“find your own way, follow someone elses, but for fucks sake whatever you do find a way. the thing of it is that it is soft and a bit abstract and really about love in the end but that is the hardest (as in face punch hard) thing and if you don’t believe that then you haven’t lived yet.” —graham wood
After all these years in the graphic design business, powerful and beautiful and even really ugly graphic design gets my heart pounding. It gives me that flittering, fluttering butterflies-in-the-stomach, knock-knee’d kind of feeling that I can only attribute to…love.
Why do you love graphic design? Why do you wake up every morning and go to your computer and start all over every single day? How did you fall in love with this profession in the first place?
And lastly, just to make this more interesting on a gloomy, somewhat overcast and drizzly Saturday morning in New York City…what is your favorite “love” graphic? Mine is this.
> what is your favorite "love" graphic? Mine is this.
I have to agree, even though it might seem like the obvious — and mainstream — answer, it is one of the best representations of the word. I snapped this four-paneled lomo of the three-d version of it a year ago. I'm also a big fan of Michael Osborne's Love stamp for the Postal Service. Now unto the harder questions.
>Why do you love graphic design?
... this is hard. Harder than I thought.
There are so many things, but most of them are intangible. One thing I know for sure is that I love the process of Graphic Design. The outpour of ideas in that first moment when you take out the sketch pad or even when you open the first blank Illustator (8.0 of course) file and start laying out stuff. Looking for the right image, the right typeface, the perfect PMS color. Moving things around, printing it and seeing how much work you still have to put into it. That first meeting with the client when you present your visual concepts is always exhilarating, especially if they get excited with something you did. I even relish on the changes they ask for, it's always a challenge and sometimes a burden, but I love it — even if I course the client's name many times over. I love going to a press check and see whatever it is I'm doing rolling off the presses, the noise, the smell of fresh ink. The final product is just the icing on the cake — the process of design is what I love.
>How did you fall in love with this profession in the first place?
No clue. It just happened and I didn't have the guts to question it. I love it and that's that.
>Why do you wake up every morning and go to your computer and start all over every single day?
One thing that gets me going is really bad design. Yes, I am that snobby. I know bad design when I see it, and I love tearing it to pieces in my own head or even with my coworkers. I love seeing the aberrations that some people call design, it just adds fuel to the fire, it makes me want to prove somebody (not sure who) that design is a science/art and not something you can fart out in the computer. Because that is what bad design is: shit. I love looking at it and pointing it out.
On Aug.02.2003 at 11:03 AM