Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project.

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas
to applications.

12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas
of others.

18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’

31. Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea – I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces – what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference – the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals – but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

The Meanings of Type—Steven Heller

Not every typeface is transparent, not all typography recedes; certain types symbolise philosophies and ideologies, some represent institutions, nations, and cults, many have intrinsic meaning. In about 1540 the French monarch François I commissioned Claude Garamond to design the typeface that bears his name. Believing that standardised typography would make governance easier, Garamond’s face was ordered to be used for all official papers, and became a symbol of French enlightenment as well as the nation’s first proprietary font. Around the same time Maximilian, the German king rejected Antiqua (used in Latin manuscripts) in favour of spiky blackletter.

In the sixteenth century, blackletter stood for German protestantism and nationalism, in the 1920s it was attacked for being antiquated, replaced by the New Typography, characterised by sans serif type in asymmetrical compositions and codified in 1928 by Jan Tschichold. In 1933, however, the Nazi government revived the blackletter face, proclaiming it Volk (or the people’s) type and condemned the New Typography as un-German.

Yet in 1941, the Nazis abandoned its own Volk type in favour of more readable faces. As if to prove further how mutable such symbolism can be, in the 1940s Tschichold lambasted the ‘New Typography’ as inherently Fascist, prompting a backlash by betrayed followers who saw him as Alvin Lustig characterised him, a turncoat.

Typefaces and typography are never designed in a vacuum. Practical and commercial motivations prevail but social and political rationales are never far away. Type design and typography are routinely informed by conscious and unconscious contexts that change with time. The following are some of the back-stories that underscore the meanings of type.

The slab serifs: big footprints
Late nineteenth-century slab serif wood types were a response to the job printers’ need for huge and durable display letters for bills and posters, and the original types were real work-horses. Despite their Victorian origins, there is nothing prim or proper about them. Slab serif faces exuded strength and masculinity – and are today associated with the printing of old wanted posters and vaudeville fliers. But throughout the twentieth century they were revived for various emblematic reasons. In the 1930s, for example, faces such as Girder, Karnak (R. H. Middleton, 1931), and Beton (Heinrich Jost, 1931), each derived from old Egyptians, symbolised the new industry manifested by American skyscrapers. In the early 1960s, however, an inexplicable interest in quaint Victorian pastiche returned the slab serif
to curious prominence in the precincts of alternative publishing.

News Gothics – screamers on wood
The typographical term ‘wood’ is the jargon used by United States editors referring to so-called screaming headlines on tabloid newspaper front pages. The term dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large, sans serif wood types were common on advertising posters and broadsides because they grabbed attention without flourish or ambiguity.
In 1919 the New York Daily News, the first American tabloid newspaper started by Joseph Medill Patterson, used wood to announce with great fanfare the sensationalist – murder, sex, mayhem – story of the day. What distinguished the serious broadsheet from the scandalous tabloid was, in part, the difference between elegant Roman and gaudy gothic type. The conventions have not changed much, either. Tabloid wood may now be digital, but the goal is the same – to signal the big story.

Peignot – monument to France
In the 1920s the future of typography rested on German experiments such as Paul Renner’s Futura, the typographic emblem of modernity. In an attempt to outdo Renner, poster artist A. M. Cassandre and Deberny & Peignot proprietor, Charles Peignot, launched investigations that led to a sans serif face notable for its thick and thin body, and the use of upper case letters in its lower case form, which Cassandre christened Peignot – a testament to his boss. The face was actually the offspring of two parents: the Bauhaus and the Renaissance. After many false starts, Cassandre and Peignot decided to follow traditional lines, while at the same time avoiding copies of what had been done. ‘Copying the past does not create a tradition,’ wrote Peignot. Cassandre had the idea of returning to the origins of letterforms. ‘Was there not something to be learnt from the semi-unicals of the Middle Ages?’ queried Cassandre. ‘The idea of mixing the letterforms of capitals and lowercase seemed to us to contain the seed of new developments within traditional lines.’ The result was a quirky mixture of letters, which required a period of adjustment for the public to get used to. In 1937 the typeface was launched as the ‘official’ typeface of the World Exhibition in Paris, selected by Paul Valery as inscriptions for the two towers of the Palace de Chaillot.

A fabricator produced cardboard cut-outs for making complete alphabets, and these were also used for murals and exhibition stands.

Art Nouveau and psychedelia – youth and kitsch
Art Nouveau exerted an influence on typography throughout Europe from the early-1890s to before World War i. Designers Georges Auriol, Eugene Grasset, Peter Behrens, and Otto Eckmann, among others, filled foundry specimen books with curvilinear alphabets with eccentric calligraphic conceits. The style did not represent a political revolution but Art Nouveau (France), Jugendstil (Germany), Stile Liberty (Italy), and Vienna Secession (Austria) were youth-inspired social upheavals that altered visual language and spawned new moral and aesthetic values. Former visual taboos – including a prodigious amount of nudity – nudged out staid images. Sinuous Art Nouveau typefaces and ornaments were similarly erotic.

Yet not long after Art Nouveau was introduced it found mainstream acceptance, particularly in architecture, furniture, fashion, and graphics.
In France and Belgium Art Nouveau was the de facto national style. And even today kitsch French signs and posters include Art Nouveau alphabets. In the early 1960s, studios such as Push Pin in New York reprised Art Nouveau lettering; later in the decade, psychedelic poster artists in San Francisco adopted it as the code for the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll generation. Art Nouveau’s youth culture underpinnings were, nonetheless, not the sole motivation. Victor Moscoso, the prelate of psychedelic posters, enjoyed the formal intricacies of the letterforms and became obsessed with drawing the ornate negative spaces between letters. The lettering for his original posters was hand drawn, designed to vibrate and shimmy.

Neuland and Chop Suey: faux ethnic
Neuland, designed in 1923 by Rudolf Koch, is a family of convex-shaped capitals reminiscent of German Expressionist wood-cut lettering. Reportedly, Koch did not make any preliminary drawings, which accounts for an informal quality that, according to a type specimen brochure distributed by Superior Typography, Inc. (c.1923), ‘expresses an atmosphere of exotic “flavor’’’. In addition it states there is an ‘unusual expressiveness; a subtle harmony of . . . ruggedness and delicacy of design.’ Neuland was recommended for advertisements promoting airplanes, boats, books, coffee, gifts, lacquers, rugs, tea, and tours, and was widely used until the 1930s when it was sidelined like so many novelty typefaces. But in 1993 Neuland was revived as the logo for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Like an ageing actor, the old typeface was offered new roles as a curiously faux ethnic representation of Africa and third world cultures used on dozens of books. Similarly, the bamboo-looking novelty typeface Chop Suey (a.k.a Far East Type) has been stereotypically wed to anything Chinese.

