Type, Font, Formatting, and Frustration...

The new, improved type and font composer that Blogger has built actually sucks. I should begin by apologizing for how the previous posts have ended up in terms of consitency of style and format. For some reason, the interface for this tool is so random and puts so many extraneous html formatting tags into the body of text that it is really impossible to know (until the final publish) how the entry will look. Copying and pasting from a word processor usually does not work. Anyways, I am not going to waste time blowing my gasket about it even though I am a stickler for type and font consitency. Blogger is free and I like what it does so I can't really be a big wussy about some of the type and font problems I am dealing with. Maybe I just don't get it. Just wanted to let you know that I am not consciously changeing fonts and formatting by design...

More on Lumasite…

My web site is getting more and more hits for Lumasite (mis-spelled by most as “Lumacite”) and although I have raged on and on about how lame this material has become as a design solution for architectural interiors, I should try and be more helpful to all you architects and designers who, through no fault of your own probably, seem hell-bent on trying to incorporate this stuff into your “innovative” concepts.

If you have read any of the previous entries I have written regarding Lumasite, you will probably already know of the frustration I have had in procuring it from its manufacturer, American Acrylic. I will pass on some very informative info to you should you persist on designing with this stuff even though its use as a design material is long outdated.

I was contacted by a very friendly rep from Architectural Plastics by the name of Pierre Miremont who informed me of their website and his company’s ability to ship Lumasite quickly. They can usually ship out in a day or so because they stock it. Good to know. I appreciated his information and would recommend going through them rather than American Acrylic.

That said, I would challenge you Mr. Architect or Miss Designer, to come up with anything better than the typical use for Lumasite which you are trying to reproduce for your project: backlighting it to get “that slick, hip glowing effect” you are trying to copy from the three-year old magazines in your library. Could you accept that challenge? Could you design something that is not just a copy of what so many others have done before you? If you are just now trying to find Lumasite, chances are you have a long way to go before you could do that.

Three years later...

It is exactly three years after the terrorist attacks that happened one morning as my old firm GOOG Inc. was just getting it's day started. We were going about the usual business of checking email, drinking coffee, catching up on yesterday's gossip, and standing around the shop talking about what we had to get done that day. Some of us had heard on the radio while coming to work that some dumb-ass had crashed his small plane into the World Trade Center and not much more than that.

Very soon, our office phones and mobile phones are ringing off the hook. It is our friends and families calling to ask if we had heard the news: terrorists had just attacked the WTC. No lie. We didn't have a TV at the shop, but we all ran to our computers and tried to log onto CNN.com, or Yahoo or anything that would carry current news headlines. No luck. All the sites we tried were bogged down because everyone was trying to do the same as us.

We were getting the news second hand but we all knew the severity of what was happening. We tried to continue with the morning's activities while monitoring any channel of information we could. The internet was slow. Sometimes, my mobile phone would not work.

It was approximately noon here in Denver when I called it a day and sent everyone home. None of us could concentrate. Our minds were totally gone and we couldn't get off the subject that, as of the next day, the US could or would be at war possibly. That scared all of us to the point where "design" was simply a joke. We all had the same feeling: what was our stupid profession worth at a time like this? Would the War Room need new seating? Is it possible that Command and Control Centers would update their space plans or want more lighting or something? Yes that was a ridiculous notion but it pointed to the fact that I felt intrinsically as I left the studio that afternoon to join my family in front of the TV for the next three days: the world is different.

The shock, awe, and anger of that day also made something else crystal clear to me: the business of design was dead.

By the time most of us were back in the office nearly a week later, our discombobulated thoughts were once again trying to focus on the task at hand. Clients, being the selfish a-holes that they can be, were wondering why we were behind on their projects, why had they not been called and a whole host of other gripes and whines that they voiced because we had, as a firm, taken some time off from those precious projects to figure out where the world was heading and what our lives really meant to us. Sorry.

At any rate, we were busy and most of us had, like many others, decided to make like "life as usual" and not allow the terrorists the satisfaction of upsetting our daily regime. Oh but how wrong we were to believe that.

Quickly the economic signs and subtle innuendos that resonated around the design biz were pointing at an ominous outcome. Clients were voicing their own skepticism. Architects wondered aloud about pending building projects. Vendors were making noise about the availability of supplies. And the mainstream press was full of chatter about certain economic forecasts and indicators that were "skewed."

