moderne badezimmerspiegel
blah blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah, blah. so what the hell was that? well, you don't knowbecause you couldn't understand it. it wasn't clear. but hopefully, it was saidwith enough conviction that it was at leastalluringly mysterious.
clarity or mystery? i'm balancing these two thingsin my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a new yorker every day, and there are two elementsthat absolutely fascinate me. here's an example. now, how many people know what this is? okay. now how many peopleknow what this is? okay. thanks to two more deft strokesby the genius charles m. schulz,
we now have seven deft strokesthat in and of themselves create an entire emotional life, one that has enthralledhundreds of millions of fans for over 50 years. this is actually a cover of a book that i designed about the workof schulz and his art, which will be coming out this fall, and that is the entire cover. there is no other typographic informationor visual information on the front,
and the name of the bookis "only what's necessary." so this is sort of symbolic aboutthe decisions i have to make every day about the design that i'm perceiving, and the design i'm creating. so clarity. clarity gets to the point. it's blunt. it's honest. it's sincere. we ask ourselves this.["when should you be clear?"] now, something like this,whether we can read it or not,
needs to be really, really clear. is it? this is a rather recent exampleof urban clarity that i just love, mainly because i'm always lateand i am always in a hurry. so when these meters started showing upa couple of years ago on street corners, i was thrilled, because now i finally knew how many seconds i hadto get across the street before i got run over by a car. six? i can do that. (laughter)
so let's look at the yinto the clarity yang, and that is mystery. mystery is a lot more complicatedby its very definition. mystery demands to be decoded, and when it's done right,we really, really want to. ["when should you be mysterious?"] in world war ii, the germansreally, really wanted to decode this, and they couldn't. here's an example of a designthat i've done recently
for a novel by haruki murakami, who i've done design work forfor over 20 years now, and this is a novel about a young manwho has four dear friends who all of a sudden,after their freshman year of college, completely cut him offwith no explanation, and he is devastated. and the friends' names each havea connotation in japanese to a color. so there's mr. red, there's mr. blue,there's ms. white, and ms. black. tsukuru tazaki, his namedoes not correspond to a color,
so his nickname is colorless, andas he's looking back on their friendship, he recalls that they were likefive fingers on a hand. so i created this sort of abstractrepresentation of this, but there's a lot more going onunderneath the surface of the story, and there's more going on underneaththe surface of the jacket. the four fingers are now four train lines in the tokyo subway system, which has significance within the story. and then you havethe colorless subway line
intersecting with eachof the other colors, which basically he doeslater on in the story. he catches up with each of these people to find out why they treated himthe way they did. and so this is the three-dimensionalfinished product sitting on my desk in my office, and what i was hoping for hereis that you'll simply be allured by the mystery of what this looks like, and will want to read it
to decode and find out and make more clearwhy it looks the way it does. ["the visual vernacular."] this is a way to use a morefamiliar kind of mystery. what does this mean? this is what it means.["make it look like something else."] the visual vernacular is the waywe are used to seeing a certain thing applied to something else so thatwe see it in a different way. this is an approach i wanted to taketo a book of essays by david sedaris that had this title at the time.["all the beauty you will ever need"]
now, the challenge here was thatthis title actually means nothing. it's not connected to anyof the essays in the book. it came to the author's boyfriendin a dream. thank you very much, so -- (laughter) --so usually, i am creating a design that is in some way based on the text,but this is all the text there is. so you've got this mysterious titlethat really doesn't mean anything, so i was trying to think: where might i see a bit of mysterious textthat seems to mean something but doesn't? and sure enough, not long after,
one evening after a chinese meal, this arrived, and i thought,"ah, bing, ideagasm!" (laughter) i've always loved the hilariouslymysterious tropes of fortune cookies that seem to mean something extremely deep but when you think about them -- if youthink about them -- they really don't. this says, "hardly anyone knows how muchis gained by ignoring the future." thank you. (laughter) but we can take this visual vernacularand apply it to mr. sedaris, and we are so familiarwith how fortune cookie fortunes look
that we don't even needthe bits of the cookie anymore. we're just seeing this strange thing and we know we love david sedaris, and so we're hoping thatwe're in for a good time. ["'fraud' essays by david rakoff"]david rakoff was a wonderful writer and he called his first book "fraud" because he was getting senton assignments by magazines to do things that hewas not equipped to do. so he was this skinny little urban guy
and gq magazine would send himdown the colorado river whitewater rafting to seeif he would survive. and then he would write about it,and he felt that he was a fraud and that he was misrepresenting himself. and so i wanted the cover of this bookto also misrepresent itself and then somehow showa reader reacting to it. this led me to graffiti. i'm fascinated by graffiti. i think anybody who livesin an urban environment
encounters graffiti all the time,and there's all different sorts of it. this is a picture i tookon the lower east side of just a transformer box on the sidewalk and it's been tagged like crazy. now whether you look at this and think,"oh, that's a charming urban affectation," or you look at it and say,"that's illegal abuse of property," the one thing i think we can all agree on is that you cannot read it. right? there is no clear message here.
there is another kind of graffitithat i find far more interesting, which i call editorial graffiti. this is a picture i took recentlyin the subway, and sometimes you seelots of prurient, stupid stuff, but i thought this was interesting,and this is a poster that is saying rah-rah airbnb, and someone has taken a magic marker and has editorialized aboutwhat they think about it. and it got my attention.
