Design Thought Leader

I enjoy everything about the design process and all the challenges it throws up along the way. I cannot think of many other professions where one finds themselves working with an architectural firm and a tribal fusion belly dancer at the same time!

Loz Ives
Founder, Designer and Art Director of Because Studio

Ultimately, it is the process. What the printer loves is the doing of it. … The nicest thing that anyone has ever said about my work is that ‘It’s always so suitable to the purpose.’ Yes, make it attractive, but make it be what the text needs it to be. …

The old guys got it remarkably right. There was an intuitive understanding of what constituted readable text. And so you can be at home with letterpress. It will die, eventually, because people will no longer remember how to do it. It’s OK. I’m only responsible for my watch. I’m thankful everyday that I get to do this.

John Kristensen
Proprietor, Firefly Press

The design process is much like the progression of a story in how it begins with the materials and a few undeveloped ideas. As the materials are crafted to fit the ideas everything is more defined and the design becomes stronger. Narrowing down and combining ideas help to create a bigger picture and a more developed design.

When coming up with a design or a piece of writing one must take into consideration the many different views that the observers and readers will have. To help with the design and writing processes there are guidelines that can be followed to clean up the clutter of the initial group of ideas to better refine and polish the work.

As many designers learn, ‘commodity, firmness, and delight’ are key terms that aid in the formation of a design and can also be accommodated for the writing process. Commodity is the utility of the design or writing. This is a design’s use as a bus shelter or the moral of a children’s story. Firmness is the structure which represents how well a design holds though the elements and how a story flows from scene to scene. And delight is how pleasing the works are to the audience through the eyes and through the mind.

Hailey Allen
Writer, Associated Content

The first stage of every new cover is nerves and self-doubt: can I do something interesting, visually smart and get across the fundamental nature of the book and help it sell? Nightmare. So I get reading and then try to throw away all my concerns and fears and start getting stuff down on the page, sketching on paper and working things out on the computer. Usually that means trying out a lot of rubbish and having to trust that eventually something will emerge from the process that works. When that happens I can breathe a short sigh of relief and then get on with developing and refining until the cover is finished.

Coralie Bickford-Smith
Book Designer, Penguin Press

When I first started to work, in order to proceed, I wrote down a verb list, just to enact certain processes, not to think about sculpture, but to think about how would I involve myself in relation to matter, in a way that would enable me to concentrate on the activity of making something. So I wrote down a simple verb list: To cut, To fold, To curve, To bend, To prop, whatever. And then I started enacting those verbs in relation to given materials, whether it was a piece of rubber, a piece of lead. And Phil Glass, a composer, and myself, would work together and take a given verb for a day, and with certain materials, would go through the processes of trying to form whatever we form.

Richard Serra
Sculptor

The more that I think of myself, truly, in the best sense of the word, as a vessel for the writer, as simply there to present the writer’s ideas, the less self-conscious I become and the more I am able to lose myself completely. I think that I’m one of the few actors now on a film set who doesn’t ever look at the video. It’s become habitual for actors to get up after a take and run and watch, and I think it’s a mistake, and I think directors should ban actors from doing it … because I think that every time you go over to the video, no matter how honest you’ve been on camera, there’s a shard of you that says ‘I look better if I do this’ or ‘Oh my voice’ … Now I won’t look because I want the process to be the reward.

Frank Langella
Stage and Film Actor