Inspiration. Now that’s out of the way.

I watched the profile on Milton Glaser and found myself inspired. Not only is his work lovely, but his philosophy on how art influences people is profound. He seems like such a mellow and content man, but his ability to put hard-to-express emotions into his clean and simple designs is incredible. How do you capture the flood of support and love and grief for New York after 9/11? He took his previous “I<3NY” design and simply extended it to read “I<3NY more than ever” and singed the heart a little bit. Such a basic change, but it made me feel as if that design was there when it happened, that it experienced the terror and anguish and the ash and dust. Through that design, I felt connected to New York, and that is an incredible accomplishment.

Glaser’s philosophy is that if you like Mozart, and I like Mozart, then we have something in common already and we are less likely to kill each other; that art has this “pacifying function” in society. Artists provide this gift to our culture that allows people to gather about something and to have something in common. I appreciate that he recognizes this function of art and utilizes it to do work that has purpose and meaning.

He also spends some time talking about how if you can sustain your interest in your field, you’re very fortunate. People tend to get indifferent, they lose their passion, and they lose their capacity for astonishment. When he talks about how things still amaze him, that’s where I feel like I would love to be his student, and that’s where his credibility as a teacher comes into play, I think.

I also watched the Pentagram ’07 clip. I found the history of their firm ridiculously complex, but I was amazed at how rapidly they expanded to five offices and I don’t know how many partners. I’m not going to lie, about halfway through I got tired of it and switched to the Pentagram ’06 clip. The set up of this clip I found much more interesting. The voice-over effect is very interesting, and very flattering. You feel like this is more along the lines of these people’s thoughts and imaginations rather than just their words, which I think is important in a certain respect – I’m much more interested in their minds than their products, or maybe I’m interested in their work as a product of their imagination, I want to see how they got to where they went. I looked up a few of the people who spoke in the film, and I thought it was interesting how they were all so vastly different in style, but that you could still see where they had influenced each other, or where they had collaborated (in the case of, say, an architect and a graphic designer) with each other. I learned a little about how a design firm functions, but I still feel like I don’t know enough. Maybe if I watched all of them…