so i was thinking, how do weapply this to this book? so i get the book by this person,and i start reading it, and i'm thinking, this guy is not who he says he is; he's a fraud. and i get out a red magic marker, and out of frustration justscribble this across the front. design done. (laughter) and they went for it! (laughter) author liked it, publisher liked it, and that is how the bookwent out into the world,
and it was really fun to seepeople reading this on the subway and walking around with itand what have you, and they all sort of lookedlike they were crazy. (laughter) ["'perfidia' a novel by james ellroy"]okay, james ellroy, amazing crime writer, a good friend, i've workedwith him for many years. he is probably best known as the author of "the black dahlia"and "l.a. confidential." his most recent novel was called this,which is a very mysterious name
that i'm sure a lot of people knowwhat it means, but a lot of people don't. and it's a story about a japanese-americandetective in los angeles in 1941 investigating a murder. and then pearl harbor happens, and as if his lifewasn't difficult enough, now the race relationshave really ratcheted up, and then the japanese-americaninternment camps are quickly created, and there's lots of tension and horrible stuff as he's stilltrying to solve this murder.
and so i did at first thinkvery literally about this in terms of all right, we'll take pearl harborand we'll add it to los angeles and we'll make this apocalyptic dawnon the horizon of the city. and so that's a picture from pearl harbor just grafted onto los angeles. my editor in chief said,"you know, it's interesting but i think you can do betterand i think you can make it simpler." and so i went backto the drawing board, as i often do. but also, being alive to my surroundings,
i work in a high-rise in midtown, and every night,before i leave the office, i have to push this button to get out, and the big heavy glass doors openand i can get onto the elevator. and one night, all of a sudden, i looked at this and i saw it in a waythat i hadn't really noticed it before. big red circle, danger. and i thought this was so obvious that it had to have beendone a zillion times,
and so i did a google image search,and i couldn't find another book cover that looked quite like this, and so this is reallywhat solved the problem, and graphically it's more interesting and creates a bigger tensionbetween the idea of a certain kind of sunrisecoming up over l.a. and america. ["'gulp' a tour of the humandigestive system by mary roach."] mary roach is an amazing writer who takes potentially mundanescientific subjects
and makes them not mundane at all;she makes them really fun. so in this particular case, it's about the human digestive system. so i'm trying to figure out whatis the cover of this book going to be. this is a self-portrait. (laughter) every morning i look at myselfin the medicine cabinet mirror to see if my tongue is black. and if it's not, i'm good to go. i recommend you all do this.
but i also started thinking,here's our introduction. right? into the human digestive system. but i think what we can all agree on is that actual photographsof human mouths, at least based on this, are off-putting. (laughter) so for the cover, then,i had this illustration done which is literally more palatable and reminds us that it's bestto approach the digestive system from this end.
i don't even have to completethe sentence. all right. ["unuseful mystery"] what happens when clarityand mystery get mixed up? and we see this all the time. this is what i call unuseful mystery. i go down into the subway --i take the subway a lot -- and this piece of paperis taped to a girder. right? and now i'm thinking, uh-oh, and the train's about to come and i'mtrying to figure out what this means,
and thanks a lot. part of the problem here is thatthey've compartmentalized the information in a way they think is helpful,and frankly, i don't think it is at all. so this is mystery we do not need. what we need is useful clarity,so just for fun, i redesigned this. this is using all the same elements. (applause) thank you. i am still waitingfor a call from the mta. (laughter) you know, i'm actually not evenusing more colors than they use.
they just didn't even botherto make the 4 and the 5 green, those idiots. (laughter) so the first thing we seeis that there is a service change, and then, in two complete sentenceswith a beginning, a middle and an end, it tells us what the change isand what's going to be happening. call me crazy! (laughter) ["useful mystery"]all right. now, here is a pieceof mystery that i love: packaging.
this redesign of the diet coke can by turner duckworthis to me truly a piece of art. it's a work of art. it's beautiful. but part of what makes itso heartening to me as a designer is that he's taken the visualvernacular of diet coke -- the typefaces, the colors,the silver background -- and he's reduced themto their most essential parts, so it's like going backto the charlie brown face. it's like, how can you give them justenough information so they know what it is
but giving them the creditfor the knowledge that they already have about this thing? it looks great, and you would gointo a delicatessen and all of a sudden see that on the shelf,and it's wonderful. which makes the next thing -- ["unuseful clarity"] --all the more disheartening, at least to me. so okay, again, going backdown into the subway, after this came out,
these are pictures that i took. times square subway station: coca-cola has bought outthe entire thing for advertising. okay? and maybe some of youknow where this is going. ahem. "you moved to new yorkwith the clothes on your back, the cash in your pocket,and your eyes on the prize. you're on coke." (laughter) "you moved to new yorkwith an mba, one clean suit,
and an extremely firm handshake. these are real! (laughter) not even the support beams were spared, except they switched into yoda mode.(laughter) "coke you're on." (laughter) ["excuse me, i'm on what??"] this campaign was a huge misstep. it was pulled almost instantlydue to consumer backlash and all sorts of unflatteringparodies on the web --
(laughter) -- and also that dot next to "you're on,"that's not a period, that's a trademark. so thanks a lot. so to me, this was just so bizarre about how they could get the packagingso mysteriously beautiful and perfect and the message so unbearably,clearly wrong. it was just incredible to me. so i just hope that i've been ableto share with you some of my insights on the uses of clarityand mystery in my work,
and maybe how you might decideto be more clear in your life, or maybe to be a bit more mysteriousand not so over-sharing. and if there's just one thingthat i leave you with from this talk, i hope it's this: blih blih blih blah. blah blah blih blih.["'judge this,' chip kidd"] blih blih blah blah blah.blah blah blah. blah blah.