* Resistance *

Scenes from a designer’s counter-practice.
@soulellis

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  I want to stand back, away from our usual distractions, and question how we make work in the world. I want to start a conversation about design culture. 

  So this talk, which is about resistance, is a totally personal account that begins with questions, and a few observations, and ends with some very small gestures. It isn’t easy, because questioning often leads to ambiguity, or doubt, and that can be uncomfortable. Questioning itself, is a kind of resistance. 

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  But I want to begin by telling you about a break. Not a break-down, but a break-up, or a break-out. The moment where I started to feel a shift, and found myself seeing things differently.

  In late 2010, after about a dozen years of running my own small design studio in New York, I decided that I needed a change. I had, in fact, just gone through a break-up. But that’s another story (and I wrote about it for The Manual). I actually closed my office and eliminated a lot of what had been considered successful by most standards. And I carefully removed myself from about twelve very good client relationships. And of course it’s a privilege to be able to make such a break. I recognize that.

  See, what I really wanted to do, on my own, was ask myself this question — what kind of designer am I, without clients? Am I even a designer, if I’m not solving someone else’s problem? I honestly had no idea.

  So I took off. Without clients. And I spent time away from home, in two ancient cities, wandering around Rome and Athens, making books and sort of looking for myself among the ruins, I guess. I was gone for five months.

  Just before I returned, one of my old clients got back in touch. “When are you coming back,” they asked. We need you. This was a big client in California and I had done some serious branding work for them. A new visual identity, brand strategy, brand guidelines. So I agreed to re-engage.

  Just a few days after returning to the US I found myself driving in southern California to go see this client. And as soon as I got back to New York, I wrote this, on my blog. Here’s the whole post:

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  I drove east from LA into the desert yesterday, and got homesick. I made my way onto the 60 towards Riverside, thinking about how this particular route was like a tour through the fall of the American Empire.

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  I was bombed by billboards for detox and botox, fast food and weight loss, banks and bankruptcy, deteriorating shopping malls and discount outlets, casinos baking in the heat. A witness to endless blankets of housing cut with corporate strips and parking lots, cheap and ugly boxes, fading-out to irrelevance before they’re even thrown up. Everyone speeding past me to get somewhere.

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  Southern California could easily pass as some alien other-world, some kind of space invasion from the future, but this is our American reality.

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  So my homesickness is partly a disorientation, a geographical shift that finds me driving on freeways after several months of walking around the ancient cities. But my sadness today, the dread — this is about bloated and unaware America choking on its own fat. War-loving and arrogant. I’ve been hit with a mega-culture shock, returning to this place I call home. All it took was a brief step outside and my America looks like a foreign, uncanny version of itself.

  And this forces me to think about my own relationship to design and branding. The sickness of corporate branding guidelines that are used to ruin landscapes. To sell junk and failure.

  Not all branding is the same. But at the risk of oversimplifying, I’d like to question the value of much of the work we produce today. Designers, marketers, branding experts blindly grabbing clients and opportunities in the name of clarity or bottom line or good design. In the end we produce a lot of surface and clutterstuff to promote and sell our clients, most of it irrelevant, unsustainable or both. Not all of it, mind you. But I stand there looking at the retail junkyards of Penn Station or JFK or the I-10 and shudder to think about how I could – or rather, how I have – contributed to these failed environments.

  And when we’re not promoting stuff, we’re busy promoting ourselves.

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  I need a new technique. Inspiration this week came in the form of a tweet: “He got hooked on what he was doing; curiosity came to supersede ambition as his principal motivation.” This resonates for me. Taken out of context, this is one way for me to articulate what I’ve been doing this year, challenging myself to get to work outside the office. Curiosity aimed at personal growth. My questions today: how can I use this motivation to create awesome, thick value in the world? How do I produce meaningful work now?

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  It’s difficult for me to read this blog post now, 2.5 years later. Because even though I’ve changed, and even though I did set out, at that point, to explore those questions, they haven’t gone away. How does one produce meaningful work when there’s so much waste? I continue to struggle with this, big time. And I’m curious who else does. How do we, as an industry of creative professionals, reconcile the fact that so much of what we make is used to perpetuate the demands of a bloated marketplace? A monoculture?

  These questions aren’t just for designers. I know that.

  At some point when I was driving in Southern California, I decided to dictate every message that I saw into my phone, and I made this list. 78 messages. 

  We could say that this is lowest-common-denominator branding. Cheap marketing aimed at an audience with very little attention to spare, driving on polluted, crowded freeways. 

  Sort of like spam, I guess. I had an extreme reaction, but it was an honest one. Because the brand guidelines that I was being paid to create were supposed to be better than this, but what I really suspected, honestly, was that they weren’t. 

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  That my work designing the instructions necessary to manifest a billion dollar brand and the work of _these_ marketers and designers and media buyers actually had a lot in common – the selling of promises. This homesick moment had clouded my perception – or maybe, clarified it – and I was seeing very little difference between what was supposed to be the best, and the worst, of branding. 

  My reaction to this landscape was complicated, to say the least. It was a knee-jerk response triggered by the signage and billboards themselves but very much about urban planning. And the socio-economic conditions that make this particular place, this consumerist society overall, so receptive to the allure of branding. I felt the unattainable promise of better, cheaper, limitless and happier right there in the work that I do.

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  In fact, promise is a word I frequently used in my own branding presentations. Walter Landor, one of the giants of modern branding said: “Simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

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  Now, I don’t believe that all branding is bad, not by any means – and we don’t all do this kind of work. But many of us in design – and I’m thinking of my own career here – are in this business of selling – selling expectations and the illusion of trust. 

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  Turn on the app store and it can be just as disappointing as that highway.

  What role does each of us play in perpetuating this cult of the brand? How can I avoid, in my own work, participating in the acceleration of unsustainable, thin value? 

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  These are questions for all of us, I think – designers, brand strategists, investors and marketers. All too often, clients come back to me with the same branding lessons, equating ubiquity and saturation with success, as some kind of branding benchmark, while losing sight of the larger landscape.

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  And when I look at what we judge these to be – the Starbucks and Apples and Louis Vuittons of the world – I see business models and guidelines and best practices designed to relentlessly pursue the same ideas and ideals, again and again: ubiquity, speed, desire, trust and immediacy turned up to unattainable volumes.