Either show an apple, or say Apple, but never do both.

Introduction

We’ve all heard it - there’s no denying it: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. This is never more true than in the world of graphic design. However, graphic design professionals are rarely bestowed with such an abundant word limit when they are explaining and analyzing designw ork. This essay examines the tenous relationship between verbal and visual communication, and more specifically, the need for the verbalisation of ‘visual language’, and its associated problem.

The need to communicate.

As human society has become more complex, we have had to leave behind the grunts and squeaks of the animal world and develop systems of language that can used not only to ensure survival, but also to express ideas and emotions, to tell stories and remember the past, and to negotiate with one another.

As the world became more complex still, the pool of available words was no longer adequate. Shakespeare, for example, added more new words, phrases and idoims to the English language than has been added by all writers in the 400 years since. Western solution made the transition from an oral to a literary culture with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent proliferation of written texts, which allowed communication between all literate levels of society and even between different societies.

As new concepts and technologies rapidly continued to emerge, modern language faced the recurrent challenge of providing a vocabulary in which these innovations could be identified, discussed and criticised to the point where literary language was stretched to its limits.

As new concepts and technologies rapidly continued to emerge, modern language faced the recurrent challenge of providing a vocabulary in which these innovations could be identified, discussed and criticised to the point here literary language was stretched to its limits.

To efficiently communicate, words need to have a “long history of understood meaning”, which cannot happen when so many new ideas and technologies emerge in such rapid succession.

In a society’s constant state of evolution, rather than creating new words which would be lost and forgotten before they ever became commonplace, existing words and phrases have acquired new, alternate or variant meanings. For example, the phrase ‘cut and paste’ expresses to a computer-literate audience the concept of quickly transferring chunks of data, whereas before the advent of the personal computer, this phrase would have possessed a much more literal meaning.

Enter: Graphic Design

All visual expression has to do with communication, but this is especially true of graphic design. At its core, graphic design is the communication of a specific message to a group of people with the success of the design depending on how well that message is conveyed. This ideas is supported by John Commander, a leading 1960s Art Director, whose clear definition of graphic design states, “To design is to create images which communicate specific ideas in purely visual terms and utter statements whose forms graphically embodies or enhances the essential nature of the motions to be communicated.

With control of colour, letterform, graphical shapes, proportion, tone, texture and imagery, graphic designers engage in a visual language that is contructed to attract, inform, and persuade a given audience on a more instinctive and emotional level, which transcends words alone. Dieter Winkler [American designer and educator] recognises this intuitive quality of graphic design, in identitfying ‘the larger portion of the visual communication process in the daily affairs of people occurs outside their conscious awareness.’

In one sense, graphic design works can be regarded as contructs comprised of a multitude of formal and intuitive elements. It is when we deconstruct a piece of graphic design back into its ‘one thousand words’ by either writing or talking about it that its meaning can become clouded, leading to confusion and consequent weakening of the intended message.

The formation of a professional community is an inevitable progression that stems from our instinctive need to belong to a group. Graphic designers, although sometimes viewed as a ‘divided, fractious lot; similarly have a need for their own professional community. The sharing of information by like-minded people helps the profession validate its own ethos and role in business and society.

The communication works not only in unifying the profession, but can also provide personal stimulation, where the interactions within the design community can inspire growth on personal and professional levels. Discussion and analysis of design work is an important part of the design community, because it gives its members a vocabulary with which to discuss their work and converse more seriously and efficiently with one another about the values and goals of their profession.

As the design profession steadily becomes a more united and established community, the role of graphic designers, and the complex message forms they generate via the fusion of design and technology, can be better understood and appreciated by the public in general.

Design intuition.

Skilled designers are essentially people gifted with a natural tendency toward visual thinking. Visual thinking describes the ability held by some people to think via visual processes, in contrast to most people, who use linguistic or verbal processes.

American design writer and Professor of Journalism Gerald Grow states, ‘Visual thinkers work in regions of the mind where words are not essential and may be intrusive. They often engage in activities which focus not on words but on such non-verbal as line, colour, texture, balance, proportion, aesthetic experience and the manipulation of objects.’

Rarely during the design process does the designer need to put words to the methodology that they are following: this only occurs in the review of their work. The difficultly of reviewing ones own work is compunded by the fact that the designer is intimately connected to it. They know how it started, how it developed, what was kept and what was discarded. The audience sees only the final piece.

Yet the designer, with their working history and alternate understanding of the context, will rarely view the piece as it is presented to the audience. Grow supports this view in his identification of visual thinkers as individuals who commonly have problems with context. Due to the fact visual thinkers ’see’ the context they have in mind, they can easily forget everyone else may not know the context they are referring to.

