Subtitles section Play video
-
I had requested slides,
-
kind of adamantly,
-
up till the -- pretty much, last few days,
-
but was denied access to a slide projector.
-
(Laughter)
-
I actually find them a lot more emotional --
-
(Laughter)
-
-- and personal,
-
and the neat thing about a slide projector
-
is you can actually focus the work,
-
unlike PowerPoint and some other programs.
-
Now, I agree that
-
you have to -- yeah, there are certain concessions
-
and, you know, if you use a slide projector,
-
you're not able to have the bad type
-
swing in from the back or the side, or up or down,
-
but maybe that's an O.K. trade-off,
-
to trade that off for a focus.
-
(Laughter)
-
It's a thought. Just a thought.
-
And there's something nice about slides getting stuck.
-
And the thing you really hope for
-
is occasionally they burn up,
-
which we won't see tonight. So.
-
With that, let's get the first slide up here.
-
This, as many of you have probably guessed,
-
is a
-
recently emptied beer can in Portugal.
-
(Laughter)
-
This -- I had just arrived in Barcelona for the first time,
-
and I thought --
-
you know, fly all night, I looked up,
-
and I thought, wow, how clean.
-
You come into this major airport, and they simply have a B.
-
I mean, how nice is that?
-
Everything's gotten simpler in design,
-
and here's this mega airport,
-
and God, I just -- I took a picture.
-
I thought, God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen at an airport.
-
Till a couple months later,
-
I went back to the same airport --
-
same plane, I think -- and looked up,
-
and it said C.
-
(Laughter)
-
It was only then that I realized
-
it was simply a gate that I was coming into.
-
(Laughter)
-
I'm a big believer in the emotion of design,
-
and the message that's sent
-
before somebody begins to read,
-
before they get the rest of the information;
-
what is the emotional response they get to the product,
-
to the story, to the painting -- whatever it is.
-
That area of design interests me the most,
-
and I think this for me is a real clear,
-
very simplified version
-
of what I'm talking about.
-
These are a couple of garage doors painted identical,
-
situated next to each other.
-
So, here's the first door. You know, you get the message.
-
You know, it's pretty clear.
-
Take a look at the second door and see
-
if there's any different message.
-
O.K., which one would you park in front of?
-
(Laughter)
-
Same color, same message, same words.
-
The only thing that's different
-
is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece --
-
and, again,
-
which is the psycho-killer here?
-
(Laughter)
-
Yet it doesn't say that; it doesn't need to say that.
-
I would probably park in front of the other one.
-
I'm sure a lot of you are aware
-
that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last
-
five years or so.
-
It's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of
-
come back the other way again and get a little more expressive.
-
But I was in Milan and saw this street sign,
-
and was very happy to
-
see that apparently this idea of minimalism
-
has even been translated by the graffiti artist.
-
(Laughter)
-
And this graffiti artist has come along,
-
made this sign a little bit better, and then moved on.
-
(Laughter)
-
He didn't overpower it like they have a tendency to do.
-
(Laughter)
-
This is for a book by "Metropolis."
-
I took some photos, and this is
-
a billboard in Florida,
-
and either they hadn't paid their rent,
-
or they didn't want to pay their rent again on the sign,
-
and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down,
-
so they just teared out sections of it.
-
And I would argue that it's possibly more effective
-
than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention,
-
getting you to look over that way.
-
And hopefully you don't stop and buy those awful pecan things -- Stuckey's.
-
This is from my second book.
-
The first book is called, "The End of Print,"
-
and it was done along with a film,
-
working with William Burroughs.
-
And "The End of Print" is now in its fifth printing.
-
(Laughter)
-
When I first contacted William Burroughs about being part of it,
-
he said no; he said he didn't believe it was the end of print.
-
And I said, well, that's fine;
-
I just would love to have your input on this film and this book,
-
and he finally agreed to it.
-
And at the end of the film, he says in this great voice
-
that I can't mimic but I'll kind of try, but not really, he says,
-
"I remember attending an exhibition called,
-
'Photography: The End of Painting.'"
-
And then he says, "And, of course, it wasn't at all."
-
So, apparently when photography was perfected,
-
there were people going around saying,
-
that's it: you've just ruined painting.
-
People are just going to take pictures now.
-
And of course, that wasn't the case.
-
So, this is from "2nd Sight,"
-
a book I did on intuition.
-
I think it's not the only ingredient in design,
-
but possibly the most important.
-
It's something everybody has.
-
It's not a matter of teaching it;
-
in fact, most of the schools tend to discount intuition
-
as an ingredient of your working process
-
because they can't quantify it:
-
it's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design,
-
but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card
-
or a newsletter.
