The Designer Says: The Collected Quips and Wisdom of Famous Graphic Designers

“Everything hangs on something else.”

On the heels of last year’s tiny gem The Architect Says comes The Designer Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom (public library) — a charming, similarly-spirited compendium of more than one hundred beautifully typeset remarks by some of today’s and yesteryear’s most celebrated graphic design minds, including favorites like Saul Bass, Charles Eames, Debbie Millman, Milton Glaser, Louise Fili, Paula Scher, and Maira Kalman.

Saul Bass, revered by many as the greatest graphic designer of all time and little-known children’s book artist, captures the essence of intrinsic motivation blind to extrinsic reinforcement:

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

Charles and Ray Eames (Image via Bo Bedre)

Reconstructionist Ray Eames acknowledges the inextricable chain of influence in art and the combinatorial nature of creativity:

Everything hangs on something else.

Charles Eames, man of ample quotable wisdom, reminds us of the usefulness of useless knowledge:

My dream is to have people working on useless projects. These have the germ of new concepts.

Seymour Chwast shares a valuable distinction:

I read once about the concepts of the lateral idea and the vertical idea. If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help. The lateral idea is when you skip over and dig someplace else.

Legendary curmudgeon and wit Paul Rand, who worked closely with Steve Jobs and who too illustrated some delightful vintage children’s books, echoes Anaïs Nin’s case for making by hand:

It is important to use your hands. This is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.

Paul Rand (Image via Irish Times)

Celebrated Italian designer Bruno Munari, oracle of Neapolitan hand-gestures, argues that in the mind of the graphic designer, like that of the inventor, creation and curation go hand in hand:

A graphic designer usually makes hundreds of small drawings and then picks one of them.

Information visualization godfather Edward Tufte reminds us of the weight of function over form, integrity over vanity:

If your words aren’t truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won’t help.

Edward Tufte (Image: Sadalit)

Erik Spiekermann echoes Dr. Seuss’s advice to children:

Read.
Travel.
Read.
Ask.
Read.
Learn.
Read.
Connect.
Read.

But perhaps most heartening of all are the words of Alan Fletcher, who eloquently articulates the joy of fulfilling work that comes from having found your purpose:

I’d sooner do the same on Monday or Wednesday as I do on a Saturday or Sunday. I don’t divide my life between labor and pleasure.

Pair The Designer Says with the collected wisdom of famous writers on their craft.

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Sign Painters: What a Disappearing Art Teaches Us About Creative Purpose and Process

“It is at the moment o f a craft’s disappearance that its cultural value suddenly becomes plain to see.”

As a lover of exquisite hand–lettering, elegant vintage-inspired typography, and vibrant storefront signage, I was instantly smitten with Sign Painters (public library) — a stunning companion to Faythe Levine and Sam Macon’s documentary of the same title, exploring the disappearing art through interviews with some of its most prominent masters amidst a lavish gallery of extraordinary hand-painted signage, with a foreword by Ed Ruscha. But this is no mere eye candy — brimming with candid insights, personal stories, and wisdom on the creative life, the book envelops the “what” with rich and ample layers of the “how” and the “why.” Macon affirms this in the introduction:

This book, like the job of the sign painter, isn’t always about eye-popping, flashy designs. It’s about process. It’s about communication. It’s about the experiences, years of practice, tricks of the trade, and design fundamentals learned over time that transform a person who just wants to paint signs into a great sign painter.

Cautioning against the glamorized nostalgia that the trope of documentaries about near-obsolete occupations tends to deliberately play on, Glenn Adamson, head of research at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, writes:

In setting on this topic, Levine and Macon are just in time. Many sign painters are now retired, or about to hang up their brushes; others have made the transition to easier, cheaper, but depressingly homogenous vinyl lettering or large-scale digital printing. As is often the case, it is at the moment o f a craft’s disappearance that its cultural value suddenly becomes plain to see.

In many ways, the individual journeys of the featured painters embody Daniel Pink’s concept of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the trifecta of success. We see them enter into the craft via astoundingly different paths — from generations-old family sign-painting traditions to serendipitous discoveries, from fine art to street art, from graphic design to gardening — yet what unites them is a shared celebration of having found creative purpose, loving the work in and of itself rather than seeing is as a means to some material end.

