natalia ilyin

This article was published by 2+3D, a Polish design magazine. I agreed with the editor that I would put it up here after the issue had been out for a while. It was published in Polish, so there's probably not too much overlap in readership here. I do recommend subscribing to the magazine. The images alone are an amazingly valuable thing: you can sort of dope out the gist of the text.

Cutie and the Deck Shoes

Right after Christmas, at the time a fresh new crop of bright sweaters, scarves and hats suddenly appears on the commute ferry from my island, I spied an ordinarily somber acquaintance wearing a particularly festive pair of deck shoes. As I looked closer at her feet, I noticed that along with magenta flowers and acid green lines of varying widths, a large photo of a bulldog smiled up at me from both shoes.
“Shoes!” I said, thinking that by saying “Shoes!” I was neither saying, “I like your shoes!” which would have been an utter lie, nor “Where did you get the tossed salads that are on your feet?” which probably would not have gone down well either. I commute every day with the same people: I must be careful.
“Aren’t they great!” she beamed up at me. “I designed them myself, on Zazzle!” Her habitual dour expression vanished. She was so happy. Curling her toes up, she pointed down.
“That’s Cutie, my dog.”

A sharp pain stabbed at my stomach: A referred pain from 20 years of paying the student loans that financed my design education.
“Your dog!” I said, brightly. “Well, there he is! Hey, I’ve got to get coffee--” and with that I lurched toward the galley and toward the safety of the coffee line.

Standing in line in front of the huge coffee urns, I bowed my head and thought sad thoughts about Cutie and the deck shoes. "It’s the end of design," I thought. "It is the end of aesthetics, of educated decisions, of culture. The Vandals have scaled the wall and they’re wearing bulldogs on their toes."

Who's a Designer?
Seems everyone’s a designer these days. From business cards to backpacks, if you can access a website, you can “design your own.” Design grads are nervous. And, from a certain perspective, they have a right to be.

The proliferation of crowdsourcing sites is increasingly making design a field of unlimited web competition and work-for-hire clauses. This is a shock to students who-- through the endless crits and psychological battering that is a classical design education--have learned clear and set beliefs about who they are and about who they should aspire to be.

So we have people putting dog portraits on their shoes, and we are competing with thousands of people for every job we get wind of on the web. To add to this mix, traditional design schools are noticing a new player on their previously private field, a new breed of “d-school” that promises computer scientists, mechanical engineers, science managers, sociologists and future MBA’s that they’ll learn how to unleash their creativity by using the magic of the “design thinking” they'll find in groups of computer scientists, mechanical engineers, science managers, sociologists and future MBA’s.

These days it can feel as though the real action in design is happening, not in the clean and quiet, white-drawing-table-and Mac-laptop-laden studio, but in some sort of brawl in the parking lot. This makes classically-trained designers, particularly young designers, feel duped. They feel dumb for spending so much on something others seem not to understand or value. They're worried that the aesthetics they have learned at so high a cost are not considered important anymore. They fear, in the words of the old parody of "Home on the Range," that in order to be a designer these days, all you have to do is "get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy, too."

Not unlike Arabian horses, designers are a high-strung breed, and design students the most high-strung. In my office, more students cry about debt than about grades or work-load. Before their eyes, they see opportunity shrinking, behind them, they see debt. They say things like:

"My parents are paying all this money for me to go to design school and my neighbor thinks he can do what I can do because he taught himself Flash and Photoshop and he'll do anything for almost free. Clients can’t tell the difference between me and him and don’t care if there IS a difference!”

If it makes you feel any better, you're not alone. I, too, must confront the anathema of Cutie and the deck shoes. We are all living through the Cutie and the Deck Shoes moment of design history together. Let’s examine what’s really going on here. Are the keys to the design kingdom really being wrested away from “real” designers? Do we really hear the unwashed masses trampling up the palace stairs? And if we do, is that an entirely terrifying and bad thing?


Service vs. Commodity
Ten years ago, I was hearing that design, always considered a service business, was becoming a commodity, and that, because of its superior technological advance, Korea would be the place that commodity was produced. To tell you the truth, this was sort of a relief to me. Making things has never been a big part of my designing life. I talk to people about brand stories, and I am absolutely bored to death by tweaking type.

