Dude.

I got nothin'.

The start of the quarter is hard for a Design Communication Arts advisor, especially when you miss the first day of it. Oh, UCLA Extension and your quarterly schedule. How we all long for a longer break!

Northern California, I miss you.

Ceasar Chavez + Dolores Huerta Day

This iconic image was created by bay area artist Ester Hernandez. It's called Sun Mad and I suppose it can also relate to the conversation earlier about Shepard Fairey and reappropriation. Thing is that Ms Heranadez has gone on to create many other works and that this haunting image was used in a specific movement, rather than as urban wallpaper.

On a related note, Friday UCLA Extension will be closed for Ceasar Chavez Day. I'd also like to give a shout out to Dolores Huerta on Ceasar Chavez Day, since they were cofounders of the United Farm Workers after all.

Monday spring starts in the academic style and it all begins again.

Yours in Quarters,
Karen

Be Still My Broken Heart

["Broken Heart" by Fabu]

No one likes cancelled courses at UCLA Extension. Not you, not me. It sucks on my end because first I have to call the instructor - I'm sorry, James Fish - then I have to call the students. Or, if I'm feeling too sad, sometimes I delegate that part to Joan or Ana. Okay, really they do it most of the time, which is really helpful.

You may wonder how or why it happens. Well, this quarter I'm going with the standard explanation for all things 2009: it's the economy. We just don't have as many people signing up for graphic design courses as we did last spring or even last quarter. I get it.

When we decide to cancel a course it's based on the number of students enrolled. Or not enrolled, as the case may be. If there are too few then it can make for an awkward course (sometimes a couple drop or transfer after the first meeting too) and it can make for a loss of money. We have a lot of invisible overhead. Yes, when you look at the prices in the catalog you may think we're raking it in, but there are a lot of expenses - the room, the technology, the salary, the parking. It's all in there. We really are a lean machine, trying to offer you the best possible courses with the raddest (yeah, that's right, raddest, I said it) instructors around for the best possible price.

There are no bonuses being distributed here. Also, I don't have an expense account, which seems like a nice thing to have.

There is also the mystery factor. Why do some courses attract a ton of eager students one quarter then don't the next? Why do some courses that sound amazing fail to attract students? Often Cristina and I will plan a new course and get all excited about it making its debut. It's going to be a hit! Students are going to love it! Then, silence.

Sometimes I think that Design Communication Arts students prefer the known, like most people I suppose. You want to take a course that has a very clear outcome, something that clearly relates to the marketplace. For example, Illustrator in the lab has only one spot left. That's something that is maybe more comfortable - it's a skill you can put on you resume right away and march into the market with. Courses that focus more on projects and portfolio pieces sometimes don't offer that immediate benefit, but do pay off in the long-term since they reflect your value in a totally different way.

I'm not trying to dis your decisions, it's just a theory I entertain when consoling myself before calling an instructor to let her or him know that the course they've been looking forward to teaching isn't going to happen this time around. For you, for them, for me, it's a bummer.

Hello Kitty with Pretensions

Here are two lines from the Culture Monster review in the LA Times of Shepard Fairey's show at ICA in Boston, by Christopher Knight:

"Visually and conceptually, Fairey's work is to graphic design what sampling is to pop music."

"Obey Giant is now an industry, Hello Kitty with pretensions."

I like pop, or at least the pop I know from my youth - you know, early Madonna - and sampling wasn't so much a part of it then. But I also like the Beastie Boys (that's right, I'm throwing down some really current musical references here) and they were the masterminds of some genius sampling. I don't think sampling in itself is bad.

But maybe not all the time. Making your name through reappropriation seems to warrant some serious wrath from the art community, along with resentment that Shepard Fairey is laughing all the way to the bank. Or maybe not the bank these days, but to his, I don't know, offshore annuity?

As for Hello Kitty, I still have a softness in my heart for her and for the little me who thought she was just the prettiest thing ever. But that is industry, not art.

Der Ring des Nibelungen

Not everybody loves the opera; I get that. And it's not like I'm a super awesome opera lover who can break down every tragedy there ever was in act-by-act detail. Really I can only name like five opera singers. But, I do like putting on my gloves and cape and going to hear some melodramatic Italian. Or, in this case, German.

Not surprisingly, there are not a ton of people around me who want to shell out some fairly serious ducats to see people slowly moving about a stage in long gowns. But, luckily, my aunt is down for the trip so together we saw the most bizarrely designed opera ever. At least, for us.

It was The Ring put up by the LA Opera, and it rocked our worlds.

