OZ SPEAKS!
Blogging lures graphic designers out from behind the velvet curtain.
Blogging is a funny, tenuous thing. Borrowing equally from message boards, diaries, note-passing in class, and vanity presses, blogging as a form is bounded only by the size of thoughts. Imagine a blog as a tactile thing, and you'd have only a ribbon of words, fringed with comments, that slips across its own site while simultaneously, almost transgressively, broadcasting through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to many readers at once. As a reader, you pick up that thread in a million possible ways: by visiting the blog itself, through quick links on other blog sites, as a subscriber to that blog through an RSS aggregation tool, or via a Google search. Quicksilver and insubstantial, blogging exists outside of time in the way all sure-fire time sucks do. It's a marvelous, addicting, occasionally junk-strewn thing to do.
From politicos to bored mothers, now to graphic designers, the blog-bug has bitten deeply. As a communication tool, blogs embody that ambiguous urgency of a voice hollering in a parking lot. Is the sky really falling? Is that the shock of full-throated truth? Or has someone just smashed a toe with a grocery cart and gotten bloody loud about it? And what happens when all of us open up with our own yodels? STEP spoke to the leading graphic design blogs to get a taste of unbounded freedom, the future of the form, and the surprising revelations of thinking out loud.
1. COME HEAVY, OR DON'T COME AT ALL
Among the design professions, graphic design is an embarrassingly low-risk enterprise. Our colleagues in architecture, industrial design and fashion design are tormented by nightmares of smoldering rubble, brutally hacked off fingers, and embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions. We graphic designers flirt with ... paper cuts. Thus liberated from serious threats, we invent our own: skating on the edge of illegibility, daring readers to navigate indecipherable layouts … Our daredevil ambitions are never so roused as when we're our own audience.
--from a Design Observer thread
There are seasoned yet inept idiots out there for whom decades in the business have granted them no special wisdom or mastery. Just as there are plenty of fresh unspoiled young guns out there who couldn't break a rule or think outside of the box if their life depended on it.
--from a Speak Up thread
It's a fusty, hot summer afternoon, and Armin Vit is pouring glass after glass of cool water, which I accept as fast as they come. We're sitting in a semi-dark conference room in Pentagram's New York offices, the site of Vit's full-time job and, I suspect, some under-the-radar blogging for his sites UnderConsideration and its graphic design blog Speak Up (www.underconsideration.com). In swing since 2002, Speak Up dishes out strong opinions as well as interactive content like Open Space--an actual paper-and-glue notebook that floats amid participants, each bedecking a few pages in turn--and Word It, a game in which Bryony Gomez-Palacio, Speak Up author and Armin's wife, tosses out a keyword, like “prank” or “box”, and designers flood her inbox with graphic interpretations of same. Vit's tousled air belies the apparently spicy Mexican underneath: this is a man who believes a pinch of machismo, for boys and girls, makes a good blog great. Two cases-in-point: a spirited knockabout of the new UPS logo, minutes after it launched publicly, and an extended deconstruction of Emigre's Rant issue, which eventually pulled Emigre authors into its orbit.
“Sometimes we're guilty of chest thumping, but our editorial stance is fluid. As a blog you have to stay open to what [participants] want,” notes Vit. Strong opinions inject energy and provoke responses, according to Vit; at the same time, participants won't return to a blog where un-nuanced bashing is allowed. A blog's success also hinges on constantly refreshed content; Vit's co-authors must start a new discussion once monthly, plus comment on any discussion once a week.
For a supposedly idle pursuit, Vit counts some substantial benefits from blogging: he met his future boss Michael Bierut, all his New York friends, and his idiomatically cheeky English, all as a result of running Speak Up. After moving from Mexico to Atlanta in 1999, then to Chicago , the blog became “the number-one reason to move to New York,” Vit continues. “Bryony and I actually knew more people there, through the blog, than we did in Chicago.”
At the same time, Vit's attitude toward Speak Up is remarkably unsentimental: he'll keep blogging so long as the talk is fast, meaty and good. “In five years, Speak Up will be either gone or changed dramatically, maybe into something more concise,” Vit shrugs. “After all, this is not what designers do. We make stuff; we don't just talk about it.”
