How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer

Introduction

by Debbie Millman

From: Steff Geissbuhler

Date: December 3, 2006 6:10:45 PM EST

To: Debbie Millman

Subject: Re: How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer

Debbie,

I think that we talk to ourselves, about ourselves, way too much. We have conferences where we talk to ourselves, we give each other awards, we publish each other’s work and words, and basically we pat each other on our backs.

I’m afraid that your book will be read by Graphic Designers only and therefore simply add to the incestuous writing in our profession. However, I found myself answering your questions to see how I would respond. I might be cringing when it’s published, but here it is.

I hope you don’t mind my critical point of view.

I often get questions like this from students, and whenever I do, I get the sense that they are fishing for a recipe to become a successful designer.

With best regards,

Steff

Steff Geissbuhler, Partner

C&G Partners

Despite its title, this book will not provide the reader with a recipe to think like some of the most accomplished graphic designers of our time. Consider it instead a glimpse into the minds of these revered masters, in order to understand the way they think and why.

This book didn’t start out quite this way. Initially, I set out to create an anthology that did, in fact, attempt to uncover common denominators and describe the thought processes of those venerated in the design field. Many of my original questions smacked of superficiality, and even though I was miffed when I first received Steff Geissbuhler’s reply, I quickly came to my senses. After all, Steff had a point. Perhaps we do talk to ourselves, about ourselves, way too much. But given the fact that design is a fairly young field, is there anything inherently wrong with a robust internal dialogue?

Identifying what constitutes a great mind, whether logical or magical or whimsical, is a necessarily subjective endeavor. Emulating a great mind is an even more complex proposition. There is no objective way to be great, let alone recommend an audience-tested, foolproof way to create with elegance, ambition, and artistry. If I was going to add to the discourse of an already cacophonous environment, I wanted to go beyond tactical quantifications of how designers work. Instead, I set out to engage in deeply psychological discussions in order to understand what motivates these practitioners to think and behave in the unique manner that they do.

Design invests raw matter with what Bruce Mau calls performativity—it endows an inert material with a capacity to incite action. But in order to accomplish this most effectively, designers must conjure this power. This process is complicated. The fundamental backbone of any good design solution is measured not only by what motivates an audience to think in a particular way, but what inspires them to feel a response.

Design is one of the few disciplines that is a science as well as an art. Effective, meaningful design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs. Thus, designers must balance both the logic and lyricism of humanity every time they design something, a task that requires a singularly mysterious skill.

Many of the designers interviewed in this book describe design as a problem-solving activity, yet it’s clear that these designers do far more than that. Despite the obvious similarities, there is one trait shared by each and every person in this group of designers: high levels of empathy. Their sensitivity has given them the ability to logically, poetically, and telegraphically transfer ideas from one mind to another. It imbues the talented designer with a wizardry of sorts, an uncanny ability to create a message and a purity of expression that cuts through the modern-day chaos of sensory overload.

This is the remarkable power every designer featured in this book has in abundance. In my interview with him, Milton Glaser observed, You convey your ideas by the authenticity of your being. Throughout these pages, there are a great many masters who offer ideas and wisdom through their authenticity. Ultimately, the conversations contained in this book reveal how designers think and view the world, but they are also a testament to how and why great designers are able to create the extraordinary work that they do.

Michael Bierut

When I first contacted Michael Bierut about talking with him for this book, he asked that we conduct the interview via e-mail. When I received his responses, I found it hard to believe that Bierut—coeditor of the anthology Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design and a cofounder of the blog Design Observer—could possibly have written what were easily the most uninteresting answers I had received thus far. Two examples:

What was your first creative memory?

I’m not sure I have any creative memories.

Did you ever have serious aspirations to pursue

any other type of career, and if so, what?

No.

Yet Michael, a Pentagram partner since 1990, is one of the most important and acclaimed designers working today. Not only has he won hundreds of design awards, not only is his work represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but Michael is charming, engaging, witty, and brilliant. The interview contained none of these attributes.

I was despondent: The idea of not including Bierut in a book about esteemed contemporary designers was unthinkable. After some nudging, he agreed to an in-person interview. He graciously gave me two hours of his time, and our discussion ended up being one of the funniest and most entertaining interviews I conducted for the book.

How would you say that you and your fellow

Pentagram partner Paula Scher are different?

Paula says what she thinks. I admire her a lot for that. I have given up wishing that I could be like that. I’ve discovered I’m really averse to conflict. I think I was brought up to be too polite! The negative aspect of this is that I’m passive-aggressive. I have deeply rooted neuroses and flaws, which actually compel me to fix things so that as many people as possible—actually everyone in the world—likes me.

