Sagmeister Interview Excerpt

March 11th, 2009

…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.

Why Typography?

February 19th, 2009

This is a book about typography. For our purposes, typography is the subject of typefaces and the matters involved in their creation and application.

The arrangement of letters on a page is an arcane corner of interest. In general, it has not proven a route to great individual advancement in a single lifetime. We know this from the biographies of typographers throughout the ages, who at best have been temporarily feted, but have rarely benefited from the glamour or the income to match the creatives and industries that depend on their endeavours. John Baskerville’s corpse took some time before it found a respectable grave.

Why, then, are so many people interested in typography? The fascination with the subject itself would seem to be the answer. It is a subject that quickly gets devotees into uncharted depths, where aesthetics meet engineering, where art meets maths, where the strictly ephemeral and decorative meets a quest for timeless values and transparent functionalism. With this going on, typography becomes something you can believe in as a good cause. Typographers are not without all hope of worldly gain, but they suspend disbelief in the face of the evidence of predecessors who failed to achieve much more than the respect of some of their own kind. And this persists. So clearly it can be enough. Perhaps typography is a noble calling, or a self-deluding one.

The growing interest and dedication of many to this subject can be best explained by its rising stature as an area of study, rather than a trade discipline. It is a growth industry - at least in the sense that there is a growing amount of work; it is a debatable poont (which we will address later) to what greater value is being created by that explosion of typographic familiarity, certainly in financial terms. While once it was a craft-based, largely in the pragmatic, fast-moving hands of the compositor, over the past century it has moved out of the print shop and become a subject with close connections to the development of art, technology and literacy. That typography is not associated with some of the more avant-garde activities in communication and innovation, with the more expressive dimensions of graphic design, also makes it a subject likly to appeal to new designers seeking to make their mark. At least we can now see that typography is no backwater: it s a nexus of thought, and can claim to be the architecture of written language, which is no small thing given that our language is one of the key definers of our humanity. So typography may be arcane, but it is not immaterial. It can even be said to be at the centre of culture.

Excerpt from the introduction to Lewis Blackwell’s 20th-Century Type

Bruno Monguzzi - AGIdeas 2008

January 13th, 2009

Have a method, not a style, a process, not a fashion. Don’t be fooled by what looks pretty. If you let the content dictate the style/form, you will be guaranteed original, varied and distinct work.

Design History - Steven Heller

January 7th, 2009

Despite all its accomplishments, the contemporary design world is afflicted by a deep vacuousness. Most students and many practitioners cannot even list or describe the field’s milestones or pioneers. I refuse to believe that this is true in other creative fields-painting, film, architecture, literature-but arguably the biggest void left by graphic design education programs is a critical awareness of design history. During the three to four years spent in undergraduate art and design school, students are offered many studio courses devoted to technology, technique, form, and even style-they are taught to solve problems in various media and to produce professional work for numerous genres. But ultimately a portfolio is the coveted end product that is given far more importance than an appreciation of history.

As co-chair of SVA’s MFA design program, I’ve found that some (not all) applicants with a graphic design background have little sense of design’s cultural significance. They lack the historical perspective that enhances modern-day professional practice. They view graphic design simply as a means to an end-a professional activity that leads to professional employment. That may be true, but this view limits the depth, and perhaps even the essence, of the educational experience.

I often urge these ‘cultural illiterates’ either to return to undergrad or take continuing-education classes that might bolster their understanding of design as a cultural manifestation. Some have taken the advice, but depending on the quality of the school and its programs, there are significant pedagogical holes that even the best-intentioned teachers have trouble filling.

I am no lock-jawed proponent of the ‘Educational Standards’ movement that seeks to hold students accountable to standardized levels of competence. However, it is critical for design students to be fluent in the language (and idioms) of design beyond the programs and styles du jour. Just as importantly, students must be aware that graphic design history intersects with other cultural, art, and political histories. Design is not produced in a vacuum, and its history must acknowledge influences from outside events, discoveries, and policies. Design history is, in a sense, world history.

