Suite 72 - 01 - Ocean

JV01

Suite72

Digital

Digest

Magazine

The Olympians Featured Article

Onozawa Yutaka

Featured Artist

Bard Edlund Marguerite Sauvage Thomas Schostok Special Inter views

The Dirty Dozen:

OCEAN Onozawa Yutaka Aimaru.I Bard Edlund Desarmes Irene Roggero Manuel Perfetto Marguerite Sauvage Pierluigi Longo Ratko Gregor Jagodic Rob Dunlavey Thomas Schostok Jessika Kasper

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2004

01

Special/DirtyDozen: 12 artists from the world ~ www.suite72.com ~ Free Download ~ Created by SUEO.IT A Digital Digest of Articles from BeingHunted, SpeakUp, DesignObser ver, IdentityWorks and Scene360.

In the previous page an illustration by Onozawa Yutaka, this issue Featured Artist.

Summary Issue 01 - July/August 2004 Suite72 is a creation of SUEO Design Collective

Antonio Moro Simone Montagnani Davide Terenzi Alessandro D’Andrea Issue Editors Tony Spaeth (IdentityWorks) Armin Vit (SpeakUp) Jason A. Tselentis (SpeakUp) William Drenttel (DesignObserver) Adriana de Barros (Scene360) Megan Sapnar (Scene360) Jörg Haas (BeingHunted) Gail Anderson (BeingHunted) Debbie Millman (SpeakUp) Marian Bantjes (SpeakUp) Sam Potts (SpeakUp) Graham Wood (SpeakUp) Simone Montagnani (Suite72) Alessandro D’Andrea (Suite72)

Translations Sara Radighieri

Suite72 is supported by

Credits

4

La Suite prende forma

5

The Suite is taking shape

8

Featured Artist: Onozawa Yutaka

12

Are We Running Out of Names?

18

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll... and Print?

20

No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image

22

Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

26

Anna Fowler

30

Digital Poetry, Visual Media: Prospects and Pitfalls for new Practioners

34

Where is Silas?

38

MetroPop: Munich Sneaker Scene

42

Bard Edlund

46

Marguerite Sauvage

50

Thomas Schostok

54

Please be Careful

58

The Olympians

62

Asking the Tough Questions

68

Hunting the horny backed toad

70

Promote: The Stencil

74

Promote:The Stickers

76

Special: The Dirty Dozen: Ocean

78

Suite72.Ack

105

Contact us

105

Articles Copyrights

105

La Suite prende forma Se è vero che nell’idea comune la Rete risulta essere la frontiera ultima della conoscenza ed un mare di informazioni d i s p o n i b i l e potenzialmente a chiunque è vero anche che nel mare una goccia è simile ad un’altra. Quello che intendiamo affermare è che laddove l’informazione è così estesa, rischia di essere dispersiva fino ad arrivare ad una equazione pressoché contraddittoria del “tutta l’informazione uguale nessuna informazione”.

CHECK OUT THE FLAG This is a bilingual (italian and english) magazine, so pay attention to the flags to find your preferred language paragraph.

Italian contents English contents

Questa è una rivista bilingue (italiano ed inglese), fate attenzione alle bandierine di fianco ad ogni paragrafo per trovare i testi in italiano.

Di questo in effetti si occupano oggi molti motori di ricerca : il cercare una informazione deve equivalere in qualche modo alla creazione di una percorso preferenziale sul genere di informazioni che cerco. Solo questa via sembra permettere l’attenuazione del fenomeno comune del passaggio di un articolo, una notizia, un sito ad un limbo praticamente inaccessibile – senza un filo significante – poiché accessibile da ogni parte.

Sebbene il link fu il fondamento dell’idea originale di Berners Lee, quando creò il World In this page an illustration by Onozawa Yutaka, this issue Featured Artist.

Alessandro D’Andrea

Wide Web, la gigantesca e incondizionata espansione delle informazioni sulla rete ha procurato il fenomeno suddetto. Quello che manca oggi è proprio una semantica della ricerca alla quale si sopperisce ad esempio con le cosiddette Web Directory. Una navigazione che crei un filo colorato attraverso le informazioni e che renda fruibile ogni documento in contesto forte dato dagli altri documenti linkati.

Allo stesso modo, una traccia statica che colleghi documenti tra loro è pur sempre una barriera data dall’interpretazione che il creatore del percorso ha fornito dei documenti stessi.

Queste sono le basi di ragionamento da cui prende forma Suite 72, che nasce con lo scopo di promuovere, diffondere e comprendere la Digital Art, intesa soprattutto come movimento.

Toccando il tema dell’arte (seppur digitale) e i problemi e le barriere che si scontrano con quest’ ultima.

Spaziando su molteplici livelli di fonti e linguaggi.

Suite non può essere un contenitore quindi, un universo all’interno del

quale cercare spunti.

Questo andrebbe contro l’idea stessa di creatività e della libertà di cui essa dovrebbe godere.

Sarebbe tuttavia impensabile immaginare questa libertà al di là dello spazio e del tempo, siamo pur sempre, volenti o nolenti, uomini in una realtà (o almeno in una sua immagine su cui siamo più o meno tutti concordi).

Si possono conciliare quindi libertà senza limiti pur rimanendo all’interno di una immagine? Possiamo provare con una similitudine. Pensiamo ad una sfera. Una sfera di dimensioni finite.

Con una superficie ed un volume. Se mi muovo all’interno del volume, prima o poi incontrerò una barriera contro la quale scontrarmi. Se mi muovo sulla superficie potrò invece seguire infiniti percorsi senza mai trovare una barriera che non sia la realtà, su cui devo poggiare i piedi. Il limite c’è, la superficie è finita e calcolabile, ma è lungi da essere identificabile come una barriera, piuttosto come immagine della mia realtà di uomo.

Suite72 allora non può essere un contenitore, ma una superficie (sferica) costituita da articoli, documenti, idee In this page an illustration by Marguerite Sauvage, interviewed in this issue.

Alessandro D’Andrea

La Suite prende forma e fatti. Elementi che ci permettono di creare infiniti percorsi tra loro pur non esulando dal limite della finitezza di un digest. Nessuno di questi elementi è ponderante rispetto agli altri (cosi come sulla superficie di una sfera non possiamo evidenziare un punto notevole, cosa invece possibile nel suo volume : il centro ) e nessuno dei percorsi tuttavia ci condurrà ad un bordo insuperabile. Magari porterà ad un punto già solcato ma da un angolazione diversa.

Ecco allora il collegamento che manca tra le idee iniziali e Suite. Sappiamo bene che un qualunque percorso è possibile nel Web. Se però ogni documento è collegato agli altri da una miriade di links come possiamo alla fine avere una immagine concreta della realtà su cui costruire percorsi.

Nell’avere tante immagini della realtà non avremo nessuna realtà. Nessuna che può essere eletta rispetto alle altre.

Questo porterebbe comunque alla scomparsa di idee e documenti poiché non legati significativamente agli altri.

I legami deboli si romperebbero ben presto.

Se invece riusciamo, da una base di documenti comuni, a trovare collegamenti significativi, semantici appunto, i documenti di partenza

verranno inglobati nel nuovo significato trovando una nuova forma, una macrostruttura che li comprenda.

Una rivalorizzazione dei documenti attraverso una significazione.

Questa è la forma a cui Suite72 aspira.

Alessandro D’Andrea

The Suite is taking shape The Web is regarded as the ultimate frontier of knowledge. On the one hand it contains thousands of information available to anyone –digital divide apart – but on the other it contains lots of information which might be considered as very much similar sometimes. What we mean is that when we have such huge amounts of information, we may run the risk that it all becomes so unorganized to result in a paradoxical equation such as ‘all information equals no information’.

Nowadays many search engines try to solve this problem: The search for information goes hand in hand with the creation of preference paths on the kinds of information I can be looking for. This is the only way to avoid an article or news or site to be cast in a sort of limbo which becomes absolutely inaccessible – with no central thread – because it can be accessed from all sides.

The original idea of Berners Lee, when he created the World Wide Web, was based on the concept of link. However,

the huge and continuous expansion of the information flow on the Web has produced the above mentioned phenomenon. What we lack today, and it is what we are trying to solve using Web Directories, is a kind of semantics of searching. A way of surfing the net which creates links among the many pieces of information and that makes it easier to get each document in a strong context created by and among the linked documents themselves.

By the way a fixed track which links documents still constitutes a barrier because it is the result of an interpretation of the documents on the part of the author of these preference paths.

From this reasoning we arrive to the form that Suite 72 wants to take nowadays. Suite 72 wants to promote and spread the Digital Art. When we talk about art (even though this is digital) we have to face the problem of interpretation as already mentioned above. Suite cannot be a container, a kind of universe where we can look for ideas. This would indeed be against the concept

Alessandro D’Andrea

of creativity and contrary to the same concept of freedom it should enjoy. It is nevertheless impossible to imagine this kind of freedom as timeless and spaceless because, willy-nilly, we are and remain human beings living one reality or at least an image of it that we all, more or less, take as the representation of a possible reality.

Is it possible to put together the idea of a limitless freedom and the fact that we must remain inside a fixed reality? We can try with a simile. Try to think to a sphere. A sphere with finite dimensions, a surface and a volume. If I move inside it, I will sooner or later find a barrier to stop me. On the other hand, if I move on the surface of it, I will walk forever, experimenting new ways, without reaching a barrier but only the reality on which I am obliged to walk. So even here we have a limit, the surface is finite and can be calculated, but in this case it is no more a barrier per se, but the representation of the image of myself as a man (my reality).

Suite 72 is no longer a container, but a spherical surface made of articles, documents, ideas and facts. These elements enable us to create infinite paths still remaining conscious of the finiteness of the reader. Neither of these elements is prevailing (as on the surface of the

sphere, it is impossible to point out a specific point, while this is possible for the volume, where we have a centre) and none of them will ever lead us to an edge.

This is what is missing between our initial reasoning and Suite. Any path can be realized on the Web. But, if any document is linked to thousands of other documents, how can we possibly arrive to a concrete image of the reality on which we have to build paths?

If we have too many images of reality, we will end up with no reality at all. At least no reality to be taken as the Chosen One. This will inevitably lead to the disappearance of both ideas and documents which are not significantly linked to each other. Weak links will soon break down.

Indeed, if we manage to find significant links (i.e. semantic links) starting from a database of common documents, we will be able to give these documents a new shape and a new meaning, so that they can become part of a macro-structure which will contain them all. In other words, a revaluation of the documents through signification.

This is briefly what we mean by proposing Suite 72.

In this page an illustration by Marguerite Sauvage, interviewed in this issue.

THE DIGEST

What’s in the Suite?

Every issue Suite72 selects the best articles and features from their content partners on the web and republish them for your brain pleasure.

18 Are We Running Out of Names?

by Tony Spaeth

20 Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll... and Print?

by Armin Vit

22 No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image

By Jason A. Tselentis

26 Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

By William Drenttel

30 Anna Fowler

By Adriana de Barros

34 Digital Poetry, Visual Media: Prospects and P Pitfalls for new Practioners

By Megan Sapnar

38 Where is Silas?

By Jörg Haas

THE DIGEST

42 MetroPop: Munich Sneaker Scene

By Gail Anderson

58 Please be Careful

By Debbie Millman

62 The Olympians

By Marian Bantjes

68 Asking the Tough Questions

By Sam Potts

70 Hunting the horny backed toad

By Graham Wood

Featured Artist

Onozawa Yutaka Tell us more about your design background (schools, works, a simple Curriculum Vitae) After graduating university, I worked at men’s ware shop.working 3years, Iresigned and went school of design using Macintosh about 3 months. It was first time to touch computers. Now I am working at small company as a web, software interface designer.

