RegardingDesign

Turkey Day

As we all prepare to spend the next 24 to 48 hours in the traditional American fall feast, I thought I'd take a moment to pay homage to the animal that makes our gluttony possible: the turkey. Design is a world of putting meaning to symbols and images, and/or appropriating already meaningful symbols and images, so it seems appropriate to consider what this bird is really all about.

 

With thanks to "whats your sign dot com", and a few other sites, (Wikipedia, of course), it seems our noble bird has quite a long history of reverence in a variety of cultures. Long before us European white folks descended on the shores of what became the U. S. of A., native cultures were already "honoring" the noble turkey by making it a sacrificial symbol of abundance and fertility. To extend this metaphorical meaning, turkeys are associated with harvest, abundance, and -- not surprisingly -- virility. Turkeys are also enjoyed in ancient and modern Mexico, and among the ancient Aztecs, "turkey was associated with their trickster god Tezcatlipoca, perhaps because of its humorous behavior," according to Wikipedia. And to think that today's youth assumes they invented body piercings and wacky hairdos....

Turkeys are not the stupid -- or flightless -- creatures they are sometimes depicted to be. Ask anyone who has tried to hunt an undomesticated bird out in the woods -- they are considered difficult quarry because they are wiley and smart. In the wild, they can and do fly, at least short distances. In my part of the world, in the fall, they can often be seen in a "rafter," or group of birds, their handsome dark , elliptical shapes punctuating the flat dun of a cut field of corn.  

 

So on your own Turkey Day, enjoy the abundance and give thanks not only for all that you have, but also for what this noble bird gave! Happy Thanksgiving!

A Little Education Goes Both Ways

Last week, I gave two guest lectures at The College of St. Rose in Albany, New York. A small college, they are known for having one of the best graphic design programs within a liberal arts curriculum in the country. At their downtown arts building, they always participated in the monthly First Friday arts night, and my husband and I were always impressed with the quality and vigor of the student artwork and graphic design work we saw displayed in their gallery.

I offered myself up to them, telling the department head I'd be happy to discuss anything she thought I might be able to credibly address and which would be helpful to the students. They suggested the general topic of "branding". In one hour. Hmmm. How to break this broad topic down into a manageable and informative chunk...

Well, it turns out that I did a bit of a crash course in basic business marketing. I started out by asking students what interested them about design and creating a list on the white board. I then wrote a different list that detailed some of what their clients would be interested in: ROI, P&L, market segmentation, etc. I pointed out that the two seemed to have nothing to do with one another. And that, to my way of thinking, branding was the thing that actually linked the two lists. Branding is using the tools of graphic design (and writing like I do) to help business people meet their goals. Business people pay graphic designers to do what they love; in turn, graphic designers must do what they love (sometimes, anyway) in service to commercial interests. I discussed the difference of B2B and B2C companies, touched on distribution concerns, described some of what you need to get from research, and led a discussion about how design's job is to translate the features of what a business makes into messages about what they're actually trying to sell. In other words, Apple isn't selling electronics; they're selling self-expression. Candy makers aren't selling sugar and fat; they're selling fun. And of course, just about everyone else is selling sex.

I was fortunate to have two very engaged and interested groups of students who paid attention, asked questions, and entered in dialogue with me. Not to mention, were also polite and thankful. But I was suprised that this kind of subject matter was not already part of the curriculum. The two teachers whose classes I addressed, who were both designers, were deeply appreciative and enthusiastic and suggested I try to offer a complete course like this. Which might come out of the "communications" or "business" departments. While this would certainly benefit the communications and business departments, wouldn't it also be even more useful to have a course like this specifically addressed to how design is practiced in the real world of business? After all, it is a "commerical art." Or at least, that's what it used to be -- and was probably more honestly -- called in the past, before design became fetishized in our consumer, Martha Stewart-ized, Michael Graves-ized culture. 

I'd love to hear thoughts from designers and educators out there, especially since I'm not a designer, nor did I study, design. Did you study maketing and basic business in school? Would you have benefitted from a course on these topics? Were you shell-shocked when you got out in the real world and realized that no one cared about the perfection and beauty of your composition of type, word, and image unless it helped them SELL something? What practical information was missing from your design education?