But for most designers, designers who love the process of design, the change of that which has been individual into that which is mass-produced is a sad thing. In the West there will be a need for designers who direct, but there will absolutely not be a need for designers who execute, because execution will be an “off-shore commodity.” This is hard to bear.

It is hard to bear because we are schooled to believe that we have more personal power as designers than we generally do. This belief gets in the way of our confronting reality. The Arts and Crafts ideal of the well-rounded design master-- the Bauhaus ideal of that master-- was actually defiled long ago. Industry long ago divided design from production. Is this pain really something to write home about? We are an industrial culture that splits operations into their component parts, that does not value the unity of one vision over the cheaper cost of "going off-shore." Why are we now worried about that splitting? Is it because it now affects us in a personal way? We didn't cry when typesetters disappeared. We did sing sad songs over Ludlow operators. But now we're singing sad songs.



Too Many Designers
What we are watching is the consequence of designer glut.
In the 1980s, hundreds of schools in the US suddenly realized that they could make their art departments more profitable by creating “graphic design” majors. These hundreds of departments now pump out thousands of graphic design grads every year. Acccording to the US Department of Labor, 286,100 people work as graphic designers in the U.S. alone. In the next ten years, experts predict that 36,000 jobs will open up. (These figures were compiled before the current recession.) However, according to the Princeton Review, 25,000 people tried to enter the field of graphic design just in the last year in the US alone. This little inequality, coupled with current crowdsourcing aches and pains, means a design degree is not going to guarantee the production job it once did. When supply is high, the customer is king.

Of those that do get a job, only 30 percent will still remain in the profession after five years. Why? Because most of the work of the average graphic designer is repetitive, dull, boring and not at all the bang-zoom life of, say, Sagmeister on Bali. These students sign up for that Sagmeister life: but most of them find work sitting in a cubicle working on someone else’s design for some sort of phone interface. Fun as that can be for a year, it is not fun for five years.

Is it so terrible to admit that most of design is a commodity? Yes. It is terrible, because it signals change: Because it forces traditional design schools to take a look at themselves and at what they are selling. The Bauhaus enrolled 150 students, more or less. Their "star designer" percentage was off the charts. Not too many institutions today could come close to matching it. Not too many Bauhauslers ended in cubicles tweaking phone apps.
There was no competition. There was little production.

Not so for the average graphic design program in the US today. The average graphic design program must now ask itself: Is it fair to inculcate students in this legacy of individualism when they will soon be plunged into a market that really does not value that individualism? Right now, many design schools still teach students the holiness of their profession: Few prepare them for the truth of it.

Utopian vs. Aestheticist
To add to this small yet roiling kettle of fish, “Design with a Large D” has, in the last few years, received the dubious distinction of being “the next new thing” for business. Design has become, again, a vehicle for Utopian thinking.

Evidently exhausted by years of finding various tipping points, thinking without thinking, acquiring the seven habits of highly-effective people, memorizing the 48 laws of power and uncovering the five dysfunctions of a team, we are now told that right-brainers will rule the future, that we should unfold the napkin and solve complex problems with simple pictures, and that using “design-thinking” we can do everything from revamping our Fortune 100 to providing goats to starving farmers in Africa.

Design can, of course. But that kind of Utopian door-opening is cage-rattling for people schooled in the systems and programs and change-defying arcana of the fossilized curricula to which so many design departments cling.

The real issue here may not be that design is wandering off into the purviews of other disciplines, but that our Utopians are veering away from our Aestheticists. The Aestheticists feel that the hard-won sensitivity and sensibility of a “classically-trained” designer is the most important aspect of design. The Utopians feel that design's role in social change should take precedence over type-tweaking. (Sometimes, when I look at the actual physical output of the d-schools, I see a momentary film-like sequence. It's Gropius’s design-workers building their Utopian cathedral, bliss upon their faces and “Kumbaya” upon their lips, but this time they're all holding self-created blueprints for how the building is to be built, and the resulting edifice looks more like the Tower of Babel.)

Bruce Mau started the real rumble off a few years back with his exciting if histrionic Massive Change, a Utopian dream of unity which became a sort of mini-industry. Here’s the gist from its continuing website:

"Massive Change explores paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image and information. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves: Now that we can do anything what will we do?"