Doc Guthrie (Los Angeles, California) echoes Alan Watts and articulates it beautifully:

This was a real creative way to make a living — and notice I said ‘make a living,’ not ‘get rich.’ If your’e under the illusion that you’re going to do something like this and get rich, it’s not going to happen. If you want to make a good living, and you want to wake up every morning and look forward to the day, look forward to painting a truck, getting up on a wall, painting a movie background, that’s a good life. Many people in this country dread getting up and going to work. You have fifty years of work ahead of you, and it should be something that you really love. I never got rich, but I provided a living for my family and owned a home — that’s a working-class American success story.

Over and over, we see this recurring theme of creative romanticism scoffing at mercantile motives. Bob Behounek (Chicago, Illinois) laments:

Bigger and better machines became available. People were getting into the sign business just to make money. … There are more people out there now who don’t understand or don’t have the passion to create a well-designed sign. Vinyl machines can cut, they can give you a circle and a square, but they can’t give you the passion of a sign painter.

If you’re in a creative field and have ever been asked about how you’re going to “scale” what you do, you might share in shuddering. Sean Starr (Denton, Texas) gets to the heart of it:

When you get the sign-painting bug, it’s not about the money. If it was, you could expand in the right market and have twenty people working for you, but you wouldn’t have the enjoyable aspect of taking time on projects. If you’re in a high-production shop, which I worked in on the digital and vinyl side years ago, it’s just miserable. It’s like a sweatshop. You don’t have the latitude for creativity because you’re being told, ‘Okay, we need three hundred of these, two hundred of this, by this deadline.’ Who cares about the money?

Coupled with that is a courageous championing of pursuing creative rewards despite uncertainty and the fear of failure. Norma Jeanne Maloney (Austin, Texas) echoes Thoreau and captures it beautifully:

There’s some fear involved in doing what you love. I get up every morning and I look at that fear and say to myself, ‘I’m doing what I love today,’ and that gets me through the day.

Some are journeys of overcoming unlikely odds, like the story of Rose Otis (Las Vegas, Nevada):

I worked with the master [Jerry Albright] for five years. After the apprenticeship, he tagged on six months for students who wanted to learn gold-leaf techniques. There were probably three or four women in my class, and it was very hard to get a job. The guys at the sign shops said that i was too small an d short (I was), that I couldn’t carry my ladders, I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t do that. They basically said that they’d hire me to sweep the floors and make coffee, but as a woman I wasn’t going to be working in the world as a sign painter.

Or take Bob Dewhurst (San Francisco, California):

I first got interested in sign painting because I was locked up in a mental institution. THere was this guy who escaped, and when they finally caught him everyone wanted to know what he’d been doing. ‘I went to San Francisco and made all this money as a sign painter,’ he told us. I thought, ‘Yeah, maybe if I escape I can go to San Francisco and paint signs, too.’

For some, this is the dawn of a brave new world that only expands our collective creative acumen. Gary Martin (Austin, Texas) marvels:

I’m extremely happy. I feel like I’ve been living on a desert island by myself for years and then all of a sudden a bunch of other people started showing up to join me. I weathered it,and sine the new wave of these younger sign painters started getting involved it makes me work and try harder. It has energized me so much. Now I can post my stuff online and get reactions from other sign painters. When I’m designing a sign I’m thinking, ‘Okay, this will be seen by a lot of people who have discriminating eyes. I have to make this good.’

For others, the virtual world is the villain to beware. Ira Coyne (Olympia, Washington) shares in Anaïs Nin’s celebration of handcraft and considers the cultural value of this disappearing art:

Sign painting creates jobs — more importantly, jobs for artists. Art and music are the first things to go in schools. The role of art is disappearing. When we were kids, we learned about bakers and candlestick makers. We learned about cobblers and all these old-school, awesome things that people did their entire lives. They specialized in making one thing. … In archeology, the things that matter most are handmade: ceramics, glass, sarcophagi, paintings. The most valued objects of lost cultures are the things that were made by hand. We need to start making things with our hands again.