According to Grow the result is that visual thinkers ‘tend to omit words that explain context and instead use terms that suggest sudden, unrelated, dreamlike apperances.’ They also tend to use broad, vague words or overuse common words in an arbitrary, eccentric manner. In ‘New York Times Magazine’ (Aurumn 2002), an interview with renowed graphic designer Peter Saville revealed a good example of the often eccentric use of words by visual thinkers. The articles author Saville’s habit of punctuating his sentences with ‘blah, blah, blah’

While this could be seen as verbal laziness, Grow actually identifies it as a common trait of visual thinkers - the tendency to use words in a ‘private and eccentric manner, like decor.’

With graphic designers often excelling in visual thinking, it is often unnatural for them to try to express the intuitive nature of their work through literal meanings. Professional designers are often taught to develop and rely on their intuition and instinct when creating design works. According to British branding specialist Peter Bonnici, it is ‘through these routes emotional effects are produced, new norms are created, strong images are devised.’

There’s no denying the presence or importance of a designer’s ability to tap into the subconscious source of creative judgement, but however real ths ability is, acknowledging it in a verbal sense is an entirely separate skill that often remains poorly developed. Internationally American designer Michael Beirut aptly describes this phenomenon in saying ‘designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth - ‘I don’t know, I just like it that way’ - simply won’t do.’

Again, this weak point can be attributed to problems involved in the translation of visual thinking to verbal communication. Grow has found individuals with refined visual thinking abilities tend to demonstrate a ‘general fuzziness’ with language that displays a ‘ You know what I mean’ quality. He suggests that sometimes produce the kind of writing that makes them sound unintelligent, rather than gifted in the mode of non-verbal thinking.

The schooling system can be held partly responsible for this discrimination against visual thinkers and the early division of words from images. On this idea, American Professor Paul Martin Lester said that early schooling teaches children to ‘make distinctions between words and pictures and to not think of them in the same way.’

Furthermore: ‘We are taught that although we can gain meaning from each, reading words is valued more than reading pictures. We are taught that pictures play a separate and subservient role to the words.’

In teaching children letters of the alphabet, images are matched up to concrete, familiar nouns: A is apple, B is for ball…etc. Each letter of the alphabet becomes a picture that corresponds with a complex set of direct and mediated images. Eventually the child will no longer have to think of the apple, they will only see its corresponding letter A.

As a result of this type of learning, from a young age our ability to read images remains largely undeveloped and lags behind our ability to read words Ultimately, this leads to an ironic passiveness to images in a culture that is increasingly visually-mediated. This negativity impacts and restricts the ability of individuals who choose to pursue careers in visual fields (such as graphic design), to verbalise ‘what the eye knows’.

Emigre designer and writer Rudy Vanderlans acknowledges the importance of understanding the visual language of design, saying that ‘Perusing visuals is a kind of reading also. It requires a certain visual literacy to appreciate looking at reproductions of graphic design.’

While many graphic designers may possess a high lievel of visual comprehension, their ability to transform thoughts and information into images needs to be complemented with the ability to transform images into written and spoken language. It is possible that graphic designers share a common understanding of a subconscious visual language of intuition and expression that defies any exact translation.

As Grow says, ‘The language of visual may be more private and eccentric than the communal language of orality.’ However, modern society with its penchant for written and verbal critique may not be so accommodating to an intuitive language that is so exclusive and elusive.

Non-visual communication in graphic design.

It is often thought that pictures should be seen and not heard, but as American digital artists John Paul Caponigro has observed, ‘Writing about images is inevitable. This kind of writing has always bee there. It always will be. Someone, somewhere, sometime will write about your images.’

The statement raises a number of questions regarding the translation of visual to verbal - all communication takes place through language, but not all languages use words. This is one of the biggest barriers graphic designers face in reviewing design pieces; home can a work designed through a non-verbal process be properly articulated?

The opening line of a Creative Review profile on the highly complex images by multimedia designer Steve Tanza - ‘Tanza’s work speaks for itself’ - clearly demonstrates the commonplace reluctance to translate visual language into a literar representation.

Another challnge facing reviewers of graphic design is ensuring that the words they use properly convey the appropriate context of the design to the audience, without jeopardising, summarising or skewing its message. Many such problems arise from talking and writing about contemporary design, and until these problems are better understood and solved, the development of literary design criticism and review will be hindered.