Similarly, David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, runs Stanford University’s “d-school,” which features fun, fresh groupings of vital, excited people running around taking bootcamps and classes in “design thinking,” none of which references or cares a whit for the various aesthetic dogmas and drills so integral to the thinking of a person principally educated in design. Kelley’s compatriots at Stanford:

"…aim to provide experiences in design thinking, to increase everyone's confidence in their own personal innovation process (sic), and to make a contribution to the world."

Holy-Moholy. No wonder design Aestheticists all over are flapping their hands and worrying that their type skills not respected like they used to be, that everyone has jumped on the Utopian bandwagon and that nobody appreciates them and their 100-year history of problem-solving any more. What if they don't want to tear down everything they've learned? What if they want to design alone and elegantly, and don’t want to jump in to collaboration and mask-making and make-a-structure-out-of-these old-bashed-up-beer-can games? No wonder they tell me the dark ages are closing in again and the canary is passing out and no one will really ever set beautiful type again and nobody will care and we're all going to die.

When "design" itself has acquired tall walls and an impermeable perimeter-- when the act of designing, or solving problems, is secondary to "the right way of being a designer" then we owe it to ourselves to ask where our real allegiance lies. Are we just threatened personally, or is there something bigger at stake?

There’s a freshness and a value to prancing software engineers and sociologists. But its value may not actually be a design value. It might be a perimeter-bashing, wall-breakdown value. Which is not the same thing. No one can deny IDEO’s spectacular success at making itself the go-to design think-tank. But take a look at their website. It’s one of the most potchky type messes this side of the Rockies. It’s impossible to read and leaves one with a sense of queasiness not brought on by excitement, but by visual exhaustion. If the “d-schools” had more readable websites, perhaps I’d fear the demise of traditional education more. Right now I feel that the Utopians serve a wonderful, fresh-air purpose. But they could use a good type handler, too.

The great thing about IDEO and the business vogue for design-thinking and all those custom sites and crowdsourcing is that it is shaking up an industry long proud of its elitism, long taking its hog-tied market for granted. “We have a skill and you don’t. You will have to pay us an enormous amount for deploying that skill on your behalf. Our skill-set was handed down to us by the high priests and therefore you will know it to be good." Well. It worked for 100 years.

Nothing in design is as fixed as flux. First we called ourselves idealist modernist form-makers, then we decided to be Marxist social reformers, then we became self-styled social critics, then Structuralists, then Poststructuralists, reading texts and slipping in subversive inclusions. After that we tried for Postmodern irony, then, when we became exhausted by the navel-gazing of the previous generation, for post-postmodern formalism. Since we had private access to the tools of communication, we were able to graft many limbs on to the tree--limbs that really did not bear much fruit for the person paying the tab. Is it really such a wonder that sometimes a client just wants to pay fifty dollars for a logo and be done with it?

Pretty Journals and Fresh Pencils
Much as the new crop of “d-schools” trumpets its fresh approaches, much as their organizers run around accessing everyone’s design capabilites and throwing open various barn doors of “design thinking strategy,” the truth is that not everyone can be a real designer. True, most people can learn from thinking about design and confronting problems in the ways a designer does, just like everyone can learn from reading "A Manual of Style" or from drawing with charcoal. But everyone who reads "A Manual of Style" does not become a writer. And everyone who draws with charcoal does not become an artist. At best, most of the people who go through Stanford's "d-school," and programs like it ,will become exactly what this world needs: good clients. Partners in design. Clients who understand the design process.

As a writer, I often run into people who say,
"Oh, you're a writer? I just LOVE to write! I'd write all day if I could-- if I didn't have to do real work (wink) I'd just write, write, write, write, write. I've got an idea for a mystery— can you to introduce me to your agent?”

These people will never write a book. And if they happen to assemble a manuscript, no one will ever buy it because it will not be valuable enough to the experience of other people for a publisher to buy it. These people like the feeling of writing. They like buying pretty journals and fresh pencils. They love to workshop and go to coffee and discuss writing. But they have no clue what real writing entails, they have no clue of the long nights and the churning of the stomach and the work it is-- the tweaking it takes, the line editing, the back and forth between writer and editor, the tinkering with structure, the craft. They will never pry the number of my agent from my compressed lips, and if they somehow did, my agent—a fabulous agent—would reject them so fast they’d have whiplash.