Sans serif vs Fraktur: the Jewish question
Type design was scrutinised under an ideological microscope during the Nazi reign. Even before the infamous 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that ridiculed Modern art as decadent and ‘un-German,’ party ideologues dictated those typefaces that were verbotten, but many decisions were arbitrary.

A 1932 election poster featuring a stark, silhouetted portrait against black background with the name hitler in sans serif capital letters was decidedly Modern yet modern typography was later branded ‘Kulturbolschevismus’. During the Weimar Republic, blackletter was considered antiquated and ugly. Consequently, in addition to modern faces, like Paul Renner’s Futura, the humanist (and more readable) Antiqua had widespread use. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Fraktur became the government’s semi-official typeface (and a symbol of its anti-Semitism as portrayed in Der Sturmer). Antiqua was Judenlettern (Jewish type) and at least one type designer – Lucian Bernhard who was not, in fact, Jewish – was vilified for his designs. Exceptions abounded. Some bastardised sans serifs (‘Jack Boot Gothics’) were sanctioned for use in party organs like the SS magazine, Schwarze Corps. Then in a turnaround the Nazis banned the use of blackletter typefaces in 1941, citing Jewish origins. The decision to deny Fraktur’s legitimacy was actually practical: German Volk typefaces were unreadable in the occupied countries.

Futurist / Fascist type: branding a movement
During the late 1920s the wood typeface Il Futurismo Artistico produced by the Italian type foundry S. A. Xilografia Internazionale became the trademark of the Fascist movement. In hand-set and hand-drawn iterations, in various weights and sizes, this moderne sans serif face was the model and semi-official typeface for party posters, signs, and periodicals. Slogans by Il Duce were also stencilled on walls using different variants. The original designer is unknown, yet iterations created by Fortunato Depero influenced a slew of Italian graphic artists at the time. As a member of the ‘second wave’ of Futurism, Depero typographically picked up where charter member Futurists left off with their invention of the cacophonous parole in liberta, which revolutionised typographic expression, yet relied more on old fashioned type styles. Depero injected an exuberance bathed in a Mediterranean palate that introduced a playfully dynamic Futurist aesthetic into commercial and political advertising. He adamantly rejected classical types in favour of eccentric streamlined lettering that symbolised speed.

Splash panel letters: typography parlant
Hand-drawn titles of comic strips, comic books, and even some advertisements comprise a genre (dating from the early twentieth century) known as splash panel lettering – so named for theatrical, or splashy, fanfare. Splash panel lettering telegraphs content and sometimes meaning, and although each is usually customised, they stem from the same root: exaggeration. The shadowed letters forming the word ‘war,’ in the comic of the same name, doesn’t actually symbolise either the terror or heroism of warfare but it does attack the eye with an explosive charge. The title Maus announces Art Spiegleman’s Holocaust memoir with a conventional comics trope that suggests shock, mystery and tragedy. And the word ‘horror’ in
the magazine’s masthead is typical of the ersatz gothic lettering seen on old monster movie posters. Similar to architecture parlant, where a building’s structure expresses its function, this ‘typography parlant’ issues a narrative cue that tickles perception, sparks expectation and shouts a message.

Helvetica and friends: neutrality in person
If there are other typefaces that have triggered the same paroxysms of joy and fits of rage among designers as Helvetica, bring them on. Designed in 1957 by Max Meidinger, the face represents a Platonic ideal and a generic sterility. ‘Conceived in the Swiss typographic idiom, the new Helvetica offers an excitingly different tool,’ reads the promotional text in a D. Stempel A. G. Typefoundry specimen sheet (ca. 1958). ‘Here is not simply another sans serif type but a carefully and judiciously considered refinement of the grotesk letter form.’ Helvetica embodied the Modern mission to democratise visual communication, and was more effective in its neutrality than Futura (the fabled ‘type of tomorrow’). Following its introduction, first in Europe and then in the United States, Helvetica emerged as the readable, versatile, and modest typeface of choice for business throughout the multinational world. When the Soviet Union ministry of commerce needed to put a Western gloss on its ‘for export only’ publications and advertisements, Helvetica was used. When the New York City Department of Sanitation wanted to clean up its image, it specified Helvetica. When the Urban League, America’s foremost inner city Civil Rights advocacy group, wanted to appeal to white, middle-class donors, Helvetica came to the fore. Yet despite its democratic air, Helvetica has long been used to obfuscate corrupt corporate messages: such is neutrality’s double-edged sword.

Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger and introduced in 1957, also sought neutrality in a chaotic typographic world. Though it certainly became a standard and ubiquitous typeface, it never had the same stigma as Helvetica.

Some say that Meta, created first in 1984 as the typeface for the German Post Office by Erik Spiekermann, and fine-tuned in 1995 for general application, is the Helvetica of the 1990s, and its widespread use underscores the point. Designed to be ‘neutral – not fashionable nor nostalgic,’ says the Meta website, it has yet to bear the same symbolic weight as Helvetica.

Avant Garde: behind the vanguard
Herb Lubalin’s art direction and design for Avant Garde magazine was regarded as ground-breaking in 1968. The magazine’s sophisticated marriage of alternative art and photography was framed by all manner of stylish typography, from Lubalin’s smashed-letter headlines inside to the intricately ligatured logo on the cover. The logo was so popular that Lubalin (and his partner Tom Carnase) created an entire alphabet of capitals. These were originally used for the magazine’s column heads, then commercially released by it in 1970 (with additional upper and lower case letters). Avant Garde quickly became known as the 1970s’ most emblematic typeface, with its array of quirky ligatures, used repeatedly on advertisements, magazine spreads, and posters. Maybe the name also seduced users; using it they could be avant garde, too. But it quickly became one of the most abused typefaces. ‘The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde,’ type designer Ed Benguiat once complained. ‘Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.’ Even Lubalin lamented that he should not have designed so many absurd ligatures.

Template Gothic: off the wall
How could a typeface whose design was influenced by a handmade sign in a laundromat epitomise digital-era typography? Timing might explain why Barry Deck’s Template Gothic (1990) became the most well known and commonly used font during the 1990s. At the time graphic design was going through a technological upheaval; Modernism was challenged by an increasing number of heretics; universality had become the hobgoblin of cultural diversity. Template Gothic ventured into areas of type design deemed taboo. ‘The design of these fonts came out of my desire to move beyond the traditional concerns of type designers,’ Deck explained in Eye no. 6 vol. 2, ‘such as elegance and legibility, and to produce typographical forms which bring to language additional levels of meaning.’ After twenty years of grid-locked design, reappraisal was inevitable. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre opened the laboratory doors and academic hothouses encouraged students to subvert. Conventional typeface design reprised or adapted historical models while strictly adhering to the tenets of balance and proportion. Template Gothic was literally ripped off the wall. ‘The sign was done with lettering templates and it was exquisite,’ Deck said. Although the original stencil was professionally manufactured and commonly sold in stationery stores, the untutored rendering of the sign exemplified a colloquial graphic idiom that designers previously had viewed as a gutter language. So, perhaps the best reason for Template Gothic’s success was that it did not invoke nostalgia, like itc Benguiat (1977), the emblematic type of the 1970s that drew inspiration from Art Nouveau, but evoked the present.

