"Live the questions." R.M. Rilke

Victore piece quoting Rilke

This week’s Business Communication assignment: “Write about a current designer inspires you.”

An unambiguous enough prompt to be sure, but it only inspires in me a propagation of incisive questions: Whom can I consider a designer? How broadly should I consider design? How liberally can I deem a designer “current”; what if they’re dead and inspiring none-the-less? At the risk of appearing to be an overachieving busybody, would it be garish to write about more than one?

Designers, designers everywhere, which one makes me think… Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore and Tibor Kalman come to mind immediately and fit the prompt criteria (maybe not Kalman, because he died in the late ‘90’s) and street artist Banksy demands to be listed in my mind as well (though flying in the face of the criteria).  I lack the fortitude to choose only one.

Sagmeister installation using 10,000 bananas 

Sagmeister has a way with self-reference that continually draws the viewer into simple designs; using typography in a warm and human way, calling out the dehumanizing factor in cold, corporate design at large. He took 10,000 bananas to spell out, “Self-confidence produces fine results” as an installation.  “Complaining is silly. Either act or forget,” he’s told us through a self-negating billboard design, and he has been personally quoted as saying, “Yes, design can make you happy.” Though conversely, he has also said, “Art fucks design and vise versa,” illustrating the tenuous relationship between the two and their relationship with us, the audience. He focuses on concept as opposed to style and has carved out a venerable style of his own regardless.

Sagmeister has involved himself in charitable efforts using his art, further emphasizing the humanity of his work. An ethic I appreciate. He has made album art for The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed and I’m supposing he’s met all of the above. Now that’s inspiring to little ol’ me.

Victore produced the above as stickers

For me, as a student who didn’t want to be a student for quite some time and who judges favorable design as “sexy,” James Victore is a persistent inspiration. Political, satirical, vulgar and always thought provoking: Victore is a champion of self-discovery and iconoclasm. Not having a solid, formal art education himself: “I try to be the teacher that I needed: less a teacher, more a fire starter. I discourage my students from becoming designers. Designers tend to think alike. They even dress alike. I want my students to become good, strong citizens, independent thinkers and entrepreneurs. I try to get them to look inside themselves for answers, and not to follow trends or fashion. I try to get them to be open, and to expand their ideas of what design is and could be.” So, if I drop out, I can blame Victore… or maybe R.M. Rilke.

Kalman for Esquire

Tibor Kalman wasn’t an art school grad either.  A perverse optimist, he championed the young, seeing them change the world around them by any means necessary. “Children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You’ll miss them forever.”

Working his way up through a company that eventually became Barnes & Noble, after dropping out of college as Journalism major, he made heartfelt ephemerae and jarring images about multiculturalism. He once said, “Graphic design is a means, not an end. A language, not content.”

And that having been said, a designer that transcends definition, missing the prompt criteria perhaps, but who’s work I consider a logical extension of where graphic design has come from and where design in general is going, is Banksy. “I use whatever it takes. Sometimes that just means drawing a moustache on a girl's face on some billboard, sometimes that means sweating for days over an intricate drawing. Efficiency is the key.”

Banksy-Leake St. London. A la Cave art @ Lascaux

Banksy’s incessant and barely legal commentary on art and society has inspired many in street art and has gained deference among contemporary art critics as well. Taking the iconic, with a liberal application of irony, he is redesigning the urban landscape with images that indict the complacent and herald change. For this Banksy is renown as a subversive. Yet his work, both street art and gallery pieces, unify a diaspora of sympathizers. Wrought with the intent to arrest his audience visually and emotionally, while evading capture legally, Banksy knows exactly what he’s saying even when seemingly inconsistent, “We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.“

So in conclusion, and in the interest of living the questions: Whom can I consider a designer? Anyone that makes things with an intended purpose that is duly received. How broadly should design be considered?  Pretty damn broadly, but please kids, do so with deft, informed preference.  Or at least make a go of it. How liberally can a designer be deemed “current”?  If people are still talking about and nigh on stealing their work, it’s current. At the risk of appearing to be an overachieving busybody, was it garish to write about more than one designer? Yes. But it was totally worth it.