EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH
Reader
You now have in your possession issue #04 of Eye on Design magazine, which, for this triannual publication, means that one whole year of publishing is under our belt, and a new one’s just begun. We’ve learned a lot about magazine-making this past year—everything, really (we all come from web journalism)—from how to develop a flatplan, to the many surprises that print production can bring, to the fine art of fulfillment. Not to mention our beloved P&L spreadsheet, one of many financial tracking tools now tattooed to the inside of our brains. With money on our minds, we decided to dedicate this new issue to “Worth,” exploring both the value of design, and how design influences what we value. As with every issue, we prefer not to take things too literally. Sure, we talk about the business of design, but we also look at the more human side of worth: What do we deem truly “good” and worthy of our respect? How do we place value on our work and on ourselves? On the money-money-money side of things, we travel to the United Arab Emirates, a country as young as it is rich, and one that’s investing a surprising amount of federal resources into graphic design. Then we head west to understand what happens when America’s top designers get lured in by Silicon Valley. And we dig into the current obsession with “empathy,” a term that has sparked a burgeoning cottage industry in UX design, suggesting empathy is not only something that can be taught, but also something that can be packaged and sold. We also find out who’s making money in graphic design, and what that means for the rising tide of women executives. It comes on the heels of our global survey of gender equality at design conferences—you’ll want to see our tally of the speakers who got the most time on stage. Then we dive into our longform interview, a rare conversation with 1970s aerosol artist PHASE 2, whose flyer 4
EDITORS’
LETTER designs define the style we still associate with hip-hop today, though you won’t find his name in any of the major design history books. Another conversation with five designers on how their self-worth has ebbed and flowed throughout their careers puts the spotlight firmly on how much humanity is at the core of issues of work and value. Paired with stories about employee-owned design studios and some fascinating experiments in universal basic income, a new, very crucial thread became clear: What we’re really talking about when we talk about “worth” is equality and balance. In 2019, in design—and in society at large—it’s impossible to talk about business without also talking about ethics. And it’s impossible to talk about money or power without also talking about who has them—and who doesn’t. When it comes to design and creativity, financial worth and self-worth are two sides of the same coin.
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Contents
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EDITORS’ LETTER
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DESIGNER’S LETTER
10 IS IT WORTH IT? Designers go head-to-head to debate the value of design awards, MFAs, and quitting a full-time gig to go freelance 18 AFTER THE GOLD RUSH A decade ago, the center of the design universe was New York City. Now designers reflect on the mass migration of talent to Silicon Valley
By James Gaddy
28 THE EGG’S JOURNEY A contemporary homage to the illustrator and author Tom Seidmann-Freud, Sigmund Freud’s visionary, gender-bending niece
Comic By Brie Moreno
38 WHO’S AFRAID OF UBI? Around the world, a new generation is eager to explore the promises of universal basic income—and how it could flip an exclusionary design industry on its head
By James Cartwright
46 READY TO DO MORE THAN JUST DONATE TO A CAUSE? MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH Designers Available has grown from a humble spreadsheet to a robust network connecting nonprofits in need with designers who can help 50 WHAT’S IN A COLOR? Inside the search for the next great red pigment
Photography by Clayton Cotterell
60 WELCOME TO THE DESIGNERS’ CLUB—KEEP OUT When you keep design for designers only, you shut out the world and design’s place in it
By Khoi Vinh
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TABLE
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69 PROVING YOUR EXTRAORDINARY ABILITIES IS AS EASY AS 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 A guide to the American O-1 non-immigrant visa
By Tala Safié
75 GETTING AN EQUAL SHARE In a time of growing economic inequality, could design studios benefit from a worker-owned co-op model?
