Category: tidbits

Rick Poynor: “Graphic design is the communication framework through which [we receive] these messages about what the world is now, and what we should aspire to. It’s the way they reach us. The designer has an enormous responsibility. Those are the people putting their wires into our heads.”

Paula Scher: “The corporate culture was the visual language of big corporations, and at that time [the 60s and 70s] they were persuasively Helvetica. And they looked alike. They looked a little fascistic to me. They were clean. They reminded me of cleaning your room. I felt like it was some conspiracy of my mother’s to make me keep the house clean, that all that my messy room adolescent rebellion was coming back at me in the form of Helvetica and that I had to overthrow it. […] I was also morally opposed to Helvetica because I viewed the big corporations that were slathered in Helvetica as sponsors of the Vietnam War.”

David Carson: “I have no formal training in my field. In my case I’ve never learned all the things I’m not supposed to do. I just did what made sense to me. I was just… experimenting, really. So when people started getting upset, I didn’t really understand why, I said, ‘What’s the big deal? What are you talking about?’ And it was many years later that someone explained to me that, basically, there was this group that spent a lot of time trying to organize things, get some kind of system going, and they saw me going in and throwing that out the window, which I might’ve done, but it wasn’t the starting point, that wasn’t the plan. Only much later I learned what determines modernism, and this and that…”

Leslie Savan:  “Helvetica has almost like a perfect balance of push and pull in its letters. And that perfect balance is saying to us – ‘don’t worry, any of the problems that you’re having, or the problems in the world, or problems getting through the subway, or finding a bathroom… all those problem aren’t going to spill over, they’ll be contained. And in fact, maybe they don’t exist.'”

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A few important dates:

– Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso: 1907

– World War I: 1914-1918

– Fountain (“the urinal”) “by” Marcel Duchamp: 1917

– World War II: 1939-1945

– Jack Kerouac writes 11 books between 1951 and 1956 including On the Road

– Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol: 1962 (“The channels switch, but it’s all television.”)

– Vietnam War: 1955-1975