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Dmitri Siegel Designing Our Own Graves Credit Where Credit Is Due...Or Not

Michael Bierut Designing Under the Influence Q&A

Alexandra Lange Games that have withstood the fads of fashion and television should look like it Criticism=Love

Steven Heller Confessions of a Frustrated Newspaper Lover Q&A

frequency is a annual conference on the trends and issues of the visual design practice through the voices of respected design writers, journalists and critics.

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Dmitri Siegel is currently the Executive Director of Marketing for Urban Outfitters where he oversees creative, marketing and e-commerce for the brand in North America. Siegel has published and lectured widely on the topics of design, technology and digital culture. His writing has been featured in Dot Dot Dot, ÉmigrÊ and Creative Review among others. His work was included in the National Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the International Biennale of Graphic Design. Siegel, a critic at the Rhode Island School of Design in the graduate program in Graphic Design earned his MFA in Graphic Design at Yale University.

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Dmitri Siegel

http://moviespictures.org/biography/Siegel,_Dmitri

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Designing Our Own Graves Dmitri Siegel A recent coincidence caught my eye while at the bookstore. A new book by Karim Rashid called Design Your Self was sitting on the shelf next to a new magazine from Martha Stewart called Blueprint which bore a similarly cheerful entreaty on its cover: “Design your life!” These two publications join Ellen Lupton’s recent DIY: Design It Yourself to form a sort of mini-explosion of literature aimed at democratizing the practice of design (never mind that, as Lupton has noted, Rashid’s book is actually more about designing his self than yours).

With the popularity of home improvement shows and self-help books, our society is positively awash in do-it-yourself spirit. People don’t just eat food anymore, they present it; they don’t look at pictures, they take them; they don’t buy T-shirts, they sell them. People are doing-it-themselves to no end. But to what end? The artist Joe Scanlan touches on the more troubling implications of the DIY explosion in his brilliantly deadpan piece DIY Coffin, which is essentially instructions for making a perfectly functional coffin out of an IKEA bookcase.

Scanlan’s piece accepts the basic assumption of Design Your Life and Design Your Self: that design is something that anyone can (and should) participate in. But what is behind all this doing-it-ourselves? Does that coffin have your career’s name on it?

The design-your-life mindset is part of a wider cultural and economic phenonemon that I call prosumerism — simultaneous production and consumption. The confluence of work and leisure is common to a lot of hobbies, from scrap-booking to hot-rodding. But what was once a niche market has exploded in the last decade. Prosumerism is distinctly different from purchasing the tools for a do-it-yourself project. The difference can be seen most clearly in online products like Flickr and

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Wikipedia. These products embody an emerging form of inverted consumerism where the consumer provides the parts and the labor. In The Wealth of Networks, Yale Law School professor Yochai Benkler calls this inversion “social production.” and says it is the first potent manifestation of the much-hyped information economy. Call it what you will, this “non-market activity” is changing not just the way people share information but their definition of what a product is.

This evolving consumer mentality might be called “the templated mind.” The templated mind searches for text fields, metatags and rankings like the handles on a suitcase. Data entry and customization options are the way prosumers grip this new generation of products. The templated mind hungers for customization and the opportunity to add their input — in essence to do-it-themselves. The templated mind trusts the result of social production more than the crafted messages of designers and copywriters. And this mentality is changing the design of products. Consider Movable Type, the software behind the blog revolution in general and this site in particular. This prosumer product has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to publish themselves on the web. For millions of people, their unconscious image of a website has been shaped by the constrained formats allowable by Movable Type templates. They unconsciously orient themselves to link and comments — they recognize the handiwork of a fellow prosumer. Any designer working on a webpage has to address that unconscious image. And it does not just impact designers in terms of form and style. As the template mentality spreads, consumers approach all products with the expectation of work. They are looking for the blanks, scanning for fields, checking for customization options, choosing their phone wallpaper, rating movies on Netflix, and uploading pictures of album art to Amazon. The template mentality emphasizes work over style or even clarity.

Dmitri Siegel

This shift in emphasis has the potential to marginalize designers. Take book covers. The rich tradition of cover design has developed because publishers have believed that a cover could help sell more books. But now more and more people are buying books based on peer reviews, user recommendations, and rankings. Word of mouth has always been a powerful marketing force, but now those mouths have access to sophisticated networks on which their words can spread faster than ever before. Covers are seen at 72dpi at best. The future of the medium depends on how it is integrated into the process of social production. The budget that once went to design fees is already being redirected to manipulating search criteria and influencing Google rankings. A good book cover can still help sell books but it is up against a lot more competition for the marketing dollar.

Prosumerism is also changing the role of graphic design in the music industry. When the music industry made the shift to compact discs in the late 1980s, many designers complained that the smaller format would be the death of album art.

