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In this episode, designer, educator, and author David Reinfurt returns to the show to discuss his latest book, A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design. Born from a series of lectures delivered remotely, online, and together with collaborators and cooperators, the new book builds on his earlier "spoken" book, exploring some unexpected and intuitive overlaps between design and the rest of the world around us.
In conversation, Liam and David cover the power of hands-on learning, the importance of going against expectations as a designer, and the positionality of design—its closeness to everyday life, how it affects those that encounter it, and how it's taught—and how individual perspective is the real driver of design as a practice.
Episode Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Background 08:53 Teaching as Performance 14:34 The Role of Collaboration in Design 18:26 Diverse Perspectives in Design Education 21:55 Exploring Design Space and Topology 26:34 Hands-On Learning in Design Education 30:13 Art and Design 32:34 Creating Space for Reflection in Design 36:34 The Evolution of Design Conventions 39:38 The Bait and Switch 42:04 Individual Perspectives in DesignDesign Notes is a podcast about creative work and what it teaches us. Hosted by Liam Spradlin, a Senior UX Designer at Google focused on the philosophy of the user interface, the show features conversations with people from unique creative fields, uncovering what inspires and unites us in our practice. Tune in to learn how UX design connects to creative work across disciplines and around the world.
Find episodes on your favorite platform at design-notes.show
1
- Shh.
Design Notes is a show about creative work
and what it teaches us.
I'm your host, lames Brolin.
Each episode I speak with people
from unique creative fields
to discover what inspires and
unites us in our practice.
In this episode, I
welcome designer, educator
and author David Reinfor, back
to the show from his studio in New York
to discuss his new book, a
co-program for graphic design.
This book, like his Last,
was born out of a series
of lectures this time during
the shift to remote learning
that took place at the start
of the Global Pandemic.
By inviting a group of collaborators
and cooperators into
the classroom with him,
David exposed some of the unexpected
and intuitive overlaps between design
and the rest of the world around us.
In our conversation, we
talked about the importance
of teaching design with
multiple voices, working
with your hands and recentering
intuition in our day-to-day
practice, even as the context
and meaning of our work
continues to evolve.
Let's get started. David,
welcome back to Design Notes.
- Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
- We recorded an episode, I think it was
back in late 2019, early 2020, so
it's been a while, both
in terms of linear time
and also psychologically, I think.
So for listeners who might
not have been around for
that episode or haven't listened
to the back catalog yet,
could you give us a, a
brief intro on kind of
what your work is now
and how you got there?
- Of course, that has
been a million years ago,
it feels like, and there
is a, a palpable difference
between real time and felt
time in the last five years.
In some ways, that's what
this book deals with.
But let me give some background.
So I'm an independent graphic
designer based in New York.
I've worked independently for
25 years, quite a long time.
I have worked in collaboration with
many different people in different ways,
but most substantially
was Stuart Bert Bailey,
under the name Dexter Sinister,
and with Stuart Bertati
Bailey and Angie Keefer
and Francesca Bertati
and Vincenzo Electronica
as the serving library,
a publishing project.
And finally, SORG,
which is calls itself a
small software company
and is me with rotating
cast of people assisting.
So I have taught at Princeton
University now for 15 years.
When we spoke in 2019,
we were talking about
in part my book, a new
program for graphic design,
which came out of the teaching
at Princeton University.
And in fact, it's useful to
understand the genesis of
that book in order to place the new book.
So when I started teaching
at Princeton University,
there was no,
there were no previous
classes in graphic design.
I was invited in by Joe
Scanlon, who was director
of the visual arts program at Princeton
to develop a graphic design course.
And that first one was
typography and those grew
and became several courses and
a, a number of instructors.
In 2017, inventory Press approached me
and said, we are, we think
what you're teaching at
Princeton might find a
broader audience.
And I had just finished a book,
co-writing a book about
Uriel Cooper for MIT press.
I was exhausted by that process.
It was involved and rigorous,
and it was a large book,
so I didn't, wasn't up
for writing a book at that time.