From film to music, theatre to art, very few creative endeavours avoid critical scrutiny, and graphic design is no exception. A noticeable difference, however, is that design criticism exists, in Rick Poyner’s words ‘in a precarious state of health.’ American designer Andrew Blauvelt identifies this deficiency of a critical framework can be attributed to the fact that, the bulk of design commentary ‘has been the celebratory reportage that has plagued design writing for decades’ instead of ‘critical writings about how design works and why it might be useful and meaningful to people, businesses and society at large.’

A quick glance in the graphic design section of any bookshop (if indeedn there is one) will show a definite dominance of playful, cryptic monographs over a highly, academic, well-groomed manifestos. According to Steven Heller, the conventional Graphic Design Competition is the closest thing te design profession comes to having a formal critical mechanism. In these ‘beauty pageants’ (as he calls them), he believes the fundamental questions of function, form and aesthetics become ’subsumed beneath subjective judgments of like and dislike.’

These problems arise from individual juror’s tastes and biases which are never fully explained in their analysis of the works. It is generally recognised that the work featured in these competitions are examples of successful design, however they lack the necessary structure required in the rationales to identify and compare the distinctions between what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work - rather that the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ of the jurors.

The American Institute of Graphic Arts Annual ‘365: AIGA Year in Design 23′ (2002) annotated each of its winning pieces with a statement from the designer and an observation of a juror. The jurors of the annual are themselves respected designers, chosen for their experience and notoreity in the field. Yet being designers, they are also predominantly visual thinkers. As a result, in their endeavours to distil deisgn works down to their winning qualities, they rarely succeed in taking it beyond an initial reaction.

In the same AIGA volume, the jurors labelled a wedding invitation designed by IA Collaborative as ‘A nicely spiced sausage.’ Such a sensational term does nothing to describe it as an award on Ted Joufla’s illustration, featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, as ‘Genuine, juicy and insane’, providing a mere colourful description without exploring the essence of its success.

What would be more beneficial and constructive would be to highlight specific factors in the pieces that work and others that don’t, and the reasoning behind their judgements.

The largest collection of English words, the Oxford English Dictionary, contains som 290,000 entries with some 616,500 word forms. Compare this to the vocabulary of an average educated person which is estimated to be about 20,000 words, 2,000 of which would be used in a week’s conversation. It is surprising then, with access to such an extensive internal and external database of languag, graphic design works are repeatedly labelled with the same (very limited) set of words.

Those familiar with the world of graphic design are bound to have been exposed to words like creative, modern, and clean on numerous occasions, and in some cases would have seen very different works labelled with the same word. Consider this case study; the covers to the December 23rd 2001 ‘New York Times Magazine’, and 2001 Iceland issue of ‘Big Magazine’, as well as the images of Jonathan Zawada, have all been described as ‘clean’ by different reviewers and jurors.

What is markedly different about them is the context in which ‘clean’ is used. Jonathan Zawada’s images of animal silhouettes are ‘clean‘ in the sense they have sharp lines and well defined edges. The cover of ‘Big Magazine’ is also ‘clean‘, but this time in reference to the purity of the ice and snow featured as its subject matter. The New York Times Magazine cover is ‘clean‘ for its modern, sterile feel and medical theme. For each of these reviews, the context that ‘clean‘ is used in assumed and not specified.

Written and spoken languages are built through structured layers of meaning. American linguist Noam Chomsky believes these layers of meaning can be separated into two categories of surface structure and deep structure. ‘Surface structure refers to the rules of grammar while deep structure involves knowing the meaning of each word within a sentence,’

Visual language too can be viewed as possessing similar surface and deep structures. The surface structure can be seen as the formal elements in a work, like tone, line, form and size, with the deeper structure existing as the underlying message of the work and the fundamental reasons behind the success or failure due to the formal elements.

As show in the ‘clean‘ example and in the comments of the jurors in ‘365: AIGA Year in Design’ annuals, very few design commentaries examine specific pieces of work beyond their surface structures. More meaningful readings of design can occur when empasis is not solely placed on the visual side of a design work, but rather on the union between style and content.

In doing this, the questions of ‘what is being said’ and ‘how is it being communicated’ arise. With graphic design criticism still being in a relative state of infancy it has yet to develop an established framework with which to conduct consistent and successful reviews and provide a structure in which to answer such essential questions. This makes it difficult for graphic designers and critics to construct mor meaningful and useful reviews of their own and others work.

A good example of successful critique structure lies within the world of film. Here, even a budding movie critic knows to deconstruct a film into its components, i.e. plot, cinematography, character development and direction (common themes that are applicable to all films). This means that films can have generally consistent and well informed reviews which still allow room for personal opinion but are not dominated by it. By focusing on all the common themes applicable to all design (e.g. delivery of the message), a similar critique structure can be developed.

