Introduction
It is a brutal fact of the free market system that there are always more new, talented, and enthusiastic creative people entering the marketplace than there are situations where their talent can be utilized to its fullest potential. I see dozens of young design professionals each year, and I am always glad when I hear that one has landed a job. Sadly, too many highly talented people do not find a place to flourish; some give up and take other career paths, some take positions where they cannot be mentored or developed. For a society—and a world economy—that depends on innovative thinkers, this seems like a double loss.
While no book could hope to right this wrong, I undertook writing this one to accelerate the arrival of some crucial aha moments for creative professionals—the realizations that guide and expand career opportunities. It is my hope that Dialogues with Creative Legends will help reestablish the importance of mentoring as a fundamental design activity—on both sides of the interview table. The process of selecting, vetting, and promoting new creative talent is opaque. There are no road maps. There are, however, some attitudes that help; some ways to remain enthusiastic and persistent in the search until opportunity opens a door.
My own search began while I was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in 1968. At the time, CMU ran several programs to bring leading design practitioners to lecture, and there were usually either Q&A sessions or workshops where students could interact with the design luminaries. My first few contacts with highly accomplished creative professionals were transformational; the idea of design—which in a classroom setting can seem abstract—became alive and vital. As a result, it became my obstinate idea that if I could meet and question other great practitioners in design, and learn how they had steered their careers to such heights, then I might discern a pattern and follow that pattern myself. This necessitated tracking them down and getting them to agree to give me an interview. The process of obtaining the appointments was frequently as educational as the interviews themselves. I have included interviews in which special mentoring or coaching took place, as well as those with designers whose work was highly acclaimed. These interviews form the first two sections of the book and are presented chronologically. Later in my career I was privileged to be hired by some dynamic business leaders, and to learn from their personal style and observe their leadership. A few of these interviews with business leaders form the last section of the book.
Motivations & Choices
Everyone with creative impulses confronts a certain set of questions as they mature:
What is the nature of my talent? Does my talent measure up?
How do I find and contact the people who need my abilities?
How do I get noticed, get experience, and get connected?
Can my talent change the world for the better?
How do I support myself while trying to figure all this out?
Even against a background of revolutionary change in technology and society, many of these questions for creative individuals are constant. They must be posed and wrestled to the ground by each new creative soul. The questions and answers vary because each talent is unique, yet there is much to be learned from the conclusions of the seekers who have gone before.
What is there to be learned from the great practitioners of design, and their counterparts in business, from this recent and amazing period of graphic invention? What constants connect the rising generation of visual designers to the grand masters who preceded them?
It is these questions about creativity, mentoring, self-discovery, and interdependence that drove the interviews in this book. I set about asking questions—frequently the wrong questions—without much foreknowledge. Some of the interviewees are legends in design and business; others are less well known but nevertheless read me deeply and taught me extraordinary things. There were dozens of interviews I chose to leave out, to concentrate on those that, regardless of their professional standing or name recognition, enhanced my understanding in ways I could never have discovered on my own.
Setting
The latter half of the twentieth century was a time of intense social change, upheaval, and creativity. Nuclear weapons ended World War II, but began a cold war built on “mutually assured destruction.” Advances in birth control brought about far-reaching changes in family, vocation, marriage, and gender equality. An explosion in music and visual culture paralleled rapid evolution in business, education, and technology. The Civil Rights movement exposed inequality and hypocrisy that had clogged America’s morality since the founding of the republic.
This period was also a coming of age for graphic design. The larger family of design professions was just beginning to see female practitioners join its topmost ranks. It was striking that, while my graphic design class at CMU was half women, the university’s lecture series for famous designers was still called Men with Ideas. Rapid improvement in communications media gave designers a host of new tools. Between 1950 and 2000, several generations of phenomenal creative talents put those tools to astonishing use, responding to their stormy surroundings with an outpouring of daring, dazzling, and iconic imagery. As the millennium drew to a close, the digital revolution transformed every area of human endeavor, including the design profession.
Technical and Historical Background
Much has changed about the practice of graphic design since the period of these interviews. I have purposely avoided as much as possible writing about history or technique, since it is the more timeless psychological and social issues that are important to career development. Yet, a quick review of the technical and historical context will make the interviews comprehensible. Let me do that here, to minimize the necessity for historical asides in the main narrative.
In the late 1960s, most graphic design was created with artists’ media: pastels, gouache, cut paper, and analog photography. Designers relied heavily on the use of photographic prints, from film negatives; if you were in a hurry, direct to paper “photostats” were used in great profusion for design decision making. Felt-tipped markers flourished for a decade or two as an essential sketch medium. Also widely used was collage, a technique requiring great skill and a large library of old magazines. Artwork was prepared on boards to be photographed for printing or filmed for broadcast. Much of what is now transacted via the Internet was then delivered in person or by professional couriers. Photocopiers, which were then coming into common use, changed many of the techniques of design and illustration. Color copying was in its infancy, though it was embraced as quickly as it became reliable.
The graphic designer’s portfolio was—then as now—the defining component of an early creative career. A professional portfolio had printed samples and tear sheets from magazines, stills from TV, photographs of installations. Until then, an early-stage portfolio was filled with drawings, studies, and mostly handmade approximations of design ideas. Most students and young professionals recorded their portfolios on 35mm slides, primarily as a backup. Portfolios had to be viewed firsthand.