But in conversation with Adam Michaels
and Shannon Harvey at
Inventory Press, we came up
with an idea to, instead
of writing the book
to speak the book,
and so we staged a three day
event in Los Angeles at their
studio in Silver Lake,
where I delivered 6 45
minute lectures a day
over the course of three days for a kind
of conscripted audience of students in a
carnival like atmosphere
where I would each class
constitute each day,
sorry, constituted one class
that I had developed at Princeton.
So the first day were six
lectures around typography.
Those were all video recorded
and then transcribed,
and that became the new book.
Okay. So that book launched
in September, 2019,
and I proceeded to do a number
of launch events
and kind of exhibitions around
the book, which continued
until the end of February, 2020.
At the end of February, 2020,
I was set to do an exhibition
and a talk in Rome at the French Academy,
and it was about February 20th, I think,
when I was set to leave.
And there was a novel
coronavirus circulating widely
in Italy, and I really wanted to go.
But in conversation
with another inventory
press author Jeffrey Schnap,
I decided it wasn't
such a good idea, which
of course in hindsight
is very clear what to do.
So by March 11th, I had walked out
of the classroom at Princeton
expecting to come back,
but I, I never returned until 2021.
And of course, classes moved
online in the meantime.
So I walked out in March of 2020
and classes moved online.
The world went into a,
a lockdown situation,
as we all well know, I found
that my Princeton students
responded really well
to the online situation.
They were, they were up for it,
and they logged in from
wherever they were in the world
and from their different time
zones and different situations
and classes proceeded.
But of course they were different.
And this was only,
the situation was only amplified by
the, the rise of,
of the Black Lives Matter
social movement in particular,
just later that spring with
the murder of George Floyd
and the kind of global movement that
that multiplied.
And so anyway, combined
with these, these factors
of realizing I needed
to really rethink how
to teach online just practically
and logistically as well as
reconsider the subject matter
and the number of voices
that were in the room
and teaching online in a
Zoom classroom gave me the
opportunity to invite lots
of different people who's
who I wanted to hear from and
to step back from the front
of the class, which I try to do anyway.
But that just gave me a
really easy way to do it.
You know, somewhere along,
after teaching online for
two semesters, I started
to realize, oh, of course
teaching this way, all
of the classes were being recorded
and transcribed automatically.
And I, I had these new
classes offered a lot
of new material that was more in line with
how I was thinking about teaching.
And so I, an idea sparked in my head to
make a book a bit like the first one
where it was edited from transcripts
and has the quality of the spoken voice,
but where the speakers were mostly not me
or as much as possible, not
me, but were other people
and collaborators,
or more often I would call
them cooperators, who helped,
you know, round out the
material in these three classes.
And in fact, it's important
to say that even one
of those classes, the middle
class chapter two multiplicity,
was co-taught with Philip Ording.
So all those ideas were developed together
and the voices were equivalent.
Okay. I think that's a long background.
- Sure. But necessary.
There, there are a lot of things
that stand out to me about that.
One. One thing that I want
to ask about upfront is
like this kind of, you know,
deriving the structure
of the book from delivering
courses, especially, you know,
in the instance of the first book,
you delivered them in this kind
of like marathon of classes.
I wonder if that changed your relationship
to the ideas that you were presenting
or changed your kind of, of those topics,
delivering them in such quick succession.
- Well, it certainly made
me think about the way
that teaching is a performance,
and I acknowledge that while
I'm not comfortable with it.
And so in that situation,
teaching was like
explicitly a performance.
It was 45 minutes each one,
you know, we'd take 15 minutes,
so I, so my voice could
recover and I drank juice
and there was like musical
interludes, which were quite fun.
And you know, the whole
thing was treated as a,
it was lively generally.
And I guess that looseness
is something i, I want
to have in the classroom.
And so I try to mix things
up as much as possible.
And so, you know, speaking,
performing those classes in
that way, just I think it maps back onto
how I think about the classroom.
And I, I guess makes me even more so kind
of embrace the performative aspects of it,
because I think that's
what loosens people up.