Conclusion.

Verbalising the visual is a difficultly that confounds designers and design authors alike. This issue has a strong cultural relevance to the design community and society at large. In our quest for more meaningful and efficient communication, design exists as an infinitely broad and flexible tool, yet it is hindered by such seemingly simpl problems as describing it with words.

This is partly due to the fact that graphic design exists in a largely non-verbal, intuitive realm, as well as the fact that graphic designers in general are visual thinkers by nature. Teaching the early stages of schooling does little to develop the intuitive learning style of visual thinkers, instead placing importance on the literary side of learning

The lack of balance between these types of thinking often causes problems for visual thinkers when dealing with context. This is due to the intimate connection they share with their work, and results in th use of inappropriate, overused and indistinct works, in some cases resulting in a complete avoidance of words altogether.

In those cases that do receive review or critique, the analysis is often poorly structured, superficial or skewed by the personal taste of the reviewer. This highlights the need for a cohesive and comparable system of critique to be adapted for the design profession so that graphic design work can be analysed beyond their formal elements and also to develop a vocabulary better suited to the intuitive nature of design. Verbalising the visual is an inevitable, highly useful and remarkably underdeveloped procedure that has the potential to offer so much to the graphic design community.

Epilogue.

I am a self-diagnosed visual thinker. The research I conducted for this essay proves this beyond a doubt, (refer to the ‘The Writing Problems of Visual Thingers’, by Gerald Grow, 1994).

Starting out with the knowledge that visual thinkers often produce ‘weak narratives that read like lists’ and accepting the fact that the role of words has ‘little relevance to visual thinkers’ was an irony that has certainly not slipped my attention. Next time I think I’ll just draw a picture.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy once said that mathematically harmonious shapes, executed precisely are filled with emotional quality, and in our opinion there’s nothing more emotionally charged than a perfectly spaced field of Helvetica, here shown as a set of numerals on a letraset sheet. Helvetica is often seen as being too ‘corporate’, which is nonsense; logos of big corporations are often not set in Helvetica but in type that imitates handwriting (Coca Cola, Walt Disney). It is the falseness of the ‘personal signature’ that is the real mark of corporate culture, not the honest, contructed beauty of Helvetica.

For us Modernism does have a more subversive side. I think that whole image of Modernism something that is primarily concerned with functionalism, utilitarianism - that is something that emerged much later, it’s more late Modernism or something. I think the early Modernist movements like Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism all had a more subversive side,  more dialectical side, they went against something.

Danny van den Dungen, Helvetica

Style = Fart has been your motto for some time. Has its meaning changed for you over the years?

Yes absolutely. I don’t believe in it any more.

When we opened up the studio there was a little sign up there that said ‘Style = Fart’. It was brought down by water damage and never replaced. And the reason is; in the beginning of the studio I thought it would be helpful, or even necessary, to use a certain style for each single project … And once we used one style, it had to be another style for the next project. That, in itself, became a little boring - this constant jumping. But also, there is a danger that you just simply rip off historic styles, or even new styles developed by other designers, to fit your project.

So at that time, I thought repeating a style would somehow be lame, but I have completely changed my mind since then. Around five or six years ago, I started to acknowledge things like having used handwriting once but that I can use it again. And maybe I can push it. Maybe I can see that it might be used in a different way and so now, using it again is not disallowed, which I think definitely changed the look of our projects.

I discovered that very good style and good form are important if you have something to communicate. It’s as simple as, for example if I go out on a date and the girl is very good-looking (that is, she has good form) and she is very well dressed (that is, she has good style) I am going to be much happier meeting her to see whatever she has to say. Now of course, if she is absolutely bland and nothing to say, the good style and the good form wouldn’t really create a long-term relationship.

And the same would be the case of work in communications. If it is just good looking, and perhaps the newest style, it probably won’t be a piece that captures my attention for long. But there is content, I think it would be silly not to take style and form seriously.

Looking at the work of your studio one might say, optical illusions, hand lettering, 3D type, quirky tricks, these are all studio hallmarks. Of course, you took the year off to explore other things, but was this partly for fear of creating a personal style?

No it was for completely different reasons. While there was some repetition I wasn’t worried aobut ’stylistic’ repetition. The year off, like many things in life, had many reasons, but I’ll start with the most important ones.