By Meg Miller
82 WHAT ARE YOU WORTH? An Eye on Design quiz 84 FUNKY NOUS DECO In the late '70s Bronx, PHASE 2’s party flyers created a visual language for hip-hop
By Jerome Harris
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By Eye on Design in collaboration with notamuse
GENDER AT DESIGN CONFERENCES We surveyed the top design conferences around the world to see who's getting the most time on stage
106 FINDING THE C-SUITE SPOT In an industry that's more than half female, more women designers are reaching the corner office than women in other fields—what’s giving them a leg up? 116 CRUSHING IT Five creatives discuss the highs, lows, “likes,” paychecks, prizes, and mental hurdles that have shaped their sense of self over the course of their careers 126
By Laura Bolt
By Emily Gosling
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: SARA CWYNAR Two new pieces by the artist examine the ways cultural value shifts, evolves, and decays over time
132 FEELINGS FOR SALE T he empathy economy is booming, but what happens when our emotional connections to others are designed, packaged, and sold? 140 MAKE IT BIGGER The UAE is where you’ll find the world’s tallest building, largest shopping mall, and biggest man-made island—is it now home to the world’s fastest-growing graphic design scene, too? 149 DESIGNBOT3000 IS COMING TO YOU SOON Five designers brand the fully automated design studio of the future
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By Liz Stinson
By Perrin Drumm
EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH
After Gold The WAS gush 18
AFTER
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BY JAMES GADDY
OF TALENT
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was people like Alexey Brodovitch, Peter Saville, Neville Brody, and David Carson that my designer friends wanted to be. They passed around copies of The Face, Beach Culture, and Wet like bootleg Grateful Dead VHS tapes. One of my buddies was convinced he was going to be the next Jim Moore. Some days, he would bring in the latest issue of GQ and try to explain the nuance of the sliver of colors that overlapped between the G and the Q. Can’t blame the poor guy, though. The early 2000s were heady times. Back then, New York was the place to be for a designer interested in the cutting edge of culture. Today, the Bay Area is seen as the epicenter of commerce, and, by extension, the graphic design that services it. Roughly 10% of all Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there, making it a close second to New York. Early last year, Facebook reported $13.23 billion in revenue in a single quarter, and yet stocks tanked because it wasn’t the projected $13.36 billion. Meanwhile Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and GQ, reportedly lost about $120 million in 2017. Designers are flocking to the West Coast in droves, and it’s not hard to see why. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says one ex–Condé Nast creative director who now runs a startup in the Bay Area. “In magazines, you get access to powerful, thoughtful people, celebrities, and you rub elbows with some incredible people, but at the same time, the publishing industry has gone through such profound change, it gets tiring 20
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to deal with cutbacks every half or every quarter of every year.” A former New York print designer who now works in Silicon Valley and can’t speak publicly puts it more bluntly: “Anyone not mentioning money is full of shit.” While some are lured by the potential for fame and fortune, simply “following the money” is not enough to explain the consolidation of talent in the Bay Area. Others are finding the opportunity to have wide-reaching influence irresistible. “Every era is defined by an industry,” says Keith Yamashita, cofounder of SyPartners, a bi-coastal design and business consultancy. “Ours is defined by technology— it’s where so much of society is being made.” To put it in perspective: Even Paul Rand did work for Steve Jobs.
Su Mathews Hale has seen both sides. She worked in New York as a designer at Lippincott, where she’s now a senior partner, doing rebrands for everything from Walmart to eBay. Two years ago, she moved cross-country to San Francisco and now consults for top tech brands while also serving on the board of trustees for ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. (She is a former board president of AIGA). She hikes on the weekends and loves it so much she decided to stick around. Somewhat ironically, working in print media is seen as excellent preparation for work in Silicon Valley. Since 2014 there’s been a steady stream of magazine creative directors and designers leaving to work in Silicon Valley, where their storytelling and multidisciplinary roles are valued at a premium. Bay Area companies, by and large, Hale says, tend to believe that print designers from the East Coast are more experienced and have a more refined eye than those who came up in the tech world. So, if I have this straight: You can leave one failing industry and go to another where you’re needed, and make more money. The cherry on top is that you are taken seriously, says Robert Brunner, who built Apple’s design department and now runs the studio Ammunition with co-founder Matt Rolandson. 21
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“In Silicon Valley, design is held up as one of the major disciplines to be good at to be successful. Yes, there’s software development and hardware, engineering, marketing—but design sits at that level, too. You end up with a seat at the table.” Some of Silicon Valley’s shine has dulled lately as consumers become more aware of how their privacy has become compromised and tech giants’ complicity in the rise of data-mining, surveillance, inequality, environmental damage—all in the name of convenience. Not to mention the likelihood of screen addiction for children, the ease with which hate speech is broadcast on these platforms, and the general annoyance at those people who walk around, head down, oblivious to anything but the app that’s open on their device. A former colleague of mine, Lindsay Ballant, remains on the East Coast as a teacher, political designer, and art director of The Baffler magazine. She has been offered jobs in Silicon Valley, but turned them down on philosophical grounds. “When we look back on this era, the designers who helped shaped the image of these tech titans will rightly be treated as if they worked for cigarette brands in the ’60s. We wouldn’t be celebrating good design from Halliburton or Palantir, would we? I must have missed the moment when a bunch of Raytheon designers were invited to speak at design conferences.” I called up another old friend, Cliff Kuang, a former editor at Wired and Fast Company, whose book, User Friendly, explores how UX design shapes our daily lives.