Because of the manual nature of design, the portfolio of a young professional emphasized manual skills. Drawing, lettering, skilled use of wet media, and the ability to indicate the space and gesture of typography using only a pencil were the designer’s stock in trade. One of my professors, Ed Fisher, Jr., repeated his mantra to four decades of student designers: “Quick expression is the designer’s salvation.” Another professor, Herbert Olds, said, “I draw because it’s the fastest way to see what I’m thinking.” I believe both will always be true, no matter how much the tools and methods change.
Beginning in the 1960s, typography underwent a series of technical revolutions. The typositor appeared briefly, a bizarre contraption that was half workstation and half darkroom, facilitating variations in headline type unimaginable with metal type. This began an emancipation of typography that gave graphic design a blast of freedom. The typositor also reduced the cost of introducing new fonts, from tens of thousands of dollars for a foundry font, to a few thousand for a typositor font. A wild outpouring of typographic innovations—and plagiarism—ensued. Herb Lubalin’s font Avant Garde, with its many ligatures and tight kerning, is an early example of how alert designers began exploiting their newfound freedom. A succession of electromechanical, photographic, optical, and digital methods for typesetting caused waves of wrenching change that eventually abolished the typographic unions and put typesetting in the hands of everyone with access to a computer.
When I began the interviews in this book, fax and automated teller machines were two decades in the future. Telephones were hardwired—no mobile—though in most cities telephone booths were abundant. There was no Global Positioning System—one either asked for directions or carried a paper map. In the early 1970s, mechanical answering machines began to replace answering services staffed by live operators. Prospecting for work by telephone was slowed by the necessity of collecting recorded calls from a machine or a remote human operator. I purchased my first answering machine in 1977; it cost several weeks’ pay and weighed 15 pounds!
The tsunami of change brought about by the Internet has made it considerably easier to make the work of new talent easily visible. Yet interactive and social media have also made more difficult the essential task of obtaining face-to-face interviews with top talent. Employers can anonymously view and eliminate all but a very few portfolios for interviews. For that reason, it is my hope that this book will convince rising designers to apply their creativity to making personal contact with their creative idols and to soliciting mentorship. I certainly hope it will remind gatekeepers everywhere of the crucial mentoring activity that goes on in face-to-face interviews, and of the necessity of hiring, in the words of Ruedi Rüegg, “people, not portfolios.”
About the Interviews
This book spans approximately 40 years. I did not begin with the intent to write a book, so many of the dialogues were recorded in note form and transcribed later. While I have presented the interviews here in present tense using a dialogue format, I cannot represent them as verbatim. Some, such as those with employers, teachers, and clients, are summarized from conversations that took place over the course of weeks or even months. Others, such as the lectures in Pittsburgh and job interviews with famous designers, were from notes made soon after the fact. The Lubalin interview is an example.
I have been privileged to meet and serve many creative and business leaders of the first rank who are not included in this book. This is not because their advice was not excellent, not because their creativity or leadership is not great. Rather, I felt compelled for the reader’s sake to make the most concise and revealing collection of dialogues, not the most comprehensive.
It has been my intention throughout to be true to what was being communicated, and to give the reader the immediacy of firsthand experience in a narrative edited to give context and continuity. First and foremost, Dialogues with Creative Legends is meant to convey the cumulative effects and connections—the aha moments—brought about by the insights of these mentors. Where possible I have sent my remarks to the interviewees to obtain their agreement. There are many references to people in the narrative who were not interviewees but who played roles necessary to the development of a point. For a few individuals playing supporting roles whom I have not been able to track down for comment, or whose real names I have forgotten, I have elected to give fictitious names. These are: Dan Small, Jonathan Green, Walter Papillion, John Wright, Squire, and Jimmy Saronsen.
Paths and Goals
The fundamental goal of graphic design is still to communicate with precision, power, and finesse. The goals of showing a portfolio are remarkably constant as well. For the interviewer the goal is to assess the creative skill, experience, and personality of the young talent. For the interviewee, the goal is to make an impression, ask and learn, and ideally find an employment opportunity. In the larger sense, the interviewer’s role is to gain insight into the ecosystem of young talent, and to help it thrive.
For new talents confronting the necessity of making a living by their art, and especially to those whose zeal is missionary in its intensity, I offer this narrative not as a template to be followed, but rather as encouragement. Showing one’s creative work can seem terrifying and insurmountably difficult. Youthful interview experiences often include mistakes, tongue-tied moments, and embarrassing faux pas. Each new talent has to indulge a few interviewers who are rude, insensitive, dishonest, manipulative, or misinformed. I hope the ideas in this book will help interviewees maintain their poise, stay alert to serendipity, and shrug off the few inevitable bad experiences. If Dialogues imparts nothing else, let the reader understand that the majority of creative interviewers have been through the same trials, and want to be helpful even if they can’t offer employment.
Each time a portfolio is shown, the creative community is strengthened in some small way. The process deepens the interviewer’s knowledge of the talent pool and strengthens the interviewee’s creative work through commentary and experience in the spotlight. It also helps prepare the interviewee for a seat on the other side of the interview table. Many interviewees later find that the interviewer’s job is often just as challenging! And I hope that Dialogues with Creative Legends will help impart a sense of the long tradition in the creative community of helping everyone who asks: stranger, friend, competitor, and collaborator alike. It is a wonderful tradition. One rarely regrets generosity; I greatly regret the times I was unable to extend it.
I received many invaluable comments, a few well-deserved insults, and much encouragement from the designers whose time I begged away from their clients, their families, their much-needed nourishment or rest. Those are debts that cannot be repaid; at best they can be paid forward. I am thankful for the opportunity to pass along insights from some truly extraordinary creative and business leaders.
—David Calvin Laufer,
Atlanta, November, 2012