Natalia Ilyin: In that part about music, it was not so much that musicians treated each other better than we do, but differently. I am not particularly interested in getting designers to smile at each other over the water cooler. It is a difference in their culture of creativity. Much about music is intrinsically communal, and much about design intrinsically individual. When you look out over a roomful of designers, you get the sense that they are all sitting there alone together. To this day, we teach designers to design alone. And it shows.

NI: Yes, we do spend most of our time working with other people. But look at what you just said. You are “contending” with peers and clients, you are “relying” on the production team. But how much do you really respect these people as equals?

NI: Would you want them to dictate an idea to you? Let’s face it, you would not want that. We designers have a deep need for total control. Er. Perhaps I betray too much.

NI: You’ve just said it. I’d have them work more communally in school: in more groups during their education. And it would be good if they could spend a little time thinking about what design actually does to the people in a culture before they get out and start manipulating forms and images with no notion of the power of their tools, nor an idea of the consequences of their actions.

NI: Oh, Jason, I am really not a child of Modernism. I am the child of a bunch of white Russians who associated Constructivism with the experience of being shot at in the name of progress. I was a grown woman before I heard the word “Picasso,” without the words “that charlatan” in the same sentence. When I went to grad school, Modernism hit me like a ton of bricks. I am critical of it the way a thinking person needs to be critical—I try to look into it from the outside. Most designers are in the Petrie dish of Modernism. When you are in the Petrie dish, you cannot map that dish’s dimensions. The Modern design language, the Modern aesthetic and ethic, is a language I learned the way an earnest adult learns a foreign language. I’m fluent, but I am not a native speaker. And that’s why I am more aware of the limits of the construct than perhaps other, more native, designers are.

NI: Designers can’t look at their work from the outside. However, they can educate themselves about the social, political, and philosophic trends that go into creating the language they speak, the language and philosophy of Modernism. In the current vogue for all things modern, practitioners often manipulate forms without much understanding of what those forms mean in a larger social and historical context. In that way these designers are truly postmodernist— they are engaging in what someone once called, “the illiterate use of symbols.”

NI: I had a grad student recently who created a great-looking T-shirt with a small illustration of Stalin on the front. He took it around to the undergrads and asked them whether they would buy it. They all wanted it because it looked so cool. They had only a vague notion about who Stalin was, they did not really recognize the face, and none could have told you that he killed 9 million people—three million more than Hitler did. But it was a cool shirt, and they wanted it. There it is: the illiterate use of symbols. I thought I was going to throw up when he told me this story and showed me the shirt. “Is this what we have done to images in my generation,” I thought? “Made everything a game of idiocy and irony? Removed images from their contexts to such a degree that nothing has meaning except as valued by the marketplace?” But, you know. The student that made the shirt was deeply affected by his own experiment. All the people in the class were affected. They weren’t just a bunch of over-mediated, irony-dripping disaffected design robot-hipper-than-thou students. They thought a lot about that shirt, that image. Students like that give me hope for the future of design.

NI: You know, for that idea they have to read the book. Preferably after having bought it for full price.

NI: Seeing is not a passive activity. Many different centers of the brain are involved in the relationship of percept and image. And the more you see, actually, the less you may enjoy it. If you are really looking you will see some pretty rotten stuff along with the lovely stuff. You may see heaven in a wildflower, as Blake did, but you may also see that in order to keep wildflowers blooming we have to make sure to protect the areas in which they grow, and that may mean not buying the McMansion on the razed hillside. Seeing predicates responsibility.

NI: Now, Jason, really. My academic semiotic woo-woo years are over. You can look, you can see; you can see, you can look. I suppose people would think that looking is brief and less intense, and seeing is a bit more Thich Nhat Hanh. But I am not so interested in the semantic difference between looking vs. seeing. I just wish designers would open their eyes a bit. I would like to see them take some responsibility for the ways their work affects real people in the world, and make an effort to stop gazing at their own narcissistic reflections in mirrors of their own making.

NI: It means thinking about other people’s work three ways: as it affects me in an emotional or intellectual way, as it relates to the broader social sphere, and as it predicts or describes trends in the larger cultural context. I am lucky to have become a writer at a time in which it is not a crime to mix personal memoir with academic thinking. Purists may call this a bastardization of criticism, but I call it criticism that people will actually read. And the more they read, the better the profession will be.

NI: I have been in design since I was 15 years old, and so far it hasn’t gotten dull. First I spent my time memorizing paper samples. Then I memorized typefaces. Then I learned to use large machines. Then I found a hard-drinking letterpress crowd. Then I fell in love with books and Adrian Wilson. Then I sat around David Goines’ press and shrink-wrapped things for him while he made posters and taught me about the Vienna Secession. Then I ran into Kindergarten Chats. Then someone mentioned the Bauhaus. Then there were all the pre, post, and neo modernisms. And then there was Arnheim and then semiotics and then cognitive theory. It’s been a Scheherazade of careers. Just when I think, all right this really is the end of the story, another something interesting crops up. Right now I have very little interest in who is using what typeface, but a huge amount of interest in how we see what we see, in what our brain decides we are seeing, and in what mental and social processes affect that.

NI: It’s funny when you look up one day and realize that you are running out of ambitions. That’s a happy day. A few years ago I was all ambition. And as far as contributing, only time can tell us whether I have done that. Now, I would like to keep my smart clients, keep SisterScarf’s programs for refugee relief funded, write the two books I have to write or my agent will kill me, teach at great schools sometimes to figure out what students are thinking, walk my dog twice a day, hear Pete play music three nights a week, read some, and have a big pile of money in the bank. Some of this is more achievable than other parts. But one’s reach should exceed her grasp.

NI: Thanks, Jason—looking forward to reversing the roles one of these days soon.

The British mystic William Blake — who lived from 1757-1827—was a writer who illustrated and printed his own writing and poetry: To see a world in a grain of sand; And heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand; And eternity in an hour.

“If you kill one man it is a crime, if you kill 1 million, it is a statistic.” —Stalin

Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Every day we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life, our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive.”

David Lance Goines—artist and writer—founded Saint Hieronymus Press in 1968 in a Berkeley print shop, where he created posters, wine labels, and other graphics.

Adrian Wilson was a fine press book designer. In 1965 he found, perfectly preserved, the earliest layouts for a printed book, those for the Nuremberg Chronicle, circa 1493, and reproduced them in his The Design of Books.

The Vienna Secession from 1897-1939 was a period when Austrian artists merged a variety of styles in an avant garde movement led by Gustav Klimt. Incorporating personal expression, and oftentimes absurd and fantastical imagery, the Secessionists paved the way for the Art Nouveau movement.

Kindergarten Chats, a book by architect Louis Sullivan, advocated expression in architecture, which conflicted with the functional and form-driven structures he was known for.

Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy and Albers were influential Bauhaus designers and educators. Their instructional methods paved the way for the current mentor/student model where art & design education takes place within a communal environment.

Rudolf Arnheim is Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. His books Visual Thinking and Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye sit on most designers bookshelves.

Scheherazade is the title of what Americans know as 1001 Arabian Nights.