P.S. Moments after typing this post, I stepped away from the computer to get tea and the mail, picked up the latest issue of Dynamic Graphics + Create, and saw that St. Rose has received Grand Prize in the magazine's Re-Design contest for their self-promo materials design by in-house art director Mark Hamilton. Instead of the usual recruitment piece, Hamilton's team designed a real book, 100-pages and journal-sized, where "each page provides a new experience to the reader," according to Hamilton.

Winners and a New Contest

We've picked two lucky winners for our fall giveaway of books on color! Congratulations to Andrew Morgan, a student at the Maryland College of Art who is studying design and illustration. Our other winner is "Kimi Design". (And if you're  reading this, I need you to send me your mailing address to get your your books!)

So given that the holiday season is upon us and everyone is probably starting to think about what kind of seasonal greeting card to create and send out to clients, friends, and family, we're going to do another giveaway close on the heels of this one. Sign up in that little box to the left to get Regarding Design in your email in box. On December 10, we'll pick two people to receive books on creative correspondence and greeting cards, like the two books pictured here: "1000 Handmade Greetings, Creative Cards and Clever Correspondence" and "1000 Greetings, Creative Correspondence Designed for All Occasions."

Speaking of unique approaches to marketing...

In these days where every headline spells more economic doom and gloom, Mohawk Fine Papers has taken a very counter-intuitive approach to cost controls. I mean this in a good way. In that they are reaching out to help their customers control their costs by not raising prices on paper. In a recent letter to customers, Mohawk CEO, Tom O'Connor, Jr, outlines the strategy:

"Slowing demand across the economy is finally beginning to have a moderating impact on raw materials and energy prices. We were therefore surprised to see some huge premium paper price increases coming into the market at this juncture. These increases come at a difficult time for you and your clients. With already reduced print budgets, it will be difficult to find new money to offset higher paper costs. We are concerned that these increases will encourage your clients not to print – or ask you to downgrade to lower quality paper.

 

We therefore want you to know that Mohawk Fine Papers will not be raising prices on our Text, Cover and Writing papers in the foreseeable future.  Our position is based in part on the success of our ongoing cost reduction efforts coupled with moderating input costs.  But in addition, we at Mohawk recognize that paper and print compete with other media for advertising resources.  As a privately held company, we are uniquely positioned to balance the short term pressures we all share with our long term commitment to the health of our industry."

When so many other companies are panicking into penny-wise/pound-foolish strategies, this is the kind of creative thinking, customer partnership, and simple solution that creates the good will that leads to long term loyalty and success. Nice to see a company that is seeking to protect its industry, not just itself. Too bad our American automakers don't seem to get this basic truth....

MWPAI part two

The hub of the downtown scene in Utica -- in addition to the aforementioned brewery -- is a scruffy stretch of Genessee Street with the glorious Stanley Theater on one side and the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute on the other. In addition to its association with Pratt, the Institute includes a museum, a performing arts series, and a school of art for community members. We recently visited the museum, which includes Fountain Elms, a restored 1850s Italianate mansion that was one of the homes of the founding family and contains their collection of decorative art. Connected to this display of lush, overwrought, Victorian splendor is the high contrast of a 1960s Philip Johnson-designed museum wing that displays the more modern pieces of the collection as well as changing exhibitions. The permanent collection contains basically one of everything, as noted in this description from their web site:

"The art collection features more than 25,000 American 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century paintings, drawings, sculptures, 19th-century decorative arts, photographs, European paintings, and European and Asian works on paper. There are works in the collection by Copley, Dali, Frankenthaler, Kandinsky, Mondrian, O'Keeffe, Picasso, Pollock, Prendergast, Rothenberg, Stella and Whistler. Also featured is the popular "Voyage of Life" series by Thomas Cole. Decorative arts makers included are John Henry Belter, Herter Brothers, Alexander Roux and Tiffany & Co."

While we were there, we enjoyed a fascinating show called "Picturing Eden." which "...features the photographic work of 37 internationally recognized artists who examine Paradise as a mythic, many-faceted place, one of contemplation and restoration as well as loneliness and despair." While there were plenty of expected forms of photography, from traditional to hyper-realistic digital manipulations, some of the most beautiful, subtle, and memorable work -- to me, at least -- were the two photographers who used nature directly in their work. Nope, not as a subject, but as a participant. One photographer left photosensitive paper outdoors and let the acids and chemicals of decaying organic matter form patterns of great complexity and fragility through natural chemical reactions. Another printed ghostly images from the Vietnam war directly onto live leaves which then dried and were entombed in glass.