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T ACROBA
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I DON’T WANT A MOVE TO BE ALL ABOUT STATUS, STABILIT Y, AND FINANCIAL BENEFITS. NONE OF T
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SE THINGS IS WHY I BECAME A DESIGNER.
He recently made the move back out to Silicon Valley and agrees that money is part of the draw. Designers can actually be wildly, stupidly rich—a first—but the bigger appeal is a chance to be on the front end of culture instead of being asked to come in and do the metaphorical logo at the end. “Designers are just going where the most interesting problems are,” he says. “There’s opportunity to have influence, and if you’re not working on these kinds of problems, you’re on the receiving end of culture as opposed to the creating end.” But scale, for some, only goes so far. “Scale, scale, scale,” sighs that same former New York designer who now works in Silicon Valley. “Designers get so hyped on the fact that people are going to see their work. But the question is, are you influencing people in a meaningful way? Every company is basically just selling ads. Scale for the sake of scale is not the thing that wakes me up in the morning.” I talked to a current creative director at Condé Nast to get his take. He says he, too, has considered moving to Silicon Valley, given the volatility of media and seemingly unsustainable nature of print. But he considers the scale of the audience to be a drawback, not a plus. “Most big tech companies see their potential consumer base as being the entire world—that’s 7.7 billion people. Designing for 7.7 billion people is a noble challenge, but currently, I still find it interesting to make work intended for a smaller audience,” he says. The mystique of answering the profound challenges of our time can’t be underestimated, but they come with their own set of limitations. “A smaller audience allows me to have a specific point of view in my work, to be very playful, to take risks, and to be imperfect,” he continues. “You’re not trying to please everyone. I don’t want a move to be all about status, stability, and financial benefits. None of those things is why I became a designer.”
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E S TAT GON OR E A LL R <> RV ND, O SIT Y, C O A L T P OR UNIV ER
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0 0.0PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLAYTON COTTERELL
Humans have been searching for the perfect shade of red since the Stone Age, when our ancestors ground up ochre to create a deep, earthy hue. Thousands of years later, we still haven’t found it. Red is an inherently imperfect pigment. It can be bright but toxic, or dull but safe; it can shine brightly then fade quickly, or last thousands of years but lack brilliance. All of the world’s known red pigments come with tradeoffs, which is why scientists are hard at work to find one that doesn’t. “We’ve been looking for a brilliant, stable red,” says Mas Subramanian, a chemist at Oregon State University, who is best known for discovering YInMn, the dazzling shade of blue derived from the elements yttrium, indium oxide, and manganese. Subramanian and his students have spent the last few years searching for a new red pigment—one that’s bold, long-lasting, non-toxic, and hopefully worth buckets of money. It’s strange to think of colors as sellable products, but that’s exactly what they are. High performance pigments like YInMn can be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenue. By one estimation, the pigment industry will be valued at $31.9 billion by the end of 2023—and that’s without a perfect red. A new high performance red pigment could add to that number significantly. The most valuable shade on the market today—Red 254, also known as “Ferrari red”—is worth an estimated $300 million annually according to Bloomberg Businessweek, and it’s still vulnerable to fading. Truly new colors are rare. They aren’t so much discovered as they are meticulously willed into existence though the scientific process. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” Subramanian says. So far, Subramanian’s experiments have yielded a sunny yellow, a deep orange, and a burnt copper hue. A true red could be one experiment or many years away—that’s the nature of research. “We’re still not quite there,” he says. “But we’re getting closer.”
EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH
Creating a chemical reaction requires heat. The lab's furnace can reach upward of 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
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The elements tin (Sn), niobium (Nb), oxygen (O), and sulfer (S) are weighed on a scale that is accurate to 1/10th of a milligram.
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The elements are combined and pulverized into a fine powder.
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The powder mixture is added to a press where it's formed into a small disk. The compact tablet ensures the elements are intermingled.
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The elements enter the furnace as a light gray disk and are heated at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit for upwards of 12 hours.
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The resulting color is placed on an x-ray disk so its atomic structure can be analyzed.
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