Interpretation By Design

As you can see from the title of this week’s post, I didn’t apply my creative side to come up with a jazzy title. I don’t know if that is because I’m a non-creative person or just lazy. I have been torn between the Australian Open (a nice alternative to baseball, T-minus 59 days until opening day), episodes of American Idol (bad singing makes great television) and Teen Mom (don’t knock it until you watch it). I did knock around the idea of calling it The Creative: Part Deux, The Creative: The Sequel or The Creative: Episode II – Attack of the Dorks (plural to include Paul, otherwise it seemed a little sad calling myself a dork).

Last week in the comments section of the Creative: Part 1 friend of IBD, Amy Ford (also known as Ranger Amy), blew my mind with large words like thermodynamics. That was the first time that word had been used on IBD and for the record no other fourteen-letter words have ever been used on IBD. The only word with that kind of letter count was the word parliamentarian in the post No Paper Airplanes. I have to agree with her comment that appealed to my left-brained creative side. I tend to work best in collaborative efforts with people who are right-brained creatives that bring the best out of my logical approach. I see myself better at transforming than creating.

When faced with transforming, problem solving or creating, I try to start by exercising the right side of my brain by brainstorming. Most of us have taken part in a brainstorming session at some point in our lives. This generating of ideas, good or bad, without any judgment can begin the processes of opening your right brain. Brainstorming leads to free thinking. If you are too busy thinking that one idea is too expensive, will never be approved, or is over the top, you miss the opportunity to create an idea that may work.

Brainstorming often works best in a location outside of your norm or comfort zone. If you work in an office all day, behind the same old desk, staring at the computer, it is hard to break your normal thought processes. Find a “happy place,” so to speak, where you cannot be distracted by your normal day-to-day operations, but a place where you can freely think and generate ideas. It does work. My happy place happens to be working in my office, behind the same old desk, staring at the computer. This doesn’t put my wife in her happy place.

The next thing you can do is daydream. Let your mind go places that are separate from reality. Despite what you have been told your entire life, daydreaming is good for your creative side and to exercise the right side of your brain. Some of the most creative in the history of the world were classic daydreamers, including famous film makers, composers, artists and mathematicians. One approach to creating ideas in daydreaming is by role playing. No costumes are needed. In your mind play the role of someone that may have an interesting approach to the problem you are trying to solve and think about how they would approach it. You can use well-known designers, artists, actors, directors or anyone you deem appropriate to problem solve. I often find myself daydreaming about what various Star Wars characters would do to solve problems.

The Darth Vader approach to problem solving is valid. I tend to get the best ideas while daydreaming when driving. Unless your happy place involves the police and a citation (which could be part of the role-playing approach), take caution before employing this approach. Find the best place for you to daydream. It will lead to ideas.

After you collect ideas, good and bad ones, then you can allow the left brain to come back into play by helping edit the ideas. Just don’t let this process sneak into the brainstorming session, it will ruin it. Kenneth H. Gordon, Jr. said “To be creative, relax and let your mind go to work, otherwise the result is either a copy of something you did before or reads like an army manual.” You must exercise the right side.

Becoming creative or using your creative muscles is a process. Research has proven through the years that regardless of the individual approach to creativity that a formula is evident in each approach that is a means to an end. Everyone’s creative approach begins with some form of research that leads to idea development which leads to choosing an appropriate idea then improving on that idea and finally seeing it through to completion. When you are going through this process don’t forget to allow time for diagnosing, strategizing, incubating and nurturing elements of the process.

Leaders and managers should foster creativity in interpretive efforts and allow those developing programs, tours, publications, websites and brochures to develop their own personal creative process. Every year at NAI‘s National Workshop you can see a creativity explosion. Ideas are generated, regardless of physical location, by the supportive interpretive community mindset found during the workshop. Managers should support attendance at these types of training events for their creative force and by simply allowing daydreaming at work. Leaders should also be aware not to crush the inexperienced creator. Just because you have been there and done that, doesn‘t mean that those under you wouldn’t gain from that experience themselves or have an approach that you didn’t attempt. Don’t forget what Anna Freud (the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud and groundbreaking Psychologist in her own right) said, “Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.”

Since I am currently in my happy place, I should return to reality. I really have no other place to go before my wife employs the Darth Vader approach to problem solving and chokes me with the Force from across the room.

