The City: Haris Fazlani
“If you can design one thing, you can design everything.”
Foreword
Creative director. Refinement-chasing multidisciplinary designer. Co-founder at WØRKS studio. Polymath leader in the making.
Preface
Growing up as the eldest child of immigrant parents in the 90s, my childhood was an oscillation between struggle and imagination. We lived above my parents' small store in a rough part of Albany, New York, where the cacophony of sirens and shouting often pierced the night. The store was robbed periodically, and drug use and violence cast a pall over the neighborhood. As a result, my parents kept a tight rein on us, rarely allowing my siblings and me to venture outside, so I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 11 or 12, and learning to swim was out of the question.
While spending countless hours indoors, I devoured kids’ chapter books, especially Katherine Applegate’s Animorphs series, plunging into fantastical worlds where teenagers could transform into animals. As a kid, I was turning to books to unmoor me from my narrow reality, and the ability of stories to transport me would always mesmerize me. My mind was always roaming free, even as my body stayed put. When I wasn’t reading, I was sketching. My drawings were clumsy at first, but I kept at it, filling notebooks with portraits of comic book and cartoon heroes, marveling as my skills began to transform on the page. However, there was little encouragement for these artistic pursuits at home. Not that my parents opposed them – they simply didn't know what to make of them. In their eyes, there was no clear value or future in spending hours with a sketchpad or a stack of novels. While craving a sense of belonging, I drifted towards more celebrated pastimes in my adolescent years such as sports, music, and the intricacies of personal style. Creativity remained my refuge, but it was a world I inhabited alone.
During my senior year of high school, we abruptly uprooted to Texas. Being torn from everything and everyone I knew was a shock to the system. The cadences and customs were foreign, the social hierarchies inscrutable. Building deep friendships felt futile, so I armored myself in self-sufficiency and embraced my role as a loner. College was a chance to fulfill my parents' long-held dream for myself and my siblings: get a practical degree, secure a stable job, work hard, and ascend to a respectable middle-class life. Since the creative field held no space in this narrative, I settled on business and marketing, the most palatable option I could discern. Despite going through the motions of beginning and dropping out of a Master’s in Advertising, random internships, odd jobs, I still felt a deep restlessness stirring within me. After a few failures, a chance Twitter interaction changed my course.
A rapper-singer-producer was on the lookout for a social media intern, and given my long fascination with the overlaps between music, fashion, and other art forms, I jumped at the chance to work in an industry I cared about. By this time, I had cultivated a basic design skillset based solely on an autodidact, passion-led approach. My Tumblr, of all things, is what caught his eye, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, would foreshadow a theme in my career of some level of curatorial skill over technical prowess. His vote of confidence and the opportunity to work in the creative world allowed me to take the plunge, cobble together a portfolio, and beg people for jobs. After moving to New York, I reached out to mentors and people who had done things I admired and asked to be taught. It has been and will continue to be a journey rife with rejection, insecurity, and imposter syndrome, but I continued to learn. The ability to keep going and continuing to strive is what it takes to get better.
When I made the leap to New York City, I sought more than just a change of scenery. Despite the city's relentless rhythm and close quarters, it quickly felt like home. That said, the first six months were tough as I experienced intense homesickness – not for the environment, but for the people. Living in the city that felt daunting at times and being separated from my family was challenging, but I knew it was the right place for me to be. My decision was fast and forward-thinking, so I didn’t really have time to sit around and romanticize it, or go out of my way to do a bunch of touristy things. New York was a place that rewarded extreme and showcased the best (and the worst) of humanity, but, for me, the spirit of the city was incapsulated in everyday interactions and the hardworking people I encountered. The geographic limitations of the city and the proximity of people creates a really deep yet unspoken empathy between people in New York that is absent in almost every other city. And because you’re forced to confront and interact with so many people that are nothing like you, don’t look like you, or don’t believe the things you believe, it forces you outside of your perspective in a way that can be really uncomfortable for people, and I think people are ultimately better for it.
Through cold emails, serendipitous connections, and solicited feedback from legends like Joe Perez and Stefan Sagmeister, I gradually began to find my footing in the industry. The former became my mentor, providing criticism, encouragement and relationships. The latter, who I landed a portfolio review with, found most of my work unremarkable at the time, but one of my logos garnered his praise. That alone was enough to keep me going.
