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.
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.
Cartooning is completely different from other media: it is closely related to film and prose, other narrative forms, but the skills needed to realize a story are very different, and include not only drawing and writing dialogue and narration, but graphic design and the ability to depict time passing visually. It's a whole suite of skills that has to go into making a comics page, skills that are quite distinct from those that go into writing a page of prose, or making a film.
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.
One of the best things I ever did was to train in a practical skill. I love computers and they've become such a part of life, especially to the world of design. But it's important to understand that they are a tool, as much as a hammer or a saw is a tool. Computers don't help you design. There needs to be more emphasis on training young designers in how to build things. A good writer needs a good vocabulary. A good designer needs to understand his materials and processes. You can't, as a successful designer, pretend to get any respect if you don't know how things are made.
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 work with a lot of music programs and there's a steep learning curve to a lot of them. You can really find yourself trying to figure out how to do things, instead of making music. Now I have another tool with the Surface music kit.
The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.
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.
People in the performing arts have a lot of other skills they don't realize they can utilize, and part of what the Actors Fund program is there to do is wake their head up to realize there are other things they can do.
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.
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.
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.
When you're an actor, your body isn't your own. Your body is part of a tool that you use. Everybody else there is using you as a tool, so they have access to those things, too.
Fiscal policy is a very important part of the tool kit for policy makers.
I have my limited skills as a journalist and a father, and the journalist part is really part of my mindset, to use my skills to try to solve problems.