In fact, Coyne believes that learning to avoid work and pursue passion will profoundly change our cultural landscape:

When corporate America started taking over and steamrolling everything, we became more and more disconnected. People are starting to rebuild those neighborhoods. If the guy who’s been working at some job that he hates moves on and opens that coffee shop or store he has always wanted to own, that will change the landscape of America.

Keith Knecht (Toledo, Ohio), who passed away in 2011 and to whom the book is lovingly dedicated, frames the historical context of sign painting as an intersection of art and commerce:

Sign painting, as we know it here in America, is a good 150 years old. It all started when growers and manufacturers began to brand their products. Before that, if you needed flour, you went to the general store and the shop owner would have a barrel of flour and would fill up a canvas bag for you. Manufacturers realized that they had to market their products to show that their goods were better than the competition. That’s when Gold Medal flour, Morton Salt, and other brands were introduced. In 1840 there weren’t big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue designing logos and creating campaigns for these companies. Sign painters designed these logos.

This osmosis of the creative and the practical appears again and again. Forrest Wozniak (Minneapolis, Minnesota) observes:

What I feel separates sign painting from art is that art is an exploration of one’s self. Whether they are exploring their egos, emotions, or their pasts, artists are exploring themselves. There’s no real failure in pursuing art. you have to do signs correctly; there’s a correct format. It’s similar to carpentry. If you need to cut something seventeen inches long, you have to cut it the right size. Sign painting appealed to my logical nature. It’s a way to pursue art with a right and a wrong.

From Wozniak also comes what’s possibly the most poignant observation on the craft’s singular allure:

As a sign painter you are a deacon to society because you don’t work for someone who is successful, you work for someone who hopes to be successful.

But underpinning the entire cross-section of sign artists is a quiet yet unflinching testament to the ethos that the best kind of success is the one you define yourself, based not on prestige or money but on process and happiness. And what makes Sign Painters particularly alluring is its focus on something so tangible and lasting, on permanent atoms in the age of ephemeral bits, reminding us that these artists are not remnants of a bygone era in the evolution of creative culture but a vital signpost pointing in the unchanging director of what’s truly and everlastingly human.

Thanks, Lisa; images courtesy Princeton University Press

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The Unfeathered Bird: An Illustrated History of Avian Anatomy

Evolutionary eccentricities, ornithological oddities, and the engineering mysteries of flight.

Birds are an incessant source of scientific fascination, from why they sing to how their wings work. The Unfeathered Bird (public library; UK) by Katrina van Grouw isn’t about the anatomy of birds — it’s about “how their appearance, posture, and behavior influence, and are influenced by, their internal structure.” Though originally intended as a tool for artists, the book is also rigorously scientific but without the burdensome language and clunky terminology of anatomical writing. What emerges is an illuminating and meticulously illustrated look at the brilliance of birds at the intersection of art, science and history, covering such intricate mysteries as how the ostrich lost two of its four toes and why the vulture diverged into radically different Old World and New World varieties. The 385 or so intricate drawings include a number of species never illustrated before and explore everything from the mechanics of flight to the aerodynamics of avian skulls.

Van Grouw — who is herself a remarkable cross-pollinator of disciplines and perspectives as a taxidermist, RCA-trained fine artist, and former curator of the ornithological collections at London’s Natural History Museum — writes of the mechanical miracle of flight:

Flight makes rather specific demands on the physical engineering of an animal. The skeleton needs to be of a lightweight structure, with large flattened surfaces for the attachment of muscles, and to have tremendous rigidity and the strength to support the entire weight of the animal while airborne. The components are highly specialized and once a satisfactory blueprint has been achieved there is very little room for modification. The paradox, then, is that although the birds represent the largest class of all the vertebrates — approaching ten thousand species — they are fundamentally rather uniform; though with some very surprising variations!

The adaptation for flight is the most important factor behind the structure of birds and can provide an explanation for virtually all of their anatomical characteristics — even those that seem to have nothing to do with flying. For example, with wings instead of front legs, birds need two strong hind limbs and a modified posture to balance on them. And with a body rigid enough to cope with the demands of flapping flight, it’s vital to have a long and flexible neck to compensate for the loss of movement. But it’s important to remember that birds didn’t learn to fly first and develop these perfections afterward. Many of these qualities had long been present in the birds’ theropod ancestors — the upright dinosaurs that walked on two legs — and only through a constant process of adaptation and counteradaptation spanning millions of years did it become possible for the feathered dinosaurs to survive and take wing.