So there I was, sitting on my sofa, watching football and drinking beer (or maybe I was watching Golden Girls and drinking apple juice, I can’t really remember). I recall thinking, “I wish the freaking Eagles could score just once!” (or possibly, “Oh, Rose, you’ll never learn!”) and this commercial came on:

It stopped me in my tracks. I was shocked, not by the truck, but to see type used so interestingly in a purely commercial venture. I’m not a truck commercial sort of guy, but I always watch this one, purely for its visual aesthetic.

Moving type is not new, dating back as far as cinema itself, but a specific vernacular of moving type, commonly called dynamic typography, has sprung up in the last four or five years. It usually involves slab-serif or sans serif all-caps type appearing in exact synchronicity with spoken words. The words on screen fit together like puzzle pieces, with quick pans, rotations, and zooms. Frequently, words on screen will reflect their meaning through movement (e.g., if the word is “fall,” the word will actually fall off the screen).

I think that the music video below, “Ya no sé qué hacer conmigo,” which my wife tells me translates to “Would you please shut off your stupid computer and come help with the dishes,” is a visual masterpiece. It was made in 2007, when this particular brand of dynamic typography was relatively new.

A quick search of dynamic typography on YouTube will turn up countless student projects that set type to music or movie quotes in this style. Here’s an example from student Linzi Bergmann, set to audio from the movie Zoolander:

While I really enjoy this style visually, the interesting thing about this type of moving typography is that it directly violates one of the tenets of good visual communication. Any presentation expert will tell you not to read the words on screen, that it’s redundant to visually represent words that exactly replicate what is being spoken. I look forward to the growth of this movement, when these beautiful and intricate typographic treatments are more than just visual reinforcements, but rather add their own element to messages.

I don’t consider myself a very creative person. I can prove this based on the simple fact that through my career, as an interpreter and now interpretive manager, all of the interpretive programs I have ever created have had the worst titles in the history of interpretation and in most cases included a colon. I have always been envious of those interpreters who create cute, funny, and snazzy program titles to go along with their hikes, audio-visual presentations, and demonstrations. All the while my The Great Mississippi Flyway: Birds of Eastern Arkansas title remains in mourning. When I visit interpretive sites I try to pick up program advertisement sheets to swipe titles from and use at my park. Does that make me a bad person? Only when I pulled the program advertisements off a bulletin board, I guess.

Most people assume that if you are involved in interpretive design that you are automatically considered a “creative” or “artistic” type. I appreciate being incorporated into a group that may be considered creative, or any group for that matter. It was Mattias Konradsson who said, “Creativity and ideas don’t come on command, they seem to spring up when we least expect it — like a rod of lightning bending our mind in unexpected directions, showing us the way.” Much like Konradsson wrote, creativity strikes me at strange moments and is very mood dependent. I have to be in the right mindset to be creative. More and more I find looming deadlines creating the mood for me, so much for walks on the beach, candles, and soft music.

So why is it that we put the creative on such a pedestal? I think emotions play a large role in this idolizing. Many creative people, especially those well known for their creativity, put a large amount of their own emotions into their work. They show us a window inside their world that many of us are afraid to open. By us I mean me. By connecting emotionally to what they have to share, we respond to their feelings or emotions with our own feelings and emotions. So in some way we can relate to the creative on a different level. Modern Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall poured his heart and soul into his work and said, “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head almost nothing.”

Many of us have stumbling blocks placed before us put there by our own subconscious. I call these my filters. We are afraid to pour our hearts into every project we are working on to eventually have it exposed for interpretation by the world. Again by we, I mean me.

The creative process is an individual process that is as different from person to person as personalities. For some the creative juices simply ooze from all of their systems. I tend to ooze cholesterol. For others, to find any creative juice they have to be run through the ringer. What needs to be remembered is that even for the most creative, creativity is a process and anyone has the potential to be a creative person. Psychologist and president of Princeton Creative Research Eugene Raudsepp said, “If you want to develop your creativity, establish regular work habits. Allow time for the incubation of ideas, and adhere to your individual rhythm. Violations of this rhythm can retard your creative efficiency.”