Fifteen years later those predictions seem almost quaint. The mp3 format makes compact disc packaging seem like the broad side of a barn. The “it” bands of the last few years—Arctic Monkeys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Gnarls Barkly to name just a few—have all broken into the popular consciousness via filesharing. Arctic Monkeys and CYHSY generated huge buzz on MySpace before releasing records, and Gnarls Barkly’s irresitable hit “Crazy” made it to the top of the UK pop charts before it was even released, based entirely on mp3 downloads. The cover art for the new album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was the result of a do-it-yourself flag project the band ran online. The public image of a musician or band is no longer defined by an artfully staged photo or eye-popping album art. A filename that fits nicely into the “listening to” field in the MySpace template might be more important. The mp3 format and the ubiquity of downloading has shrunk the album art canvas to a 200x200 pixel jpg. Music videos, once the ultimate designer dream gig has shrunk as well. Imagine trying to watch M&Co.’s “Nothing But Flowers” video for the Talking Heads on a video ipod. As playlists and favorites become the currency of the music industry, the album as an organizing princi-

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ple may disappear entirely. Soon graphic designers may only be employed to create 6x6 pixel favicons.

In Revolutionary Wealth, veteran futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler (Future Shock, The Third Wave) paint a very optimistic picture of prosumerism.

They rightly make the connection between the do-it-yourself ethos and the staggering increases in wealth that have occured around the world in the last century. They describe a future where people use their extraordinary accumulated wealth to achieve greater and greater autonomy from industrial and corporate production. Benkler also spends a great deal of time celebrating the increased freedom and autonomy that social production provides.

But is the unimpeded spread of this kind of autonomy really possible? Benkler also raises serious concerns about efforts to control networks through private ownership and legislation. Wikipedia is not a kit that you buy; you do not own your Flickr account and you never will. When you update a MySpace account you are building up someone else’s asset. The prosumer model extracts the value of your work in real time, so that you are actually consuming your own labor.

And what would the role of the designer in a truly do-it-yourself economy? Looking at Flickr or youtube or MySpace, it seems that when people do it themselves, they need a great deal less graphic design to get it done. The more that our economy runs on people doing it themselves, the more people will demand opportunities to do so, and the more graphic designers will have to adapt their methods. What services and expertise do designers have to offer in the prosumer market? Rashid and Lupton have provided one answer (the designer as expert do-it-yourselfer), but unless designers come up with more answers, they may end up designing-it-themselves...and little else.

Design Observer / june 26, 2006

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Credit Where Credit is Due...Or Not Dmitri Siegel I was recently in the booksole author of a design, it store and I saw a big green is incumbent upon a probook called Broadcast Design. fessional designer to clearly I was pleasantly surprised identify his or her specific upon opening it to see some responsibilities or involvevery nice reproductions of ment with the design. Examwork by my former boss at ples of such work may not Sundance Channel, Keira be used for publicity, display Alexandra. I was not so pleas- or portfolio samples without antly surprised to discover clear identification of precise that neither she, nor I, nor areas of authorship.” Unforanyone who had actually tunately, this dictum has not worked on these projects was led to consistency in the way credited…at all. I couldn’t es- graphic design is credited in cape the feeling that this was magazines, books, websites, not right, but I also couldn’t or contests and doesn’t adput my finger on exactly who dress the problem of unatwas in the wrong. Should I be tributed work. upset at the editor, for not demanding complete and The AIGA’s stance speaks to accurate captioning inforwhat has traditionally been mation?; The publisher, for the major issue in graphic not fact-checking?; The VP design attribution — in such of Brand at Sundance, who collaborative work why does was interviewed for the book a single designer end up despite the fact that the getting the credit? Micheal work in it was done before Bierut gave a detailed exshe joined the channel? I had ploration of this issue in his stumbled into a very murky post Credit Line goes Here. area of design — attribution.

But there are a lot of other open questions about giving In its Standards of Profescredit in design. For example: sional Practice the AIGA What about young designmakes this unequivocal ers who put work done at a statement regarding auwell-known studio on their thorship, “When not the personal portfolio site? What

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about big studios that use a monolithic studio credit for the work done by individual employees? And (as in the Sundance Channel example) what about work that goes completely uncredited?

Design annuals exemplify one extreme of the design attribution quandary. In order to avoid missing anyone they feature exhaustive (and exhausting) lists of project participants, carefully ticking off everyone and everything from creative director down to the software used. Such attempts at thoroughness, however, illustrate the futility of attribution in design. Each level of detail that is included reveals another level in the network of causation that is not. (If software is included, why not software authors?).

Or, in other cases, an individual name is repeated over and over again in a single caption.

Other professions have much more highly developed languages of attribution. In films, for example, credit is acknowledged once and for all and in detail at the end of a film. There is a great deal of horse-trading, arguing, and appeasement regarding the credits for any film project, but by opening night everything’s printed on film, the modern equivalent of being set in stone. In contrast, a

Dmitri Siegel

piece of design can reach the widest audience and still remain anonymous. There is generally a lag between the completion of a design project and the need to write the attribution for a contest or reproduction. Film credits have been instrumental in codifying the labor hierarchy in the film industry, institutionalizing a shared vocabulary of job titles and responsibilities. No such standard has evolved in design — for example the term Art Director means something vastly different in an in-house design department than it does at an advertising agency.

“In contrast, a piece of design can reach the widest audience and still remain anonymous.”

It is precisely these native complexities and contradictions in graphic design authorship that are used to justify the kind of blanket corporate attribution used by Sundance Channel in Broadcast Design. Rather than wade into such ambiguous waters, it is easier to simply not credit anyone. Many large design studios have

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reached a similar conclusion and simply credit any work done at the studio to the studio entity. Frequently the mainstream press simply leaves works of design unattributed as if they were produced out of thin air.

