My thoughts on the late designer Jackie Casey can be found on Eye magazine’s new blog. The post is in response to Elizabeth Resnick’s piece in the latest issue of Eye, where she (like me) names Casey as most unappreciated in the field. An excellent on line gallery of her posters can be found here (via AisleOne).

How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Allworth Press, 2007
How acquired: Purchased at Debbie Millman lecture

This collection of interviews presents 20 noted graphic design-related figures ruminating about their activity. In her introduction, Debbie Millman disclaims the book’s title but it’s fairly descriptive, being instructive by example rather than recipe. Since the book makes no pretension of compiling a definitive list of contemporary design “greats,” I won’t fuss overlong (for me) over the arbitrariness of the designation.

What does constitute graphic design greatness? All of the interviewees are practically accomplished graphic designers (save John Maeda, who has renown but simply isn’t a graphic designer by the field’s common standards). However, the jury’s out on the long-term significance of most of these practitioners. That many other designers could claim equal—or greater—stature compared to those selected doesn’t spoil the book. Still, it would have helped for Millman to, at least briefly, outline her criteria.

Again, a curve isn’t necessarily being drawn that would be thrown off by alternate choices. The common trait attributed to all the interviewees is “high levels of empathy” that makes them able to “logically, poetically, and telegraphically transfer ideas from one mind to the other.” Besides being a tad mystical for my taste, the description suggests I may want to wear my tin-foil hat if I ever attend a Design Legends Gala. Some more demonstrable and mundane abilities may first be ascribed to these worthies—without lessening their real accomplishments as producers.

These arguments are ultimately beside the point. This is a book about and for graphic designers who are already sold on the standing of the interviewees. The biographies provided on the designers are cursory, longer on superlatives than context. Overall, there’s more telling than showing going on (if someone is possessed of great wit or an engaging spirit, it should be made manifest in the subject’s own words). It’s obvious from the text that the reader will expect no justifications. Millman isn’t engaged in a whitewash (and, for their part, the designers don’t actively sanctify themselves) but I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the great design bastards. They exist, don’t they?

While I would sieve out the majority of the modifiers in the author’s text, it’s the interviewees’ words that are the heart of the book. At this level of the field, it’s given that these people are articulate. And practiced at talking about themselves. Remove a third of these designers from the lecture and conference circuit and…well, the remaining two-thirds would need twice as many interns as they picked up the slack. So, the challenge of this book is squeezing something fresh out of over-examined people.

On this count, Millman does a fine job. Having a group that tends toward the garrulous helps but has its drawbacks. Millman prompts with a light touch and checks her enthusiasm, letting it work for her. Some of the questions are shopworn (”What’s your first creative memory?”) but the interviews are accomplished with admirable restraint. They aren’t the “deep(ly) psychological discussions” promised in the introduction (more confrontation would needed to pull that off) but the book is no worse for it. Simply put, How To Think was an enjoyable read and I learned stuff about everyone featured.

The best favor How to Think does for graphic design is demonstrating the variety of personalities, approaches and opinions amongst its practitioners. In other words, it showcases some healthy friction. Millman doesn’t directly challenge her subjects’ opinions or natures but the “greats” go at each other across the pages. It’s good to read Neville Brody claiming Stefan Sagmeister is “extremely wrong” on a topic—then saying why. And early on, Carin Goldberg succinctly defines (and disdains) designer schtick, which is later performed by its master, Chip Kidd* (replacing the bulk of his text with a rim shot sound-chip would eliminate the middle man and prove no substantive loss).

How To Think is a nice mid-range discussion—between a critical ‘scoping and the typical lecture Q & A—best filed under “Conversations with Notable Graphic Designers.” And it is small praise to simply credit Debbie Millman for bringing a smart, new interviewing voice to design.

What I would like to see from her next is a long-overdue project for the field: giving voice to the “regular” graphic designer. The real picture of graphic design is the legion of non-”great” but thoughtful (and sometimes not) practitioners crafting our visual environment. Millman’s own empathy for all designers is considerable—evidenced in this book, her Speak Up posts, and Design Matters shows. Interviews of the kind offered in How To Think with the “regulars” might do more to raise awareness of graphic design outside the field. Then again, it might not. But Debbie Millman could be the one to give it the best shot.