It also captured the conscious and unconscious needs of young designers to reject the recent past. Conceptually playful, experimentally serious, and purposefully imperfect, Template Gothic was a discourse on the standards and values of typographic form.

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=98&fid=485

The creative process is not performed by the skilled hand alone, but must be a unified process in which ‘head, heart and hand play a simultaneous role.’

I quote the Japanese saying, ‘first acquire an infallible technique and then open yourself to inspiration.’

Herbert Bayer, 16 March 1979

Begin with ideas
Embrace chance
Celebrate coincidence
Ad-lib and make things up
Eliminate superfluous elements
Subvert expectation
Make something difficult look easy
Be first or last
Believe complex ideas can produce simple things
Trust the process
Allow concepts to determine form
Reduce material and production to their essence
Sustain the integrity of an idea
Propose honesty as a solution

Daniel Eatock

It is often argued that graphic design is most valuable when it addresses specific needs. Like plumbers or dentists, we must find solutions to problems. Anything else is just noise, distracting us from what really counts.

So, too, in the world of typeface design; a division exists between what is useful and what is useless, based on how well people are served by your work. When you design ’serious’ text typefaces, for instance, there is an automatic assumption you will serve the needs of the masses well. Highly legible text typefaces lead to clear typography, which leads to non-mediated, honest messages, which contribute to the betterment of society. Problem solved.

On the other hand, when you design display type, or anything that cannot be easily classified as a text typeface, you’re a self-indulgent artists expressing yourself and making a quick buck, all at the expense of communication.

The problem with this argument is that in terms of the design of new text typefaces, we are no longer addressing needs, and are well into the realm of addressing desires. We have long ago produced all the text typefaces we need—and the typographic principles to use them properly—in order to produce texts of the highest readability. We figured this out centuries ago. Therefore, the contemporary designer who spends his or her time designing highly legible type is doing no more of an important or useful job than the one creating so-called headline or display type. S/he may be doing a more difficult job, but the act of drawing text type is largely a self-serving pastime. And I don’t see anything wrong with that. It is a human impulse to create, and dedication to one’s art is to be encouraged and rewarded.

When Zuzana Licko coined the phrase ‘People read best what they read most’ (Emigre #15, 1991), she was pointing out that what makes certain typefaces easier to read than others is our familiarity with them, more so than their intrinsic legibility. She arrived at this idea from the simply observation that our most common letterforms have changed dramatically over time. Before the invention of movable type most texts were handwritten, and by the beginning of the 21st century, we easily read bitmapped typefaces on computer screens.

Her statement was not a critique of the classics. On the contrary, it was an argument against creating new typefaces and sticking with what we have. If we believe in the benefit of universal typographic standards and a typographic world without affectations or cultural specificities, then there is really no need to reinvent the wheel. If we are convinced than easy accessibilty and readability of texts is of the utmost importance, then we should simply use typefaces that have long, established track records of usage, such as Times Roman, Baskerville, Courier, and Helvetica.

But new text typefaces are being created continuously at a pace that has significantly increased ever since the arrival of type design software, such as Fontographer and FontLab. However, there’s very little evidence that this increase in text type satisfies any special needs. No matter how professionally produced, rarely do the makers offer scientific proof that these new fonts will function any better than the models they are often based on. Instead, they’re usually accompanied by claims of purity, historical accuracy, and a dose of professional snobbery and territorialism. But in the end, all they offer to prove their case is personal bias.

There are exceptions, of course. For example, Euroface, the font designed to replace all road signage throughout the European Union, once and for all omitting culturally-specific characteristics, was the product of rigorous testing. However, the results were vehemently disputed by type and legibility experts from around the world. Obviously, when it comes to legibility and readability, objective standards are hard to come by.

Let’s face it: whether you develop headline or text type, we all contribute to a typographic Tower of Babel. Zuzana Licko understood this when she started designing typefaces. She also recognised that the reasons new text types are created are the same reasons that new non-text types are created, which are the same reasons we design almost anything: we have a desire to differentiate, to stand apart. But mostly we do it because as human beings we like making things, and we enjoy showing our personal quirks, technological obsessions, or our cultural heritage through our work. And it would be disingenuous to omit economic incentive. Typeface design can be a lucrative occupation when practiced with the right combination of skill, talent, honesty, and dedication. Such work should be rewarded.

To think of the design profession simply in terms of how it solves problems or fulfills specific needs is missing the point. Design and type design alike have a lot more to offer. When graphic designers are asked what inspires them, they often show examples of vernacular work. Handmade signs, deteriorated letters on a store front, the accidental collages of torn, overlapping billboards, etc. Herbert Spencer filled many pages of his Typographica magazine with photos of such vernacular work. Pentagram Papers, a small publication infrequently published at Pentagram, is filled with examples of ‘low culture’. U&lc in its heyday often showed the private collections of graphic designers that usually contained found objects displaying the funkiest of typefaces and graphics. All of a sudden, bad letter spacing is no longer an issue. Purity of form is inconsequential. Poor craftsmanship is a curiosity worthy of collecting. Why? Designers understand the importance of this work because they know that the indigenous qualities inherent in vernacular design resonate with audiences on a level far beyond the fulfilling of needs. What matters is the soul of the thing. All graphic designers secretly wished they could make such work themselves.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with fulfilling needs. But we serve the needs of our audiences even better by being honest about our work, and by admitting there are no simple answers to questions like whether text type has more value than headline type. Much of what we produce as designers is, indeed, just noise. But if done with love and care, it can be a beautiful sound.

Rudy Vanderlans, an excerpt from Emigre #65, If we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, what are we reaching for?

As a designer it’s our job to communicate. I find that so much of communication falls into an old version of modernism: informed by machines, very exact, and ultimately cold. Although that kind of communication worked very well in the 20s and 30s when it was new—we’ve had it now 80 years, at least 40 of which it was the status quo—modernism now leaves a vast percentage of the audience pretty cold. So to bring in a personal point of view or even subjectivity seems to me like a pretty obvious strategy. I am not arguing that every piece of communication should be designed from a personal point of view, but even the type of communication that seems the least conducive to personal communication would work much better were it not done in the standard modernism mode.

