natalia ilyin

I'll be on a panel at the JumpStart event sponsored by AIGA Seattle.
It's going to be held at Cornish College. It's about getting started in design.
More detail at www.AIGA.org.

This is the first time I've been to an AIGA Seattle Chapter event, and I'm looking forward to it. Sean Bolan, Director of Education for AIGA here, is so on top of the details that I know it will be a really worthwhile evening.

Now. Where is that book I promised for the raffle?

I dreamed last night that I had patented a software program that aged photographic portraits in real time. This invention solved the problem of my photograph looking far better than I do in real life. This is a common problem for writers, whose publishers get fabulous photographers to take their pictures, and for well-known designers, who tend to look boyish and craggy or waif-like and arty in pictures but stringy and tough in person.

No need for these glaring gaps between image and reality! With my new PhotoDorian add-on, no one ever need be surprised again by the unretouched youness of you.

No need to thank me. Your appreciation is enough.

In my years of doing radio interviews-- and the machine of book publishing requires that a writer do a ton--I have never in my life met a host as gracious, well-prepared, incisive and just downright bright as Debbie Millman.

Mostly, when you go on someone's show, they've just gotten a brief bullet-point memo from a staff member about the three things that will make you interesting to people driving home from work. They ask you questions that are just off the mark, and you find yourself treating the host like a small child, explaining things, and making dumb questions seem interesting. This is not the case with Debbie Millman.

After her opening, during which she read from my book-- what writer could withstand that kind of blandishment?-- she dove in with a question about mathematics and whether we humans had invented or discovered it. Well, that strained the old grey cells. All I remember after that is fielding acute question after acute question. It was a heck of an experience, talking to someone I had never met before who had really read my work. Even the man who called in was clear, intelligent and thoughtful. It was Radio Nirvana.

I had listened to her show before, when people I knew were on. But now I'm a convert. Every Friday 12-1 PST , 3 EST, you know where I'll be.

Debbie Millman's talking with me on her radio show today.

( Friday, at 12 noon PST, 3 pm EST on the VoiceAmerica Network) (more…)

Perhaps you've heard of Muriel Barbery's book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. My friend Sheri thrust a quote from it into my hand the other day, saying: "It just feels right-- there's something about it...it's just right."

Here's the quote:

"What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort. ...this essence cannot be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and of the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them and engender a force, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both the tension and the balance of the configuration-- this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects...achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form."

It's hard to believe that this writer, born in 1969, published this in 2006. When I read it, a wave of relief swept over me, because the success of this book signals the end of the Era of the Anti-Essentialists, the era of Barthes, Baudrillard, De Certeau, Deleuze, De Man, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan.

Barbery is the first to really gain ground against the Culture-Makes-Meaning stance of the authors above, which has affected design for so long. If you read what she says about consonance, you'll see that she's putting you back at the center of your own work. No longer is a person who takes as a career "the disposition of objects" merely a puppet, a conduit between audience and culture. Ms. Barbery is giving you back your power. She's telling us there IS essentiality, there IS universality of meaning. After all that postmodernism and poststructuralism, she's scored a punch for universal principles. We owe her.

It's Valentine's Day.

Time to remind you that men and women view gifts differently. Speaking generally, men give and like to receive tools, while women give and like to receive symbols. This is why many suburban husbands hate Valentine's Day. It's a day of Symbols. They like to give and receive Tools.

Conversely, women generally love Valentine's Day. It is a day of Symbols. (more…)

Last night Rem Koolhaas's building burned in Beijing. Pictures of bystanders watching the new building burn put me in mind of this poem by Robert Burmer, a poet and musician here on the Island.


NIGHT VISION

Some nights, certain nights
a frightening clarity descends.

When roads and faces,
remembered - reflected,
arc as neutrinos
through each turn of the eye.

Where the heron walks on ice
as its cry leaves a track on the moon.

When our bets are called in
but cannot be covered,

And lovers appear,
hair streaming
down desert back roads
no longer imagined.

Flesh or dream,
it does not matter.

Our birth cries form
as ashes on the waves,
bending the light
of a younger star.


Robert H. Burmer

Bad news on the home front. Flowering Around, the flower shop right across the street, formerly known for flowers, has suddenly gone into the organic latte business. This may sound like a boon, what with my having only to roll up the old pj pants and throw on a coat and walk across the street to score the perfect split shot 2%. But already it's spelling trouble.

Unlike most people, I work at home a couple days of the week. This I count as one of the great perks of Pam and my running our own business. Some days I work on the business and some days I write on my current manuscript. But now there's Flowering Around, with its espresso bar, right across the street.

The proprietor is, unfortunately, charming, smart and friendly. Dennis. Known for his dreadlocks here on an island of Norwegians. Massage therapist and shop manager. And then there's my friend Art the Writer, known for his love of coffee and thinking-talk, who's found the new place. But, of course. I introduced him to it.

Fool, I. At my desk in my house, working, I know Art might just be sitting over there at Flowering Around, ready to look up from his book with a smile to offer me a chair. Ready to talk about crafting-the-narrative or what-makes-good-prose-sing or some other topic that can burn more time than almost any other vice. A veritable siren song, this smell of coffee wafting in my window. Right across the street.... So near, yet so far.... Art and coffee: my Scylla and Charybdis.

Epictus once said, "If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write." But in my experience, the best writers read. A ton. And the best designers read a ton, too.
How to do it? There's the rub. We live, we work, we commute, we cook, we take care of children, we see friends. When are we supposed to read?