If that approach to the process is too militaristic or systematic for you perhaps the late 19th-century French painter Raoul Dufy’s words will speak to you: “I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.” (Pictured here is a 1934 Dufy painting titled “Regatta at Cowes.”) As mentioned before, as different from person to person as personalities.

The one area where I feel like the creative process and my path cross is in the area of problem solving. The creative are known as skilled problem solvers and organizers. I tend to be one of those left-brained persons, but by drawing conclusions from data that doesn’t meld, the creative are excited by the process of solving problems. Okay, so only Paul gets excited by this.

Perhaps Roger Sperry was on to something when he developed the Modes of Thinking also know as Divisions of the Right and Left Brain. According to Sperry the left side of the brain is the responsible side that processes things logically, in sequential order, is rational, analytical, objective, and looks at parts instead of wholes. The right side of the brain is the creative side that looks at things randomly, intuitively, holistically, synthesizes, is subjective, and looks at wholes instead of parts. This research points out that the creative are definitely more right-brained people. Knowing this, the left-brained person is not unable to be creative. They just have to work harder at it. The left brain is concerned with logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy, while the right focuses on aesthetics, feeling, and creativity. Those like me who are responsible for creative work, that tend to be more left than right, must learn to think on the right. It can be difficult but even marathon runners must first begin running one mile at time by placing one foot in front of the other. The problem for me is that I’m a really slow runner.

Next week, in Creativity: Part 2, I will take on some practices to improve creativity and try to apply them to the title of the post.

A while back, I declared my allegiance to the serial comma, and I am ready to take another stand.

I believe that double-spacing after a period at the end of a sentence is outdated, clunky, and typographically unsound. (While I’m at it, I also believe that college football’s postseason format is fraudulent, the designated hitter rule is silly, Conan O’Brien was treated unfairly, and Arrested Development was taken off the air way too soon.)

This is not exactly a cutting-edge opinion, but there are still plenty of people out there using the antiquated post-period double space. This is fine if you’re writing e-mails or crafting ransom notes from magazine clippings, but if you’re creating professional-quality printed materials, the single space is the way to go.

The double space after periods was a standard in the days of typewriters, which used monospaced typefaces in which each letter or grammatical mark, whether a capital M or an apostrophe, is given the same amount of space. The typeface Courier, pictured here with ugly, gaping double-space holes after the periods, mimics a typewriter and is an example of a monospaced typeface. (Note the way the characters line up in columns, delineated here with pinstripes, because of the monospacing.) The thinking at the time was that the double space helped provide a visual break between sentences, but when the computer came along and allowed for more subtle variations in spacing, the double space became obsolete.

Since the advent of the computer, most typefaces are proportional, allotting the appropriate amount of space for each typographic character, including spaces after periods. See the typeface Minion, set with elegant, contemporary single spaces, in the example here.

These days, most style guides, including The Chicago Manual of Style and Associated Press, call for the single space. Another proponent of the single space is Robin Williams (the not-funny female graphic designer and author, not the not-funny male actor), who has written several books on technology and graphic design, such as The Mac is Not a Typewriter, The PC is Not a Typewriter, and The Non-Designer’s Design Book.

You’ll notice that nearly all professionally designed printed materials (books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) utilize the single space. The double space after a period looks especially silly if you are using justified type, which already skews word- and letterspacing to force lines of text into a certain amount of space.

The proponents of two spaces after a period seem to harp on the same point: I was taught that way. Many are trying to stop but can’t. Others refuse to hear reason, desperately clinging to their Sholes & Glidden typewriter in one hand, waving the jagged end of a broken moonshine bottle at you with the other.

In the end, there is technically no right or wrong when it comes to spacing after periods, unless you are obligated to follow one of the many style guides out there that call for the single space. But then again, there’s technically no right or wrong when it comes to wearing tapered jeans and paisley shirts, and people do that, too.

This confession will most likely not be a surprise to most of you. I collected comic books right up until the time I got married. My getting married later than other friends was directly related to my comic book collection. I loved reading comics as a child and as a young adult. Okay I still like them. While growing up my mother was simply happy that I was reading anything, so she supported my subscriptions and collecting of comic books. My wife did not support me in the same way, but did get behind the effort of selling them on eBay.