For example, I collect emergency exit cards from airplanes—I have hundreds of them. With one single exception, Virgin, they are designed in the same style: some sort of modernist icons with arrows that show you how to find the exit. I am on planes a lot, yet I have never seen a passenger looking at these cards, despite the stewardesses always reminding passengers to do so. Virgin, as far as I know, is the only airline anywhere that designed these cards with a much more personal, more cartoonish, and subjective point of view. Whenever I fly Virgin, I see people looking at the emergency cards. The same is true of the instructional videos. People actually watch the emergency movie because it’s done quite beautifully. They are done with some love and care not only with regard to the content but also to the form. I think that sort of strategy could be even truer when your content is more personable, such as for a charity or a cultural event.

An excerpt from Amidextrous Magazine.

1 The problem is the problem

This book is about ordinary graphic problems and how the problems themselves can lead to surprising, original graphic solutions.

Provided the designer is prepared to let go of any preconceptions about how design is supposed to look.

The first time I practiced what this book is preaching was in 1954. Here’s how it happened. More or less.

I was asked to design a title card for a television comedy called Private Secretary about a stupid secretary.

I wanted to do something that was original. But I kept thinking of ideas based on images I had already seen. Then I realized that it was inevitable that my ideas had to be based on previous experiences What else could possibly be in my consciousness but previous experiences?

I would have to go outside of my head to look for an original idea. I decided that getting involved in the new problem was the most likely way of going outside. Of having a new experience.

If I could express the uniqueness of what the problem was trying to communicate with an image which was valid only for that problem, then I would have invented a unique image.

In other words, defining a unique problem would inspire a unique solution.

2 Interesting words need boring graphics

Take a statement like: we cure cancer free.

It isn’t necesary to make a statement like that look interesting. It is interesting, Because it is important.

If you try to make an interesting statement look interesting, the way it looks competes with the statement. The look doesn’t make it easier to see. It makes it harder.

When you have a statement which isn’t particularly interesting like: a rose isn’t like anything else, it can be more interesting by expressing it in a more poetic or imaginative way:

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Again, it isn’t neccesary to make that statement look interesting. It is interesting Because it is poetic.

The examples in this section are all jobs where I thought that the words were sufficiently important or poetic or amusing not to need additional interest from color or typography or layout.

I deliberately made the design elements boring so that they wouldn’t compete with the words.

There are thousands of images competing with your design for your audience’s attention. If and when your audience finally gets around to yours, make sure that the elements within your design don’t compete with each other.

3 Think first. Then draw.

The next time you pick up a pencil to make a drawing, wait a minute. Think about what you want to say. Or what you are feeling.

Drawing (illustration) is just like design. It’s a process. A means, not an end. Both are a way of making statements. So unless you have a specific point of view about something, don’t even begin the process.

As soon as I have decided (or the problem has dictated) what I want to say (or feel), then I can begin to invent the right lines, tones, textures, patterns and compositions which will help articulate the statement.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be using a pencil at all? A 4-inch brush or a delicate crow quill pen might be more appropriate. Do I want a mechanical, uniform line or a very wild, expressive line?

What about color? Is my statement best made in black and white or in gold leaf and day-glo or in some other color(s)?

Should the drawing reveal the minutest detail or be very simple? Realistic or decorative or abstract? If abstract, then hard edge or not? If decorative, what sort of decoration: Tantric, Art Nouveau, American Indian, Medieval or any one of hundreds of other possibilities?

Every kind of drawing evokes a special atmosphere which will either enhance or detract from the message.

Think about it

4 Stealing is good.

People have been making images for the past eight million years.

Images like x-rays, flags, NASA moon photographs, comic books, paintings on cave walls, theater masks, engineering drawings, pub signs, grafitti, Civil war daguerreotypes, engravings, Christmas cards, the Mona Lisa, exit signs, etc.

These images, depending upon how they are used, can transcend their original narrow purpose. They can represent a period of history or a cultural attitude. Or they can symbolize very precious ideas.

If a designer finds one of these images (say, an engraving of an Edwardian couple dancing) and it communicates perfectly what he wants to say, why bother to invent a new one?

Why not use (steal) the engraving?

What makes a designer’s work personal and original is the way he uses images to communicate and to solve problems. His ideas. Not necessarily the images themselves.

I didn’t invent any of the images in this section. They were all stolen. But by using them in a new context or by altering them in some way never conceived of by their creators, I made them mine.

Warning: you will probably have your right hand cut off for stealing in Saudi Arabia. Check with a lawyer in other countries.

5 Boring words need interesting graphics

Designers are not usually very good copywriters.

Most copywriters aren’t much good, either. So chances are that the words a designer has to deal with are not going to be very inspired.

If this is the case, then a designer is better off letting the graphics do all the attention getting and letting the words give the information in the most straightforward way.

On the other hand, as I said in Section 2, if the words are attention getting, then the graphics should be straightforward.

The most important thing is to make sure that the words and the graphics never compete with each other.

6 Less is more.

This section demonstrates that it should always be possible to take any two subjects or images and, however unrelated they seem, make one, simple image out of both of them.

I could have written more, but…

7 More is more.

The most or the biggest or the tallest anything is fascinating. If you’re in doubt, take a look in the  Guinness Book of Records.

Who can fail to be overwhelmed by the case of thousands in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the WIll of by a perfect scale model of the Eiffel Tower made out of 6,300,521 matchsticks by a retired locomotive driver?

What does any of this have to do with graphic design?

Don’t ever do anything in moderation. If your solution calls for color, then use more color than ever seen by anyone. If the type is supposed to be big, then let it be really big.

Take any idea or graphic direction as far as you can take it. And then after you think you’ve pushed it as far as you can go, you’ll find that you can push it much farther.

Remember: it’s not natural to go to an extreme in anything. That’s why I’m recommending it.

8 “I was following order.”

The reason that most graphic design and advertising is so predictable and vapid is because of the philistine clients. That’s what the designers say.

Perhaps. But I always assumed that getting imaginative work accepted by clients was as much a part of the problem as solving the problem, that there’s no such thing as a bad client. Only a bad designer.

What designers really mean when they complain about their dumb clients is that their clients don’t have the designer’s patrician art school tastes.

That’s true. But the conflict between the clients and designer is healthy. It has produced many remarkable creations, including the Sistine Chapel, the Volkswagon advertising campaign and Citizen Kane.

If designers had their own way, we’d be living in an even more homogenized environment than we do now. Anyone who’s seen an English New Town (a new community built from scratch) will confirm that well-meaning designers designed the life out of everything they could get their hands on: street signs, shop signs, bus timetables, local governments leaflets, etc. They succeeded in eliminating the “lows” of design, but they also eliminated the “highs.”

I know that it’s impossible to produce work of quality and integrity which also satisfies every single real (or imagined) commercial requirement every time.

So what. Designers can do no more than their best. If a client wants less than the designer’s best, that’s the client’s problem.

We must learn to say “No” sometimes.