I had lived in places like Vienna, and then I lived in New York, and then I lived in Hong Kong. In between these, pockets were created. In fact, I found that my biggest changes came in these spaces where I had the freedom to reconfigure. Being in love with New York so much I didn’t want to move again, so I thought it might be helpful to create an artificial space - an artificial ‘in between’. More importantly, even though I had the year off in mind for a while, I discovered I was having less and less fun in the office. I thought, if I don’t do something about this now, then everything will go because if I have less fun I will do work that is less satisfying…

It would become a job and not a passion?

Yes. Of course, there were a good number of other reasons, too. Ed Fella (influential American designer, typographer and Cranbrook Academy teacher) had also visited the studio and he had created this incredible amount of freedom for himself with his typographic experiments - I think that was quite influential. They are the main reasons that come to mind now, though, I am sure there were many others.

With regards to the work you have become famous for, do you get clients requesting a similar look to previous, separate projects? If so, how do you deal with it? I mean, I understand that the ‘Style = Fart’ philosophy is now defunct, but does that still stick in the back of your mind when clients come saying “can you do this style for us?”

They rarely do. They rarely, rarely, do. If I repeat myself it is more than likely my fault. Illustrators mostly complain about this problem of specific style. Belmore illustrators are known for one style only and it is very difficult for them to break out of it as a result. But then there is Christoph Niemann, who is a German illustrator living in New York. He started four styles and is working on all these four at the same time and he doesn’t have than problem.

He created that exit for himself?

Yeah. So now, I am far less understanding of illustrators who are cornered in and typecast. In our case, I can say for sure that if I do repeat myself it is not the client’s fault - it is my own.

You mentioned Ed Fella earlier, his notebooks and the experiments that he has done. Did that, combined with the year off, have a considerable effect on how you work or did it reaffirm how you were walking already?

These two are different things. I think Ed Fella was partly responsible for giving me the last push to do that year. But the year itself created a whole bunch of things. I mean, for one, it also got rid of a lot of things.

When I was very stressed and very busy there wer times, before than year ever came about, that I’d rather be a musician or I’d rather make movies. During my year off there was a period in the first month where I actually seriously thought I wanted to make movies. I even made a plan on how to go about this. And I had the possibilities - I had the money to do it, I had enough knowledge of the film industry to get some entries and I was not naive enough to think that this was going to be easy. I had even planned to go to school and I figured it would probably be around ten years before I would do anything I would be comfortable with.

However, as I settled that question in my mind I thought, if I spend ten years doing this what happens if, at the end of it, I have nothing to say - that I have nothing new to say in a film whatsoever? And then it sort of struck m, that it might be better to see if have something to say in graphic design and speak in a language that I already know rather than forget about that language in place of another before I even know if anything to say or not.

Different languages are probably better at different things. I’m sure that French is a better language for a love poem than maybe Cantonese might be. And in the same way, film is a better language for a love story than architecture might be. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it in architecture, the Taj Mahal being one example. And I think with graphic design it is simliar. There are certain things that it might be difficult to express because of the short time span you have with your audience, but nevertheless, I think it is possible.

And so, there you have it. One of the things that came out of the year was I don’t want to be a film director any more. And I don’t want to be in music. I very much settled that.

Was it a shock for you to find that out?

You know, it was a shock for me…Well maybe not a shock. It was interesting to me how many things I thought I would want but didn’t really want at all. Reading was another thing I read quite a lot and I thought that during that year off I’d definitely read much more. But it turned out that I have no desire to read for ten hours a day.

So, before you took the year off, you were just putting excuses in your head, saying - I’m not happy, I want to read more. I want to be a film maker. And the year off gave you the space to reflect on this?

Yes, yes - to test it!

I am curious to know how you told your staff, your colleagues and your clients that you were going to take a year off? How did they react?

The clients? That was a surprising thing. Se, this was all at the very height of the boom so I felt really silly saying I was going to take a year off. Initially, I actually thought about lying, saying things like I was involved in a large project and I couldn’t take on any more work. At the end of the year, I thought I’d just try to sort something out.

But I was never a very good liar, so I figured I might as well just come out with it. And everybody loved it. Clients said, “Oh my God, that is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, good for you.” And I gave them all ample warning - we didn’t let anybody hang.

For Hjalti (Karlsson), who was a designer working with me at the time, and for the interns, it was easy. I just stopped the studio for that period. Actually, for Hjalti, I think it was the necessary kick in the ass to open up his own studio, which he did with an old intern of ours.

But there were a good number of other fears - fears that everybody would forget us and we would open up with no clients. However, there was so much hype in the US about me not working and it became so bad that a guy I know very well, a designer in New York, took me aside, sort of nudging me saying, “your’re really working this, you know” He really thought it was a PR stunt!

