Read full NPR article here.

I think this raises some interesting ideas about visual language as it relates to process in the new digital millenium, and I think some kind of middle ground may be where I land — yes, the “anthropomorphic” representationalism of, say, a — entirely virtual — trash can seems a little outdated or old hat, but are we ready to let go of that convention in favor of a “image free” conception of our gizmoid functions and performances? How is the MEANING of it changed? Is there a new understanding of what is transpiring if there is no “depiction” of it? Probably. I think the interaction becomes that much more abstract and concrete at the same time, oddly. But colder and maybe even more solipsistic — so, it makes sense I think that microsoft would be at the cutting edge (and I really kinda only mean that sorta snarkily — I mean, y’know, it kinda makes sense considering what they’ve been about culturally and historically). I agree that there’s some silliness associated w/ the woodgrain and the stitching, but I wonder if doing away w/a representational approach to user-interfacing isn’t a step too far in the other direction.

Another perspective

Today is sam’s birthday. To my great surprise and delight, he said recently that he wouldn’t mind having a wristwatch (one of his “cool” friends must wear one), so I was very happy to have his present easily determined and then purchased. I very deliberately got him an analog watch rather than a digital one — and I was actually thinking about this in the car on the way in this morning — cuz a digital read-out will tell you what time it is RIGHT NOW — THIS VERY SECOND — with no indication of how that relates to the “sweep of time” on a grander scale. A minute hand and a second hand and an hour hand, on the other “hand,” convey what comes before and hence — you can see it there — the second hand moving through space IN TIME. It’s a more humane experience of time. Still a man-made contrivance, but somehow more organic. And I wonder how these little aspects of our daily life add up and influence our experience of the world and how we react to it. I saw a GPS on the dashboard of the car in front of me, and thought how, similarly, the GPS will tell you EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW. A traditional, paper map shows you the space and then it’s up to you to put yourself in it — a fundamentally very different approach. The further we get into abstraction, is more humanity lost byte by byte? And what is happening to the hard-wiring of our children’s brains — the ones who never heard of a floppy disk? How is their experience of the world different from ours?

oddly enough, i may very well have been reading the only one of his books that i actually own at the moment he passed. i’ve enjoyed his writing in periodicals and online for years, but only recently saw fit to pay cold hard cash for ink on paper, having picked up the most recent compendium, “arguably,” just last week. i read the better part of “god is not great” just standing in the aisle, transfixed in the barnes and noble like the proverbial choir that loves being preached to, and his hellbent slate posts were regular lunchtime reading. last night however, i was ushered off to sleep by the dulcet tones of hitch excoriating gore vidal for his repeated sins of intellectual lassitude, comparing the critical writings of john updike to The Importance of Being Earnest — for the better part not unfavorably, and considering theism and uh… pretty much anything it touches. plenty has and will be said elsewhere, but it goes without saying that dude would brook no bulls#it and he did so with inimitable panache — cross hunter s. thompson with lord byron. the guy’s freakishly sharp mind, combined with apparently (and reportedly) effortless verbal dexterity, eloquence and passionately held convictions gave voice to impossibly complicated ideas in expressions that could be alternately brutally incisive, sinewy, supple and make his points in a fashion not unlike that of the scotch of which he was unrepentently fond: smooth, complex, possessing of a not-inconsiderable kick and likely to leave one feeling somewhat woozy afterwards.

obviously hitch was in no direct way connected to design or marketing, but whether writing for magazines, the web, books, speeches or debates, he was a communicator of ideas often (usually?) at odds with mainstream conceptions. he remained steadfast and unbending in his insistence upon integrity of intention, unfettered truth at all costs and, even in the face of his own very shuffling off of this mortal coil, determined to shout when necessary, “the emperor has no clothes” as loudly as his voice would carry.

for those who are not familiar, "art&copy” is a feature length documentary that came out a couple years ago about the creative side of the advertising industry. constructed like any other talking head-driven vehicle, we hear stories, anecdotes, rants and pearls of wisdom from the most brilliant and successful advertising minds of the last 50 years. not dissimilarly to the earlier released “helvetica,” the condensed history lesson helps to contextualize much of the discussion, and perhaps it takes itself a little too seriously (although maybe not), but if they as icons and we as acolytes don’t, who will?