And so in a class recent,
you know, at the beginning
of this semester, I, I invited a class.
We, when we did our introductions,
we all stood on stools.
So we were basically at the, you know,
which is rather awkward,
but it again just, you
know, lets people loosen up.
These are art classes. After all
- The last time we spoke, you
also mentioned like putting
your teaching into the form of a book
and some like tension
there between the content
that you were presenting and how the form
of a book might make it
more static or concrete.
I mean, it's hard to
achieve a carnival esque
environment within a book.
And I wonder how your perspective
on that has changed now,
especially having gone
through this whole, you know,
transformation of teaching online
and seeing how, how that works
and also integrating these kind of new,
new class structures.
- I think one thing I was anxious about
with the first book was that
my students would see the book,
would read the book
and then bring baggage to the classroom.
And I've, I am happy to report
that the book flies under
the radar for the students.
So this is great. I never
mention it, and I mean, I could,
but I, I don't, I feel like it's,
it would not help the situation.
It would only kind of hinder it.
And so that has been a nice surprise.
I was, I mean, this is one thing
that was a nice fallout from
recording the first book in this way is
that the voice on the page
has some degree, some measure
of self-doubt.
And I feel like you, that is
100% necessary in teaching
because your position
communicates the opposite of that.
And so, and the kind of student,
student teacher relationship
presumes that this,
that the teacher knows what, what she
or he is talking about.
And it's, it's only partially the case.
I mean, we can share our
perspective, which was
what we learned with and
what we have thought about.
And that never aligns with
individual students' perspective
coming from where they come from.
So anyway, I have something
to offer, I have my
experiences. That's it.
- I think that's an important note.
And I think something that
really stands out to me
with the new book is that it's kind
of building on this thesis
that was developed in the
first book of teaching design.
I also noticed that you said
that this is an art class,
which I really appreciate.
I I want to hear more
about kind of your theory
of teaching design, especially
how it shows up in a co-program
for graphic design where,
yeah, as you said before, you,
you really integrated other
people into the lesson in a way
that feels kind of central to the whole
idea of teaching design.
- Well, let me, I'm glad you
appreciate the art reference.
I mean, it's how I think
about designs kind of, I
neighbors, and it happens
to be at Princeton,
the design classes that I teach
and that Laura Cos
and Laura Schwart currently also teach,
they're in a visual arts program,
and it's a small program with 16
students per year.
And the classes are small, 12 students
who come from different disciplines.
So anyway, I suppose to
your second question,
the kind of cooperative
makeup of the second book,
that was really a
consequence of just realizing
as everybody else did,
that I could invite people from all over.
And there are people I wanted
to hear from, people I,
who I didn't necessarily
know or didn't know well.
And then lots of people I did know well,
but who coming
to class previously
would've been too difficult.
And so, and so I just loaded
the classes with visits as much
as possible and tried to
let the visitors drive
what was talked about.
I feel like as long as
they know what the rubric
of the class is, then
they're gonna bring something
interesting to it.
So, so that was a practical response.
And I think it was only
afterwards that I, that I thought,
oh, okay, you know, this is
really like a chorus of voices
and that is what I want
to, that's what I'd love to
communicate as a way of
thinking about design.
'cause you know, I always
like to, I often like
to quote Bruno Menari
who talked about design is
always being a group activity.
Like designers work in groups.
He was emphatic about that.
And although I've like practiced
independently, it's
never by myself, right?
It, and I just think design is structured
by the client designer
relationship to begin with.
Designers often don't have
all the expertise they need,
and so they bring in, you
know, other people to work.
And that fluid
and kind of cooperative nature
of doing any design project
is something I really enjoy.
So it's not like I'd make a distinction
between collaboration and cooperation.
So I think collaboration has, has some,
there is some idea that it is two
or more people kind of
blending their ideas together
to make something better that
neither one would've made.
And I've done that before
and that can be wonderful.
But I think much more
often I work cooperatively
where it's individuals who
kind of bring in what they know
how to do or what they
have good insights on,
and they work doing that.