About illusttarion, I like to draw pictures

from childhood. Maybe influence of my mother, she is an architect, often making drawings at home. I saw my mother working and took interest in drawing, I think.

Do you think your background in college/school helped you in any way when you went digital?

The reasen I went desital is that Mac is a required tool for DTP. Because I was interesting in publishing design. The time starting Mac, I did’t use it for illustration.

Featured Artist

Onozawa Yutaka What school of thought in design and painting do you belong to? (if any) I have not gone to the university of design or art.

What usually inspire your curiosity and drives you to create materpieces of art and design?

The best inspiration source is illustarations. I am watching many variety of illustrations on web and magazines. I

value the impression received from these works more than the techniques. While I am drawing, I don’t watch anythig. I depend on my memories and stocked imagination.

Favorite artists/designers/illustrators?

I saw the picture collection of Dari and Chagall in childhood. Their art is strong impact on me. I can feel the extension of imagination.

Luis Barragan, His construction is very colorfulness, and silence. I feel very

Featured Artist

Onozawa Yutaka mysterious atmosphere.

Tell us the usual steps in creating one of your illustrations. (programs used, techniques/filters/ brushes/patterns/etc, creativity, passages, etc. please explain as much as you can) 1 Drawing by pencil.

2 Preparing materials, painting water colors and pastels, taking photos.

3 Scaning original drawing and materials.

4 Layout these materials between lines like the way of collage.

Using program is only photoshop. I use only basic functions, adjustment of color, size and direction.

Commercial works versus personal projects: what do you think about this eternal “war”?

I think that the switch of motivation is necessary. Which is better, full of creativity? My answer is both.

At this time you are a freelance artist or you work for an agency? and what do you plan for the future?

I am working as a designer at company.

Noe I have no special plans, Because I am busy.I hope more people to see my illustrations.

Are you interested to work outside Japan?

I dream to plan the solo exhibition in

Featured Artist

Onozawa Yutaka

Featured Artist

Onozawa Yutaka

Featured Artist

Onozawa Yutaka Europe France, Italy, England.

Which is your deďŹ nition of creativity?

Every activity to draw, build, speak, cook, play sports, and so on needs it.

Creativity is to ďŹ nd the best way by ourselves.

Thank you very much Onozawa, there are anything you would like to add?

On my web site, You can see more works. Please give me your impressions.

Thank you very much!

If you want to know more about this artist, please visit this website:

www1.odn.ne.jp/~cch27450/

BRANDS

Are We Running Out of Names?

Visteon? Miravant? Diageo (the recently announced merger of Grand Metropolitan PLC and Guinness)? In the naming business, are we beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel?

In a word, yes. There is a numeric limit to the universe of names, the combinations of letters of five syllables or less that are pronounceable, avoid offense in principal languages, and are not someone else’s property. A population explosion of business entities, on top of product proliferation, means we are rapidly depleting the supply. And as more companies think “global,” more seek global name protection, vastly increasing the pool of possible conflicts.

In especially crowded categories like financial services and computers, you can pretty well assume that any letter combination both appealing and meaningful is already taken. Colleagues in the naming business confirm my own experience; our “short lists” of candidates that go into the top of the legal search hopper are getting longer. Where we used to screen 10 names to get a final choice of two or three “probably available,” today we must screen 40. In turn, the master lists that must be generated to pick those 40 often expand into the thousands. (The list from which American Express drew “Optima” exceeded 2,500 candidate names.)

At the same time we are depleting the supply, we have raised the availability hurdle. In January 1996, Congress (in its wisdom) further shrank the pool of available names via HR1295, adding an “anti-dilution” provision to the Lanham Act, section 43(c).

Previously, your rights to a name were limited to your product and related categories; the test was simply whether real customers might reasonably be confused by someone else’s use of the same name.

Thus Lexus (or even Lexis) vehicles and Lexis information services could comfortably coexist. HR1295 said, “Not so fast–whether or not consumers are likely to be confused, if your name is sufficiently famous, you may deserve protection in all categories.” This immediately added boundless monopoly power and greater wealth to owners of famous brands, making it much easier, for example, to license their brands across product categories they never before dreamed of directly entering. And HR1295 also increased costs, risks, and uncertainties in naming.

BRANDS Are we running out of names?

by Tony Spaeth

The Internet adds yet another hurdle.

Companies (reasonably) want company names that can be domain names too, without alteration. But anyone in the world may innocently have registered a given combination of letters, sometimes with wholly unrelated meanings, as a domain name . . . and probably has.

Two predictions. First, expect more “combination” names, the unexpected splicing of two ordinary words–a technique that geometrically expands the pool of realsounding, meaningful possibilities. I have found company names like Flowserve (and last year’s Footstar) easier to clear and protect, as well; a given combination either has been used or it hasn’t, with little room for ambiguity.

Second, expect more strange new names like Diageo, distinctive yet functional, that take some getting used to. We really are scraping the linguistic barrel and have to reach further beyond our comfort zones to make names that work.

If you want to find other similar articles, please visit the former host of what you have just read at:

www.identityworks.com

PRINT

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll... and Print?

II usually read magazines, like any goodblooded American, on the John (a detail must of you could probably do without) or on the subway on my way back from work. What you read on the subway is a way of telling your fellow passengers what your interests are or somehow what you stand for. I enjoy when the person next to me does that downward-eye-peekwithout-moving-the-neck-or-face gesture to see what I’m finding so interesting that I don’t care to engage in useless chit chat with him or her. And I always proudly hoist my design magazines to let people know that, oh yes, I am a graphic designer.

Last week I thrust the latest issue of Print, plastic bag and all, into my bag, walked to the station, got on the train, found a seat, pulled Print back out, ripped the plastic bag and – gasp – the sex issue lay on my lap. In all its vainy, three-dimensionalized, gory glory. Now, I’m not a prude man, but I don’t like people thinking I’m some sort of Mexican pervert riding the “L” 24 hours a day looking at S-E-X. So I changed seats and went to the back of the car.

Flipping through the issue, I thought “Boy, I wouldn’t want to be the editors at Print right about now”. Many design magazines or any trade publication other than, say, Playboy, receive angry letters

from their readers when they dare to show nudes, words like “fuck” or posters with “questionable” content. A whole issue, then, of a commonly conservative magazine devoted to sex will undeniable raise, at the very least, some eyebrows.

A quick week after the mailing of the July/August issue Joyce Kaye, Editor-inChief of Print, has already posted a note on their web site.

Now that I was in a more comfortable spot on the train I gave the magazine a closer read. Gangbang, anal beads, freaky she-male farmgirls and dildos – words that never find their way into Print, nor Speak Up for that matter – abound… in just four pages. Even reading the table

PRINT Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll… and Print?

by Armin Vit

of contents (Pony Girls of Berlin, Pixel Vixens, Sexplaythings…) was, um, oddly stimulating. And let me tell you, for those designers who only look at the pictures, this will probably be your favorite issue.

Ever. The editors at Print decided to go (graphically) all the way, well, almost all the way: female nudity, illustrated vibrators, screen grabs of various porn sites and many other phallic imagery adorn Print’s glossy pages. Even sexually-clichéd drop caps for every article.

newsstands this month; STEP magazine proudly sports a vibrator on its cover – although disguised as some fancy industrial design artifact. Inside, in “Come out and Play”, beautiful photographs of glass and plastic vibrators and items vividly illustrate that sex toys are, you know, OK. Also, “Risqué Business” takes a look at the ultimate in men, women and sex objectification for the sake of retail: Abercrombie & Fitch’s Quarterly. For STEP to delve into these delicate topics is indication that sex is, you know, OK.

Unfortunately, many soon-to-be offended Print readers will miss a great issue. Rick Poynor’s “Designing Pornotopia” alone is worth dozens of subscribers who will threaten to unsubscribe. Eric Zimmerman, consummate gamer that he is, proposes six sex games with amusing titles like “Probabilistic Sex Role-playing” – think X-rated version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Even KarlssonWilker gets in on the action with one of their trademark charts, at one point showing giant-penised men and an abstract vagina claiming: “Being abstract makes me less intimidating”.

As the train got more crowded and the gazes more judgmental, I ultimately decided to just close the magazine and take it to my other magazine-reading inner sanctum. Why does the word sex have such negative weight? Why do we feel guilty about it? Where did go wrong – should we keep blaming Adam and Eve? As designers what is our role in employing sexual imagery? And why, does that guy in the blue shirt keep staring at me?

In such a strangely conservative country, Print’s point is well made. Sex is just sex, it’s part of our lives, so get over it. For such a forward-thinking country that America claims to be, its obfuscation of sex has always perplexed me.

Oddly, Print is not luridly alone on the

If you want to find other similar articles, please visit the former host of what you have just read at:

www.underconsideration.com/speakup Leave a Comment on this Article

JOB

No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image It’s summer, a fresh batch of creatives seek work. Some just left school; others want to reinvent themselves. No matter who you are or what you seek, you may not find work right away. While looking for that high-paying job, keep yourself busy in constructive ways. Whether fulltime, part-time, or contract gigs, consider the following, and most importantly, keep a positive frame of mind. You control your design destiny.

So where do you begin? First of all, you’ve got to talk with people. Network.

Get out of the house. Leave your studio.

Don’t sit in front of the television. Don’t waste your money at the shopping malls or on new computer gadgets. If you haven’t joined your local AIGA chapter, do so. You’ll meet people in and around the community that have the scoop on design work and opportunities. And if you know vendors in printing or other production services, talk with them. They see the ebb and flow of annual reports, direct mail, brochures, catalogs, packaging, and signage. If there’s work, they know which firm has the client with money to spend, and who has the money to hire.

Not every night can be devoted to an AIGA lecture or convention. You won’t always have the energy to roam through parties talking about what you do and what kind of work you hope for. So dur-

ing your downtime, update your book.

Truthfully, it should be updated whether or not you have work. Keeping your bio materials fresh and current lets you hit the streets if you’re fired on whim or are still waiting to be hired. Like a soldier of fortune, always have your book armed and ready. Plenty of resources exist to help you craft a well built portfolio. Steff Geissbuhler’s article at the AIGA site covers some valuable dos and don’ts. Your book demonstrates your visual capabilities, and how well you use an X-acto and spray mount. Craft skills are important, and so is organization.

When the book is built and you’re ready for feedback, get in touch with a local agency. Most of them provide portfolio reviews either weekly or monthly. Call them up, and find out who looks at them.

It doesn’t hurt to email your resume in advance. Even if the firm isn’t hiring,

JOB No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image

By Jason A. Tselentis

having them see your work gets you into the door. This helps your chances of them contacting you when work does come up. Most importantly, you’ll get constructive criticism, “You need more logo work.

I didn’t see enough color usage, most of your design is black and white with spot colors.” Don’t be bitter. Don’t cry.

They base feedback on the work they do and the experiences they have. Take it all with a grain of salt, breathe in, exhale, and then consider how you can make your book better. Looking better may mean increasing the range of work you show: more logos, less websites, and fewer fantasy projects. Having your portfolio look smarter through tone matching doesn’t hurt either. When you tone match, your portfolio mirrors the firm’s. You match aesthetic biases and/or clientele to evidence that you’ll fit in, and hit the ground running. But don’t go overboard here. You always want to produce unique work that’s targeted and focused.