You don’t seem to have an unhappy bone in your body.

That could also be denial. Paula used to say that I was the kind of guy who could be like this for 30 years, and then one day come into the office with a machine gun and go postal. But I think I’ve gotten over that, also. On the other hand, as you can see in the case of a politician desperate for everyone’s approval, you end up getting really confused about what your own convictions are.

In terms of design, I really admire and envy designers who always must do it their way and can walk away from a job if it’s not done on their own terms. I remember early on in my career, I worked with a guy who was absolutely secure in his convictions; though he liked it when people agreed with him, it wasn’t necessary in order for him to feel that he was right. Whereas if I go into a client meeting, and I can’t sell something, I feel like I’ve failed and my convictions get shaken.

When I first started talking directly to clients, I had some moments where I got so obsessed with obtaining approval about a project that I mistook that for doing the job right. By the time one project was about to go to press, I remember my boss—Massimo Vignelli—saying to me, What is this? And I said, This is a job for so-and-so. And he said, Why does it look this way? And I started to say, Well, they did this, and then they did that, and it had to be this, and he said, No. This is awful. We can’t let this go. He picked up the phone at my desk and called up the boss of the boss of the boss of the guy who had been jerking me around for three weeks and said, You know this thing you’re doing for the blah blah blah? I’m not sure it’s quite right. I want to do it right. We’ll send it over after we do one more thing to it. We have time, right? Then he sat there and scraped off all the shit that had accrued on it over the past three weeks and did something crisp and right and perfect.

Massimo had this saying: Once a work is out there, it doesn’t really matter what the excuses were.

It doesn’t matter if you didn’t have enough time or if the client was an idiot. The only thing that counts is what you’ve designed, and whether it’s good or bad.

These are words to live by. I have overcompensated by trying to do lots and lots of work in the hopes that something good will get out there. I think my batting percentage is so low that I just have to get lots of at-bats in order to even the score at all.

Do you really believe that?

Yes. I like working fast, and though now I’m old enough to know better, I’ve gotten addicted to closing my eyes and shooting. It’s a bad way to hit a target, actually.

Well, if you ha d missed the target a number of times, you probably would have stopped working that way. The fact that you haven’t stopped means you’ve had some success.

Yes. Sometimes if you’re fast, it’s mistaken for genius. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good. You can get acclimated to a certain way of working; you get some useful habits, but you also pick up others that aren’t very good.

There are times when I know that I have to write something for Design Observer [the blog about design and visual culture founded by Bierut, Jessica Helfand, William Drenttel, and Rick Poynor], and I’ll keep reminding myself that I have to post it on Thursday, and yet I’ll keep putting it off and putting it off. As long as I know what the subject is, and as long as I’ve been thinking about it for a week or so, when I’m ready, I can start writing and continue onward all the way to the end—one paragraph after another until it’s finished. It’s as if I’m working with an outline that was written down to my elbow. While it might seem that I haven’t been working all that time, I actually have—it was just unconscious or sub-conscious working.

You were germinating.

When I first started writing, one of the reasons I liked it so much was because it was so hard to do. I would finish a piece I had written and go back and look at it and reread it again, and I’d think, Wow this really is great, it’s really nice the way I did this. It reminded me of the way I felt about design in the very beginning. I remember looking at the first prototype I designed. I just couldn’t take my eyes off of it; it was so beautiful, so real, and so perfect. But over enough time, it becomes all too flawed, or worse, you become bored with it.

Likewise the first time you receive a finished piece; I’ve got my first printed piece somewhere in my basement. I’ve got samples of all sorts of things: a brochure for a lamp company that I did 25 years ago. It was a two-color piece, and I think I have 20 copies of it. At the time, I thought it was really important, and I had to have that many copies of it because it was just so beautiful. And of course it wasn’t that good, but it was one of the first things I designed that got printed. I was mesmerized by the realness of it. It had me all agog.

I think really brilliant people do a number of different things when they’re working. They’re able to force themselves to put a lot of time into things and give them a lot of attention, and not succumb to the shortcuts that regular practice can lead to. Stefan Sagmeister works like this. Or else you have someone like Tibor Kalman, who purposely fixed it so that he didn’t repeat himself.

How did he do that?

He would do two things. One, he’d be very ambitious about doing things in a new genre. If someone came to him to design a brochure for a museum exhibition, and he’d already designed a brochure for a museum exhibition, he’d say, "No, I want to design the exhibition," even though he’d never designed an exhibition before.

He also—and I think this was a kind of pathology/genius—he was able to burn his bridges behind him so he could ensure he wouldn’t repeat himself. After he did the animated Nothing But Flowers video for the Talking Heads, he received a lot of calls from television directors. They would say, Hey Tibor, could you do that typography thing on my commercial, could you do this, could you do that?