And the sum total
of those results adds
up to something better.
And so cooperators have a bit more
agency, they're a bit more independent.
There's not this like
presumption that, you know,
compromise is not really a part of it.
The best design doesn't
result from compromise.
It best design results
from like cooperation.
And so everybody's pointing
towards the same goal.
And you figure out how to get
there by bringing what you,
your best stuff to, to the projects.
- I, I wanna also get at
this note of, you know,
your students are approaching
these design lessons from
different disciplines,
which is something I hear
a lot on the show that most
of my guests, I would say,
when I ask them about their journey
and design, they say
something like, you know,
I took a very non-linear path,
or I, you know, I have
an unusual story about
how I got to design.
And I wonder what role you
think that might play in,
in the practice of design ultimately?
- Well, yeah, I think
that's interesting that
that's a common thread.
I wonder if that's like the kind of people
who you've asked on your podcast,
however, so yeah, I would say I had a
like non-conventional
approach into design.
But it sounds like it's
actually rather like being
non-conventional is
actually the, the standard.
It's the convent than that.
Exactly. Isn't that funny? Okay.
So in the classes, I love the fact
that students are
studying different things
come from different disciplines.
You know, it might be
like aerospace engineering
or it might be neuroscience,
or it might be English,
or it might be physics or whatever else.
Actually lots of computer science students
because of the adjacency and
importance of design in there.
Anyway, I, I guess I always am convinced
that design like thrive, like
thrives on being a generalist activity.
Like people who design,
design are inevitably interested in lots
of different things.
And I have previously
attributed that to the fact
that design doesn't really have
a subject matter of its own.
It only like, you know,
comes into being when it
touches some other discipline.
And so you are asked to, well
for example, I'm designing a,
a DA accessible sign for
a, like an old castle,
which is an art institution in Italy.
That's what I was doing this
morning as it would turn out.
And, and it's fun
because the criteria are
different than I understand.
And I understood some
things about, I mean,
I understood some things
about that area previously,
but they have experts who
were experts in this kind
of signage and specifically
for public institutions in Italy.
And so that's a much more granular thing.
And so it's just, it's
interesting to hear it's useful
and eyeopening to hear
what their insights are
and it's gives you some
additional criteria to
what you would think is a
successful design or not.
So I love that kind of thing.
I think that's unique to
or characteristic of design
and certainly graphic design.
And so, and so the
students coming from their,
from their various areas of
study just make it richer
because they'll have insights.
The, that being said,
the classes like angle
a certain direction.
I do get a lot of
computer science students,
like I mentioned, I, I, some,
I think I get quite a few
engineering students also,
like general electric
engineering, whatever.
But I'm always excited when
I get humanities students
'cause they really bring some
different concerns into the
classroom, which is great.
- Yeah, I think one, one way
of understanding design maybe
that that stands out to me,
especially in the multiplicity
section of the book, is kind
of an emphasis not just on
being able to create a system
or create an artifact,
but knowing how to observe
and decode the systems around us
or to see how they emerge
from, from the world around us.
And I guess, yeah, I guess
I'm interested in, in
that concept of like,
folks coming from different viewpoints.
You know, design is always,
has a positionality in the world
and I guess it's like applying
that lens to different eyes.
- Well, in the, in the case
of multiplicity, like the,
the class was set up to
bring together topology
and graphic design
and try to figure out
where the two might meet.
And right from Philip Ording is,
professor Topology is currently at Pratt.
He is a friend
and somebody who, we've had this ongoing
conversation for quite a while.
And I think Philip had the
idea originally that one area
where the two disciplines meet is in
particularly in like software
based design projects,
where there might be, you know,
like a a, he called it a
multiplicity of like right answers
or of like viable candidates,
which might be, for example,
defined parametrically, like
by, by parameters that set
that define a like design
space, a possibility space.
And so this is something,
these possibility spaces
of like equally equivalent
answers are something that
that topology gives us very
strong tools to evaluate.
