INTERVIEW
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Renaissance man
Justin Ferrell is the essential voice for design-thinking in organizations
WRITING
Ben Walker PHOTOGRAPHY
Tom Campbell
People have extended opportunities to me that I didn’t see myself Dialogue Q4 2019
Sometimes others are the best judges of your own qualities. “People have extended opportunities to me that I didn’t see myself,” says Justin Ferrell, a guru of design-thinking from Stanford who began his career as a sports reporter on a local newspaper. “It’s not just about your skills, it’s about responding to what others see in you.” Ferrell had a boyhood dream of working at the great campaigning newspaper the Washington Post – “I’d seen All the President’s Men”. It came true – not because of his self-perceived qualities as a reporter – but because of others’ recognition of his skills as a designer. Working on a sports desk of just three people at a newspaper in St Augustine, Florida, everybody did everything. The then 23-yearold Ferrell would write match reports about high-school American football games, then lay them out on page. He learned page design from the sports editor, but longed to be involved in other events. “There are bigger things going on, I wanted to be involved in news. And sports writing is super-competitive. Something like 80 people applied for my job at St Augustine, and I probably got it because they could pay me the least.” Ferrell sent his cuttings nationwide (in those days, before internet news became a thing, they really were cuttings, physically chopped from newspapers). He was rejected time after time. “I sent them all over the United States, I didn’t even get an interview,” he recalls. Then, one
day, a newspaper in Greensboro, North Carolina, called him. “I said, ‘Did you like my writing?’ They said, ‘Oh no, we didn’t like your writing. But the news desk passed your clippings along to us – we are the copy desk. We’re just wondering whether you wrote the headlines on these stories, and whether you laid out these pages?’” Ferrell answered in the affirmative, got an interview as a designer – and got the job. “I became a designer because the industry told me that I had more talent there than I did as a writer,” he says. After five years, he moved on to a management-level newspaper job across the state in Raleigh. Then, after just a year, he landed a job at the Washington Post, the dream fulfilled by a circuitous route – “the opportunities offered to me by other people, rather than my intentions.” Ferrell was at the Post for almost eight years, and when it merged with its website (they were then separate companies), he moved into digital design. When designing the Post iPad app, he read about David Kelley’s work at the Institute of Design at Stanford (Stanford d.school). He later met with a colleague there who worked with Kelley, and was, he says, “blown away by the place”. He joined a journalism fellowship, taking ostensibly temporary leave of absence from the Post, but never looked back. His family loved California. Then, at the end of the year, somebody else saw something in Ferrell that he hadn’t seen in himself. Sarah