-
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 know
because you couldn't understand it.
-
It wasn't clear.
-
But hopefully, it was said
with enough conviction
-
that it was at least
alluringly mysterious.
-
Clarity or mystery?
-
I'm balancing these two things
in my daily work as a graphic designer,
-
as well as my daily life as a New Yorker
-
every day,
-
and there are two elements
that absolutely fascinate me.
-
Here's an example.
-
Now, how many people know what this is?
-
Okay. Now how many people
know what this is?
-
Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes
by the genius Charles M. Schulz,
-
we now have seven deft strokes
that in and of themselves
-
create an entire emotional life,
-
one that has enthralled
hundreds of millions of fans
-
for over 50 years.
-
This is actually a cover of a book
-
that I designed about the work
of Schulz and his art,
-
which will be coming out this fall,
-
and that is the entire cover.
-
There is no other typographic information
or visual information on the front,
-
and the name of the book
is "Only What's Necessary."
-
So this is sort of symbolic about
the 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 example
of urban clarity that I just love,
-
mainly because I'm always late
and I am always in a hurry.
-
So when these meters started showing up
a couple of years ago on street corners,
-
I was thrilled, because now I finally knew
-
how many seconds I had
to get across the street
-
before I got run over by a car.
-
Six? I can do that. (Laughter)
-
So let's look at the yin
to the clarity yang,
-
and that is mystery.
-
Mystery is a lot more complicated
by 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 Germans
really, really wanted to decode this,
-
and they couldn't.
-
Here's an example of a design
that I've done recently
-
for a novel by Haruki Murakami,
-
who I've done design work for
for over 20 years now,
-
and this is a novel about a young man
who has four dear friends
-
who all of a sudden,
after their freshman year of college,
-
completely cut him off
with no explanation,
-
and he is devastated.
-
And the friends' names each have
a 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 name
does not correspond to a color,
-
so his nickname is Colorless, and
as he's looking back on their friendship,
-
he recalls that they were like
five fingers on a hand.
-
So I created this sort of abstract
representation of this,
-
but there's a lot more going on
underneath the surface of the story,
-
and there's more going on underneath
the 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 have
the colorless subway line
-
intersecting with each
of the other colors,
-
which basically he does
later on in the story.
-
He catches up with each of these people
-
to find out why they treated him
the way they did.
-
And so this is the three-dimensional
finished product
-
sitting on my desk in my office,
-
and what I was hoping for here
is 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 clear
why it looks the way it does.
-
["The Visual Vernacular."]
-
This is a way to use a more
familiar kind of mystery.
-
What does this mean?
-
This is what it means.
["Make it look like something else."]
-
The visual vernacular is the way
we are used to seeing a certain thing
-
applied to something else so that
we see it in a different way.
-
This is an approach I wanted to take
to 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 that
this title actually means nothing.
-
It's not connected to any
of the essays in the book.
-
It came to the author's boyfriend
in 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 title
that really doesn't mean anything,
-
so I was trying to think:
-
Where might I see a bit of mysterious text
that 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 hilariously
mysterious tropes of fortune cookies
-
that seem to mean something extremely deep
-
but when you think about them -- if you
think about them -- they really don't.
-
This says, "Hardly anyone knows how much
is gained by ignoring the future."
-
Thank you. (Laughter)
-
But we can take this visual vernacular
and apply it to Mr. Sedaris,
-
and we are so familiar
with how fortune cookie fortunes look
-
that we don't even need
the bits of the cookie anymore.
-
We're just seeing this strange thing
-
and we know we love David Sedaris,
-
and so we're hoping that
we'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 sent
on assignments by magazines
-
to do things that he
was not equipped to do.
-
So he was this skinny little urban guy
-
and GQ magazine would send him
down the Colorado River
-
whitewater rafting to see
if 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 book
to also misrepresent itself
-
and then somehow show
a reader reacting to it.
-
This led me to graffiti.
-
I'm fascinated by graffiti.
-
I think anybody who lives
in an urban environment
-
encounters graffiti all the time,
and there's all different sorts of it.
-
This is a picture I took
on 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 graffiti
that I find far more interesting,
-
which I call editorial graffiti.
-
This is a picture I took recently
in the subway,
-
and sometimes you see
lots 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 about
what they think about it.
-
And it got my attention.
-
So I was thinking, how do we
apply 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 just
scribble this across the front.
-
Design done. (Laughter)
-
And they went for it! (Laughter)
-
Author liked it, publisher liked it,
-
and that is how the book
went out into the world,
-
and it was really fun to see
people reading this on the subway
-
and walking around with it
and what have you,
-
and they all sort of looked
like they were crazy.
-
(Laughter)
-
["'Perfidia' a novel by James Ellroy"]
Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer,
-
a good friend, I've worked
with 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 know
what it means, but a lot of people don't.
