| Think More, Design Less  | | Ellen Lupton | GRAPHIC DESIGNER ELLEN LUPTON IS INTERVIEWED BY DAN WAGSTAFF
A one-woman think-tank, Ellen Lupton is a prolific author, designer, curator, and educator. She is the director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art, and the curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She has a regular column, “The El Word,” in Readymade magazine, and has contributed to Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. Ellen writes on the web about design at Design Your Life and on her own website ellenlupton.com. My introduction to the writing of Ellen Lupton was her indispensable guide to typography Thinking With Type. Pulling the book off the shelf and—quite typically I’m ashamed to say—flipping through it backwards, I stumbled across her concluding advice first: “Think more, design less.”
Several years later, “think more” still seems to epitomise Ellen’s design philosophy.
A frequent lecturer at home and abroad, it is clear she will speak about design to anyone who will listen.
DAN WAGSTAFF: What was the inspiration for Graphic Design: The New Basics?  ELLEN LUPTON: There are dozens of books out there about the basic principles of design, but to us, most of them are either poorly designed or out of date. There are some classic books from the 1960s and 70s which I love dearly, but which don’t communicate well to young designers today. The New Basics was authored by myself and Jennifer Cole Phillips. We are directors of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Working with graduate and undergraduate faculty, we created exercises and design problems with our students over a two-year period, turning our entire design program into a laboratory. The result is our new book, which is a “state-of-the-art” guide to the visual language of design.
DW: In the introduction to Graphic Design: The New Basics, you discuss the ‘legacy of the Bauhaus’. What is that legacy? EL: The Bauhaus was an art school founded in Germany that became an international center for art and design in the 1920s. Today, art schools around the world are still organized more or less on Bauhaus principles. Designers and artists at the Bauhaus, including Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, revolutionized the idea of approaching visual communication in terms of abstract principles such as time, motion, and transparency. Our book is indebted to the Bauhaus spirit, which we believe has renewed relevance in the software-driven world of today. DW: In the documentary film Helvetica many respected designers were clearly appalled by the dominance of post-modernism in 1980’s and 1990’s. Do designers need to go back to basic principles? EL: The problem with postmodernism is that it replaced an analytical approach to visual form with the idea that all expression consists of quotation, pick-up, scratch mixing, etc.... Somewhere along the way, young designers were missing out on structural ideas. Jennifer and I believe that an understanding of ideas such as scale, layering, modularity, and figure/ground helps designers create more powerful, effective, and beautiful work, whatever the content. DW: Thinking with Type is a very accessible introduction to the history and practice of typography. Why did you decide to write it? EL: Anyone who wants to engage with typography should immerse themselves in some typographic history. If you are a designer, poet, writer, indie filmmaker, or underground craftista, it’s good to know where your fonts come from. The movie Helvetica did a fantastic job showing the origins of one particular font; more significantly, the film showed how the meaning of the font has changed from generation to generation. DW: How do you feel about Helvetica, the font? EL: What do I think of Helvetica? I went to art school in the early 80s, and back then, we all thought Helvetica was pretty square. I admire Helvetica but I rarely use it. To me, it’s still represents a kind of corporate/bureaucratic blandness. EL: In the design community, the expression “free fonts” refers first and foremost to crappy, bootleg fonts that you can find on the internet. Most are suitable only for “special occasions,” like Halloween or a high school prom. Designers disdain “free fonts", which are basically junk food for your computer. I became interested in whether there might be a “free font” movement that was about different values, connected to globalism and open source. It turns out there are a couple of designers committed to creating free fonts as a kind of public resource. My exploration of this topic was quite controversial among typeface designers, and I learned a lot from my dialog with that community. Some of my initial ideas on the subject were rather naïve. DW: D.I.Y: Design It Yourself and D.I.Y: Kids are design manuals for non-designers (old and young!). Are computers and the internet helping more people become aware of design? EL: Software has become a gateway to graphic design for anyone with a computer. Today, children in school are using the same software that professionals are using in design studios. Kids are playing with video editing, PowerPoint, and Photoshop. These authoring tools, combined with the distribution power of the internet, can be incredibly empowering, allowing people to communicate not only to their immediate friends and family but potentially to people around the globe. It’s an amazing time to be a designer and a citizen. DW: In what ways can design improve people’s lives? Can good design in every day life ever be more than a luxury? EL: Design is also about the basic structure and organization of objects in your home or office. Arranging things in a useful and humane way is not a luxury. Making environments safe and sustainable is not a luxury. Making media that can be readable on line by non-sighted people is not a luxury. DW: What inspired you to become a designer? EL: I have always been a writer as well as an artist, and graphic design is the perfect blend of the two. It is both visual and verbal. Design is a tool of publishing, and that has been a huge seduction for me. DW: Did you have a mentor, or was there a designer who you particularly admired? EL: My teacher in college, George Sadek, was a huge influence, along with my husband, Abbott Miller, whom I met in college. My twin sister Julia has always been my best friend and is now a big collaborator. DW: If you could give one piece of advice to students or aspiring designers, what would it be? EL: Try it. Design is all about doing. You can’t truly learn it by reading books or going to museums. DW: What are some of the common mistakes amateur designers make EL: Amateur designers tend to make their type too big on print pieces. This is partly because the software always defaults to 12 pt (too big for most text type on a printed piece), and because type looks different on the screen than when you print it out. Amateurs also tend to put everything in the middle of the page, with a big title on top in Times Roman. DW: Do you have a particular ritual which you adhere to when you’re working? EL: Drinking tea. Constantly, no matter what the job. DW: You have a number of online projects. What websites do you read everyday? EL: Design Observer DW: You’re not just a designer; you’re also a writer, an educator and curator. Is it important to you to have an interdisciplinary approach that combines research and writing with design? EL: Yes, the mix of these different practices is essential to who I am. I use design to format and produce my writing; and my writing is usually the subject of my design. DW: You’ve written an essay on bookselling. Why are independent bookstores important? EL: Independent bookstores are a place where you can see books and magazines beyond the ordinary. I love how they reflect the individuality of the staff. In a big chain store, most of the stacks and racks of books facing out are there because of a corporate agreement. In an independent store, these choices are made by the staff. DW: When you’re in a bookstore, do you immediately gravitate to the design section, or do you look for inspiration elsewhere? EL: Like most people, I graze around the books at the front of the store, the books that are on tables or front-facing shelves. I want to see “what’s happening”. I’m interested in the covers and what’s going on in the packaging of books. In an independent store, this process is much more interesting. DW: What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up? EL: I just read James Collins' novel Beginner’s Greek, which I bought in an independent bookstore in New York. I picked it up because it was reviewed in The New Yorker and sounded fun. (It is terrific!) DW: Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with EL: I love Pierre Bayard’s recent book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Seriously. He’s a respected French critic who argues that any time we read a book, we are already forgetting it, constructing our own memory and narrative. As someone with thousands of books in my library, I totally relate to this. I’ve absorbed each of these books in some way over the years, and yet I’ve also forgotten them all.
Dan Wagstaff is a graphic artist and a former bookseller at Pages Books & Magazines. Amongst other things, while at Pages he drew the comic strip "The Optimist" that serves as the in-store sign over the graphic novels section. He now works as a publicist for Raincoast Books. He lives in Toronto.(Photos courtesy of Raincoast Books.) |
