By day, I have the good fortune of spending time with young designers looking to hone their skills and gain insights into the craft and business of design — I’m a teacher. In our program, we keep a fairly robust two-way conversation going with our students through a few electronic forums and every now and again, something pops up that’s worth sharing and this medium is ideal for this sort of dialogue. The below is one of the pieces that I sent to the students and a colleague recently mentioned that it has relevance beyond this discrete audience… I hope that’s the case.

Students:
You might be familiar with the quote “God is in the details.” In the lives of designers, nothing could be more true (other than: “Remember where you put the Xacto”). All professions have “buy-ins” and “table stakes” of their trade and while some might call them “details,” it’s what we’ve come to expect from ourselves — and what others expect from us. Mastery of these is not only good for those at the top of the profession, but essential for every practitioner.

The phrase “God is in the details” is often, but not always, attributed to 20th century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

As we’ve discussed, graphic designers generally perform services on behalf of a client and are in service of an audience. So, looking at the role of the designer from the other side can yield some insights — specifically as it relates to the idea of expectations or trust — and weigh this against other professions.

For instance, would you trust a civil engineer — who’s responsible for the stability of bridges and the like — if there was a math error on their cost-estimate? Would you trust a mechanic who drives a broken-down hatchback? Would you trust a personal trainer with love handles? Now, I don’t care if my engineer has love handles or if my personal trainer drives a smoking Hyundai, but there are minimum expectations in each profession. In order for a personal trainer to convey a sense of health and well-being (and that they’ve mastered it enough to pass it on to me), they should also be fit, right?

Where does that leave the graphic designer? What does the world expect of us? What should we expect for ourselves? Well, for starters, remember that we are communicators. Added to that, we’re aesthetes. We are also conceptual thinkers. And, to top it off, we’re craftsmen. That’s certainly a tall order, which is one of the reasons we often tell students that graphic design is one of the most challenging courses of study in art school.

So…what does this mean?

As communicators we’re expected to be able to craft a compelling story. We need to understand our audience (so there’s a bit of psychology thrown in). We need to understand and master the narrative structure so we can engage and hold the attention of our audience — and do this in a way that connects to both their hearts and their heads. Good storytellers have a command of ideas and concepts…metaphor and analogy…prose and poetry. Good storytellers run spell-check and proofread.

As aesthetes, we’re expected to turn a white sheet of paper or a blank screen into a work of art. We are expected to know the work and influence of Paula Scher and Paul Sahre (and difference between Paul Rand and Rand Paul), what the colors blue and pink mean in the life of Pablo Picasso, and the difference between camp and kitsch and how to use (or not use) each. We study history so we know what’s worked in the past and how to avoid the trappings of simply copying old ideas. Style is the life-blood of the aesthete and beauty is the byproduct. And that style exists in every facet of our lives, from the things we surround ourselves with to the things we create to surround other people … from the magazines we read to the magazines we design. We’re wary of shopping or eating at places with “barn,” “factory” or “warehouse” in the name. If it can be said “you are what you eat,” for a graphic designer it’s “you are what you eat, breathe, swim around in, and happen to spit-out.” Everything matters. However, we’re also wary of hype, and remember the moral of the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — just because someone says it’s wonderful and amazing, doesn’t really make it so.

In the story The Emperor's New Clothes, the Emperor is convinced he has wonderful robes that only the most worthy can see when in fact, he was wearing nothing. Sounds a lot like over-hyped marketing to me.

As conceptual-thinkers, we are expected to connect with the audiences mentioned above in new and innovative ways. In the late ’90s, I went to see J. Mays — head of auto-design at Ford — present the newly designed Ford Thunderbird. He mentioned how the designers in the ’50s looked to the newly invented jet airplane for inspiration for the original car. So, when the designers were re-envisioning the car for the new millennium, they looked to the 1950s Ford Thunderbird for inspiration… Wait…wait! Why not again to jet airplanes? Not old jets, but new ones. How cool would a car be if designed after the newest fighter jet? (The Lamborghini Revention (below) was inspired by the F-22 jet and is much much cooler in my opinion than the new Ford Thunderbird). Without bringing something new to the table, we’re destined to eat last week’s meatloaf over and over again with a different sauce on top or chopped up and thrown in with some pasta. Designers have to keep the world fresh with meaningful, new ideas that challenge the perceptions of the audience enough to make it interesting and worthwhile, yet temper this wild innovation with a bit of strategy. We’re always thinking, not just about the next new idea but often about how to get that new idea to the audience. One of the things I learned in the world of corporate design is that it’s not about doing good work — all good designers can do good work — it’s about getting good work approved and produced. We are looking at what could be designed and weighing this with what should be designed knowing that people crave freshness but are, ironically, naturally resistant to change. A good designer can walk that line. We approach everything with a delicate balance of wonderment, suspicion and respect.