Don’t fall into the trap of constantly building a portfolio through mimicry.

When it’s time to pick up your book, do so graciously. Thank the person at the main desk. Say something complimentary about their appearance. Remember their name, because you may see them again. Lastly, send a thank you note to those who saw your book. Whether or not they had an open schedule for your portfolio isn’t the issue, showing them

you’re a considerate person who appreciates their valuable time means more.

Once you have your physical portfolio assembled and gotten some feedback, update your online presence. If you don’t have a website, getting one can be critical. Jobs won’t always be down the block from your condo or two bus transfers away. Work can be found from one coast to the next. If you live in Kansas and the person reviewing your portfolio resides in San Diego, the Internet mediates them seeing your design.

Most designers already have an online portfolio. But for those who don’t, consider what your Internet service provider can offer (AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast provide free webspace for most of their customers), look into web services like CommArts, or research the provisions universities give their alumni. The above options can save you some cash when you don’t have a lot to spend. And these days, setting up your own hosting doesn’t take much more than a Windows or Unix box. A friend of yours may be doing this in his/her basement, so check with your digitally-minded pals. Now if you have a fat wallet and feel luxurious, go ahead and cough up the money for your own unique web address (such as designrocker.com). Separate yourself from designers out there with the long-winded addresses (http://home.earthlink.net/~univers72pt)

JOB No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image

By Jason A. Tselentis

Your online portfolio should mirror your physical portfolio. In other words, don’t over design. There’s no reason to have the online portfolio full of bells and whistles (literally). Even if you specialize in motion graphics, video, sound design, and animation, just let the work tell that story. Human resources agents and headhunters I’ve spoken with consistently tell me, “Let the work stand out, not the site.”

Your Internet portfolio can either hold your design like an art gallery (clean, structured, and considered), or it can rock out to fancy beats like a night club (competitive, bombastic, and unfocused).

look gave customers a greater emotional connection.”

Work aside, you must stand up on paper too. A concise resume narrates where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and the accomplishments you’ve achieved. Art directors and creative directors will go to your work first and then your resume; human resources and marketing may look at your resume first then consult with the creative team. Both of these divisions serve unique purposes, and your resume should speak to them both. Avoid designer jargon, “I crafted advertisements using a structuralist approach that spoke to my Cranbrook audience,” that a marketing director won’t understand. Instead, demonstrate how you’ve made a difference objectively, “Through the redesign of the OOtico logo, the company sales saw a 10% increase over a three month period. Audience analysis stated the new

In the end, you can do all of the above and still be jobless after three months.

No sweat. It’s common for job placement to take 1-4 months. Firms have a lot of resumes to sort through, and the interviewing process is time consuming. Just be patient. And don’t settle. Know the kind of work you want to do. Be mindful of the salary you should accept. Have a clear understanding of where you’d like to fit in, and the people you enjoy surrounding yourself with. A successful and rewarding job will be shaped as much by your peers as by the kind of clients and design projects you interact with.

Here’s a note on details: when putting together your resume, don’t be in a rush.

Take time. Spell check. Have somebody else read it. And avoid some of these mistakes pointed out by Petrula Vrontikis.

Neither Petrula nor I enjoy seeing our names butchered, and the person you address your resume to won’t either.

Research everything, from names to the kind of work the studio does. Knowing the firm is over half the battle.

The process of finding work can be a nail-biting experience. Don’t let it wear on you. Smile. Use your free time and

JOBS No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image

By Jason A. Tselentis

build your image—both the portfolio and resume—to the best of your ability, and do so carefully. Maintain your personal image too: exercise to keep yourself loose and limber for interviews, don’t sleep in through the noon hours, and groom yourself for heaven’s sake. When it’s all said and done, if you still have downtime, read about things we sometimes overlook during our job search in Part II: Distinguishing Yourself.

If you want to find other similar articles, please visit the former host of what you have just read at:

www.underconsideration.com/speakup Leave a Comment on this Article

DESIGN

Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

Adolf Wölfli was a mad artist, a schizophrenic who molested three-year-old girls. Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1864, Wölfli died in 1930 at the age of 66. Thus, his life spanned the era of Bismarck, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, World War I, the rise of Fascism, and the great depression of the 1930s. While the world was changing, he spent 35 years in the Waldau Mental Asylum in Bern being a graphic designer. Or so the argument goes.

In his own lifetime, Wölfli established an international reputation as an artist; he later won recognition from Jean Dubuffet and André Breton; and he has influenced contemporary artists such as Jonathan Borofsky, Annette Messager, and Meret Oppenheim. In the seminal work on mad art, Insania Pingens (1961), he stands out as a visionary. Of course, “outsider art” is deeply influenced by Dubuffet’s collection of works by outcasts and the mentally ill — what became known as art brut. Wölfli is its greatest model.

Last year, the American Folk Art Museum in New York City mounted a major exhibition of Wölfli’s work, and an amazing (but problematic) catalogue, The Art of Adolf Wölfli, was published.

Everyone from The New Yorker to Jason Kottke loved it. (A concise biography is on artnet; many of his drawings are on inmostra.)

His work, primarily comprised of 45 hand-bound volumes with over 25,000 pages, is filled with prose texts, poems, fantastic narratives, myths, songs, travelogues, musical compositions — an endless collage of calligraphy and illustration to create a description of an imaginary cosmos. There is madness throughout: “Motto. Forword. Careful: Take care.

The most-honored gentlemen, printer K.J. Wiss, Gurten-Gass, Bern: And, the

Up: Adolf Wolfli, The Cevelar Mary (Funeral March, p.4038), (detail), 1929 Down: Adolf Wolfli, Ria Griganttika-Snake, Australia (Cradle to the Grave, Book 4, p.357), (detail), 1911

DESIGN Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

By William Drenttel

bookbinder, employed by the latter, are hereby politely asked and requested to carefully examine the numbered pages, from page 1 to page 34 at the end of the last chapter in this little book, Notebook no. 5, and to follow my instructions and remarks precisely and punctually.

This will not be to your disadvantage.

I was frightened in front of my dear darling, when I wanted to marry, anno 1885 in Bern: And, thus, from that hour on, a loon. Probatum, esst: in the seabed. Good morning you gentlemen, and ladies:? what do you want, from, me: I am not among the tame: And yet no wild animal.

Signed, Adolf Wölfli, Bern.” [c.1912]

by Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann ventures into territory I have not seen before: an attempt to elevate an artist to the higher plane of being a graphic designer. This argument is made by Edward M. Gomez in his essay: “Adolf Wölfli — Visionary Graphic Designer.”

Gomez is an experienced writer, contributing to a book on Yoko Ono (another mad artist?), as well as authoring a long series of books on “new” design: New Design: London: The Edge of Graphic Design and companion volumes on Miami, Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles. He’s also a writer for The New York Times, doing stories like, “If Art Is a Commodity, Shopping Can Be an Art.” [He’s also a graphic designer, according to his biography.] want to quote Gomez on Wölfli because he takes a basic 19th-century-madmanartist and turns him into the model 20thcentury visual communicator:

There is an interesting art history debate about whether mad art is real art, and generally “outsider art” is included in contemporary narratives of art history.

But the recent catalogue of Wölfli’s work

Adolf Wölfli, General View of the Island Neveranger (detail), 1911

“Throughout his voluminous oeuvre, a number of skillfully developed components of Wölfli’s finely crafted drawings call attention to his accomplishments as a graphic designer. And because conscientious planning is fundamental to the practice of design — which, by definition, entails creating order out of chaos or giving meaningful form to ideas, information, or raw materials — the assump-

DESIGN Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

By William Drenttel

tion that Wolfli made knowing decisions about how he shaped his drawings and bookworks informs any analysis of his achievements as what is known in design terms today as a ‘visual communicator.”

Gomez also wants Wölfli to be a book artist (“decisive use of the book as his information-storage device and information tool”); a multidimensional visionary (“not as static images, but rather in motion, transpiring in time..., complete with sounds and atmospheric details?”);

and a new media designer (“the quintessentially postmodern act of appropriating mass-media images and using them for his own authorial purposes”). In his prose, he works hard to find ways to use the word “design” in every sentence where “artist” appears: “[Genuine artists] produce works of lasting memory and wonder ... almost always — in some discernible and essential if inestimable measure — by design.” His conclusion is that “a good artist is a good designer, too.”

Adolf Wolfli, At a Paris Art Show (Geographic and Algebraic Books, Book 13, p.31b), 1915

DESIGN Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

By William Drenttel

I am troubled by this argument (and use of language). Adolf Wölfli may well have created form out of chaos. I would hope that designers could learn something from his drawings: the freedom he found in symmetry, the unique “typographic” approach he took to musical notation; and the nutty way he creates beauty out of pattern. But we should not aspire to learn from artists such as Wölfli because he has been artificially labeled a “visual communicator.” Graphic designers should worry when “design” becomes the new catchall phrase, an easy description for all artistic endeavors. If we want the words graphic design to mean anything, we should challenge their loose application to everything and everyone.

It’s one thing to call Adolf Wölfli a madman. It’s even worse to call him a graphic designer.

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ART

Anna Fowler “…I explore the glitter and banality of fame and pop culture.”

Anna Fowler Anna Fowler was born in 1979 in Bradford, England; living in this small town she admits that not much happens there.

Even though, she feels fortunate to live in a city which is known for another local talent, David Hockney, and also because Bradford is situated only 20 minutes from big city Leeds — where she pursued her studies. In 1998, she enrolled in an art foundation course at Bradford College and then in an illustration course at Stockport College. And only in 2000, did she begin her studies at Leeds Metropolitan University — graduating with a BA (Hons.) in Graphic Arts and Design.

Currently, Anna works as a freelance illustrator for local companies.

From the early age of 15, Anna has been involved in commercial illustration. She started with a two-week work experience at home with her father (a freelance illustrator). Anna explains, “My dad showed me his own technique of sketching out the image in coloured pencil, then markers and gouache on a plastic surface and a spirit to mix the colours. It enabled me to create the fake, airbrushed, ‘too perfect’ look that is often used in advertising imagery. I don’t like to elaborate too much as it is a well kept secret between my dad and I!” Her

artwork is indeed catchy, colourful, and sharp in detail — highlighting fashionable characters, fast food and tasty fruits, and a lot more. But before its aesthetics spellbinds us, we need to “look beyond style to finding the substance.” Anna’s work began when she saw “It Girls” (people known for being famous socialites) getting out of their limos at a film premier in London. She thought to herself, “If they can be stars then so could the friends I was with at the time.” So she reinvented and stylized her friends by photographing and renaming them into characters such as ‘Dolores and Dave.’

And that is how her work was born. She exhibited these paintings around bars in Leeds, where her newly stylized friend ‘Dolores’ made appearances. “My goal was to show how a normal person could be elevated to star status having been styled by someone else. I think it is a

Marko-in-the-park-oh Spirit based dyes and gouache on drafting films Anna Fowler

ART Anna Fowler

By Adriana de Barros

hopeless situation, when so-called ‘stars’ of today are unable to even dress themselves! In my paintings, I try to explore the glitter and banality of fame and popular culture.”

