A mix of photographs culled from Friendster’s 21,000,000+ users and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Strangers on a Train.

Above: Cover of Wilshire x 8 by Hilary Greenbaum.

“Watch List” is a series of interviews with interesting and engaging young designers I know. Hilary Greenbaum is the first of these interviews, and I can’t think of a better person to kick off the series. Her work is consistently challenging and conceptual, but always human. The three projects we’ve chosen to discuss are visible here. To see more of Hilary’s work, visit greenary.net.

Rob Giampietro: When do you first remember being interested in design?

Hilary Greenbaum: A long time ago, actually. A friend and I designed a magazine together in fourth grade. Just a single edition. It was just for ourselves I guess. At the time I did everything. I drew, I painted, I think I wanted to explore everything that was visual.

RG: Fair enough. What was an early piece of design that was formative for you?

HG: Some of the earliest pieces of design that were formative I think would have to be some of the most basic type exercises I started doing in college. Very simple, very Bauhaus, very stripped-down. I can’t think of any one piece, but Carnegie Mellon, where I was going to school at the time, had a large collection of Swiss posters. I found them very inspirational. I’m not sure which era their collection spans, but I remember it being fairly comprehensive. At the same time, I was also looking at a lot of artwork and painting which was much more raw.

Above: Interior spreads from Wilshire x 8 by Hilary Greenbaum.

RG: It sounds like that was influential, too. Your graduate thesis project at CalArts was called Wilshire x 8. I was very impressed with it when I first saw it. Certainly this is a mapping project, but I also see it as an acting project. Do you have any thoughts on this?

HG: Well, there’s certainly different roles we play as designers, but I think the ‘role-playing’ aspect of the project wasn’t necessarily about acting, but more about trying to understand how other people use and understand design. Wilshire is the constant, so that you, as a reader of the maps, can understand not just the street itself, but how different people could approach mapping it. It is a study of both people and place.

RG: Sometimes I think fonts are involved in this understanding as well in your project. How did you arrive at the type you chose?

HG: There’s a main typeface for all of the general content of the book, which I chose partly because of its boldness, its ability to break up the book, as well as its deco-inspired flavor, something I feel Wilshire has a lot of. Then there’s each individual map, which took on its own character. Those typefaces were chosen only with that map in mind, so when compiled, the shifts in the book become more obvious. There were some type choices where I was interested in making the text feel more automatic, as if it had been generated by the street, while there were other choices that focused more on nostalgia, for example, embodying a more personal sentiment. But it’s tricky with typefaces, because it can get really heavy-handed. Usually finding a typeface is a really intuitive process for me. I have to look at a lot of things. Finding a typeface that feels “nostalgic”, for example, without feeling insincere means digging through a whole lot of crap, and then possibly having to modify it anyway.

RG: I know the Myers-Briggs test was important to your development of this project. How did it come up, and why did you decide to follow the lead?

HG: Well, the project itself originated from an interest in showing how no piece of design is completely objective, even information design. More specifically, I was looking at how maps are merely representations of space, and how depending on who’s doing the looking, the space is inherently different. So, I thought of how different people could interpret the same space in various ways, and how people are inherently different; enter Myers-Briggs. I’ve always been inspired by people/sociology/psychology in my work, but I think this framework was used both to explore others as well as find common denominators in myself, like “What are the things that keep coming back? What are the themes that I keep focusing on? Is there a way that I’m most comfortable doing something? How can doing it the opposite way help me push out of that comfort zone?”

RG: One or two more questions about your thesis: Several rolls of tape appear on the cover of the book; obviously there’s a simple metaphor there with the idea of drawing the map of a road and variations on a theme. What makes it a compelling object for you?

HG: Well, it’s about the tape, but also the location of the tape. The background of the cover, the weird illuminated grid pattern, is the refracting film I put up on the window behind my studio desk for privacy. The tape is stuck to the outside of that window, and you’re looking through the window at me and my workspace, but refracted. I liked the tape because it felt dynamic, like they were bodies in motion, on a track, traveling. The length of each roll of tape correlates to how many pages in the atlas that map assumed, so it’s kind of a table of contents.