One of my favorite elements of comic book collecting was the organizing and preserving of back issues. I had the collection placed on acid-free backing boards, in acid-free bags, in acid-free boxes, and stored them in an archive-quality box within a room with consistent temperature, humidity, and limited exposure to light. I had them in alphabetical order by name, followed by numerical order by issue. To me, there was something reassuring about keeping the comics a certain way at that point in my life. The sad part is that I still find reassuring feelings in keeping things a certain way. Now that I put that into type, I realize how abnormal I am.

Why do things have to be a certain way? On IBD we deal with many absolutes about how things should be and the way things should be designed or produced. Rules are good, right? But in the book IBD we include a section on breaking the rules. I have this constant battle waging in my head. Part of me likes consistency and structure, the other part likes breaking the rules and stepping outside the grid or what is readily acceptable. Sometimes you just have to mix prints and plaids.

Keeping within the topic of graphic design elements in movies that Paul started on Monday, it excites me when movies aren’t a certain way. Slumdog Millionaire breaks the mold in many different ways. I’m not here to talk about the non-linear storytelling, universal ties, emotional and intellectual connections, truthful approach or amazing performances that made the movie great. The movie is great and if you haven’t seen it, rent or add it to your queue soon. I’m here to take on the unusual use of subtitles found in the movie. Wait, please don’t leave. Subtitles are an interesting topic. I’m sure of it. Especially when presented in a comic book style.

The first things that come to mind for me on the topic of subtitles is a type set in sans serif that is hard to read, in a small point size that is yellow or white, found at the bottom of the screen. I also think of really bad movies that make poor use of subtitles stand out even more. Things don’t have to always be a certain way and Slumdog Millionaire proves that point even within the typography used in the subtitles. The first noticeable change to the Slumdog subtitles is that they are not rigidly centered at the bottom of the screen, but are placed more appropriately near the person speaking. In a style reminiscent of comic book typography, minus the use of Comic Sans, the change brings the watcher’s eyes up to where the action or emotion is actually taking place. It makes it easier to watch, keep up with what is being said and by whom, and process the dialog along with the acting at the same time. It just makes sense.

As with most things, I was behind on seeing the movie and we watched it at home. If you haven’t seen it or have a copy, here’s something interesting and fun to do. Pause the movie during one of the scenes with subtitles, get really close to your television set and recognize that the director chose a typeface that has serifs. I live in a small town and what is considered fun is relative. I wish I knew why the director chose this typeface or that I had something more to add here but that’s all I’ve got. The typeface is not aggressively serifed but more passive aggressive serifed. It works fine.

Much like my comic books, things are better in boxes, but colored boxes?  The third drastic difference that Slumdog took in the realm of subtitle greatness was placing the text in text boxes filled with color. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of text in color-filled boxes. As much as I like things in boxes, in most cases I prefer type free from the confines of a box, filled with various levels of saturation. In this instance, it worked because the color helped on different levels. Primarily, the color boxes improved legibility in scenes where type could have easily been lost. Without the boxes the text would have just been difficult to read. Secondarily, the colors echoed the mood of the scene. The colors used seemed to be picked from elements of the scene and fit in aesthetically and reflected what was taking place.

I’m pretty sure I now know why Slumdog won the Oscar for best picture; it was the subtitles. I no longer read comic books, but when I’m at Barnes and Noble and tell my wife I’m headed to the graphic novel section, she has no idea that I’m perusing the comic books.

In about a decade, I plan to have a midlife crisis, during which I will undergo a bunch of plastic surgery, quit my job, and move to Los Angeles to work as a movie title sequence designer. Also, I will live in a refrigerator box because LA is expensive and I’ll have spent all of my money on a red sports car.

My first love in graphic design is print design—the interaction of type and image on a tangible surface. But if, during my midlife crisis, I were to dump print design for something younger and sexier, movie title sequences would be a great rebound. Title sequences take type and image, then add the elements of time, motion, and audio. So many elements have to work perfectly together to succeed, and when they do, they are truly memorable. I’ve posted a few noteworthy examples below.

Frequently, title sequences are designed by firms that specialize in the medium and that are completely removed from the production of the film. Sometimes this results in a marked difference in quality between the titles and the rest of the film. The Island of Dr. Moreau is a famously terrible movie, but it’s well-known in design circles for its excellent title sequence created by Kyle Cooper of the firm Imaginary Forces.