and inasmuch as narrative is spun from the creative point of view, it’s not particularly surprising that “art&copy” is not very kind to bureaucrats, but looks unflinchingly at the relationship between those functions and the creative spark and process. it reminds me that the challenges that we as designers, art directors and copy writers confront are to a degree universal — the walls to be pushed against, imposed from without and from within, have in many ways not really changed much over time. sure, there are macs now where there once were tissues, but the problems to be solved remain fundamentally quite constant. we’re all kinda trying to do the same thing; connect and convey in as meaningful a fashion as possible. that connection to the forebears makes me feel a small part of a larger whole, a sense of family of sorts. and the tales of trial, tribulation, joy and exaltation in the ongoing quest to create art in the service of both commerce and some greater good also remind me that the rewards can be small or large, simple or profound.

highly, highly, highly recommended.
(i assume one can get via netflix or amazon?)

Not so surprisingly, there also appeared somewhere on the web a review of “worst uniform designs,” and to my horror, dismay and great consternation, there, amongst many perfectly deserving examples from the “Annals of Bad Uniform Choices” (oh, and there have been some doozies — i’m lookin’ at you, bill veeck) was the beloved “Curly W” of our very own hapless Washington Nationals professional baseball franchise. Somehow it had been construed that one of the most elegant and historic icons in sport was in fact not just fussy, but musty. Um, hellooo?

This is me taking much umbrage. Quake before the righteousness of my indignation.

Besides ruffling my feathers by bad-mouthing the home nine, what this did for me was shed just a little light on the idea of perspective and the eye of the would-be beholder, because clearly whomever put our graceful and stately logo on that god-forsaken list is no fan of the suddenly resurgent Nats, probably not a Washingtonian, a baseball fan, or evidently even one with a passing familiarity with the institution. Because if he/she was, they’d know that:

Hondo would approve.

The design resurrects/revives/revisits the look of the old Washington Senators, making a strong and direct connection not just to the local history of our nation’s pastime in the nation’s capital but to the deep roots of the game itself. Again, continuity is a beautiful thing. Countless scribes and scholars have waxed much more poetically than I, and unfortunately the old saying, “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” will not be soon forgotten. And while sadly, a visual connection to the Golden Era may be as close as we get for a while, a sense of historical awareness couldn’t be more appropriate for this town. Baseball has a long memory. No sport reveres its history like baseball: it’s the central tenet of its culture. “Respect the game” possesses the gravitas of “honor thy mother and thy father.”

Baseball, for all its foibles, still maintains a central sense of elan that the other major sports simply do not possess — for a sport played by big, often dumb young men it retains an inarguable sophistication where others pander — and for all the modernizing and “keeping up with the ever changing times” baseball remains somehow fundamentally unchanged. That quality is reflected in The Curly W.

and — duh — w stands for “win.”

I’d forgotten to bring appropriate head-cover-and-visorage (read: ballcap), when I went out to Tucson for my buddy Dave’s wedding, so I picked one up while tooling around the UniversIty of Arizona the morning before the ceremony. I’d seen U of A’s logo on the side of their football helmets on tv, but never really looked at it particularly closely, and as it turns out, I should have cuz it’s pretty cool. Not a smack-you-upside-the-head-with-its-cleverness kind of design, but a quietly smart bit of juxtaposition. In a nutshell, it consists of one capital letterform (“A”) floating inside of, or surrounded by, another. The inner A is of a classical persuasion, with its gently flared serifs and proportions one might imagine carved into a frieze on the acropolis. The outer is of a more recent vintage by comparison, with big ol’ slab serifs (probably popularized about the time the school was founded) boldly declaring its modernity. So, I instantly got where the designer was going in his/her attempt to suggest simultaneously dichotomy and integration: “knowledge is perpetual, and this is an institution where we roll around in it in our time and embrace the continuum — we’re a contemporary facility that doesn’t just value that which precedes us, but celebrates how the future grows from memoria — past is prologue, baby.”

No seriously, I totally got all that from one A inside another. It’s a complex idea simply and gracefully rendered: the volumes are well balanced, positive-negative where the two letterforms create a negative inner-space doesn’t hinder legibility, and the two-color approach feels utterly obvious in the very best sense. The visual representation feels perfectly expressive of the idea it manifests and it handsomely serves all of the myriad purposes and applications that are required of a high-profile visual identity component of a modern educational facility.

