Designing With Constraints: Thinking Inside the Box
Breaking the Rules
5 Tips for Creating a Memorable Logo Design
Featured Artist:
MOLLY CRABAPPLE
Issue 01 | November 2018 | processmagazine.com
CONTENTS 14
Featured Artist:
MOLLY CRABAPPLE
NY artist and writer, Molly Crabapple, discusses everything from business to burlesque, and how to make meaningful art along the way.
27
5 Tips for Creating a Memorable Logo Design
33
Designing With Constraints: Thinking Inside the Box
41
Fonts to Last
44
Breaking the Rules
59
The Secret to Creativity
A logo might be the most important visual connection a brand makes with users. Read Process Magazine’s 5 tips for creating a logo your client can’t resist.
How to handle a project with lots of rules attached.
30 of the best fonts and typefaces every designer should own.
Your inside look at the best ways to commit type crimes while creating your masterpiece.
How to get inspired when in a creative rut.
MO CR “WHEN I WAS A KID IN SCHOOL, I LEARNED THE TWIN POWERS OF ART TO MOCK AUTHORITY AND TO PLEASE.” Interview by Tina Essmaker | Photography by Clayton Cubitt
14 PROCESS
OLLY RABAPPLE
When we first spoke for your TGD interview published in August 2014, you were already working on your memoir, Drawing Blood, which is out today, published by HarperCollins. What led to your decision to write a memoir now? Oh, dear god! This question! Ahhh! So, I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I was doing these personal essays for VICE that people seemed to really love, and I thought that perhaps I’d make something that was like a really long personal essay—by the way, a memoir is not actually like that, but I was a naive first-time book writer. And then I was roped into doing the damn thing to the bitter end.
The opening chapter of Drawing Blood ends simply with, “This is the story of a girl and her sketchbook.” And it’s true. Art has been the constant in your life, and it has given you a platform for your voice. When did you first realize the power of your sketchbook? I’ve been drawing since I was old enough to make a mess. Drawing is more of a compulsion than a vocation—it’s less of a job, and more like doing coke or picking scabs. I draw because I need to. But when I was a kid in school, I learned the twin powers of art to mock authority and to please. I’d draw the beautiful popular girls, but also mean pictures of my teachers.
Do you read memoirs and, if so, do you have a favorite that struck you? I do! God, I love so many, but I think my current favorite is Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. It’s about her experience growing up as a rebellious young writer in occupied Ramallah. It’s both beautifully written and painfully incisive—it’s a sort of harsh-on-everything incisiveness that comes from deep love. 15 PROCESS
What are your interactions with the contemporary art world now? I have a gallery called Postmasters that’s quite respected. I have people that collect my work. But I don’t care that much about the contemporary art world. I love making art but the art world itself … it seems really boring. I just feel like it’s the land of highly speculative but kind of ugly objects. A Koons isn’t just a Koons. It’s like a stock certificate. It’s really boring to me. And I’ve gotten increasingly impatient with everything that bores me. I would rather spend my time hanging out with brave, interesting people than dealing with art world stuff.
How do you cope with the money and the gentrification driving out the kind of thing that you’ve been drawing and writing about for a good chunk of your career? We’re still all here though. There are still ways. Whenever there is an extreme concentration of money like this, there is always a way to scam off of it and feed off of it. It really sucks that in many of these cities artists will only survive as warriors. [But] we’re not really like the people who are getting fucked over by it. The people who are getting fucked over by it are working-class people or young people starting out. I don’t feel like I’m being fucked over by the gentrification in New York even though I’ll never be able to afford to own a place here. I don’t think we as artists are the primary victims. I think that working-class people are the primary victims, and people of color. Not that those categories are mutually exclusive, but I think that the people who don’t have the patina of cool around them are the people that [are affected]. They’re not able to turn what they do into a courtier function for the elite, like we can.
“I’VE BEEN DRAWING SINCE I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO MAKE A MESS. DRAWING IS MORE OF A COMPULSION THAN A VOCATION.”
What about criticism? Does it bother you? I get criticism everywhere. Seriously, I think if you took everyone who criticized me and you put them all at a table you could find world peace, maybe.
How do you deal with that? It’s become kind of a theme. The thing is, I feel like all public women – all of us, doesn’t matter who we are, doesn’t matter our persona – once we hit a certain threshold we all get massive shit from someone. We each have our own group that we’ve pissed off. It’s just a function of getting to a certain platform. [And] what people really want is, especially if we are pretty white chicks, to rehash the mean things that people said to us in the press and talk about how bad it made us feel and want big daddy on Twitter to censor people and make us the damsel that leads to the gentrification of bad parts of the internet. I’m so uninterested in that. I … have people who are really awful to me. I don’t think that it’s my job to use my public platform, which they don’t have because they spend all their time being shitbags, to amplify their shitbaggery and talk about it. Why? I’m an artist. I find the demand that we constantly speak about how we deal with something that we all deal with so dull.
When we first spoke for your TGD interview published in August 2014, you were already working on your memoir, Drawing Blood, which is out today, published by HarperCollins. What led to your decision to write a memoir now? Oh, dear god! This question! Ahhh! So, I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I was doing these personal essays for VICE that people seemed to really love, and I thought that perhaps I’d make something that was like a really long personal essay—by the way, a memoir is not actually like that, but I was a naive first-time book writer. And then I was roped into doing the damn thing to the bitter end.