The title sequence in the movie Catch Me if You Can created by the firm Kuntzel + Deygas tells a story in a visual voice completely different from the rest of the movie, but it works because not only is it visually interesting, it evokes the era in which the film is set and sets the appropriate pace for the rest of the movie.

You can tell that the designers at Shadowplay Studios who created the titles for Thank You for Smoking had fun with the project. The sequence doesn’t attempt to tell a narrative story (as with Catch Me if You Can), but rather uses the unique visual vernacular of cigarette boxes to set an appropriate tone.

One of the most famous title sequence designers was Saul Bass, a graphic designer and film maker who died in 1996. His work influenced (and continues to influence) a generation of designers (you’ll certainly see his influence in the Catch Me if You Can title sequence). Friend of IBD Brian Trosko turned us on to the above video, “Star Wars Versus Saul Bass,” which is the result of a school project in which student Brian Hilmers sets the titles of Star Wars in the Saul Bass’s unique visual voice. (For real Star Wars nerds, it’s essential to watch this video reply, which adapts this spoof to the remastered Star Wars.)

For those of you who are really into this sort of thing, check out the site Art of the Title. There’s enough there to keep you busy for countless hours that might otherwise be spent on work or family.

One of my favorite episodes of Seinfeld, titled “The Pool Guy,” deals with worlds colliding. In the episode, George is concerned about Jerry introducing their friend Elaine to George’s girlfriend Susan. The mixing of “relationship” George and “independent” George was just too much for him to handle. For George, keeping elements of his life separate was the best approach for self-preservation. In the episode George says to Jerry, “A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

Much like George, I find it difficult to keep elements of my world separate and in many cases have given up trying. Now, I try to look at organizing elements of life differently and try to see worlds colliding as a positive. I seem to have the most difficulty in enjoying elements of life and how it conflicts with design. I have to realize that design collides with everything in one way or another and that I need to get a life. I have learned that in some cases passions colliding can be a great thing.

I’m a passionate birder (birdwatcher). I’m also overly conscious of design issues. These two worlds, both taking up valuable and limited real estate in my head, make me really hard to please when it comes to finding bird-related publications. For the longest time I wasn’t pleased with field guides for many different reasons. Some guides provided too much information, were too large or too heavy or the pictures/images/drawings were too small, maps were on separate pages from images, all leaving me carrying multiple guides on birding trips. My design conscience was even more frustrated because the designers of the field guides were not following the “form follows function” approach. I don’t know if those responsible for designing those guides were birders providing layout priorities to the designers or if the guides’ original purposes for the books just weren’t meeting my needs, but I found myself searching for that perfect guide.

The American architect Louis Sullivan has been given credit for coining the phrase “form follows function.” (I am known for coining the phrase “I can sing that song.”) In Sullivan’s designs of structures he took his mantra to heart by creating buildings that met the needs of users as well as the materials that he had available. An interesting side note (for Paul and me) is that Sullivan’s apprentice was Frank Lloyd Wright, who took the “form follows function” to an entirely different level.

As interpretive designers we too should adopt this approach to our products. Too many brochures, websites, exhibits and other interpretive products have been created by placing too much emphasis on the message and not how the message is conveyed. The message is the most important part but if it cannot be effectively received all is lost.

Since I was unusually harsh on Paul with one statement in last week’s post, I will try to circumvent retaliation by making the following statement. One of the best examples that I have seen in recent years that reflects the form/function approach is Paul’s design of the pocket program schedule for the NAI National Workshop. If you haven’t made it to an NAI National Workshop in the last few years, Paul has digested the daunting event schedule for the week into a quad fold brochure that folds in half to fit into the name badge holders provided at the workshop. All of the workshop participants need the information available for quick reference, and the form of the brochure follows function. I have now adopted this approach for a quick reference guide to my children’s names.

After several years of me complaining on birding trips, a friend gave me a copy of Kenn Kaufman’s first edition of the Field Guide to Birds of North America and all of my problems were solved. From a birder’s standpoint, the guide is well organized and simple to use. Pictures of the birds are located on the right-hand page and their range maps are located on the left-hand page with a brief description and key information. An appropriately designed grid aligns the images, range maps and information. The layout allows for quick referencing and fast information finding. From a designer’s standpoint, the above-mentioned applies along with crisp digitally enhanced images. Many birders initially criticized Kaufman for using Photoshop to remove distracting backgrounds, apply drop shadows, fix color variations and even enhance key field marks. The approach is successful and most importantly the guide fits in my back pocket.