That it was a ploy? But did it turn into a PR push for your studio?

It didn’t hurt the studio. It definitely did not hurt the studio.

Was it difficult to go back into a working environment with clients after not having had any for a year?

No, no. It was weird but it had nothing to do with going back. It was weird because we opened up in mid September 2001, which was, you know, three days after 9/11

Did you welcome that? Is that something that you were comfortable with?

Oh yeah, absolutely! Actually from the beginning I always said I was going to do one or two years without clients. I always wanted that option of a second year. After ten months of the first year; I figured I better make a decision - “Am I going to do a second year because, if not, I have to start looking at hiring people and everything.” But it was a very, very clear decision to open again after one year. I was absolutely ready. Even now, when I am pissed off at something, it’s something good to remember that when I had the option of taking another year off I actually preferred doing the regular studio work.

You said earlier about not being able to lie - that you are a bad liar. The honesty in ‘Sagmeister - Made You Look’ is uncharacteristic for graphic design books and monographs. Is honesty important in your work and in the broader sense of graphic design?

Yeah, yeah. I think it is important for me in my life. Apart from it being nice to be honest, in the end, it helps avoid problems. I sometimes think that I have a very free life because there are very few secrets.

I also think that it is a very valid strategy. I teach at SVA in New York and Stephen Heller who heads that program, and has probably written 70% of the design books out there, knows pretty much everybody. He bring an incredible amount of guest speaker to SVA. He organises such a wide variety of guest speakers and these people talk to 12 students. It is quite a course - it literally takes 12 students.

One time Quentin Crisp was speaking. Do you know him? He’s that old English guy that Sting sang about in ‘I’m an Englishman in New York’. He was this 80 yar old triple gay queen and he spoke in quotes. I mean, literally every sentence he uttered you could have printed up in sixty point type.

Of the many things he said, one really stuck with me. I can’t do his accent but he said, “I used to say to journalist everybody is interesting. And the journalists would say, ‘That is not true Mr Crisp, there are many boring people out there.’” So, he revised it to say, ‘Everybody who tells the truth is interesting.’ After thinking about it for a bit I thought it was really true.

I believe everyone who talks from the heart and says things as they really are, becomes automatically interesting. This was at the time when I was working on the book and I thought, “Oh my God, if I am honest, it should become automatically interesting.” That is basically it…

Would you say the design industry, in general, is suffering from a lack of honesty? For example, you’ve been quoted saying ‘branding is overrated crap’. But there are a lot of design companies, a lot fo design gurus or self professed gurus, who stand behind the brand philosophy, the brand mentality, much of which is just dressing up companies regardless of their true beliefs. And some of these people have succesful businesses making a lot of money from this. Do you see a relationship between honesty and how people might approach branding or projects of that nature?

I think that within branding there are two different levels of lies. One level includes teh lies of the designers, or branding experts, give to their clients, meaning that they pretent that they’re part of the branding job; that they’ll do things that it could never do alone. I think there is an incredible over estimation within our industry of how important branding really is. There are some unbelievable idiots out there, too. During a lecture I attended, the global brand director of Interbrand, had a slide showing a cup of coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Underneath, it said 60 cents for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and $3.50 for the Starbucks coffee.

He went on to say that the difference between the two is branding. As if the idiot has bever been outside and tasted a Starbucks coffee and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. It is so clear that these two are different products. To begin with, one is brewed and the other is hand made for order. It’s the product that makes the difference, not the brand. Froma branding perspective, Starbucks is okay. They have a lot of outlets, so they are very present. But Dunkin’ Donuts have a lot of outlets too.

So it’s not just about who has the bigger signpost, or who has the bigger brand awareness alerting people to their outlets - it’s down to the product or service?

Oh absolutely!

And if the product doesn’t live up to the brand, the brand is not going to save the product?

Exactly, exactly. I think so many people in our profession take credit for things that they really have not created. At the moment, my primary example is to look at the history of advertising books. Almost all of them are in agreement that the best advertisement campaign of the 20th Century is the Volkswagon campaign for the Beetle. It’s always hailed as the big thing - something that contributed considerably to the successful sales of the product, not the car.

Well the fact is, the Volkswagon was the number one car in South America and it was the number one car in Europe but neither had benefit of those campaigns. So, the Volkswagon basically sold itself on account of it being a great product. The good advertisement - which is lovely - didn’t hurt it either. The mindset that these advertisement campaigns made the car what it is are just not true.