One of the most intriguing chapters deals with the divergence of vulture species between the New and Old World:

The universal truths about vultures are, as every schoolchild knows, as follows: they have a bare head, a hooked beak, and long, broad wings, and they eat things they find dead. Few definitions could be more cut and dried. All over the Americas, Europe, and Asia this very uniform group of birds can be instantly recognized and, on a group level at least, poses no problems of identification.

So when, in the 1980s, the newly developed techniques for hybridizing strands of DNA revealed that the New World vultures may not be vultures at all but close relatives of the storks, it created something of a sensation. Indeed, to the average birdwatcher the concept seemed to symbolize the chaos that test-tube technology would drag their world into without the steadying hand of empirical common sense. What many birdwatchers didn’t realize was that this concept wasn’t new. In fact, by the time the DNA experiments were taking place, it had already been around for over a hundred years, based on a range of complex anatomical features: the musculature of the wings, formation of the intestines, and so forth. More recent DNA research has once again made the position of the New World vultures uncertain. They are probably not, after all, stork relatives, and for the time being some authorities have tentatively returned them to the company of other hook-billed birds.

What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is not that New and Old World vultures may not be related but that two possibly unrelated groups of birds have come to look so alike. They differ externally only in the longer and functional hind toe of the Old World vultures and the open nostrils (you can see right through from one side to the other) of the New World vultures.

This similarity is the result of a process called convergent evolution. It’s the selective pressures of the lifestyle that shape an animal, not the shape of an animal that dictates the lifestyle — given sufficient time, that is. So when different animal groups share the same ecological niche independently of one another there is a tendency for them to reinvent the wheel, finding the same solutions to the same challenges and ultimately coming to look very much alike.

Meticulously researched, gloriously illustrated, and absorbingly narrated, The Unfeathered Bird lives at the heart of that timeless temple where art and science meet to enrich one another with “systematic wonder.”

Images courtesy Princeton University Press

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The Architect Says: A Compendium of Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom from Iconic Architects

Gehry, Eames, Le Corbusier, Fuller, Hadid, and more.

There’s something inescapably alluring about pocket-sized compendiums of quotes by great architects and designers — take, for instance, those of Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright. Fittingly, The Architect Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom (public library) gathers timeless wisdom on design and architecture from more than 100 of history’s most vocal — and often dissenting — minds. What emerges, besides the fascinating tapas bar of ideas about the art and science of building, is the subtle but essential reminder that what lies at the heart of creative legacy aren’t universal formulas and unrelenting tents but perspective, conviction, and personality.

Frank Gehry (1929–) speaks to the power of ignorance and insecurity in the creative process, and echoing Orson Welles:

For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I’m not sure where I’m going — if I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t do it.

Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) offers a list of “the only requirements to be considered when building a house”:

1. sex life
2. sleeping habits
3. pets
4. gardening
5. personal hygiene
6. protection against weather
7. hygiene in the home
8. car maintenance
9. cooking
10. heating
11. insolation
12. service

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) reminds us of the joy of the analog:

Is anything more pleasurable to the mind than unsullied paper? The studious comparisons and selections of ‘stock’ in textures and colors of cards and paper?

Tom Kundig (1954–) stresses the importance of cross-pollinating perspectives:

I learn more from creative people in other disciplines than I do even from other architects because I think they have a way of looking at the world that is really important.

Thom Mayne (1944 — ) explores the relationship between simplicity and complexity:

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

Glenn Murcutt (1936–) voices something George Lois has since echoed:

We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers.

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) stands for the honesty of drawing:

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster and leaves less room for lies.

Jan Kaplicky (1937–2009) on creativity as subtraction:

It’s not a sign of creativity to have sixty-five ideas for one problem. It’s just a waste of energy.

Then there are the contradictions:

Some of them, of course, are but a caricature of the infamous architect arrogance. From Louis Kahn (1901–1974):

The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.

Really? (At least he didn’t say “my building.”)

The Architect Says comes, unsurprisingly, from Princeton Architectural Press.

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