We went to opening night of Das Rheingold last month and will see Die Walkure in two weeks. The entire ring cycle will be up in 2010 when you can see all 15 hours of Wagner's opera in rapid succession, without many bathroom breaks. Apparently, they're trying to make it a city-wide festival, which I'm excited to see.

Let me tell you, the lighting, the stage, the costumes, the website, the program, the everything is incredibly designed. I don't necessarily mean incredibly as in pretty or perfect or just right, but incredibly as in awesome and risky. People walked out in the middle. At the end it was a combination of standing ovation and boos. It was seriously controversial, perhaps because the entire production is somewhat reminiscent of an evening after a dinner of sauteed psilocybes.

It's exciting when designers - in this case, Achim Freyer - move away from the safe, away from what they know about an audience (and the opera audience is pretty well defined), and do something that they know is going to result in some seriously rich people contemplating their membership in the upper echelons of donor-dom.

It was design, it was communication, and it was art.

Print is for Lovers

I love print, especially books. This Kindle thing is not going to work for me; I want a nice paperback or hardcover in my hands. They're so much easier on the eyes, so much more portable and so much more cozy. Why do I want to read something that reminds me of being at work all day? My brain goes, computer = work, so I really don't want any more of it when I'm not here. Not that I don't like being here, but I get enough of monitors and keyboards during the weekdays.

So, if I am going to peruse a bookstore, like all other consumerist perusal times, I'm going to be seduced by packaging, or I suppose in this case, publication design. And Chip Kidd is the awesomest Lothario of all book times. He makes me want to read.

Also, here's an conversation he had with Milton Glaser in The Believer.

Speaking of Designing Politics

Check out this example of graphic design on the set of Maude. She endorsed Humphrey!

This is a perfect example of the kind of thing instructor Geoff Mandel does, btw. He is teaching Design for Film and Television this spring. He is also working on Mad Men.

Hello, field trip!

You Too Can Design Politics

A lot is being said about Shepard Fairy these days, so I'll leave that discussion to someone else. But, on a related note, other politicos are picking up on the by-the-people design buzz.

Barbara Boxer is getting into the idea with a request for a poster design she can use in her upcoming bid to keep her U.S. Senate seat.

If you do it, make it your own.

It's Business Time

I've been feeling unsettled about the business > art > design post I wrote after Mr Bucher's talk. 'Cause designers, while artists, are different than fine artists. Design, inherently, must have function and quite often that function is market-based. And, often designers are independent, which means they have to also be business people. In many ways, I suppose, we're all business people by necessity. We need to manage our personal finances and we need to know what the economic climate is in order to evaluate a transaction.

So, while it's nice to think of art as a separate, sacred pinnacle of purity and self-actualization, it exists in context and our cultural context is super on the money tip. Also, design and art intersect, but are different.

344 = 210 + 134

Last night, thanks to Lucie, I went to hear Stefan G. Bucher talk about his life and times as a designer. I sat in the second row, next to the projector, which was like sitting next to the heater. I liked that since it's so rarely cold in Los Angeles.

Mr Bucher (I've decided to skip the . like The Economist does) had a nifty visual presentation that reminded me of when I was in grad school and had an assignment to create a presentation for a course on integrating technology into the classroom. I did a slideshow of photos from a trip I took to China in 2001, one that was fraught with loneliness and smog. I put the photos to Radiohead. Anyway, that assignment was one that really stuck with me, one that makes me think I could make more slideshows that double as personal expression, and maybe one day have them shown at a reception in the atrium at the Hammer.

Anyway, Mr Bucher's slideshow was also personal, and included stories of his youth in a small town in Germany where he drew cartoon bears for thousands of deutchmarks, while letting his clients believe he was way older. He talked about avoiding debt (good) and responding to RFPs (bad). There were a lot of jokes that especially tickeled the Austrian in the audience. Euro humor!

One point that I found especially provocative, especially after attending so many AIGA events, was that designers are not business people, they're artists. I admit I was somewhat scandalized by hearing a successful business person say this, but also relieved. Let artists be artists, he said, and I agree. His argument was based on keeping art sacred, on preserving the perspective that an artist can bring to a project. Here he got a little Us v. Them for my tastes, but, I get it.

Additionally, (this is me now) designers often get the message that they have to be everything, some magical mix of marketer, inventor, painter and dreamer. It can be exciting to be an interdisciplinary renaissance person, but it can also be too much. Especially considering that sometimes (some may argue always) art and business can't cohabit peacefully. So if you're trying to do both in your brain, you may end up with too many voices. And, in a society that often determines your very value based on the marketplace, you have to take measures to protect your artistic integrity.