Part of the problem is that attribution only becomes an issue after a work has become enduring or “important” and by that time it’s hard to recreate exactly how it came about. Most of the time design is a compromised, rushed commercial enterprise and it would seem pretentious (if not perverse) to diligently record this information while a project is in process. Even if there were the time, the roles on a design project are incredibly fluid: ideas come from all over, designers come and go, bits of a project are farmed out, last-minute changes are made and so on. It is only months or years later when a piece of work garners some notice that all of these twists and turns are revisited. Indeed, preparing the caption for the image at the beginning of this article started with numerous e-mails and more than one Google search before I gave up and simply credited the creative director.

On the other hand designers now have seemingly limitless opportunities to promote

themselves. On a portfolio site, a blog post or a Facebook page, designers are free to make their own assertions about their contribution to a given project. This was not the case when the only opportunities for recognition were only a handful of contests and publications each year. Now every designer has their own “catalog” site and design work circulates in a fairly unregulated way even within the design press.

The lack of a consistent professional standard for attribution is rooted in the fact that Graphic Design has traditionally been an anonymous pursuit. In fact, the vast majority of graphic design is still done by unknown designers for unknown clients. It is a testament to the increasing influence of design that people care at all who animated a network interstitial or laid out a signage system. Perhaps this enhanced profile has made an unrealistic expectation that designers should get credit at all in a field with a blurry notion of authorship.

Or perhaps the proliferation of design media channels simply offers more opportunities for half-truths and situational ethics when it comes to giving credit (and taking it).

Design Observer / may 19, 2008

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Michael Bierut is a graphic designer, design critic and educator. He has been a partner at Pentagram since 1990 and is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art. Bierut served as the national president of the AIGA from 1998 to 2001. He studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Bierut “is responsible for leading a team of graphic designers who create identity design, environmental graphic design and editorial design solutions.” His work is represented in several permanent collections including: the MoMA, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York and the Library of Congress.

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Michael Bierut

http://somosgraficos.com/show.php?id=133

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Designing Under the Influence Michael Bierut The other day I was interviewing a young designer, just nine months out of school. The best piece in her portfolio was a packaging program for an imaginary CD release: packaging, advertising, posters. All of it was Futura Bold Italic, knocked out in white in bright red bands, set on top of black and white halftones. Naturally, it looked great.

Naturally, I asked, “So, why were you going for a Barbara Kruger kind of thing here?”

And she said: “Who’s Barbara Kruger?”

Okay, let’s begin. My first response: “Um, Barbara Kruger is an artist who is... um, pretty well known for doing work that... well, looks exactly like this.”

“Really? I’ve never heard of her.”

At first I was speechless. Then, I started working out the possibilities. One: My twentythree-year-old interviewee had never actually seen any of Barbara Kruger’s work and had simply, by coincidence, decided to use the same typeface, color palette, and combinational strategy as the renowned artist. Two: One of her instructors, seeing the direction her work was taking, steered her, unknowingly or knowingly, in the direction of Kruger’s work. Three: She was just plain lying. And, finally, four: Kruger’s work, after having been so well established for so many years, has simply become part of the atmosphere, inhaled by legions of artists, typographers,

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and design students everywhere, and exhaled, occasionally, as a piece of work that looks like something Barbara Kruger would do.

Let’s be generous and take option four. My visitor isn’t alone, of course. Kruger, who herself began as a graphic designer, has created a body of work that has served as a subtle or not-so-subtle touchpoint for many designers over the past two decades. Occasionally the reference is purposeful, as in my own partner Paula Scher’s cover for From Suffragettes to She-Devils, which uses Kruger’s trademark typeface for a book that surveys a century of graphics in support of women’s rights, although in this case the Futura is turned sideways and printed in shocking pink.

Similarly, the late Dan Friedman’s square logo for Art Against AIDS

“every time, the question eventually comes up: is it possible for someone to “own” a graphic style?” deploys Futura (Extra Bold) and a red-and-white color scheme in a way that is both effective and evocative.

We’ve debated imitation, influence, plagiarism, homage, and coinci-

dence before, and every time, the question eventually comes up: is it possible for someone to “own” a graphic style? Legally, the answer is (mostly) no. And as we sit squarely in a culture intoxicated by sampling and appropriation, can we expect no less from graphic design? I remember my disorientation several years ago, when I first saw the new American Apparel store down in Greenwich Village. A banner bearing the store’s resolutely hip logo hung out front: the name rendered (American Airlines–style) in cool Helvetica, paired with a stripey star symbol that effortlessly evoked the reverse hip of seventies American style. And no wonder: it was the very logo that Chermayeff and Geismar’s Bruce Blackburn had designed for the American bicentennial back in 1976.

Today, Blackburn’s logo is gone from the American Apparel identity. A lawsuit? Does Bruce Blackburn own stripey five-pointed stars?

How much design history does one have to know before he or she dares put pencil to paper? Picture a frantic land-grab, as one design pioneer after another lunges out into the diminishing frontier, staking out ever-shrinking plots of graphic territory, erecting Keep Out! signs at the borders: This is mine! This is mine!

I remember seeing an Esquire cover about ten years ago: the subject was radio personality Howard Stern. What a ripoff, I thought, seeing the all-too-familiar Futura Italic. To my surprise, it turned out to be a Barbara Kruger cover illustrating a Barbara Kruger article.