Tibor hated being hired because someone thought he knew how to do something well. I love being hired for it. I have an unrestrained enthusiasm for being hired to do something that I do well. It can get to be tough when you’ve done something over and over again, especially if it’s a genre of work that you have a reputation for and you keep getting calls to do another one and then another one. Eventually, you run out of ways to do it differently, and you find that it’s hard to disguise the fact that this very thing that has given you so much pleasure is now not enough.

It’s a basic psychological reaction; it’s like rats with pellets in a maze. You know exactly what gave you pleasure the first time you tried it, and you try to keep repeating the thing that led to that success. And just like any addict, you know the subsequent payback is insufficient. You remember that the first time it happened, it was wonderful; and by the tenth time, it’s, Ho hum, here’s another one. I’m not even going to take a picture of it, never mind 20 copies in the basement.

Are you addicted to anything?

Reading.

Reading? You consider reading an addiction?

I have a real fear of being alone with nothing to read. Of being on a plane with nothing to read. I take it to an extreme. There’s something really extreme about going to an amusement park with my kids and needing to take a book with me just in case the line for rides is too long. I think a lot of it is to inoculate myself, to keep my mind full so that I don’t have any time for self-reflection. I’ve really tried to improve this.

Do you think that you’re trying to distract yourself, trying not to confront something?

I think on some level, yes. But I think on the other hand, it’s just like a lot of compulsions: I also have to jog three miles every morning.

What happens if you don’t?

Well. You really want to know? I have a chart in my basement, and I have years and years of calendars on clipboards. They all have different markings on different days. There are markings I make when I do certain things, and certain marks I make when I do other things. Sometimes I give myself a special dispensation not to run, which is either one of three reasons: Either I have an 8:30 a.m. appointment, it’s raining pretty hard, or it’s below ten degrees—not including the windchill, but the actual thermometer reading. For these reasons, I’m allowed not to run that morning. No one else cares. Literally, no one else cares.

Why did you choose ten degrees as the cutoff point?

It’s single digits. It’s really cold when it’s nine degrees, even when you’re running. Twelve degrees you can run—it’s not so bad. Less than nine degrees, running becomes unbearable.

If I sleep late, I draw a little sad face for that day on the calendar, a frown face. If I don’t run, I’ll make an X. It’s horrible, all these really compulsive things. On the other hand, exercise is good for you.

So this calendar is sort of a hieroglyphic diary of your life.

Yes, it is. But it’s nothing I’m proud of. I think it’s fucked-up and embarrassing, to tell you the truth. It is not worth emulating at all. Oh, and there’s more. I keep notebooks. I have 79 of them. They go back to 1982. They’re all unlined, which is really hard to find, harder to find now than ever.

Do you have boxes of these notebooks stockpiled?

New ones? I’m about to run out. I had someone score me a whole cache about two years ago. I can find the genesis of every single thing I’ve ever worked on in them. And then there are a lot of notes from meetings and lots and lots of phone numbers.

How many do you carry around at a time?

I carry the current one and the previous one.

When you’re first carrying around numbers 79 and 80, how does it feel to put number 78 away?

I honestly can’t say there’s that much ceremony involved. The only thing I can say for sure is that there are two that I’ve lost. I remember both of them very distinctly. One of them I had just started, and I lost it, so I simply restarted it. The other one was almost completed, and I left it in a bathroom in Heathrow Airport.

Now, you may ask, Why was it in the bathroom in Heathrow Airport? Well, I was sitting on the can. I had nothing else to read. I didn’t have a book, I didn’t have a newspaper, and I didn’t have a magazine. That’s my nightmare: trying to go to the bathroom with nothing to read. So I took out my notebook and started looking at it, and then I finished and washed my hands and went away whistling. I forget when I realized that it was gone. It’s interesting in that I found I could survive quite well without it.

Sometimes, I’ll go to a meeting and forget my notebook, so I can’t write things down. When I’m working on a project, I’ll have a meeting with clients and ask lots of questions and take lots of notes, all with the idea that I’m going to be poring over them at great length later. But I really don’t, because it’s already in my mind. Sometimes, I’ll go back to check to see, What were those three things they said? I think just the act of writing something down helps clarify things in your mind.

Right now, I’m moving my desk at Pentagram because the available seat for Luke Hayman—who joined Pentagram as a partner—is right on the end. It would be rude to put the new guy on the end. So I’m going to sit at that desk, which means that I have to move all of my stuff. My stuff includes all those notebooks, all 77 of them. And I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at