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Blah blah blah blah blah.
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Blah blah blah blah,
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blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah.
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Blah blah blah, blah blah.
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So what the hell was that?
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Well, you don't know
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because you couldn't understand it.
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It wasn't clear.
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But hopefully, it was said
with enough conviction
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that it was at least
alluringly mysterious.
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Clarity or mystery?
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I'm balancing these two things
in my daily work as a graphic designer,
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as well as my daily life as a New Yorker
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every day,
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and there are two elements
that absolutely fascinate me.
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Here's an example.
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Now, how many people know what this is?
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Okay. Now how many people
know what this is?
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Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes
by the genius Charles M. Schulz,
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we now have seven deft strokes
that in and of themselves
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create an entire emotional life,
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one that has enthralled
hundreds of millions of fans
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for over 50 years.
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This is actually a cover of a book
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that I designed about the work
of Schulz and his art,
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which will be coming out this fall,
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and that is the entire color.
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There is no other typographic information
or visual information on the front,
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and the name is the book
is Only What's Necessary.
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So this is sort of symbolic about
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the decisions I have to make every day
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about the design that I'm perceiving,
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and the design I'm creating.
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So clarity.
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Clarity gets to the point.
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It's blunt. It's honest. It's sincere.
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We ask ourselves this.
[When should you be clear?]
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Now, something like this,
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whether we can read it or not,
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needs to be really, really clear.
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Is it?
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This is a rather recent example
of urban clarity that I just love,
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mainly because I'm always late
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and I'm always in a hurry.
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So when these meters started showing up
a couple of years ago on street corners,
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I was thrilled, because now I finally knew
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how many seconds I had
to get across a street
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before I got run over by a car.
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Six? I can do that. (Laughter)
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So let's look at the yin
to the clarity yang,
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and that is mystery.
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Mystery is a lot more complicated
by its very definition.
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Mystery demands to be decoded,
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and when it's done right,
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we really, really want to.
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In World War II, the Germans
really, really wanted to decode this,
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and they couldn't.
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Here's an example of a design
that I've done recently
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for a novel by Haruki Murakami,
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who I've done design work for
for over 20 years now,
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and this is a novel about a young man
who has four dear friends
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who all of a sudden,
after their freshman year of college,
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completely cut him off
with no explanation,
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and he is devastated.
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And the friend's names each have
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a connotation in Japanese to a color.
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So there's Mr. Red, there's Mr. Blue,
there's Ms. White, and Ms. Black.
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Tsukuru Tazaki, his name
does not correspond to a color,
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so his nickname is "Colorless," and
as he's looking back on their friendship,
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he recalls that they were like
five fingers on a hand.
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So I created this sort of abstract
representation of this,
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but there's a lot more going on
underneath the surface of the story,
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and there's more going on underneath
the surface of the jacket.
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The four fingers are now four train lines
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in the Tokyo subway system,
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which has significance within the story.
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And then you have
the colorless subway line
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intersecting with each
of the other colors,
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which basically he does
later on in the story.
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He catches up with each of these people
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to find out why they treated him
the way they did.
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And so this is the three-dimensional
finished product
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sitting on my desk in my office,
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and what I was hoping for here
is that you'll simply be allured
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by the mystery of what this looks like,
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and will want to read it
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to decode and find out and make more clear
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why it looks the way it does.
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[The Visual Vernacular.]
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This is a way to use a more
familiar kind of mystery.
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What does this mean?
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This is what it means.
[Make it look like something else.]
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The visual vernacular is the way
we are used to seeing a certain thing
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applied to something else so that
we see it in a different way.
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This is an approach I wanted to take
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to a book of essays by David Sedaris
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that had this title at the time.
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["All the Beauty You Will Ever Need"]
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Now, the challenge here was that
this title actually means nothing.
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It's not connected to any
of the essays in a book.
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It came to the author's boyfriend
in a dream.
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Thank you very much, so -- (Laughter) --
so usually, I am creating a design
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that is in some way based on the text,
but this is all the text there is.
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So you've got this mysterious title
that really doesn't mean anything,
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so I was trying to think:
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where might I see a bit of mysterious text
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that seems to mean something but doesn't,
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and sure enough, not long after,
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one evening after a Chinese meal,
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this arrive,d and I thought,
"Ah, bing, ideagasm!" (Laughter)
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I've always loved the hilariously
mysterious tropes of fortune cookies
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that seem to mean something extremely deep
-
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but when you think about them, if
you think about them, they really don't.