In her food paintings, some solely with fruits and meals and others of Anna eating; she creates different moods based on the color and form of each edible element. A study of sexuality of the object provided by classic and contemporary art, and media imagery. E.g. in “Strawberry-Sucker ” a girl looks straight at us, nibbling and sucking on a strawberry.

The character has an intense look which reveals innocence but also sexual desire.

In another example, “Lemon,” shows us a girl biting down hard on a lemon making her eyes squeeze fiercely due to the sourness of taste. It may not be as sexual

as the first but it definitely shows risk and dare. Anna represents food metaphorically, and in “Burger-n-flies” she holds no exception. It is an image symbolizing a lifestyle accessory — fast food, a cheap and nasty product injected with value into advertising and marketing. “My loving interpretations of trashy fast food turn the most unglamorous of subjects into things of beauty.” And this occurs precisely in ads, making things desirable for the consumer society.

Anna’s present art series focus mainly on self-portraits. These pieces are intriguing as they are coincidentally similar to Cindy Sherman’s technique — i.e. the artist representing herself as main character of her photographs. Anna transforms herself into characters that seem familiar to us from our daily life, like a school girl drinking a soda in the Woodys and Whirliepop Spirit based dyes and gouache on drafting films Anna Fowler

ART Anna Fowler

By Adriana de Barros

afternoon sun, a preppy rich kid getting out of her Daddy-paid sports car, and a wannabe girl trying to dress hip like the other girls. Her scenarios seem clear and obvious like real instant photos, and they are prepared that way. She sometimes takes a quick photo or can take as long as seven hours to prepare a shot with props in the right location setting. And as you look closely into the painting, the story behind the protagnist seems obvious, but is it really? “I have produced my images from a certain point of view, but here are many layers to my work Grandma-n-mary Spirit based dyes and gouache on drafting films Anna Fowler

making it impossible for me to explain in full, which is why I paint. As the artist Duchamp said, ‘50% of the creative act is up to the viewer, not the artist.’” She additionally clarifies that Sherman hasn’t influenced her at all, because she just recently became acquainted with the artist’s work. There have been other people making the same comparison, although in reality Anna has always loved dressing up and experimenting with her image since childhood. When she was growing up, she even had an obsession with matching hair ribbons with bows on her

ART Anna Fowler

By Adriana de Barros

knickers, and this was at the age of five.

But, like many artists influenced from pop culture and the media (from Anna Fowler to Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol), their source of inspiration explains the parallel tendency for certain themes and styles. Anna, like other pop artists, have been inspired by B-movies and television, film posters, billboard ads, record sleeves, old postcards, and other items collected over the years.

“A world within a world” is what Anna Fowler attempts to do; “I have created my own little world through my paintings where everything is just as I like it…

Colourful, kitsch, ironic, pretty, nostalgic and a bit tragic.”

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Donuts, Aeromeal, Burger-n-flies and Lemon Spirit based dyes and gouache on drafting films Anna Fowler

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CULTURE

Digital Poetry, Visual Media:

Prospects and Pitfalls for new Practioners The growing popularity of software like Flash has ushered images, animation, sound, and kinetic typography into the poem, blurring the boudaries between film, graphic design and computer games. Exploring the Web as a medium for new forms of artistic expression, digital artists, designers, programmers and poets have collaborated to create some provocative work that alternately challeges and ignores the institutional apparatus for “traditional” or “mainstream” literature.

With the ability to create real-time, scalable, interactive, high-frame rate animation with sound in a file small enough to be suitable for Web delivery, Flash has quite literally set the Web in motion, emerging as an industry standard development tool used by both professional designers and amateur Web enthusiasts.

While some poets see Flash as an ideal means for affordably and easily realizing interactive multimedia literature, critics suggest that Flash serves more to dumbdown poetry than it does to inspire fresh, insightful literary experiments.

The history of multimedia literature in the 20th century includes some innovative work, from using sound and images in Europe in the 1920s to “poem-painting” and “film-poem” experiments in the U.S. and elsewhere during the 1950s,

as well as many other instances of collaborative and cross-genre work. While there is a growing body of significant and groundbreaking new media poetry, there is also a fair share of work rooted in less ambitious aspirations, winding up perhaps more Disney than Duchamp.

The latter can certainly be enjoyable and well-designed; they can be very sophisticated visually, but they are less ambitious because they fail to impart on the viewer a larger sense of the complexities and contradictions that mark “good” art.

Instead of challenging us, these works speak in a language we understand and tell us something that we already know.

We are all familiar, of course, with the language of motion. We see words and images move around screens every day, speaking in the moving language of

CULTURE Digital Poetry, Visual Media: Prospects and Pitfalls for new Practioners

By Megan Sapnar

electronic media: Visual codes we have learned through television, advertising, and film — from opening title and credit sequences to the graphically rich introductions of nightly news. The language of motion can speak as loudly as the language of words, a point of no small importance to those working with moving images and kinetic typography. Motion graphic designer Hillman Curtis explains: “In motion graphics, the motion can be more important and have more impact than the graphical element being moved.

The way you choose to move, or not move, an element across the screen can enhance the meaning of that element greatly. If, for example, I choose to move a text element slowly, scaling and fading up from black and resolving center screen, I imbue that text element with a sense of drama, focus, and perhaps, stability.”

In graphic design, this is about communicating a message. In art, this can be used to question dominant ways of seeing. The text element that fades up from black and resolves center screen is also imbued with film language: Drama, focus, and so on, have been communicated to the viewer who is familiar with the codes of motion graphics through other media. When we see an element fade in or out, we know what to expect — a point of transition, a new scene, a dramatic conclusion.

Because new technologies (e.g., Flash) have made it easier to set text and images in motion, there is the risk that authors will incorporate movement into a work purely for visual excitement, reproducing visual codes with which we are familiar as a matter of style: Distressed, dreamlike, nostalgic, yet lacking critical reflection on the ways in which the manipulation of text, time, motion, and space can impact our perceptions, introduce contradictions, and add multiple layers of meaning to a work.

Overused clichés are metaphors are predictable and feel trite. Love is beautiful; death is sad; life is a journey… Poems that reiterate such things reaffirm what we already know. Bringing poetry to visual media means there will inevitably be new clichés — tired ways of using motion, obvious visual metaphors, and interactivity for its own sake. Some new media poems mask mediocre writing behind visual effects that may suggest “high quality production,” but do little to challenge our accustomed perceptual habits. As a result, artists may not want to move elements in a particular way because certain forms of motion are oversaturated, signaling “commercialized” or “produced.”

On the other hand, artists may rely on a viewer’s familiarity with media codes

CULTURE Digital Poetry, Visual Media: Prospects and Pitfalls for new Practioners

By Megan Sapnar

in order to emphasize their effects. In “Genius,” for example, Skye Giordano sets the rhythm of Thom Swiss reading his poem against the environment in which the action takes place, using graphic effects to underscore the mediated language: “A camera tracks its flight;” “quick cut back;” “it was after all their scene.” As the woman watches the news or skims a magazine, we too watch through another media layer, another screen. The poem itself comes to us like a broadcast; MTV graphics and special effects editing meets CNN Headline News.

The steady rhythm of the poem is soothing; the motion graphics are easy to watch, and we are almost lulled by the effects until the jarring conclusion, which sounds a few loud bangs after the line, “Tiresome these interruptions.” The brazen “You don’t have to be a genius to guess this wreckage will fuck him up” is repeated in text before the image is momentarily frozen, duplicated, and removed, suggesting a change of channel or a discontinuous signal. The media is emphasized now in another way: The

distorted image, the buzz of static, and then finally the color bars — an artificial signal generated to provide a consistent reference in post-production — all work to call attention to the viewer’s own perception of the relationship between representation and the screen.

“Translating” a written poem from the page to the screen can sometimes do neither the original piece nor the new media a favor. New media, after all, doesn’t make a poem inherently any better or more appealing, just as film can’t make a book a better read. Big-screen literary adaptations which succeed do so not because they remain faithful to the fidelity of the original or because the novel as a form for this narrative was lacking, but rather, because these films were able to accomplish something in their own right, and not in the same way as the novel Indeed, in the case of “Genius,” the new media text offers a different reading than the words of the poem alone. For one thing, the text of the poem (read apart from the images) is primarily about the woman. She is the one watching television, reading a magazine, contemplating love handles, and dealing with the boredom, guilt, and pain of the daily routine. She is tired of the outbursts from

CULTURE Digital Poetry, Visual Media: Prospects and Pitfalls for new Practioners

By Megan Sapnar

the television (“Tiresome these interruptions”) and prays, “Don’t let it be like that for me.” There is only one line about her son: “About an hour ago her son said before napping, sleeping hurts me I don’t want to sleep anymore.” She goes on to speculate, “These days it seems nobody wants to, just like nobody wants to see their house blown apart.” But with the images, the sound and the motion, the impact of text changes significantly.

The son, for example, has a bigger role.

There is the image of the boy propped on his elbows (in prime TV-watching position); he is shown imagining a house being blown apart, and the viewer is led to believe that, perhaps, this is why sleeping hurts him.

son, the soldiers, the boys who had been throwing rocks, people with love handles? Genius calls us to investigate this text a little further, and demonstrates again that one thing is certain about all good poetry: It demands a re-reading and still offers a continually renewed sense of delight, or uneasiness, or else, simply stays with us long after the experience has ended.

Likewise, the text’s conclusion (“But the boy on the screen who screams at the soldiers is interrupting again”) points back to one of the boys who had stopped throwing rocks in the poem’s opening lines. Yet the accompanying image superimposes the boy inside the TV screen, making the connection between the woman’s son and the boys on CNN visually apparent, as here “the boy on the screen” is literally her son. Is this poem about a boy traumatized by violence on television, or about a woman’s fragmented connections between her own pain, and the pain of others—her

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ART

Where is Silas?

‘Where is Silas’, the new book published

by Laurence King, is a collection of art, design, illustration, creative writing and photography curated by Silas and Maria. It features exclusive pieces by the people who have been working with and for the label since its beginnings in 1998 - influenced by their namesake and mentor, legendary maverick Silas Holmes. The book seeks not only to answer the question of its title, ‘Where is Silas?’, but also to carry the spirit of what he stood for and what he means to those who knew him, celebrating the life and loves of this illusive character.

Silas and Maria Silas and Maria began its life as a small mens and womenswear label in 1998, and has since grown into an internationally distributed brand balancing commercial success with critical acclaim. Since its inception, Silas has collaborated with artists and designers, both in terms of creating their collection and through a range of special projects manifested in the form of catalogues, stickers, brochures, an interactive website and dolls.

Ben Sansbury “Having met Russell and Sofia (silas owners) at Slam City Skates years and

years ago I started doing graphics for ‘Holmes’ they’re previous brand and precursor to Silas. When they left Slam City to start Silas I continued working with them more and more - doing art direction and design producing: Tee’s, prints, patterns, catalogues, websites, printed literature etc. etc. for them and am obviously working heavily with them. I had always wanted to do a book project for them and we had discussed the possibility of doing it before a few years back.

I wanted to do something that pulled together all the Silas contributors and gave us all an opportunity to create something beautiful that also had a reason for its existence (ie. A story not just a collection of images) we decided that the best idea was to chart the history and life of Silas Holmes.”

ART Where is Silas?

ART Where is Silas?

