Contents
A Mass for Mass-Market Paperbacks
Section Two: So You Want to Be a Graphic Designer
Draw Me Schools of Graphic Design
Homage to Velvet Touch Lettering
Clipping Art, One Engraving at a Time
When Bad Things Happen to Good Logos
In Praise of the Anthropomorphic
Section Three: Cautionary Tales
Miss Branding: A Cautionary Tale
Revisualizing the Four Freedoms
Design in Belgrade: A Jolt of Graphics
Smearing Power with Wheatpaste
Introduction
Design is both cult and culture. On the one hand, designers, and particularly graphic designers, are a tribe of little understood yet much needed artists and artisans with their own rituals, lore, and language. They also worship the same design gods (of which there are a few). On the other hand, designers routinely produce objects so essential to everyday life that some of what they make become cultural icons and iconography. Studying this intersection—indeed being part of it as a designer for forty years—has long been the basis for my writing about design history and contemporary practice. I am compelled by the richness of the subject to write virtually every day: That is my ritual.
Before the web, my scribblings were limited by the frequency of the publications and periodicals for which I wrote. One, two, sometimes three months would go by before an article or book would be published—time enough to edit, re-edit, and rewrite to avoid the embarrassing ill-conceived sentence, paragraph, or entire thing. Now, with weblogs, publishing frequency has increased exponentially, while the time for reconsideration has decreased incredibly. In addition to traditional magazine and newspaper stories, I publish at least twice a day (except weekends) on The Daily Heller /Imprint website (published by Print magazine); once a week on The Atlantic’s online magazine; and occasionally on Design Observer and other blogs. For two years I also wrote a monthly column, ”Graphic Content,” for The New York Times T-Style online. That’s a lot of pixels.
The downside of this pace of production is that reflection is a luxury. The upside is that my ability to develop design stories, of which there are many, and see them published in a timely way is totally enabled. My needs are beyond satisfied. Whether readers’ are too is my biggest worry.
This collection of my essays from the past three or four years is aptly a digital publishing project for the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Almost all of them were published exclusively on the internet, either for the blogs mentioned above or other venues. They represent various themes and tangents but always circle back in some way to design as cult and/or culture. I hope they also prove just how wide the berth a design writer can occupy. Design, after all, is everywhere—and arguably everything, too.
Curse of the “D” Word
Do you make things look nice? Do you spend more time worrying about nuance and aesthetics than substance and meaning? Do you fiddle with style while ignoring the big picture? If your answers are yes, yes, or yes, then you are a decorator.
Graphic designers don’t necessarily want to perceive themselves as decorators. But what’s the big deal? Is anything fundamentally wrong with being a decorator? Although Adolf Loos, an architect, proclaimed ornament as a sin in his essay "Ornament and Crime," an attack on late nineteenth-century art nouveau, in truth decoration and ornamentation are no more sinful than purity is supremely virtuous.
Take for example the psychedelic style of the late 1960s that was smothered in flamboyant ornamentation (indeed much of it borrowed from Loos’s dreaded art nouveau). Nonetheless, it was a revolutionary graphic language used as a code for a revolutionary generation—which was exactly the same role art nouveau played seventy years earlier with its vituperative rejection of antiquated, nineteenth-century academic verities. Likewise, psychedelia’s immediate predecessor, Push Pin Studios, from