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?