My latest article, “Yourselves: Declaring Ourselves,” is posted on the Design Observer blog in the “Observatory” section. The piece looks at the history and mission of the AIGA Design Educators Community—I serve on the organization’s steering committee. Particular focus in the article is given to the DEC’s current initiatives.
Posts
Thought Experiments in Graphic Design Education
I am included in the new book Thought Experiments in Graphic Design Education, a project of Booksfromthefuture, edited by Yvan Martinez and Joshua Trees. The book “documents an international mix of experimental, reflexive and speculative projects made by students, educators and practitioners who continue to question how and why graphic design is studied and practiced.” My contribution is a reprint of my essay “Chaos Theories and Uncertainty Principles,” which first appeared in Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture.
Announcing the Design Illuminary Duplication Initiative!
You’re a designer. You crave inspiration. Not just any creative stimulus but the kind that only manifests through close proximity to an awesome design industrialist. But you’re troubled. You worry that the same few sick stars appear over and over again at lecture series and conferences. There just isn’t enough awesombroso to go around! You may have to wait days for another Paula Scher showing! Or weeks for the opportunity to bask again in Bantjes! Admit it—you’re convulsing in dread like a denuded Bichon Frise bounding fresh from a frigid Salish Sea on a midwinter morn just contemplating it. Worse yet, you may be tricked into enduring a presentation from some no-one whose name you’ve never heard of—lecturing some drivel at you that hasn’t been declaimed ad infinitum to myriad adoring crowds across the globe! It’s not stale—it’s classic! You crave more Victore! Beaucoups of Bierut! Is David Carson conscious and mostly vertical? Prop him up behind another dais already!
Magazines and blogs are doing their part, limiting features on the non-renown to a bare minimum—palate cleansers between features on what those rascally young(ish) Pentagram partners are up to. But venues and fora are proliferating and too few awesomedary designers are available. Is an awesomeawesity Armageddon in the offing?
Breathe deep design Bunky, science has shown us the way. Ephemeral States is pleased to announce the Design Illuminary Duplication Initiative! The DIDI is a morally questionable but crowd-pleasing program that seeks to clone the corps of design glitterati. Now every design spot can have a dollop of Awesome and then some.
No more frustrated hang-fired waiting on Stefan Sagmeister to return from his latest walkabout, Vision Quest, or whatever the hell it is he does when embodying non-stop awesomeass induces his ennui. Now, we can swoon to sundry Sagmeisters recounting their most recent off-duty odysseys while a slew more are away on their own fabulous furloughs. One could be right next door! (Hey, draw your blinds, Nature Boy!)
We may now also realize the dream of design readers everywhere—filling every design-writing outlet in print and on line with Steven Heller copy! (Then again, we’re practically at that point now, so we may as well stick with the one we have.)
Consider the possibilities! An entire AIGA National Conference speaker list entirely composed of Chip Kidd! Main stage, breakout sessions, breakfast and lunch roundtables, manning the registration booth, in the lobbies and bars of every conference hotel! All Chip, all the time! Best of all, the Mr. Chips can interview each other! Since, let’s face it, who gives a Good GodRand what anyone other than an awesomealicious designer thinks about design! We can go all the way and stock the audiences too with a Kidd collective! Imagine the hilarity! You’ll have to! ‘Cause if you’re not a Chip Kidd…you won’t be there!
The Design Illuminary Duplication Initiative. Because awesome is made up of a we some me!
(A note on the graphic: Designers like pictures with their words—more so, really. So I hacked this out in Illustrator in, like, ten minutes (okay, I looked at cat videos mid-way through)…it’s probably why no-one asks me to lecture about design!)
At Central Michigan University
I was a guest speaker/presenter for the Graphic Design program in the Art Department at Central Michigan University, November 12–13, 2013. On the evening of November 12, I gave a talk called “Singing the Surface,” and followed the next day with a presentation of my “Graphic Equalizer,” after the essay in my book Volume. Thanks to David Stairs of CMU and Designers Without Borders for the invitation, and the brave/inquisitive students and faculty that came to the events.