’03 til infinity

The MVA Studio weblog—thoughts on design, creativity, business, marketing, teaching, writing and culture by J. Namdev Hardisty and Kimberlee Whaley.

[mvajoshua]

The most important thing that we provide is honest discussion around design education and the questioning of the status quo. Neither Mitch nor I hold back on what we think about teaching and students and I think that’s the best part of our show. In my cumulative six years of education I never heard anybody say that critiques were a drag and maybe not necessary. Or that “good design” is a fucking illusion. And while neither Mitch nor any of guests thus far agree with me, I’ve never heard a teacher advocate for not teaching the “rules.” I don’t know the extent to which Through Process affects anyone or anything but its important to me that we talk through these ideas (even if we end up changing our minds later).

Multi-hyphenate creative person and co-chair of VCFA’s MFA in Graphic Design Ian Lynam interviewed me and my Through Process co-host Mitch on podcasting, design criticism and what movies we’d like to show our students (or, do show as the case may be).

[themva]

Another interview with Joshua, this time with his podcast co-host (and fantastic designer) Mitch Goldstein.

[mvajoshua]

One last thing: part of what makes hardcore or punk work is that you create from your skill level. The worst bands are always those ones that tried to write music that copied more mature bands rather than play organically from where they were at. It took me a long time to understand this idea in terms of work. I have a particular way of working, it’s fairly minimal and not on-trend but it’s how I like to work and what I want to see in the world. When I was at agencies and tried to make work that was more slick and popular almost nothing I made ever got produced. At some point I stopped “trying ” and just treated every project like it was my own and all of the sudden, things are getting produced. When you work from where you’re at you tend to make something that has more of you in it and when that happens you’re probably making better work.

I have a general philosophy that everything is terrible and everyone has bad taste. This might seem cynical on the surface but I use it as a reminder that there’s no correlation between quality, trends and success so I might as well do what feels right rather than what other people seem “good.” This might be punk in a nutshell.

[mvajoshua]

I was already a fan of sergeant’s new site exploring the influence DIY subcultures like punk and graffiti have on careers and business so I was honored to be a part of the “Alumni” series. We get into how my experiences in hardcore shaped what I do as a designer as well as the programming I’ve been trying to undo in recent years.

[themva]

New interview with The MVA’s Joshua Hardisty on punk, skateboarding, graphic design and business.

[themva]

What I’m Doing When I Design

When I design (when I’m doing it right) I am taking a piece of content and finding a perspective on it that I can turn into an image. All I’m doing is writing a story. And I don’t understand how you can write a story without understanding your characters, their motivations and the world they occupy.

MVA Creative Director and designer Joshua Namdev Hardisty breaks down how we view design over at Medium.

[03surplus]

Boring Typography 43/Book Cover of the Day 58: An Outline of European Architecture

An Outline of European Architecture. 1963. Pelican. Designer: Herbert Spencer.

[themva]

Great design by Jonathan Gray. Cool references to the fact that its an unfinished novel. Typewriter face for the author (am I correct that DFW did indeed hammer it out on a typewriter?), hand-drawn notes, and the unbound, shifting manuscript pages.

[themva]

May We Be Forgiven book cover design by Jonathan Gray/Gray318

[themva]

R.U.R. opens at The Soap Factory, Saturday, March 2nd. 

Web flyer designed by Dylan Lathrop/Unequal-Design.

[themva]

Flyer by The MVA Studio for R.U.R. at The Soap Factory. Opens Saturday, March 2nd. More Tumblr-friendly gif flyer by Dylan Lathrop coming tomorrow but if you’ve got some love for the Soap Factory then re-blog this.

[hardcorefornerds]

I’m all for file sharing. That’s great—as long as people are prepared for the significant consequences. One is that music will become completely couched in advertising. That’s already happened. And another is that people should be prepared to have fun with the past because the only music that can possibly be free is the music that’s from the past. It costs money to make music. And if people are prepared to only have the past to listen to, then let it be free. But if they want new music then they are going to have to figure out a way to be patrons of the arts. And they will. We discussed doing a free option, but we were like “No, Fuck it. They can pay a dollar.” We played shows for five dollars at a time when people thought it would be impossible. We played five-dollar shows for so long and nobody ever complained about that, and then we sell it for five dollars and they’re like, “Why isn’t it free?” Well, it’s just trying to help us recoup a little bit.