* Note: Carin Goldberg does not name Chip Kidd (or any other designer) as a purveyor of designer schtick. The interpretation and identification is entirely my own.

I was in charge of three coolers: two filled with Little Hug® juice drinks (they’re little plastic barrels with peel off lids) on either side of one holding juice pouches: Kool-Aid Jammers® and Kraft Capri Suns®. For about 45 minutes, everything was great. Kids first filed past in their respective classes, grabbed either a pouch or a jug, and moved on. When seconds were announced, children came and went sporadically. I roved away from my post to sit with Emma (”Daaaa-aad!”).

Things were winding down when I returned to the coolers, now being overseen by the school’s security officer, Mr. Stewart. He was joking with the two or three kids who would come by—who kidded him right back—and knew most of them by name. He urged them to dig deep in the icy water, to get the cold ones.

I was next to one of the Hug-filled coolers when a small girl reached in and pulled out a different juice container, one I hadn’t known was inside. It was about the same size as the Hugs but with a reclosable pop-up top and no label. The girl showed the container (holding a purple juice) to another who asked, “What’s that?” On being told she found it in the cooler, the second girl plunged in and emerged with another, filled with a yellow-greenish liquid.

Word of the novel bottles spread instantaneously amongst the kids milling about. In seconds, there were six or more children squeezed next to each other, bent over the cooler, scouring the ice and water. A crowd of a dozen or more kids pressed in behind them, craning necks, eager for a look at one of the prizes, trying to force their way to the front. The girl who found the first bottle was pinned against the wall in front of me, a look of trapped panic on her face. I tried to clear a path for her while pulling a boy off the floor, knocked down in the rush and in danger of being trampled.

It took four adults to halt the fracas: me, Mr. Stewart, another parent, and a cafeteria worker. Kids were organized into a ragged line to progress to the coolers. Mr. Stewart closed the lid of the desired cooler, sat on it, and announced all the new bottles were gone. Children buzzed around for a while, regretfully making other choices, while casting longing looks at the guarded cooler.

For the last ten minutes of the picnic, Mr. Stewart and I exchanged disbelieving comments on what had just occurred. None of the kids had a chance to taste what was in the bottles, and none had a label to say what brand it was. (The girl who got the yellow-greenish one asked later to exchange it because “It’s yellow!”) The kids had gone crazy over a container—because it was different from the others available for an hour.

I suppose there may be a moral here about packaging or branding. If there is, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just about kids being kids. All I know is next year, you’ll find me serving condiments.

I love print stuff and have a lot of it (not as much as I’d like, though). Anyone who’s visited my office can testify to this. They’ll also confirm that it’s dangerous to start picking things out and asking me to comment upon them. Where to start? Where to stop!

One reason I’ve never personally referred to myself as a design critic was because of my highly selective and sporadic output. Once, maybe twice a year isn’t even warming up. But I’ve wondered what a sustained graphic design criticism would look like.

As many design commentators have noted, there isn’t any regular, on-going criticism of graphic design happening. Music and film reviewing (to name just two other cultural forms) is commonplace in print and on line. The design reviewing that’s occurring is very selective and intermittent. Simply taking the mass of printed material that gets produced, there’s no shortage of material. Fold in web and interactive and any sensible mind will be boggle if it considered trying to critique it all.

So, combining these considerations with a practical need to fill these pages, I’m self-declaring The Chronographical Survey.

This ponderous title simply means I’m going to review everything graphic designerly I get in the next year. My approach will be situational and improvised. Meaning, some things will get the full essay treatment, most not so much. At least, I’ll acknowledge everything sent to me, and document my design purchasing habits (not that much of a mystery, really). To start out, I’ll actually reach back to give mention to a few things I’ve acquired over the past couple months. Here goes.

On Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far

The arguments these artists mount to the detraction of beauty come down to a single gripe: Beauty sells, and although their complaints usually are couched in the language of academic radicalism, they do not differ greatly from my grandmother’s haut bourgeois prejudices against people “in trade” who get their names “in the newspaper.” Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement. Art is not idolatry, they say, nor is it advertising, and I would agree—with the caveat that idolatry and advertising are, indeed, art, and that the greatest works of art are always and inevitability a bit of both.
—Dave Hickey, “Enter the Dragon”

Gonna make you, make you, make you notice
Gonna use my arms
Gonna use my legs
Gonna use my style
Gonna use my sidestep
Gonna use my fingers
Gonna use my, my, my imagination
‘Cause I gonna make you see
There’s nobody else here
No one like me
I’m special, so special
I gotta have some of your attention—give it to me
— Chrissie Hynde, James Honeyman-Scott, “Brass in Pocket”

I like Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far. As a showcase for previously released Sagmeister material, it’s an improvement over Made You Look. However, the compilation aspect is a minor similarity between the books. The focus exhibited by Things can be partially attributed to presenting a themed series of works. But Sagmeister also continues to come into his own as an artist. So much so, in fact, that he deserves his own category: hyperdesigner.

What’s significant about Sagmeister’s work, and makes him a “hyperdesigner,” is that he’s not very original, as that term is classically used. He lifts freely from a wide range of designers and artists (in this book, he channels his post-Hipgnosis sensibility through Ed Ruscha). Sagmeister recognizes that the history of art is a history of appropriation and adaptation. And, more importantly, that graphic design is now a distinct language operating in culture, with its own idioms, tropes, and representations. Hyperdesign is graphic design taken to a higher level, self-aware and self-referencing.

This is one way that Sagmeister represents another crisis for the Modern movement in design. He’s jettisoned or contradicted nearly all of Modernism’s directives, not out of a contending doctrine but simply because it’s dull and confining. Never mind your literacy-warrior typography and “ugly” graphics; it’s Sagmeister who’s killed off the Modern design movement—with kindness.

Things is not a standard codex (a given) but more a variation on the AGI/Mike Doud/Peter Corriston package design for Led Zeppelin’s 1975 LP Physical Graffiti. Instead of that package’s New York tenement, here you peer into the die-cut head of Sagmeister.

The cover concept is so simple it feels patronizing to explain it. Within the sleeve are 15 separate booklets with different cover designs that may be shuffled to the front to produce a different pattern within the designer’s face. Each of the booklets features a typo-pictorial staging of one or more of 21 declarations of things Sagmeister has learned in his life. Most are fairly self-evident (“Everybody (always) thinks they are right”), some ironic (“Trying to look good limits my life”), some I’ll have to take his word on (“Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.”)

The dramatizations (“illustrations” is too meek a term) of the statements are a catalog of visual representations. The book is the print equivalent of a David Byrne mix tape: a cumbia followed by a New Orleans brass band next to an North African chant before an chamber orchestra work alongside some funk. Sagmeister will perform his own compositions (for instance, shaping words himself out of AC ductwork or twigs), or step aside for guest soloists (Marian Bantjes forming words out of sugar).

Things is a testament to eclecticism and where Sagmeister lunges down Modernism’s throat and yanks it inside out. His formula to relate to the broadest possible audience is kaleidoscopic stylistic variety. Rather than synthesizing the Universal, he’s asserting subjectivity as the way to communicate widely and accurately. If Sagmeister indulges himself, he connects with you. In his quest to not be boring, the only boundaries are his personal taste. Otherwise, Things is a triumph of “it works if you make it work.” Everything is up for grabs.

Beyond the cover sleeve, no attempt is made to relate the statements with its attendant imagery. Disconnection is the declared strategy. Significantly, it’s here that Sagmeister gets wobbly in his justification: “Even though I am, in general, not a big fan of ambiguous design (“the viewer can take whatever she or he wants”), in this instance I thought I would leave the system open and create room for the audience to relate.” This rationalization suggests the need for a 22nd statement: “Don’t make distinctions without a difference.” Sagmeister’s design may not always look like a Cranbrook special but it’s quacking like one.

The sentiments that the book is built around are simultaneously heartfelt and meaningless. They’re textual hangers to drape the graphic indulgences upon. Sagmeister possibly sees his salvation from Ambiguous purgatory in the ordinariness of the phrases: no clever word play, puns, or double meanings. Sagmeister’s list may also push back against a perceived pressure to be “serious” in his work. Someone else (like critics?) wants him to have a (gulp!) theory. No thanks, he’ll just pull something from his diary and run with it.

