Denver, Colo. 2008

Hey Tim—you look tired. Are you enjoying your new desk? What about that other art director—do you think he is going to quit soon? Remember how I tried to keep you from getting hit by that train? I guess I should have figured that you knew what you were doing, but I know how you are.

You say you are having a busy month, but I wonder if that maybe you just forgot what it was like to be truly busy and you honestly do have enough time to talk about the book with me. What are you doing right now? Probably eating yogurt or a choco-graham. I couldn’t imagine a better time to chat on the internet about an interesting project.

Aurora, Ontario 2008

Davin needed a driver for a gardening magazine photoshoot and knowing that I had well over a decade of proper driving experience, he knew it was in his best interest to give me a call. We trucked up to Aurora, some fifty or so kilometers north of Toronto. His assignment was to photograph a woman called Elfie Blue and her unique compost.

My friend Mike Essl made a website encapsulating the perpetual question between the disciplines of art and design. Totally stripped of context and debate, free from the defense of ego people can vote on one of the most annoying questions that follows designers from their first viz comm class to their death bed interview.

http://isgraphicdesignart.com/

There are so many levels to both “disciplines”—from a preteen grandson making a website for his grandmothers quilts, to Damien Hirst living to see himself make millions and millions of dollars—how do we place ourselves on this spectrum for the purposes of a conversation like this?

I imagine, for most people that are informed in an average way about the fact there is potentially a difference between design and art, it is a matter of “I know it when I see it.” I think this is a totally reasonable place for most people to be. After years and years of their son going to various school for design, photography, and fine art, my parents still don’t understand why or how I delineate those three things, and they get along just fine.

For me, I stopped worrying about the delineation because it served no real purpose except for to occasionally help describe what I do in a more palatable way. To my wife’s parents I am an “art director” because that is my most recent job title. To my brother I am a photographer because that is what he sees me doing.

I don’t know many people making a living as a graphic designer, art director, creative director, design researcher, design analyst, interaction designer or anything else calling themselves “artists.” At least in regards to their day job. They don’t have any need or interest in defending any particular position. Design being design is just fine, they don’t have to aspire to be artists.

All this terminology is very loaded for anyone even remotely creative. I remember my first art history course, and the teacher kept referring to “plastic” and an hour or so into class a girl stood up and screamed “WHY THE HELL DO YOU KEEP TALKING ABOUT PLASTICS!?”

Since we all have different backgrounds and have no idea what someone else might think the word plastic means in the context of art history, it is very hard to have our comments accurately received.

In a conversation with Mike last night he put it simply, “…graphic design is graphic design. I don’t care for it to be anything else.”

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1912-2008

Lakewood, Colo. 2008

Adam Lerner is the Executive Director of The Lab at Belmar. I spoke with him earlier this month about land use, the civic spirit, and the future of the art museum for an upcoming article in the Denver Voice. I’ll be posting the story and some photographs once the new issue is out in November.

Back when newspapers controlled (and billed for) the word count of classified listings, one had to be extremely frugal. With the advent of the now ubiquitous website craigslist, there is no need for such self-limiting (or censoring, in some cases). Hundreds and hundreds of words replace the twenty, and we’ve all become our own Crazy Eddie, developing our own tactics and tricks in an effort to sell our surplus stuff.

This transition to internet based classifieds, and the “deregulation” of listings has had a rather notable and well covered impact on the newspaper business—mainly that they can barely afford to operate anymore.

Socially, there have been other, less apparent results from this phenomenon, however. Beyond a simple description, often people’s opinions of their possessions are laid bare. Searching for specific keywords can result in an absorbing sociological experiment—and this project is based around just that.  By limiting my search term to the word “classy,” we get a cross section—from Mercedes to telescopes—of what people perceive (or want to have be perceived) as classy. While commercial advertising might try to tell us how we should want to appear to the world— self-generated classifieds let us tell everyone how we view ourselves.

Click here to see the entire project.

I’m not sure what this means. I’m not sure where this came from. I’m not sure where those thumbs have been.

And so another day draws to a close. Exhausted from bike rides and long a long day in a poorly ventilated office, our hero calls his dog to bed. The dog’s weight pins the blankets to the mattress in a fashion that makes them inaccessible to his master. It is not worth fighting over, and they both fall asleep.

Toronto, Ontario 2008

…Kodak, the big gay dragon!

This sign does more than identify a photographable location. It actually tells me that there was a time when I might have thought this sort of branding was cute and/or charming. If this same view was sponsored by a Canon G9 I would be far less amused.