World-renowned graphic designer Lorraine Wild on the art of contemporary book design
Interview by Kristine McKenna
Reflecting on the history of design in her home state of Michigan, Lorraine Wild once commented “well, you have to start with the birch bark canoe.” This is my idea of panoramic vision. This is vision that can gaze into the past and spot things that have previously gone unnoticed, and peer into cracks and crevasses that no one else has bothered to investigate, despite the fact that they’ve been there for decades. Unfiltered by issues of race, class, gender, or nationality, it’s a way of looking that simply sees what’s there, and not many people can do it.
This ability is central to Lorraine Wild’s genius as a graphic designer. It’s kind of like having perfect pitch, and it’s hard to say how she acquired her panoramic vision, but it’s a fundamental building block of her personality. She’s interested in pretty much everything, and is willing to take whatever pops up once around the block in her mind.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Wild was raised in Detroit where she earned a B.F.A. at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1975. Two years later she moved to New York for a job with Vignelli Associates, then returned to school and earned an M.F.A. at Yale in 1982. In 1985 she was named founding director of the design programme at the California Institute of the Arts, and though she stepped down from the position in 1991, she continues to teach there and lives in southern California. In 1996 she launched her own firm, Lorraine Wild Design, which morphed into Green Dragon Office in 2004, and this is her present base of operations.
Wild is a widely published essayist, was a partner in publishing imprints Greybull Press and Foggy Notion Books, and has designed hundreds of books and exhibition catalogues for artists, architects, galleries and museums throughout the country. She’s usually working on between five and ten books in various states of production, and is a design consultant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mind you, these are strictly the high points: Wild has done tons of other stuff, and I’m pleased to report that after years of nagging from friends and colleagues, she’s finally embarked on a book about her own life and work.
I once overheard someone say to an artist whose book I’d designed, “oh, I thought you designed your own books,” and that meant I got it right
Kristine McKenna: There are many paths you could’ve taken with your training as a designer: what drew you to books?
Lorraine Wild: If you’d asked me forty years ago if I wanted to be a book designer I would’ve said no, because although I love to read and I love books, they were fairly conventional in their mode of design for much of the 20th century. Then, during the eighties a few adventurous publishers began doing interesting things and the field became much more appealing. Digital technology changed everything, of course, and suddenly there were loads of things you could do that had previously been impossible. It struck me early on that a lot of what graphic designers do has a pretty limited shelf-life, but books tend to stick around for a fairly long time and that’s one of the reasons I love doing them.
KM: Is it easier to make a book with a dead artist, or do you enjoy collaborating with living artists?
LW: When you’re working with a dead artist you’re usually working with an estate or curator and that presents its own set of challenges. When you’re working with a living artist you’re dealing with someone with a heightened sensitivity to how their work is depicted and how context can change meaning. Artists know their work intimately well, but they don’t necessarily understand how books work, and it can get very prickly. I’m comfortable with that, though, because I was raised by very prickly parents.
I don’t consider myself an artist and I don’t have an artist’s ego. I see myself as a transmitter of ideas and information, and while I usually have a lot invested in my own interpretation of the material I’m working with, I don't have a “style.” I once overheard someone say to an artist whose book I’d designed, “oh, I thought you designed your own books,” and that meant I got it right.
KM: If you can “see” the design does that mean the design is too heavy-handed?
LW: No, that’s a piece of design mythology. In the 1930s a typographer named Beatrice Warde wrote an essay called 'The Crystal Goblet' that likened typography to a crystal goblet so thin and perfect that it’s like an invisible bubble. That line of thinking makes the case that design is strictly a delivery system for content and I don’t really believe that. The goal isn’t simply to disappear.
KM: There are several artists you’ve done books with repeatedly, including Mike Kelley, Richard Tuttle, James Welling, Richard Prince, and Lari Pittman. Can you talk a bit about a few of those collaborations?
LW: Richard Tuttle honed my ability to listen carefully and deepened my understanding of how to translate a complex network of ideas into a sequence of pages. Working on his books made me realise that I have patience, too!
Mike Kelley really knew books and was unusually sensitive to the look and feel of books as objects, and he had interesting thoughts on that. I loved working with him and the first book we did together was the Whitney Museum catalogue, Catholic Tastes. After that we worked on The Uncanny [2004], Hermaphrodite Drawings and Day is Done [2007], Horizontal Tracking Shots, [2009], Educational Complex Onwards 1995 – 2008 [2010], and Exploded Fortress of Solitude [2011]. Mike took his own life in January of 2012, just when we were starting to work on his retrospective catalogue for the Stedelijk Museum, and we were also working on a book about Detroit, where we both grew up. His death was a huge loss on many different levels.
Mike Kelley really knew books and was unusually sensitive to the look and feel of books as objects, and he had interesting thoughts on that. I loved working with him
KM: You've described yourself as a middle class kid from Detroit who was an art nerd in high school. Your goal as a young person was to “go to New York”; what did that represent to you?