The Lamborghini Reventon was inspired by the F-22 jet and is much, much cooler in my opinion than the new Ford Thunderbird

As craftsmen, we don’t make mistakes. We have a command of the materials and resources used by the profession: paper, pencils, pixels, paste, posters, programs and pictures. Just as a carpenter knows the difference between maple and mahogany by the smell of the sawdust, we know the difference between Akzidenz-Grotesk and Helvetica just by looking at the numeral 2. We never leave a word hanging out on a line by itself, much less on the next page. All of our quote marks are “smart.” We never use a handwriting typeface, but instead write it and scan it in. We never do something that would be on par with our scrap-booking neighbor. We never try to “rez-up” a web jpeg for print use without running it through its paces — and when it doesn’t work, we look for a new image… even if we have to take it ourselves. We never say, “well, that’s all I could find on the internet.” And we know that the word “window” isn’t always preceded by “browser,” and that some windows open to let in fresh air, sunlight, new inspiration, and a fly or two. We never settle for free fonts that end in “-o-rama” when there’s a more well-crafted one that’s more suitable for our use — even if we have to pay for it. Heck, sometimes we create typefaces for ourselves when we can’t find one that’s working just right. We know the difference between a hyphen, an en-dash and an em-dash and use each correctly. We never double space after punctuation. We track each line of type and often — if it’s still not working — we change the font size, grid or even rewrite. We’re often more interested in the spaces between things than the things themselves. We do things over, simply because we don’t settle for “good enough.” We follow directions, but are wise enough to know the difference between the “letter” and “spirit” of the task before us — and if we decide to break from the rules, we do it in a way that creates an end-product far better than anyone imagined possible, yet we’ll still be willing to go back and do it the way it was “s’posed” to be done (or do both in the first place).

While Helvetica is often characterized as a modern, refined version of the previous Akzidenz-Grotesk, a few noteworthy differences separate the two.

So… Where does that leave us?

In studying Gestalt theory, we learn that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” So even when the above checkboxes are ticked off, what sort of designer are you “as a whole”? Where do you want to be? Who do you think is most responsible for getting you there? (Hint: you are.) How can you begin to trust your instincts rather than relying on someone else to tell you what’s good? How can you look at your work and the work of others and learn something from each? What’s next?

It’s a challenging profession and it takes a lot to succeed — but for many, it’s worth it.

Hunter Wimmer has more than a decade of experience in translating strategic business objectives into innovative, relevant visual solutions through his work for IDEO, Gap and Banana Republic. He is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Graphic Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Hunter can be found blogging at Redneckmodern and Room 557.com.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

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Illustration for Bloomberg View, 2011

The first thing you ought to know about Brendan Griffiths is this: Do not click on the exclamation mark.

The objectionable glyph follows the name of the 29-year-old’s firm, Zut Alors!, on its website, zutalorsinc.com. Griffiths joined the company of the founding partner, Frank DeRose, last May, after picking up his M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale. While still in New Haven, he helped develop the site into a statement of the practice’s principles, a statement that has proved to be “very polarizing,” according to Griffiths. “People either love it or hate it.”

That’s just the kind of response the partners were looking for. Since coming aboard ZA!, Griffiths had been turning out bracing, acerbic graphic work for clients such as Bloomberg Businessweek, as well as iPad apps for Condé Nast titles. “Whenever we hire Zut, we always get really wild ideas,” says Gary Fogelson, whose firm, Other Means, has commissioned illustration from the office for Bloomberg’s editorial page, Bloomberg View. Appropriating familiar images and pairing them with bitingly sarcastic text, Griffiths and Zut Alors! have articulated a distinct visual language; what it says, Fogelson says, is “fuck you.” It’s an attitude that gets attention, and if it gives the client some in-your-face cred, so much the better for them.

Zut Alors! website ,2011

Yale Graphic Design M.F.A. 2011 website, with Juan Astasio Soriano and Brian Watterson, 2011

 

Paperweight for senior thesis, 2011

The message comes through in infographics, bookmaking, and typography, but perhaps nowhere more so than on the firm’s website, full of blind alleys and blinking icons. This iconoclastic approach matches Griffith’s own. At school, he and a group of colleagues created the Book Trust, a theory-minded but tangible design catalog in which other artists could purchase “shares”; they peddled it — in full corporate drag, name tags and all — around the New York Art Book Fair.