-
So it tends to get discounted.
-
This is a quote from Albert Einstein, who says,
-
"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.
-
There comes a leap in consciousness --
-
call it intuition or what you will --
-
and the solution just comes to you, and you don't know from where or why."
-
So, it's kind of like when somebody says, Who did that song?
-
And the more you try to think about it,
-
the further the answer gets from you,
-
and the minute you stop thinking about it,
-
your intuition gives you that answer, in a sense.
-
I like this for a couple of reasons.
-
If you've had any design courses, they would teach you you can't read this.
-
I think you eventually can and, more importantly, I think it's true.
-
"Don't mistake legibility for communication."
-
Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates.
-
More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing.
-
So, what is the message sent before
-
somebody actually gets into the material?
-
And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area.
-
This is working with Marshall McLuhan.
-
I stayed and worked with his wife and son, Eric,
-
and we came up with close to 600 quotes from Marshall
-
that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times,
-
predicting so much of what has happened
-
in the advertising, television, media world.
-
And so this book is called "Probes." It's another word for quotes.
-
And it's -- a lot of them are never -- have never been published before,
-
and basically, I've interpreted the different quotes.
-
So, this was the contents page originally.
-
When I got done it was 540 pages,
-
and then the publisher, Gingko Press,
-
ended up cutting it down considerably:
-
it's just under 400 pages now.
-
But I decided I liked this contents page --
-
I liked the way it looks -- so I kept it.
-
(Laughter)
-
It now has no relevance to the book whatsoever,
-
but it's a nice spread, I think, in there.
-
(Laughter)
-
So, a couple spreads from the book:
-
here McLuhan says,
-
"The new media are not bridges between Man and Nature; they are Nature."
-
"The invention of printing did away with anonymity,
-
fostering ideas of literary fame
-
and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property,"
-
which had never been done before printing.
-
"When new technologies impose themselves
-
on societies long habituated to older technologies,
-
anxieties of all kinds result."
-
"While people are engaged in creating a totally different world,
-
they always form vivid images of the preceding world."
-
I hate this stuff. It's hard to read.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
"People in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe,
-
and no possible occupation except information gathering."
-
That was it. That's all he saw as the options. And not too far off.
-
So, this is a project for Nine Inch Nails.
-
And I only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden,
-
and it was done right after 9/11.
-
And I had recently discovered a bomb shelter
-
in the backyard of a house I had bought in LA
-
that the real estate person hadn't pointed out.
-
(Laughter)
-
There was some bomb shelter built, apparently in the '60s Cuban missile crisis.
-
And I asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by,
-
and he goes, "It's something to do with the sewage system."
-
I was, O.K.; that's fine.
-
I finally went down there, and it was this old rusted circular thing,
-
and two beds, and very kind of creepy and weird.
-
And also, surprisingly, it was done in kind of a cheap metal,
-
and it had completely rusted through, and water everywhere, and spiders.
-
And I thought, you know, what were they thinking?
-
You'd think maybe cement, possibly, or something.
-
But anyway, I used this for a cover for the Nine Inch Nails DVD,
-
and I've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape,
-
and it's ready. I think I'm ready. So.
-
This is an experiment, really, for a client, Quicksilver,
-
where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence
-
and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the Web.
-
So, this is a six-shot sequence.
-
I've taken one shot; I cropped it a few different ways.
-
And then the tiny line of copy says,
-
If you want to see this entire sequence --
-
how this whole ride was -- go to the website.
-
And my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site
-
to get this entire picture.
-
Got no way of tracking it, so I could be totally wrong.
-
(Laughter)
-
I don't have the site. It's just the piece itself.
-
This is a group in New York called the Coalition for a Smoke-free Environment --
-
asked me to do these posters.
-
They were wild-posted around New York City.
-
You can't really -- well, you can't see it at all --
-
but the second line is really the more kind of payoff, in a sense.
-
It says, "If the cigarette companies can lie, then so can we." But --
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
-- but I did.
-
These were literally wild-posted all over New York one night,
-
and there were definitely some heads turning,
-
you know, people smoking and, "Huh!"
-
(Laughter)
-
And it was purposely done to look fairly serious.
-
It wasn't some, you know, weird grunge type or something;
-
it looked like they might be real. Anyway.
-
Poster for Atlantic Center for the Arts, a school in Florida.
-
This amazes me. This is a product I just found out.
-
I was in the Caribbean at Christmas,
-
and I'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell --
-
not that they will sell --
-
that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin.
-
This was either an old product with new packaging,
-
or a brand-new package, and I just thought,
-
Yikes! How's that still happening?
-
I do a lot of workshops all over the world, really,
-
and this particular assignment was