COMMENTS WELCOME.

First issued May 1999

Reissued January 2002

Reexamined September 2007: current thinking in italics

I was fairly idealistic in 1999; this manifesto was the main body of my grad school thesis. I was just learning how to design, having joined the 2D Design Department at Cranbrook halfway through my matriculation. It was a tough time: I was groping for a voice and basic skills in front of some of the best young designers in the industry. I will never be a great, iconic, rockstar designer, but I admit I occasionally have good ideas, and perhaps my execution adds to the message in some of my personal pieces.

So I entered the field a little half-baked, with a pedigree that I worried I didn't quite deserve. I let my own insecurities pry me away from what I actually hold dear: my creative ethic. Now, years later, I am in regular contact with a few designers who don't really accept me. I think they sense my struggle and take me for a fraud, or at least a poseur. Alas. It has been depressing to face and doubly damning to feel myself accepting the perceived opprobrium without a fight. So fuck it. Fuck it. I am going back to what I know. I am tired of not loving what I do. I am fighting the drift, trudging through the snowbank back to the fire. Might as well be open about that to you, maybe you will find something useful in it all.

And for those of you who like to use the content of personal blogs against the authors in job searches and all that, shame on you. If we can't be honest in public on occasion, we are just so screwed.

And so we begin: 

Right there, right off the top, it becomes problematic. I started drifting when I got distracted by my office job. It happened so slowly, so imperceptibly, like a radon leak. Eventually I found myself pretty much engulfed in complacency. To have an ethos is to be disciplined, to practice is to fumble each day with primary truths. It can become habit, but it cannot be mastered completely. And so it can be lost from time to time.

 
State the (personally) obvious.
By obvious I mean the most profoundly true, most terribly important statements I can summon. Certainly this cannot happen every day but I will consider it a viable daily goal in designing...
IF I AM WITHOUT PASSION, I WILL FIND A DIFFERENT JOB.

This was the point that always got me into a little trouble. You can't be passionately, personally true when cranking out a web banner selling margarine. You just can't. It took me a long time to become passionate about the bigger issues in production: craft, quality of concept, and execution—I simply had to mature, to learn how to use the tools better. This is definitely the most black/white statements I make in the piece. Oh, youth.

Remember the viewer has as much intelligence as I do.
With all that latent elitism I pretend not to have cultivated, I need to remember the audience is assuredly capable of understanding. Why say I should be accessible to our viewers when I should be looking for ways to access the viewer, as an equal, on his or her terms?

This one, I have never, ever forgotten. This is absolutely true and good and worth fighting over. Call it usability, call it informed consumerism, call it whatever you need to to counter the marketing wogs and their pap. You will make better work.

Remember people choose what they believe.
There is a lot of in the world trying to convince everyone otherwise. I work with this mass capacity by assuring the viewer that she can evaluate, that he has a past he can draw upon.

And here I fall into idealism again. Or tread the line clumsily. Yes, people can choose to delve and understand. They choose not to do so with a regularity I couldn't admit until I accepted my own lethargy. It was really humbling to realize I was using my snobbery to cover my own ass—with myself. Once I admitted I love to hand the reins over and let entertainment lull me into oblivion, this point became a bit more relevant. I could do my own user testing.

Remind the audience of its power with respect and humility.
Any person in my audience could be in my place tomorrow.

Sweet jesus, is this one true. Maybe a bit of a blanket statement, but there is a lot more talent and drive in the world than I knew. And when I grew fearful, it kicked my butt.

Invite evaluation and interaction.
Design with and for the audience.

Meh. This is very sweet, but shows my art girl side. I envision lots of nice little projects in white-walled galleries, my friends showing up time and again to interact with pieces I have talked about endlessly for 5 months. I smell brie and boxed wine on this one's breath. It is all about preaching to the choir, I fear. Putting the responsibility for keeping in touch with the world on the world, not on me... It shows I didn't really understand my third point about remembering my audience's intelligence. It needs revision, is all. I need to add: Find ways to actively contact your audience and be ready to be ignored most of the time. It is very rarely about you, little one.

Remember Perfection is and will always be just an idea.
No selling empty dreams of perfection and endless desire to people who have much better things to be doing. The point is that we can find peace and completion on our own without mass consumption or such crap.

Yeah... it's a valid point, and also counter to most of the point of a commercially-driven field. Comes in handy when you're working on those clever self-reflexive campaigns that wink at the viewer and still sell their widgets with all possible moxy. But I love it, and I miss it, and I come back to it again and again. It's a keeper. And besides, one day I won't have to make things for other people and their products to pay the rent.

CHANGE THE WORLD.
I will pick my battle and fight it. I will use the training I have gotten from my entire life, not just that which I received at school. I will use the tools I was born with before I go to the ones I bought.

This one seems to be a polemic, but isn't. It's about drawing a line in the sand you will regularly have to cross, but can return to for sustenance. It describes the position I assume before having to compromise myself, and I can either beat myself over the head for being in the world or I can nod and remember my integrity is not dependent upon day-to-day vacillation. It is the result of the overall trajectory.

Believe and believe.

And believe and believe and believe.  My little lifelette is mine, and what I have to stoke the fires is mine, and always will be. When I fell into a lull for a few years, I looked all over for something to blame. No go. It's my responsibility, no matter the events that form my experience. It's my frame of reference, and I can work to maintain it or brattily expect the world to buoy me up.

 

Okay. Here ends this examination of standards past and present. Begins, I mean.

I am opening the comments up for this entry because I know there are flaws in my thinking. If you feel so moved, please rebut or respond.