Less is More?

Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,

(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!

Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
—Robert Browning, from the poem “Andrea Del Sarto”

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright during the Victorian era known for his dramatic monologues. In 1855, he wrote a poem called “Andrea Del Sarto” named after Renassance painter known for his technical skills, but his paintings often lacked emotional qualities and “soul” that many critics say prevented him from achieving the same fame as Michelangelo, Da Vinci or Raphael. Browning’s poem is written as if Del Sarto is speaking to his wife, Lucrezia.

Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe was a German-American architect known for pioneering the 20th century architectural style known for it’s minimalism and clarity. Unlike his contemporaries, his buildings utilized modern materials like glass, steel, and concrete. His designs stripped away all the superfluous ornamentation and excessive details to create what he called “skin and bones” architecture. He is famous for his use of the aphorism “Less is more” which, despite often being credited as it’s source, is lifted from Robert Browning’s poem about Andrea Del Sarto.

The phrase “less is more” has become the muse that all minimalist design rests on. Minimalist design, at it’s core, is about removing as many elements as possible, leaving only what is necessary. The French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry put it this way: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

When someone says “less is more” the idea is that by showing (designing, including, etc) less, you are actually getting more impact. The problem with the phrase “less is more” is that it implies “more” is still the goal; still the desired outcome. Is more really that much better? Can’t less be just less?

More isn’t always better. A product with more features, but subpar performance probably isn’t better than a product that does only one thing and that one thing really well. Perhaps a design is understated because it wants to be understated.

Dieter Rams, in his Ten Principles For Good Design manifesto, took a slightly different approach. Instead of “less is more,” he says “Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better—because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.” Less, but better. I like that.

Less isn’t always more. Less doesn’t need to be more. Sometimes less is just less.

Less, but better.

Learning to Work with Constraints, or, What’s Missing in Design Education

This is how it goes: You get a new project. You meet with the client and discuss what the design needs to accomplish, what problems it needs to solve, maybe some of the aesthetics, a budget, a general timeline and any other pertinent information. You then slave away in your studio, pushing pixels, scratching out half-baked sketches, and trying to come up with a solution. You go back to the client and show them what you’ve got. They like some it. But not all of it. The type here is too small and this image isn’t exactly the look they want and this concept isn’t clear. So you go eagerly return to your studio to work on revisions. These are called constraints.

As a designer, I thrive on constraints. I need them. Creatives who produce work without constraints are called something else. We call these people artists.

Artists create work freely, often for their own purposes and desires without any outside factor telling them how things need to be done. Designers, on the other hand, always have outside forces contributing to the design in one way or another, either directly or indirectly. It may be due to budget, or the client’s timeframe. You may have to work with an in-house team or you may have adapt and incorporate previous designs or you may have to work with awkward copy and headlines. Design, at its core, is about problem solving. It’s about working through these constraints to (a) solve the problem at hand and (b) make something aesthetically pleasing.

In my education experience, I’ve found my professors have focused primarily on teaching (b) while more often than not ignoring the important aspects of (a). I’d say the majority of the projects I’ve completed in my three years of design schooling have all been based on making the final piece attractive. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with this—it’s a designer’s responsibilty, in my opinion, to elevate the visual culture—it’s not always like that in the “real world.” I’ve always had complete control over the projects I’ve worked on in class; the only limitations I’ve had have been regarding paper size or my time frame. When colleges and universities are training designers solely on how to make things “look good” or “communicate clearly,” they are missing an important aspect of the design process.

Ira Glass said that when you go into creative field, it’s because you have good taste and then over time, you will learn to take that taste and create your own work. The majority of design student’s, I would hope, have “good taste.” They know what looks good and what doesn’t. And that taste will be perfected and change overtime, but in the end, they know what they like. Creating aesthetically pleasing, technically proficient work is only part of it. What happens when these fresh-out-of-college design students start working for an agency and realize they don’t always have the creative freedom they were given in school?

I’d like to see schools give projects that more closely echo what it is like working in the field. Dan Phillips said “Clients are full of surprises. Design is what you make of those surprises.” What would happen if a professor took on the role of the client? They had a small budget to work with? A predefined visual style the designer (student) had to work with? What if they complained about the logo size or midway through something changes? How would the student work through these constraints?

I would argue they’d become a stronger designer because of it. They might have to sacrifice their comfortable, usual visual style to work with the client and they may need to learn to defend their choices if they feel their solution is the correct one. We are not artists. We thrive on constraints. We need problems to solve. I’d like to see design students work with constraints. It will make that transition from student to professional much easier and much less surprising.