RG: What did you take away from doing an MFA thesis, beyond the work itself?

HG: Part of the reason I wanted to go back to grad school was to be able to teach design as well as practice it, so the process of creating your own project was great. On top of being able to assess something about design, and then use design to talk about it.

RG: Do you have an assignment you’d really like to give someday?

HG: I don’t have one in mind right now, but I think an ideal project would allow the room for different outcomes, like my thesis project did. So that each student could interpret and excel in their own right.

Above: Cover and interior spreads from Patterns of Preservation by Hilary Greenbaum.

RG: Ok, let’s talk about Patterns of Preservation. One of the major things you were dealing with in this project is the presentation of books. Do you have thoughts on this?

HG: Books are objects, and for this project, I was interested in how the appearance of the cover interacts with its contents, if the object itself felt like a cohesive whole or not. I think the presentation of the book goes far beyond the image of its cover.

RG: So you were looking at the covers, and the surprise is that even without them, the insides of the books still manage to communicate something about the content, even if it’s less directly communicated than on the cover?

HG: Yes, I think both should relate to each other, as well as the sentiment of the writing.

Above: Elsa Brooks poster by Hilary Greenbaum.

RG: The relationship of parts to the whole is also visible in your project “Elsa Brooks.” How did you feel about generating a history for a woman who is herself a kind of design historian? What drew you to her, specifically, as a character idea?

HG: She was someone who I would be interested in hearing speak at a design conference, which was the basis for the assignment. I was drawn to her as a character because she was trying to counteract the insular nature of graphic design. To bring more voices to the table.

RG: Again in this project, as in your thesis project, you are creating kind of a character and almost functioning like an actor here. I see this in your project in the way you let each of the participants use a grid to design their own lettering for Elsa.

HG: I set up a framework which allowed for multiple voices to coexist in the same setting to be sympathetic to the character that I had created.

RG: The design reminds me of the refracted image of yourself you put on Wilshire x 8: one self, many ways.

HG: It’s funny, during the process of doing the Wilshire x 8 project, I of course had to take the Myers Briggs test myself. In one of the descriptions of my own personality type it said my type are “systems builders, but based on human beings and human values, rather than information and technology.” I felt like that summed it up pretty well.

RG: The idea of authorship becomes a very sticky thing when you’re dealing with a piece as collaborative and participatory as this one. Do you view yourself as the “author” of this piece, or merely as the “author” of the system used for making it?

HG: I view myself as the designer of this piece. I initialized the concept and then facilitated it’s production. I don’t think most pieces of design today can have strict authorship. We don’t even write our own software. Much of it depends on the origination of the content, whether the idea for the project was initiated by the designer or by someone else. Mostly, it’s by someone else, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a collaboration. Different types of designers just operate in different ways, and some do more self-initiated work, while some do less. I think there’s a difference between self-initiated work and client-initiated work, but of course the starting points for both can have a lot of crossover. Obviously there are many shades of grey, but I don’t think “Self-initiated” has to strictly mean “for me.”

Above: Times DB typeface by Hilary Greenbaum.

RG: The final project you’ve chosen to share is a type design project called “Times DB.” What draws you to Times New Roman?

HG: I think until recently, it was largely ignored by many designers as being too much of a default, and then caught the attention of certain designers just for that reason. I thought it would be amusing to make a display version of it for the same reason. It just seems a little ridiculous.

RG: Sure, “default decadence.”

HG: Exactly!

RG: How very ironic of you, Hilary.

HG: I do my best…

RG: Do you see yourself doing more typefaces in the future?

HG: I think I’d like to continue creating typefaces. I really enjoyed starting these projects this year, but I think it would take me a long time to get to the point where I could actually release a face. I like the idea of designers creating their own tools, though: it’s customization at a higher level.

RG: What’s next?

HG: Well, I just got to New York a week ago, so I’m seeing what’s going on here. It’s a very inspiring place. My favorite season is autumn, and I’ve been on the west coast for a while now, and missed out…I wanted to come back to catch this year’s show. I’m coming from LA, so just riding the subway is fun for me. Being in the throng is really thrilling.