Photography has often left me a bit cold -- it seems to me more a record of something than an expression of something. This exhibit changed my mind profoundly by showing me some of the new ways creative people are using this old technology to express feelings and stories of humanity's dreams, hopes, and failures.

MWPAI Part One

Utica, New York is one of those former industrial cities that dot so much of our country -- miles of factory buildings standing empty, unused, windows broken, sagging sentinels to the loss of our manufacturing core. It's also a city trying to find it's way into a new economy based on education, the arts, tourism, high-technology, and perhaps most important of all, a vibrant local micro-brewery. (The 100 year old Matt Brewing Company that makes the Saranac line of beers and soft drinks.)

The other thing Utica has which is of almost as much interest to wanna-be designers as good beer is PrattMWP. This little enclave of a dozen buildings on the main drag is a kind of joint venture between the MusonWilliamsProctor Arts Institute (more about this place tomorrow) and the famed design school, the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY. This school provides the first two years of Pratt's Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fine Arts, Communications Design, and Art and Design Education. It's a great solution for students who want a less intense environment than Brooklyn for their first couple of years and would prefer a smaller student-to-teacher ratio (8:1) and a more closely-knit community. Not to mention proximity to that brewery I mentioned, along with their Thursday night music series and the famed Boilermaker run, considered the biggest, best week-long party associated with a 15K run in the country. (There are other, shorter runs as well, and a post-run party at the brewery.) If that's not intriguing enough, consider the difference in cost: Utica's cost of living is a fraction of Brooklyn's, and the school claims they cost about $11,000 a year LESS than most four-year, private art colleges.

Utica is located in Central New York State, almost directly between and an hour-and-a-half away from the larger cities of Syracuse and Albany. It's also quite close to the Adirondak park for those designers who love the outdoors as much as their Macs. We've been exploring its environs since moving nearby and discovering an ethnically diverse community with more Italian restaurants than you can count, interspersed with Middle Eastern, Asian, and Spanish holes-in-the-walls, as well. A recent renovation of a fabulous Art Deco theater, the Stanley, is promising. And there is also, as one would expect, a pretty cool arts scene which we are just starting to find, if all the tatooed, dredlocked, pierced, scarfed, and scuffed shoe crowd we saw at a recent art show is any indication....

Do Not Disturb

My husband just came back from a business trip and brought me a very endearing souvenir. No, it’s not flowers or chocolate or jewelry. It’s the kind of thing only a communications dork like me would like. It’s … a … door hanger from his hotel room. And why, you may ask, would this little memento be interesting to me? Because of the highly creative and funny message it contains. Instead of the usual, curt, blah, ubiquitous, off-putting “Leave me alone” statement, this door hanger says, “Shhh…I’m hatching a plan to bust some little soaps out of here. Do not disturb.” Hysterical, no? And memorable. And ballsy. The piece is even diminutive in size to go along with the conspiratorial tone.

I bring this up as an object lesson in marketing. There are so many overlooked opportunities to make an impact on your customers or other interested parties. Not by barraging them with product features and benefits, but simply by showing a little personality. As I always say to my corporate communications clients, it’s the difference between walking into a room and announcing, “I’m really funny and have a great sense of humor,” instead of walking in and simply telling a good joke.

This little door hanger will make me look into the Embassy Suites next time I’m looking for a hotel. Something no typical ad or brochure ever would have done.

The Cool School

I recently saw a great art documentary, "The Cool School." It's about the artists associated with the legendary Ferus gallery in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Los Angeles. But more, it's about how LA developed its own art "voice".