And It looks cool on the front of a ballcap — and mine’s off to whomever designed this one, cuz it’s always encouraging and sometimes inspiring to see ‘the art and the craft’ performed at a very high level. Go Cats.

When I was in second grade, we lived in the Chicago suburb of Brookfield and I was a huge Cubs fan. My dad would pitch whiffle balls to me in the front yard, and I would go one-by-one through their batting order, imitating each player’s stance and swing. Ron Santo was my favorite — and he had lots of competition: Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins, Ernie Banks (whose autograph I got at Wrigley in ‘68 or so). He was our home run hitter after all, and besides, I played third base in little league. A year later after we had moved to Lake Bluff, Illinois, I made a drawing of my hero and sent it in to WGN, the Chicago television station (not yet a “super station”) that broadcasted the Cubs’ games and had an after school show during which they showed kids’ artwork between installments of Diver Dan and Sea Hunt. I was pretty damn proud when they showed my drawing of Ron Santo — a truly pre-renaissance conception of perspective, but exquisite detail in the uniform — on the TV, and I’m not entirely sure that the experience didn’t have an impact on the direction that drawing and art would take in my life in years to come.

The music was generally pretty cool, but it’s the album covers (yes, we’re talking LPs here) that have stuck with me. They had a single, consistent visual treatment that was disarmingly simple yet elegant and arresting. As I recall, they featured enigmatic black and white photos cropped in unexpected ways (or sometimes no photo at all), with very, very simple typographic arrangements (Helvetica 55, flush left, one color—a straight orange, pale blue, maybe a grey or reversed out of the photo). There was a clear synergy-cum-corollary with the austerity, angularity, and abstraction of the music inside the package (’80s Euro avant-garde jazz and art music). Swiss modernism pushed to the extreme, these designs could very well have come off as naive or unfinished, but the apparent simplicity instead made them so haunting that I remember them well some 20 years later. The utter absence of anything extraneous made these covers so memorable—and in successful marketing communications too, distilling an idea to its essence can lead to greater clarity and even moving communication. Prudent editing is a crucial aspect of the craft — whether we’re talking layout and design, copywriting, or any of many other disciplines (i.e. music, painting, literature, architecture). To increase the likelihood of a successful exchange of ideas, it behooves one to know when to say when, and it’s our job to know when successful messaging is compromised by "too much stuff."

Anyway, just as the jazz label Blue Note had an iconic look in the ’50s and ’60s that was emblematic of its times, the HatHut remain for me a gorgeous lot fixed in time. Seek them out at your local record store…on vinyl.

p.s. Turns out they’re still around. www.hathut.com.

Part of the challenge of developing quality creative is to not only to deliver salient messaging via appropriate vehicles, but also to do it in a way that is compelling — not just visually arresting and/or alluring, but conceptually resonant and memorable. A strategic marketing plan may be indispensible, but it’s useless without a creative vehicle that not only garners attention, but rewards it.

The Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI) came to Fixation ready to make a bolder statement with the creative for their annual PACK EXPO trade event. The campaign that we’ve developed this year introduces bold colors (coded by vertical market) to enliven photography, an energetic and contemporary typographic and design sensibility, and a pointed but flexible approach to messaging that, through series of “Because” statements, spells out very specifically and persuasively the issues and concerns of the industry. The look is a significant departure from not just what PMMI has done in the past, but from the way that the industry portrays itself in general. The “Because” approach to copy confers a touch of swagger while conveying important information in a businesslike fashion. Together, they articulate a vision and message that looks and sounds unlike other marketing efforts propagated in the industry.

Zigging when everyone zags may just be the way to get noticed — and perhaps make an important connection — amongst the dizzying information overload. Can giving voice to a unique idea or new expression be a little risky? Sure, but so is the risk of having one’s message un-consumed because it’s ordinary or forgettable. Who can afford to be ignored?

When there’s a lot at stake, the safe option can seem pretty appealing for obvious reasons. And if you’re operating on a recession-hammered budget and can’t afford Hollywood endorsements or elaborate photo shoots on glamorous sets, the challenge becomes even greater and the value of unique creative becomes all the more apparent. Given that there’s really only so much that each of us can process, blending in seldom emerges as the best option. Sometimes it takes a brilliant idea rendered in a fresh and fascinating way to cut through the clutter.