"Cool is conservative fear dressed in black."

I cannot take credit for this title. Bruce Mau, a man who has very strong ideas about what design is NOT, wrote these words. He believes that design is not cool, and I have to agree.

Cool is trendy, and it passes with the times. What my parents thought was cool is ver not cool at this day in age. I do not accept cool, partially because cool does not accept me, but partially because it is not worth very much.

Every Abercrombie storefront sells cool. It costs about $75, and that is just for the jeans! Cool won't pay the bills forever, cool does not mean intelligent, and cool is based on fear.

While I was looking for inspirational posters to spark something in my mind, I found a hell of a lot of cool. Every movie poster and clothing store had something to say about cool and why their product is cool. The sleek lines and toned muscles told us that if we are not a part of this, we are missing out - and probably will never get laid.

What I find much more fascinating is the ugly.

Ugly is something that can be so beautiful and fascinating if we let it take hold of our imagination. This poster, designed for the band Taxi Taxi, uses the ugly to grab our attention in a seductive way. Although the gradient in the back is pretty disappointing, the bloody bandaids have such a tactile quality, even when viewed electronically, that we can't look away.

Ugly comes in many shapes and sizes. Ugly also comes in many different shades of beautiful. There is culturally accepted ugly, such as the Windows Vista interface. There is also a brand of ugly that is entirely culturally unacceptable. An ugly woman will never be seen in a Victoria's Secret ad. That is just unacceptable - culturally, that is. Intellectually, I would find it very captivating.

Cool does not, however, rule out the ugly. Just by googling cool and ugly together, I find many pop culture icons. The first think that pops up is "The Family Guy" showing off his bulging belly. Does any one else find a double standard here?

The beautiful can also be turned to ugly with a slight shift. This woman, who is probably very beautiful, could be a model in a Victoria's Secret ad. It would usually be very culturally acceptable to see this woman naked, or in various forms of naked, across ads and in men's magazines.

The shift, however, lies in the composition. Her vulnerable position, and her "severed" feet, show the viewer a different picture.

Even without reading the words at the bottom, which I can't do because they aren't in English, you know that something very ugly is at the center of this subject matter.

My point is that beauty very often lies in the ugly, and vise-versa. Cool doesn't have much of anything to do with it. Cool, as Bruce Mau puts it so elegantly, is a display of fear, especially a fear of creativity.

what am i?

What is graphic design?

This is a question that every design teacher has asked me since I began studying it as a subject. The dictionary program on my dashboard says some sterile, uninspiring bit about combining text and pictures in various fields of communication. I sure as hell hope that there is more to my chosen area of study than this.

I hope, and yet I know. Graphic design brings sanity and beauty to every bit of information that every crosses our plane of vision - if the editor would only let it. Graphic design is the answer to the question, “how do I make sense of all of this?” By organizing and deciding what is important visually, a graphic designer can actually control the way that content is read, understood and appreciated.

Speaking of appreciation, I do also understand that graphic design is one of the least appreciated aspects of communication material. When there isn't enough room in the budget or on the page, design is the first thing to go (at least for most newspapers, magazines, newsletters . . . I could go on). I also understand that the design is one of the most important aspects of a page. When a reader is flipping through a magazine, whether she knows it or not, the design of the page has a lot more weight in the decision of whether or not to read it than the actual content. The appreciation of design is something that the average person does automatically.


What is Typography?

I can't say that I have ever been asked this question before by a professor, but whenever I mention this word to a non-designer, he or she automatically asks this very familiar question. In short, it is the art of arranging, or setting, type.

In long, it is a grueling process of detail-oriented changes and a lifelong appreciation of the subtle nuances and radical changes that typographers have created to the characters that we so often take for granted. It is understanding that the upper-case Q of any typeface is probably the most defining characteristic of the entire alphabet. It is understanding the personality of helvetica as if she were the girl next door. Typography is the arranging of written material with the intent of readability or abstraction, expression or mutability.


What are my responsibilities as a designer?

As a designer, I feel responsible for making the content I produce visually interesting, understandable and aesthetically pleasing, but only when necessary. I am responsible for challenging the average viewer on their definition of beauty and working hard to create my own.

That being said, I am also responsible for my own work. I will never put my name on something that is not my own, and I will never tolerate this from others. A designer’s responsibility is to create new things and not to recycle old ones under a new name.


What can make my classes more valuable to me?

The first answer to this question is, well, me. I have always been the one to decide what I want out of a class and how I can get it. It always helps to have a teacher that challenges me and my boundaries. I need a lot of guidance at this stage in my learning, but I also sometimes need a person to shove me into the water and say, “swim for yourself!”