Switchfoot ‘Hello Hurricane’ Review

“The storms of this life shatter our plans. They tear through our world and destroy our hopes and dreams. They ruin sunny days, flatten the structures we depend on, and shock our world views. Hello Hurricane is an attempt to sing into the storm. Hello Hurricane is a declaration: you can't silence my love. My plans will fail, the storms of this life will come, and chaos will disrupt even my best intentions, but my love will not be destroyed. Beneath the sound and the fury there is a deeper order still- deeper than life itself. An order that cannot be shaken by the storms of this life. There is a love stronger than the chaos, running underneath us- beckoning us to go below the skin-deep externals, beyond the wind, even into the eye of the storm. Hello Hurricane, you're not enough- you can't silence my love.” —Jon Foreman

It’s been nearly three years since the San Diego-based rockers Switchfoot released the experimental Oh! Gravity. and they are now returning to the spotlight with their latest endeavor, Hello Hurricane, a twelve song masterpiece full of the best songs the band has written so far. I’ve been listening to the album for the past week but it wasn’t until I was driving home this past weekend at night, nothing but headlights for miles, that I realized the full brilliance of this album.

The album opens with the expansive “Needle and Haystack Life” which immediately shows a maturity in lead vocalist and principal songwriter Jon Foreman’s writing. Always know for his deep and poignant, lyrics, Foreman’s writing on this album takes that even further tackling themes with a thoughtfulness we haven’t quite seen before. “This song makes me think of abundant, overflowing life,” comments Foreman, “The math involved for life to be possible at all is staggering. Let alone beauty. Love. Joy. Forgiveness. To hold someone in your arms is to hold a living, breathing miracle. At any age, this life is a gift.”

“Mess of Me” follows and is exactly the style of song we’ve come to expect from Switchfoot. Loud guitars, a stirring melody, and reflective lyrics make this class Switchfoot as it tackles the theme of prescriptive drugs. Follows is the ballad “Your Love is a Song,” the final song in a trilogy (also including “Let Your Love Be Strong” from Oh! Gravity. and “Your Love is Strong” from Foreman’s solo album) that could have easily fit on one of Foreman’s solo albums. Another rocker “The Sound” follows which will surely be a fan favorite and a concert staple.

“Enough to Let Me Go” is an interesting look at love and loss and Foreman’s ability to parallel this concept with breathing is another prime example of his unique thinking process that make his songs all the more poignant. The title track captures the theme of the entire record in it’s brilliant chorus: “hello hurricane, you’re not enough / hello hurricane, you can’t silence my love / I’ve got doors and windows boarded up / all your dead end fury is not enough / you can’t silence my love.”

The second half of the album slows it down a bit with the vertically focused “Always” which showcases a different style of writing we haven’t seen much from the band. One of my personal favorites, “Yet” has an old, analog feel and a steady beat before picking up at the close. The album closes with arguably two of the band’s strongest tracks of all time. The spiritual “Sing it Out” slowly builds to an epic close before the album closes out with the reflective “Red Eyes.” As the final song fades away, the chorus of “Needle and Haystack Life” quietly plays, blending the two choruses together as if to wrap the album and it’s overarching theme into one proverbial bow.

Hello Hurricane is musically diverse, lyrically relevant, and thematically substantial. In an interview I heard, Foreman said that I had written over eighty tracks for this album and that the way they’d decide which songs made the cut is by asking themselves “Is this a song we would want to die singing?” That’s a heavy requirement and a high bar to reach, but after a few listens, I am confident that these San Diego boys have achieved it. Every song is perfect on its own yet it all fits together into one fantastic message.

And that message, in Foreman’s words is:

“Yes, I will die one day—of this I am certain. But I'm not dead yet! No, tonight there is breath in my lungs- pushing, pulsing, yearning to break free... I will dream, for dreams are the seeds of what may be. I will wonder, for without wonder, how could life be wonderful? And I will sing.

Yes, until my pending death I will sing. In the face of indifference, I will sing. In the face of adversity, I will sing. I will sing about the pain. I will sing about the mystery. I will sing of the hope, the cage, the bullet, the winter, the dreamer. I will sing of all of these. I've seen miracles there in your eyes. It's no accident we're here tonight. We are once in a lifetime.”

Five Years

What does one write on their blog that has fallen to the wayside over the past couple months to celebrate it’s fifth anniversary? Do you write anything at all? Do you even mention that you’ve been meagerly slaving away for five years on a little blog that maybe no one reads? Is five years even worth celebrating? What’s the average lifespan of a blog these days anyway?

It could be pure coincidence but it was just last week that I started feeling the itch to get back into writing on a regular basis, not even realizing this anniversary was before us.

And last year, I made a big fuss about changing the direction of the blog and focusing on quality over quantity. Focusing on actual writing. Unfortunately, over the past few months, I think both have suffered.