Because you enjoy writing in your journal does not mean you can write. Because you pay Stanford a bunch of money to be exposed to "design thinking strategies" does not make you a designer. Proficiency in rusty beer-can structure experiments does not make you an architect. Some design things just aren't about one's own personal quest for innovative strategies. Some design things make sure the envelope doesn't get caught in the post-office router, that the building doesn't fall down on your head. And in that pursuit of elegant solutions to plain old realities lies some of the real relish in being a good designer.

Identity in Flux
Designers have always worried about their identity. They worry that clients don’t appreciate them. They are always explaining their jobs to people who have no idea that everything a person touches was designed by someone. As a community, design has the identity issues often found in a really good actor. It can take on many personalities, but has a hard time maintaining one of its own. That’s because, Aestheticists or Utopians, we are a screen for culture. We manifest what our culture values, what it wants, what it has convinced itself it is, right now.

Right now, our culture wants to survive. It wants to find some good drinking water. It is less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned about polar bears slowly drifting away from each other on melting ice floes. Design seems to be manifesting more on the Utopian side these days and less on the Aesthetic.

Real-full-time-this-is-my-life-honest-to-God-designers need to find balance. They need to balance a gift for synthesis, a gift for aesthetic relationship, and a gift for understanding the cultural stresses and strains inherent in the time in which we live.

Changes in public access and perception do not change the value of educated designers or of the design process, nor do they make educated designers obsolete: the more the world changes, the more the function of educated design remains the same. That function is to martial the resources of the human mind and spirit in order to make life safer, healthier, better, more beautiful. Anything else is just gilding the deck shoe.

I so appreciate the continuing comments on "Why No Place at the Table," which was mentioned by DesignObserver recently. Many of the comments I've received put the blame for American designers' being functionally illiterate squarely on the shoulders of the public school system.Two things come to my mind here.

First, I went to public school in California--Terra Linda High School: a big, sprawling place that, at the time I was there, enrolled more than 2000 students. I am sure that plenty of people came out of that school functionally illiterate. But if they took writing with Patrick Skinner, they came out writing well, no matter how poorly they had written when they came to his class. It takes one motivating teacher and one semester of weekly writing assignments to train a person to write well.

I'm not saying that that person will be "a writer," but she will know where to put a comma, when it is "it's" and when it is "its," and all the rules of writing that my students do not know. Like drawing, writing is a skill, and anyone can learn the basics.

Second, because a person did not learn to write in high school does not mean he is doomed to drag himself through his life as a designer not knowing how to argue on paper, nor does it mean that he wants to do so. As I said, learning to write takes one semester. Of all the students I have encountered, not one has told me that writing is unimportant. I have never had a student tell me that she is not interested in learning to write well. I have never had a student tell me writing is valueless. Most students look sheepish when they turn in their papers. They feel inadequate to the task. But they are not uninterested. In fact, they look a bit desperate for help.

Perhaps I run into especially motivated students. Or maybe they fear me and feign interest. ( I can hope.) But I think we do students a disservice when we assume that they do not want to write. I think we need to teach them. We need to expect it of them-- and of ourselves.

I 've been in design my whole life. During this admittedly lengthening period, I've listened to many designers spend much energy fighting to be recognized, fighting to be heard by the people who make things happen in corporations, in NGOs, in government.

For years I have heard stirring arguments about how designers need "a place at the table" around which important systemic decisions are made. And still that place at the table is not an assured place. Why are designers still not really a part of things? Why are they not an assumed voice in high-level decision-making? Even today, when innovation and sustainability and green are the newest corporate cliches, it is rare to see a designer in the boardroom.

"And why is this?" I asked myself, walking back from teaching tonight. The answer came to me, borne on feathered wings, somewhere between Nordstrom's and the ferry.

The reason that designers have only a feeble grip on that chair at the table is not because design is not respected, it is because most designers cannot write. I don't mean they can't write like Faulkner. I don't mean they don't have a discernable prose style. I mean they cannot WRITE. They do not know where to put a subject and a verb and a capital and a period. They are functionally illiterate. Only the very top echelon of designers writes. And let me tell you, that top echelon writes like the wind: read Stefan Bucher, read Michael Rock, read Michael Bierut, read Jessica Helfand, read Sagmeister--these people are not only literate, they are wonderful writers and they get their ideas across in ways that inspire people to agree with them. It should be noted that two of these people are writing in a second language.