So the class begins with an example
of snowflake Bentley, who was
a farmer in northern Vermont
who took photo micrographs, like using a
microscope and a camera to
make pictures of snowflakes.
He did this at the turn
of the 20th century
and made exhaustive records of snowflakes.
They're absolutely gorgeous things, no to
or alike as the story goes.
And here's,
and he published a, a book,
which is a Dover Press book,
which has many of the photographs in it.
You know, here's a, here's a kind of like,
I guess we could say a
design, which is a, you know,
a symmetric ice crystal,
which has lots of shapes which
are related to each other.
And you can put those in an order
and you can put those in like
a linear order from like most
pointed to least pointed.
Or you can put those in two
dimensions of like most pointed
to least pointed and most
detailed to least detailed.
And there you have a kind of,
you've articulated a
possibility space of lots
of like valid responses
to what is a snowflake.
And this is something that
design increasingly does with,
you know, with like software
based approaches of course.
And something that
topology, like just that
the way in which Philip talks about
how those are related opens
up lots of different ways
to think about it is it's like
frankly exciting in that way.
And also just
to watch another approach
to talking about this and to drawing it.
Like, I was so surprised in
this a revelation to watch
him lead us through problems
where his approaches weren't,
like, his approaches were
so mechanical
and kind of like, you
just like draw it out,
you take all the circumstances
and you, you try to draw yourself a map
and then you refine that. Anyway.
- Yeah, I, I, first of all,
I I found that fascinating.
I find the concept of
design space fascinating
and woefully underused in my
own industry, which is ux.
But something I also noticed
or that, you know, I, I went
really deep on that lesson
and I noticed that so many
of the exercises, not just in
that class, but in all
the classes in the book
rely on a really like tactile component.
Like mm, it, it feels like
you're always doing something
with your hands, which is
really interesting to me.
Not only from the perspective
of pedagogy, but also
because these classes
were structured in a way
that they could be performed remotely.
- Right. Yeah. That's interesting.
I wonder that's, that's a
great thing to pick up on
and not something that
had occurred to me before.
I love that now. I mean, whether
it's like Philip, you know,
Philip had a document
camera, which is just a
for Zoom or for anything.
And, and so you could, you
could see him writing on a piece
of paper and, and that was
absolutely compelling to me.
I like love to watch that,
you know, it's so nice to see
and just kind of watch
as his like giant pencil
on the screen, like work
through this, this issue.
I wonder if it was, yeah,
I wonder if it was like a
compensation technique for us,
like saying, oh, you know,
you gotta use your hands
because look sick of looking
at the screen and doing this.
I expect it was, yeah.
And yeah, a lot of the
assignments do have a
hands-on, I mean, require
physical artifacts.
But, you know, I do that
in the classroom too,
like always just
because I find, just think about like
how your body moves when you cut a piece
of paper versus when you
move something with a mouse.
And the more range we have,
I think the more it
loosens up ways of thinking
and like being in the
classroom and et cetera.
And so, you know, I've often
had students who use paper
and scissors or exacto knives and,
and photocopiers in place of computers.
And anyway, I just try to
keep them off the screen.
- Yeah. As much as reasonable.
I, I hesitate to claim this as fact
because I don't have a
citation in front of me,
but fine, I'm pretty sure I've heard that
that handwriting is more
effective than typing.
And this feels intuitively
true to me as well than at,
you know, it, it's more beneficial
for learning and memory.
And my intuition is that
maybe doing physical exercises like this
with your hands not only
helps you get a sense of
what you're doing better
from the physicality of it,
but also
that it might change your
relationship to what you're making.
I think maybe if you're
just sliding rectangles
around in Figma, then
- Yeah,
- You, you might not have as strong
of a subjective connection to the result
- That rings completely true to me.
And I wonder if it's like,
it takes, I, I like the fact
that it takes longer and it is slower,
and so that immediately you
build up more investment in it.
It's so sad to see like
something made so quickly
with very little investment,
she's like, oh, I can do it like this.