In the end, if subway stations and newspapers and magazines and billboards are polluted with banal, dishonest images, it’s our own fault. Not the client;s.

The clients only pay for the images. They can’t make them.

For all the rules you ever learned about graphic design. Including the ones in this book, by Bob Gill

How would you say that you and your fellow Pentagram partner Paula Scher are different?
Paula says what she thinks. I admire her a lot for that. I have given up wishing that I could be like that. I’ve discovered I’m really averse to conflict. I think I was brought up to be too polite! The negative aspect of this is that I’m passive-aggressive. I have deeply rooted neuroses and flaws, which actually compel me to fix things so that as many people as possible — actually everyone in the world — likes me.

You don’t seem to have an unhappy bone in your body.
That could be denial. Paula used to say that I was the kind of guy who could be like this for 30 years, and then one day come into the office with a machine gun and go postal. But I think I’ve gotten over that, also. On the other hand, as you can see in the case of a politician desperate for everyone’s approval, you end up getting really confused about what your own convictions are.

In terms of design, I really admire and envy designers who always must do it their way and can walk away from a job if it’s not done on their own terms. I remember early on in my career, I worked with a guy who was absolutely secure in his convictions; though he liked it when people agreed with him, it wasn’t necessary in order for him to feel that he was right. Whereas if I go into a client meeting, and I can’t sell something, I feel like I’ve failed and my convictions get shaken.

When I first started talking directly to clients, I had some moments where I got so obsessed with obtaining approval about a project that I mistook that for doing the job right. By the time one project was about to go to press, I remember my boss — Massimo Vignelli — saying to me, ‘What is this?’ And I said, ‘This is a job for so-and-so.’ And he said, ‘Why does it look this way?’ And I started to say, ‘Well, they did this, and then they did that, and it had to be like this,’ and he said, ‘No, this is awful. We can’t let this go.’ He picked up the phone at my desk and called up the boss of the boss of the boss of the guy who had been jerking me around for three weeks and said, ‘You know this thing you’re doing for the blah blah blah? I’m not sure it’s quite right. I want to do it right. We’ll send it over after we do one for thing to it. We have time, right?’ Then he sat there and scraped off all the shit that had accrued on it over the past three weeks and did something crisp and right and perfect.

Massimo had this saying: ‘Once a work is out there, it doesn’t really matter what the excuses were.’ It doesn’t matter if you didn’t have time or if the client was an idiot. The only thing that counts is what you’ve designed, and whether it is good or bad. These are words to live by. I have overcompensated by trying to do lots and lots of work in the hopes that something good will get out there. I think my batting percentage is so low that I just have to get lots of at-bats in order to even score at all.

Do you really believe that?
Yes. I like working fast, and though not I’m old enough to know better, I’ve gotten addicted to ‘closing my eyes and shooting.’ It’s a bad way to hit a target, actually.

Well, if you had missed the target a number of times, you probably would have stopped working that way. The fact that you haven’t stopped means you’ve had some success.
Yes. Sometimes if you’re fast, it’s mistaken for genius. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good. You can get acclimated to a certain way of working; you get some useful habits, but you also pick up others that aren’t very good.

There are times when I know that I have to write something for Design Observer [the blog about design and visual culture founded by Beirut, Jessica Helfland, William Drenttel, and Rick Poyner], and I’ll keep reminding myself that I have to post it on Thursday, and yet I’ll keep putting it off and putting it off. As long as I know what the subject is, and as long as I’ve been thinking about it for a week or so, when I’m ready, I can start writing and continue onward all the way to the end — one paragraph after another until it’s finished. It’s as if I’m working with an outline that was written down to my elbow. While it might seem that I haven’t been working all that time, I actually have — it was just unconscious or ‘sub-conscious’ working.

You were germinating.
When I first started writing, one of the reasons I liked it so much was because it was so hard to do. I would finish a piece I had written and go back and look at it and reread it again, and I’d think, ‘Wow this really is great, it’s really nice the way I did this.’ It reminded me of the way I felt about design in the very beginning. I remember looking at the first prototype I destined, so real and so perfect. But over time, it becomes all too flawed, or worse, you become bored with it.

Likewise the first time you receive a finished piece; I’ve got my first printed piece somewhere in my basement. I’ve got samples of all sorts of things: a brochure for a lamp company that I did 25 years ago. It was a two-colour piece, and I think I have 20 copies of it. At the time, I thought it was really important, and I had to have that many copies of it because it was just so beautiful. And of course it wasn’t that good, but it was one of the first things I designed that got printed. I was mesmerised by the realness of it. It had me all agog.

I think really brilliant people do a number of different things when they’re working. They’re able to force themselves to put a lot of time into things and give them a lot of attention, and not succumb to the shortcuts that regular practice can lead to. Stefan Sagmeister works like this. Or else you have someone like Tibor Kalman, who purposely fixed it so that he didn’t repeat himself.

How did he do that?
He would do two things. One, he’d be very ambitious about doing things in a new genre. If someone came to him to design a brochure for a museum exhibition, and he’d already designed a brochure for a museum exhibition, he’d say, ‘No, I want to design the exhibition,’ even though he’d never designed an exhibition before.

He also — and I think this was a kind of pathology/genius — he was able to burn his bridges behind him so that he could ensure he wouldn’t repeat himself. After he did the animated ‘Nothing but Flowers’ video for the Talking Heads, he received a lot of calls from television directors. They would say, ‘Hey Tibor, could you do that typography thing on my commercial, could you do this, could you do that?’

Tibor hated being hired because someone thought he knew how to do something well. I love being hired for it. I have an unrestrained enthusiasm for being hired to do something I do well. It can get to be tough, especially when you’ve done something over and over again, especially if it’s a genre of work that you have a reputation for and you keep getting calls to do another on and then another one. Eventually, you run our of ways to do it differently, and you find that it’s hard to disguise that fact that this very thing that has given you so much pleasure is now not enough.

It’s a basic psychological reaction; it’s like rats with pellets in a maze. You know exactly what gave you the pleasure the first time you tried it, and you try to keep repeating the thing that led to that success. And just like any addict, you know the subsequent payback is insufficient. You remember that the first time it happened, it was wonderful; and by the tenth time, it’s, ‘Ho hum, here’s another one. I’m not even going to take a picture of it, never mind 20 copies in the basement.’

Are you addicted to anything?
Reading.

Reading? You consider reading an addiction?
I have a real fear of being alone with nothing to read. If being on a plane with nothing to read. I take it to an extreme. There’s something really extreme about going to an amusement park with my kids and needing to take a book with me in case the line for rides is too long. I think a lot of it is to inoculate myself, to keep my mind full so that I don’t have any time for self-reflection. I’ve really tried to improve this.

Do you think that you’re trying to distract yourself? trying not to confront something?
I think on some level, yes. But I think on the other hand, it’s just like a lot of compulsions: I also have to jog three miles every morning.