As an example, consider the debate over design’s social role and designers’ social responsibility. Though useful for a designer’s self-awareness, this topic seen through the lens of history would lend it dimension and weight. Today’s designers are sometimes blamed for contributing to the wasteful excesses of our globalized capitalist consumer society, but branding and marketing methodologies-often cited as the culprits in present-day problems of conspicuous consumption-are hardly new. They were introduced more than 75 years ago when Ernst Elmo Calkins, a Midwest-born advertising executive who founded an ad firm in New York, developed a product strategy that involved regularly altering graphic styles for advertisements and packages. In the 1920s, this was dubbed ‘styling the goods’, the idea being to push consumers to change their buying habits and thus goose the economy. This confluence of advertising, product design, industrial design, and public relations was key to what eventually became the supreme paradigm of American consumer culture. And in those days-when the U.S. had seemingly endless resources-waste was not a hotly contested issue.

Tracing how Calkins’s ideas developed into the practice of planned obsolescence and the role of design in this process is more than simply fascinating, it provides a meaningful context for understanding today’s issues. Comprehending this history might not change the attitudes of the No Logo adherents-those who consider globalization and the brand ethos to be forces of economic and cultural devastation-but for teachers and students it provides a necessary foundation for intelligent and informed critical perspectives. While design educators’ primary job is not to develop the next generation of social critics, why shouldn’t designers be fluent in a critical language? For that matter, design programs should encourage designers to become critical historians. Even if scholarship is not part of students’ ultimate career goals, this kind of critical thinking will doubtless enhance relations with clients. Just as a thorough knowledge of world history helps diplomats to better understand current events and to more intelligently argue their perspectives, interactions with clients would greatly benefit from designers who are more enlightened and hopefully articulate about their own milieu.

A critical understanding of history is also vital in addressing questions about designers’ relationships to their governments and the social order, a fact crystallized by the war with Iraq. Individual decisions must be made about how (or when) designers contribute to war or anti-war efforts. Designers have created good and bad propaganda in the service of past wars, and the recent military effort was no exception. Understanding the history of both oppositional and official propaganda by analyzing it from the vantage points of politics and esthetics is an invaluable introduction to this practice. By exploring the history of propaganda, students can critically perceive how their own work functions to aid, abet, or critique public policy.

In my own truncated critical history lecture series for MFA students at SVA, I teach one class that focuses on how racial and ethnic stereotypes have been perpetuated in popular arts and mass media since the mid-19th century. The purpose of the class is to expose students to a slice of American and European history that is unfamiliar-to discuss the origin of stereotypes and to explore what remains today of this unfortunate historical legacy. Regrettably, the class isn’t allotted enough time to address some of the peripheral issues-for instance, caricature and cartoon as a means of creating and deflating public myths. While this topic is not related to graphic design in the catholic sense, it is nonetheless an important aspect of design history. And there are dozens of historical sidebars that allow for similar critical analyses about graphic design practice. Sadly, most schools barely touch on design history at all, much less these tangents.

When it comes to the educational fundamentals, the omissions are often egregious: Most design schools do not offer history survey courses that tackle more than a superficial canonical timeline, do not employ dedicated teachers of history and criticism, and do not train educators to teach this curriculum or take critical history into advanced realms of study. Even if there were more trained educators, most schools claim they do not have the finances or underwriting to maintain a dedicated critical history program.

Of course, developing a history curriculum has a lower priority than purchasing up-to-date technology or developing studio courses that have immediate professional applications. There are only so many credits available in any given year and a strict laundry list of graduation requirements prevails. So what currently takes the place of required history classes? There are various ad hoc nods toward history. Hank Richardson at Atlanta’s Portfolio Center, for one, routinely assigns students in his classes a project that involves researching a vintage 20th-century style and then producing design work influenced by that esthetic. The research is meant to go beyond the superficial into a deeper analysis of the time and place in which the styles were produced. During the course of this research, students immerse themselves in the particular methodology and mannerisms that may no doubt lead to further curiosity and investigation.

As valuable as this may be, it is far short of a devoted critical history program. Sure, the student may learn about form by researching and copying important canonical works, but the big picture-design’s influence throughout society and culture-remains a blur.

Some schools do have survey courses that use Philip Meggs’s pioneering A History of Graphic Design as a means of injecting a dose of history for a semester or two, and even a cursory sampling is better than none at all. However, the scattershot method usually results in a dry experience devoid of both passion and insight-names, dates, and places do not make for an exciting or inspiring historical narrative. Meggs’s book (or Richard Hollis’s Graphic Design: A Concise History) is best used as an outline upon which to build more engaging, pragmatic, and thoughtful activities. But the killer constraint is time.