Wow. No,
- I'm, I am a believer that
that shows up on the other side
as well for the viewer.
- Yeah, I think so.
- Yeah.
And I, I can't help but also think,
because this is like upfront in the book,
and this is like a, a quote that I go
to often from Corita
Kent, That we have no art,
we do everything as well as we can.
I was also so hyped to see
that in the book as well,
because I think it's really important.
And I think, you know,
we've talked a lot about
how people bring different
perspectives to the work,
how people are coming from
different places, how they're,
you know, learning to
identify these systems
through their own eyes.
And yeah.
I wonder what you think
about like, the positionality
of design as a concept, like the,
the quote would suggest
that it's actually just
part of everything else.
Like it's part of life, right?
- I mean, I think that's
what draws those of us who
wanna work in design into it,
is that it's not separate from
everything else.
It's, you know, art relies on a,
on a, you know, concerted disinterest.
Like there's, there's some
space between you and the work,
and that's, you know, that's
great, that's wonderful for art
because it let gives you a
moment, a space in which to
like, to behold the thing
that you're looking at,
to think about it, to ruminate
on it, to have new ideas.
Design is much more imminent.
It's like right there, it's
like the, the, the door handle
that you just pushed.
And so there's less time for reflection,
which may not be great,
but there is a connection
to everything else you do in the world.
And so if you're somebody who thinks that
how you set the table is as important as
how you design the latest
thing, then I think
you may find yourself
working and happy in design.
It's just, it's a,
I feel like it's almost
an ethical disposition
that, that you don't see
a distinction between,
between kind of categories, I guess.
I mean, I love, you know, that
Corita Kent quote is amazing
and if, if I can recommend
tracking down the Lucas Blade
Locke film, which is which
which is about Corita Kent,
which is the documentary, and
you get to hear her say it,
she says it many times.
She says it so many times in those clips.
But at one point she
appends it with, you know,
you don't have art often,
this little niche somewhere,
you know, like separate from
everything else in the world.
And that idea is, yeah,
just as compelling to me
as it sounds like it is
to you, I guess just,
it's part of everything else.
- Yeah. I think it's a
beautiful way of framing art
and design, but also framing life
- Yeah.
- To kind of affirm that.
Like it's just part of what we're doing.
- Yes. - I'm, I'm really
interested in this comparison
between art and design,
I mean, as I always am,
but specifically how
you put it that art kind
of leaves a space between
the artifact and you,
and I wonder, this might be hard to answer
as a designer yourself,
but I wonder first if you
have seen something designed
that created that space
or triggered the same kind of reflection,
or if that would no longer be design.
- I think the former, I've seen
so many things that do that,
and maybe I'm willfully reading
them into this situation,
but I think any design work
that like stops me, it stops me
because it like includes some kind
of dissonance, you know?
It makes me, it, it's not too smooth,
it's not invisible.
And it makes me think,
oh, why is it like that?
And what does that make
me think about the world
and, and this kind of thing.
So I think it still remains designed.
That's the kind of work
I want to make, you know,
where it just, where it
gives you pause for a minute.
It's, it does what it needs to do,
but maybe it doesn't do it
exactly the way you thought it
should, it was going to do it,
or it doesn't do it in
the most invisible way
unless that's baked into the
kind of prompt and then great.
But yeah, they're,
I would really say like
the works of design that,
that I like, like almost
always have that, that space
or that kind of like thing
that doesn't quite line up
something that's just a bit wrong.
- Yeah. I think, I think
that's really important.
I think often in UX
design we are so trying
to close that space and
run away from unexpected
and friction and space.
- Yeah. - So I think that's
a really important lesson.
It also strikes me that like creating
that tension on purpose
can actually be, I mean,
it's not just gratifying for designers
or designers who encounter the work,
but also for the people who
are ultimately using the work,
- I would guess that the, the
attempts to close that space,
like also do a little bit
to curtail imagination.
And so sometimes,
like the most wonderful things
are the unexpected things,
and they may work absolutely smoothly.