Who would have thought: she’s a Howard Stern fan. And the lesson?

If anyone can rip you off, you may as well beat them to the punch.

79 short essays on design

Michael Bierut

Q & A with Michael Bierut conducted by designboom DB

Please could you tell us how you came to be a graphic designer?

MB

As an enthusiastic young high school artist 40 years ago, I found that I was happiest when I could use my artistic skills in the service of some practical goal: getting people to come to the school play, for instance, or decorating an ugly hallway. I was also always interested in lots of things, particularly reading and books. I found graphic design to be a perfect way to combine art, usefulness, and literacy. To this day I work on lot of different kinds of projects: books, large signage programs, identities. I take a real pleasure in seeing the things I’ve designed out in the world, coming into contact with people who have no idea there was a design process at work behind the scenes, and improving their lives in even the smallest of ways.

DB

What made you decide to join pentagram rather than work independently?

I like working with other people. That’s one of the reasons I became a designer. On my own, I think I would get lonely and insecure. Working in a collective like pentagram, I have eighteen talented partners that I can turn to for inspiration, help or just for company.

MB

DB

What is the attraction of designing identities for you?

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MB

I actually find identities rather frustrating to design. When you design a book, or a signage system, it stays designed exactly the way you did it. An identity program is really a living thing (here I am distinguishing between identity and the more simple problem of designing logos or symbols). Its ongoing success only partly depends on what the designer brings to the process.

What really makes a difference is how the program is used day after day. How does it change while remaining consistent? How is it informed by what the client company does?

How does it connect up with audiences and users? This is why some of the most understated identity programs, where there’s really not much ‘design’ at all, are so successful.

In a way, when you design a really effective identity system, you’re not designing the rocket ship, you’re designing the launch pad.

What mistakes or ‘traps’ should a young designer avoid when working on an identity system?

DB

Well, to use the same analogy, a lot of people like to design rocket ships. It’s just more fun and glamorous! A launch pad is boring by comparison. The biggest challenge is to really slow down and think through the problem.

MB

DB

Why is this identity system necessary?

What is it supposed to accomplish?

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Who is going to implement it? Who is the audience, and what are they supposed to get from it?

When I was starting out, I used to think that I was the audience, and the goal was to please myself. Then I got some experience and realized that the client was the audience, and the goal was to please them. Of course, both of these things are sort of true, but basically wrong. I finally realized that the real audience were the people out there in the real world who were going to be stuck with whatever it was I was designing.

A lot of time there is no one to speak for those people during the design process. The more you can be their advocate, the better the design will be. That’s not just the goal of identity design, but design period. The biggest trap is to believe the brief you’re given is the whole story. It never is, and I repeat, never the whole story. Moreover, the part that no one has thought to tell you up front is often the most important thing you need to know.

Don’t worry, it will come out eventually, usually when your first idea is being rejected. It’s important to keep an open mind when you’re presenting design work. Don’t assume you know it all, just shut up and listen.

MB

are of graphic design?

I have a short attention span, so I like diversity. Thank god there are lots of specialists out there, because the world needs both.

MB

DB Do you think it’s important for a graphic designer to be able to draw?

MB

To be honest, not any more. I would take someone who is able to read over someone who is able to draw any day.

DB

Besides design, what are you passionate about and why?

MB

I like music, movies, theatre and books… the same as most people.

DB What is the best piece of advice you have ever been given?

MB

Massimo Vignelli told me early on that “if the work stinks, no one cares if it’s on time and on budget” but he put it more elegantly than that.

Given your experience, are you able to finalize a logo or identity design much quicker than you used to?

DB

MB

MB

DB

I think the process I go through is almost exactly what it was when I started out in 1980. Sometimes you’re lucky and you hit a good solution quickly. Sometimes it takes forever. Every once in a while it never happens at all.

DB

What is the worst piece of advice you have ever been given?

When I was little, someone told me that brussels sprouts tasted awful and to never eat them. I may have been in my 40s before I gave them a try. Now I love them. designboom / february 19, 2014

The work you produce is quite diverse, do you prefer not to specialize in one

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Michael Bierut

“My earliest clients were my classmates who needed decorative lettering for the fall sports banquet, posters for the senior play, and convincing simulations of R. Crumb for their notebook covers.

I still remember the thrill of discovering that this method of servicing the varied worlds of jocks, drama nerds and stoners wasn’t just fun but actually had a name: graphic design.�

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Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic. Her features, reviews and essays have appeared in Architect, Domus, Dwell, Medium, Metropolis, New York Magazine, the New Yorker blog, and the New York Times. She has been a featured writer at Design Observer and has taught architecture criticism in the Design Criticism Program at the School of Visual Arts and the Urban Design & Architecture Studies Program at New York University.

Lange has lectured widely at universities and museums, on topics ranging from the history of women architecture critics to the opulent modernism of Alexander Girard to the proper use of social media for designers.

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Alexandra Lange

http://www.whatcriticism.com/participants/

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Games that have withstood the fads of fashion and television should look like it Alexandra Lange I went online recently to buy my favourite board game: Othello.

Or should I say re-buy? My grandmother still has the set on which I learned to play, stacked on a high shelf with Candyland and Hungry Ant, bingo, a baby animal memory game, and the little-known wordgame Probe.