-
And it's a story about a Japanese-American
detective in Los Angeles in 1941
-
investigating a murder.
-
And then Pearl Harbor happens,
-
and as if his life
wasn't difficult enough,
-
now the race relations
have really ratcheted up,
-
and then the Japanese-American
internment camps are quickly created,
-
and there's lots of tension
-
and horrible stuff as he's still
trying to solve this murder.
-
And so I did at first think
very literally about this in terms of
-
all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor
and we'll add it to Los Angeles
-
and we'll make this apocalyptic dawn
on 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 better
and I think you can make it simpler."
-
And so I went back
to 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 open
and I can get onto the elevator.
-
And one night, all of a sudden,
-
I looked at this and I saw it in a way
that I hadn't really noticed it before.
-
Big red circle, danger.
-
And I thought this was so obvious
-
that it had to have been
done 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 really
what solved the problem,
-
and graphically it's more interesting
-
and creates a bigger tension
between the idea
-
of a certain kind of sunrise
coming up over L.A. and America.
-
["Gulp." A tour of the human
digestive system by Mary Roach.]
-
Mary Roach is an amazing writer
-
who takes potentially mundane
scientific 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 what
is the cover of this book going to be.
-
This is a self-portrait. (Laughter)
-
Every morning I look at myself
in the medicine cabinet mirror
-
to see if my tongue is black.
-
And if it's not, I'm good to go.
-
(Laughter)
-
I recommend you all do this.
-
But I also started thinking, you know,
here's our introduction.
-
Right? Into the human digestive system.
-
But I think what we can all agree on
-
is that actual photographs
of 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 best
to approach the digestive system
-
from this end.
-
(Laughter)
-
I don't even have to complete
the sentence. All right.
-
[Unuseful mystery]
-
What happens when clarity
and mystery get mixed up?
-
And we see this all the time.
-
This is what I call unuseful mystery.
-
I go down into the subway,
take the subway a lot,
-
and this piece of paper
is taped to a girder.
-
Right? And now I'm thinking, uh oh,
-
and the train's about to come and I'm
trying to figure out what this means,
-
and thanks a lot.
-
Part of the problem here is that
they'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 waiting
for a call from the MTA. (Laughter)
-
You know, I'm actually not even
using more colors than they use.
-
They just didn't even bother
to make the 4 and the 5 green,
-
those idiots. (Laughter)
-
So the first thing that we see
is that there is a service change,
-
and then, in two complete sentences
with a beginning, a middle, and an end,
-
it tells us what the change is
and what's going to be happening.
-
Call me crazy! (Laughter)
-
[Useful mystery]
All right.
-
Now, here is a piece
of mystery that I love:
-
packaging.
-
This redesign of the Diet Coke can
-
by Turner Duckworth
is to me truly a piece of art.
-
It's a work of art. It's beautiful.
-
But what part of what makes it
so enheartening to me as a designer
-
is that he's taken the visual
vernacular of Diet Coke
-
-- the typefaces, the colors,
the silver background --
-
and he's reduced them
to their most essential parts,
-
so it's like going back
to the Charlie Brown face.
-
It's like, how can you give them just
enough information so they know what it is
-
but giving them the credit
for the knowledge that they already have
-
about this thing?
-
It looks great, and you would go
into a delicatessen
-
and all of a sudden see that on the shelf,
and it's wonderful.
-
All right, which makes the next thing
-
-- [Unuseful clarity] --
all the more disheartening,
-
at least to me.
-
So okay, again, going back
down into the subway,
-
after this came out,
-
these are pictures that I took.
-
Times Square subway station:
-
Coca-Cola has bought out
the entire thing for advertising. Okay?
-
And maybe some of you
know where this is going.
-
Ahem.
-
"You moved to New York
with the clothes on your back,
-
the cash in your pocket,
and you're eyes on the prize.
-
You're on Coke." (Laughter)
-
"You moved to New York
with an MBA, one clean suit,
-
and an extremely firm handshake.
-
You're on Coke." (Laughter)
-
These are real! (Laughter)
-
Not even the support beams were spared,
-
except they switched into Yoda mode.
-
[Excuse me, I'm on WHAT??]
-
"Coke you're on." (Laughter)
-
This campaign was a huge misstep.
-
It was pulled almost instantly
due to consumer backlash
-
and all sorts of unflattering
parodies 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 packaging
so 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 able
to share with you some of my insights
-
on the uses of clarity
and mystery in my work,
-
and maybe how you might decide
to be more clear in your life
-
or maybe to be a bit more mysterious
and not so over-sharing.
-
(Laughter)
-
And if there's just one thing
that I leave you with from this talk,
-
I hope it's this:
-
Blih blih blih blah.
Blah blah blih blih.
-
Blih blih blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah.
-
Blah blah.
-
(Applause)