What happens if you don’t?
Well. You really want to know? I have a chart in my basement, and I have years and years of calendars on clipboards. They all have different markings on different days. There are markings I make when I do certain things, and certain marks I make when I do other things. Sometimes I give myself a special dispensation not to run, which is either one of three reasons: Either I have an 8.30 am appointment, it’s raining pretty hard, or it’s below ten degrees — not including the windchill, but the actual thermometer reading. For these reasons, I’m allowed not to run that morning. No one else cares. Literally, no one else cares.

Why did you choose ten degrees as the cutoff point?
It’s single digits. It’s really cold when it’s nine degrees, even when you’re running. Twelve degrees you can run — it’s not so bad. Less than nine degrees, running becomes unbearable.

If I sleep late, I draw a little sad face for that day on the calendar, a frown face. If I don’t run, I’ll make an X. It’s horrible, all these really compulsive things. On the other hand, exercise is good for you.

So this calendar is sort of a hieroglyphic diary of your life.
Yes it is. But it’s nothing I’m proud of. I think it’s fucked-up and embarrassing, to tell the truth. It is not worth emulating at all. Oh, and there’s more. I keep notebooks. I have 79 of them. They go back to 1982. They’re all unlined, which is really hard to find, harder to find now than ever.

Do you have boxes of these notebooks stockpiled?
New ones? I’m about to run out. I had someone score me a whole cache about two years ago. I can find the genesis of every single thing I’ve ever worked on in them. And then there are a lot of notes from meetings and lots and lots of phone numbers.

How many do you carry around at a time?
I carry the current one and the previous one.

When you’re first carrying around numbers 79 and 80, how does it feel to put number 78 away?
I honestly can’t say there’s that much ceremony involved. The only think I can say for sure is that there are two that I’ve lost. I remember both of them very distinctly. One of them stared, and I lost it, so I simply restarted it. The other one was almost completed, and I left it in a bathroom in Heathrow Airport.
Now, you may ask, ‘Why was it in the bathroom at Heathrow Airport?’ Well, I was sitting on the can, I had nothing else to read. I didn’t have a book, I didn’t have a newspaper, and I didn’t have a magazine. That’s my nightmare: trying to go to the bathroom with nothing to read. So I took out my notebook and started looking at it, and then I finished and washed my hands and went away whistling. I forgot when I realised that it was gone. It’s interesting in that I found I could survive quite well without it.

Right now, I’m moving my desk at Pentagram because the available seat for Luke Hayman — who joined Pentagram as a partner — is right on the end. It would be rude to put the new guy on the end. So I’m going to sit at that desk, which means that I have to move all of my stuff. My stuff includes all those notebooks, all 77 of them. And I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.

I think I kept things I’ve worked on around me as evidence that I’ve participated in something, though they do become useful when you’re the victim of a random IRS audit. Yes. I’ve often said that if I’m ever the victim of a random audit, I’m just going to kill myself. And people say, ‘Why? You haven’t done anything wrong.’ And I say, ‘I have done wrong. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, but I’ve done lots of things wrong. I don’t know what they are. But I am so guilty.’

What frustrates you?
Physical things, stupid things. I’ll get really mad at a drawer that won’t close properly. I bang it shut over and over again while shouting, ‘This motherfucking thing just won’t stay closed!’ Now that I’m aware of this, I’m much better at it actually. I had a period in my life when I had anger issues.

What about your wife, did she ever see it?
Oh yes, she would see it. But I wouldn’t get mad at her. I would get mad at anyone who wouldn’t hang up their coats. I would get obsessed with neatness issues. What actually drove me to a therapist was that I had a very unhealthy obsession with laundry. I’m in charge of doing the laundry in my family — and I’ve gone from simply doing the laundry to having an entire weekend-long methodology for doing the laundry.
Without going into too much detail, it had to do with what order things were washed in, and most importantly, how the clothes were folded and stacked. Now, keep in mind that five people live in my house. I got to a point where I would fold my son’s pants in a certain way. All of the jeans would be together, and the shirts would be organised in a certain way.

He has three basic kinds of shirts: short-sleeved polo T-shirts, short-sleeved shirts, and long-sleeved shirts. So they would have to be organised like this: collared polo shirts first, then long-sleeved shirts, the short-sleeved T-shirts. And I would do this over and over again for all five people in the house. Actually getting all of this staged properly takes a lot of time.

What made me mad was that no one seemed to appreciate my efforts. They would demonstrate their lack of appreciation by just grabbing any goddamn thing they wanted right out of the pile. And the pile would topple over. Yet, while someone might think I had a legitimate cause for irritation, it turns out this whole thing was really an attempt to attain some sort of control.

Did it give you great joy to see those stacks of neatly folded clothing?
Sure. Do I like to cook? I hate to cook. I’ll tell you why: You get it all ready and people just mess it up. I like to wash the dishes. You get them washed and then they’re neatly organised, perfectly clean — sometimes they’re clean for weeks.

Are there any areas in your life where you’re messy?
Unfortunately, not anymore. I wasn’t like this as a kid. Well, my desk is a little messy. My books are messy. It’s funny; I’m a fairly messy designer. It doesn’t show in my work, but my process is messy. Sometimes someone will ask, ‘Oh, we’re doing a piece about process, can you show us your design process?’ And I know exactly what they want. They want this sequence of rough sketches leading to almost-rough sketches leading to almost-finished work leading to the final, chose piece.

I don’t have those things; I don’t work in a sort of methodical way. A lot of your questions are about creativity, and I don’t think design involves that much creativity. It involves creativity in the way doing a crossword puzzle involves creativity. You need some imagination and knowledge. I think of artists as creative because they have to invent something out of nothing. I think designers design because they can’t invent something out of nothing. Or at least that’s why I design.

So do you see design as more of an exercise in connectivity rather than creativity?
Yes. One of those things I admire is seeing a designer re-purposing something rather than inventing something brand-new. I remember when I first saw the 1990 Time Warner annual report that Kent Hunter did — the ‘Why?’ Annual. There wasn’t a single thing in it that was new. It was all ripped out of old Spy magazines. But there was something about the audacity of it. Being able to put all those things together for this particular purpose was amazing. But if you actually examined it, there wasn’t much original form-making. Other people had done the original form-making.

A lot of it was taken from Rick Valicenti, who is very compelled to make things. He can start with a blank piece of paper. His forms seem to come intuitively, and his clients align themselves with his interests in making these things, and they get the benefit from it.

When I get a request to come up with something brand-new, it’s really hard for me. Really hard. I end up having to invent a problem in order to do it. And that is something I just love doing. It gives me great physical pleasure to solve problems. I remember watching Massimo Vignelli do things over and over again. But each time, they were always slightly different. He found enormous pleasure in finding slightly different ways of doing the thing that he loved to do.