Mr Bucher rules his kingdom autocratically, however. He's not into sharing it with those who may make demands on his payroll or mistakes with his copy. I am familiar with this desire for control, and don't fault him for it. Sure, when you're a one-person show you can eat all the cookies and only have to look to yourself when there isn't any milk to go with them. But it also means you can eat all the cookies and only have to look to yourself when there isn't any milk to go with them. And that can be a lonely way to design.

Blog Love

I know that blogging is like, so 2007, and really I should be focusing on learning how to sound like a bird, but I'm really getting into this (vanity?) project. When I wake up in the morning I have that excited feeling like when you like a special someone and that special someone likes you back, but it's early and you're not sure what's happening, but something new is happening and although the feeling is a little bit like indigestion, it's a good feeling, and you just want to have more of it.

Maybe this is a case of transference, and really I should go out to dinner with a special someone more often.

OR, MAYBE, I'm excited to be writing again after closing the drawer on a first novel and aspirations of a laptop-in-a-cafe existence. I like coming to work, like being in a cube next to Cristina, like having days like yesterday.

What was yesterday like you wonder? What IS the existence of a sometimes fashionable program coordinator and usually patient student advisor?

Yesterday was an above-average day (I used to be a high school teacher, so I like to evaluate things on a rubric that can be translated into a grade). In the morning Scott, Cristina and I met with new instructors who will be teaching in the spring and summer with the visual arts. There was Lawrence Azzerad, Jay Stuckey, Mary Beth Carosello, Robert Gallagher, Christine Caldwell, Meghan Paddock Farrell and Mike Walden.

Also, there were bagels.

One of my favorite parts of this job-o-mine is working with instructors who are new to UCLA Extension. It's an exciting, delightful time when everyone is seduced by their hopes and fantasies of how awesome a course is going to be. Then Cristina and I talk about what to do if someone needs an ambulance and how to deal with the occassional student who tries to take a course without registering, and the fear starts to set in.

So we had a bonding time, all of us in a meeting room at 1010, and I went on to have a delicious burrito at Whole Foods and meet with prospective students who asked smart questions. Then, I checked my mail box and found several bronze ADDY awards for our AIGA Student Group President, Lucie Mamos. Since I was planning on sitting in on The Why and How with Joanna Lee that night, I could hand the envelope to her myself with congratulations. See, a good day!

This is all real, by the way. Not some weird promo-collage of reality.

Then I sat in on class and realized I knew all but one of the students personally and felt good about that. I enjoyed seeing what everyone was working on, portions of which included a CD case that opens like the growing flower that's illustrated on it, a business card that is somehow also a wine cork and pasta packaging that includes seed packets for planting.

Then, Joanna told me she was engaged. For reals! This all happened yesterday, Thursday, March 12, 2009.

Around 10p I walked to Lot 32 got into my aunt's car (I don't have one and she's out of town, so, bonus!) with the fancy parking (my uncle is UCLA faculty and has a blue permit, so, convenient!) and I drove the four minutes to their home to their black cat, Monty, that was very happy to see me and all lovey-dovey.

Together we watched Property Virgins on HGTV, and I went to bed thinking about all the house I could buy in North Carolina.

In conclusion, not only did I have a good day but I am also writing about it.

Oh, and P.S. the television show Maude makes me happy, which is why this posting has a fantastic photo of Bea Arthur here. Netflix it people. It's unlike anything on TV these days.

About Stefan Sagmeister's Happiness

Does design make you happy? Can you design happy into your life? Does happy a designer make? The man who carved type into his skin for an AIGA poster thinks so.

Photoshop: "The Man's" Tool of Oppression?

France wants to outlaw images that are detrimental to people's self esteem. Are magazine covers of blemish-free, super fit, How-I-Got-My-Body-Back models keeping you down?

This video suggests that, at the very least, retouchers should be credited prominently in a publication.

Naming

So yeah, we decided to call this the white boards. Ideally, the name gets at the process of design, the idea that you explore many ideas before finding the best, most functional one, and that sometimes you have to wipe everything out and start over.

When Scott and I went to Schematic a year or two ago to check out their facilities and discuss user experience with the designers there, we both fell in love with the slick, white movable walls of their offices. Walls of white boards slid to reveal more white boards underneath. They were covered in notes that looked like they were from the set of A Beautiful Mind - formulas, bubbles, diagrams, drawings. They were beautiful indeed.

So naming is a big deal, and reflects a lot of the challenge of design - ideas come up against the parameters of what already exists, different people have different meanings assigned to words, and let's not even start with the sociopolitical implications that some naming conversations imply.

Linguistics aside, here we are.