The idea for WØRKS, our creative studio, grew organically from my freelance work. I had always envisioned having my own practice one day, a place where I could collaborate with talented people to push the boundaries of design and create beauty. The name, a nod to the Deutscher Werkbund that prefigured the Bauhaus, embodied the spirit of interdisciplinary mastery we wanted to cultivate. WØRKS was founded by myself and Marc Moran, a cultural heavyweight in Chicago and one of the best creative business minds in the industry. We were soon joined by the aforementioned Joe Perez and a once-in-a-generation design talent, Roy Cranston. With more talent joining the studio, we’ve grown into a multidisciplinary team that routinely punches above its weight, as fluent in physical installations as we are in digital platforms, driven by the conviction that thoughtful design is an act of empathy, a public good. Every day is our chance to learn from each other, to blur the lines between art and commerce, and to create work that moves people.
Looking back now, my path seems accidental and inevitable, shaped by the constraints of my youth and the boundless energy of the city I now call home. All I know is that everything I didn't have made me everything I am. Every blank page, every hour spent trying to render the world in sharper detail, all of it was preparing me for something bigger, even if I couldn't see it then. As I continue pouring myself into client projects and personal experiments alike, that restless spirit remains, that kid who couldn't stop sketching. He is still learning every day, still reaching for more, but he no longer does it alone.
The Shelf Daybed | Oak plywood and linen (2023)
Infinity Blue | Vogue Plus China (August, 2023)
Objective Beauty | Numéro Netherlands (February, 2023)
Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy | Film identity (2022)
The Italic Chair | White ash (2021)
Epilogue
WØRKS is now entering its sixth official year of existence, and collectively, we've learned so much about solving creative problems, relationships, work styles, and each other. Our team is small, yet its fluidity and agility allows us to continuously get better, and I'm consistently amazed by each member's ownership of their work, seeing projects through with meticulous consideration. It's a testament to the caliber of talent we've assembled.
As a creative studio, we believe in cultivating cross-functional mastery and the importance of a baseline understanding of as many disciplines as possible. Designing a website, for instance, isn’t so far removed from creating a physical space or a visual identity. There’s an overlap in the type of thinking required, an agility in moving between the tangible and the digital. This very adaptability is what sets us apart.
Being drawn to projects within cultural space (music, entertainment, fashion), we’ve been fortunate to partner with some incredible names in the industry, yet our visibility remains one of our ongoing challenges. At WØRKS, we’re naturally inclined to keep our heads down and let the work speak for itself, but in an increasingly crowded and fast-paced market, we recognize the need to be more proactive in sharing our story and being heard.
On a personal level, I'm also grappling with how to reconcile the disparate parts of my identity as a child of immigrants. It's a complex knot I'm still unraveling. Outside the studio, I've found solace and inspiration in two seemingly unrelated pursuits: furniture design and fitness. The former feels like a natural extension of my fascination with sculpture, a way to create functional art that counterbalances the intangibility of screen-based work. There's a profound comfort in making something tactile, analog, rooted in the physical world. Fitness, in its turn, has become a vital counterpart to my creative practice. The mental clarity and fortitude I've gained from pushing my physical boundaries, be it running or grinding toward a strength goal, directly translates to my approach at work. There are undeniable parallels between the discipline required of an athlete and that of a designer. In both arenas, consistent, focused effort is what ultimately yields results.
As I look to the future, I'm acutely aware of the breakneck pace of change in our industry. Today, we’re working on designing not just solutions for our partners, but the tools they can use to bring those ideas to life. Constantly emerging platforms and technologies are reshaping the very landscape of what’s possible, but rather than fearing this evolution, I believe it’s our responsibility as creatives to actively participate in steering it. We can’t afford to be passive observers, ceding control of our tools and our trade. The onus is on us to adapt and innovate, to bring our empathy and consideration to bear on these new frontiers. No matter how virtual or automated our world becomes, I remain convinced that humanity, in all its messy and inventive glory, will always win out.
Bibliography
The City
Favorite thing about living in New York ↝ Unprecedented access, culture and walkability
One thing you can't survive without in the city ↝ Coffee
Three adjectives describing New York ↝ Not adjectives, but: Time Dilation, Moore’s Law, Energy Transfer
The most inspiring spot in the city ↝ Wherever direct sunlight is hitting at any given time
Current obsession ↝ The work of Peter Do // learning natural biomechanics movement patterns // the novel Three Body Problem // games designed by Hideo Kojima // nutrition // car reviews on YouTube // finding stillness in chaos