Silas Holmes Born sometime in the Forties to a beautiful midwestern prostitute, grew up on the road. As a young adult he consorted with the luminaries of the San Francisco City Lights scene and the beatniks of Greenwich Village, gave poetry readings with Allen Ginsberg and played clarinet with John Coltrane. At weekends on Ken Kesey’s ranch, Holmes became friendly with the San Bernadino Hells Angels, and some of their shadier friends.

Drifting into organised crime and political activism, Silas again travelled across the continent to New York. Always illusive, he is rumoured to have been involved with the Weathermen, the Yippies and the Black Panthers, but leaves no evidence of his involvement. Even his rumoured role as a minor player in Andy Warhol’s much filmed and photographed Factory appears to be undocumented.

Travelling to Europe, Silas continued to paint, write, create and inspire all those whose paths he crossed. In 1994, he came to London to start work on the creation of a fashion label in collaboration with Slam City Skates’ Sophia Prantera and Russell Waterman.

Carrying his surname, ‘Holmes’ became a cult success but in 1998, around the time Silas vanished, Prantera and Waterman chose to leave Slam and set up their own company. Through this new company they produced the fashion label Silas, using the first name of their friend and mentor, hoping he would soon return and continue working with them. Silas has not returned but Silas, the label has flourished. It has built up a solid reputation and achieved cult status.

ART Where is Silas?

Side Note

Credits:

‘Where is Silas?’ is an artbook with contributions by the creative people behind the label Silas and Maria. Please do not mistake this for a fashion catalogue which it is not. You will get an exceptional piece of printed matter (acutally it’s two) with the styles and visuals that Silas and Maria has been so highly acclaimed for.

Art Direction and Design: Ben Sansbury Edited by: Sofia Prantera, Ben Sansbury and Russell Waterman Format: 1x 192 pages clothbound - CMYK w/ special colours 1x 46 pages perfectbound - B&W 1x Clothbound case w/ CMYK belly band Date: published in October 2003 by Laurence King (ISBN 1856693708)

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FASHION

MetroPop: Munich Sneaker Scene If you think that Munich doesn’t fit too well into this list of sneaker capitals you are 100% correct. The question is – does it have to fit? Is it preferable to be living in a sneaker metropolis? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?

Let us begin with the positive side: there are sneaker specialty stores, the important clothing lines have at least one outlet there (which will get the collaboration models), there is a high number of tourists from sneaker-loving countries that are setting standards in regards of what they are wearing in the street and requesting in the shops, and there is a good chance that you’ll meet people who share your interest and who are more than willing to talk to you about it. There is some sort of a sneaker culture present.

There are negative aspects, as well: everyone knows the sneaker specialty stores, boutiques, and release dates so you have direct competition when ‘hunting’ for a ltd. model, the tourists from sneakerloving countries often plan their trips in accordance with release dates for ltd. models (= more competition), the bigger market might also draw more resellers to your city (= even more competition), and, finally, the number of releases might not run parallel with your financial capabilities.

What about living in Munich then, a

non-sneaker capital. Of course Munich is missing most of the advantages like having sneaker specialty stores or boutiques where the owners are buddies with the street wear dons (Bape, Goodenough, Recon, Stussy, Supreme, etc.). This means no Stussy Huaraches, no Stash Air Maxes, no Supreme Dunks, no Undercover Vans will ever appear in any of the local shops. Not too many tourists from sneaker-loving countries visit Munich and when they do they wouldn’t probably be looking for sneakers. So, no high standards in regards of what they are wearing nor in what they are requesting. And will you meet a lot of people who share your interest? Not in the street, unless you have a couple of weeks time to look for them.

However, there is some sort of a sneaker culture present in Munich. Things are a bit more difficult, though. Most of the sneaker stores here are run by people who either have a business- or sports background. Not many of them will understand why an Atmos (suggested)

FASHION MetroPop: Munich Sneaker Scene

FASHION FASHION Munich Sneaker MetroPop: Munich Scene Sneaker Scene

Air Max 1B might be so appealing. And after doing the math they will probably come to the conclusion that an Air Max Plus will be more profitable – no need to do the phone calls to Nike then. The other sources for sneakers in Munich are fashion stores which have widened their spectrum to sneakers. Problem is, most sneakers that are fashionable in Munich (or Germany) might not correspond with the tastes of a sneaker head. You can literally get hundreds of colours for the Puma Mostro, Speed Cat, and so forth.

Ok, this might not sound too great for Munich. However, there are people who do get what they want and who know where to get it. The fact that ltd. models are not available will let you get more creative. Suddenly you have friends all over the globe, exchanging Euro Footlocker Exclusives for Artist Series. You

will make phone calls to Hong Kong and Singapore. You’ll see yourself running to shops that you usually wouldn’t set foot in, to get shoes that you laugh at – because they are so readily available.

Not in L.A., New York, or Tokyo though.

But the biggest advantage is this one: if Munich ever sees exclusives, there is no need to get hectic. No resellers, no tourists, not too many other sneaker heads in front of you. No lines. If you are lucky (and the model is too bright or unacceptable to the regular buyers) you might even cop a pair at a discount.

Our experiences tell us that it doesn’t really matter where you live. If you are collecting sneakers you will always find ways to get the pair you are looking for.

Be reasonable, though, and don’t follow the easiest ways (ebay and resellers).

Get connected, travel, meet people,

FASHION MetroPop: Munich Sneaker Scene

exchange and trade, and talk to your local stores. Try to establish a sneaker scene. Get some of your friends to join you. Maybe your non sneaker captial will become one through your efforts.

At beinghunted here in Munich, we are working on it.

Not to be missed in Munich: Mighty Weeny, Siegesstrasse (Schwabing) huge collection of new and vintage adidas, Nike, Puma, etc.

Kickz, Feilitzschstrasse (Schwabing) gets ltd. edition adidas, Nikes, Euro exclusives adidas Originals, Hohenzollernstrasse (Schwabing) - no explanation necessary Pool, Kreuzstrasse (City Center) top Nike and adidas accounts Doubleight, Eisenmannstrasse (City Center) ltd. edition adidas, Nikes, Euro exclusives

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Interview

Bård Edlund Whom is it useful what you do? i don’t think my art is important to very many people. in fact, i probably have a smaller audience now than i did five years ago. but my art is absolutely crucial to myself, and i suppose that’s enough.

Where do you look for the inspiration? i don’t really look for it; it’s everywhere. sometimes i convert something that happens to me into an image. sometimes it’s a song or a world event that gets me going. lately i’ve also been drawing inspiration from my own poetry -- i’ll write something and then i’ll make an image months later that is sort of based on what i wrote. this often happens after i find a new meaning behind the original idea.

Which is your favourite season? my favorite thing is the idea of seasons. i wouldn’t like one without the others. i like that things change.

Does it coincide with your most productive period? seasons don’t affect that as much as time of day. i do almost all my work at night, and i’ve never made anything good at 9am.

Blondes or dark hair girls? yes please, both! (ok, maybe i have a slight preference for dark hair).

Interview

Bård Edlund

What do you do to pay your lease?

What do you think about man?

i do design and illustration for a large news organization.

i think all people have the potential to be good people. the way that we organize our world hinders the objective sometimes. but the question is kind of like “what do you think about water?” you know, it’s great to drink and shower in, but it sucks if you’re drowning.

What time do you get up in the morning? just in time to walk to work by 11am. on the weekends, i sleep well into the afternoon if i can.

What kind of music do you prefer listening? right now i’m listening to Paul Westerberg. i like a lot of rock music with good lyrics, and some singer/songwriter stuff. my favorite is Mark Eitzel. i also like a lot of experimental things, including modern Norwegian jazz.

Is it anything you have never done but you absolutely wanna do it? there are still a lot of places in this world i would like to visit. and i would like to accomplish something artistically as close to my potential as possible. it would be nice to get recognized for it, too.

Is it anything you have done but you absolutely mustn’t ?

What do you think about politics?

lie.

in short: everything is going to hell and our votes seem to only affect the speed at which we will reach the destination.

American politics make me want to cry.

Where do you believe?

What do you think about planet Earth? it’s an exceedingly unlikely opportunity that i’m afraid we’re wasting. it’s pretty damn good compared to most other planets though.

where? everywhere and nowhere. i strongly believe in a number of things and ideas; god is not one of them.

Where do you hide your money when you stay in the hotel ? i don’t really hide it. i leave it out in

Interview

Bård Edlund

the open. my girlfriend always tells me i should hide it “because you never know.” i figure, if anyone stole something, it would almost certainly be room service people, and i don’t think they would do that, because they could lose their jobs over it. room service people usually can’t afford to lose their jobs. besides, if someone stole my money they probably needed it more than i did. that doesn’t mean i wouldn’t be pissed off; it’s just a sobering fact.

What kind of tools do you use while working(software, hardwares, materials, etc) i use a pc with a wacom drawing tablet, rhino 3D modeling software, photoshop and painter, among other things.

Which are your favourite web sites? sorabji.com, metafilter.com, gawker.com, ftrain.com, themorningnews.org

Interview Tell us your typical working day. i get up and go to work at 11am. i work in a newsroom that can get pretty frantic. it’s a fast-paced environment where i can get several dozens of small design assignments in the course of a day. other times i work on longer-term things for a whole day. it all depends on the workflow. i design everything from page layout and special reports to small info-graphics and illustrations for stories. after my official job is over at 7pm, i go home and have dinner and spend some time relaxing -- then i start working on personal artwork at 10 or 11 and usually work until 3am or so. this work includes digital images, music, website design, video editing... anything creative.

Bård Edlund

Which are the first three things you keep near your computer? a cup of tea. one or several CDs i’m listening to. my electric guitar.

Do you wash your hands after have been in toilet (WC)? yes, always. mostly to avoid disgusting the people around me.

Which is the imprecation or the curse you use most? hmm... probably the sound “bah!!!” which means absolutely nothing. but it sounds really funny when i say it. it started as a joke but now i say it naturally. beyond that, you can never go wrong with “fuck.”

If you want to know more about this artist, please visit this website:

www.edlundart.com

Interview

Marguerite Sauvage Whom is it useful what you do?

I just hope it’s useful. I want to bring happiness to people who see my pictures.

Where do you look for the inspiration?

Everywhere from street to magazines trough souvenirs.

Which is your favourite season?

I just don’t likee rain, but each season as her value.

Does it coincide with your most productive period?

Hum I think sun is a very powerful source of energy, and softness too, but it also incites me to profit of the weather, not very productive.

Blondes or dark hair girls?

Pink headed.

What do you do to pay your lease?

I work.

What time do you get up in the morning?

It depends but not too early.

What kind of music do you prefer listening?

Bossa Nova and girls’ voices.

Interview

Marguerite Sauvage

What do you think about politics?

I quite can’t do anything.

What do you think about planet Earth?

How beautiful she is and how often we forgot.

What do you think about man?

I love otters.

Is it anything you have never done but you absolutely wanna do it?

Where do you hide your money when you stay in the hotel ?

In my suitcase, not really hiden.

What kind of tools do you use while working(software, hardwares, etc) Photoshop, Outlook Express, Media Player and msn.

Tell us your typical working day I work at home, so my working day is often interrupted by friends’ visits or private occupations

I want to save otters.

and it can last from 9 am too 2 am throuh week end.

Is it anything you have done but you absolutely mustn’t ?

I have my computer in a room and my drawing table in other. I share my time trough both.

I have’nt killed or hurted anybody, so I can say “nothing”.

Where do you believe?

Where: everywhere, specially on beach or in nature.

In what : in something, but what, I don’t know.