LW: New York was where everything emanated from and I just got it in my head that I needed to go there. I was already on the path to being a writer or something along that line. I visited Manhattan for the first time when I was sixteen, and between the food, the museums, and going to see Viridiana, the city was everything I’d thought it would be.
KM: Is there a single designer who’s had a big impact on shaping your sensibility?
LW: Yes, Alvin Lustig, who I never met because he died in 1955. The way he wrote about design really affected me. He wrote about graphic design in the present, and about what it was like to be a graphic designer in his own time, and he worked through problems in communication and design in ways that I found profoundly moving.
KM: After graduating from Cranbrook, you moved to New York and got a job working for the legendary Massimo Vignelli, who designed the New York City subway map in 1972. I read a quote by him where he declared “the life of a designer is a life of fight! Fight against the ugliness!” Is this quote indicative of his personality?
LW: Yes! But, to give credit where credit is due, Massimo and his wife, Lella, taught me the importance of taking pride in your work and not cutting corners. They were both very demanding people and they were that way with pretty much everybody, but no corners were ever cut in that office. They were very tense people, at least when I worked for them in the seventies. Massimo had just emerged from a bankruptcy and there was a great deal of anxiousness around maintaining perfection and making a profit. We did a lot of work for New York City non-profits, but that came with a price!
KM: You moved to New York in the mid-seventies and during your years there, you spent Saturdays at the New York Public Library digging through the stacks. What were you looking for?
LW: I was trying to piece together a history. I’ve always felt that there’s a lot of lost history in graphic design, partly because for years it simply was not recognised or categorised very coherently. People are more conscious now of documenting things, and there’s an online archive of graphic design [The People’s Graphic Design Archive] that’s crowd sourced and already has a zillion things on it. Still, there’s a lot of confusion about what design is, or should be, and that’s why it's so complicated in terms of how it’s taught.
At Cranbrook I was exposed to the great modernist typography of Germany and the Bauhaus, Russia, and a little bit of France. I was also exposed to Swiss typography, which was a continuation of the Bauhaus. Everything had ground to a halt during World War II, then in the fifties, design picked up where it had left off.
If you were an American typographer, you were taught those two phases of modernism - the twenties and the fifties - but I couldn't quite understand how all that translated into the U.S. I figured there had to be pieces of design history that simply hadn’t been incorporated into the story yet, and that’s what I was looking for. So I would go to the library where they had complete runs of any magazine you could imagine, and I’d ask to see every issue of Gebrauchsgraphik between the years 1919 to 1925. Then I’d make notes on 3 X 5 cards about anything that pertained to what I was researching. I pieced together a story of how Modernist graphic design came to be practised in the U.S. through two prongs: one was a group of older emigrés who came to New York between 1932 and 1939 and began practising. The other prong was young American designers who at that moment were in their twenties and saw the new European modernist graphics and wanted to do their versions of it.
I didn't know what I was going to do with this research, then a friend said “hey, people get degrees for this kind of research”. Then I learned that several of the Americans who’d first responded to European modernist design were all teaching at Yale. Some of them were pretty old, but they were still there, so I thought it made sense to go study with them. Unfortunately, when I told people there what I wanted to do, it went down like a lead balloon. I was really discouraged against doing the kind of research I was interested in because the old men didn't want me writing about them. Those guys needed to feel like they were always at the cutting edge, so for me to want to talk to them about the past was alienating to them. Once I had a meeting with Paul Rand and he said, “How can you write about the fifties? You weren’t even born in the fifties!” First of all, I was born in the fifties. Not to mention, how could we have any kind of history if only those who’d lived it were allowed to write about it? I encountered all sorts of confoundingly stupid arguments like that. Or they’d take the fake humble approach like, ‘Why don't you write about El Lissitzky? He was so much better than I am.” But I was stubborn and able to get a lot of insight through those interviews, despite how awkward they were.
The documentation of Modernist design in the U.S. at that time was spotty and archives were already disappearing, so I got a real introduction to the difficulties of doing research in an area of visual culture that had defied categorisation and hadn’t been collected in organised ways. Things have improved since I was doing that work, but there’s still a lot to say about art that artists aren’t saying, and there’s a lot to say about design that doesn't get said.
I’ve always felt that there’s a lot of lost history in graphic design, partly because for years it simply was not recognised or categorised very coherently. People are more conscious now of documenting things
KM: How has the digital revolution affected design? Are viewers more sensitive to the subtle nuances of images, or are they less able to decipher them?
LW: I think they’re less sensitive — how could they not be with the deluge of images that bombard us every day. Yesterday I was looking through a box of old books and I came across an issue of Time Magazine from 1994 that had an image of O.J. Simpson on the cover. The cover was a Matt Mahurin drawing based on Simpson’s police booking photo, and the editors asked Mahurin to alter the image because they thought the mug shot was already too well known. Mahurin used early digital means to make Simpson look darker and more menacing, and I saved the magazine because I was so struck by the degree of editorialising in the image. Today, we’re so accustomed to the use of filters and the altering of digital images that the Simpson magazine cover wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. There’s just so much more visual fakery in our lives now.
KM: Do young people today care about the real and the authentic, or do they take images less seriously now?