My family’s smaller travel set, a hinged green plastic box that flipped open, has been lost. Sold, perhaps, with our minivan, along with action figures stuck beneath the floor mats. Othello, with its baize gridded board, black-andwhite pieces, Helvetica logo, and roll-top storage slots would seem to have timeless design. Mass-market yet elegant, each element had a purpose and all of these came together in a tidy package nice enough to leave out on the coffee table.

Of course, they’d messed it up. New Othello has a blue plastic board with curved, muscular edges, as if Old Othello had started drinking protein shakes. New Othello has shrunken chips and a board that flexes as you play. New Othello abandons the old, ominous-yet-exciting tagline “A minute to learn… a lifetime to master” for “Simple, fast-flipping fun!” New Othello sees itself in competition with sports.

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Old Othello didn’t have to beg for your attention.

New Othello has a lot of Amazon reviews suggesting you try to find a vintage set. Which I did, on Etsy, for about the same cost. It wasn’t the first time, either. Over my seven-plus years as a parent, I’ve bought airports, sewing patterns and plastic plates (the latter, designed by Massimo Vignelli for Heller, also sport a Helvetica logo) all on Etsy or Ebay.

It’s not just nostalgia that I seek, though I did buy my daughter the Fisher Price A-frame dollhouse I never had, but games and toys where design serves as a platform for play – not suggesting narratives, not imposing gender norms, not rushing to capitalise on the latest fad.

Games that have withstood the fads of fashion and television should look like it: generic, sturdy, and most of all clear. The basics of interaction design are there in anything you have to explain to a three-year-old: anything unnecessary you simply skip over or leave out, a sort of mental swipe. I never realised how good my childhood was – design-wise, at least – until I got a look at the products aimed at today’s youth.

Othello and I are approximately the same age, so it was bought new for my cousins and me. The version of my youth was designed by Goro Hasegawa in Japan in 1971, and distributed in the United States by Gabriel and then Pressman. Based on a late 19th-century game still sold as Reversi, Hasegawa’s version became a cult hit in Japan and beyond.

A November 1976 issue of Time magazine noted: “Today Othello is a national pastime played by some 25 million Japanese — and a full-blown fad replete with towels, tie clasps, and key chains, all emblazoned with the distinctive Othello emblem.” According to Time the design was suggested by Hasegawa’s father, a Shakespearean scholar, who thought the battle between black and white in the game had parallels to the “dramatic reversals” of the Moor’s play.

Othello and Reversi are also both simplified versions of the evenmore-ancient game of Go, traditionally played with black and white stones on a gridded wood board.

Scaled down in size, with a simplified rulebook, Othello became a game that levelled the playing field between children and adults, and could be completed in a short, focused burst. For the parent, it is a welcome relief from the doldrums of Candyland and Snakes and Ladders (known in the US as Chutes and Ladders) – games that also require no reading but consequently require very little strategy.

But Othello isn’t the only classic game that’s undergone an unnecessary and play-inhibiting transformation. Snakes and Ladders has a long history, recently chronicled by Doug Bierend at Re:form who writes that the game originally included moral lessons – land on a square with a bad choice and you were

Alexandra Lange

sent sliding back down a nasty snake – although those “choices” were made by arbitrary rolls of the dice.

The snakes were eliminated for the US edition produced in the 1940s by Milton Bradley, whose vast game holdings also included Barrel of Monkeys, Battleship, Connect Four, LIFE and Operation. Renamed as Chutes and Ladders, the lessons became softer and simpler. In today’s US version, published by Hasbro, you slide down a chute for colouring on the wall, climb a ladder for taking out the trash.

Fair enough, but the chutes, ladders, and children have been made so large that there’s no room on a rectangle for your playing piece.

When I tried to play with my children, we got confused about how to occupy the space of the board.

The redesign seemed to have been intended for the appearance of fun – all those bouncing, big-head children – rather than the performance of it.

Hasbro also introduced identity politics into the playing pieces. The 1950s version of the game I used to play had coloured pegs in red, yellow, blue and green. It’s now populated by a set of four illustrated children, carefully balanced for race and gender. This introduces a completely unnecessary specificity – my daughter kept searching for the girl who looked like her (who didn’t exist) when she could have just picked red.

The older version of the game suggested a fluid narrative, where you became the child, good or bad, whose space you happened to occupy. Now there’s a conflict: are you the black-haired girl of your playing piece, or the baseball-hat boy on the board?

Worse still is what’s happened to

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Candyland. Some versions have kept the coloured gingerbread men as playing pieces, but others have moved toward kawaii, giving kids a choice between “a melting ice cream cone, a screaming gumdrop, a gingerbread girl, or a marshmallow with bloodshot eyes,” as thePeachie Speechie blog put it. The benevolent candy rulers have also become increasingly detailed and voluptuous lords and princesses, with tight superhero-style costumes, high heels and short skirts – Bratz in the sugar shop.

“The redesign seemed to have been intended for the appearance of fun rather than the performance of it” There’s a Disney Princess Candyland edition that eliminates boy playing pieces entirely, despite the fact that your goal is now to “Be the first Disney Princess to dance at the ball!” As philosophers of the romantic comedy have long argued, the prince – played by one of the generic brown-haired Chrises now popular in Hollywood – is hardly the point.

We know the name of the actresses in the new live-action Cinderella (Lily, Cate, Helena) but I’ll never learn who plays Prince Charming.

