Paul Rand: conversations with students
My highlights
“It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.”
Surely every Interactive Designer can relate to this. Thats why I love nothing more then spend days on end just sketching and drawing out new ideas and erasing them.
One of the booklets described the development of the logo for Steven Jobs’s company NeXT Computer in Palo Alto, California. In these he helped the companies understand his research into different typefaces and their transformation into the definitive mark. I was always impressed with how clear, concise, and complete his explanations were. Even with my bad English, I could understand every sentence.
In my opinion every styleguide & document ever written for design purposes should be like this. Not ends on ends of data. Data is important, dont understand me wrong. But its your job to interpret it for the client in a clear way that he understands.
Design is relationships. Design is a relationship between form and content.
This is perfect explained in the following example from the book: “OK, you are standing there. You have gray: gray shirt, gray lines, light gray, dark gray. You have a whole symphony of grays. These are all relationships. This is 20 percent, 50 percent, these are all relationships—got it? Your glasses are round. Your collar is diagonal. These are relationships. Your mouth is an oval. Your nose a triangle—that is what design is.”
The process of designing is from complexity to simplicity. The part of complexity is filled with all kinds of horrible problems. Then trying to evaluate and weigh all these problems to make it simple, this is very difficult.
Sometimes you think it does. I mean, you think you have got a great idea and it is not so great. But that is the process. If you are talented and honest, you look and you say, that is lousy, forget it, and you start all over again. That happens all the time, or you redo a job; I rarely have done a job that I did not redo maybe ten times.
Design without a ego. If you think this idea is brilliant, just keep on going and do it again or another one.
The design i s the product of your thinking. The solution to these problems comes in a second. But before you have focused these thoughts, you are all over the place, because you are searching. You are feeling. You are looking for things. You do not know what you are doing. You are lost. You are in a maze. So thinking is number one in the design process.
A comp in the old days consisted of type and artwork and color and Photostats and color prints. Can you imagine how long that took, and how much it cost to do? You do it in half an hour today; it used to take two weeks, literally two weeks. There is something wrong in that, too, because it does not give you time to be contemplative. You do not have time to sit and think about it, and it keeps kicking you in your rear end as you go along.
We should all appreciate how easy we have it today. And how in theory we could focus so much of our efforts in just thinking of the idea and solution and then throw it in a few hours photoshop together. So why is not everbody doing this again?
Make sure whatever you do, get paid because he may not like what you do, and you may be doing a perfectly terrific job, and it is not fair. I think that you guys have squeezed enough blood out of my stony head
Every freelancer will know about this story.
“You will learn most things by looking,” he would say, “but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.”
In my opinion this book is more inspiring and bringing you forward as a designer than any article about productivity or workflow. It can be read in just one evening but the keyinsights you gain, will make you want to read it again and again. Its available as Book & Ebook, so go get it right now and start getting free.
