Creative Director - Facebook Art Department

Serving as the Head of Facebook’s Art Dept. was both a deep honor and a great professional challenge. As the company underwent incredible growth in recent years, my charge was to scale our beloved Analog Research Lab (ARL) and Artists in Residence Program (AIR), bringing inspiring art and design across Facebook’s corporate spaces and surrounding public communities around the world.

The Analog Research Lab has existed at Facebook since late 2009, began as an underground printmaking shop, and was started by Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak. Both were early members of the Facebook design team, with backgrounds that favored more traditional graphic and environmental design.

Back then there were less than 2,000 employees and Ben and Everett were often right there when interesting things were said or discussed. So with no budget or permission they scavenged, built, or bought art equipment. Working out of unused storage space on our original campus, they simply started printing posters. Overnight, or on the weekend they stapled them up. They felt this was the best way to open up discussion around important issues.

And thus, “Poster Culture at Facebook” was born. In time, the original space was found not to comply with California building regulations, but by then the posters and the creative culture around them were truly loved, so an official Facebook Analog Research Laboratory was built in the company’s current Menlo Park campus and it became a legitimate part of our infrastructure and one of the most visible representations of Facebook’s unique culture.

Facebook posters uplift consciousness in its workplace and remind employees that the things they work on ladder up to Facebook’s mission to “give people the power to create community”. They also remind them what we’re doing matters. And what employees are thinking about when they work also matters.

To keep the messaging in our spaces inspiring and at the level of the best galleries, a second program was created in 2012: AIR, the Artists in Residence Program, one expression of Facebook’s commitment to staying open, porous and alert to the world.

The AIR Program sources, supports and shares stories on contemporary artists whose work we bring into our spaces, all over the world.

A personal collection of photos from some of my favorite spaces around the world shows what the AIR team did for our spaces and our culture.

Building for scale meant standardizing certain ways of working so the team could keep up with Facebook’s construction timelines. One example of this was the work I led that gave our Facilities partners a better way to understand when and how to construct new Analog Lab maker spaces across the globe. That took deep cross-functional work and a communication plan strong enough for Facebook’s massive Facilities organization to adopt our standards.

Facebook’s mission to create community inspired a pivot in how the Art Dept. could contribute in its own way.

Under my leadership we wrote a new mission, to cultivate the world’s most meaningful creative culture, and getting there meant sharing the creative culture we got to live every day as employees with the world outside.

That led to my work expanding our public programming and extending Facebook’s creative culture to the communities around our offices worldwide.

Public workshops. Art and design mentorship through hands-on and instructional workshops.

Exhibitions. Showing up in the community with the same art and design we hang in Facebook spaces, so our neighbors get the same creativity our internal community does.

Street art and public murals. Piggybacking on existing street art events to commission high-caliber work for Facebook and the public to experience together.

Community partnerships. Partnerships with museums and other creative venues let us offer more to our neighbors, and partnerships with local craftspeople broaden their reach.

Speaking events. Community-inclusive talks on building and maintaining strong communities through art and design.