Chip Kidd Lecture…

I went to hear Chip Kidd speak today at lunchtime. He gave a lecture that was co-sponsored by both the Cincinnati Advertising Club and the Cincinnati Chapter of the AIGA. And yes, my Chair at Northern was even kind enough to pay for my admission with departmental dinero. It was a pretty sweet gig all the way around.

The lecture was great! Chip was super entertaining. When he spoke he was informal and relaxed. He didn’t at all act like a pompous ass, like some other renown designers of his caliber tend to behave. Seriously, he just seemed like a regular guy with a great sense of humor. It was pretty refreshing. At one point he even recited a verse from the bible in the voice of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. I know that sounds weird, but it was hilarious.

During his lecture he started out talking about some projects that he is currently working on; like the stuff he’s doing for Vertical, some cover designs for DC Comics, and even a poster for Julia Robert’s Broadway debut. What was cool about the way he presented his ideas was, that he wasn’t just giving another portfolio style slide show. He walked us through the process of most of the pieces. You could catch a glimpse of how quickly he really works. To get a sense of his super-human design speed, he’s worked for Knopf Publishing, in New York for 20 years and has designed over 900 book covers in that time!!! Nine-freaking-hundred! No joke. He also told us about the hang-ups within his processes, the stuff the clients didn’t like, the changes he had to make, the crap he has to put up with, and so on…

What I found even more interesting about the lecture though, was that I started to get a sense of the way he thinks and works. When he spoke about his projects, you could really see that his work thrives off of instincts. I saw it as ‘designing from the gut’. Granted, there are 20 years experience and 900 book covers in that gut, but his decisions seem to be bold and primal in their wittiness. Sometimes working that way burns him and other times he’s the hero. But it’s apparent that he isn’t hung up on rules or process. His work is very much about those first strong ideas that pop into your head at the beginning of the brainstorming. It’s just that his first ideas are the ones that take the rest of us a while to get to.

I took a couple of pictures, but the lighting was so crappy, that you can’t really make them out very well. I had hoped to stay after, but the presentation went long and we had to get back to school for a class. Chip was also doing a book signing tonight at Josepf-Beth Books, but I couldn’t make that either. A colleague of mine was considering going to that, and if she made it, she was going to pickup an autographed Cheese Monkeys for me. We’ll see tomorrow I guess.

Moral of the story: If you ever get the chance to go attend a Chip Kidd lecture, you should do it. I’ve seen talks by Sagmeister, Beirut, and Cooper and Kidd is still the winner.

Accreditation?

Our design department is not NASAD accredited. When I first came on board at NKU, my colleague and I both agreed that we value accreditation and would make sure to go through this process in our area.

We’re both in our third year now and with all of the in-house things that have had to be done here over the last few years in revitalizing our program, we simply haven’t had the chance to start this process yet. I’m guessing that with all that’s happening right now, we’re still not going to get to it this year either. We do think it’s very important we just haven’t had enough time.

In the process of serving on a few college committees lately, I’ve been speaking to other colleagues throughout the university in different departments who have had to go through their own accreditation processes. Some are very much for it, and some are very much against it. They each have their own reasons for either loving or hating it; some selfish, some valid—it was actually a pretty even mix. I realized during these conversations that I never thought that there might be valid reasons why some faculty members may not want to be accredited. And this is actually a conversation we haven’t had yet as a department that we probably should. Do we really want to seek accreditation? My instincts say: “yeah, of course we do”, but I’m beginning to think it’s worth some consideration.

Accreditation has its advantages. With it comes more of a validity in your program’s reputation among peer institutions…at least I think that’s what happens. And of course the review process can identify areas in your curriculum or program that you may not have realized were lacking or need improvement. It would be great to have an impartial outside observer give our version of design education the once over. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment but the designer in me is craving that critique. Another argument frequently mentioned on the “pro” side of accreditation is that it can give a school the ability to recruit a higher level of student. This one I’m not so sure about though. Remembering back to when I was a fresh-faced undergrad just out of high school, I’m pretty sure I didn’t really know much about accreditation. As it turns out, both colleges that I attended (undergrad and graduate) were accredited, but that had very little weight in my decision to attend them. Very little. Maybe I should’ve cared more, but I think I was concerned most about the reputation of the institution.

