
“The nature of process, to one degree or another, involves failure. You have at it. It doesn’t work. You keep pushing. It gets better. But it’s not good. It gets worse. You go at it again. Then you desperately stab at it, believing ‘this isn’t going to work.’ And it does!”
Saul Bass
more infosource: Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design by Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 386.
category: creative process, failure, graphic design, perseverance
medium: Monograph
“My office, which has always been more or less the same, is a big undifferentiated room. I sit in one place in the room, in the same relationship to the rest of the room as everybody else. There is no visual hierarchy. I think it may have to do with the fact that when I was a kid my family lived in a three-roomed apartment. The family would spend its evenings in the living room. My mother would knit at one end, my father would read the paper and listen to the radio, my sister was at her desk, and I was at the other end doing my homework. I became accustomed to the lack of privacy and got used to working in a place where a lot of things were going on.”
Milton Glaser
more infosource: Studio Culture: The Secret Life of the Graphic Design Studio, edited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy (London: Unit Editions, 2009), 131.
category: creative process, graphic design, office, studio
medium: Interview
“Everyone complains that it has all been done before, but we haven’t even begun. There’s an incredible amount of new tricks up good people’s sleeves.”
Tibor Kalman
more infosource: interview by Moira Cullen, Eye magazine, Spring 2006. Link here.
category: creativity, graphic design
medium: Interview
“I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.”
Michael Bierut
more infosource: interview in How to Think Like a Graphic Designer, by Debbie Millman (New York: Allworth Press, 2007), 12.
buy on Amazon
category: calendar, graphic design, perspective, time, work
medium: Interview
“The designer of letters, whether he be a sign painter, a graphic artist or in the service of a type foundry, participates just as creatively in shaping the style of his time as the architect or poet.”
Jan Tschichold
more infosource: Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 13.
view on Google Books
category: graphic design, sign painter, visual culture
medium: Nonfiction


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