Computer is also a mean to do my administrative tasks.

So my working day’s schem is very “fluctuant”.

Which are the first three things you keep near your computer?

My phone, my cactus and my glasses.

Interview

Marguerite Sauvage

Do you wash your hands after have been in toilet (WC)?

Yes, ever and even before eating and after taking the metro.

Which is the imprecation or the curse you use most?

“Merdouille” and “argh” , I’m so polite.

Do you like to praise or insult anybody?

No, but sometimes it’s difficult.

If you want to know more about this artist, please visit this website:

www.margueritesauvage.com

Interview

Marguerite Sauvage

Interview

Thomas Schostok Whom is it useful what you do?

Everybody or nobody... I don¹t know, and honestly: I don¹t care.

Where do you look for the inspiration?

I don¹t really “look” for inspiration. It¹s always present. On days when there is none, i don¹t work.

Which is your favourite season? it¹s hard to say. i love summer because it makes more sense to wear elvis-sunglasses then. but i wear them anyway so i¹m not dependent on summer. spring is cool, too.

Does it coincide with your most productive period? i never thought about that point. but i¹m sure it doesn¹t, because then i will do other stuff. i will not hang around with my computer when there is sunshine. I do my best designs when i¹m angry or frustrated and that¹s not easy in summer, so i think the most productive time is a really ugly winter or a damn hot summer.

Blondes or dark hair girls? both!!! ohh, and don’t forget the kinky red hair girls...

What do you do to pay your lease? i make websites or printed stuff for really serious people who can accept that i have this “beasty soul” in my chest...

Interview

Thomas Schostok

What time do you get up in the morning? why do you want to know that???? let me think: it should be around 9.

What kind of music do you prefer listening?

The most time of the day, I hear songs from Elvis. Mostly live records from the ¹70, the time where he got fat and forgot the lyrics. The other time I hear songs from Barry White, also from the ¹70. It gets me in the mood for making “love”.

What do you think about politics? politician are amazing: it¹s a crowd of people who pretend to work for the benefit of the society, but the way they do it makes me think that they do it for their own pleasure and nothing else. they are so egocentric... and the worst thing is: the society does not at all benefit from their actions. you can¹t trust them. trust no one!

What do you think about planet Earth? it¹s not such a great place. it could be better, far better. i mean, i like the nature and all of that stuff, but the people are really shit. not all, but at least most of them.

What do you think about man? i don¹t know where the fatal tendency to treat others badly comes from, but it is there. that¹s a bad thing. if anyone would treat eachother the way he would like to be treated, we would have no wars, no problems, just peace. it¹s so simple and it was said by so many philosophers before. i can¹t understand why nobody acts that way.

Is it anything you have never done but you absolutely wanna do it? no, i usually do what i like to do. hmm, maybe surfing (on shores) i never tried.

Is it anything you have done but you absolutely mustn’t ? not that i could rember at the moment...

Where do you believe? in simple rules as the one above.

Where do you hide your money when you stay in the hotel ? in my socks!

Interview

Thomas Schostok What kind of tools do you use while working(software, hardwares, etc) a mac, photoshop, acrobat, freehand, glue, paint, paper, a scanner and a pack of playboys.

Do you like to praise or insult anybody? no, not really. just for fun. or wait, maybe this is a good moment to insult the bush government. Ok, that¹s it. i did my insult.

Tell us your typical working day i get up, i work till 16.00 and then i do “good stuff”, art, design, whatever, then i go back home and go to sleep. inbetween i drink as much coffee as i can and eat cake or steak.

Which are the first three things you keep near your computer? some paper, a pencil, a mouse and the 2nd edition of the book: “90% of all assholes are clients”.

Do you wash your hands after have been in toilet (WC)? no, of course not! it would spoil this wonderful smell of urine...

Which is the imprecation or the curse you use most? i have not much reason to curse, so i can¹t remember.

If you want to know more about this artist, please visit this website:

www.ths.nu

Interview

Thomas Schostok

DESIGN

Please be Careful This is the opening “address” I presented at the 8th Annual Packaging and Brand Design conference organized by the Institute for International Research held in New York City on June 22, 2004.

How much money do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Have you ever taken an anti-depressant? Have you ever bounced a check? Have you ever taken a pill to enhance your sexual performance? Have you ever had sex on a cellphone? On a computer? Yes? No? Why? Why not?

You may not believe this, but in 1967— yes 1967—a year when many people in this room were not even born, Marshall McLuhan described a culture of universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and society’s need to know. The traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions are no longer private and here’s the real catch—they are no longer erasable. Welcome to the 21st century and our new, google-ized world. We have reached a point where our personal histories… when we go to the bank, when we pay a toll to go over a bridge, when we buy Pepperidge Farm cookies or Dial soap or Kraft Macaroni & Cheese or Thermasilk shampoo, when we charge a hotel room or rent a car…all of this is permanently recorded and identifiable. What are

the ramifications of this new common, available knowledge, now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting result of technological advancement?

According to McLuhan, one of the results of this open-network of information and revelation is that our character is no longer simply shaped by our families. The whirlpool of information fathered by this new techno-society far surpasses the influence that our moms and dads used to bring to bear. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are living in sensory overload: we determine our beauty factor by comparing ourselves to airbrushed super-models and surgically enhanced celebrities, our intelligence by answering questions correctly on Jeopardy, our fear

DESIGN Please be Careful

By Debbie Millman

factor by considering whether or not to be covered in maggots while we eat rat feces, our sports acumen by watching and worshipping steroid pumped ear biters, gamblers and murderers, our bravery by war-obsessed leaders, and our leadership by sex-obsessed presidents.

It is a really perplexing time in our little corner of the universe. This lack of personal privacy and mass consumption of information has changed the way we relate, perceive and live. While we may be lucky in that we can google “American presidents” and in .6 seconds get 1,890,000 results, we can also google “xanax” and find 760 places to buy this pharmaceutical illegally. Ultimately access to information becomes both a privilege and a responsibility. I am not sure we quite get this yet.

“Hmmmm,” you may be saying. How does this have anything to do with packaging? Why is this being talked about at a conference about brand design? The answer is actually relatively easy. Packaging and brand design is not just about design anymore. There is no more “mass market” in which to target a product.

There is no one demographic picture of the planet. I saw Grant McCracken speak two weeks ago, and he discussed how while lifestyle typologies expanded to first 3, then 6, then 9 and then 12 typologies—there is now too much vari-

ation and we have reached categorical exhaustion.

As a result, I have come to believe that the term brand design ultimately undermines the job we do as brand consultants, marketers, designers and strategists. Brand design is not only about design. It is the perfect, meticulously crafted balance of cultural anthropology, psychology, marketing and creativity. It is about cultural anthropology because what we do in our culture—whether it is an obsession with reality television or weapons of mass destruction, this has a major impact on the brands around us. It is about psychology because if we don’t fundamentally understand the brain circuitry of our audience and really know what they are thinking—and why they are thinking it!—we will not be able to solicit their imagination. It is about marketing because understanding the marketplace and the messaging impacts and influences perception. It is about creativity because if we don’t create a pretty package, then consumers won’t notice it and buy it. Yeah, right. What is the lead gene in this equation?

Rather than call it brand design, I believe is it more about brand composition. Brands are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social

DESIGN Please be Careful

By Debbie Millman

consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, and unaltered.

Any knowledge of culture is impossible now without an understanding of the implications of “brand.” We have entered a day and age where brand is an extension of human facility, whether it be psychic or psychological. Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass. Computer technology created globalization. And now brand technology creates culture. Our culture has gotten to a place in our collective history where it is almost entirely composed of brands. Everything we consume—even the most basic commodities like water and salt—are brands. Experiences are brands. People are brands. Our role models are people, and thus our role models have become brands. It is circular, it is insidious and it isn’t going to stop. The more information we have—the more access to information we have, the more capacity we will have to particpate in the composition of our human experiences. And for every human experience there will now be a corresponding brand.

No-logo-ers like Naomi Klein think this isn’t so good. Pro-logo-ers like Wally Olins is fine with it. I think they are both missing the eye of the hurricane in this debate. Whether it is good or bad is really just an attempt to understand the condition and judge it. Determining whether

is it good or bad is not going to stop or encourage it in any way. I believe that the full ramification of this type of cultural evolution is yet to be fully understood.

We are enveloped by brands. They form a seamless web around us. What are the ramifications of this totally branded society? Branded relationships? Branded sexuality? What are the ramifications of a branded government? Brands are now just about anything you can get away with.

Brands, by changing the culture in which we participate, evoke a unique composition of sensory perceptions. The extension of any one of these sensory perceptions alters the way we think and act—and the way we perceive the world.

When these perceptions change, people change. I contend that brand composition has more impact on our culture than any other medium.

And guess what? We are the composers, the arbiters, the instigators of that medium. It is our practices that are now creating the perception of the world we live in. But as Montaigne said, “The thing of it is, we must live with the living.” And living in our future—from this view anyway, seems dangerous. Perhaps, as A.H. Whitehead said, “it is the business of the future to be dangerous.” But as we sit on the precipice of a branded universe, I

DESIGN Please be Careful

By Debbie Millman

ask us all, I ask myself, to be careful. As we compose our branded stories, as we weave our myths and hope and dreams into our brands, as we project our fantasies and lusts, needs and demands into our brands, let’s remember our frailty and strengths and foibles and failings. Let’s remember our humanity. And let’s try and be careful. Please. Be careful.

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Featured Article

The Olympians Flying in the face of adversity, I thought it would be fun to engage in some unapologetic hero-worship. I had been thinking about the Greek Gods, and musing about various designers and wondering where they might fit in the pantheon of design gods. Who, today, is our Zeus? Who is Hades?

I couldn’t do it alone, so I teamed up with Armin. We started with a list of 50 which we had to whittle down to 12. It was very, very difficult and even between the two of us, well … I won’t say we fought, but in the final round we had to do a little horse trading (I’ll give you x if you give me y). I have no doubt that we will be lambasted and skewered for some of our choices, but that’s half the fun.

I’ve started with a basic outline of the Greek Gods, but for the purposes of this exercise I’m ignoring the confusing incestuous relationships and some of the more sordid details of their biographies and skills. I am however listing some basic relationships just to give you an idea of where and how they rank—also, if you think of them as potential designers, it’s pretty funny.

On Mt. Olympus there lived the twelve Olympians, the Dodekatheon. Descended from the Titans, they were ruled by, of course, Zeus.

Zeus, the king of the gods: supremely powerful, jealous, the god of the sky, weather and thunder; he ruled the other gods, and the world, with his lightning bolt. in this page: Paula Scher

Featured Article The Olympians

By Marian Bantjes

Hera, the queen of the gods, wife of Zeus, protector of marriage but once responsible for a revolt against her husband. She is the most powerful of the goddesses.

Poseidon, god of the sea, Zeus’ brother and the second most powerful god. He was of a quarrelsome nature, covetous of earthly kingdoms and boasted to have created the horse, which was sacred to him.

Apollo is the son of Zeus, and is his most likely successor. He was the god of music, light and truth among other things, and despite being noble and skilled, also evoked fear and awe. The phrases “know thyself!” and “nothing in excess!” were always on his lips.

Athena was the daughter of Zeus, having hatched, full-grown—and fully armed—from his forehead. She was fierce and brave, but a protector, not an aggressor. She was the goddess of the city, handicrafts and agriculture, and was known for wisdom, reason and purity.