“Anybody knows…You gotta keep your worlds apart!” George Costanza

I am about to reveal something that will shock the world. Okay, maybe it will just shock my esteemed co-author Shea and a handful of people who have attended an Interpretation By Design workshop.

I don’t hate centered type.

On rare occasion, I actually center type myself (most recently in 2005). I acknowledge that there are schools of design theory in which carefully considered instances of centering are accepted and that talented professional designers do it all the time. Certain industries have created instantly recognizable visual vernaculars based on centered type, like wedding invitations and movie credits. (For the record, I designed my own wedding invitations and did not center the type.)

Here’s what I do hate: lazy graphic design decisions.

When I see a big, centered title at the top of a composition, it looks undesigned to me. In training sessions, I have described centered design elements as the Comic Sans or clip art of typographic layout. All of these—centering, Comic Sans, and clip art—are crutches that amateurs use because the computer makes them all too easy.

In our book and in training sessions, we demonstrate the use of a grid, a simple page composition mechanism devised by Swiss typographers in the mid-20th century. The grid creates order in compositions through alignment, both vertically and horizontally. (See a previous post about the grid here.) Unless you work with intricate details of letterspacing and point size, centered text rarely works within a grid, and without a grid, the work of amateur designers quickly becomes cluttered and inaccessible.

We ask that designers be able to defend their decisions about typefaces, colors, images, and other visual elements. This works with typographic alignment, too. So often, the choice to center type is a mere convenience, or to put it bluntly, lazy. It’s a default option in every word processor or page layout program out there, so of course, you see it everywhere. And centered type is symmetrical, which makes it that much more appealing to someone striving for balance in a composition. (Note: Symmetry is good on faces, boring in graphic design.)

Of course, there’s a time and place for everything, including centered type. So if you center your type, be able to explain why you did so, and as with any design decision, “Because it felt good” is not the right explanation. If you do choose to center type, and I still hope you won’t most of the time, here are some basic guidelines to follow:

• Center only short blocks of type. The ragged alignment on the left and right make it hard for readers to follow long passages that are centered.
• Do not center titles or headlines over flush-left/ragged right body text (also called left-justified). The uneven nature of this alignment will cause your centered headline to look off, even if it is not.
• Never trust the computer to center your type for you. Because of optical effects created by the shapes of different letterforms, you’ll likely have to get into your compositions and tweak the position of each line of text to truly make it appear centered.

At the session Shea and I presented at the NAI National Workshop in Hartford last month, we asked groups of participants to choose colors and typefaces for an identity system for hypothetical organizations. One participant made the comment that the groups spent more time discussing the intricacies of colors and typefaces in that activity than they do on real projects.

Don’t let this happen to you in your design projects. Go ahead and center type, but have the discussion (even if it’s just with yourself) about why you’re doing so.

Two of my last three posts have been about the community that revolves around IBD and this will mark another. I love being connected to our readers but it seems as if the relationship between Shea the friend and Shea the IBD blogger has been blurred.

I received one Christmas card and one Christmas letter (along with many others mind you, I didn’t just receive two) that included traditional holiday greetings along with specific notes not to put them on IBD.  I’m one of those people who visits a museum and when the sign says don’t touch, I have to. On one visit (of many annual visits, more to come in a future post) to Graceland, home of Elivs Presley in Memphis, Tennessee, I felt the touch of a security guard on my shoulder while touching a jumpsuit. There are no refunds at Graceland when ejected. I’m very tactile and it was worth the interrogation.

It is possible that I will not receive Christmas greetings from these two next year, I’m okay with that. This is a hard lesson to learn. The card was a beautiful handmade card not like anything that you would find on a Christmas aisle at any big box type store. It had a craftsman style to it along with huge amounts of character. It did have an insert that was desktop produced with a well written holiday greeting printed in an acceptable easy to read sans serif typeface. What else can you ask for in a holiday greeting? The letter was a very well written year in review type letter filled with beautiful images and interesting typefaces. It was thoughtfully laid out in an organized manner with great respect for ease of use by the reader. Again, what else can you ask for in a holiday greeting?

