And sitting there in the audience, utterly transported, it came crashing down on me: I had completely screwed up that catalog. Seen live, Wilson’s work was epic, miraculous, hypnotic, transcendent. My stupid layouts were none of those things. They weren’t even pale, dim echos of any of those things. They were simply no more and no less than a whole lot of empty-headed graphic design. And graphic design wasn’t enough. It never is.
Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or — even better — subjects about which I’ve become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work. I believe I’m still passionate about graphic design. But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else.
The new graduate doesn’t need to know economics any more than a plumber does; like a tradesman, he or she needs skills that are, for the most part, technical.
But 5 or 10 years down the road, how can a designer plan an annual report without some knowledge of economics? Lay out a book without an interest in, if not a passion for, literature? Design a logo for a high-tech company without some familiarity with science?
Nowadays, the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates. But it’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.
People are capable of anything if they’re given an excuse to do it.
Most of us enter the field of design filled with individual passions and unrealized visions, and learn quickly that the other people know better: first teachers, then bosses, finally even the judges of design competitions and editors of design annuals. We put aside our doubts — none of us want to be prima donnas anyway — and become comfortable professionals in just another service industry. And when we’re roused to our feet by a call to action, second thoughts set in. “That’s easy for him to say, but my clients won’t let me do that.” But of course that’s not true. In fact, we don’t know what would happen if we tried. We take too much pride in the quality of our “service” to find out.
What’s so bad about styling, anyway? If styling, mere styling, is so dismissively easy, why does everything look so horrible? Can’t we just get a few more of these clients interested in this styling thing?
But any designer that’s been lucky enough to work with their own version of a Perfect Client knows firsthand that something else is at work here, something less rational than the simple good design / good business equation would admit. Meryl Streep was once asked why she devoted so much time to perfecting aspects of her performance that would never be visible to a movie audience. She sheepishly replied, “I guess I’m just the kind of person who likes to clean behind the refrigerator.”
My big training was on Transworld Skateboarding magazine: 200 pages full-color every month, and I had this personal thing that told me that if I was going to get something out of it, grow in myself, then I couldn’t repeat myself. I always had to do something different. I never used the same approach for any two openers.
A house can have integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom.
“The replacement of reality with selective fantasy is a phenomenon, of that most successful and staggeringly profitable American phenomenon, the reinvention of the environment as themed entertainment.”
But, one wonders, when has the taste for fantasy ever gone unsated? From high culture to low, it’s difficult to find anything that doesn’t revel in a certain degree of simulation.
Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Graphic designers, in truth, view the advertising world with a measure of envy. Whereas the effect of design is secretly feared to be cosmetic, vague, and unmeasurable, the impact of advertising on a client’s bottom line has a ruthless clarity to it. At the same time, ad agencies have treated designers as stylists for hire, ready to put the latest gloss on the sales pitch. Revolutions often begin with the politicizing of the most oppressed. And in the ecosystem of the design disciplines, graphic designers have long dwelled at the bottom of the pond.
Designers actually can change the world for the better by making the complicated simple and finding beauty in truth.
We’re seldom asked to lie. Instead, every day, we’re asked to make something a little more stupid, or a little more blithely contemptuous of its audience.
I happen to believe that the visual environment improves each time a designer produces a good design — and in no other way.
It is axiomatic in the world of diplomacy that methodology and tactics assume an importance by no means inferior to concept and strategy.
Accomplishment, as defined here, is nothing if not relative. Hosting a breakfast to honor the National Design Awards is hardly a public relations coup for the White House, and the attention that design gets from such a gesture is pleasant but not exactly transformative. Likewise, the erosion of George Bush’s approval ratings are unlikely to accelerate just because a handful of graphic designers take a stand, no matter how principled. What we have here, then, is a symbolic protest to a symbolic event.
You can only have your rib pokes so many times, and it doesn’t seem to put you in the mood to buy things. Today’s ideal magazine cover is enticing, not arresting, aiming not for shock, but for seduction.
Kubrick understood so well that the everyday hallmark of the 21st century would not be the wonder of technology, but our day-in, day-out struggle to master it.
What kind of work do we do? For whom do we do it? These are the fundamental questions for practicing designers, and it’s tempting to reduce the options to a depressingly simple choice: do commercial mainstream work that may have an impact on the mass market, or do “independent” work, projects of a more personal nature that may never extend beyond a small, specialized audience of connoisseurs. In other words: sell out, or resign yourself to marginalization.
After the tumult of the late sixties, Watergate, stagflation, and Reagan-era deregulation, corporations are no longer looked to for civic leadership. Offshore outsourcing makes the Columbus-style company town seem like a paternalistic anachronism. The inefficient realms of education and good taste no longer tempt rigorous CEOs with their eyes on the bottom line.
Writers are notoriously obsessive about the tools of their trade, investing perfectly sharpened pencils, specific brands of writing papers, obsolete manual typewriters and such with nearly magical qualities.
Clearly, these artists delighted in the world around them. They were not afraid to be uncool.
It is that true sense of life, everyday life lived to the fullest, that is the mark of a great designer, and perhaps it is part of what separates the designer from the artist. “Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again.”
Make no small plans, for they have no magic to stir men’s blood.
In two footnotes, Bell has neatly nailed the choice that many designers feel they face. They can choose to become the passive, “objective” voice of their clients, or they can be creative fountainheads, beholden to no one but their own imaginations. The Aesthetes sneer at the Agents for selling out to big business; the Agents dismiss the Aesthetes for their self-indulgent immaturity.