Ares, the son of Zeus and Hera, was disliked by both parents as well as most of the other immortals. The god of war, he loved battle for its own sake, delighting in the ransacking of villages and the slaughter of men.

Hestia, Zeus’ sister, was the protector of the family, social stability and ideals. She never took part in wars or disputes. She

was also, oddly, offered the first victim of every public sacrifice.

Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was miraculously conceived and arose from the sea foam, riding to shore on a giant scallop (right, her!).

Hermes, the son and messenger of Zeus. He was the fastest of the gods with winged sandals and helmet. He was also the god of thieves and of commerce.

Artemis, Apollo’s twin sister, was the goddess of wild nature, a huntress—precocious, confident and self-sufficient.

Hephaestus, the son of Zeus and Hera, was the god of fire and the forge, and was the smith and armorer of the gods.

He was ugly and lame, but kind and peace-loving.

Those are the official 12 Olympians. And then there is Hades.

Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, chose not to live on Mt. Olympus, and took instead, the underworld, ruling over the dead. A very important god, but an outsider, he seldom ventured above ground. He was also the god of wealth.

OK, cut to the chase. Immediately we realized that matching personalities of the top 12 designers with the Greeks would be impossible. But we did really need to have at least a Zeus figure, a Poseidon, an Apollo and a Hades. The rest, make

Featured Article The Olympians

By Marian Bantjes

your own comparisons. Our gods are all living, and we eliminated those more closely associated with type design or illustration (sorry Matthew and Seymour).

The six Olympian goddesses also became a problem, but we felt we couldn’t sacrifice greatness for equal opportunity, so our Mt. Olympus is dominated by men (although …).

What makes a design god? Fame + Power + Influence + Design Icons Created + Historical Significance + Longevity + “Would you be thrilled to death to sit next to each of these at a dinner table?” + “Would you put an epithet between their first and last names?” (a couple of worthy designers failed these last two tests).

So, without further ado, and with our apologies to everyone …

ZEUS Paula Scher: god of all gods. Rules from her domain in Pentagram, ancient house of gods and demi-gods. The powerful word is her weapon. She has been resurrected at least thrice, and her work has touched us, formed us and awed us in nearly every arena for decades. She has laid waste with Constructivism then rebuilt with a breath of life. Her hand has written on every country in the world, she is all around us.

POSEIDON Milton Glaser: the god of wit and colour, he is much beloved by the people and all the other immortals. He is actually one of the last of the Titans, at the height of his power and influence in the 60s and 70s. His love for his domain resulted in a worldly, lovely icon—imitated by many, surpassed by none. He holds honorary status at the head of the table.

His weapons are the pen and the brush.

APOLLO Stefan Sagmeister: The subversive god, god of surprises. His weapons, the pen and the pin. Despite his youth and relatively small body of miraculous works, his influence is enormous. The immortals both love and fear him. Immune to humanly tools, his body serves as a self-healing canvas. Temples to him currently outnumber any other god—for this he is also widely envied.

in this page: Milton Glaser

Featured Article The Olympians

By Marian Bantjes

incomplete manifesto, his colour is black, his weapon, Life Style, a very hefty book.

Massimo Vignelli: god of the grid, master of the letterform. He is the direct ancestor to many gods and demi-gods and holds a respected place in Olympus although his temples have grown scarce among mortals. To his expertise, the City that Never Sleeps is endowed, as he deciphered and depicted its transportation maze. Legend holds it that his artillery consisted of only five single, deadly typographic cliques.

David Carson: god of chaos. Widely credited with the invention of the illegible page layout, he is worshipped as a rebel. Disliked by many of the immortals but has a huge following of fervent acolytes. His weapon is the Ray Gun (deactivated), his weakness, reliability.

April Greiman: god of juxtaposition, she wields technology as her weapon, baring her body to its power without concern for mortals’ opinion. Her hair is known to disappear at the slightest of provocations. Long revered, now Made in Space, her future is uncertain.

THE REST Bruce Mau: A massive force, briefly of the house of Pentagram, now supreme ruler of his own god-dom. The region of Zone is one of his domains. He has the magical ability to win contests he doesn’t enter. His sermon from the mount is an

Peter Saville & Vaughan Oliver: Twin gods of music.

Saville, charismatic and attitudinal, teased the house of Pentagram briefly with his talent but it was not meant to be.

Acerbic simplicity and urban elegance emanate from his fingertips. Music, Fash-

in this page: Massimo Vignelli and David Carson

Featured Article The Olympians

By Marian Bantjes

ion and now a City are at his visualistic mercy. Oliver wields the random visual fragment and has done so for the most rocking of numeral and alphabetical pairings: 4AD and v23. With a preference for the organically handmade over digitally rendered creations his following exceeds that of his British domain.

Together, Saville and Oliver (along with compatriot Brody), ruled a music empire like no mortal can ever dream of.

Neville Brody: god of typographic expression. Widely acclaimed and venerated for his Face. He ignited a typographic wave with the Fuse of his deepest desires. Lord of the British during the two decades of the last millenium – and trying to regain control in the current one, despite his talk not being as mighty as his walk. Still remembered for his illustrious work for the most Macro of Medias.

Chip Kidd: god of books, his domain is the house of Knopf. Widely credited with awakening the book cover from the dead, he is a patron of photography and a bit of a visual trickster. His weapon is the visual pun, his weakness, the comic book. Cheese Monkeys shall forever haunt him as he wields his mighty pen.

Gert Dumbar: god of the avante garde. His domain is Studio Dumbar and his acolytes mostly European, with his largest temples being in Holland. A god of the cognoscenti, his work often

inuences through indirect routes. His magic skill is to balance sophistication with innovation. A god worthy of more sacriďŹ ce. in this page: Neville Brody and Chip Kidd

Featured Article The Olympians

By Marian Bantjes

HADES Rick Poynor: god of critique and wordsmithing. Not being a designer, he does not live on Mt. Olympus with the other gods, but rules instead over a kingdom of writers and critics. He gave life to the ever-watchful Eye, nurtured it to maturity then ceded its control. Presently, blogdom is his domain and observing his amusement. Mortal designers aspiring for their own deity eminence fear his decrees.

And that, my friends, ends this mythological exercise. Start crucifying.

Eye is one of the world’s best graphic design magazine, a quarterly journal of provocative, thoughtful and informed writing together with an eye-popping selection of extraordinary visual material. It features photography, typography, art direction and design - for multimedia, advertising, publishing and the Web - from the world’s leading practitioners, taking an independent, critical look at the social and cultural roles of visual communicators.

www.eyemagazine.com

Born on-line – currently growing off-line – in September of 2002, Speak Up is an author-based, reader-supported community devoted to graphic design open to conversation and dialogue. It stresses and questions the importance of the profession in our culture. Speak Up challenges those who practice inside the field, in hope of more accountability for their actions and in light of the responsibility we all have as communicators. Its mission is to further the graphic design profession from within with the goal of creating a stronger and clearer sense of what our role is as professionals endowed with the duty of creating social, cultural, political and/or economical communications based on our ability and obligation to do so in a visually clear and comprehensible manner.

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DESIGN

Asking the Tough Questions You wouldn’t know it from looking here at the front page, but there’s trouble brewing in the Book Club. A gauntlet is on the floor, having been thrown by Mr. Rudy VanderLans, proprietor of Emigre and of course editor of “Rant,” who writes: “Where are the designers who align themselves, through their work, with their ideologies? The discussions on Speak Up often rage about the big political issues of today, such as media consolidation, corporate scandals, American imperialism, war, the environment, etc. Opinions galore about important issues. But they always seem to be separate from the work that designers create. … Why is no one willing to ask the tough questions?”

What I want to know from you the general readership is, what are the tough questions? What are the questions that you ask yourself on the drive to the office? Are they political questions, creative questions, pragmatic questions, ethical questions? How do you make the tough decisions—do you have any kind of political/ethical/practical guidelines or principles thought out beforehand, or do you confront situations as they come along?

I don’t believe that there are no tough questions. Nor does the likelihood that the answers are complicated or vague or unsatisfactory make the questions any less important. (As James Thurber said, “I’d rather know some of the questions

than all of the answers.”) But I also don’t believe that the tough questions are solely political. The best way I can think to put it, in good old Jeffersonian everyone-be-free-and-also-accountable terms, is: What do you choose to be responsible for?

In other words, what are your values as a designer? And—I think this is a little what Rudy is getting at—are your values as a designer separated from your values as a citizen?

Not your usual Friday fare, but someone’s gotta pick up that glove. Several more paragraphs of my own ranting, which you’re all free to disregard, are in the link below: I do not agree with Rudy’s characterization of the Speak Up discussions. Most of the raging seems to me to be about design issues (esp. branding), design politics (the, uh, AIGA), design software (aka the Shoot Me Now debates), design culture (Who Wants to be a Rock Star), and design taste (in which someone, ahem, actually defended the Dunkin Donuts logo). No one is wondering when Kenneth Lay or Ari Fleischer is going to show up and weigh in with their views—

DESIGN Asking the Tough Questions

By Sam Potts

discussions are pretty much about design and designers’ lives.

But more to the point, I don’t agree with the implication behind Rudy’s comment: that designers don’t very well put their money where their mouth is (a rather ironic metaphor, since what a waste of money), that we talk an ideological line but don’t walk it in our actual production.

The implication is that designers are hypocritical. I don’t agree because I don’t think it’s a question of hypocrisy.

Some form of idealism is at work to think that political ideologies and design practices should be harmonious. I leave it to you all to define more precisely that form of idealism is (pie-in-the-sky, optimistic, foolhardly, compelling, etc).

The hypocrisy game is an easy one. It’s easy to demand that a designer with a poltical opinion should be making antiBush posters on their own dime (because of course if you’re a designer you’re definitely anti-Bush, right?), or that if you have a shred of feeling about forests, you should be spec’ing only recycled paper.

Remember when you were in school and were supposed to decide if you’d take a job designing cigarette packaging?

Quelle facile dilemma!

These are pretty easy and almost always polarizing shots to take and prove nothing about the real moral ambiguity of design practice. But the presumptuousness behind them (that designers are liberal, or always in charge of budgets and therefore production decisions,

or that designers even feel professionally obligated to care about politics) is transparent. It seems to me simplistic (in a bad way) and kind of absurd to argue that if a designer cares about politics, they should produce poltical work (only polticial work? mostly political? 38% political? Who’s setting the standard, by the way?). It’s simplistic on the level of the reality that many designers are not in a position to do a lot of picking and choosing of clients. It’s absurd because who has only one or two or five things they care about? I could list about fifty things that I care about and want to design for without taking a breath—am I therefore professionally obligated to go out and work only in those areas? I do not much care for religion—does that mean I should never do any work for a religious organization? (Maybe I’d learn something from such a project, which would be good fo my black little soul.)

And who exactly am I to say what you should care about and what kind of projects you should be producing? It’s rather an evangelical position (not to mention undemocratic in the generic sense), but then I always thought the worst kind of evangelicals were the political ones.