The Book Trust Prospectus, published by Investment Future Strategy, Ltd., with Benjamin Critton, Harry Gassel, Zak Klauck, and Mylinh Nguyen, 2012

“Almost all of graphic design is very commercial, including a lot of work I make,” Griffiths says. Alternating satire with confrontation, he is trying to work his way out of the design-world straitjacket, even as he’s piecing together how to operate a professional partnership. Griffiths says, “We’re just figuring it out as we go along.”

See the other 2012 New Visual Artists:

• Sang Mun
• Erin Schell
• Berton Hasebe
• Drea Zlanabitnig
• Casper Heijkenskjöld
• Kelsey Dake
• Jerome Corgier
• Tracy Ma
• Olimpia Zagnoli
• Ryan Thacker
• John Passafiume
• Lisa Hedge
• Jungyeon Roh
• Dafi Kühne
• Jing Wei
• Caleb Bennett
• Naz Sahin
• Serifcan Ozcan
• Brendan Griffiths
• George Michael Brower

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More Design Resources:

• Learn about the next generation of app design from one of the industry’s leaders!
• Available now: Print Magazine’s Guest Art Director Digital Collection
• Get an inside look at logo design from Chermayeff & Geismar

I bet many of you don’t know what the Michelin Man, also known as the Bibendum, is made of. Take a wild guess! French cartoonist Marius Rossillon, also known as O’Galop, created the prototype for a Munich brewery (he was holding a glass of beer and quoting Horace’s phrase “Nunc est bibendum” — now’s the time to drink). It was rejected. But the Michelin brothers saw the image and suggested replacing O’Galop’s man with a figure made — yes indeed — from tires. Voila! The Bibendum is now one of the world’s most recognized and collected trademarks in the world.

England has a long tradition of dystopian prophecy in literature and cinema. The likes of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Ridley Scott all seem to revel in presenting doomsday scenarios. Films such as 1961′s “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” and the 1965 BBC docudrama “The War Game,” depicting a Soviet nuclear strike on England, as well as books like Raymond Briggs’ “When the Wind Blows,” a deceivingly innocent tale of untold horror, are among the works that underscore the British fascination with and fixation on nuclear devastation.

“When did music become so important?” That’s Don Draper from last week’s “Mad Men,” set in 1966. Later in the episode he turns off “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the Beatles album “Revolver,” and walks out of the room.

art: Rick Griffin

There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is — do you, Mr. Draper? One year later, Rolling Stone magazine will make its debut, followed soon by “Rock and Other Four Letter Words.”

“Rock,” a 250-plus-page Bantam paperback, was published in January 1968 and subtitled “Music of the Electric Generation.” It was one of the first books of its kind, chronicling a cultural revolution that was still in the midst of its own creation. Crammed with black-and-white portraits of bands and musicians, it’s part oral history, part visual LSD trip. One of its fold-out spreads has an intricate, circuitlike diagram that connects over a hundred names, from the Butterfield Blues Band, the Beach Boys, and the Byrds to Busby Berkeley, Brubeck and Bach.

The editor-designer was a writer named J Marks. The photographer for most of the images was Linda Eastman, who went on to work for Rolling Stone and — oh, yes — marry Paul McCartney.

By the sheer force of its graphic presentation, ”Rock and Other Four Letter Words” conveys the mid-1960s music scene’s spirit, vitality and relevance.

 

Memory is evanescent. I can’t recall where I made the purchase; perhaps it was during an elementary-school or Cub Scout trip. Nor do I remember my exact age; it was anywhere between 8 and 10. What I do remember vividly is the visceral experience: the feel and smell of the paper as I unfurled it. The sense that I was both witnessing and experiencing history, which I then held tangibly in my hands. In the morning of that day, my mother had given me some small change for the day’s trip, and I spent it on a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence. It was printed on a rough-hewn, yellow paper stock with stains on both sides, and it had a rigidity that made it hard to open (it was folded in quarters). The reproduction possessed a distinct smell, and the texture was coarse, as if it was once damp and left to dry. “Onion paper,” my mother explained when I got home. It sounded exotic. Sadly, I’ve forgotten the whereabouts of that formative piece of paper, but the power of the experience has remained.

As I remember it. Every defect was a hidden treasure.