Obviously, as the President of our firm it was my job to look down the road a bit and plan ahead for projects, new business development, hiring trends, cash-flow ups and downs and whatever else a president has to do to keep a group of creatives focused on a "big picture." I personally did not like what I saw. I felt it deep inside. I smelled it. It was a thing. An object you could almost touch and taste. It was the economy flushing itself down the toilet. And Design was the biggest turd in the bowl. The first to go.

I want to make a long, depressing, and fairly straightforward story short. We sat on the sidelines waiting for the war. We spent our days working on projects that were on-going and continued from earlier work that was in motion. I was getting less and less calls for new business or go-sees. Other principles that I was talking to voiced a similar sound. They were nervous and even jittery when the subject of "future work" came up. This was not just interior or architectural firms I was relating to but every type of creative service firm: ad agencies, graphic designers, photographers, contractors, jewelry designers. All were in the same boat. We wondered, as life during wartime approached, what our skills really were good for. Why would clients want to spend money right now? Who needs our work when survival becomes primary?

A long two years followed. Business did, in fact, bomb. I slowly watched the firm I started in 1994 slowly lose more and more steam. I had to let go of lots of people. A few went on to completely change their careers and destiny. Others, lacking any other usable skills, had to basically start their own firms in one of the worst times in American history to be an entrepreneur. Bottom line- it sucked. And the reality is that it really has never recovered. The last three years have been an eye-opener for us all. I particularly was effected by the shoddy outcome of the attacks. I lost a lot and learned a lot about myself and the people who worked for me. I watched design trends and studied the efforts and systems of companies operating in a field where beautiful and expensive commodities are marketed and sold in a world gone mad. It was enlightening to, for the first time, really try and understand the ramifications and goals of what I am doing as a designer, a fabricator, and a business person. It was weird, in a way, to analyze the data for an industry dealing in luxury goods and services during the collapse of our - up until now- unstoppable dot-com economy. For the first time in a long time, most of us creative types looked out from behind our oversized monitors and checked out how crazy things had become. We saw and enemy who wanted our luxury life gone. Who didn't care about design and would never be a potential client. The design world was finally hearing the collective sound of millions of checkbooks slamming shut.

It is now September 11, 2004 and I am smarter than I was three years ago. I think we all are. I am more concerned about the real world that I had been. I am thinking about the connections between politics, economics, art, design, and commerce. I believe my studies and research over the past couple of years has made me more aware of design and its meaning than before and my conclusion is this: design as the metaphor for living and its place in our economic viability has never recovered from pre-9/11/01. In fact, I am sensing a depletion of design sensibility in the world right now. The overuse of the terms "green" and "sustainable" shows just how bad design has become. Rather than innovating, we are salvaging. We throw terms like LEEDS around to satisfy and justify client fees. It is all bullshit. I am still getting a steady spoon-fed bowl of plasticized pabulum from some of the crappiest design catalogs I have seen in years. It does not make sense to design for a long term outcome. Why bother when you can throw everything away so quickly and start over? And the thing that bugs me the most is my own response to that notion: "So what?"

I believe I have lost faith in thinking that design matters right now. It just really doesn't . I finished designing a project that I thing was cool for about five minutes and yet, this project has become a financial goldmine for the clients. I really don't see the innovation in the project any more but it doesn't matter - people love it.

I peruse through my monthly stack of design magazines featuring all the new clubs, restaurants, and hotels and once again I am looking at the same barstools, the same lighting, and the same over-used backlighting and plastic decors I was looking at on September 10 2001. Nothing is changing and in fact, it is getting worse. But clients are still clamboring to own the newest plastic barstools and the one thing I can't stand in design trends: Kolor Kinetics and its lame over-spec'd proliferation in the hospitality industry. Any designer using that stuff from now on is simply contributing to the demise of western civilization from this day forward. Oh yea? You don't think so? You think you are using the stuff better than the designers who came before you? Get a life! You suck if you think that putting that cheese-ball effect into a lounge or hotel lobby will get you anything more than a passing mention on your own website for true innovation. Plastic barstools ordered from Design Within Reach? Are you serious? Or are you simply showing in 3-D what I have been alluding to in this writing: Your design ideas are going nowhere and if you stop and think about it, the only reason you are resigning to using such mindless space filler is that your own creative energy is waning or is gone and that the object of your intention is specifying this outmoded crap is that it is the easiest way to fulfill your scope of work to your client for the most profit on your budget. Right?

The attacks three years ago made us all a little more jaded. They made us skeptical. I think, the good that one must identify in all that mess is that it did strengthen us as a country if in no other way than to recognize when someone is sneaking up on us in order to kick our ass.