2. A THOUSAND, MILLION, BILLION WORDS
What's amazing to me about blogs…is that it's all text. People have to have some verbal ability to operate in this medium and there's been a lot of creativity--the invention of emoticons, for instance--in the way people express themselves in writing. How do you graphic designers and visual specialists feel using the keyboard and not the brush tool? Fish out of water?
--from a Speak Up thread
How does all this writing sit with designers, in many ways picture-people to the core? “Good designers are good communicators,” offers Adrian Hanft of Be A Design Group (www.beadesigngroup.com) via email. “When you make a post on a blog, you have to care about what you are writing and filter through the complexities to get to the core of an issue. That part of blogging is very similar to the design process.” For his business partner Bennett Holzworth, blogging sharpens his powers of observation, improving both his writing and design skills: “[Now] I see things that would be interesting to blog about and I take notice, or photograph it. Writing about different design topics [also makes] me really solidify my thoughts about design.” Ultimately, it's the quality of the writing that wins arguments and calls forth more nuanced thinking, both from the author and commentators.
Like other journalists, design writers have had to raise their collective game with the advent of blogging. Rick Poynor, former editor-in-chief of the U.K. design magazine Eye , co-created Design Observer (www.designobserver.com) in October 2003 with Pentagram's Michael Bierut and Winterhouse's William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand. Poyner is unequivocal about what makes a blog great: “It has to be the quality of writing. That means good ideas, relevant subjects, timely observations, sharp thinking and a prose style that's a pleasure to read. If a blog can't provide most of these basics, why waste your time with it?” Michael Bierut agrees, explaining how blogging attracts published writers as well as amateurs: “I have always liked writing about design, but I have always disliked (a) deadlines imposed by editors; (b) the lag time between the submission of an article and its publication; and (c) the lack of immediate, or even eventual, response. Blogging neatly solves all of these problems.”
Whether blogs will destroy, or somehow co-exist with print publications is a matter of some ferocious debate—for journalists, at least. So far blogging seems to work best for fleeting or even one-note story ideas, like a burning kaffee-klatch topic that begs for discussion. Arguably print publications will continue to excel at more researched, voice-driven pieces—although a serious-minded blog could impose this editorial rigor online, with still more immediacy than a print venue. Adrian Hanft offers a clear-eyed vision of how things might evolve: “I would like to say that eventually there will be a critical mass of design blogs, and then they will taper off to a few good ones. I can't. That is the beauty of blogs; their independence is one of their greatest aspects.” In the rising babble of voices, then, both the loudest and the best will get heard—no guarantees, however, as to which is which.
3. WHITHER BLOGS?
Blogs offer designers a fresh outlet and previously unimaginable communal reach, but in creative hands it's only a matter of time before the form morphs. What's next?
Movable Type and other blog softwares offer considerable flexibility already—Armin Vit speaks for the group when he says, “Maybe on the sixth day God rested, but on the seventh he created Movable Type.” Bloggers improve upon Movable Type's templates by trading open-source plug-ins: for example, plug-ins to correct curly quotes or structure an archive of posts for different kinds of searching. With the growing prevalence of Flash and rich media, blog templates might very well introduce these elements, too.
Perhaps the smartest future app for blogs is low-tech: a more intuitive, fluid means of communicating what your firm is all about. Chicago-based Coudal Partners redesigned itscorporate site in 1999 as a blog-heavy community portal (www.coudal.com). Coudal explains the shift in an interview with British magazine Computer Arts : “Our experience is that assignments are given based on the dynamic between the people involved first, and the actual work you've done for other people second. So we've built our site as a way for a potential client to see what we're all about as people.” Put more bluntly, Coudal remarks: “If you're chatting up a girl in a bar, you don't talk about the other girls you've dated. That's how we feel about the portfolio." With interactive projects like Photoshop Tennis—a single image bounces from designer to designer, each adding a new layer—Coudal Partners' public site is porous, distinctive and, oddly enough, more credible as a result. After all, how better to speak your mind clearly than in your own voice?
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For more design-oriented blogs, visit: www.kottke.org , http://journal.aiga.org , www.newsdesigner.com , and www.typographi.com .
—Jude Stewart for STEP inside design, September/October 2005
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