do a lot of cool things. 

Do you have any advice for students building a portfolio for art programs, and more specifically design programs? 

Just showing that you understand perspective, I think that’s the number one thing. Also, the ability to do a really good technical drawing and having information while not giving too much information, are two really core things as well. Being able to do some Computer-Automated Design CAD is probably quite impressive too. Keep it varied, while showing you know the nuts and the bolts are a big thing. 

Do you have any tips for students working through their design tech IA? We all know the IB can be very heavy with deadlines so how did you stay on track with that? 

Number one is just keep focused on why you’re doing it. Hopefully, there is a legitimate problem you’re solving with everything. Just keep on working, and keep in mind why you’re doing it and how far it can go. I think the other thing too is just putting in the hours. I always found getting up early, getting a nice drink, and just dedicating time where no one else was around to work on it helped. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be a bit inconvenient for yourself in all that. Especially if anyone wants to go into design, it’s one of those things where free time is not something that’s just going to happen in college or university, that’s just how it is. So I always thought “Work more, don’t stress.” 

What software do you use most frequently? Are there certain CAD programs that you use for prototyping or programs you use for design pitches? 

There’s Sketchbook Pro for drawing, an alternative for drawing on paper. In terms of programs, SolidWorks is the best to learn. At Humber for instance, you will definitely be learning that. And once you know SolidWorks, you know Autodesk Inventor since they’re pretty much interchangeable. There are so many programs out there depending on what you want to do. I’ve had to learn Inventor, Moto, Revit, Civil3d, AutoCAD, Shaper3d, and Alius [All of these are different programs for computer-automated design]. 

What is your creative process when approaching a new project? How do you deal with a ‘design block’ or lack of motivation when creating? 

To be honest, I think that there aren’t that many situations, at least that I’ve come across, that design block has kind of been the hard part. I find that very often, you’ll be given a need, and people will always dump so many different requirements for this and that. So, a lot of the time it’s more just figuring out the issues for the design and making all the constraints work. To be honest, there is almost never enough time to have a design block because there’s always something to do. Unless you’re doing your own products, that can be a thing too, but also, usually your capacity for being able to design vs. your capacity for being able to order products is very different. Regardless, there are a lot of good strategies for coming up with designs, like sticky notes of different features and categorizing them, talking with people who aren’t in the same field, and the IDEO method. There’s a lot out there and there’s no one way to brainstorm. 

And a final question for all the technical drawing enthusiasts (and me!): what is your favourite pen to use when sketching? 

I have a mechanical pencil and a pen. I have the Frixon Ball Slim by Uniball, it’s 0.38 millimetres. Super super fine tip, I’m a big fine tip user. It’s fantastic for ghost lines because it’s basically a near-invisible super thin pen that if you draw over it, you can’t see it, so it’s really good for framing stuff out and doing perspective lines. The only downside is that it has literally cut paper before! If you press too hard, it is so thin it will cut the paper. I also love that you can erase it because contrary to belief, mistakes do happen.  

For mechanical pencils, I use the Kurutoga Advanced in 0.3 millimetres and 2H lead. The cool thing about this one is that Mitsubishi developed it. They come in a few different versions, but the advanced version is just the high-end version of it. It micro-clicks when you take it off the page. It does it in a way that it doesn’t wear out one side of the pencil lead, so you get a perfectly smooth lead all the time with no weird edges and you never have to click it. On a long day of design work, this thing saves me so much time.