LW: If I asked any of my students at Cal-Arts that question they would probably say yes, of course I take images seriously, but the way they interact with them is complicated in ways they may not be aware of, as is the case for all of us.
KM: Something that’s been said about your approach to teaching is that you encourage students to use their own personal and emotional experience in their work. Traditionally, have designers been encouraged to leave their own story at the door when they take on a project?
LW: It’s true that I used to do that but I’ve kind of reeled that back in a bit because students have become more comfortable sharing, which probably reflects the identity politics of the moment. If work becomes too personal or identity-based, however, you enter a subjective realm where you can’t really respond to the material at hand. A crucial skill a designer needs is the ability to bring themselves to their work with complete openness.
KM: Reflecting on the arrival of the iPhone in January of 2007, you commented “graphic design as we knew it was gone at that point.” Can you elaborate?
LW: Before the iPhone came along, you had to have a professional designer trained in production if there were certain kinds of work you wanted to do, but that working model has been gradually dismantled by the iPhone. In the nineties, for instance, early software programmes arrived that allowed you to edit video on your computer: previously, editing video was something only trained people with high-end equipment could do, then suddenly you could do it by yourself on your phone. Access to tools have been radically democratised. This doesn't mean that more people have something to say, but the means are there if they think they do.
KM: Has this innovation spawned more creativity throughout society?
LW: No, I feel like there’s always the same amount of creativity. It just spawned more stuff.
KM: If a book is visually dazzling is a reader less apt to read it?
LW: No. Maybe the only visual thing that could discourage a reader from reading a book is the typeface. Fonts are incredibly byzantine and some accumulate so much baggage that they become unusable. For me, the one with the craziest amount of baggage is Helvetica, which I’ve never used.
KM: Can good design rescue failed content?
LW: It can disguise it for a while, but ultimately, no, it cannot.
KM: What’s your favourite part of the process of designing a book?
LW: The initial analysis. You receive the content and start thinking about the possibilities given the set of parameters you’ve been given, and those issues of constraint are different with every project. From there, you have conversations with artists and authors and try to arrive at an agreed on set of questions that the book will attempt to clarify. That’s the part I love.
Fonts are incredibly byzantine and some accumulate so much baggage that they become unusable. For me, the one with the craziest amount of baggage is Helvetica
KM: You’ve said that “great design reflects the time in which it was made.” Is it possible for design not to represent the time in which it’s made? It seems to me that the facts of a thing – when, where, how and why it was made - reveal themselves, no matter how hard you try to disguise them.
LW: This is complicated, but I’ll try to explain what I meant. Versailles, for example, is a pretty magnificent summary of a point in time and an expression of power. Then, let’s look at Trump Tower. To someone with an untrained eye, these two places probably seem like they’re in the same style because both of them have lots of gold, chandeliers and mirrors. And yes, Trump Tower does say something about the time and place that it was made, but it’s essentially an empty vessel. On the other hand, there are complex and highly significant layers of history and visual style embedded in Versailles.
KM: You also said that “things of the present must be placed in a historical continuum in order to be fully understood.” Is there a fixed historical continuum that never changes?
LW: No. Our historical understandings are organic and they fluctuate because our society doesn’t always pay attention to how things are made and where they come from. And I'm not just speaking about the realm of design here. Our food system, the production of energy - origins and connections are difficult to map. We live in a kind of instrumentalised society; if something you need is at hand you use it, and it doesn't matter where it came from.
KM: You’ve made a distinction between design journalism and design history; can you elaborate?
LW: Some design journalism is O.K., but, to me, people writing about design without footnotes is often promotional and repetitive. People are given credibility when they haven’t earned it, and there’s no quality control. I’m less interested in design journalism and much more enthusiastic about design history, and there’s lots of new and interesting work in that field.
KM: What is the epitome of bad taste?
LW: Things like taste and style are always in flux, so it’s hard to answer a question like that. Years ago, John Waters was seen as a purveyor of bad taste, but over time it’s become clear that bad taste is simply his subject matter. At the moment, bad taste seems to reside in the realm of prejudices, and bad taste is no longer a social faux pas. It’s become something more aggressive.
KM: You have very porous boundaries in terms of how you define what you do. You’ve collaborated on projects with chef Alice Waters and clothing designer Christina Kim, done books with Diane Keaton and Mr. Chow, designed a monograph on a private home in the Hamptons, and have never focused on developing a recognisable brand that can be stamped on your labours, whatever they be. Are there drawbacks to working this way?
LW: Yes! You don't get to be rich and famous for your brand.
KM: What would you love to design that you’ll probably never get the chance to design?
LW: I’d love to design a library where people could do their work and socialise and be surrounded by things that are of value.
KM: You’re comfortable in the halls of academia, yet you always have one foot in the street and your sensibility is somewhat rogue. You’ve done books on the Beat Generation, punk rock, the Black Panther Party, musician Dan Hicks, the Hairy Who? and renegade hippie collective the Diggers. Where did this come from?
LW: I blame that on my early exposure in Detroit to Iggy & the Stooges and the MC5.
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