For a picture book that isn’t a monograph, Things is damn wordy. In addition to Sagmeister’s extensive explanatory texts, the book boasts three guest essays. Psychologist Daniel Nettle, Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector, and omnipresent design writer Steven Heller contribute tracts in their specialty areas (happiness, art, and writing genial forwards to design books, respectively).

Since the featured imagery is being reprinted for the book, Things can be regarded as a “making of” documentary. Sagmeister’s text resembles a director’s commentary track on a DVD bonus disc. His attention is almost exclusively on technical details and anecdotes. The text has no more in-depth analysis of design than found in a typical issue of Print (i.e. none).

Sagmeister proclaims that the book’s intended audience is non-designers. Evidently, they appreciate—or require—voluminous liner notes. Sagmeister prefers the books where the designers get chatty. And the popularity of those behind-the-scenes DVD extras supports a populist approach. However, this being a book of graphic design raises the question of explicatory overkill—if not negation.

Perhaps this is simply my personal preference to enjoy work without the artist constantly whispering in my ear. (I’m still of two minds about printing the lyrics of songs in albums and CDs.) I feel I may almost trust Sagmeister’s work more than he does. A real area of risk may be for him to restrain his impulse to coat his work in a syrup of “talk normal” banter. Save it for the lectures.

The voluminous text points out another schema in the book. Why trot out Spector and Heller to speculate on Art and Design if you’re not up to something? The weightiest aspect of the text is ruminations on the relationship of those two disciplines. Sagmeister introduces the topic then, unfortunately, hands off to Spector and Heller. Of the three, Sagmeister is briefest but has the best grasp of what’s going on culturally. His exceptional instincts lead him to the essential truth; art and design differ only in the segment of the marketplace in which they operate. The essential activity is the same. They just answer to separate validating structures.

But what Sagmeister gets wrong isn’t really his own claimed insight. Usually, his art borrowings have merit. Here, however, Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd is approvingly quoted that “Design has to work. Art does not.” Going to fine artists, however well respected for insight on their art, is the last place to visit for reliable commentary on graphic design.

That fine art is relieved of the necessity of actively pleasing an intruding clientele would be news to Christoph Büchel or Richard Serra.

Of course, it all depends on what your definition of “work” is. Much of the design in this book “worked” no harder than a Judd piece. Sagmeister’s clients have gone from agreeable (some rationalized connection of client content to the panoplies is required) to indulgent (“do whatever you want”).

His briefs were open-ended. The clients were buying “a Sagmeister”—not commissioning a graphic designer. Wrangling over matters such as budget, siting, and content is typical for art installations. And though art buyers may not specifically commission an artist to make a kind of work, they regularly place demands on the type of piece they’ll purchase. They also return art to the gallery without qualms.

Sagmeister, usually a voice of sense and sensibility about art, here takes an uncharacteristically romanticized view of the enterprise. It’s puzzling why he bothers to wade into the morass at all. He should trust his instincts and not differentiate. It unfortunately leads him on a path away from his full potential as a transformative figure.

Not that he’s actively applying for the job. He’s too savvy to get bogged down in grandiose gestures. Every aspect of his work is downplayed and soft-pedaled. He admits the statements making up the book are “almost banal.” The whole project began as a spontaneous riff, initiated under deadline pressure. In the contemporary coinage of non-admission concession: it is what it is.

Sagmeister is refreshingly self-effacing and upfront about his ambitions. The extravagant claims come from the textual hirelings (I’m making them for free!). One claimant is psychologist and author Daniel Nettle. His essay on happiness is fine until it specifically addresses Sagmeister’s phrases. Nettle inflates their meaning more than they are worth. While it’s good that scientists are studying happiness, the reported findings aren’t exactly revelatory. They easily fall into the category of reports like “Men are attracted to women they find comely.” (But now we have metrics!)

Nettle means well but overstates the case. An artist keeping a diary with reflective thoughts isn’t headline news. Despite this, Nettle comes close to having a point if he juxtaposed Sagmeister with fine artists over the emotional tenor of his work.

Art for the last century, and contemporary art in particular, continues to scorn aesthetic pleasure and emphasize the baser instincts and actions of humanity. To use a generalizing, musical metaphor, art regularly embraces atonality. Graphic design promotes melody. Uplifting messages in art grow scarce and suspect as you get to the rarified heights of the field.

