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How did you get involved with design and illustration?
I thought about going to film school, or art school,
or studying music. Graphic design wasn’t necessarily the perfect
fit, but it brought together a lot of things I was interested in.
You can call yourself a graphic designer and work with musicians,
work with animation, work with video, work with print. It’s
wide open.
Graphic design is also a democratic medium. It’s
public and accessible. Some of the things that affected me as a
teenager and a young person came through mass media. The idea that
something can make an impact and speak to a large number of people
is rewarding.
Graphic design is a shared language, and since you’re
speaking in a shared language, you can play with that language.
You can play against certain assumptions that are built in to it,
and you can play against symbols.
You’ve referred to graphic design as “the
language of legitimacy.” What do you mean?
Design lets people know that whatever it is you
are talking about has been considered and planned out. It looks
right and it looks like people have put thought into it. When you
make something concrete, like making a flier for a show that your
band is playing, it can make the event seem more real, more concrete,
and more relevant. Graphic design comes in many forms. Whether you’re
making an annual report, or a logo, or a t-shirt, design imbues
a kind of legitimacy to its subject.
What are the different challenges involved
in working on your own products as compared to working on projects
for clients?
With a client, an automatic expectation is built
into the process. The parameters have largely been defined before
you get the project. With my own work, the hardest thing is setting
those parameters for myself. A lot of times, I’ll deliberately
try to set some of those parameters. I like the collaborative client
process, so I try to reconstruct that.
What advice would you share with people who
want to use graphic design as a tool for creating their own products?
Graphic design is about the
overall impression. When you’re creating a product, think
about it in terms of creating a brand. Think about the entire experience—not
just the product, but also everything that goes with it and how
it’s presented. Extend beyond the product and reinforce
it.
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