I was grateful to receive both extremely personal greetings produced with love and passion. Thank you to you both for sharing them with me and my family. But, this is the part that you have been waiting for, right? The part of the blog where I make insightful comments about their work that are filled with humor, right? The part where I use self-deprecating humor as an attempt to soothe the burn of criticism from a friend, right? Well, you will have to wait for a post from Paul reviewing some of my work for that to happen. I cannot post images of their greetings because their statements, added in parentheses, to a warm holiday greeting really bothered me. Would I have done something like that without the parentheses? Would I have put their greetings up on IBD to share with the world (actually about 9 people, 7 if you don’t count Paul and me)? Am I that kind of guy?

Okay, I guess I am and I am sorry.

The part that bothers me about these two statements is that our community and relationships in our community should be built on trust and two of you obviously can’t trust me. I’m sorry. I hate for such an important element of our community such as friendship being defined with parentheses. Saying Merry Christmas (don’t put this on IBD) is kind of like saying you are a great friend (when you don’t wear sweater vests) or I love you (but Star Wars is lame). Thank you for bringing the element of IBD paranoia to my attention. Again, I have no control over Paul and his future comments. Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t have scanned your letter and card and sent them to him. Again, I have no control over him.

Here’s what is great about your card and my second point in this post (the first point, just in case you missed it was that honesty is important in a community) is that your card and letter were both filled with passion. As I have said before I am sucker for passion. I can look past many design flaws, and use of Papyrus, if what is being produced is produced with passion. This is also goes for any interpretive product or program. If it is produced with passion or presented with enthusiasm, issues with style or technique can be easily overlooked. In Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden wrote about passion and said “Whatever is written without enthusiasm will be read without interest.” What you created and shared was filled with enthusiasm and passion. If we put more of our hearts and our souls into what we created the end product would be much higher quality.

Needless to say this McDonalds employee was lacking passion and enthusiasm when assigned the task of updating the marquee.

When I was in high school, I ran on the cross country team in the fall and on the track team in the spring. Cross country was simple (though not easy). Everyone on my team ran 3.1 miles against everyone on the other team. The fastest runners won. I enjoyed cross country and wanted desperately to succeed, but I was not good at it. I was not a fast distance runner.

In track, there were multiple events, from short sprints to two-mile distance events, not to mention field events like shot put and pole vault. As a self-imagined distance runner, I practiced with the distance runners, ran distance events during meets, and made fun of the sprinters for their wussy practices.

Then one day, one of our top sprinters was injured, and because I never placed in any distance event, the coaches pulled me out of the mile and two-mile runs and placed me in the 100-meter dash. To my chagrin, I placed first. Before I knew it, I was the lead sprinter (on a very bad track team, mind you) in the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and the anchor of the 400- and 800-meter relay teams. During practice, I would watch the distance runners as they glided around the track, knowing they were scoffing at my wussy sprint drills. I eventually accepted and enjoyed sprinting, but in the fall, I would always go back to the cross country team with the idea that my body might yet morph from that of a stocky sprinter to a lanky distance runner.

As a graduate student in visual communications at Virginia Commonwealth University about a decade ago, my fellow students were supremely talented graphic designers, each with a particular talent or knack that defined them in my mind. Five of them in particular really made an impression on me. Sandie Maxa had an amazing skill for working with color; Mark Sanders used his background in architecture to establish a unique and appealing visual voice; Grace Marraccini applied an elegant and sophisticated touch to everything she produced; Kristy Pennino had a flair for combining her own intricate photographs with simple but expressive type; and Guido Alvarez had a way of thinking about design (and the world) that made me shake my head, smile, and say, “Wow.”

I admired the work of all of these classmates then and still do today. Sometimes I’ll get something as simple as a greeting card from one of them or see something they’ve posted on Facebook and it reminds of the sort of work I imagined I would do some day. (Pictured here is one of my favorites from Guido, a poster for an international film festival that envisions a theater experience that goes beyond popcorn and candy.)