To cast aside the joy aspect of human existence is plain dumb. Though it usually does so clumsily, graphic design has carried a banner of beauty (with an effort like “Cult of the Ugly” being the clumsiest). Sagmeister’s dogged pursuit of happiness is a welcome contribution to a pleasurable counterforce.

If there’s an artist that Sagmeister resembles, it’s Yoko Ono. Her work is frequently simple and affirmative, making it stand out in the avant-garde art world (which was an initial attractant to the oft-cynical John Lennon). I treasure my copy of Ono’s A Box of Smile, a small plastic container, that when opened, reveals a mirror at its bottom. The piece rarely fails to generate the intended reaction. Simple, commercial, insightful (literally!). And with famous works such as Cut Piece, Ono was willing to make her self part of the art. Being cut also figures prominently in Sagmeister’s portfolio.

The essayists who speak directly about Sagmeister and art are Nancy Spector and Steve Heller. Despite the fact that Sagmeister consistently insists that he’s not making art but graphic design, Spector offers an art history lecture on artists dabbling in the advertising/print world.

Spector’s discourse on these art movements is irrelevant. It’s not the lineage Sagmeister’s coming out of. Her comparisons serve only to demean the designer’s real, relevant activity. Spector can’t get her mind around graphic design being substantive in its own right. Only when it resembles what “real” artists do does she count it as deserving recognition. A telling comment is when she labels Sagmeister a graphic designer “extraordinaire.” This precious term smacks of condescension. Would Frank Stella be called a “painter extraordinaire”?

Conversely, Steve Heller simply doesn’t get art. He repeatedly commits a fundamental art critical error: drawing comparisons based on surface similitude. In the course of three pages, Heller stumbles through 20th century art to align Sagmeister with Futurism, Dada, Fluxus, environmental art, conceptual art, word art, Pop Art, and his own contra-historic confection, the “epigram school.” At that pace, he may as well have continued on to Surrealism, neo-Geo, Lettrism, concrete poetry, or neo-Pop (to name a few). Heller’s effort is not to provide insight as much as encrust Sagmeister with high-art accolades.

Incredibly, Heller dedicates only a sentence fragment to associating Sagmeister with something or someone specific in graphic design (Tibor Kalman). No other reference to the field is made—no mention of design movements or philosophies. From Heller’s text, a reader should assume graphic design to be a homogenous, ahistorical practice, bereft of any significance when discussing its most storied contemporary practitioner.

Actually, one other explicit design reference is made: to the Heller-led SVA “Designer as Author” program. The ostensible design critic and historian remains uninterested in separating self-promotion from criticism and scholarship.

If Sagmeister is to be linked to the contemporary art marketplace, more relevant artists can be found than those presented by Spector and Heller. Sagmeister’s confessional nature suggests Gillian Wearing’s Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1993). Her title is an apt summary of Sagmeister’s entire project.

Wearing’s photographic series documents people she met on the street holding handwritten signs expressing their chosen thoughts. They are simple expressions of individuality, and the tension between private life and public display. They’re also exercises in giving—and getting—voice in contemporary (media) culture. Sagmeister stands in for Every(wo)man in his work, while Wearing puts her/him center stage. Both projects feature bland statements that are made profound (and strange) by their presentation. An additional spin on the art/design/commerce interplay comes with the “appropriation” of Signs for a Volkswagen ad campaign (among others).

The greatest failing of Spector and Heller’s essays is that they don’t question the popular conceptions of art and design. As it would require them to question their own establishment views, it’s no surprise they go the traditional routes. For them, artists remain privileged for their experiments in the design realm, over graphic designers. The assertion is exactly backwards. Sagmeister isn’t inserting himself “unabashedly” anywhere he hasn’t always been. At the least, he’s reclaiming usurped territory and showing them how design’s done.

An oft stated failing of graphic design is that it must derive meaning from some other source. Graphic design can only be the means to a meaning. This supposedly holds it back from being a fine or even liberal art. But Sagmeister’s work suggests that graphic design may, in fact, be able to stand on its own. Of course, we must open up our definition of “meaning” even further than we have so far.

Paint is long established as having meaning as paint. Abstract painting is where the vehicle became the driver. Why not graphic design? A unique aspect of graphic design is its manufactured, multiple nature. The various material effects—inking, varnishing, die-cutting, paper stocks, embossing, bindings, et al—are expressive in consumer culture. They are extensions of physical representations such as a rough paper edge signifying “immediacy” (“torn from today’s headlines!”)