Those who would argue against the NASAD process would probably cite their ability to remain agile in their curriculum. Accreditation comes under an existing curriculum. In a way, it can bind your hands and lock your program into “their” model for a number of years. I like that our institution is still young (est. 1968). I like that if I want to get something started or change something in our program on my own and have the ambition to do the legwork myself—it will probably happen and relatively quickly. That really suits graphic design. Sure, we have our own set of fundamentals and concerns as a discipline, but we are changing increasingly quickly, and sometimes in a much faster span of time than one or two years. What if we want to shift our focus or be more entrepreneurial in our approach to design education? The flexibility is probably a great thing to have. There are also a number of great institutions with strong reputations in graphic design that are not accredited, like Cranbrook’s 2-D program for instance. I don’t think many students turn down an opportunity to attend these sorts of universities because they are not accredited.

I’m curious to see what everyone else out there thinks. Is it worth it? Should we still do it? Should it be NASAD? How about an AIGA design school version?

Searching, Boston and the Kidd…

I feel like I haven’t made a post in forever and when I look at the dates I realize I really haven’t. I have been super busy lately and for some reason blogging has dropped on the old priority list. I’ll work on it.

What’s new?…Well, despite whatever your Chair or other colleagues may tell you, working on three search committees at the same time is no fun. Just this week I had to make seven different reference phone calls that were at least a half hour each—a couple were much longer. I don’t know about many of you out there, but I am not much of a phone person. In fact, I think I actually hate talking on the phone. When it rings at home, I never answer it, (even if I’m the only one home) and at work I only use it when it’s a necessity. I’m not anti-social or anything, I just really loathe the telephone for some unknown reason. I haven’t even owned a mobile phone for four or five years now. Although, for some reason, I sense that I’m going to have to ‘turn to the dark side’ on that one soon. Not having a cell phone and traveling can be super rough.

Speaking of travel, the CAA conference is in Boston this year around the mid twenties (23, 24, 25…something like that) of February—and I’ll be going. I’ve never been to Boston before and am kind of looking forward to it. It seems like an interesting town. I’ll be there to interview what I hope are tons and tons of wonderful candidates applying for a tenure track teaching position here at NKU in graphic design. I’ve posted the job description here on this site before, but it’s still NOT TOO LATE for someone to send in their materials and apply for the opening. Our reviewing starts at the end of this month. Tell your friends.

On the 31st of this month Chip Kidd is coming to Cincy to give a lecture in the afternoon and do a book signing in the evening for his new book. It’s on a Tuesday and I don’t have class that day so I think I’m going to try and get to the lunch thing. It’s being put on by the Advertising Club of Cincinnati, in the downtown area. Only one catch, I just re-checked the old invite and it will be 35 clams just to walk in the door. Students are cheaper at 18 dollars, but I think I’m going to have to try and seek alternative funding for that (by “alternative” I mean: not the Brauer checking account). I thinks it sounds like a perfectly valid business expense that the department could take on…don’t you think? It’s part of that faculty enrichment that I keep hearing about…right? Anyway, if I go, I try to rattle off a few snapshots and give a full report in my usual rambling format.

Classes are shaping up pretty well this semester. The only rough patch that may come into play is the head count in Illustration. I think we’re hovering right around 22 or 23 students. That makes for a bit of a different crit format. Let’s call it “terse.” Yeah, that’s a nice way to say it.

Still plugging away with Pimsleur at German II, (Unit 5).

The Design Entrepreneur…

As I was sitting in the interviews today, I have to admit that for a moment or two, my mind began to wander. You see, I had just heard the word “entrepreneur” for about the fifteenth time today and I started to really examine its definition and how it can relate to graphic designers. You know, I was sitting there, already had the laptop open…what the hell, huh?

Anyway, the reason I started to consider it was the context in which it was being used. Many of the interviewers were discussing it as a characteristic of someone who innovates and creates new beginnings, therefore generating new outcomes; as opposed to simply solving existing problems. As you can imagine, my mind started racing a-mile-a-minute. I always thought that as a designer, I was an am a problem solver. Is this a bad thing? Am I just another pair of eyeglasses? (you know, the old “treating the symptoms” and “not addressing the problem” metaphor) It’s really something to think about in design.

