Speak Up is run with Six Apart’s 
I was lead by my daughter, from one book to the next, as she explored the vast sampling at the Fondo de Cultura Económica bookstore in Mexico City. We soon lost count of the books she had pulled from the shelves, but eventually we had to make our choices and bid our farewell. It was at this moment that I noticed a black, horizontal book on a side bookcase: The Black Book of Colors. Intrigued, I picked it up and found myself reading the whole thing right there and then.
Next Tuesday, May 20th, during the HOW Design Conference in Boston, Debbie Millman will be interviewing Michael Bierut live, on stage and broadcast through her radio show, Design Matters. Since Debbie has interviewed Michael a couple of times — first, as a guest on Design Matters back in 2005, and then for her book, How to Think like a Great Graphic Designer — they want anything but awkward silences on stage, so they will be pre-taking questions gathered from the internets. So, what would you like to ask Michael Bierut?
The top 15 out of a 35-quip week.
Oftentimes, design students use the word interesting during reviews and critiques. They elevate a design to the stature of acceptable, ideal, or award-worthy. But interesting is not an easy path to glory.
One of the ever pressing matters for graphic designers is how to display our work, especially work that is best experienced by interacting with it or seeing it at 100% size and reality. With online and PDF portfolios becoming the norm, it is increasingly hard to convey the experience of flipping through a book or magazine, or holding a bottle of some fancy vodka, or staring at a poster half the height of a human being — of course, we have figured out how to show posters, through the preeminent Finger Hold.
The top 15 out of a 42-quip week.
I see you. I see you not. I see you. I see you not. I see…
At some point during the late 1990s I saw Modern Dog’s poster work for the first time, and it then became a consistent recurrence to see it again and again in design annuals, year after year. What impressed me the most wasn’t the actual work but the indomitable breadth of styles and approaches that they were able to work in. Nothing looked the same twice, and everything had a sensation of being scraped at the last minute from resources unbeknownst to anyone living outside Seattle or not last-named Chantry. I’ve always enjoyed their work, but I never knew why. Maybe it was “peer pressure” that I had to like it, because everyone else did. But much like the work of Art Chantry, Aesthetic Apparatus or even Peter Saville I never quite “got it” — meaning, the visual references or choices appeared arbitrary, or simply chosen for their coolness, or as an inside joke funny only to a handful of people — even if I enjoyed looking at it. Of course, that is my problem not theirs, and there is always a good reason behind everything when you have a chance to hear these designers speak or read their monographs. With the publication of Modern Dog: 20 Yearsof Poster Art — chronicling the poster work of the firm founded by Robynne Raye and Mike Strassburger in 1987 — I’m relieved to know that, in fact, some of these assumptions on my part are true, but also that there is a story to be told behind almost every poster (and there are 226 of them in the book) and that each story illuminates a different aspect of what it takes to be a graphic designer.
The top 15 out of a 22-quip week. Yes, a day late, sorry.
The top 15 out of a 23-quip week.
