“I think most of the blah-blahing about MP3s versus records (or printed books vs. e-books) is a mix of honest-to-God personal preference and sheer sentimentalism. I think we all need to shut up about this, because nothing anyone writes or says is going to change any minds. Most of the drum-beating amounts to snobbery for being part of a grand tradition or arrogance for being an early adopter. Both are equally foolish things to be prideful about. Find what works for you, and be happy with it. Music is fun and nourishing. Let it be.”
—Frank Chimero on access versus ownership, print versus digital, and mp3s versus records.
Neither is inherently better than the other. Both can coexist. Find what works for you and fully enjoy that book, that album, that movie, that anything.
Frank Chimero:
[T]he value of design is less established by the quality of the work, but rather the presence of the audience. They’re the ones that imbue value to what we do and determine whether or not we are successful. Design is meant to be seen, to be considered, to be interacted with and used. Each one of those things creates an experience, so in its essence, it’s the job of design to make meaningful, memorable experiences for people.
See also: The Value of Design
There is a great interview over at Design Bureau with two of my favorite designers, Frank Chimero and Rob Giampietro, discussing one of my new favorite websites, The Mavenist, and the conversations drifts to one of my favorite topics, gift-giving. A great quote from Rob:
In terms of design, gift-giving is a useful structure. For one thing, gift economies create a different kind of value than pure monetary value. So when designers are asked about “monetizing” design, it’s good to invoke a gift metaphor to counter this. When you put good things out there, good things come back, and they may take both monetary and non-monetary form. Much of design is given away, either physically (like a business card) or digitally (like a website) or even experientially (like a slide talk). All of these are design and many are free, but all have great usefulness and value. Their value comes partly from their aesthetics, but aesthetics, as we know, can be highly subjective. Gift-giving gives us a criterion other than aesthetics to evaluate design. It shifts the emphasis in design discussions away from the production of forms by practitioners and toward the production of actions by recipients.
And then Frank adds:
The form of things matters only in so far as they have a good intent. I’m not convinced that design can rise above its content, because it’s so subservient to the message it’s communicating and the effect it has on its audience. The thing that merges design so eloquently to the process of gift-giving is the fact that one person is hiring another person to make something for a third person. The designer and the client are working together to create something for someone else.
“[E]verything we do, everything we make, is not about the beginning or the end of things. We may draw a line, but we are in the thick of life. We make for these middle parts. Every time we sit down to write, draw, design, paint, dance, we do so because we believe there will be a tomorrow. Every movement and each creation says, “The world is not done yet.” To make is to be optimistic. We get to make tomorrow for ourselves and one another, and we are lucky, because we are allowed to be engaged with the world and one another in this way.”
From Frank Chimero’s inspiring piece The Storm and The Line
We get to create tomorrow. Together, we can build a new world, a world that’s better than this one. That’s what great art does—it momentarily takes you out of this world and lets you see a glimpse of another world, a better world. A world we too can create.
This is one of those things you always know to be true deep down but sometimes it feels good to let someone else say it. This is one of the many reasons I can’t wait for Frank’s book.
Frank Chimero on the don’ts of design:
Wow, I had to contort that sentence to make it work. Ugly writing. Regardless, it’s not you. It’s not the client. It’s the audience.
It’s easy to get fooled into thinking that you’re serving the client. It may seem so because they sign the checks, but really great clients have the same needs as the audience. It’s good business to give people what they want in a way that they want it.
100% yes. This fits right in with my recent post on the value of design.
“There’s nothing wrong with correcting mistakes, and proper form is usually important, but to discount things because of the reasons they are wrong may just be to ignore all the other reasons that they are right.”
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes! This is everything I’m about.
Semi-related to the previous post, Frank Chimero on the pencil:
The pencil is general, yet specific. Ideas can be hashed out with ease to gauge their potential. The marks can be vague enough so one doesn’t judge the execution, but instead judges the potential of the idea. This is why I can’t come up with ideas on computers. Computers are too specific; they have too many degrees of separation between my mind and the canvas. With a pencil, it starts from my brain, moves down my arm, straight out my hand to the paper. Atoms transfer from the tip of the pencil to the surface of the paper. I can see the sheet fill up. With the computer, I have to turn on the computer, grab the mouse, launch the software, select the tool I wish to use, think about how to use that tool, and then worry about the mark that it makes. The beauty of a pencil is you don’t need to think about how to use it. It’s instinctive. A five-year-old knows how to use a pencil just as well as a sixty-year-old. The pencil is the great equalizer.
I had a few thoughts saved in Simplenote that I had hoped to turn into a post that honored the pencil. Frank said everything I wanted to say and more in a much more eloquent way. Thanks, Frank.
And maybe that’s why I prefer the pencil. It forgives me for my mistakes: there’s an eraser there, after all. It accepts me for who I am: I can use it however I wish, and I don’t have to learn any special means to operate it like you might on a computer. There are no “rules.” And the pencil will always be cheap and available to anyone. I like what that represents: everyone has what they need to make something incredible.
