The first two are from Paula Scher’s article “The Devaluation of Design by the Design Community: I Have Seen the Enemy and He Is Us,” originally published in a 1993 AIGA Journal of Graphic Design and republished in her book Make it Bigger:
Everyday I find myself in supermarkets, discount drugstores, video shops, and other environments that are obviously untouched by our community. No “bad Brody” or “Emigre garbage,” or for that matter no “saintly” Vignelli, Rand or Glaser. Just plain, old-fashioned, uncontroversial bad design, the kind of anonymous bad we’ve come to ignore because we’re too busy fighting over the aesthetics of the latest AIGA poster. We don’t talk or write about it, it heads no one’s agenda, but it’s still most of America.
And from an earlier part of that same article:
If one factors in all the world wars, diseases, poverty, illiteracy, and natural disasters, a well-designed hangtag is silly. But I don’t think the responsibility for the visual environment of our society is silly or trivial, and collectively, that is our charge.
And this last one I found via Michael Surtees’ blog Design Notes, which he found on another blog here. The quote is from a designer named Ernesto Aparicio:
Designers who win awards for edgy design they did for a friend’s business, with a print run of one hundred or something like that? They’ve got no art director, no creative director, no client’s representative, no agency person. Where’s the obstacle to good design there? But take something like a cheese. When I see a really good package for a cheese, I know what that designer went through to get there. It makes me want to fall on my knees and kiss that designer’s feet, that cheese.Tune in tomorrow for Item Two (of three): Go ahead. Disagree.
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I wanted to make a quick comment about the last designer you quoted in this section.
ReplyDeleteErnesto Aparicio was a professor of mine at the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a fantastic instructor and always exuded a pleasant demeanor and unique outlook on design. It's nice to see his wit and charm shared on this blog.