“good points as usual from Ian MacKaye from this Pitchfork interview - especially about advertising, that’s always been my fear/annoyance with the ‘free’ cost of many things online (when it stops being an annoyance and is, as he says, ‘couching’ content in a way we don’t really pay any conscious regard to but which nonetheless shapes, distorts and underpins the medium, that’s probably worse).”

Additional commentary at hardcorefornerds

[themva]

I should be so lucky

I was driving home tonight listening to the 2002 album Two Guns Twin Arrows by Abilene. I have no idea how many people have even heard of the long-defunct Abilene but I’m guessing its 5,000 at the absolute max. There’s probably about 3,000 of these CD’s in circulation and because the label that issued it went out of business I have a feeling there’s boxes of these in a warehouse or, more likely, a closet somewhere.* But that doesn’t really matter because I own this record and it means a great deal to me whether there’s 10 or 10 million of them. Two Guns Twin Arrows is the kind of record that just dredges shit up in me. Its this raw mixture of guitar-driven screaming post-hardcore (in that guitarist Alex Dunham used to be in hardcore bands not that its weird or goofy) with some kind of jazz element due to the trumpet and quasi-dub underpinnings. All of which sounds horrid when put down to paper but its sounds like no other record I have heard. And it gets to me. I start thinking of big F situations—failure, frustration, my dead father. It just dredges shit up in me. I can’t point to what exactly does it (as if you ever can with a great record) but its not content-based as the lyrics are so cryptic as to border on meaningless (but just bordering). It has to be the emotional space of the music. It basically goes from raw, noisy and angry to melodic and melancholic. Its definitely not a record with “a little something for everybody.” I can’t listen to Abilene all the time. They produced 2 records, neither of which I will ever part with but I take them out in measured doses (and always this time of year incidentally). I think they’re some kind of therapy and so, for the next week or so, I’ll listen to them until I can’t handle it any longer and they’ll go back on the CD shelf for another 8 months or a year or whatever. Abilene toured a little bit, they played shows and they sold CDs. And they probably never made a legitimate dime of profit off their efforts. Hopefully they made enough off of selling CDs and at the doors of clubs to get to the next city. They took time off of work to do the work of touring in a band but it was likely more of an expensive vacation. I doubt that they came home with more than a couple hundred dollars in each members pockets, if that. And while money is never the be all end all of creative endeavors it certainly helps to make things worth it. Abilene broke up sometime after Two Guns Twin Arrows and its no shocker. The members were in their 30’s, had been touring in different bands for 10 years plus and probably had to due the kind of “shit sorting out” that one needs to do in order to say, have kids or build a sustainable career. And while that’s sad, my point has nothing to do with the conundrum of aging work-horse punk musicians but with the value of their art. I have gotten something major emotionally out of Abilene’s music for 11 years. What are we really talking about? Two pieces of plastic that cost me a grand total of $25. How can something that bring so much value to my existence have cost me so little? What’s the real value of those discs? How much is it really worth to own something (or access it as the case may be) that can transport you to a wholly different emotional place; that can make you miss your father and cry in traffic? How did it come to be that the catalyst for that experience—a CD—cost me the price of lunch pro-rated 100 times across a decade? Music industry 1.0—the making and selling of plastic objects—set the expectation that music was a commodity with no real differentiation between artists, hence every CD had (and has) to cost the same. The punk scene set the expectation that paying someone for their art was bullshit and hence CDs had to priced in such a way as to recoup the production costs and not much else (if the entire print-run sold out). Music Industry 2.0—the making and selling of bits—has continued this folly to its extreme. Music is now either free or $.99 a song. We’ve officially decided that a Snickers bar is worth more than a piece of music. What the fuck is wrong with us? I don’t know how or if I can ever repay Abilene for what they’ve given me but I know its worth way more than the $12 I paid for a copy of Two Guns Twin Arrows and its definitely worth more than $2.28 that you can buy a new copy of it on Amazon.** On the one hand, its offensive to musicians that we find it reasonable that they’re creative output is worth less than a pizza but on the other hand, what is it that we’re constantly complaining about? The most compelling and affective art that we engage with in our daily lives is music. And we get it for nothing. We complained that CDs were pushing $20 a piece. Our complaint wasn’t that it was $20 and musicians were still getting screwed on royalties, no, we complained because we knew that it only cost $.95 to manufacture a CD (as if we really had a clue as to what it cost to manufacture anything) so therefore we were paying $19.05 too much. I don’t have an answer as to what a download of a song should cost but I know this, we should feel royally fucking blessed that right now it only costs $.99. There would be a gaping void in my life if Two Guns Twin Arrows, Life.Love.Regret., It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Paul’s Boutique, and every other transformative record were to be erased from existence. What if every $15 I ever spent managed to bring me so much repeated enjoyment for years to come? I should be so lucky.