It’s all you need and and it’s always there; waiting for you to pick it up and start making.
In celebration of the launch of Internet Explore 9 (I didn’t know IE was still producing new versions!), Microsoft commissioned designer Jason Santa Maria (Kutztown grad!) to design a site to showcase its new capabilities, specifically its better typography support. Jason recruited two of my other favorite designers, Naz Hamid and Frank Chimero, and between the three of them, they produced the amazing Lost World’s Fairs.
Not only are the designs amazing in their own right, the programming and CSS styles are quite impressive. You must take some time to look through what the trio has created. Art direction on the web may finally be here!
Also, read what each of them had to say on the project and their respective roles: Jason’s / Frank’s / Naz’s.
Insightful and inspiring thoughts from Frank Chimero on magic:
I’m not sure I know specifically what magic is, but maybe it is encountering a good impossibility. We don’t run into many Willy Wonkas or Walt Disneys in our lives: someone who has a completely different viewpoint than our own, and somehow, through sheer talent or brute force, builds a temple to that point of view. One who isn’t shy to embrace the seemingly impossible, then be able to pull it off. To defy gravity, to make things appear or disappear, to create unimaginable experiences because to make them requires the ability to mix things together that we wouldn’t even fathom possible. Magic!
And then on design:
At this point in my life, I believe the future of design is the polymath. It is to embrace design not only as a craft, but also as a liberal art and to realize that design is a cultural vessel. While bowls are nice, what makes them useful is that they can hold something. They must be filled with something good. The future is knowing something about programming or knife-throwing or molecular biology or psychology or even cooking, and realizing that these things are assets and not dead weight. It is about using design to project your point of view on these things, and to let the content influence the design and to let the design influence the content, to let each push and pull on one another to make the friction that smooths. It is digging, it is finding, it is learning, it is knowing. It is connecting. Life is research.
“Consider that Coke. You’ve looked at the nutritional label on a Coke before, right? You can look at how much sugar is in there or how many calories or however you want to frame it. That’s nutritional stuff on there. But, if you look at it from a nourishment perspective, there’s really only one thing that matters. Are you no longer thirsty after you drink it? Are you content?”
The first part in Frank Chimero’s series on nourishment was exactly what I needed to read today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of nourishment and thirst and satiating hunger. Not in the strict sense of food and drink, but in the philosophical sense of life and meaning. I’ve been thinking about the Coke we drink that we think is satisfying that thirst but in the end, it’s just a temporary cure and ends up making us even thirstier. Think of all the things we consume, habits we indulge in, and relationships we involve ourselves in just in an attempt to fill that thirst. But it always leads us wanting more, doesn’t it?
I think in many ways, I’ve tried to quench my thirst with knowledge. If I just learn more facts, read more books, watch more documentaries, I’ll feel better. But knowing facts doesn’t quench your thirst. A wine taster knows more about wine than I will probably ever know. They know how to hold the glass if it’s a white wine versus a red wine. They can take one sip and tell you about the grapes used. With one sip, they can go on and on about the facts of that particular wine. But you know what, a wine taster doesn’t drink wine when they are thirsty. They know that drink and those facts won’t quench their thirst.
Perhaps it’s time to stop reaching for those temporary quenchers that only leave me thirstier.
“I don’t think we need to shoot up another leaky rocketship. But, where do we go to find promise? Where is a light we can start walking towards? We’ll project promise on to anything that feels like it will not break. Politicians, deities, products or punditry, no matter. Promise us something unbreakable and we’ll give you our hearts.”
“So let’s talk about ink on paper. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but here is what I want to see: I want to see things earn the privilege to be objects. If we have the option of things being “real” and “not real,” I want the real stuff to be really good. I want the times when ink hits paper to always be beautiful, useful, and desirable. It seems like such a shame to cut down a tree to print this Land’s End catalog, with the thin model coyly smiling at me on the back in her awkward swimsuit. I bet it bunches up in the wrong spots. It seems silly to give permanence to a thing that was meant to be ephemeral to begin with. This goes for junk mail, beach-books, handouts for students, whatever. If your shelf-life is shorter than forever and ever amen, I think we need to think about whether or not it needs to be printed.”
—Frank Chimero responding to a question on the future of print design. I 100% agree with him. As we move into an era where printed material could become second to digital content, we need to make sure the printed content is really, really good. Jaw-droppingly good. It needs to be worth the extra cash. I’d be very curious to hear what Mr. McLuhan would say today because he was talking about this stuff fifty years ago.
Frank ends with the real kicker though: “Here is my tip to you: stop thinking of yourself as a print designer. You’re not designing for print. You’re designing for content.” Brilliant.
My current favorite designer/writer/illustrator has just launched a refresh of his website. Go read through everything he writes. I love the way Frank thinks.