I know that I have made work in design that I would consider an innovation…err, at least I hope I have. But I started to consider whether it was something I was doing consistently; or in fact, am I simply treating symptoms? This is a pretty tough, self-critical question.

I think that probably most design entrepreneurs work a great deal on client education. They asses a client need and create a design that correctly addresses that need. I can remember an example of mine in graduate school where all of us were to work on a project of redesigning a shopping cart. After quite a bit of thinking and research, I came to the conclusion that what the client actually needed was a creation I called: The Handheld Shopping Cart. I rethought the shopping experience. I went from a cart to a handheld scanner, I re-examined new methods of point of purchase displays, I explained the added value of technology in such a device, and so on. By the end of my presentation, the client was excited by the idea. They were expecting a wire box on four wheels with a handle, and instead they got a tricked out PDA and a new store. The idea was exciting to them and I remember them being impressed with a whole new experience. It wasn’t what they wanted initially, but it was probably what they needed.

I’m also aware that there is plenty of work I’ve created that could simply be called “corrective design”—all of those car commercials, for one. Those ads sure aren’t going to win any awards, but they do help with that private school tuition for the kids.

It’s a challenging question to ask of yourself. Are you making something new that addresses the design problem at its roots? Or instead with your design work, are you simply treating some symptoms of the problem? I guess one could argue that not all projects can meet this criterion, but then, I would put forth the notion that some may argue just the opposite—that all design projects should be treated this way.

I’ll tell ya’ what man, dang ol’ confidentiality, man…

I left the house today very early when it was still dark and by the time I got out of the conference building tonight it was already dark again. Although this process is quite a bit of work it’s remarkably interesting. A search at the dean level is much different than a search at a faculty level position. The problem is that I can’t really comment on all of the interesting things that are happening because of a confidentiality agreement. I would however, recommend to anyone who is nominated to such a committee, that they accept that nomination.

The only downside has been, having to cancel the first day of classes. We’ll just have to meet on Wednesday, but there is something great about that first day of class. I think those are some of my favorite days of the year. It’s one of the ways I know I’m in the right profession—I like school way too much.

Back to the grindstone tomorrow with five more candidates.

The Hibernation is Over…

Alright, so I guess it’s finally time to come out of my cave and stop hiding. School starts back up on Monday and I’ve been avoiding the inevitable for as long as possible. I love the breaks in teaching, and when I go on break—I really go on break.

As I said earlier, classes do start back on Monday, but not exactly for me. Somehow, I was nominated to serve on a search committee for the new Dean of the College of Informatics. Since this is a pretty high-level search committee, I was honored and eager to participate. Well, now it has come time to “pay the piper.” On Monday and Tuesday from 7:00 a.m. until about 6:30 p.m. we will be conducting TEN candidate interviews at the airport. Obviously because of confidentiality agreements, I can’t report on too much information about the specifics, but this is going to be quite a bit of work. And as a result of scheduling, my first classes on Monday had to be cancelled (no teaching on Tuesdays).

As I look back on my rants regarding my trip, I realize it may have seemed like I was a bit jaded about the whole trip. I had a great time and I loved Germany, I just had a bit of trouble getting home. I am definitely going to go back again and whenever that is it won’t be soon enough. Before I left, I did finish Pimsleur’s German I audio lessons (about 30 lessons that took a little less than two months of driving back and forth from work). I think I drove my wife bananas with all of the German talk but it did pay off while we were there—I used it a ton. I can speak enough to get by—it’s not an acceptable level, but it doesn’t intimidate me as much anymore. The funny thing is that I can’t read or write it very well at all. I’m going to have to keep working on it. I though that once I got back, I wouldn’t use the audio lessons anymore, but once I drove in the car a few times without them; I missed them. I’m already into my third lesson of German II and I think I’ll probably finish all three courses. I would recommend Pimsleur to anyone who has a commute to work of a half hour or more. Regular driving just seems like I’m wasting time now.

Bis Montag!