Scanning while in meetings, glancing over things and speed-reading are not the answer. I can't tell you how many times some nice designer has come up to me and said,
"I just loved your book. I can't really remember what it was about, but I loved it while I was reading it."
Honestly. They say that. Might as well just shoot me. Nothing a writer likes better than becoming part of the confused cultural haze that clouds your head.

So scanning is really not the answer. Reading without concentrating is a waste of time. Luckily for you, however, I have accumulated a pocketful of tricks for getting a lot of reading done. Here they are:

1. Never read anything you do not want to read.
This may seem obvious, but it is amazing how much junk is forced on you that you do not have to read. People with moist eyes press books into your hands.
"It's about living in the moment and it changed my life!" they say.
I say skip it.

Read ONLY what YOU want to read. Be it graphic novel or JC Penney catalog. Because if you only read what you want to read, you will never avoid reading, and it will become as natural to you as breathing in and out in the eternal NOW.
Oops. Forgive me.

2. In future, avoid any book that has the word "Syndrome, Plan, Secret, or "The Story of" in the title. Also avoid any book that describes the protagonist as uncovering, hunting, taking control of, communicating (with dogs), targeting (for death), taking on (a new assignment) or discovering (devastating secrets).
You really just do not have the time.

3. Similarly, avoid books which feature:
a rogue CIA agent
a lethal teenage gang
a vampire summit
a gangster patient
or combinations of the above.

3. Good stuff in, good stuff out.
If you keep your mind clear of craposis, poor writing, rogue agents and lethal gangs, you will be able to concentrate on things which can affect your life for the better. By this I am not saying you should only read profound books, like Siddhartha. ( I just hated Siddhartha. How come the women just got to stand around having mouths like cut figs? That was their entire role! Annoying. But anyway.) I am saying only read books that are written well. What is written well? Pretty much anything that has won the Booker Prize. Anything that has won the Pulitzer. Anything that has been in print for over 50 years.

4. Read abstracts, precis, and introductions to academic works BEFORE reading the works themselves. Then, if you are really interested, read the piece. Read the original writer before reading any sort of commentary on that writer. For instance, Jung is a far better writer than most of the people who comment on him. Just cut to the chase and read Jung and Heidegger and Hegel in the original.

I read all academic works in the tub. That way, if I get bored with the academic prose, I tend to keep reading to the end, because it's more work to get out and dry off than it is to finish the piece.

5. Put loved ones to work.
I remember being terribly jealous years ago when a friend told me that her husband and she took turns reading aloud from Greek literature while the other did the dishes in the evening. How cultured is THAT! My jealousy knew no bounds. But a few years later, this tip in the back of my mind, I was able to steal their technique for getting through epics. I recommend having a well-placed baritone read to you from the Aeneid. This practice over the suds, day in and day out, will get you through the St John's Reading List at a slow, yet valuable, pace.

6. Read happy things on the way to work. I include the design blogs, STEP, PRINT, CA and Metropolis magazine in the happy zone. I feel happy looking at all the bright colors and hearing that soon everything is going to be nice and green and that everyone will soon have attractive lamps and tile.

7. Read the Times at lunch. If lunch is filled with clients and prospecting, read the Times in the morning right when you get in and everyone else is getting in late and talking about what a line there was at Starbucks. It's amazing how long morning office-settling takes, and you can be done with it before they're ready to go.

8. Read anything with the word "Journal," "Newsletter," or "Update" in the title on the way back from work if you travel by public conveyance or shuttle. If you commute by car, stop doing so immediately. Commuting solo by car will have to go if you are going to get your reading done.

9. Have only one book on your bedside table. Read before sleep or if worried. Avoid anything with an exciting plot. I like a nice long mid- eighteenth century novel. Also, the Russians are great for plots that unfold in real time. Tolstoy yes. Lermontov yes. Dostoeyevsky no, because he'll rile you up too much and have you thinking about the damned questions and so forth.

10. I save the French Post-Structuralists for times when I have had red wine or caffeine by accident and it's kept me up. I figure these are similar conditions to those in which they were probably written.

So we are told this week that modern medicine has made it possible for a misguided woman to birth a litter of eight babies, like a sow.

This bizarre, sad news story was on my mind when I picked up the latest Design Management Institute newsletter yesterday and read a commentary by Maren Connary. She tells us that futurists like Ray Kurzweil believe we are at the point of the curve where exponential technological growth is about to shoot the roof off the house. "Now," he says, "is an excellent time to think about how we plan to manage the future."
To this understated remark I respond, "Ya think?" (more…)

Good to see that work by Joseph Coates will be published in the 2010 Graphis Poster Annual. I'll put the link up on my "her books+" page when it's available, so you can pre-order.

- ISBN: 1932026479
- ISBN-13: 9781932026474
- Format: Hardcover
- Publisher: Graphis, Inc.
- Pub. Date: January 2009

Although I am a person deeply involved in helping businesses figure out who they are, how they differ from their competitors and why anyone should care, I have recently developed an antipathy for calling that business activity "brand work" or "branding." Just in the last few weeks, I have begun to associate "brand" and all the swish and swash books about it with an era just gone by--an era in which free-market economics ruled and "lipstick on a pig" was the grin of the day around the marketing meeting table. Since the Obama election, the word "brand" just somehow has an aroma of obfuscation, of finding ways to sell people things that are bad for them, of lying to the customer. I don't know why. It just feels that way to me. (more…)