They're just not what you
thought it was going to be.
So isn't that wonderful when
something like teaches you how
to use it rather than
conforms to your, you know,
like conforms to the way that,
to the majority experience of
how things have existed before.
And of course, you know,
I always think about like
how quickly conventions
harden in interface
design specifically
because of the like scale problem of
so many people using these
things from different places,
et cetera, which are all
very important issues.
The kind of jumps from one interface idea
to another are acts of imagination
and they don't conform
to what existed before.
And you have to cultivate
room for those to happen,
or it's good to, it's useful
to cultivate room for
those things to happen.
And it's hard, it's often hard
to justify at the same time.
Yeah. I'm sure as I
understand you deal with so
- Completely.
You know, it makes me think about, again,
like the positionality of
design not only, you know,
socially and as part of the environment,
but also temporarily
that, you know, these, at
least speaking from UX design,
so many of these conventions
emerged from specific
incentives at specific
times in the development
of technology, and now
they're like sticking around.
- Right? Yeah.
- But, but often I think these things mean
something else when they have
been around for 20 years,
which, you know, I think is
an important lesson for fellow
UX designers to consider.
But I'm also, yeah, I wanna
hear your perspective on how
that shows up in other disciplines.
- You know, I, I think of
like typographic conventions,
which, which hardened, you know, which,
which are old, like how we read English
is in many ways a consequence
of movable type and the printing press.
And so many of the
conventions that we know of
as like book typography are 500 years old
and we read by convention, right?
So we, the page number, we know what
that little number is
because of where it is
and where we've seen it before, et cetera.
Those things are incredibly useful.
So I guess in, in say,
interface design or user
experience design, I can imagine
that that feel the
technology moves so quickly,
like the products change so radically in
what they've been able to do
in 20 years, that then those
conventions need to evolve
more quickly, you know,
and they need to evolve with
like, some imagination of like,
how you do this next thing.
- Yeah. I'm, I'm thinking
now about book layout Yeah.
And all of the kind of esoteric methods
of drawing a star across
the page to get the Yes,
- Yeah.
- The right dimensions
that leave these big juicy
margins for Yeah.
All the cool marginality
that you could write in
with your fountain pen.
- Absolutely. - One, one last
thing that I wanna touch on
surrounding the book is something
really interesting that,
that you said in our last conversation
that I think ties into this discussion of
teaching design, the
relationship to the material,
it's dynamism.
You said that it kind of exterior form
of the book can kind of
set the conditions for
how someone engages with it,
but then as you get into
the material, it kind of
complicates itself in a way that
keeps you going, but,
but gives you like a really nuanced idea.
And it strikes me that like,
that kind of, that kind
of consideration not only
of the book as an artifact,
but also of the lessons
themselves as a type
of design as well.
- Yeah, I mean, I guess I, I
think I probably described it
as bait and switch before,
which is I think something,
it's a technique I like a lot
because, you know, you
present something as,
as in a category that people
already know what to expect.
And so since we're
dealing with conventions
that makes it easier
to register some change when
those conventions are slightly
altered and it's not
about wholesale rejection,
I feel like it's much,
much more effective when
you bring somebody along.
So they, they say, oh, it's a book.
I know what a book is
about, and it's a book
about graphic design.
Okay, great. I'm expecting to learn
how to do graphic design.
Well, you're not, that's
not what you're going
to learn in ACO program
for graphic design.
But you'll learn, you'll hear
from some other people who've
either practiced graphic design
or practiced do do things
that are adjacent to it
and you'll hear how
they think about design
and hopefully that will open
up your own, your own ways
of thinking around what it
might mean to do, to do design.
And so, you know, I don't think
that would happen if it was presented
as like a revolutionary new
approach to, to, you know,
a chorus of people speaking
about graphic design like that
you might come to it with
expectations that aren't resolved.
And so I think I'd much
rather invite you to dinner
and then talk to you, talk
to you about something
that's more complicated
than you were expecting
after you've had a drink or two maybe.
