Category Archives: Design

Go Speed Racer Go

Speed RacerMost of you reading this probably have only a few days left, at most, to go see what in my opinion will surely prove to be one of the most underrated films of the recent past — before it’s withdrawn from your local multiplexes entirely due to its almost universally poor critical response and its relatively anemic box office performance to date. The name of the movie is “Speed Racer.”

Don’t be fooled by its juvenile source material — an American adaptation of a Japanese anime franchise that originated in the late 1960s — or its unabashed formulation as a would-be summer blockbuster. It really is one of the only movies I’ve seen this year that really qualifies as high art, not just entertainment, but a leap forward in filmmaking. For designers, this movie should also be of some interest: its disappointing reception amongst both the cognoscenti and the popular moviegoing public are a testament to my theory that the combination of graphic design and cinematic storytelling is a surefire recipe for failure.

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D-Crit

Later this year here in New York, the School of Visual Arts will debut a new, two-year Master of Fine Arts program in Design Criticism. The program promises to train students “to research, analyze, and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications,” and boasts a faculty roster that includes many of the sharpest minds writing about and working in design today.

In spite of my general aversion to academia, I must admit that I’m pretty excited about this. Don’t get me wrong; I have no objection to scholarly pursuits. There’s just something about academia that usually fails to get me as worked up as I feel like it should. But D-Crit, as the program has colloquially named itself, has the potential not just to turn out stellar practitioners, but also to elevate a sorely underdeveloped aspect of our craft. Design has gained much traction over the past several decades, but the way we think and write about design has a long way to go, it seems to me.

The chair of the D-Crit program is the prolific Alice Twemlow, who has written far and wide about design and over the past several years has had a rapidly growing reputation and influence as one of the profession’s key critics and thinkers. She also happens to be a friend of mine, so I took advantage of that fact to conduct a brief interview with her here, trying to get a better idea of her ambitions for the program as it readies itself for a fall kickoff.

(Another note: in advance of that kickoff, D-Crit has been organizing a series of readings in New York City, previewing some of the writing and works from faculty. The next one takes place this coming Thursday, at KGB Bar in New York’s East Village, and focuses on the intersection of design and food. I’ll be there.)

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Cover Stories, Old and New

Far be it from me to pretend I really know what makes for good rock ’n’ roll. Beyond the music and musicians that I like, I have no idea, really, what does or does not make sense for the rest of the listening public. But I sincerely do believe that, past a certain age, most acts really should stop releasing albums and just let their back catalogs stand as the definitive statement of who they are. There are plenty of good reasons for this, not the least of which is that the youthful theatrics of rock music are just an embarrassment when pantomimed by nearly anyone over, say, forty years old. Maybe forty-five.

Another reason is that, past a certain age — or perhaps a certain stage in a career — most acts’ new album cover designs lose that singular, epochal quality that was so common to their early releases. That is, where an act might once have released iconic albums replete with cover art that not only reflected their time but also defined it, those acts’ older, mid-life incarnations tend to release album covers that only lamely follow ripened trends.

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Keynote for Print

Here’s how much I like Apple’s Keynote presentation software. I just used it the way I might have used QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign: to create a document intended not for the screen or projection, but for printing, and being held in one’s hand.

The document is my final, outgoing treasurer’s report as I finish up my two-year term as a board member for AIGA New York. (My work isn’t quite finished yet, though, as I’m moving on to the national board.) When I started to create the report, I originally tried to use InDesign and Illustrator, but the prospect of using those lumbering programs seemed slow and tedious compared to Keynote, where all of the charting and graphing tools are built right into the application and are lightning fast.

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Great Numbers, Not So Great Design

Let me admit a real prejudice that I have, and maybe you can try to convince me that I’m wrong: it’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.

This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish — a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist — maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.

Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical. For design to work as a business, it almost always has to scale to some degree. The smaller the scale, though, the more efficient the practice of design; transmitting ideas among a small number of people is much more effective than transmitting them among a large number.

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Out of the Box Thinking

Seagate FreeAgentGenerally, I think it’s great when companies adopt a bit of the customer-friendly approach to designing and packaging products that most of us have come to associate with Apple. I’m talking about the premise that, even after the consumer has handed over her money for a physical product, the process of opening up its packaging and using it for the first time should be as seductive and reassuring as was the experience of having been sold on it in the first place — if not more enjoyable, even.

