Why Design Matters

Debbie Millman

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780062872982
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Kreativität

Foreword by Roxane Gay

"Debbie Millman brings her Design Matters podcast, 'about how the most creative people in the world create their lives, ' to the page with this excellent interview anthology. Sharpened by Millman's penetrating commentary, the candid musings teem with insight and empathy. This sparkling collection is one to be savored slowly."— Publisher's Weekly

The author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast Design Matters showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today's leading creative minds from across diverse fields.

"Debbie Millman has become a singular voice in the world of intimate, enlightening conversations. She has demonstrated time, and again, why design matters."—Roxane Gay, from the foreword

Over the course of her popular podcast's fifteen-year reign, Debbie Millman has interviewed more than 400 creative minds. In those conversations, she has not only explored what it means to design a creative life, but has, as Millman's wife, Roxane Gay, assesses in her foreword, "created a gloriously interesting and ongoing conversation about what it means to live well, overcome trauma, face rejection, learn to love and be loved, and thrive both personally and professional."

In this illustrated, curated anthology, Millman includes approximately 80 of her best interviews with visionaries from across diverse fields. Grouped by category—Legends, Truth Tellers, Culture Makers, Trendsetters, and Visionaries—these eye-opening, entertaining, and enlightening conversations—offer insights into new ways of being and living.

Accompanying each entry is a brief biography, a portrait photographed by Millman, and a pull quote written in Millman's artistic hand. Why Design Matters features 100 images and includes interviews with:

Marina Abramovic, Cey Adams, Elizabeth Alexander, Laurie Anderson, Lynda Barry, Allison Bechdel, Michael Bierut, Brené Brown, Alain de Botton, Eve Ensler, Shepard Fairey, Tim Ferriss, Louise Fili, Kenny Fries, Anand Girhidardas, Cindy Gallop, Malcolm Gladwell, Milton Glaser, Ira Glass, Seth Godin, Thelma Golden, Gabrielle Hamilton, Steven Heller, Jessica Hische, Michael R. Jackson, Oliver Jeffers, Saeed Jones, Thomas Kail, Maira Kalman, Chip Kidd, Anne Lamott, Elle Luna, Carmen Maria Machado, Thomas Page McBee, Erin McKeown, Chanel Miller, Mike Mills, Marilyn Minter, Isaac Mizrahi, Nico Muhly, Eileen Myles, Emily Oberman, Amanda Palmer, Priya Parker, Esther Perel, Maria Popova, Edel Rodriguez, Paula Scher, Amy Sherald, Simon Sinek, Pete Souza, Aminatou Sow, Brandon Stanton, Cheryl Strayed, Amber Tamblyn, Christina Tosi, Tea Uglow, Chris Ware, and Albert Watson.

Milton Glaser

Alison Bechdel

Eileen Myles

Cindy Gallop

Seth Godin

Elizabeth Alexander

Paula Scher

Anne Lamott

Albert Watson

Marilyn Minter

Steven Heller

Milton Glaser

© Axel Dupeux/Redux

August 2005

Legendary, brilliant, intellectual, inventive, sweetly naive

These are just some of the words that have been used to describe Milton. I use Milton’s first name intentionally but with no disrespect. Like John, Paul, Mick, or Keith, his name is instantly recognizable. Milton Glaser was very much the superstar of the graphic design business. He designed the iconic Bob Dylan poster and the I Love New York icon. Milton Glaser passed away in 2020, on his ninety-first birthday. During his long career, Glaser often talked about the confusion many people have about what it means when we use the word “art.” He has suggested that we eliminate the word art and replace it with work. He then came up with the following descriptions: The sad and shoddy stuff of daily life can come under the heading of bad work. Work that meets its intended need honestly and without pretense, we call simply work. Work that is conceived and executed with elegance and rigor, we call good work. Work that goes beyond its functional intention and moves us in deep and mysterious ways, we call great work. Milton Glaser was a creator of great work.

DM One of my favorite things you have authored is a piece titled 12 Steps on the Designer’s Road to Hell. In it, you sought to understand your own willingness to lie. You said that you created this when you were working on doing the illustrations for Dante’s Purgatory. How did you come up with the steps?

MG I was doing the illustrations for the Divine Comedy specifically for the section called Purgatorio, which I was disappointed with. I thought that illustrating the conceptual hell would be more interesting, until I realized that purgatory is where we all are, somewhere between hell and heaven. The great distinction between purgatory and inferno, or hell, is that the people in purgatory know what they have done and the people in hell do not. The souls in hell haven’t got the chance of getting up. The people in purgatory somehow can get out of it.

At any rate, I thought that everything that you do is either a step to going into hell or getting out of it. I thought that in our business—the communication business—the questions become most egregious. We are always in a situation of transmitting ideas to a public. If we apply the idea of doing no harm to what we do because we have some responsibility to that public, we have to look at the nature of the messages that we are sending out into the world. I started with benign things that are quite acceptable to most practicing professionals, such as making a package look larger on a shelf.

DM That’s number one.

MG Number one. That comes under the general heading of professional practice, and while it is misrepresentation of a certain kind, that misrepresentation is an attribute of design because you are always dramatizing things. It is something that you could justify and causes little pain.