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DESIGN

Hunting the horny backed toad As the snow falls heavy outside, the wind so fierce it drives the flakes horizontal on the air, i think: this is such a soft thing, this thing, this thing of making and doing, producing out of thin air the objects and forms, images and words that all whisper of endeavour, of trial and error, failure, yes (always), of that micro-cosmology, charting the constellations of the human heart. what is an idea? is it that which contributes to our humanity, a nervous question, a thought harnessed to some intent, pointed, probing, taking this time we have and forming it, trying against all hope, against physics, to shape it into something that possesses a certain permanence, even if only for one moment? is it, in the end, a rejection of this duality that seems to bind us, in favour of some kind of delicate balance? in answering questions with questions, it would seem a point is proven: an idea is a question itself.

So, questions: this or that? this against that? this and that? what comes of adding two things together? just two things? or something else altogether? why? why is the sky blue? not, what physics, chemistry and biology contribute to our perceptions of blueness in the sky, but, why is the sky blue? here, in an unfortunate way (because it does not conform to the rational, but instead demands us to savour the joy of it) is where we start to investigate the ineffable.

I’m not talking about mystery and magic,

although they do have their part, especially mystery (and, of course, love), but that which is possessed in the ineffable: the sheer joy of observing the vaulted heavens all around us and realising that all i can do is to get on and carry on, get on with these things and these things, letting them get on with getting out of me, ripping off that caul that grows through life over our sight and laying it all out bare, saying: come on, i am human and these things are of human endeavour so why wouldn’t i be interested? why wouldn’t they be interesting? scalpling

DESIGN Hunting the horny backed toad

By Graham Wood

out the critical instinct, transplanting scepticism for intent, infusing our biology with the necessity to always wonder (full of wonder) why.

it out may just be the only way (maybe there is an only way? and the choice is whether or not to take it?) to realise the idea.

That’s the first bit: then comes work. what happens in those grey cubes between the designated hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. is not work. it is ‘occupation’. filling time. filling that time then, not now, or now, or being in time, but frozen, impatiently waiting to be set free. so, there is the very notion of ‘freedom’, a construct to tempt the imagination that perhaps one day, one day … but what about work and life? another balance, work as life: the possibility that every moment may well be the one to act—or at the very least, having the choice to act at any moment, rather than fixed to those designated hours, this calendar, trapped, fettered, neutered by dates and by time; but, however, look there-back there-it came and went: one word which sits here at the heart of this, a key. choice. soft, gentle, immediate and contemplative. dangerous. the power thing inherent in an idea-for all ideas are neutral, surely, dormant and of equal value-yet given breath through the application of choice. the exercise of choice is the beating heart of an idea, inseparable one from the other, choice the engine driving forward motion (at that one moment), choice blind to right or wrong and only obeying intent. dangerous because so definite and unavoidable, consequence the punishment or reward, but taking that chance step with fatal choice to bring

Ideas come from everywhere. it’s no mystery. look at everything, listen to everything, research everything, read everything, go everywhere as often as you can: you know you never can, but you keep trying, in the same way that your heart keeps beating. that’s where ideas come from, and it doesn’t matter, because if an idea is just an idea, it’s nothing. yet the something that resides in the having, the getting of an idea holds a fascination beyond any worth, poised unsaid, the shadow of the real question, the conversation around the thing, never about the why of thing: yet there is an answer. it’s just that the real question is never asked: so, not, ‘where do ideas come from?’, but ‘why did you do that?’. there is always a why.

It’s all so seductive, this thinking-in-garlands, rapt in it’s own self-fullingness, circular to the point of negation. where do ideas come from? from my mind, out of my head. then i do something about it. that’s it. it takes what it takes: there is no mystery, none at all, so little that there’s hardly anything worth talking about, yet the fascination with the question provokes multitudes. why is that? why ‘where do ideas come from?’ at all: perhaps it’s not the question itself that is interesting, but, rather, why it exists. again, all propositions are of equal value-in itself, a thought, if worth think-

DESIGN Hunting the horny backed toad

By Graham Wood

ing, is worth voicing. it may not be worth anything once voiced, may not contribute anything, may be evil, or sad, or transgressive. but the thought is not the act, and may be the one thought that urgently needs expressing. circumstance, emotion may prevent that expression, but necessity demands it. it is somewhere in this crux that we can find fear.

Here’s an idea: don’t be afraid. not in the first instance, the moment when the choice to open the mouth is taken and there’s no going back. constantly make one choice, the same choice. speak. one step at a time, limited, careful, but always in motion, always acting. an idea is a lonely thing: no one cares for it but it’s parent, and you need to feed and nurture it, devote yourself to it if you want it to grow and take it’s own way in the world. what this requires is the conquering of fear, even to the point that fear is forgotten, gone completely, not even an instinct: when this happens, ideas come from everywhere.

Oohhh! ideas: they come, they come from, yes, they’re coming, spat out fast and hard like so much fuckmuck, everywhere you look an idea some other idea, another one come off brought off fetched off with business, the rubbing business peristaltic, not one no none of them at allworth very much at all if you don’t mind me, don’t mind this application of value to this somehow unsaid unspoken yet very well known yes wellobserved and summated i’ll tell you precisely looked at and nailed down pinned down and inter-

rogated good bad cop style until it confesses sobbing ‘i did it did it i did iit’ ‘did what?’ ‘wasted your time that’s what’ and they all leave the room lost interest because there was no contrast only grey in shades like distance or fog snowfall a christmas present considered against the music of water droplets considered like life or death at that moment and accepted with an ‘ohhh you shouldn’t of’ and you go off wondering (but thank god you can still) Where do ideas come from? from thoughts about things, conversations about those thoughts about things, and activity that realises the objects of those thoughts and conversations. it is true to say that ideas come from everywhere, but it’s a simple truth, not a mystery. the most mysterious thing about ideas is also the most practical: ideas require work. the mystery inherent in this work, this effort, is something to do with the simple sitting-down-and-getting-on with-it of an idea: for example, you have an idea to keep a diary, one page a day for 365 days. on the first day, there is an empty book. on the last day, there is a full book. what happens in between? you write a page a day. that’s all: but you have to do it. then, when the work is done, there’s the next idea. and the next: carrying on, never letting success or failure determine the worth of an idea, but rather ideas themselves being their own reward and the act of work confirming their necessity through the fact that it is done.

DESIGN Hunting the horny backed toad

By Graham Wood

Yet ideas do not fall out of the thin air. they do come from involvement, commitment, intent. again, effort, a willingness to make many attempts yet see only one bear fruit. an ability to reduce through analysis a welter of forms, propositions, approaches, and questions to their essence. an ability to know that with this thing that came from the idea, this object, there is also it’s reason, and that you know the reason, and that you can answer the question ‘why?’.

And still the wind is still churning the tiny snowflakes in a frenzied dance, teasing them with the promise of settling down to earth.

all of this has something to do with the moment, something to do with showing, or demonstrating, how things can flow unfettered and also unsung: all those lost or hidden things that were once ideas and are now finished objects, shelved, cheaper than they once were because no longer new, fresh, contemporary, but still ideas, still had, once, by someone somewhere who knew, who just really knew that this was the one, the very one and only and there would be no more, not one other … but time passes, passing on, assigning history to the moment, to the smallest thing, outweighing with distance, that subjectivity, that observation, that simple weight of words that culture slops on to the tiniest thing, the most simple of things, unbalancing the snapshot with the critical weight of the overfed mind.

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SPECIALISSUE THEDIRTYDOZEN T W E LV E S E L E C TEDARTISTSF ROMTHEWOR LDONASINGLE THEME:OCEAN

Thank You World.

Over an year ago we requested 100 designers and artist from all-over the world to realize a work on a single theme: Ocean.

We have received over 60 original works. Now, with the exit of this brandnew version of Suite72 we can’t publish all the 60 works, so we have selected just a dirty dozen of works.

We would like to apologize and say thank you! to all the artists not selected for publication, sorry guys, we hope you can understand us.

This special “DirtyDozen” will come back on issue 3 (january/february 2005),

we’re sending now invitations for the next theme (“Toys”), if you want to enter this “contest” and possibly see your work on Suite72, please use the “enter the Suite” form on our website. Please don’t send us any work if you haven’t received an official invite from us.

Artists Contacts

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Onozawa Yutaka 29 Japan cch27450@nyc.odn.ne.jp www1.odn.ne.jp/~cch27450

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

aimaru.I 27 Japan cueon@leto.eonet.ne.jp http://www.cueon.net/

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Bard Edlund Norway 26 edlund@edlundart.com http://www.edlundart.com/

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Desarmes Spain 33 desamers@jazzartistas.com www.desamers.com

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Irene Roggero italy 22 irene@creattivity.it www.creattivity.it

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Manuel Musilli 25 Italy manuel@digitalultras.com www.digitalultras.com

Artists Contacts

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Marguerite Sauvage 26 France margueritesauvage@wanadoo.fr http://www.margueritesauvage.com

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Pierluigi Longo Italy 34 pierlongo@tiscali.it www.spazio.org/arte/longo/longo1.html

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Name & Surname ................................

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Ratko Gregor Jagodic 29 Croatia gregor@kioskstudio.net www.kioskstudio.net

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Name & Surname ................................

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Rob Dunlavey 48 USA rob@robd.com www.robd.com

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Thomas Schostok unknown Germany 1@ths.nu www.ths.nu

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Name & Surname ................................

Age ...................................................

Nationality ......................................... email ................................................. website ..............................................

Jessica Kasper 25 USA jessica@jessicakasper.com www.jessicakasper.com

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Suite72.Ack “Suite72” and Suite72 logo are registered trademarks of Suite72.com; All rights reserved.

All trademarks and copyrights in this issue are recognised, and are acknowledged where possible. If we have failed to credit your copyright then do please contact us - we’re happy to correct and oversight.

Any material submitted is accepted on the basis of a worldwide right to publish in printed or electronic form.

Articles Copyrights “Are We Running Out of Names?” by Tony Spaeth (c)2004 IdentityWorks / Tony Spaeth - All rights reserved.

“Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll... and Print?” by Armin Vit (c)2004 SpeakUp / Armin Vit - All rights reserved.

“No Work? No Problem, Part I: Shaping Your Image” by Jason A. Tselentis (c)2004 SpeakUp / Jason A. Tselentis - All rights reserved.

“Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?” by William Drenttel (c)2004 DesignObserver / William Drenttel - All rights reserved.

“Anna Fowler” by Adriana de Barros (c)2004 Scene360 / Adriana de Barros - All rights reserved.

“Digital Poetry, Visual Media: Prospects and Pitfalls for new Practioners”

by Megan Sapnar (c)2004 Scene360 / Megan Sapnar - All rights reserved.

Contact Us You can contact us by e.mail at: info@suite72.com If you want to collaborate with our magazine or be featured as an artist on our issue themes please send us your personal site with samples of your works.

Don’t send us any work if you have not received an official invite from us.

Thank you very much for downloading Suite72.

“Where is Silas?” by Jörg Haas (c)2004 BeingHunted / Jörg Haas - All rights reserved.

“MetroPop: Munich Sneaker Scene” by Gail Anderson (c)2004 BeingHunted / Gail Anderson - All rights reserved.

“Please be Careful” by Debbie Millman (c)2004 SpeakUp / Debbie Millman - All rights reserved.

“The Olympians” by Marian Bantjes (c)2004 SpeakUp / Marian Bantjes - All rights reserved.

“Asking the Tough Questions” by Sam Potts (c)2004 SpeakUp / Sam Potts - All rights reserved.

“Hunting the horny backed toad” by Graham Wood (c)2004 SpeakUp / Graham Wood - All rights reserved.

All the other contents on this issue: (c)2004 Suite72/Sueo - All rights reserved.