But below that level, it is very rare to find a really good writer in the pack. Oh, sure, there are one or two in every AIGA meeting. But to be blunt, the greater mass of designers is a mass of functioning illiterates. I know. I've edited them. The odd part is that these designers have convinced themselves that they CAN write. They think they are fairly good writers and that a little dust-off with Spellcheck will pretty much make them excellent writers. They have a totally unrealistic view of their own skills. They dress up their writing in the Emperor's new clothes, but those clothes don't fool anyone at the table.

Now. Why is writing important to getting and keeping said much-ballyhooed chair? For two reasons. The first is that no one trusts illiterate people to make decisions. If they did, all countries would be democracies.

The second is that the rest of the people at that table can write and they look down on people that can't. It's a class issue (though in America we would never say that) and it's an issue of the perception of judgement. Not being able to write-- thinking you can when you can't-- shows a willingness to believe in vague and untrue things, a willingness to obfuscate. It shows an inability to be clear, to be rational--to think. That's not something people want at the table.

Being unable to write well also shows a lack of understanding about the way corporate culture works. CEOs write. CFOs write. Marketing directors write. You can draw on a napkin all you want, but napkin-drawing is not the native problem-solving tool of most CEOs: Writing is. It is the stuff of which convincing arguments are made. It is the natural language of the boardroom. No matter how brilliant you are, if you don't know how to write well you will never be perceived by the rest of that table as anything but a window dresser wearing Prada.

This morning Brent and I found ourselves talking about the design merits and demerits of various West Coast cities. This is the kind of thing you find yourself talking about in the gloom of winter here-- daily dark clouds so low you could touch them if you stretched. We agreed on the basics: Portland: so vibrant! San Francisco: so romantic! L.A: sun drenched! Seattle.
Pause.
Seattle?
"The problem with Seattle, " Brent said, "Is that it has never established its own color palette."
Now there's a line worth immortalizing.
Without a thought, you know L.A's palette: the blue of Hockney, warmth of terra cotta, pink of stucco and fuchsia of bouganvillea. Or San Francisco's: white skyline, blue ocean, white fog, warm hills, dark cypress. But Seattle?
Only a designer would see the world this way.

The Bill Hill article is out!
It's in the Communication Arts Advertising Annual 50, which packs a punch.
Particularly a great article by Sagmeister on his year "off" in Bali.
Reminding me of my oft-repeated rant to students: smart designers write well.
Practice. Set yourself tasks.

Maybe we should have a "design write-off" essay-writing contest at Cornish. Students, professors and staff vie for large, attractive prize judged by panel of experts. How about deadline on April 15th? Seems appropriate.
(Write-off? Get it? Tax Day? Do I have to spell it out for you? Yeesh.)

I'm seriously considering this little junket. If you look at the list of participants, you will note that it is a fine opportunity to get to know some of the best minds in European design. Shall we? Check your frequent flyer miles and get back to me.

Here's the information from Jacek Mrowczyk:

The Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice cordially invites all design teachers, researchers, students, alumni and professionals to participate in our 2nd International Design Conference. Entitled "Responsibility in Graphic Design," it will be held January 14-15, 2010 in Katowice at the Roundabout Art Gallery. Accompanying workshops will be held January 11-13.

The registration deadline is December 30, 2009

Participants include:
Filip Bla¸ek - Lex Drewinski - Jonathan Barnbrook - Marjatta Itkonen - Krzysztof Lenk - Karel van der Waarde - and others--


Goals and objectives:
The focus of this conference and workshops is on the notion of "responsibility" as it relates to graphic design professionals and teachers, attitudes in design practice, and scope and methods of education. The conference brings together an international group of academics, students, and professionals. We invite everyone who is interested in shaping civic attitudes and teaching responsible design to take part in the lectures and discussions. Our main objective is to direct the attention of participants to their own work strategies, curricula and teaching methodology, and to inspire research and projects that reflect current thinking on socially responsible graphic design.

For more information and registration form:
http://conference.aspkat.edu.pl/2009/

Today I have been informed that Pantone is pleased to announce PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise, "an inviting, luminous hue", as Color of the Year for 2010.

We are told that "Combining the serene qualities of blue and the invigorating aspects of green, Turquoise inspires thoughts of soothing, tropical waters and a comforting escape from the everyday troubles of the world, while at the same time restoring our sense of wellbeing."