More and more designers seem to be describing graphic design as outright corporate servitude. Perhaps our industry is looking for something more, somthing for greater substance. Perhaps it is simply a desire for more honesty. But these designers are not exactly on the periphery of our profession determined to dissent. They are more mainstream than that. Are designers questioning what it is we do?

I don’t think that represents all schools of thought out there. However, there will always be people who engage in visual pollution. I think it would be lovely if there were a system where you tax or punish visual polluters just as much as you do the people who let the shit into the river, because I think culturally it is just as bad.

I don’t have a proposal on how that could actually be implemented but I definitely think that it should be thought of in that way. I think one level of the dishonesty is designer’s tallking to their clients and concealing and misrepresentating the power of what they actually do. They use crappy presentations with branding language trying to talk like MBA’s but when you translate it into English it simply says, I like good things and I don’t like bad things.

The second thing is of course dressing up the products or bad services as something that is good, which is the less personal but ultimately bigger lie. But I guess we are all guilty of this and I certainly don’t have a clean vest.

You have been adamant in saying you would like your design to touch someone’s heart. Why is that so important for you?

That is partly through jealousy of other artistic fields. I realised that music played an incredible and important role in my life and was always able to touch me. A good number of movies have also achieved this, as have a good number of books. It seemed I had to search longer and harder to find a piece of design that did the same thing. And so muhc of what we do as professionals, though nicely done - well illustrated, beautifully photographed - is ultimately fluffy. My desire is to move beyond.

Do you think it is really possible when deisgners are the message bearers of somebody else’s message? A book might be more personal, a film might be personal - music is certainly personal, but a designers output is largely influenced by soneone else - the client. And if the client is not willing to touch someone’s heart with their message it is a lot harder for designers to package it that way.

I think it is a good point. There is a good saying by Katherine McCoy from Cranbrook that ‘design can never rise above its content’. I definitely think that is true. So obviously, if you are involved in toothpaste packaging, you probably need to just package the toothpaste nicely, maybe in a way that is not jarring in someone’s bathroom. And I don’t believe you need to touch someone’s heart with it either. I mean I don’t have a particular desire to have my heart touched while brushing my teeth.

However, I think that part of our decision is whom we work for. When I first realised this I thought maybe I should actively search for clients that would demand that. Not too long after, I started to work for an organization called Move Our Money, which was trying to reduce the United States Pentagon budget. With this, I think the goal was appropriate and I think there are a good number of things out there in a similar vein.

Part of my critique is that, if you look at deisgn overall it is such an incrediby powerful language. It can educate, entertain, make people laugh, agitate and even unite.

Professional designers, myself included for a long time, choose to take this unbelievably powerful language and use it for this tiny little segment, which is promoting and selling. I have nothing against promoting and selling by the way, but it’s just a pity that it seems to be all we do, or almost all we do.

I used to do design for music classes at SVA, but I stopped that and switched it to this touch subject - Can you touch someone’s heart with design? I have completed one full semester in Berlin - 24 students working on this one question. The results were unbelievable! We were defintely touching people’s hearts, I mean we proved it without a doubt because most of the projects had to be executed. Theyhad to do these projects for real then document whether their target audience was touched or not. And it was proven. Of course, not every student succeeded, but a good number of them proved without any doubt that it is possible.

Did that affect how you thought aobut things? Did you learn from that?

Well I’d never seen it on such a massive scale. I would have found projects, here and there, where I would have said yes, they definitely touched me. But I had never quite seen it repeated in the span of a semester and then see it can absolutely work.

‘Made You Look’ must have been a very challenging project. Did it change how you interpreted your own work or even graphic design for that matter? Or was it simply a relief when it was done?

I had talked to a good number of designers who all bitched about doing their own monograph and said it was the most difficult job they’d ever done. We started designing ‘Made You Look’ before the year off, and I knew it I didn’t get it done before the year started I’d spend that entire year just finishing the book. I would never have taken a year off to design a book, so the deadline was self imposed and set in stone. I think the designers that I had talked to before didn’t have that deadline so these projects went on for six years or so. Which meant that you redesigned that sucker every year and a half, because you didn’t like it anymore and it would inevitably become an incredible drag. Though, I do remember, after sending it off to Hong Kong, not knowing if it was good or bad, but knowing that I had done as well as I could have at the time. I was truly unsure if it had any quality or if it was something worthwhile.

In describing your work, Paula Sher said that ‘it’s never boring’ and that ‘designers have an obligation to be interesting.’ Do you see the same obligation?