-
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This says, "Hardly anyone knows how much
is gained by ignoring the future."
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Thank you. (Laughter)
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But we can take this visual vernacular
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and apply it to Mr. Sedaris,
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and we are so familiar
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with how fortune cookie fortunes look
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that we don't even need
the bits of the cookie anymore.
-
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We're just seeing this strange thing
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and we know we love David Sedaris,
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and so we hope that
we're in for a good time.
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["Fraud." Essays by David Rakoff]
David Rakoff was a wonderful writer
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and he called his first book "Fraud"
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because he was getting sent
on assignments by magazines
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to do things that he
was not equipped to do.
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So he was this skinny little urban guy
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and GQ Magazine would send him
down the Colorado River
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whitewater rafting to see
if he would survive.
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And then he would write about it,
and he felt that he was a fraud
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and that he was misrepresenting himself.
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And so I wanted the cover of this book
to also misrepresent itself,
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and then somehow show
a reader reacting to it.
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This led me to graffiti.
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I'm fascinated by graffiti.
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I think anybody who lives
in an urban environment
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encounters graffiti all the time,
and there's all different sorts of it.
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This is a picture I took
on the Lower East Side
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of just a transformer box on the sidewalk
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and it's been tagged like crazy.
-
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Now whether you look at this and think,
"Oh, that's a charming urban affectation,"
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or you look at and say,
"That's illegal abuse of property,"
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the one thingI think we can all agree on
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is that you cannot read it. (Laughter)
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Right? There is no clear message here.
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There is another kind of graffiti
that I find far more interesting
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which I call editorial graffiti.
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This is a picture I took recently
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in the subway,
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and sometimes you see lots of fury
and stupid stuff,
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but I thought this was interesting,
and this is a poster that is saying
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"Rah, rah, Airbnb,"
-
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and someone has taken a magic marker
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and has editorialized about
what they think about it.
-
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And it got my attention.
-
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So I was thinking, how do we
apply this to this book?
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So I get the book by this person,
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and I start reading it, and I'm thinking,
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this guy is not who he says he is.
-
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He's a fraud, and I get out
a red magic marker,
-
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and out of frustration just
scribble this across the front.
-
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Design done. (Laughter)
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And they went for it! (Laughter)
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Author liked it, publisher like it,
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and that is how the book
went out into the world,
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and it was really fun to see
people reading this on the subway
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and walking around with it
and what have you,
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and they all sort of looked
like they were crazy.
-
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(Laughter)
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["Perfidia." A novel by James Ellroy.]
Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer,
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a good friend, I've worked
with him for many years.
-
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He is probably best known as the author
-
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of "The Black Dalia"
and "L.A. Confidential."
-
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His most recent novel was called this,
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which is a very mysterious name
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that I'm sure a lot of people know
what it means, but a lot of people don't.
-
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And it's a story about a Japanese-American
detective in Los Angeles in 1941
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investigating a murder.
-
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And then Pearl Harbor happens,
and as if his life wasn't difficult enough,
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now the race relations
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have really ratcheted up,
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and then the Japanese-American
internment camps are quickly created,
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and there's lots of tension
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and horrible stuff as he's still
trying to solve this murder.
-
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And so I did at first think
very literally about this in terms of
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all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor
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and we'll add it to Los Angeles
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and we'll make this kind of, like,
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apocalyptic dawn
on the horizon of the city.
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And so that's a picture from Pearl Harbor
-
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just grafted onto Los Angeles.
-
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My editor in chief said,
"You know, it's interesting
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but I think you can do better
and I think you can make it simpler."
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And so I went back
to the drawing board, as I often do.
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But also, being alive to my surroundings,
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I work in a high rise in Midtown,
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and every night,
before I leave the office,
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I have to push this button to get out,
-
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and the big heavy glass doors open
and I can get onto the elevator.
-
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And one night, all of a sudden,
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I looked at this and I saw it in a way
that I hadn't really noticed it before.
-
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Big red circle, danger.
-
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And I thought this was so obvious
-
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that it had to have been
done a zillion times,
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and so I did a Google image search,
and I couldn't find another book cover
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that looked quite like this,
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and so this is really
what solved the problem,
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and graphically it's more interesting
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and creates a bigger tension
between the idea
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of a certain kind of sunrise
coming up over L.A. and America.
-
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["Gulp." A tour of the human
digestive system by Mary Roach.]
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Mary Roach is an amazing writer
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who takes potentially mundane
scientific subjects
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and makes them not mundane at all.
She makes them really fun.