Ok. So. How did Pantone decide what turquoise means? The inspiration of tropical waters and thoughts of comforting escape are nice, but they are not the things of which I first think whenever I look at turquoise. How much of Pantone's assertion about the "meaning" of this color is what they've researched about people's psychological associations with it, and how much is what Pantone wants the stressed producers of fashion and interiors in a lousy economy to believe so that they'll feel safe in using the color in the hope that it will attract someone to their products?

As a semiotician, I feel bound to find out how Pantone arrives at its decisions about what colors mean. Luckily, I happen to know that color consultant Leatrice Eiseman, who has published books with Pantone, lives on my small island. I do not know her, but I will track her down and ask her how she thinks Pantone creates these decisions about meaning.

Sara Thompson and SuGing Ngouv blew the scalp off Lance Rutter earlier in the day with posters designed for an AIGA-sponsored event featuring Modern Dog.

Earlier this evening, I wrote:
"Rutter seems to believe that influence is plagiarism. "
And Lance responded in the comments below.

I had been reminded of David Lance Goines's dictum:
"Steal with Both Hands."

For the full tempest in a teapot:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30843947&id=1388020992

Whew. What a last minute flurry trying to get on the road again. I just posted the fabulous new student spotlight (on my website's student page.) It's the blog for NowWhat, three Cornish students who have started a music poster design company here in Seattle. More about Seattle, grunge and poster art on the student page, or you can go straight to their blog:

http://nowwhatposters.wordpress.com/

Thomas, our NY Times-reading all-things design eyes and ears in NYC contributes this article about the challenge of type-sensitivity to lighten your Monday morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/arts/16iht-design16.html?_r=2&em

WAX, Twist, Thirst/3ST, The Royal Order of Experience, Xpatriate, The Luxury of Protest, Opolis, Plural, Studio on Fire, Knock Knock, Office, 50,000 feet, Air Conditioned, Blender, Bustbright, Cue, Grow, Hunter Gatherer: When exactly did design firms start to think of themselves as bands?

Current design business names produce a jangle of non-meaning. and, taken as a whole, shore up what "serious business" has thought of us all along: Much as we talk "innovation, strategy and sustainability," the three current buzzwords, we're just a bunch of clever creatives after all.

Designers have ached for years to be taken seriously by mainframe business. And yet, in our attempts to show how "current" we are, we undercut our own value by giving our principals "fun" titles and naming our businesses inpenetrable names. We set ourselves up as the great brand experts, and then marginalize ourselves through the choices we make in self-description.

The Cooper Hewitt-- the Smithsonian's National Design Museum-- holds this award competition every year. I believe it is the only "people-juried" serious award going. Looking at the site and seeing what's been nominated provides insight into what our culture deems important or amusing right now. Next year what is important or amusing will have shifted.

Could this be an example of design acting as artifact of the time in which it was created? And just what is the influence of this group of objects-- objects beheld as valuable designs suitable for winning prestigious awards-- when it is seen by other designers? I just ask.

http://peoplesdesignaward.cooperhewitt.org/2009/

Some projects just fly on wings.
Here's a note from Aaron, a student I met during a RISD workshop
two years ago:

As many of you know, last summer I started a collaborative poster
project in support of Barack Obama's campaign,
Design for Obama (http://www.designforobama.org );
it aggregated a sizable poster collection, formed an international
community of designers ranging from novice to professional, and got a
fair amount of attention in the process.

After receiving a phone call from the legendary filmmaker and
activist, Spike Lee, he and I teamed up to publish the growing poster
collection. Spike had been sent one of our posters, specifically a
remix of his "Do the Right Thing" movie poster where the title had
been changed to "Did the Right Thing" and Spike had been replaced with
Obama. This poster led him to the entire collection.

Thanks to his efforts, those of legendary design author and
historian Steven Heller, and the good people at Taschen Books,
this November 4th will see the publication of
Design for Obama - Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology.

I am incredibly excited and honored that my foreword will
be accompanied by essays from Lee and Heller, not to mention 200 of
the best posters submitted to designforobama.org in the course of the
2008 presidential election.

The book is available for preorder on amazon.com now
(http://bit.ly/CEZ16) and will be released this November 4th
to celebrate Obama's historic win.
We'll be having book signings in New York and Los Angeles
(details to come) and I'd love to see you there!

