A Few Random Thoughts - 09/06

Less Is More

The effort to bring you GDUSA never ends, and while grinding away late on Sunday afternoons in a lonely office building on lower Madison Avenue, I seek company and diversion in the Dave Ramsey Show. This homespun radio talk program is sweeping the country. Ramsey preaches that the American way of debt is bad for body and soul, that “cash is king and the paid up home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the status symbol.” Listeners call in for personal advice, sign up for “financial peace” training sessions, tell their stories of debt, despair and occasional triumph, scream “we’re debt free” if applicable, and shred their credit cards in an act called a “plasectomy.” It’s all a bit hokey (and by Sunday afternoon I’m a bit punchy) but I mention the show because it is a harbinger of a broader rebellion against rising debt and a middle class that feels increasingly squeezed. Another manifestation:  the fast-growing Compact site on Yahoo!, whose members commit to “voluntary simplicity,” the concept of owning less in order to have greater independence. Says Judith Levine, an adherent to voluntary simplicity who has written a book called Not Buying It: “Your life does not have to be run by what you buy.” Yet another strategic challenge/opportunity for the graphic design community and, I predict, a big one.

Two Birds

Two reasons why “Graphic Design” struggles to achieve full recognition as a profession or an art is that it’s practitioners and institutions do not do enough to document the history of design, and it’s educators do not teach upcoming students enough about that history. Milton Glaser and the School of Visual Arts are seeking to kill two birds with one stone (an apt though admittedly violent cliché) with the opening this fall of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archive. With a founding gift by Mr. Glaser, the mission is to collect, preserve and make accessible materials in the areas of art and design, with a special emphasis on graphic design. Located within SVA’s newly renovated library, the center currently holds a significant and historic body of work by Glaser, Ivan Chermayeff, Tom Geismar and Henry Wolf, and is expected to provide “an invaluable teaching tool” for the design community, scholars, authors and students of graphic design.

Non-Profits

An interesting trend suggested by our American Inhouse Design Awards summer annual (GDUSA, July 2006) is the growing design and marketing sophistication of non-profits. This reflects, among other things, their burgeoning importance in our post-industrial society. While entrants in the Inhouse Design competition clearly understand the value of professional communication, most non-profits still have not fully come to grips with it. Thus, I found interesting the comments of Joel Zimmerman, director of consulting services for Creative Direct Response, at the recent Direct Marketing Association’s Annual Bridge Conference. His point: non-profits must recognize that they are, in fact, marketers and must have a marketing plan in order to succeed in a very competitive environment. “Non-profits need to take a broad look,” he stated. “Having action-oriented goals will only enhance the experience for everyone.”

Mandatory Retirement Age

The late summer’s geopolitical developments — the terrorist plots, the war in Lebanon, the sectarian violence in Iraq — made me feel like a wet rag or a wet noodle or some other metaphor for limp and wrung out. The wet rag syndrome peaked late last month as I watched the world’s hate-monger-in-chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, use the 88-year old Mike Wallace and the hapless CBS network to spread his special brand of fear and loathing. Wallace could not stir himself to ask one hard question to the king of state-sponsored terrorism who also manages — presumably in his spare time — to provide weapons in Iraq that kill American soldiers everyday, deny the Holocaust and threaten his neighbors with annihilation, endorse and fund suicide bombers as an instrument of policy, and oppress women, minorities and dissidents at home. A disgraceful programming decision by the eyeball network and a sad capstone to Mr. Wallace’s career, the single best argument ever seen for enforcing a mandatory retirement age.