Brand extensions have come to many a board game – a move that looks like a last gasp at relevance.

Clue, which I also played in its 1980s sans-serif, English country mansion iteration, now includes a garage with a sportscar on its house plan board, and has a range of tie-in editions, from Firefly to Harry Potter to The Simpsons.

Monopoly (a game I’ve never been able to sit through) has been Frozen. Vintage Clue emphasised the colour names given to the players, from yellow Colonel Mustard to blue Mrs. Peacock, but that small bit of wordplay now seems lost along with (for many) the game’s origins in Agatha Christie. The board now has the aesthetic of a video game, which is probably the point. All these 3D games feel their market pinched by the digital realm – and yet, despite the graphic wonders of truly digital games like Monument Valley, Othello apps are no more elegant than that blue board.

Families like ours turn back to board games to get the children looking at something besides a screen, strategising out loud and with physical blocks, discs, or gingerbread men rather than the Minecraft ones. If it is nostalgia, it is nostalgia for a type of interaction rather than a specific game or toy. The pleasure of tucking those Fisher Price Little People into their bunks, of stacking the Heller plates into a rainbow, of drawing the Neapolitan card and leapfrogging over your brother to Ice Cream Floats.

As toys get bloated and plastics thinned, as games get sloppily illustrated or brand extended to absurdity, those interactions become less satisfying. It’s harder to find the fun, because there are so many big heads and ill-fitting pieces to ignore. It’s nice that we can re-buy the past so easily, that Etsy serves as an alternate-reality Amazon marketplace, until you stop to think of all the tricked-out and pumpedup games in the real marketplace, ready to confuse, frustrate and break. dezeen / march 6, 2015

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Criticism = Love an open letter by Alexandra Lange Dear swissmiss: It may seem strange to be bothered by something published on the internet in 2011. But I am, because that text remains the clearest evocation of an attitude I continue to see on design blogs: that we critics are motivated by hate. This is just plain wrong. Criticism = love.

On October 17 of that year you quoted your studiomate Chris Shiflett under the heading, “Ignore haters”: I always take more pleasure in liking something than in disliking something. That’s not to say there aren’t some things that deserve to be liked and some things that deserved to be disliked, but I’m never fond of disliking something.

The lesson I’ve learned is to be wary of those who are. The ones who seem to think that being critical is the same as having good taste.

Those people almost never have good taste, so their opinions don’t matter.

There’s no particular sophistication required to be a critic. We know this, because children often dislike foods they learn to love as adults.

As a child I disliked the Eames LCW chair in my parents’ bedroom. I took no pleasure in hating it. My feeling separated me from my mother, whose taste I have always admired.

Was Eames a flavor I had to become more sophisticated to enjoy? Perhaps. But that dislike, that gap between us in taste, fueled

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a productive thought process. I had to figure out what was so great about an object so ugly, so bulbous, so unlike the other (normal) chairs in our house. I had to learn about the Eameses, about bentwood, about cleaning up “the slum of legs.” If at the end of that process I still hated the chair, would I have gained less in sophistication? I learned to love the exploration. I love the chair too, even though, due to its age and the innovative industrial means of its manufacture, it is now sculpture rather than furniture.

All my life, criticism has been a gift. Literally. My mom gave me the Eames chair a few years ago. I can wave at it from the desk at which I’m typing.

In high school my mother gave me the collection of Ada Louise Huxtable’s essays, Kicked A Building Lately?, as an example of what writing about architecture could achieve.

The reflected skyline on the cover. The pithy comments within, which hardly required illustration. The rhythm of seeing and thinking and writing. It felt fast and it felt just. Can’t you imagine Huxtable as Lois Lane, kicking the steel corners of the nascent Park Avenue School of Architecture? It’s true, she didn’t make the buildings. But, just like Lois, her reporting separated the real Supermen from Bizarro. Her words shaped what came next for New York. She made up names for what was happening to the city and to culture. By naming, she created an arena in which discussion could occur. My now-husband’s first

Alexandra Lange

gift to me was another collection of criticism, Michael Sorkin’s Exquisite Corpse. My education in criticism up to that date had been establishment; this book was made of ruder stuff. It bristles with dislike about some of the very same buildings Ada Louise Huxtable loved, and love for those about which she was lukewarm. The Ford Foundation. The Whitney.

My favorite essay in the book is probably the one on the Whitney, an all-too-rare love letter to Marcel Breuer intertwined with a demolition of Michael Graves and his “shitty beauxarts apparatus.” However quotable, I still wouldn’t call that hating. Sorkin says Graves can’t help it, the apparatus is just his way. It’s on the rest of us to save the Whitney. Sorkin is simply giving us reasons why we should. His conclusion is less important than explaining how to get there.

Your blog is clearly a critical enterprise. The mission of swissmiss seems obviously analogous to Tattly, which you created to clean up the slum of temporary tattoos. You must get hundreds of emails a day with products, apps, videos and posters that you deem unworthy of publication. Every time you don’t publish something, you are being a critic. Yet you don’t share that judgment. That negative determination happens without comment, in the click of the trash button. What I’d like to hear about is what happens in your head between the look and that judgmental click.

Why this and not that? What’s wrong with that picture?