Around that same time my father came home with a present for me. It was a ream of blank newsprint paper. He was a transit worker, and he explained that someone had left it behind on the subway. For me it became a treasured gift, as the paper looked exactly like the paper of the comic books I so fervently read. With the paper as my narrative canvases, I began producing my own comics by the score: Dr. Sol, The Crusaders, The Saturator, Gas-Man! et al.

Page from The Saturator, created when I was 11. At long last, I could produce comic books that looked like comic books.

Cut forward to 2001 when I first began to go through the Woody Guthrie Archives, located in Manhattan, to explore whether it was possible to make a book of his artwork. (It was.) Peering through his drawings and journals, I had the same experience I had as a child, although this time the documents had authentically aged: The years had added a yellow patina to many of these pieces, despite the fact that they were stored in a climate-controlled environment. This was the first time I was confronted with the question of how best to reproduce this work. Does one attempt to imagine it as it was when originally created, with pristine white backgrounds and colors that have not yet faded? Or reveal it as it exists today, less vivid but with the stains of time present? Since the former was impossible to know, I came to the conclusion that only the latter made sense.

I experienced this again a few years later with Louis Armstrong’s collages, which he “laminated” with Scotch tape. With these collages there was no question about heading back in time—the dried tape was as much a part of the collages as every photo was.

Woody Guthrie’s journals gain gravitas with the patina of passing years.

 

In Armstrong’s collages, yellowing tape adds to the experience.

Which brings me back to comics. One of the first collections I ever purchased, in the 1980s, was Bill Blackbeard’s oversize “Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,” first published in 1977. Within the anthology, “Hogan’s Alley,” “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Buster Brown,” and myriad others were lovingly and photographically reproduced with great detail on a paper stock closely akin to newsprint.

Imagine my surprise when I began to explore hardcover anthologies of comic books from DC and Marvel, released in the same era. “DC Archives” and “Marvel Masterworks” could not have been more different from Blackbeard’s groundbreaking accomplishment. They were garishly colored on high-gloss white stock; I had the sensation that I would need sunglasses to read them. I soon learned that since the original comics were unavailable—as were photostats—and the original artwork had been lost, destroyed, or scattered, the reproduction involved hiring present-day artists to trace and recolor the comics. The final effect was not so much of a black-and-white MGM classic colorized by Turner but rather like Gus Van Sant’s frame-by-frame remake of “Psycho,” starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates.

A page from Bill Blackbeard’s seminal work on newspaper comic strips, beautifully photographed in the pre-scanning days.

 

A side-by-side comparison of the original Fantastic Four #4 comic and a Marvel Masterworks “recreation.” Not only are the tracings inaccurate, the coloring does not adhere to the original.

The first time I became aware that change was in the air was when DC released “Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1. “Here, an off-white paper replicated the look and feel (although happily not the fragility) of newsprint, and the line art was reproduced from the original stats. Fortunately, DC has employed this technique for other releases, although Marvel has opted for the strategy of tracing and reproducing on bright paper.

Smaller publishers like Fantagraphics followed Blackbeard’s lead, and since the advent of digital scanning, many others have chosen similar tacks: Abrams, IDW, Dark Horse, Titan, and Yoe Books all beautifully reproduce from the source. Still, two schools of thought have emerged about how best to achieve an optimum reading experience, both utilizing matte paper. One approach keeps the yellowing borders intact, while the other involves removing the borders and enhancing the colors, as if the comics had originally been printed on white, higher quality stock.

The DC release Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1, successfully replicates the look and feel of the original comics.

In the next month, two books of comics reprints I’ve edited will be released, showcasing both techniques. “Golden Age Western Comics,” published by powerHouse Books, reproduces the original pages whole cloth, although the blacks and colors have been enhanced to replicate how they would have appeared before fading. In addition, we made minor touch-ups. Up until this point, this generally would have been my preference, as I prefer the viewing experience to be as close to reading a 60-year-old comic as possible; these comics were never printed on white paper to begin with. However, Fantagraphics has removed the borders and all signs of aging on our Mort Meskin book of reprint stories, “Out of the Shadows.” Comparing the two releases, I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of both approaches. As a genre, Westerns are mired in nostalgia, having long since been replaced by other action tropes in modern-day entertainment. With that in mind, a book as object set in a distant time and place seems appropriate. For the Mort Meskin collection, we hoped that a contemporary audience would rediscover him; Fantagraphic’s fresh, newly minted approach goes a long way toward achieving that.

A page from Golden Age Western Comics, published by powerHouse.

A page from Out of the Shadows, released by Fantagraphics.