The opening chapter of Drawing Blood ends simply with, “This is the story of a girl and her sketchbook.” And it’s true. Art has been the constant in your life, and it has given you a platform for your voice. When did you first realize the power of your sketchbook? I’ve been drawing since I was old enough to make a mess. Drawing is more of a compulsion than a vocation—it’s less of a job, and more like doing coke or picking scabs. I draw because I need to. But when I was a kid in school, I learned the twin powers of art to mock authority and to please. I’d draw the beautiful popular girls, but also mean pictures of my teachers.
14
“I WAS WRITING ABOUT MY LOVED ONES FROM A DECADE AGO. I DIDN’T WANT TO BETRAY THEM. IT WAS FINE TO CUT MYSELF OPEN, BUT NOT THEM.” You’ve lived a full life thus far, but I imagine that in another thirty-something years, you’ll have more to write. What was the process of writing your memoir like, and do you think you’d tackle another project like this?
Your memoir is honest and vulnerable—you don’t leave anything out. What experience was the most challenging to write about, and what do you hope readers will take away from your willingness to share?
I will never ever do a memoir again. This was harder than my most meticulously researched work of journalism. You’re pulling out your guts, and then asking people to marvel at the pleasing pattern you’ve made. I started by locking myself in hotel rooms and binge writing. Then I sharpened the whole sprawling, messy horror showdown to what we now see. There are about a hundred or two-hundred pages that I cut out. Those are sitting around in a Word document, and perhaps someday I’ll plunge into them again.
Writing about other people was always the hardest. I wasn’t writing about people who I met as a journalist, who knew the terms of our talks. I was writing about my loved ones from a decade ago. I didn’t want to betray them. It was fine to cut myself open, but not them. Trying to make something that was both my own truth and true to what others knew was so, so hard. Memory, god you are a slippery beast. I don’t know what I want readers to take away—I can’t even think of that. Maybe I want them to embrace their own jagged bits, their own impossible plans.
After I finished writing, editing, and re-editing the book—I made five or six rounds of edits—I made a giant list of the art I wanted. I was able to finish half of the artwork by the deadline.
Do you have any role models at all? I was obsessed with Toulouse-Lautrec and Diego Rivera. It’s such a cliche to be like, “I like Picasso.” I don’t actually like most of Picasso’s art. He’s one of those people who was this sublime genius from birth and so stopped [caring] somewhere around his 30s and produced crap for many, many years after. There’s something I like about Picasso in that he’s one of these amoral god-monsters of modernism who knew no boxes, no boundaries, no limits.
Was it scary to cross forms from drawing into writing? Terrifying. When I was in high school I wrote this really bad novel that will never be published because it’s a blight. I’m still proud that I slogged through 200 pages.
People ask me what my beat is. I’m like: “Look at Pablo Picasso. He drew minotaur porn.” Probably the greatest war painting of the 20th century. Ceramics. Neo-classical baroque things in his childhood. He invented several genres. I think Picasso was someone who took art’s powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That’s something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now. That’s something that I find inspiring although sometimes I think he was kind of a hack.
Are there any female artists that inspired you? I wrote an essay about this for Paris Review. Women were not able to be artistic equals to men until the era in which arts started losing a lot of interest for me. My tastes are representational. Women were systematically discriminated against throughout art history in the west. They were not able to be peers because of institutional repression. There are a few women throughout history who are considered great artists; Artemisia, of course. [And] Suzanne Valadon [who worked as an] artist’s model.
PROCESS 16
Burn it, because when you sell your archives someone will republish it after you’re dead. You know when you are young, and you think what makes a book great is really long sentences? Or what makes David Foster Wallace great is footnotes, so you try to copy all that? You have no understanding of what makes it good. That’s what my high school novel is like. Writing was really hard for me so I stopped doing it. Then the more I did art, I was working these fields where everyone told me I was really stupid. When you’re a girl who is doing sex-work stuff, or when you’re doing work that’s about sex and you’re a young woman … I felt like for most of my 20s it was like these older men kind of implying that I was really fucking dumb. I was actually quite successful as an artist, I’ve been a financially successful artist since I was 26. I was lucky in that I had a community of really good friends that were journalists and [they] really helped me and mentored me at the start. Some of my first essays are still my favorite things, the essay I wrote on being a professional naked girl … I think that’s because sometimes when you’re still figuring out it’s the best.
You’ve lived a full life thus far, but I imagine that in another thirty-something years, you’ll have more to write. What was the process of writing your memoir like, and do you think you’d tackle another project like this? I will never ever do a memoir again. This was harder than my most meticulously researched work of journalism. You’re pulling out your guts, and then asking people to marvel at the pleasing pattern you’ve made. I started by locking myself in hotel rooms and binge writing. Then I sharpened the whole sprawling, messy horror showdown to what we now see. There are about a hundred or two-hundred pages that I cut out. Those are sitting around in a Word document, and perhaps someday I’ll plunge into them again.
“ALL I WANT TO DO IS ESCAPE FROM THE WORLD AND GO SOMEWHERE FAR FROM CELL PHONE RECEPTION WHERE I CAN DRINK ALL THE WHISKEY AND READ ALL THE BOOKS.”
17 PROCESS
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