The time allocated for even required design history courses is minimal. One or two semesters is the maximum at even the better schools, and that’s barely enough to get a firm grounding in the European Modern movement, much less the richness of postwar design and a viable survey of type. Besides, when so much material is covered in such a short time, the students end up with only a cursory amount of knowledge and a paucity of insight. To establish a truly engaging curriculum, design history must be critically presented and analyzed. It should be a foundation for understanding theory and practice, not an expendable filler.

Given the political and jurisdictional concerns of most colleges and universities, proposed changes are often deemed radical. But the ideal curriculum would be a required critical history course that is not squirreled away as a footnote to the art history department but instead must run for no less than three years within an undergraduate design program. Make it an academic or studio requirement-the rubric is irrelevant, but the subject demands the attention. The program should be structured to teach the subtleties of the requisite historical facts as well as develop critical thinking abilities. Students should come away from the program knowing how to research and analyze design’s history, how to apply their historical knowledge in critical analyses about contemporary design, how to collect artifacts, and how to write history. They should understand the intertwining, ongoing influences of design, art, politics, culture, and technology. Schools should encourage design students to create not only a portfolio, but a body of scholarship and critical writing.

While most design educators respect history, graphic design education gives lip service to a scholarship that integrates practice with historical comprehension. We teach students to experiment, we teach them to produce, we teach them methods that will get them good jobs. Graphic design education-indeed, graphic design practice-requires an even greater intellectual rigor. Many students are competent designers, and some are better than that, but they must be equally good as thinkers. They must be able to research, analyze, critique, and write. A critical history program would make this the norm for design students, not the exception.

As seen on Typotheque.

The Cheese Monkeys - Chip Kidd

December 27th, 2008

‘When the air cleared, we got the assignment for the fourth crit - the weirdest yet. He was careful not to lok at me as he issued our orders, an ungesture that hurt more than a piercing stare ever would. We had to show Winter “something that I’ve never seen before and will never be able to forget. Because that should always be your goal. If you can do that, you can do anything - ever attempt anything less.” (190)

Jillian Tamaki’s Process

December 3rd, 2008

IDEA GENERATION

[Below is a handout that for a little talk I gave on concept generation for my class at Parsons. I thought maybe you would enjoy it, since Frank seems to get a great reception when he gets all "talky" and informative.

Following this guide will not guarantee you success, conceptually, professionally, or otherwise. It's just my way of working and I know for a fact it will not work for everyone. However, I was pretty interested to read that Chris Neal, someone whose work I really admire, follows a similar sort of process.

I do not address many important things in this little blurb, including the importance of aesthetics, appropriateness, marketability, and taste. These things may arguably be more important than conceptual prowess, since I don't think you need to be especially smart to be successful. Not that I consider myself exceptionally smart.]

WHAT ARE CONCEPTS AND HOW DO I GET ‘EM?

Concepts are Ideas. Some ideas are good. Some are bad. Some are offensive or insensitive. Some of them are tried-and-true (but possibly boring). Some are clever and make you laugh. Some rely on intangible things like “atmosphere” and “emotion” for their power. Some live and die on the execution (finish) of the piece.

In order for a piece to be successful, you must communicate your idea to the viewer. The viewer should be charmed, intrigued, empathetic, repulsed, provoked. SOMETHING.

They should be touched enough to want to cut the illustration out of the magazine.

How you choose to connect with viewers is up to you. There is no right or wrong, just successful and unsuccessful. There is space in illustration for personal vision and passions (in fact, illustration usually sucks when they’re absent), but we can’t forget about “the viewer” and our role as communicator.

“COMING UP WITH IDEAS”

Plunking yourself down in front of a pad of paper and scraping the inside of your brain is probably not the most effective way of generating ideas. If we only draw upon the images that already exist within our heads, or our own memories and experiences, we are actually quite limited.

Step 1. BE INTERESTED.

- Consume media. Participate in culture. Read books, go to movies, the news, fashion magazines, stupid blogs, etc. Browse the bookstore just for the hell of it. All of this contributes to our personal visual fabric. Soon you will be CONTRIBUTING to this world.

– Find inspiration in museums and the visual arts. Discover the connections between what is going on now and what has already come before. You might be surprised to learn that your favourite artist is really a knockoff of someone from 100 years ago.

Step 2. COLLECT THAT MEDIA.

- See an amazing photo/illustration/design? Save it. I keep a folder entitled “Reference” on my desktop where I keep anything I find interesting. Sub-folders include: Bodies/Gesture, Chinese Posters, Colours, Faces, Vintage Objects, Maps, Nature. A quick jog through these images can really help you out when you’re stuck for a colour scheme or composition. Or they can form the BASIS of an idea.