Lane cannot avoid the aisles of the grocery store, the app store, or Toys R Us. This Internet of Things: can it be without glitch? Skimming the cream off the top will always generate more clicks (anyone can compare our Twitter followings), but there’s more constructive work to be done below, where so many design blogs fear to dive.

You are motivated by a love of design, as am I. Haters are name-callers, body-shamers, trolls. They are destructive. If my fellow critics and I did not love buildings, books, gadgets and food, there would be no reason for us to do what we do. I really don’t get paid enough.

But as I move through the world of objects, I have a lot of questions. I can’t ignore what I dislike or don’t understand. Sometimes I describe the way I choose my topics as scratching an itch: if something bothers me each time I see it, the only salve is investigation.

Growing up is doing more than complaining (or, as you have said, coming up with a Twitter hashtag). Let’s talk about it—as adults, of course. I would like to save a building or improve a megaproject, but sometimes the critic has to settle for creating a conversation.

Maybe this is just the long way of saying something very simple: Dear Design, I love you. But love isn’t blind.

Alexandra Lange, Critic Design Observer / february 1, 2014

To be able to say, simply and directly, what is wrong (or not-yet-right) in design is not a child’s task. I don’t think it is possible to educate about design without talking about the world of wrong, ugly, misguided and oversize.

Yes, swissmiss, like Switzerland, might be the exception to that world. But it will never be the rule, and accentuating the positive will only reorganize so much territory. Today’s Lois

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Steven Heller is a critic and an author of many works on the history of illustration, typography, and many subjects related to graphic design. He wears many hats: For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Heller has been graphic design’s biggest fan.

There is not a symposium, conference, show, book, publication or graphic organization that does not continually rely on his counsel and recommendations. For any question asked of him, he responds with twenty ideas, and if those aren’t the right ones, he finds another twenty.

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Steven Heller

http://branding.sva.edu/faculty/department/steven-heller

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Confessions of a Frustrated Newsprint Lover Steven Heller

I give up. I’ve held on devotedly to newsprint as long as humanly possible but I recently reached the point where my loyalty gave way to expedience.

It came after spending a week in Paris with The International New York Times, a handsome extension of the domestic NYT with the perk of comics. It is also printed on finer newsprint than the NYT, smooth to the touch, which makes a delightful crinkling noise as the pages are folded. Oh, yes — it is larger, too — like the size that the original once was.

What could be better?

It couldn’t be worse, experientially speaking.

I’ve gotten so used to the domestic product once its width became incrementally reduced, that I’ve forgotten the skill necessary to fold a broadsheet. And even if I could master it all over again, the world has gotten more crowded and the available public space needed to open and fold the International edition has shrunk considerably. The INYT is not made for tiny Parisian café tables. And I’m not made for the INYT.

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Opening and trying to refold the paper is like attempting to unfold one of those canvas retro beach chairs that you might see in a Jacques Tati film. Picture Monsieur Hulot wrestling with the INYT and you know who wins. It is not pretty. And it is humiliating.

True, folding challenges are a small price to pay for the joy and privilege of handling that beautifully massive collection of paper pages. But the embarrassment of incompetence in public is not worth the psychic cost.

I am still scarred by the Parisian sitting to the left of me, daintily turning the pages of his smaller Le Figaro.

And then there is that American lout in the corner, snickering with his more manageable USA Today. I’m ten times the standard newspaper reader, and reading ten times the newspaper. And feeling self-conscious about folding ineptitude.

So, call me a coward! A traitor! A wussy liberal! I’ve had all the disgrace I can stomach. I quit! A bientôt printed INYT, and bonjour app. Oversized broadsheets be damned. There is strength in tablets.

Design Observer / august 19, 2014

Steven Heller

Q & A with Steven Heller conducted by Tina Essmaker TE

Describe your path to what you’re doing now.

I’m 64 now, and as I get older, it gets harder to remember the path. It gets harder to remember everything. But when I was a kid, I had a precocious streak, and I made publications and then tried to sell them. I don’t remember what the content was, although I don’t think it was very profound. When people asked me what I wanted to be, I’d say, “I want to go into advertising,” maybe because of a movie I saw or some character I’d liked on TV. But I also wanted to be a cartoonist. As things started to progress and I entered high school in the 1960s, I started showing my work around. It was cartooning, but with an introspective bent.

I was hired by an underground paper called New York Free Press.

SH

TE

Did you have formal training or did you learn on your own?

Well, I went to New York University (NYU) for almost two years, where I was presumably an English major. It was the 1960s, so the school actually got closed down by antiwar demonstrators at some point. Plus I had my job while I was there. And I got thrown out for various reasons, one of which was because I was doing comics for Screw and somehow the school got ahold of a copy and saw that one of the comic strips had my philosophy professor in it—I used his SH

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name because it was a great name, which I’d rather not divulge. Then I was out of school for a little bit, got reclassified in the draft as 1A, and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), where I was accepted as a freshman.

I never went to class because I was working.

They wanted to know why I wasn’t going to classes, so I showed my portfolio to the chair, Marshall Arisman, and he said, “If you come back, I’ll make you a senior,” just so I could get my draft deferment. I never went back, so he threw me out. He’s now been one of my closest friends for forty years, and we’ve done four books together.

TE

You’ve done so much. Have all of these opportunities come about because people saw your work and approached you or were you out there trying to make these opportunities happen?