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So in this particular case,
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it's about the human digestive system.
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So I'm trying to figure out what
is the cover of this book going to be.
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This is a self-portrait. (Laughter)
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Every morning I look at myself
in the medicine cabinet mirror
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to see if my tongue is black.
-
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And if it's not, I'm good to go.
-
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(Laughter)
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I recommend you all do this.
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But I also started thinking, you know,
here's our introduction.
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Right? Into the human digestive system.
-
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But I think what we can all agree on
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is that actual photographs
of human mouths, at least based on this,
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are off-putting. (Laughter)
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So for the cover, then,
I had this illustration done
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which is literally more palatable
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and reminds us that it's best
to approach the digestive system
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from this end.
-
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(Laughter)
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I don't even have to complete
the sentence. All right.
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[Unuseful mystery]
What happens when clarity
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and mystery get mixed up?
-
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And we see this all the time.
-
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This is what I call unuseful mystery.
-
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I go down into the subway,
take the subway a lot,
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and this piece of paper
is taped to a girder.
-
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Right? And now I'm thinking, uh oh,
-
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and the train's about to come and I'm
trying to figure out what this means,
-
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and thanks a lot.
-
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Part of the problem here is that
they've compartmentalized the information
-
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in a way they think is helpful,
and frankly, I don't think it is at all.
-
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So this is mystery we do not need.
-
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What we need is useful clarity,
so just for fun, I redesigned this.
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This is using all the same elements.
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(Applause)
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Thank you. I am still waiting
for a call from the MTA. (Laughter)
-
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You know, I'm actually not even
using more colors than they use.
-
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They just didn't even bother
to make the 4 and the 5 green,
-
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those idiots. (Laughter)
-
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So the first thing that we see
is that there is a service change,
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and then, in two complete sentences
with a beginning, a middle, and an end,
-
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it tells us what the change is
and what's going to be happening.
-
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Call me crazy! (Laughter)
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[Useful mystery]
All right.
-
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Now, here is a piece
of mystery that I love:
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packaging.
-
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This redesign of the Diet Coke can
-
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by Turner Duckworth
is to me truly a piece of art.
-
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It's a work of art. It's beautiful.
-
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But what part of what makes it
so enheartening to me as a designer
-
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is that he's taken the visual
vernacular of Diet Coke
-
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-- the tight faces, the colors,
the silver background --
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and he's reduced them
to their most essential parts,
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so it's like going back
to the Charlie Brown face.
-
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It's like, how can you give them just
enough information so they know what it is
-
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but giving them the credit
for the knowledge that they already have
-
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about this thing?
-
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It looks great, and you would go
into a delicatessen
-
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and all of a sudden see that on the shelf,
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and it's wonderful.
-
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All right, which makes the next thing
-
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-- [Unuseful clarity] --
all the more disheartening,
-
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at least to me.
-
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So okay, again, going back
down into the subway,
-
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after this came out,
-
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these are pictures that I took.
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Times Square subway station:
-
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Coca-Cola has bought out
the entire thing for advertising. Okay?
-
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And maybe some of you
know where this is going.
-
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Ahem.
-
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"You moved to New York
with the clothes on your back,
-
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the cash in your pocket,
and you're eyes on the prize.
-
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You're on Coke." (Laughter)
-
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"You moved to New York
with an MBA, one clean suit,
-
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and an extremely firm handshake.
-
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You're on Coke." (Laughter)
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These are real! (Laughter0
-
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Not even the support beams were spared,
-
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except they switched into Yoda mode.
-
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"Coke you're on." (Laughter)
-
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This campaign was a huge misstep.
-
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It was pulled almost instantly
-
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due to consumer backlash
-
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and all sorts of unflattering
parodies on the web
-
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-- (Laughter) --
-
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and also that dot next to "You're on,"
that's not a period, that's a trademark.
-
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So thanks a lot. So to me,
this was just so bizarre
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about how they could get the packaging
so mysteriously beautiful and perfect
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and the message so unbearably,
clearly wrong.
-
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It was just incredible to me.
-
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So I just hope that I've been able
to share with you some of my insights
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on the uses of clarity
and mystery in my work,
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and maybe how you might decide
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to be more clear in your life
-
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or maybe to me a bit more mysterious
-
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and not so over-sharing.
-
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(Laughter)
-
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And if there's just one thing
that I leave you with from this talk,
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I hope it's this:
-
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Blih blih blih blah.
Blah blah blih blih.
-
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Blih blih blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah.
-
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Blah blah.
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(Applause)