Let me be clear: I love my job. I love that I get to work in a variety of media (print, web, logos, and sometimes video), and I love that I work for an organization filled with great people and whose goals and mission I believe in. But when I started grad school, I thought I’d end up as a poster designer in some European city where I would go out at 5:00 in the morning with a bucket of glue and a paint roller to place edgy posters that I had designed among all the other edgy posters that other designers had designed. (Also, I would own an airplane and not be so tubby.)

Of course, the area where I had the most success in grad school was not where I wanted to succeed but something else altogether: Information design. The best group critique I experienced in six semesters as a graphic design student was for a project in which we were asked to redesign food nutrition labels. In order to break free of this—to explore and embrace a world of rough edges and imperfection—I did my entire thesis project on what graphic designers can learn from yard sale signs.

Guido used to torment me during critiques (I seem to invite that sort of thing), but the most penetrating comment he ever made was, “Your work can be so obvious.” I earned a Master of Fine Arts in 2001, all the while feeling like a distance runner in a sprinter’s body.

Last week, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about graphic design resolutions for the new decade. It was all about detail-type things (using em-dashes instead of two hyphens, not using globes in logos, etc.). It was not about how to think about graphic design.

This week, my real resolution is to visit with my former classmates and other designers online and in person as much as possible (starting with this post), to try to continue to grow and learn as a designer, to focus on the process of graphic design rather than the end result, to identify and break out of boxes, to strive to become a graphic design distance runner.

As a runner, I was constrained by my body type (you don’t see a lot of marathoners with short, thick legs) and I’m not sure that all of the hard work in the world would have made a big difference. But as a designer, I feel I can build on what I perceive as my strengths (organization, information, clarity) and work toward a more expressive and unique visual voice.

Note: You can find Sandie and Mark’s design firm, Q Collective, at www.upwithq.com. Kristy now teaches and posts her students’ work on Flickr. Guido and the weird stuff he does is at www.hyperscholar.com.

Over the Christmas holiday I was able to hang out with two high school buddies who are now life-long friends. It was a great time to be nostalgic and relive the good ol’ days—before the introduction of moral compasses, responsibilities, and obligations. It is remarkable how quickly we fell into circa 1991 personalities, roles, and behaviors (minus the pinch-rolled pants, acid-washed jeans, fluorescent t-shirts, and episodes of Saved by the Bell). It is equally remarkable how those memories and experiences can mean so much to us while at the same time be so under appreciated by our spouses.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the community that revolves around IBD. In the post, Star Wars Stamps, the concept of contributing and participating in the community, which can lead to a heightened sense of belonging, was highlighted. Just like my friends who encouraged me to return to the tenth grade (for laughs and to re-take Algebra II), readers of IBD have encouraged Paul and me (again to the disdain of our spouses) to continue with our actions and behavior.

If we had elected or appointed positions in the nerd herd, Kelly Farrell would rank high due to her willingness to support and share, and for her participation on IBD, along with many other personal reasons. I actually would have nominated her for the IBD Parliamentarian position (though not the highest ranking position but carries nerd-like qualities that can be unmatched) but that spot has already been reserved by an unnamed professor. Just in case you were wondering, Court Jester has already been taken by Paul.

The following pictures of interesting signs and the following comments were provided by Kelly:

On a guided hike at Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area, Interpreter Steve Chyrchel welcomed the group to the historic Van Winkle Hollow area, not AN historic area, THE historic area, and besides, even if it weren’t THE area, it would just be A historic area. [Note from IBD Management: If the latter portion of that last comment makes no sense to you read this post on Paul’s Grammar Pet Peeves.]

So, at the trailhead is this marker, which Steve pointed out clearly communicates the following:

• go this way
• wheelchair accessible
• no bicycles
• no riding horses (and actually, no riding them backwards)
• no paper airplanes.

I saw this sign in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. I tend to be one of those purposefully far out parkers, one who doesn’t mind the extra walk. But, like most, I also enjoy the thrill of scoring a front parking space once from time to time.

However, I’ve never considered actually parking in the entrance. Designers have got to say what they mean and mean what they say.

Kelly, thank you for your participation, and thanks as well as the others who have provided support, encouragement and interpretive design fixes for us all. On our way home from visiting with my buddies, my wife counseled me on the reasons why it was good that I wasn’t that way all of the time or at all. Her key point was that she had worked too hard to change me. She may have removed my behavior from the early 90s, but she hasn’t removed the Right Said Fred from my iPod.