Sagmeister’s métier is exploiting and celebrating these mechanically generated production effects. Though he’s regularly noted as not having a signature style, this exploration of physicality is essentially the same as style. He’s not the originator (Peter Saville and Ben Kelly’s sleeve design for the first Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark LP is the purest example) but has made it his distinct expression.

So, the popular estimation of Sagmeister in the design profession is right on: he’s an artist as a graphic designer. Unfortunately, he continues to be mis- and over-praised by an insecure field stuck on the Modern conception of “originality.” (See Peter Hall’s text for Made You Look for the definitive example of this.) Sagmeister doesn’t do anything new. He does better: wringing new articulation out of timeworn graphic dialects.

A subject for concern is if Sagmeister abandons the public art aspect of graphic design. To do so would be to echo art’s service of exclusive clients. Forms may change but the framework of capital remains. Sagmeister’s insistence to be counted within the populist medium of graphic design is negated if his artifacts are estranged from a mass audience. “Blurring the boundaries” is a meaningless, restricted diversion if the design market economically functions the same as that of art.

What is potentially transformative is if Sagmeister challenges the connection between elite practitioners and the moneyed culture. As a producer of rarified commodities, he’d be just another facilitator of celebrity and capital. Good for him if he breaks into the art market. But will it be a triumph of stardom and networking, or graphic design?

Things is a positive indication in that regard. It’s Sagmeister the designer, making signs to and for everyone, out in the everyday world, not being boring, generous and mischievous. It’s more fun than “art,” and, perhaps, better for you.

Note: This essay is adapted from the curatorial text (in progress) for an exhibition of Stefan Sagmeister’s work to be held October 18–November 23, 2008 at the Barron & Ellin Gordon Galleries of Old Dominion University, Norfolk Virginia.

Welcome to the revised version of my site, now structured as a blog. As does every blog, I’ll be posting my news, comments, observations, and announcements on subjects in the various categories ranged elsewhere on this page. A particular feature will be a return to critical writing about graphic design, as I did for ten years in the pages of Emigre magazine. When that journal came to an end, I set aside the notebook that I kept of ideas for and fragments of a number of possible writings. I didn’t foresee any comparable interest in the writing I was doing. The subsequent years have affirmed that conclusion (with some gratifying exceptions). One article did make it out of the notebook and into the world—“The Resistance”—but I wasn’t feeling it. Most importantly, continued writing like this offered few—if any—tangible career benefits (something I’ll detail in a future post after my UCDA conference presentation).

I’d always said I could walk away from writing without regret and now I was doing it. But every so often I’d tell someone about the notebook and reconsider. It wasn’t as if I was thinking about my career when I wrote all the others. So, a blog. I always thought I was just talking to myself anyway. Expect future posts on: chaos as a strategy for design; correlating economic conditions and eras of graphic experimentation; an unpublished review of the book Emotion as Promotion; the ubiquitous graphics that are never ever discussed; design and class; segments of an essay collection in progress, tentatively titled Make Ready Romance; and other things that I hope will be of as much interest to someone else as they are to me.

But first up, in a few days, a review of Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far. He was generous enough to have a copy sent to me, with a note that said he hoped I liked it—or hated it less than Made You Look. As I can count the number of free new books I’ve been sent with the fingers on one hand (with enough left over to flip pages and someone the bird), I feel obligated to respond in the only way I know how….

I will be attending the University & College Designers Association’s fourth national conference for Design Educators on May 29-31, 2008 in DeKalb, Illinois. I’ll participate in a panel discussion, “Gettin’ R-E-S-P-E-C-T in the Academy: What Constitutes Graphic Design Research” with Daniel Jasper, and Steven McCarthy. My topic will be critical writing as research. A revised and expanded version of my comments will (eventually) appear here.

My profile of illustrator/designer Mark Andresen is included in the spring 2008 issue (#67) of the international design review Eye. The article, titled “Pesky Illustrator,” looks at the former New Orleans resident and Hurricane Katrina refugee. Andresen’s work has been published in New Orleans: As It Was (Gingko Press), and he’s the creator of the typeface Not Caslon.