The line running through Tobias Van Schneider’s interview is simple: designers complain about tools all the time, but the better move is to build the environment you wish you had.
Nikolas Wrobel interviews designer Tobias Van Schneider, founder of Semplice and mymind, and the profile traces that pattern directly: Semplice for portfolios that didn’t fit the platform/template world, then mymind for thinking without the performative noise of social media.
Van Schneider:
How do you protect yourself against consuming, draining effects from Social Media, or disenchanting tech-mechanisms?
This question almost too perfectly leads into what I do everyday. In part, I protect myself by using mymind.com (which I created) — there are no ads, no vanity metrics, no social media features, nothing but myself. Only me and the things I care about. Over the years, mymind has become so valuable to me, it’s the first place I go to look for inspiration. In fact, while I am answering this interview, I find myself going back and forth between old notes and musings inside mymind.
Social media still drains me, just like everyone else, but it’s nice to at least have one place just for myself. And thats mymind.
Aside from that, I just get offline and out into the world. Or I create something.
Van Schneider isn’t pitching another social layer; he’s describing a private room for memory, taste, and reference.
He later explains where that product idea started:
As with many things, it was a total coincidence. When we initially worked on the mymind product and brand, we didn’t even have the name “mymind” yet. The whole thing was called AWMT, which stands for “As We May Think” and is a reference to an old essay by Vannevar Bush from 1945 in which he wrote about a machine called “The Memex” which was some sort of machine that collects and connects your personal knowledge.
Coming off of that inspiring essay, we came up with a slogan called “Think for yourself” which is sort of the antithesis to the cloud/hive mind of what we call social media today. Especially since we position mymind as a private sanctuary, it just made sense to us.
All of this eventually got me into the rabbit whole to search for ideas for our logo. The classic “Thinker” statue immediately came to mind. I always loved that one, a man deep inside his own thoughts, unfazed by the world around him. But the statue was a bit too literal to me, too well known, too sharp and serious. We needed something more abstract, more playful. Eventually I found out about Cycladic art, originating from the Aegean islands during the Early Bronze Age. Very famous for their minimal and stylized marble figurines. Now, the rest is history. I immediately fell in love with the simplicity of it and it felt like a great canvas to build our visual universe on it. The rest is history (:
Wrobel asks Van Schneider about the conditions he works best under:
The creative me enjoys being alone. Completely isolated, nobody even in the other room. It gives me freedom and clarity to think for myself and be myself. My real creative being thrives in these moments, untouched by the opinions and desires of others.
My ultimate solitude tends to arrive at midnight. It almost transforms me. The dark brings focus. Silence brings new ideas. No voices interrupt, no chance of emails, just me and my thoughts. It’s this time I feel most creatively alive.
Now, add a soundtrack to it and I’m in creative heaven (:
I don’t think every designer needs midnight solitude. But design work does need stretches where taste can form before it becomes consensus. In a work culture that treats collaboration as a default good, that distinction matters.
This is also why the tools question matters. A portfolio system, a private reference space, even a type foundry site are not neutral containers. They either protect the conditions where taste can develop, or they pull the work back toward the defaults of the platform. Van Schneider’s career makes that feel less like a manifesto and more like a working habit: when the available environment makes the work smaller, build a different environment, then keep using it until it changes the work.
Van Schneider’s favorite advice turns complaint into output:
“The best way to complain is to create something” by James Murphy, founder of LCD Soundsystem. It has become one of my guiding principles. It turns useless, negative energy into productive, positive energy.