*Hopefully, I’m wrong about this and there’s 10,000 copies all of which have found a happy and loving home. **But, I see that you can buy a new copy for as little as $2.28 on Amazon so I think my instincts are correct on this one.

Related Links:

Buy Two Guns, Twin Arrows on Amazon

A long feature at Hardcore for Nerds

Just Google this record, the people that know it are obsessed with it.

[themva]

Kieler Woche posters

If you visit the website of the largest sailing event in the world Kieler Woche, you are not going to be struck by the quality of design. But the festival does have a legacy of commissioning great modernist design by the likes of Wim Crouwel, Anton Stankowski, Otto Treumann, Jean Widmer, Ruedi Baur, Ben Bos, Siegfried Odermatt, Rosemarie Tissi, and Bernd Kuchenbeiser.

Some personal favorites:

1954, designed by Achim Bargatzki

1962, designed by Anton Stankowski

1964, designed by Hans Hillman

1972, designed by Rolf Müller

1995, designed by Barbara and Gerd Baumann

You can check out whole series from 1948–2011 here. In addition, if you poke around the design section of the site and click on “Übersicht der eingerichten Entwürfe,” you can view the all of the final submissions (multiple designers are asked to submit sketches each year) for each year going back to 2005 and stumble onto some gems like this rejected poster by Jörg Zintzmeyer.

[themva]

...“What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost. Making something obvious has a cost. You can’t make everything obvious because you have limited resources. I’m not talking money—although that may be part of it too. I’m primarily talking screen real estate, attention span, comprehension, etc. Making something obvious is expensive because it often means you have to make a whole bunch of other things less obvious. Obvious dominates and only one thing can truly dominate at a time. It may be worth it to make that one thing completely obvious, but it’s still expensive.

 Jason Fried on software development (though the correlation to design proper is fairly clear), from “The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible” at Signal vs. Noise

[themva]

20 observations, questions and hopes in response to the Girl/Chocolate video trailer

Girl & Chocolate Trailer from Crailtap on Vimeo.

Is it really called Girl Skateboards Chocolate Skateboards Video? Or, from Girl Films & Chocolate Cinema? I really hope so. Untitled Video from Girl Films & Chocolate Cinema would also be pretty great.

It’s cool that a lot of the makes are from ads—Alex Olson’s picnic table ollie and Gino’s kickflip-pivot-to-fakie stand out.

Is there going to be legit Pops footage? He actually flips his board in here.

I’m psyched on a new Devine Calloway part.

Finally there’s video of Mike Mo’s late-pressure flips (even if its on flat)! I’ve been dying to see this since one of the mags ran a Chocolate southern U.S. tour feature and Mo was doing a late-pressure flip over a double-set.

There’s 2 540° ollies in here. I think that’s significant.

Cory Kennedy has been blowing minds for awhile but his 2 clips in the trailer are amazing. A full-part with Ty Evans at the helm seems like it has the potential to go curtains.

Unless, of course, MJ continues his Fully Flared tear. Which seems extremely likely.

