Visual Aesthetics — Fall 2012

Michael Bierut’s 79 short essays are charming, informative and wise. I think that his essay about “How to Become Famous,” is hilarious, but most likely, very close to the truth. He give short and simple examples of what to do to be a “famous” graphic designer. It is reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen” , turning topics like “How to Win Graphic Design Competitions,” into short introductory sentences like “Enter only the kind of pieces that win in design competitions.” This common sense/obnoxious statement is actually completely true. We often need to step away from our work and make sure that it serving it’s purpose. If you want to create something for a competition, make it appealing to a judge. If you want to create work for a client, make it appealing to the correct audience. NO BRAINER! But we miss that mark so many times before we get it right, time after time. My favorite piece of advice that Bierut shares in his “How to Become Famous” essay is in the section about “How to Do Great Design Work.” He says to simply “Do lots of work.” I whole heartedly agree with this statement. As a developing designer, I realize that the more design projects I do that are unnecessary, the more inspiration I bring to to my necessary work. If I take a moment to make a custom card or a silly poster for a friend, I bring that creative energy and joy to a strategic concept.

Bierut’s essay entitled “I am a Plagiarist,” makes me question my habits of looking at other people’s design work. I used to think that the more good design that you absorb, the better you are at understanding your own aesthetic and how to make strong design choices. Now I am noticing that studying others has its cost. With every inspiration to take from others, you begin to start closing your window of originality that you bring to a project. There are only so many ideas that will rise to the top in a creative project, and often times we can let other’s ideas over shadow our own. I’m not saying that I feel my work is plagiarism, but I hope to start considering how I concept ideas, taking steps to do some raw brainstorming before I begin researching and “stealing” inspiration from those I admire.

Just some thoughts.

Reading through Michael Bierut’s essays on design, I felt like I was getting more of a psychology lesson than a graphic design lesson. Bierut talks more about the methods and the reasons behind graphic design than the actual form. I’ve written this sentence 1,600 times (exactly 1,600, I’ve counted) but it really is more about the mental process than the actual artform.

Let’s talk about fame. Fame is abstract. And stupid. We can agree on that, right? Fame is stupid. And like Bierut pointed out, it’s ridiculously subjective and formulaic. You can fool people into letting you become famous through graphic design. Although, obviously, money(fame)=happiness, Bierut hints that this isn’t the thing that should be strived for. I mean, it’s something to achieve if you want, but not necessarily the people who produce the best things don’t necessarily get the acclaim.

That last sentence basically could of came out of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” which leads me to my next point: plagiarism. I’ve probably done it. I mean, I read a lot. There’s no way I don’t subconsciously incorporate ideas from other writers when I blog about whatever I blog about. But I really don’t think that’s plagiarism. In one of my 900 word ranting blogs for Lackaff I pointed out that music is almost entirely self-referential. The Beatles made it big by hammering out old American rock songs in Germany before breaking out with their own solo stuff. But you can’t get to creative genius without picking up on things people have done in the past. Western culture is too pigeon holed into specific stylistic elements.

But the point being, design comes from the past. And you have to adapt to the current methods and mediums, but being well versed in all aspects of it give you more of an arsenal than it hinders you from being successful.

Michael Beirut gave one of my favorite quotes in the movie Helvetica. He was talking about the huge change Helvetica brought to corporate identity in the ’60s and what it must have felt like to go through that change: “That must seem like you would crawl through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust and then someone’s offering you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water to kind of clear away all this horrible burden of history.”

So I figured I’d enjoy reading the selections from his book, 79 Short Essays on Design. Each one is set in a different typeface to match its topic.

29. Vladimir Nabokov: Father of Hypertext
Here Beirut reflects on wasting an afternoon surfing the web (I think we’ve all done that) and after he returns to his weekend chore of putting away some books lying around, he picks up his copy of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He describes Pale Fire as proto-hypertext because of the way the footnotes lead you around the book like hypertext links. Apparently some computer nerds at IBM even briefly proposed using it to test an early hypertext-like system in 1969.

This one really brought me full circle, because it reminded me of my second blog post for this class on Stitch Bitch by Shelley Jackson. I had written there about a book I fell in love with when I was 16, called House of Leaves, that is similarly structured to Pale Fire, with some crazy layouts thrown in.45. Mr. Vignelli’s Map
In 1972, Massimo Vignelli designed a map for the New York City subway that, when necessary, chose design over geography. The result was this map that is often thought of as incomprehensible, but Beirut disagrees. He says it was his favorite souvenir from his first trip to New York in 1976 and describes it as “gorgeous, iconic and cerebral.” I wasn’t sure exactly what Vignelli’s map looked like; I’m only a little familiar with the current version that replaced Vignelli’s in 1979, so I decided to look at it. And I think I agree with Beirut. But I’ve also never had to try and navigate the NYC subway system.

46. I Hate ITC Garamond
“The most distinctive element of the typeface is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibility, but only in the same way that dog poop’s creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.”
Beirut is good at metaphors. I like this essay because it tells me that it can sometimes be okay to hate something just because. Beirut lists a few reasons ITC Garamond is bad: it’s dated, it doesn’t deserve the Garamond name, its x-height is exaggerated, the letter-spacing is too tight. But he says he just really dislikes it for some reason that isn’t listable. Maybe it’s the combination of it all.

I hate ITC Garamond, too. Just look at it for a minute and compare it to some of the other Garamond derivatives. In the words of Snoopy, bleah.

Beirut also makes a good point: that he can usually find a saving grace in a typeface he doesn’t like.

This essay reminded me of that page at the end of all the Harry Potter books, with the diamond-shaped paragraph, that tells you the text was set in Adobe Garamond (as so many books are). I always read that page in every book, even though it said the same thing in all of them (except book 5 where the size is reduced to 11.5-point from 12-point!), because I liked it for some reason.

65. I am a Plagiarist
The part about Hellen Keller is my favorite part of this essay: “…when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book.”

Beirut discusses the subjective nature of plagiarism and how it can be difficult to know if your idea is really your idea or just some faintly recalled memory of that thing you saw that one time. I think it’s really important to realize this, because we all derive inspiration from the worlds in which we live, and it’s not possible to be completely and absolutely original. And that it’s okay.