But here’s the thing I’m discovering: there are a few subjects that I am completely, 100% passionate about (design, art, typography, film, spirituality, creativity, history to name a few). These subjects come up in conversation and I will go on and on, without filter, sharing everything I know or am thinking about regarding said topic. This blog use to be my forum to discuss these things, to share my passions with others, I’d like to get back to that.

John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s talk from SXSW this past year on blogging so utterly changed my ideas of online publishing that I started to remember the purpose of this blog in the first place. You should listen to that talk. If you take one thing away from it, it’s this simple formula on how to be a successful blogger (or writer or artist or thing-maker): obsession times voice. Find your obsession. Find your voice. And then go make really cool stuff.

I’m not going to commit to anything. I’m not going to lie to you and say I have some great posts coming over the next few weeks. Because I don’t. I don’t know where the blog is headed or what is coming next. All I really know is I’ve stuck with this thing for five years and I’m not finished talking about the stuff that gets me excited.

Because what it comes down to is that the people who read this blog, for the most part, are people like me. We share the same interests and passions and maybe you point out typefaces when walking down the road like I do. So if something gets me excited, chances are, it’ll make you excited too. And we’re all on this journey together, I think. Thanks for sticking around listening to me gush about my obscure and sometimes random interests for the last five years. I’m looking forward to keep sharing the things that make me excited with you.

This Is It

When Michael Jackson died in June, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, the world lost mourned the loss of arguably the greatest entertainer of our time. Maybe even the greatest entertainer of all time. Personal problems and molestation cases stole the spotlight from his talent in his final years of his life making his death all the more untimely. Thankfully, the new documentary, This Is It, succeeds in returning the crown to the King of Pop and returning the humanity to a trouble artist.

Filmed during the rehearsals for what was scheduled to be Jackson’s 50-concert come-back tour, This Is It focuses solely on the creative process of putting these events together and becomes a fascinating portrait of an artist at work.

What one will first notice in the film is the intense passion of an artist at work. Many of the final photos and footage we are seen of Jackson is a weak, almost frail individual, often walking to and from courthouses; someone struggling to get by. This image is quickly forgotten within the opening moments of the film as we a Jackson full of energy who comes alive when the music starts.

What was most fascinating to me, however, was the intimate look at Jackson’s creative process and strict attention to detail. It’s the candid moments where he’s talking to the musicians about how the music must sound or when he’s sitting in the production room watching footage for a background video and commenting on how the lighting feels off. Almost taking on the role of an auteur, having his hand in every aspect of the show—from the music to the choreography to the light design to stage set. Jackson had opinions about it all and fought respectfully to see his visions come to fruition.

There is no doubt in my mind that this concert would have been unlike anything we have ever seen before. An epic stage set complete with videos, lighting effects, choreography, a full band, and of course the music, this could be one of the most designed concerts in history—this would not have been a concert you simply go and see, this would be a concert you would go and experience with all your senses. Every detail was planned to perfection.

This is not simply a biopic of the world’s greatest entertainer, this is a true inside look at an artist at work. At what goes through the mind of a true musical genius and the work he did to make sure his art could be shared with others.

Absent was the controversy and the questions surrounding his death and the split public perception of the creative genius or the troubled pedophile. This Is It is how I’d hope the future gets to see Michael Jackson: an incredibly talented, passionate artist and performer. Look at Michelangelo or Van Gogh or Shakespeare, these individuals had extremely troubled personal lives, but the legacy they’ve left behind—the things people remember them for—is their art. I wish the same for Michael Jackson.

This Is It does a great job of making sure that legacy lives on.

Recent Photography

Shortly after I moved to Philadelphia for a brief time in 2007, I went on many photographic excursions to help get acquainted with my new city. I spent a Saturday a few weeks ago doing the same thing for my most recent town. There is a strong contrast of the rural farmlands I'm surrounded by now than when I was in Philly but that doesn't mean there is less to photograph.

Overall, I'm really happy with how this set turned out and think I was able to experiment with some different editing styles yet still capture a sort of rural/farmland/Autumnal feel. As I Twittered earlier today, I also noticed how quickly I've switched exclusively to shooting RAW after really just starting to dabble in it earlier this year. I have not shot JPG since. I can't recommend it enough when you are doing heavy editing and processing to your photos. The flexibility is just perfect.

Here are a few of my favorite recent photos, and as always, there are more on Flickr.

Designer For Hire

After a very successful summer of freelancing work and in the final stages of a few projects, I'm currently looking to take on some more projects from now till the end of the year.

I'm looking for work in print design, web design, logo/identity development, product design, illustration, and some photography. If you are an individual or business in need of design work or a design firm looking for a contractor for extra projects, please feel free to contact me or visit the For Hire page so we can begin discussing your project.

I'm looking forward to the possibility of working with you over the next few months!