That’s very nice of Paula to say that. Personally, I’m not sure if there are any special obligations. I mean, no more obligation than if you were a street sweeper, or a heart surgeon. Well actually for a heart surgeon, there is this nice little doctor quote, which says ‘do no harm’. I think that applies very nicely to designers as well. Though, I’d agree with Paula that there is an obligation to be interesting if you are in communications. You don’t want to bore people to death!

Here’s a big question for you - what are you views on globalisation?

I love it! I’ll give you a story from my Dad that impressed me very much. My Dad grew up in the thirties and said that every village in our area (in Austria) had village cripples. The reason they were criples was because they dared to date a girl from another village adn they were stones as a result. And it was an accepted practice in society then and those people were not prosecuted. Part of the reason this has changed is globalisation.

All that folk culture is now generally in museums or kept alive for tourists, even though there are still a lot of brass bands and things that people are truly enjoying out of tourism. So, we lost some of it, but we also lost a lot of crap. You know, people were unbelievably narrow-minded before.

So my views stem from my own experiences, and if I look at my own experience the fact that I can travel anywhere in the world and not be ostracized from my village is a result of globalisation. It’s a personal view, of course. I admit I have no proper insight of what gloablisation really does to a worker in the northern part of Mexico. I can only read that from the New York Times and then I have to trust that they are being honest. Even though I am very aware of the hardship globalisation has brought to many people, I do think there are upsides, too

Certain cultures have suffered as a result of globalisation. Others have not. You travel, lecture and work with international clients in a lot of different countries. How do you approach working with foreign cultures? Though globalisation has granted unlimited access, thankfully there are still strong cultural differences in the world to work with.

I think, and I would hope, that things become much more local again. You see quite a bit happening on the high end of the hotel industry. The earliest people to travel regularly were the rich people, so they were the first ones to get really fed up with hotels being chain hotels - all looking the same. That’s why you now have quite individual boutique hotels emerging. But essentially I am an optimist. If we as humans go down the wrong path for a while, I do believe in our capability to recognise that and turn around.

Lastly, what are the challenges you face now?

The biggest challenge is doing work that both my audiences and myself find satisfying.

“Joel was talking today about the importance of trust in what you feel, and of finishing what you’ve started. He described the moments when you are working on something and someone looks over your shoulder and says, ‘what the hell is that,’ and how you can’t let that interrupt your process and stop you from doing your thing - even when that voice is your own”

“Drawing workshop - Washington Square Park, 2pm at the water fountain. I never felt like I could draw. I never had any formal art education, and until I started going to the workshops, I felt as if it was some kind of limitation. I eventually got over that fact. Now I always keep a sketchbook on hand, and I don’t worry about whether or not my drawings are good or bad. It is very good to define in writing why you are doing something. And it’s good to remember that there are very few set rules. I kept going to the workshops to shake things up, stir the pot. When you leave, some of the pieces fall together in a different way. The world looks different. I never had any concrete goal or intention for the workshops - I just let myself be carried away by the experience, and be open to wherever it would take me. Sometimes it was difficult, and I could feel myself up against my own walls so vividly.”

Take a journey. Record it. Give the journey form.

Make some work using reflections - water, light, typography

Make a three minute film edited in camera

Write a poem or story. Make a 12 line grid Use a single size and weight of black serif type / a single character style. Set the story / poem.

Photograph each other.

Write a story. Give it form.

Tonight, make a map (a record of the journey) from the workshop to where you are staying, about what ou do tonight and your journey back to the workshop tomorrow morning. Any medium. It can be a combination of media.

Make a description of a memory from your childhod. Give that memory form.

Find an object no bigger than your little finger. Get the cheapest camera you can find. One light source. Make a series of images.

Build a structure. Photograph it.

Interpret the following as you would like: outside while inside. Inside while outside.

Big sheets of paper. Black paint. Big brushes. Black and white words.

Go into the city - somewhere you do not konw or have never been. Record the experience. Give the experience form.

Make a map of the day.

Tell a story without using words.

Everybody write a sentence. 20 combinations of the sentences, or some of the sentences. This is a film script. Make the film.

A moment in time you remember with clarity. Create an informative storyboard of the linear occurance of that moment with 10 frames. This is about information not about beauty. You will use this storyboard as a tool. It is not a result, but a step in a process.

Write a poem. Give it form.

Write a description of your favourite piece of work. Describe its shape, its elements, its quality. This is a brief for anyone to interpret.

Record a moment, any media.

Make a map of the internet.

Write to music. Draw to a piece of music. Combine the two. Take a section of the result. Re-make that section. Add one element. Place what you have made in an environment and photograph it.