What I tried to do in the Road to Hell was to increase each problem so at a certain point you realize you’re creating mischief. The question is personal: Where will I stop? What will I not do? I have to ask myself that question when I find myself going down the road a bit. I realized there was a certain point that I would go no farther. It’s an interesting thing. It’s very personal. People respond very differently to it in terms of what point they feel that their conscience or their sense of ethics will not permit them to go any deeper. You’d find that there is by age, there is by vocation, and certainly there is by individual.

DM Here is the full list:

1. Designing a package to look bigger on the shelf.
2. Doing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like a lighthearted comedy.
3. Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has been in the business for a long time.
4. Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent.
5. Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Center to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11.
6. Designing an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.
7. Designing a package for children whose contents you know are low in nutrition value and high in sugar content.
8. Designing a line of T-shirts for a manufacturer that employs child labor.
9. Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn’t work.
10. Designing an ad for political candidates whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.
11. Designing a brochure for an SUV that turned over frequently in emergency conditions known to have killed 150 people.
12. Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use could result in the user’s death.

Milton, where do you net out numbers-wise?

MG I hover around the top five before I find that I can’t go further if I am really stringent about causing no harm. It’s almost impossible if you have a firm conviction that you will do nothing to harm another creature. A lot of this is relative. A lot of ethics are relative. On the other hand, causing somebody’s death doesn’t seem to be complex at all. If you’re willing to do it, it means you don’t think of them as human.

DM At this stage in your career do you find that it’s easier now to say “no” to projects, or have you always adhered to your principles?

MG I’ve always had principles and I’ve always tried to do no harm. I don’t think it becomes easier as you get older or more successful. Quite the contrary. I’m a great believer in simply observing what is, and if you don’t want to change your behavior, at least you know what your behavior is. From that point, I think it’s necessary for designers to be aware of what they do when they are participating in misrepresentation or causing someone’s death. They should simply know that’s what they’re doing and not pretend that they have no role. My problem with Ken Garland’s First Things First manifesto is that it doesn’t give people any place to go. It says, “Why don’t you work for schools, universities, cultural institutions, and so on?” without the recognition that they form only 5 percent of the total economic opportunity for designers. The real question is, “What are you going to do if you are in business, and you’re participating in a capitalist enterprise which serves to maximize profits above all else?” What is your role in that? Certainly, going elsewhere is an alternative, but in most cases it is a nominal alternative. People don’t have the opportunity to go elsewhere. The big question for most of us is staying within the system, understanding that we are in a profit-making capitalist economy. What do you do? That is a more complex issue than simply only working for universities and cultural institutions because most people simply don’t have that option.

My problem with First Things First is that it doesn’t provide real alternatives for people who have to survive and live, but, on the other hand, it does raise questions regarding the meaning of what you do. I feel ambivalent about the manifesto. I signed it and I would sign it again, but I think it has to present a deeper and more thoughtful idea of what people’s alternatives are.

DM You have a book coming out in a few months called The Design of Dissent. You’ve stated that you feel that at this particular moment in time, the dissenting press is all but invisible. How did that happen?

MG What happened is that seven corporations now own the media. Corporations, business, and government are one, and you can’t separate the interest of business from the interest of government. There is a collusion between business interests and what the government is interested in. In fact, there’s no separation between those objectives by and large, and the people and journalists have been intimidated by the fact that if you want to pursue a career in journalism and you get labeled as a troublemaker, you’re not going to have much of a career.

DM I find it interesting that being a troublemaker now can ruin your career when thirty years ago being a troublemaker made your career.

MG The terrible thing about it is that it’s not as overt as one would hope. What people have done is they have voluntarily withdrawn from asking the questions because they realized it was dangerous. The government didn’t have to tell them to shut up. Their business didn’t even have to tell them to shut up, but they know what happened is, in fact, that they’ve created difficulty.

DM Is there anything that designers can do to change that?

MG I think designers can do only what good citizens do, which is to react, to respond, to publish, to complain, to get out on the streets, to publish manifestos, and to be visible. They can’t do more than citizens can do except they have one great advantage: they know something about communication.

DEBORAH KASS

artist

August 2005

Alison Bechdel

© Andrew T. Warman

May 9, 2016

For some artists, work and life are so intertwined that it’s impossible to tease them apart.

Alison Bechdel is one such creator. Her cartoons and graphic novels lay out the complex intimacies of her life in all their heartbreaking splendor, upending long-held expectations in the process. Her long-running Dykes to Watch Out For is one of the major achievements in the comic-strip genre. Her graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? propelled her work to the mainstream, thanks to their thunderous emotional resonance. Our conversation took place a year after Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning Broadway musical.

DM: You were born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Your father was a high school English teacher, and he operated a funeral home. Your mother was an actress and a teacher. I believe you were about four years old when you saw your first butch lesbian. What happened?

AB: I was out with my dad on some funeral home–related errand in a larger city; we might’ve been in Philadelphia. He had taken me to lunch, and a woman came into the luncheonette who just blew the top of my head off. In seeing this big woman wearing men’s clothes, I recognized a version of myself, and my father recognized that in her too. He said to me, “Is that what you want to look like?” Of course that was exactly what I wanted to look like, and I didn’t know it was possible or that anyone else did it. Simultaneously, I was getting the message that it was not okay.

DM: When you were ten years old, you experienced an episode of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It would take you all night to write a simple diary entry. Your mother got involved, and you dictated entries that she would enter into your diary; you’ve written that you feel this activity became a kind of template for your life. In what way?

AB: When my mother took dictation for my diary, I became a memoirist because the thing I was most passionate about was the act of writing down...