The Ferus Gallery was begun by an art lover named Walter Hopps. He was eventually joined in the enterprise by Irving Blum, who was the deal maker, schmoozer, glad hander that put the fizz into the art drink. The artists who showed there included the then-very-young John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, and others. These macho, cowboy artists, are pictured here:

The gallery – and the whole scene – got a big boost when they brought an until-then unknown artist from NY to show a collection of his soup can paintings. Yup, Andy Warhol had his first show at the Ferus. The film documents not just the art, but the whole hippie, iconoclast, anti-establishment, anti-NYC vibe that was going on and fomented at places like the Ferus and its after-hours hang-out, Barney’s Beanery. The movie has used some interesting techniques to aid in the storytelling, as described by a review from the New York Times: "The movie’s director, Morgan Neville, tells what followed through an often fascinating, visually charming and intelligently edited mix of found footage, home movies, still images and contemporary interviews, ably assisted by a jazz score and narration from the actor (and photographer) Jeff Bridges. The older footage is particularly delightful, including the sights and sounds of a grinning, goateed Mr. Kienholz bargaining with a junkyard dealer to buy a 1953 Cadillac door that probably ended up in one of his amazing assemblages." They also include interviews with Frank Gehry, who apparently found, as he was coming up in the world, the local architects a bit stiff and this crew much more simpatico. You'll also find an interesting trick during some of the interviews: they are filmed B&W, in keeping with the archival footage they have, but they let bits of color pop up, for example, in the bright cherry of a cigarette or the red shoes of an artist.

 I have a personal interest in this crew because I spent a lot of time as a toddler in the mid-60s wandering around the Ferus gallery and Barney’s Beanery, weaving my way through the forest of adult legs, whining and wishing I could go home and get away from all these lunatic, slowly-getting-drunk, so-called grown ups. Because to me, then, that’s all that they were. My mother attended Chouinard Art School, now part of CalArts, with John Altoon – in fact, they were each other’s first love – and all these now-famous artists were just the paint spattered, cigarette smoking, cheap-beer drinking guys that hung around our house on the weekends and whose antics scared the pants off the shy little girl that I once was. So it’s rather interesting to look back from my mid-40s vantage point and see what became of them all. And for your viewing pleasure, I will share with you some never-exhibited early John Altoon paintings ( the colors are just a tad off ) that have been passed down to me after my mother died – Altoon destroyed tons of his work, but fortunately, she salvaged these from the garbage. The artists may have frightened me, but even as a little girl, I did love their work…

The surfers is still my all-time favorite painting in the world.

This is a portrait of my mother, by Altoon.

He was famous for his bawdy sense of humor – this is a drawing he made in one of her sketchbooks in the mid 1950s.

 

Business Cards

Having recently moved, I, of course, needed to get new business cards made. My "old" cards, which I've had -- with some slight variations -- ever since I started life as a freelance writer, some eight years ago, were letterpress printed on thick, Italian paper. Here's one from the most recent incarnation:

I decided that it was time for a bit of an update. I still want the letterpress printing of course -- the tactile, retro quality is too lovely to forego. (Funny sidenote -- a printer I was interviewing some months ago told me that letterpress is coming full circle and becoming cool again, to the point where some young designers think it's a "new" technology...) I decided to forget the street address. I work with people all over the country and no one seems to care where I live. Even after I tell them, they don't really know where New York State is anyway -- like so many people, they think the city and state are somehow one and the same. Working with my friendly letterpress person in Burlington, Vermont, Zoe Papas, we came up with this simplified design, which we printed on multiple color stocks, mostly Strathmore papers:

Since I was snapping pics of biz cards, let me also show you two other faves. Situation 7 is my husband's "side" business in buying old buildings and this card was designed by Overit Media in Albany.

This two-part card with slipcase that makes a cool, optical illusion as you slide out the card is something I picked up when I was interviewng Stefan Sagmeister.

And if you're finding yourself thirsty for business card design inspiration, check out this book, number eight in an ongoing series that showcases, as titled, "The Best of Business Card Design."

Something I Missed

If New York City is the premiere design center of the world, then it's not surprising that some of the most iconic designs of our times are associated with that city. The "I-heart-NY" logo, for example. And also the NYC subway map.

Apparently, back in May of this year, Massimo Vignelli updated his original, 1972, design and did a limited edition printing of signed maps that were sold through Men's Vogue magazine to benefit the nonprofit Green Worker Cooperatives, an organization in the South Bronx that is building an alternative green community. Not surprisingly, the entire run of posters sold out in three hours.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, for the many of us who were denied the pleasure of the actual poster -- which, incidentally, was priced at a reasonable $299.00 -- is an image. Props to Mohawk Fine Papers; the poster was printed on archival, acid-free Superfine Ultrawhite by Taylor Tocci & Co.