Above: Photograph by Lars Clove for the New York Times.

Rob Walker’s plain-spoken article on branding and the counterculture appeared in this week’s NYT Magazine to the interest of many readers, including this one. One question that Walker wrestled with—and did not quite resolve—is that of how you can claim to be rebelling against consumer culture while you’re manufacturing products for people to consume. One way of addressing it is to say that the entrepreneurs Walker describes aren’t rebelling against consuming, they’re rebelling against mass-market consuming. Everything they make is made in limited quantities, exchanged from one knowing party to the other. Theirs is a boutique economy; they want to consume small, not big.

In terms of these entrepreneurs’ claims of honesty and authenticity, they are virtually assured, first as a necessity for entering their chosen marketplace—their customers wouldn’t buy otherwise—and second because the ceaseless churn and craving of newness in that marketplace doesn’t give them the time to sell out anyway. No sooner have they made it when their customers are on to the next microbrand. Businesses such as those Walker describes face a fork in the road. Either get big and become what you don’t want to be; or stay small and true, fading gracefully into obscurity. The model does not embrace longevity, nor should it: all countercultures take youth as their primary fact, and youth, as we all know, is fleeting.

From left to right, above: NHL, then and now.

Last July, after millions of disappointed fans had endured a yearlong strike and a lost season of their favorite game, the NHL turned the lights back on in rinks across North America, and players hit the ice once more. The NHL was not the organization it had been a year earlier, but after being slammed against the proverbial boards it attempted to a brave face on the situation with—what else?—a new logo. The new logo is essentially the same as the old logo, except instead of orange and black it’s silver and black, instead of flat it’s 3D, and instead of sloping downward from left to right it slopes upward. “New,” indeed.

The Doctors may not know much about hockey, but one of the first rules in branding is that if something needs to change, it needs to change in a significant and noticeable way. The NHL was a company had spent the past year without offering the product that its customers expected, and it had done so because it didn’t want to pay its employees enough to keep them from walking off the job. If there was any question what fans were thinking, let the Doctors settle it now: things sucked for the League and visible change was necessary.

But change visibly they didn’t. By casting a slightly revised version of their old logo as “new,” the NHL cast itself as an organization that was not only unchanged but also somewhat self-deluded. They hadn’t changed, but they seemed to think they had. What had changed was comically insignificant. The change of color scheme, for example, like the change to 3D, was meant to associate the NHL logo with its primary icon of competition, the Stanley Cup. But the two forms look nothing like one another, and the Stanley Cup itself has been “logofied” on many occasions for all kinds of NHL merchandise, including, most recently, the “My Stanley Cup” campaign, launched this April, which features a player’s silhouette hoisting a Stanley Cup high above his head. While the whole thing is encircled by a regrettably unhip swoosh, the “My Stanley Cup” icon is otherwise effective: it shows a player (which the NHL has been accused of neglecting), with a trophy (which the NHL’s unfortunate lost season had failed to produce). With it, the NHL stands for its players and competitions, which is what it should stand for. Not the most groundbreaking logo we’ve ever seen, sure, but a step in the right direction.

In the case of the not-new new NHL logo, though, the visual allusion to the Stanley Cup is unsuccessful. To say that making something silver and 3D will help fans to associate a shield with a cup is not only counterintuitive, but it also sounds a lot like lip-service. If the NHL had chosen gold as its faux logo metal of choice, the Doctors are pretty sure that no one would have objected that it clashed with the Cup. Fans got it: the NHL wanted to show some bling.

This desire to swagger through some rather adverse circumstances was also the key motivator behind the NHL logo’s other—ahem—”significant” change, from downward- to upward-sloping initials. While the Doctors don’t expect sports organizations to be bastions of artistic subtlety, the reason for this clunker is so obvious that it hits you right in the face mask. But the NHL’s press release points it out anyway, noting that the new logo “uses upward-reading letters to project a vibrant, optimistic image.” While the up/good, down/bad equation is simplistic enough for a 4th Grader to understand, it’s regrettable here, both for its one-liner lack of depth and for its probable lack of recognition. Since the new logo is so much like the old, most fans will think nothing has changed, reading up but remembering down, swapping good for bad, or, at least, more of the same. This is not to insult fans: the failure is the NHL’s. In the same way that we stop listening to stories that have no point, we stop seeing new logos that aren’t new logos. Diagnosis? In the words of the hockey blogger Razor with an Edge, “That’s It? Maybe I’m at fault for expecting something a little more radical.” The Doctors agree.