- Yeah. You know,
I mean obviously you've just
put out this entire book
of lessons about design,
but what would you say
is the most urgent thing
that designers practicing
today should be thinking about?
- I, I guess my, I, what I try
to foster is an individual response.
And all I mean is I want students
to develop their own
approaches to how to do design,
to how to think about it
and to ha to really kind of build those,
build those points of view
and build those like methods
and ways of thinking, build
'em solidly for themselves.
Because I think they're gonna
get eroded by, by the process
of doing design where you're
considering lots of factors.
That's the great complication of it.
But it, it's also, you
can get lost, you know?
So this is,
I think I would have said the
same thing a bunch of years ago.
So it's not like necessarily, I mean, it's
what I would still say is like the
most important thing today.
But if you graduate and
you're working in design
and, you know, there's been a
fairly significant shift into
working in-house in larger
teams and there even more.
So I feel like you might lose
your individual perspective
and as a designer, like your, what you
what you bring is your individual
perspective, your intuition.
And I think like
intuition gets written out
of design a bit more than it should.
That's why I like invoking art
and other practices that are, you know,
that absolutely rev rely
on you knowing what to do.
You just kind of like, you
kind of, you trust your own
motivations and you trust
your own lateral leaps.
And so anything I can do
to encourage that in students.
And so sometimes that's like asking them
to reflect on why they made choices
and how that related to the last project
and how that related to
the previous project.
And, and trying to emphasize that
there's nothing, there's
no method I can offer them
that will be right for them.
There's only a method they can develop
for themselves that
will be right for them.
And, and yeah, I guess
it's a position. Hmm.
You know, you might think like,
yeah, people have different
relationships to
how they think a design
project should happen,
and I'd love to see as many
different ones as possible
and just never, never just
passively accepting
the way you're told it should be done.
I mean, right, individually.
I, I, there's something
I love from John Cage,
American artist in the
mid 20th century who,
when he was talking
about teaching, he said,
the only thing I can
teach a student is, is
that you are utterly alone.
- I think
- It's true.
- I'm curious how you hold onto that,
how you keep from that individual
perspective being eroded
over time, over many
different kinds of projects.
- I think you gotta set
up, you gotta set up some
practices, some ways
for yourself to do that.
So for me it's like reading,
like carving out time to
read, thinking about that as part of my
like design practice.
And also like, making lots of waste,
like making lots of work.
It never sees the light of day,
and I don't mean like
three, like extra options
for some design project I'm working on,
but just like following some path
because not knowing
where it's going to lead
and maybe it leads nowhere
and you abandon it and,
but maybe it makes three
beautiful drawings along the way
and you maybe keep those or
use those somewhere else.
So, you know, a strange
thing, I won't say a strange,
but something I found that also
talking about your own work,
whether it's in slideshows
or I think it most, most
often slideshows for me,
actually solidifies what I think about it.
'cause inevitably there's some
distance from when you did
the work and so you're,
you're talking about it.
And so I always take
like invitations to show
or talk about work very seriously.
You know, I just, or I, I
spend a lot of time on them,
whether it's serious time or not.
And I think that's also
useful to like kind
of tell yourself like, here's what I
think, here's what I think.
'cause this is what I did,
so I must've thought it.
And here's, oh my goodness, it connects
to this other thing that I did before.
And that's, that's a
sign of success for me.
So it's also like people, I,
I just reject the idea that
you gotta be new every time.
I think it's more important to be like,
true than new.
That's, that sounds way too glib,
- But I mean, that's a
great succinct to answer.
I think that's a good note
to close on, David. Great.
- Excellent.
- Congrats on the book. Thank you.
I, as I told you before
we started recording,
I've already become fixated
on it multiple times.
Good. Excellent. Yeah.
Thank you for, for joining
me again on the show.
- Thank you for inviting me.
And I guess I just did something
of what I was describing,
which is like, by talking
about what I do make
- Yeah.
- Solidify the, the
difficulty is not letting it
ossify, right.
So it's it's gonna always stay.
- Yeah, totally. You can subscribe
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