Journal #11
Debbie Millman
Debbie Millman is a partner and president of the design division at Sterling Brands, one of the leading brand identity firms in the country. Millman is president of AIGA, and chair of the School of Visual Arts’ master’s program in Branding. She is a contributing editor to Print magazine and host of the podcast “Design Matters.” She is the author of How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer (Allworth Press, 2007), The Essential Principles of Graphic Design (Rotovision, 2008) and Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Inter section of Life and Design (How Books, 2009).
Design Matters is a radio talk show she hosts about design and design professionals.
I chose to listen to and blog about her interview with authors Malcom and Joyce Gladwell. Malcom Gladwell is one of my favorite authors so I was really excited to listen to what he had to say, unfortunately more than the first half of the hour long interview was about him being Canadian and how that’s different than living in America. I won’t lie, I sort of skipped through those first 30 minutes, just listening in for a minute every few minutes. I’m sorry but I want to hear one of my favorite authors talk about something more than the difference between living in Canada versus America. Probably the first thing that actually was interesting though was when Malcom began talking about the republishing of his mother’s book. He discussed how he thought books were ugly: there’s so much time spent creating the book, and trying to make it interesting, that even if it does interest the reader and creates emotions and what not, all the pervious time seems trivial. What? He’s an author – a really good one. He explains that books aren’t very special, and that’s why he made sure that when he republished his mother’s book, that it was designed very carefully to be something really memorable that people could treasure. A point he makes a little later is about being an outsider, and this is where he clears up the confusion for dissing writers, when he is one. He claims to be an outsider, an observer, which is very clear in his writing. My favorite book by him, maybe of all time, is Blink, which is simply a collection of research of things he’s observed about the world and how people interact and behave. He made some other neat points about his writing throughout the rest of the interview, but this is the point that really stood out to me and made me appreciate what I got out of his books even more. I myself am more of an observer; many people think I’m terribly shy when they first meet me because I like to observe people and situations before really interacting. I think he applies this process to his writing too, and it could be applied to design as well. It doesn’t mean you have to do tons of research and observed design and think through everything into your process, but just taking time to see what’s going on around you and let inspiration grow from that.