- As a professional, one can write-off much of the media you purchase. Books, movies, museum tickets, etc. all become professional expenses.

Step 3: TAKE THE SOURCE CONTENT SERIOUSLY.

- Read content (the book, the play, the article) carefully and thoughtfully. Several times. If possible leave a day between reading and starting work on it. Sometimes leaving it to sit in your brain for a while is very helpful, I find.

- WHILE reading content, highlight vivid imagery, key phrases, descriptive passages, notable quotes, and anything else the jumps out at you. Take quick notes or do a quick doodle in the margin if something comes to mind.

– Go find supplementary material, if necessary, to help you parse the content. If you’re doing a cover illustration for War and Peace, it may be helpful to read online discussions, dissertations, reviews, and such. The internet makes this VERY EASY.

Step 4. START WITH WORDS.

- Starting with words is quicker and more fluid because the concepts do not exist as solid representations or images yet. They make the concepts easier to manipulate.

- Use the words you isolated in Step 3 as a foundation. From here, really open your mind and think of it as a game of word association. Metaphors, symbols, verbs, colours, random thoughts and connections… they’re all important, so jot them down. Do not think in specific solutions (but if one pops in your head, make a note of it).

Step 5: ADD IMAGES.

- We think of ourselves as creative people, but the reality is that Nature is way more bizarre and interesting than anything we can come up with. Does your picture involve fish? Research variations. Does the story take place in the Texan desert? Gather some photos. You may see something in one of them that triggers a great idea (who knew cacti could look like that?).

– Try Google Image Search, GettyImages, Corbis, and Flickr. Books too (although I realize time is often short). Remember! You are drawing elements from these sources. Not transcribing or copying.

Step 6: MIX.

- By this point, you probably have some good leads as what looks interesting/what you’d like to explore. Your head is fully in the content. You’ve isolated what is important to communicate. Here are a few things to help you flesh out some usable ideas:

Combine words from the word list, even if the combinations seem strange. Unexpectedness is good.

Do character sketches. Many of them. Look at the word list and perhaps use some of the adjectives/concepts to guide your characterizations.

Sometimes thinking of COMPOSITION or DESIGN first can be helpful. Draw a thumbnail of the pleasing composition or gesture. Assign details to shapes.

Is colour very important? Build a composition to highlight it.

Look back into your Reference folder for inspiration. Sometimes you can fit your material to an existing design, colour scheme, etc.

Step 7. BUILD UP THUMBNAILS TO FINISHED SKETCHES.

- The Art Director is infinitely thankful for your research and process steps. They are going to provide her with a unique and interesting final product. But she does NOT want see them (however, I will sometimes include a reference photo to say, “this is the colour scheme I’m thinking of.”) EDIT your ideas, distill them into legible sketches, in the format.

IN CONCLUSION
This is my process. Everyone works differently, and maybe there are some fabulous steps out there I have yet to discover. But it’s a very standard way of generating ideas (which is just a fancy of way of “getting the juices flowing”). Try some of these techniques and think of it as an experimenting with concepts as you would experiment with paint. Everyone’s personal style and interests will dictate the exact process (a little less words, a little more character development, for example). One could argue that Step 1 is actually the most important.

Fin!

Jillian’s Blog

ABC3D Book

November 8th, 2008

SVA

October 25th, 2008

Like busy wallpaper, images and messages surround us in our everyday lives, each visual communication demanding our attention. The competition is fierce.

Now more than ever, great design matters. It has to stand out in the avalanche of posters, ads, flyers, direct mail pieces, books, magazines, Web sites, etc., or else disappear from sight.

At SVA, you become a graphic designer who matters by developing a personal visual vocabulary that is strong in the formal principles of design and solves problems through the process of clear conceptual thought.

You start with the basics. What’s mandatory is an in-depth understanding of scale, texture, symmetry, tension, line, color, tone, balance, contrast, pattern and the principles of perspective. These, in a sense, are the alphabet of your visual vocabulary. Typographic design skills are essential, and you will develop not only fluency in the range and uses of available typefaces, but insight into how people perceive textual communication. You’ll know the “why” along with the “what.

School of Visual Arts

MFA Designer as Author

The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer #1

October 10th, 2008

Softlightes - Microwave Song

October 9th, 2008