“It is a feast or famine business. And you are either uptight because you have the work or because you do not have the work. After seven years I still worry about going on vacation. Am I going to miss that huge job while we’re away?”
— Gerard Huerta on freelancing (via Penrose Annual, 1982)
“Perhaps more than any other form of visual expression, the Polish poster embodies the language of metaphor visibly and dramatically. For decades these posters have earned international praise, and indeed are considered as a national art form in Poland. The popularity of the posters, their uniquely personal style, and sophisticated use of symbology have earned them a place of honor in Polish culture. They are thus of the common repertoire, the second language.
When asked to comment on the obvious skills of Polish art students in their use of metaphor in graphic design, a well known Polish writer and critic explained that in a politically repressed society in which authorities impose censorship, alternate languages develop (verbal, visual, gesture) that allow for the exchange of information without fear of repression.”
— Tom Kovacs (1981)
A few quotes from an interview with designer Gunter Rambow in Eye Magazine:
On seeing:
“I went to a boarding school run by the Protestant church in Güstrow, which is a town full of wonderful Renaissance, Baroque and Classicist architecture. Everything there is so interwoven that it results in great harmony. During that period I perceived the world with great intensity and stored up a lot of visual material, which I continue to retrieve from my memory.
I still pursue this visual training today. I walk through the streets only looking at windows – nothing else, no cars. And then I see what is happening in them. What kind of flowers, curtains and other messages do they have? Is the window made of a synthetic material, has it been destroyed by renovation, or is it a really old one? From the window decorations alone, I can learn an extraordinary amount about a street and a city. Sometimes I photograph hundreds of windows but I never make a single print. Only the negatives exist. I do not even know where they are, but they are in my head. I recommend this visual training to my students. ‘When it is market day, look at the shoes the women are wearing,’ I tell them.”
On his poster for Antigone:
“In Kassel I gave seminars on the ‘Metaphysics of Things’. In one, for example, everybody had to bring a chair with them. We then discussed the mythology and symbolism of sitting and the chair. God’s throne cannot be represented but the emperor’s throne certainly can. Then a whole world opens up: it was not design but the definition of a chair that was being extracted. We also considered which objects belong in this world of metaphysics: what are the extended meanings over and above pure function? After that I can start developing an intellectual and cultural language. When I set fire to a chair, it burns, and in addition you also read the word ‘Antigone’. We immediately make an association with the king’s throne although we only see a simple kitchen chair. By violating universal rights the ruler is also burning his power.”
On the quality of poster design in 1997:
“Nearly all of it is of a despicably low level, whether it is a cultural poster, commercial poster, election poster even a posterior a concert. I think the reason for this is that there are few design and art conscious decision makers in the business. The advertising agencies are simply financial turnover machines concerned with marketing and sales strategies. Design does not play a big role with them.”
“It’s what the person’s like – and what the work’s like – that determines whether they get work. And chance.”
— Richard Hollis
“More than twenty years ago, I served on a committee that had been formed to explore the possibilities of setting up a New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). Almost all of the other committee members were older, well-known—and, in some cases, legendary—designers. I was there to be a worker bee.
I was suddenly in—what seemed to me then, at least—the center of the design universe. There was already so much to see and do, but I wanted more. I was ravenous. Establishing a New York chapter for the AIGA would mean more lectures, more events, more graphic design. For the committee’s first meeting, I had made a list of all designers I would love to see speak, and I volunteered to share it with the group.
A few names in, one of the well-known designers in the group cut me off with a bored wave. ‘Oh God, not more show-and-tell portfolio crap.’ To my surprise, the others began nodding in agreement. ‘Yeah, instead of wallowing in graphic design stuff, we should have something like…a Betty Boop film festival.’ A Betty Boop film festival? I wanted to hear a lecture from Josef Müller-Brockmann, not watch cartoons. I assumed my senior committee members were pretentious and jaded, considering themselves—bizarrely—too sophisticated to admit they cared about the one thing I cared about most: design. I was confused and crestfallen. Please, I wanted to say, can we start talking some sense?
I thought I was a pretty darned good designer back then. A few years before, in my senior year, I had designed something I was still quite proud of: a catalog for Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center on the work of visionary theater designer Robert Wilson. The CAC didn’t hire me because I knew anything about Robert Wilson. I had never heard of him. More likely they liked my price.
About a year after my disappointing meeting with the planners of the AIGA New York chapter, I finally saw my first Robert Wilson production. It was the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 1984 revival of Einstein on the Beach. And sitting there in the audience, utterly transported, it came crashing down on me: I had completely screwed up that catalog. Seen live, Wilson’s work was epic, miraculous, hypnotic, transcendent. My stupid layouts were none of those things. They weren’t even pale, dim echoes of any of those things. They were simply no more and no less than a whole lot of empty-headed graphic design. And graphic design wasn’t enough. It never is.”
— Michael Bierut (via 79 Short Essays on Design)
“It is important to use your hands. This is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.”
— Paul Rand (via Conversations with Students)
“There’s all sorts of work that designers do that falls somewhere in the spectrum between marketing and protest, and I would argue that some of it is critical to the existence of what culture we have, unless you cynically write off all culture within a capitalist society as simply serving a market.”
— Lorraine Wild
“Design should be repositioned so that it is viewed more as an enrichment to culture and not only as a service to business.”
— Dan Friedman
As an established designer, do you think Twitter is the right place to criticise work?
Michael C Place: No. My biggest problem with the people who are openly criticising the work is that they have no idea of the process involved and how it led to the end result. They are not privy to the discussions with the client. It’s critique based purely on a visual outcome. Which we all know is just one element of the whole design process.
The whole ‘I could have done better’ is utter bullshit. It’s disrespectful to the client, agency and designer. Basically, it’s design as spectator sport or clickbait.
— (via)
