No Room for Lazy People - Lisa Traffie
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Lisa Traffie
I’m more on the contemporary end of design because I market modern items or industrial products. So I take simple things and try to make something complex and appealing from them that still clarifies a message. And to me that’s a challenge and I enjoy a challenge: not only as a designer, but also in cooking. I enjoy being creative. You know: green beans and broccoli. They’re both green. What do you do with them? You make them appealing. Most of our clients are industrial. We do some consumer advertising: once in a while somebody will come to us and say, “I’ve designed this great pot. You can put it on your stove and you don’t have to put water in it. I know there’s a market out there.” So you develop an identity for their company. But before you do that, you have to think, ‘To whom are you going to market this? ‘It involves research as well as designing a creative visual for the buying market. In high school I took four years of graphic design and photography, which is my hobby. I went to North Middlesex Regional High School in Townsend: they had a great program. My teachers were good friends of our family, which in turn gave me one-on-one attention. I could go there during my free blocks of time at school. One teacher taught graphic arts and photography. The other did architectural drawing and so it was a nice mix. They were intrigued by my older sister, who went ahead of me. The energy that our teachers sensed behind us, our drive for being creative, they captured that. The other thing about doing this type of work is that your mind never shuts off. You go on vacation and people say that’s your ‘rest.’ Maybe from actual producing, but I don’t think you ever really rest from being creative. If anything, I’m driving down the road and see a billboard and, it’s like, Wow, that’s really cool. And the more you see, the more ideas start coming. This is the thing: I’m not an artist in the sense that I can sit down and draw something. Instead, I might see objects and colors that some say won’t go together; that’s my challenge. I take visuals and put them all together to make something look good and promote a product.
People with whom I come in contact professionally are completely surprised to learn of my background. One of my clients knows my creativity and is very open about giving me ideas and telling me to go ahead and work something up. But he’ll ask me questions about growing up: he’ll come out and say things like, “What did you guys eat for breakfast every morning?” It blows his mind that there were 14 children in our family.
As a kid, I always liked to tinker with my hands. I used to take, I’m trying to think what they called them, a little plastic thing, like the first Legos, but they were flat, and play with them. And I enjoyed being outdoors; even now, I’ve got to have a sunny spot to work. I enjoyed building things, whether a hut or “building” a cake; we’d make mud pies. We made huts out of pieces of plywood, cinder blocks, or logs. We had our own little world in the woods.
My dad worked for different construction companies. He wasn’t home all the time, but you had something to look forward to at five or six o’clock at night. I remember my father saying, “I would love to send you off to college.” I think it was when he first realized that I had ambition to do something creative. And now it’s come to the point in my work where I think I really do want to go offto college. So I’m thankful that I didn’t jump into it.
I think everybody is here for a reason and I believe this desire to be a designer has come from God. He gave me a good talent and the desire to do it and I think I should fulfill that. To have different talents is not something to be taken lightly because I realize I couldn’t do these things if it weren’t forGod giving me the ability to do them or accept them. Growing up without television, I was not exposed to a lot of advertising, so my response to advertising is that I look on my work as trying to help grow a company. And I’m very fussy about what I advertise or how I advertise or how one goes about explaining things. The key thing is it’s not up to my judgment. It’s always up to the client; what they want. It’s company-to-company selling, not consumer advertising. If the work were to become consumer-oriented as we know it today, that would be my turn to back out. I had an opportunity to go and work for an agency doing consumer advertising. Very consumer-oriented. Things I just backed away from. It would have been a great opportunity for me, but as far as consumer advertising goes, you get into a lot of different thinking.
I am less susceptible to advertising, not so much because of my background, but because I have a marketing-oriented mind. I know what advertisers are trying to say to me and am not manipulated by sell tactics. I lead a very simple life, compared with a lot of people my age. People who walk into my house probably don’t believe I’m a designer because it’s all this mismatched furniture that was left there when I rented the house I have the biggest conglomeration of stuff. I’ve had friends and family come in and say, “Oh, you should do this and this and this.” But I don’t care. To me, it serves its purpose and it’s there. My dream house and where I’m at now are two totally different things. Living there has taught me to be content. I’m very thankful for the conglomeration of stuff, because otherwise people would come to my house and have to sit on the floor.