Take, for example, this external hard drive that I bought recently from Seagate: an inexpensive model called the FreeAgent. I’ve never thought of Seagate, a well-respected hard drive manufacturer but not a particularly friendly brand, as being very consumer-focused, but I have to admit they surprised me. Mostly.

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The Sagmeister Phenomenon

The graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister is now a kind of phenomenon. In recent months, he’s released a second book, mounted a solo exhibition at the renowned gallery Deitch Projects, and made a splash at Art Basel. And these are just the latest achievements in a career brimming with landmark design solutions and attendant accolades.

All of which has been well-earned. His work is often breathtakingly ambitious in its understanding of what design can be. It takes a certain kind of ingenuity and clarity of vision to intuit that this profession can mean typography carved into human flesh, or charts and graphics rendered huge and inflatable, or hanging out the side of the Empire State Building.

What’s more, his work also possesses a unique sense of whimsy that’s typically scarce in graphic design. Whether it’s a wall bricked with hundreds of bananas or a two actual school buses stacked one on top of the other, there’s a healthy amount of pure mirth present in most of his solutions — you rarely get the idea that he’s weary of his assignments, or that he’s doing anything less than having the time of his life. Indeed, one of the things that makes it so genuinely engaging is that Sagmeister seems to possesses an indefatigable willingness to act upon his playful ideas, to go to whatever lengths necessary to turn them into reality. Contrast that alacrity with the resignation of those of us who, if we can’t conjure up a solution in software or within ten feet of our desks, rule out anything more ambitious entirely. (Guilty as charged.)

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The Power of the Printed-on-Demand Word

Digital evangelists: if you have any doubt about the convincing power of print, then order yourself a book of your own making over at Lulu.com — remember to put your name prominently on the cover — and show it around to your friends. That’s what I did for a project I’m working on with Steven Heller; I wrote and designed a ten-page spread (illustrated by my good friend, the incomparably hilarious Olso Davis) and created a PDF in which the pages are repeated over and over again about fifteen times, then sent it off to Lulu.com for a single hardcopy.

The effect I was going for was a kind of bookish trompe l’oeil in which I create the impression of a real, full-length book. But more on that when the project actually comes to fruition.

In the meantime, I’m very pleasantly surprised and delighted by my first experiment with Lulu.com. I just got the end product in the mail last week, and when I opened it up I saw it was really just a bunch of laser prints hardbound together — nevertheless, it’s convincing as heck. When I show it to friends and colleagues, their eyes light up with amazement at my name on the cover. I mean, it stops people in their tracks. Sadly, Web sites don’t do that.

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Design Couldn’t Save Yahoo

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, as you’ve no doubt heard by now. To my mind, it’s a terrible idea to combine two foundering behemoths in an attempt at besting an even bigger behemoth like Google (and moreover to do so with only enough ambition to shoot for being number two). But the point, I think, is that Yahoo has failed. The company flew high for much of its life, but it would surprise no one to say that it’s been in trouble for some time.

Why is Yahoo in this position? I won’t pretend to have all the answers to that question, but I can say one thing: design apparently had nothing to do with it.

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I Wants These Fonts

Yikes. Just now, I spent over US$600 on new typefaces. Well, not really. Mentally, I did, because I just quickly tallied up all of the typefaces I’ve seen recently and wished that I owned.

I’ll do that from time to time; window shopping, as it were, for new fonts to add to my repertoire, though I’ll rarely indulge myself by actually buying them. It’ll come as no surprise to most folks that, more often than not, I’ll fall back on Helvetica.

Still, I do have some desire to broaden my horizons. It’s just rare that I’ll find new typefaces that strike me as compelling enough to buy. The problem isn’t that I find recent typographic design lacking. Rather, it’s that I just don’t often find new typefaces that I feel are a good match for my particular ‘design voice’ (say what you will about the relative distinctiveness — or lack thereof — to be found in Helvetica, but it helps me say what I want). I draw a parallel between finding the right typefaces for my repertoire and putting together a wardrobe: there are plenty of clothes that I see worn by other people to smashing effect, but it’s not every style that I feel would look good on me.

That said, here are a few of the ones that I threw into my mental shopping cart.

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