"Ornament und Bildentwurf," (Ornament and Design Process) is the book created at the Imagelab Workshop at Basel where pattern and ornament and complexity were recently explored. If you can get your hands on it, it's really worth reading. Signals a big change. And may be a response to the interests of the students, a sort of bottom-up reverse osmosis. Which would also be a new thing at Basel.

Here's a quote by Orlando Budelacci, a contributor:

"Ornament is not only adornment, decorative accessory and luxurious decoration: above all, it is no crime."

The walls are closing in. Everything I know to be true is being challenged. I must lie down.

So Sources Close to the Hill tell me he is indeed gone from Microsoft and these same sources have provided blogspot info and facebook page addresses, which I had been hoping to avoid. The blogspot thing has no way to contact him, and gives the impression that the man is currently wandering around Russia wearing a kilt. It surprises me that his blog is reverse-reading type, which I thought the Starch Readership Reports reported was hard for people to read way back in something like 1962. Ironic.

But the Facebook page. Now see, that is a problem. Because there is something about Facebook that just makes my skin crawl and I hate to have to join it just to track down Bill Hill. I dislike LinkedIn too, which I got snagged into years ago, but haven't had the time to figure out how to make my darn page there just go away.

Facebook is one of those things I could easily take a stand against and then end up using out of sheer peer pressure, so I am watching my words here. I see its appeal for people in college. For people older than thirty, it just seems sad to me.

Perhaps I've been involved in computer security discussions too many times for my own good, but if a total stranger came up to you on a city street corner and asked you your birthdate and the names of closest friends and what you were currently reading and what you were currently listening to, wouldn't you be slightly repressed about answering? And yet we can't wait to put all that stuff on Facebook, where it becomes part of a huge database owned by a corporation with no moral agenda.

My real problem with Facebook is that, unliked Linked-In, which is basically a resume service and has no pretence to warmth, Facebook gives us the illusion that we have real, working relationships. It allows us to "keep up" with people without actually doing the hard work of interacting with them. With Facebook, we can avoid the back and forth of real conversation--posts are not conversation-- and thereby reduce the friction with which real communication burnishes friendship after the age of fifteen or so.

Facebook also reduces "friends" to a numbers game. Real friends? if you're lucky, you'll have three in your lifetime. To devalue the concept of friendship, to commodify it-- that's a depressing outcome of social networking. When all friends are equally important, none is important.

Facebook is attractive because it is a large, clean grid into which we can enter, a grid that makes life less complex, provides a sense of boundary, of safety, of organization, of comfort. With the population so much larger than it was even ten years ago, an organizing system for people is useful. And so much more fun than having a small number tattooed on one's forearm.

I've signed up and look! I have so many friends. I must be of value. I can sit here and create and promote a better me. I can clean up my existence and create a false-fronted representation of my life. Hey. Let's all contribute and create a huge network of false-fronted lives, lives that make us all feel of value, of importance, to ourselves if to no one else.

I can play Facebook all day long, and avoid the real work of my life, the work of becoming "single, separate, vertical and individual," as Wallace Stegner once said.
I can always avoid the work of my life in other ways, but this particular procrastination device is more attractive than my previous procrastination devices-- it's designed to change and refresh and update constantly before my eyes. It keeps me busy and happy in my chair. Facebook keeps me busy like a baby with a mobile over the crib.

Really, why spend too much time in real life where things get hard, where people make so little sense, where sadness erupts, where life can be messy and confusing? Why not just sit here and write little things and look at the pictures of all my friends and post to people from my past whom I never bothered to contact before contacting them became as easy as typing in a search? But we're in touch now, and isn't that nice? Something of a relief, feeling like we're in touch again.

Maybe I'll just sit here, honing the constructed image of my life until there's no time left for me to create a real one. It will be easier on the world. Fewer people thinking thoughts. Fewer people questioning. Fewer people rocking the boat.

But what am I saying. I'll probably end up joining.

Here, now, the birds start up early. The first sleepy chirp sounds at 3:30. A real chirpfest by four am. Head under pillows, what’s left but to push back the percale and stumble out and make coffee and sit watching the light come. The white sky deepens to clear blue--the green of new leaves, the climbing rose spilling yellow blossoms over the balcony.