I was always out there trying to make opportunities happen, but not in an ultra-aggressive way. When I did something I thought others might be interested in, I’d mail it out to people. It was like networking without the Internet. And I’d meet people, too. For example, I had been contracted to do a book on contemporary caricature and cartoon, and I needed an intro for it. I knew that Tom Wolfe was interested in this area, so I wrote him. We got together, and he wrote an introduction for an exhibition that I did, which was more historical. Then I asked him to do the foreword for my book, and he SH

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did. A lot of opportunities came out of cold calling people, who I found to be accessible; now, with the Internet, people are extremely accessible.

whatever that moment is, that’s your reality.

Everything else is a myth. My reality is what I do now. I can look back and probably romanticize it a bit.

TE

TE

Before we started the interview, you mentioned that you grew up here.

What was your childhood like? Was creativity encouraged?

SH

Well, creativity wasn’t distinct from anything else. I grew up a couple blocks away from where we are now, in Stuyvesant Town, a middle income housing project that was made for veterans returning from the war. That was when the US had a middle class. I was brought up in a very liberal Jewish background. My mother worked in the childrenswear business, meaning she was a buyer for a company that owned big department stores and traveled all over the world.

She had the air of a creative, but that wasn’t a job at the time, particularly for a woman.

She was ahead of her time having a full-time job for most of her life. My father worked for the Air Force, and I wanted to do the same in the way kids follow their fathers. His office was only a few blocks away, so I’d hang out there. Every so often, he’d take me to an Air Force base, and it was very appealing because it was before the Vietnam War, when it seemed like there would never be another war.

You’ve experienced so many phases of New York. I couldn’t imagine growing up here and watching it change so much.

TE

Yeah, but if you look at old photos and newsreels from before I was born, it also seems different, but it doesn’t necessarily feel great. When you’re living in the moment, you’re living in the moment; SH

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Did you have an “Aha!” moment when you knew what you wanted to focus on?

Yeah, it was when I was at the Free Press the first year, and I didn’t want to go back to college. A lot of people have those kind of moments, but they usually get talked out of them by their parents, or they get ordered out of them. I had an uncle who was a professor at Columbia, who’s still alive at 93. He was a radical when he was younger, and he interceded on my behalf with my parents, who came out of an immigrant family and wanted me to go to college. My parents were liberal enough and adjusted to meet my needs after my uncle told them, “He can take off! He doesn’t have to go to college or he can come back to it.”

SH

TE

You briefly mentioned mentors earlier.

Did you have any mentors or influential individuals in your life?

When I was at that pivotal stage, I met an illustrator named Brad Holland, who is still a pretty well-known illustrator. He was a rebel in terms of the culture and context of what was going on at the time—it’s too long to get into. He was a formative influence on me, and he was the reason I stopped drawing. He was so good, and I was not; he never gave me any props for it, so I stopped.

One day, after I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, he said, “I haven’t seen your drawings lately,” and I said, “I’ve stopped doing them,” to which he replied, “Well, that’s too bad.

They were good.” I never went back to it other than at the Times when I ran out of a budget

SH

Steven Heller

and did my own illustrations under a pseudonym. Brad taught me what typography was; he taught me how to think; he got me off the rail.

TE

Do you feel a responsibility to contribute to something bigger?

I feel like there’s a requisite to do that, which occasionally freaks me out.

Again, if it’s a natural occurrence, I do it and don’t think about it. This is a metaphor or explanation for that. When I walk down the street and see someone who is blind, tapping their way to the corner, I go through agony deciding whether or not I am going to help them cross the street. I can’t tell you why. At first, I was self-conscious; then there was the idea of rejection or doing it the wrong way.

SH

TE

Are you creatively satisfied?

SH

No, I’m never satisfied. My son is a filmmaker, and I love that he is; I live vicariously through his burgeoning career. I wish I could’ve made films. When I left the Times, all of my technical strengths stayed there. I now rely on a lot of people to do things I used to be able to do myself. Creatively, there are so many people who do wonderful things, and I’m good at finding them and putting them together.

TE

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

SH

There are all sorts of platitudes I used to give, but they’ve become so rote that I don’t say them anymore. I used to say follow your passion. How many times have you heard that before? But it’s true. If you follow what you’re most interested in,

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hopefully you’ll get to the place where that becomes your career. It’s just one of those things I don’t like saying and people don’t like hearing, because it’s not a how-to. I wanted to be an illustrator, but I couldn’t, so I found something else within the same area. When I was at the Times, I saw hundreds of people every month, and I’d tell some of them, “This isn’t for you. Find something else.” Our jobs are to be encouraging and you have to figure out how to do that for each person.

TE

Is it important to be part of a creative community of people?

SH

All my friends are in this business more or less. Being involved with creative people is great when you want to work on projects together or when you want to talk about something. There’s a certain competitive quality, too; you want to show that you’re on the same level. Everybody finds a group to be part of, hopefully.

TE

What kind of legacy do you hope to leave?

SH

The funny thing is that I already have a legacy because I’ve done over 170 books. Presumably, because a lot of it is online, it will be available and will hopefully have some meaning to other people. I want to feel like I’ve made some sort of contribution to the field I’m in, as minor as it is. I’ve often visualized my own funeral, but I also don’t like thinking about it. As you creep up in years, even though there are theoretically a lot left, anything can happen.

The Great Discontent / september 30, 2014

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