This article was written for BusinessWeek.com but never published. © 2006 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

As soon as we’ve realized this, we turn around and see a trail of fish behind us. Fish in John Baldessari’s work,

fish in Mark Dion’s work,

piling up,

and, on page 101 of Supermarket, the name of a fish that’s the name of a town that I’d heard of before.

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Returning to the introduction of Joshua Tree—VanderLans writes, “It is an archetypically American experience to drive through the desert…. Like many artists who helped define and shape the cultural image of California, Gram Parsons was not originally from there.” The question that hovers above these statements, all the time, is deceptively simple: where was he from? The search for origins—a human drive as ancient as Altamira—informs not only VanderLans’s quest to know his rock heroes, but also, as all art does, the quest to know himself. Specifically, to know himself as a designer and photographer and as an émigré to California, and it is this quest, I think, that motivates his fourth and largest book, Supermarket.

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Artist Doug Aitken tips the swimming pool on its side, throwing our equilibrium off like we’ve got water in our ears. Seen this way, the pool evokes the form of the numeral zero. Across from it, in this book, are a grid of billboards, and all of these billboards are blank. Let’s use Aitken’s structure—signs on the left, pools on the right—as we continue.

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That moment is in the early spring of 1997, when Emigre magazine published its 42nd issue. Emigre was initially launched in Sacramento, CA, by Rudy VanderLans (who was born in Holland) as a magazine to showcase the cultural contributions of émigrés like himself. But by issue 3, in late 1985, VanderLans had begun to experiment with his wife Zuzana Licko’s coarse-resolution typefaces, like this one.

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This article was originally presented as a lecture at the Type Director’s Club, New York City, as part of the “Type Salon” program on 21 April 2005.

I want to begin, tonight, with where we are, a darkened room with a screen, and with the context of where we are, a slide lecture. This kind of gathering is not without a history, a set of expectations, and the first slide I’ve brought to share with you deals with that.

This is a photograph of the staging of a play called The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein. It depicts an actor playing the woman we know as Heidi Holland, who is employed by Columbia University as an art historian. The prologue of the play finds Heidi in the midst of one of her slide lectures concerning three women artists that, while well respected in their time and by their societies, are virtually unknown today.

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Above: The vast Overlook Hotel.

I.
An enormous, abandoned, unreachable hotel; a delusional, axe-murdering psychopath; a clairvoyant, telepathic child; and a frail, scared young woman: a cursory list of elements in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining would seem to position it squarely within the horror film genre. Couple this with the fact that it shares these elements with an earlier novel by Stephen King, who has built an entire literary career out of manipulating the narrative conventions of the American ghost story—a genre that has been part of our oral history since the start of European settlement in the 1600s—and you might have the beginning of argument that places King’s text at the center of the film’s success. Kubrick’s adaptation does share several key elements with King’s original, including a certain foundation in genre, but few critics attribute the film’s success to King. Even King’s fans do not claim it as one of “the master’s.” In a pamphlet entitled “The Films of Steven King,” enthusiast Michael R. Collings admits, “the best approach to Kubrick’s The Shining is to divorce it from any connections with Stephen King—not because Kubrick failed to do justice to King’s narrative, but simply because it has ceased to be King’s.” Cultural critic Frederic Jameson takes this argument even further, writing in his book Signatures of the Visible that “the genre does not yet transmit a coherent ideological message, as Stephen King’s mediocre original testifies.” Indeed, as Jameson suggests, Kubrick’s adaptation, while it maintains elements necessary to cue the genre of the horror film, expands King’s work of popular entertainment into a thoroughly postmodern work of art.

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