Where’s Carroll? Did I miss him in there or has he been sticking exclusively to to filming in parking lots (of which I would gladly watch 3 minutes of)?

Guy Mariano. 2 parts in a 5-year period. Yes.

I will be really down with a full part of just doubles.

Am I correct that the Elijah Berle banked wall clip is on the waterfront in Chicago?

Is this going to be really, really long video?

I can’t even imagine how you edit this trailer, there’s so many names in line-up. 26 of ’em to be exact.

20 of these is going to be hard.

This might not be a popular opinion but I was kind of happy about the over-all lack of skits in the last Girl/Crailtap production Fully Flared and I would be just fine if this video is basically wall-to-wall skating.

But, then again, all the skits in Yeah Right were pretty great.

Are we going to see a lot of transition? Its weird that Chocolate would be the team to bring it back.*

Ty Evans, Corey Weincheque, and Spike Jonze are the dream team. Seriously, how do you make a trailer for a skate video seem so epic with such a low ratio of people-doing-tricks to people-falling-in-a-not-particulary-gnarly-way-and-dudes-faces-looking-emotional?

Best video since Fully Flared? All signs point to yes.**

Bonus: Number 16 has been redacted in light of re-viewing the items linked to in Number 17.

*With respect to Creature and Grant Taylor, of course. **With all due respect to Stay Gold.

[themva]

Neat Vol. 1

Some interesting UI stuff—Namdev

5by5.tv has a button you can turn on so that links open in a new window. (I love this because I open everything in a new tab with the goal of making it take about 30 minutes for Firefox to start up.)

Top: The search field at apple.com when you load the page. Bottom: The search field once you insert the cursor.

Top: The footer on the already excellently designed Daring Fireball. Bottom: The Appearance settings on Daring Fireball where you can only change the font-size. I like that this sends the message that changing color or typeface is bullshit and the font-size is most likely the biggest culprit in terms of reading difficulty.

[themva]

Introducing Boring Typography

It was in 2006 when I first noticed that I was going to used bookstores and purposefully looking for books with black sentence-case (only the first letter of the first work is capitalized) sans serif type on a white spine. This method of selecting books to browse through actually turned out to be fairly productive in that I ended up with a couple of books that I absolutely love. Later as I was teaching at MCAD I blew many lunch breaks just browsing the stacks randomly picking up books and judging them by their spines. It was a long-running joke that I was going to make a book called Boring Typography and it would just be a thousand pages of architecture and engineering books from the 1960s with left-justified Helvetica on the cover.

Well, I finally did it. Except its a blog. We set up a copy stand in the studio. I’ve been checking out books by the dozens from the MCAD Library. I’ve spent hours driving around the Twin Cities tracking down every last remaining International Style sign. And I’ve been posting images daily for the last few weeks.

So, to celebrate the launch of Boring Typography, here’s the MVA crew with their favorite covers.

Namdev with Ad Reinhardt (1966)

Kim with Signs in Action (1965)

Our daughter Patience with Creative Playgrounds and Recreation Centers (1969)

Zoey with The Nature of Recreation (1972)

[themva]

Often the best way to find out what I think about something is to write about it. There’s this assumption that you must know about something to write about it, but often the process of writing about something mirrors the process of learning about it. Certain pieces I write I know will be key pieces, but other shorter writing is almost like a gym workout — it keeps my mind sharp and my eyes open.

Project Projects principal, design educator and writer Rob Giampietro interviewed by Justin Kropp. A fantastic and short read on work of all kinds.

I don’t know that enough people understand that writing is a process of discovery moreso than a process of dictation.

[themva]

The work was not idea-based in the sense of cute metaphors or rhetorical tactics more familiar in advertising campaigns. It was not what I refer to as ‘one-move’ design, where an initial idea is then swiftly completed in one gesture without subsequent refinement. Our work involved multiple moves, a step-by-step compositional progression, and in that sense had a large element of craft to it.

Simon Johnston, founding partner of 8vo on the modus operandi of that studio. From his essay “Dust” for the 8vo monograph 8vo: On the Outside (2005, Lars Müller Publishers). I love the bit about “cute metaphors.”