And good designers can’t always do that. They are who they are, and somehow as their work develops — no matter how eclectic they think they are — they end up finding that there’s a certain handiwork that comes out of them that is just as compulsive as a lot of compulsions that we all — some of us at least — are driven by.

Given your self-admitted sense of being deeply flawed, to what do you attribute your success and popularity?
I remember being in high school. This was before I took the SATs, and I wanted to prepare for them. This was back in the ‘70s, and there were no SAT preparatory classes. I remember someone saying, ‘You can’t study for these tests. It’s natural.’ I remember thinking, ‘Can’t study? Excellent! In that case, let me not study.’ I remember I carried two new Number 2 pencils, and I showed up on time and sat down and took the tests.

And I got very good SAT scores. I remember my guidance counselor telling me they were so good that I could get a scholarship and go to any Ivy League school with my scores. And I remember thinking that I was good at art. I already knew what graphic design was. My guidance counselor thought I was really smart and felt it was a waster for me to go into art instead of becoming a doctor or a lawyer. I thought that there must be a lot of smart doctors and lawyers but I didn’t think there could be quite as many smart commercial artists. And I remember thinking, ‘I bet a smart commercial artists would really have an edge on things.’
And that’s what I think I am. I’m a smart commercial artist. There were at least two other kids in my college classes that were better natural designers that I was. But at the end of the day, having something issue forth from your imagination will only get you so far.

That doesn’t win you a project. That doesn’t find a specific solution to allow you to indulge your creativity, that doesn’t help  you explain that solution to your clients, that doesn’t help you do all the hard work that will muster up big groups of people to do major things.

All of those things take something else: brains. I actually think that I’ve compensated for whatever flaws and shortcomings I have as a creative person by being really smart and well-read and by working really, really hard. And by getting more at-bats. I seem to hit a lot of home runs because I have ten times as many at-bats as everyone else in the league. Meanwhile, the stands are littered with foul balls and strikeouts. And no one knows about them because I don’t count those. Right?

The idea of searching out a shared framework in which to invent and organize visual content dates back to the origins of modern graphic design. In the 1920s, institutions such as the Bauhaus in Germany explored design as a universal, perceptually based ‘language of vision,’ a concept that continues to shape design education today around the world.

This book reflects on that vital tradition in light of profound shifts in technology and global social life. Whereas the Bauhaus promoted rational solutions through planning and standardization, designers and artists today are drawn to idiosyncrasy, customization, and sublime accidents as well as to standards and norms. The modernist preference for reduced, simplified forms now coexists with a desire to build systems that yield unexpected results. Today, the impure, the contaminated, and the hybrid hold as much allure as forms that are sleek and perfected. Visual thinkers often seek to spin our intricate results from simple rules or concepts rather than reduce an image or idea to its simplest parts.

The Bauhaus Legacy
In the 1920s, faculty at the Bauhaus and other schools analyzed form in terms of basic geometric elements. They believed this language would be understandable to everyone, grounded in the universal instrument of the eye.

Bauhaus faculty pursued this idea from different points of view. Wassily Kandinsky called for the creation of a ‘dictionary of elements’ and a universal visual ‘grammar’ in his Bauhaus textbook Point and Line to Plane. His colleague Laszlo Moholy-Nagy sought to uncover a rational vocabulary ratified by a shared society and a common humanity. Courses taught by Josef Albers emphasized systematic thinking over personal intuition, objectivity over emotion.

Albers and Moholy-Nagy forged the use of new media and new materials. They saw that art and design were being transformed by technology—photography, film and mass production. And yet their ideas remained profoundly humanistic, always asserting the role of the individual over th absolute authority of any system or method. Design, they argued, is never reducible to its function or to a technical description.

Since the 1940s, numerous educators have refined and expanded on the Bauhaus approach, from Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago; to Johannes Itten, Max Bill, and Gui Bonsiepe at the Ulm School in Germany; to Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann in Switzerland; to the new ‘typographies’ of Wolfgang Weingart, Dan Friedman, and Katherine McCoy in Switzerland and the United States. Each of these revolutionary educators articulated structural approaches to design from distinct and original perspectives.

Some of them also engaged in the postmodern rejection of universal communication. According to postmodernism, which emerged int he 1960s, it is futile to look for inherent meaning in an image or object because people will bring their own cultural biases ad personal experiences to the process of interpretation. As postmodernism itself became a dominant idealogy in the 1980s and ’90s, in both the academy and in the marketplace, the design process got mired in the act of referencing cultural styles or tailoring messages to narrowly defined communities.

The New Basics
Designers at the Bauhaus believed not only in a universal way of describing visual form, but also in its universal significance. Reacting against that belief, postmodernism discredited formal experiment as a primary component of thinking and making in the visual arts. Formal study was considered to be tainted by its link to universalistic idealogies. This book recognizes a difference between description and interpretation, between a potentially universal language of making and the universality of meaning.

Today, software designers have realized the Bauhaus goal of describing (but no interpreting) the language of vision in a universal way. Software organizes visual material into menus of properties, parameters, filters and so on, creating tools that are universal in their social ubiquity, cross-disciplinarity, and descriptive power. Photoshop, for example, is a systematic study of the features of an image (its contrast, size, color model, and so on). InDesign and QuarkXpress are structural explorations of typography: they are software machines for controlling leading, alignment, spacing, and column structures as well as image placement and page layout.

In the aftermath of the Bauhaus, textbooks of basic design have returned again and again to elements such as point, line, plane, texture, and color, organized by principles of scale, contrast, movement, rhythm and balance. This book revisits those concepts as well as looking at some of the new universals emerging today.

What are these emerging universals? What is new in basic design? Consider, for example, transparency—a concept explored in this book. Transparency is a condition in which two or more surfaces or substances are visible through each other. We constantly experience transparency in the physical environment: from water, glass, and smoke to venetian blinds, slatted fences, and perforated screens. Graphic designers across the modern period have worked with transparency, but never more so than today, when transparency can be instantly manipulated with commonly used tools.

What does transparency mean? Transparency can be used to construct thematic relationships. For example, compressing two pictures into a single space can suggest a conflict or synthesis of ideas (East/West, male/female, old/new). Designers also employ transparency as a compositional (rather than thematic) device, using it to soften edges, establish emphasis, separate competing elements, and so on.

Transparency is crucial to the vocabulary of film and motion-based media. In place of a straight cut, an animator or editor diminishes the opacity of an image over time (fade to black) or mixes two semitransparent images (cross dissolve). Such transitions affect a film’s rhythm and style. They also modulate, in subtle ways, the message or content of the work. Although viewers rarely stop to interpret these transitions, a video editor or animator understands them as part of the basic language of moving images.