People have their favorites, but when sleep is not an option I read Rilke. I go back to Letters to a Young Poet. It's not just for the young. In the face of these clear words, everyone is young.

Here’s something from Rilke about criticism. It may seem strange coming from me, since I write criticism. But I agree with him.

“… And let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism— such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just to them.

Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.”

I come from a family of writers. Growing up, it sometimes felt as though writing was the family business. It was discussed around the dinner table, sort of like a generational practice in dentistry, or auto repair. My Russian grandmother, Olga Ilyin, my father’s mother, wrote memoir and novels about her youth, and spent months with us every year, “in ze country,” which was actually in ze suburbs. She, with her Chekhovian mindset, didn’t choose to see the white rocks, the tract houses, the cheap stucco.

I grew up with her routine: breakfast at eight; writing from nine to twelve; lunch; a reading of what she had just written for critique by my father, who had spent the same time in his studio, painting; afternoon tea, then friends over for dinner and conversation in the evening. Sadly, growing up with this going on in the house, I missed the fact that most people were not retired, not painting and writing, not critiquing over the Earl Grey but in fact working for a living.

Consequently, I have spent my life trying to resolve these two lives, mixing tea and writing one day with hunkering down and hammering out work with clients the next. It’s been Dreams of my Russian Summers Meets Marketing For the Small Design Firm all my life, and for this reason I now offer up this nugget of advice to those who would be design writers: be born wealthy, marry wealthy, or invent something early on, because the bifurcation of spending time in the total concentration of writing, the other world of it, followed by the slam of reality that is business is one of the hardest things I negotiate.

The transition is akin to the grinding of gears, and it is a transition I make every day. When I look around at other design writers, it is only lately that I notice that a good deal of family money is floating around backing up the career choice. Heed my wise words. or the grey hair you see at my temples shall be yours at my august age.

Sun. All of Seattle is pinned down by it, all of us lizards upon rocks.
Although the deadline looms for my manuscript, I have settled down again in the sun-splotched studio with Dr. Zee’s, “Fearful Symmetry: the Search for Beauty in Modern Physics.” As I said in my Amazon review, I avoided reading Dr. Zee’s book, fearing I wouldn’t understand it. But Anthony Zee is a storyteller as well as a theoretical physicist, and his book is about the beauty and simplicity of the design of the Universe. For people like me, schooled in the modern and post-modern agendas, this book serves to strip away much theoretical dross. I recommend it wholeheartedly to the thinking designer. I also suggest that my students read it leisurely over the summer, because it will be a part of our conversations in the Fall.

For years my students have given me a bad time about my reading glasses and not without reason. I have a pair that I found on the bus. The perfect strength! Really nice ground lenses! I was thrilled when they showed up. But there’s a downside. They are old. Not old enough to be vintage or hipster or retro. No, just old and big and, well, to be frank, perhaps not that flattering. I have suffered through their gentle remarks for years. But today I am relieved of the burden of my insistence: today I happened upon a wonderful picture of Jane Jacobs. A fabulous picture. A brilliant woman. And something I had never noticed before. My exact bus glasses. I knew I liked her.

Lordy. We've been having some busy days at EmersonHarris. The kinds of days that include coming back from a meeting, sitting down to deal with stuff and awakening a few hours later to the fact that you are still wearing your coat and scarf.

Anyway. Two things.

One: http://www.yourlogomakesmebarf.com/
Just to remind us that we are actually in the aesthetics business. A contribution from Mr. Goryeb.

Two: Would you rather hear about what exactly makes me crazy in the wording of the emails that people who are looking for work are sending me-- Natalia's grammar and cliche do's and don'ts; or would you rather hear about the pathetic state of current 30 year-old women's self esteem as estimated by their responses to an invitation.
Which one? You tell me.

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.

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…)

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…)

Abi and I decided that we'd use a quote about Tobias from my book,
Chasing the Perfect. Proving that some designers are born, not made:

"When Tobias was nine years old, his family flew to England to spend
some time with his grandmother in Kent. In the morning, his mother came
downstairs to find the small Tobias sitting at the kitchen table, staring
at a tin of biscuits. The rest of the children were outside yelling and
climbing trees, and there sat Tobias, staring at a tin. (more…)

"I am as passionate about bacon as I am about modernism."

Thomas Goryeb, architect