Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history.
Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots
of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism.
My family owned a gelateria business, so as a kid, I would always design ice cream cones. If you want to transform a shoe from design into a properly wearable product, however, you need technical knowledge. So I worked for four years inside a local shoe company.
I've been working on a graphic about carbon emissions. It's an incredibly simple graphic - a bunch of blocks and a table below it - but it's taken me three weeks to design. For some reason it just wasn't working. Then finally I realized there was a number present, which I was rendering in each version, that wasn't necessary for the understanding of the piece. This figure was getting in the way and distracting from the main flow of the narrative. As soon as I pulled that graphic out of the design, it sprang into focus. Suddenly it worked.
In my book "Sound Unbound" we traced the guy who actually came up with the main concept for the graphic design of the record cover sleeve. His name is Alex Steinweiss. And one of the things in my book that we really tried to figure out was the revolution in graphic design that occurred when people put images on album covers.
I don't consider what you're wearing when I design a shoe. I don't have a particular look in mind or make a shoe thinking, "This would look great with a blue pinstripe suit." I just let you dress yourself. I'm looking at the shoe itself, not as a component of an outfit.
When I was working at the game company, I wasn't just doing graphic design, I was doing the entire product management, so I would do the graphic design, I would create the advertisements, even the catch copies. I would figure out what kind of packaging and design of the packaging, so I was basically doing total product management at that time.
I don't see myself as an artist. I work with artists and collaborate with them, but then it becomes graphic design. It's not an art. I'm a graphic designer.
Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.
When we changed from Tiger to Nike, we had to have a design for the shoe. And where do you go to? There's no 'dial 9-1-1' for design.
My undergrad degree was in graphic design, and I don't work in that anymore, but I obviously do a lot of design and editing and Photoshopping, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is essential!
I thank Marc Jacobs so much for giving me the opportunity to design a shoe for Louis Vuitton, but the thing that broke my heart most was when they said, 'You're finished. The shoe's finished.'
Many people think that being a graphic designer means going to an expensive art school and buying expensive software that will cost you thousands of dollars. This is so far from the truth. There are hundreds of online education centers that offer top-notch graphic design training.
The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.
Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look - all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that's what excites me.
What is said determines who listens and who understands. Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances - accents, punctuation and so on - that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are.
Patrick Morrisey means nothing to me. He is a bootlicker. If shoe polish was poison, he'd be dead.