Tobey was gracious and affable. When I told him about the effect that the Golden Book History of the US had had on me, he laughed out loud. “I painted those for 18 straight months,” he said. “But the deal was that if I got them done on time, Golden would send Rosalyn and me on an all-expense-paid trip to Europe for the rest of the year.” It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what it must have taken to do all those paintings, more than 350 of them. As a working designer, I knew the kind of deadline-conscious calculations I made to cope with something as trivial as the paste-up of 32 page brochure: one-fourth done, halfway done, ten more to go, five more… To think of this guy working his way through American history with a paintbrush and a stack of blank canvases… my God.
Yearning for the glories of his homeland’s inaccessible neighbor to the south and trapped in a house with a remote, mercurial father and an alcoholic mother, McCall withdrew into a “compulsive passion for drawing.”
Every architecture project starts with an infinity of possibilities. And that has its own terror. On one side, there’s the physical world in all its unruly grace — space, climate, the land — and the thorny trappings of human society — money, politics, use. Then there’s history, weighing on this unformed thing, and taste, and clients, and time.
But there is usually a reprieve: when an architect commits to an exclusive ideological or formal strategy — be it Beaux Arts or blob — one path through the thicket is marked. That is a great relief, the comfort of style, and seeking it is one reason why, looking at the methods promoted by leading architects, we see so many fixed forms, universal ideas, and gimcrack gimmicks applied to a widely differing architectural dilemmas.
How much design history does one have to know before he or she dares put pencil to paper? Picture a frantic land-grab, as one design pioneer after another lunges out into the diminishing frontier, staking out ever-shrinking plots of graphic territory, erecting Keep Out! signs at the borders: This is mine! This is mine!
As Frankfurt points out, it’s beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” There must only be the desire to conceal one’s private intentions in the service of a larger goal: getting your client to do it the way you like it.
Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer?
Among the design professions, graphic design is an embarrassingly low-risk enterprise. Thus liberated from serious threats, we invent our own: skating on the edge of illegibility, daring readers to navigate indecipherable layouts, and concocting unlikely new ways to solve problems that don’t actually exist.
Hey, why avoid the obvious?
The seduction of the big brand name is very real. But somewhere along the way the glitter would fade and it would be just me and the process. I never woke up with a real sense of purpose or a relationship I could value. So in the end, if I would not want to have a new client wake up in my house and share breakfast with my family, why should I give up my time for them?
Everyone seems to understand this intellectually. Yet each time I unveil a new logo proposal to a client, I sense the yearning for that some enchanted evening moment: love at first sight, getting swept off your feet by the never-before-seen stranger across the dance floor. Tell clients “Don’t worry, you’ll learn to love it,” and they react like an unwilling bride getting hustled into an unsuitable arranged marriage.
It’s doesn’t do anything. It’s just a decoration. Adidas’ stripes support the arch. Puma’s stripe supports the ball of the foot. Tiger’s does both. This doesn’t do either.
They were all in love with the three stripes. They didn’t want a new logo; they wanted an old logo, the one that belonged to Adidas.
Give Nike founder Phil Knight credit: he had the vision to admit, “I don’t love it. But I think it’ll grow on me.”
It’s not hard to see why innovation is becoming the design world’s favorite euphemism. Design sounds cosmetic and ephemeral; innovation sounds energetic and essential. It’s taken for granted that innovation is always good.
Everyone wins on the innovation bandwagon. A recalcitrant client may cheerfully admit to having no taste, but no one wants to stand accused of opposing innovation.
The initial reaction to the building upon its completion in 1952 was one of sometimes grudging and even surprised approval. Most critics had not expected this design by committee to work, but most were immediately struck by its effectiveness as image. The elegant Secretariat tower was still nothing more than an office building, signaling that the managerial revolution had taken place and that bureaucracy rules the world, while nevertheless it was one of the most perfect achievements of modern technics: as fragile as a spiderweb, as crystalline as a sheet of ice, as geometrical as a beehive.
He is exotic because of the presumed mystery inherent in what he does, and menial because whatever he does is required only for relatively low-level objectives, to be considered only after the real business decisions are made.
The first mistake is to justify design’s importance by ignoring its unique contribution. Designers say We solve problems, and We can do strategy, and they forget that everyone else is also solving problems and contributing to strategy. The question is what problems can you uniquely solve?
Unpaid competitions have been a way of life in other creative fields like architecture and advertising, but they’ve been resisted, barely, by graphic designers up until now. In those other cases, the potential prize is big: for architects, a chance to keep a studio busy for years on an important, visible project; for agencies, millions of dollars in commissions on advertising space.
I need a partner with whom to have a serious relationship but I don’t want to invest any time or effort in finding the right woman; I shouldn’t have to. I’m a great man and any woman should be proud to be with me, so I’m holding auditions. I’d like for all interested women to visit me and show me your “wares.”
One lucky winner gets a $400 wedding ring and the prestige of having me for a partner. The rest of you just get screwed. Awright, who’s with me?
What motivates me more than anything else is the conviction that my clients are depending on me: if we don’t come through for them, there’s no back up. The responsibility is mine and mine alone. Knowing that 3 or 4 other teams are toiling away at the same challenge, rather than whetting my competitive spirit, simply brings out the slacker in me.