Layering is another universal concept with rising importance. Physical printing processes use layers (ink on paper), and so do software interfaces (from layered Photoshop files to sound or motion timelines).

Transparency and layering have always been at play in the graphic arts. In today’s context, what makes them new again is their omnipresent accessibility through software. Powerful digital tools are commonly available to professional artists and designers but also to children, amateurs and tinkers of every stripe. Their language has become universal.

Software tools provide models of visual media, but they don’t tell us what to make or what to say. It is the designer’s task to produce works that are relevant to living situations (audience, context, program, brief, site) and to deliver meaningful messages and rich, embodied experiences. Each producer animates design’s core structures from his or her place in the world.

Graphic Design: the New Basics, Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, pp 8-9

…however on a sunny afternoon in his compact conference room at the top of a red-stepped, spiral staircase near the trendy Meatpacking District of New York City, he shrugs off such terminology. What animates his conversation is talk of making things. At the mention of engineering - which he studied in high school - he talked at length about his respect for engineers as unsung heroes who are ‘creative at the very meaning of the word, in that there’s actual creation going on.’ Bring up typography - which, in his work, is made from materials as various as sausages, straw, or most famously, cuts in his own skin - and his thoughts turn to uncovering the person behind the forms.

‘I was never that interested in picking the right typeface,’ he says. ‘It seemed a tedious exercise. When we needed something that was beyong the general form, I felt the need to create it ourselves. Much of the type usage out there seemed so cold. I felt that the audience outside the design industry wouldn’t even know a person was behind it.’ In fact, Sagmeister is famous - or perhaps notorious - for making it clear exactly who is behind his work by featuring his own scantily clad body in memorable posters. Yet for him, there is nothing outrageous or ven self-aggrandising about this approac. ‘It’s actually quite logical,’ he says. ‘In all those pieces, the project was about myself. So using a picture of me in a lecture by me is the most conservative possibility that will work.’

For Sagmeister, design must make a direct, immediate, and logical connection. He started out wanting to make album covers for his favourate bands - which he did, for Lou Reed, th Rolling Stones, David Byrne, and Talking Heads. He even picked up a Grammy Award along th way. But the deeper desire was to make connections. ‘One of the reasons I became a designer was a fascination with mass communication.’ he says. He has no interest in being a ‘designers’ designer’, comapring that approach to the attitude of some directors he worked with who were contemptuous of the people in their theatres. ‘They did’t really care for the audience; they cared for newness,’ Sagmeister says. ‘At 19, I admired that. But then I began to realise that they only directed their friends, and that seemed morally reprehensible. If that’s your role, there’s no need to do it for an audience. Do it in your living room.’

In contrast, Sagmeister’s designs have appeared on billboards, magazines, books and galleries all over the world, which has led to a renewed effort to describe and define the man and his work. Nancey Spector, chief curator at the Guggenheim Museum, calls his output ‘design masquerading as art’. Designer Debbie Millman says, ‘Sagmeister is letting the world know that graphic designers are indeed artists.’ Graphic designer Steven Heller splits the difference and refers to him asn an ‘artist/designer’. Sagmeister prefers the simplicity of artists Donald Judd’s phrase, ‘Design has to work; art doesn’t’ and uses it as a standard to judge what he does. ; I first define what the design has to do, and then I test if it does that,’ he says. ‘When functionality declines and becomes unimportant, then it morphs from design to art.’

He also recognises that design has to sell. “My parents were salespeople and proud of it,” he points out. “Great salesmanship is inherent in all aspects of life.” He specifically admires the salesmanship required to get a big, bold idea, whether it’s a movie, television show, or the St. Louis arch, executed. “You have to get hundreds of people to share that vision,” he explains. “Even people that might want to change that vision into something much more mediocre.” However, he also realises that design, as an industry, has the potential to move beyond gross commercialism. “I know that the profession can do so much more,” he concedes. “But if there is a responsibility, it is from the individual designer. It’s a responsibility as a person. But no more than a streetsweeper or a mayor. The designer doesn’t have a special responsibility, any more than a restaurateur does, to do good work and be a good person.”

For his part, Sagmeister is continually looking for ways to express his own sense of responsibility to the larger world. “Considering what a rich language design is,” he says, “it is peculiar that we use it for only these two things, sales and promotion. Wouldn’t it be strange it we used only French for his, for example, instead of for poetry.” One of the riskiest ways to step beyond these limits involved taking a year off from design in 2002. He returned to his studio with a different set of professional priorities. He still takes on projects for music and corporate clients, but also for artistic and socially responsible organisations. These interests are not new to him. For someone with the reputation of a deisgn shock jock, look beyond the hype and you will find someone who is surprisingly gentle in person and in his interests. This is a man who teaches a class on using design to touch the heart. He gives extensive thanks to his colleauges, heroes, collaborators, and friends - three spreads of tiny type worth - in his latest book. He speaks frankly about striving for happiness, being good, helping others and loving his girlfriend as well. He even credits much of his success to being a good boy who got positive press early on simply because he was responsive to requests from the media; as a former magazine art director, he was sympathetic to their needs.

Instead of chasing the money machine, as he refers to it, he has kept his studio very small; just four people working cheek-by-jowl in a spare, unwalled window-lined space, looking out over the rooftops above 14th street and beyond. And he is generous with whatever wisdom he has acquired in the process. Not only in his latest book called Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far, but he is collegial and collaborative in his work. Studio designer Joe Shouldice points out, “We all work side-by-side and we’re super collaborative in everythgin. I mean, I can throw a paperclip and hit Stefan, so just listening to him on the phone and as he works, I’ve learned so much about every aspect of design.”

And even without chasing the big corporate dollars, Sagmeister has found some impressive financial and professional rewards. His current client roster includes the Azuero Earth Project, Levis, TrueMajority, Museum Plaza, Columbia University and Universal Music, but he is regularly paid to do whatever he wants in magazines and billboards. He currently has “about ten times the amount of work offered than we can possibly take on.” His year off was met with an outpouring of new commissions, and he plans to shut the studio again in 2009. He has two books out and another in development. His designs are collected by major museums. He is widely sought after as a public speaker, everywhere from design shcools to the TED conference. He is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts and has held chairs and professorships at the Cooper Union adn the University of Arts in Berlin, among other places.

And instead of being a young designer plotting ways to get the attention of his design hero, Tibor Kalman (founding editor or Colours magazine, with whom Sagmeister worked at the beginning of his career), now he’s got designers happily waiting three years to start a coveted internship at his studio. “It sounds cheesy,” says Richard The, a staff member from Berlin, explaining how he cam to work with Sagmeister, “but I took his course about how to touch someone’s heart with design, and compared to what we were doing in digital design, this was super refreshing.”

Refreshing. It’s a word that certainly applies to the surprises to be discovered not only in the work, but also the man.