May Flights Of Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest

The Original Angels at The Emmys, 2006

My mother bought me my first gun when I was five years old.

She did not want to buy it for me, but I begged and pleaded until she did. It was a toy gun, a .38 Special replica that fired caps off of those rounded red disks. The same gun that Kelly Garrett, Sabrina Duncan, and Jill Munroe carried. (My mother did not know at the time that our housekeeper Helga had been allowing me to watch episodes of “Charlie’s Angels” in secret; I was only officially allowed to watch PBS.)

“My name is Munroe!” I yelled to my mother, after mock-shooting a Bad Guy (it was a seagull) on our beach, thrilled by the reports of my toy gun’s caps.

“Munroe?” my mother queried, brushing brunette strands of hair out of her face against the wind. “Your name is Bartelby. Who is Munroe?”

“Jill!” I exclaimed, firing my toy gun again and channeling the woman I had seen on our brand new color television set, fighting Bad Guys and solving crimes and racing cars and playing tennis and looking fabulous, all feathered blonde hair and soft, whispery voice.

“I am Jill Munroe!”

My mother laughed, indulging me. “Well, mon cher, I am sure that you are.”

That evening, we watched an episode of “Charlie’s Angels” together, after I had confessed to her that I had been watching it, but without divulging Helga’s involvement. We watched Jill drive. We watched Jill run (in five-inch cork wedge heels). We watched Jill solve crimes.

As the closing credits rolled, I turned to my mother and asked excitedly, “I’m Jill, yes? I am Jill Munroe?”

“Yes,” my mother said to me, caressing my cheek, “you are definitely Jill Munroe.”

It’s a difficult space to be in, when one of your idols has died. When one of those icons of your youth has suddenly vanished. When everything that they represented to you comes back into focus. When suddenly that toy gun that you made your mother purchase for you, just so you could become so much more adept at being Jill Munroe, a.k.a. Farrah Fawcett, suddenly retains so much more meaning.

Farewell, Angel.

I shall miss you.

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ELSEWHERE ACROSS THE DIGITAL WORLD:
There is an excellent post up right now on BlogHer that is a fabulous compendium of Farrah Fawcett’s life and career, by AV Flox, of course. You should read it.

Job Applications In The 2.0

SuperCW And A Really Goode Job Application

Last evening I received an email from a dear friend of mine from back in my days of The Cocktail Circuit in Honolulu, Christa Wittmier. It was a brief note explaining that she was applying for a job, asking her friends and contacts to vote for her video application, and linking us to her application page at Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County. The “Really Goode Job” is for a social media whiz whose title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent,” and I think that the concept of requiring job applicants to submit YouTube video footage of why they deserve the job is amazingly fitting.

I really can’t think of a better way to test the talents of a potential social media maven than to request an application via video, and Christa, of course, rose to the challenge, compiling her extensive online curriculum vitae into exactly one minute. The video condenses a Google search into only the most essential information, and showcases it all remarkably well.

As a friend who is very well-acquainted with Christa’s tireless photoblogging efforts at Honolulu Nightlife Diaries, jealous of her constant VIP passes to only the hottest of Honolulu nightlife and arts events, and enamored with her ability to socialize and write it and photograph it all at the same time, I suppose it is no surprise that I voted for Super CW here.

(And also no surprise that I think you should, as well, since I give good recommendations like that.)

But more so I think that this is where job applications should be heading: concise, simple, creative communications of our talents.

In only sixty seconds.

What’s In A Brand?

This past weekend, I became engaged in a conversation with several friends on Twitter regarding Nabisco’s apparent redesign of the Oreo and Ritz brands’ packaging. I was not too surprised at my nearly irrationally vehement reaction against the redesign, for both aesthetic (i.e., “ZOMG the redesigns are sooooo flat and soulless and hideously awful!”) and purely practical (i.e., “Why was this necessary?! WHY?! Were they broken?!”) reasons. My reaction reminded me rather a lot of my reactions to the Peter Arnell-orchestrated rebrandings of Pepsi and Tropicana in late 2008 and early 2009 (although I will concede that those two reactions were far more vehement than mine to Nabisco’s recent foible). The discussion got me thinking not only about the reasons why and when a particular brand chooses to even entertain the (always costly and usually risky) venture of rebranding, but also about our relationships to brands (and even the very concept of brands) in general, as a society and as individuals.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this weekend also saw the resurgence of a particularly thought-provoking blog meme started last year by advertising industry blogger Jane Sample, who published a humorous and engaging graphic representation of all of the major brands with which she came into contact throughout the course of one day. The piece was published one year ago to this day, and I remember reading it last May (and reading the ensuing comments and plethora of other advertising and media industry bloggers’ versions of their own Brand Timeline Portraits) and placing it as a line item on that List Of Fun Personal Projects That Atherton Bartelby Somehow Never Seems To Get Accomplished. This weekend, however, thanks to a revival of Sample’s original post by the Rocketboom blog, and an additional mega-boost from a reblogged mention by Linkage King Jason Kottke, the “Brand Timeline Portrait” meme has been, as Alan Wolk noted today, entirely reanimated.

So I brushed off my epic “To Do” list and recorded my own Brand Timeline Portrait today.

Brand Timeline Portrait Of Atherton Bartelby

I’m really glad that I took the time to do it, and to reflect on how it looks, on what it says about me, and also on what it means about brands in general. Because not only does it tell me a lot about the differences in my life now versus if I had completed it when I first saw it last year, but it presents me and others who see it with a timeline of my experiences, a visual narrative of not only my daily life, but of me as a person. In some ways, the brands represent me more individually than do the color of my hair or my green eyes; in others, they evoke a striking sense of community, i.e., they’re not only my brands, but those of my agency’s colleagues who share my work space, of the other New Yorkers who take the same forms of branded transportation as do I, or even, for that matter, of those who live in the same branded city as do I. Brands are, or can become, as much of an integral part of our individual and collective consciousness as our experiences, or of our very memories. So I don’t suppose a vehement consumer reaction to a seemingly unnecessary rebranding, that has at first glance been executed with little or no thought given to the previous brand experience that has been shared by so many different individuals, is really so very surprising.

Obviously, much thought goes into any rebranding initiative or redesign. I in no way mean to imply that all rebranding campaigns are executed with no thought whatsoever paid to the brand and to how its consumer base will receive its new identity, beyond the initial studies of profits or the eye-roll-inducing evangelizations of the “Personal Branding Experts” on Twitter. But I do think that, more often than not, rebranding initiatives get a bit too caught up in themselves, a bit too blinded to the products’, well, connections to a vast group of other human beings, a bit too ignorant of the hearts, souls, and experiences that consumers have invested in the brands themselves.

Because brands are not just products, or logo artwork, or packaging, or pixels and vectors and typography arranged nicely (or not so nicely) in space and time. Brands represent shared experiences. And brands (and rebranding) shouldn’t always only be considered from a profit standpoint, or from the standpoint of failed artists who are now ad men and attempting to impose their own aesthetics on products that are not only parts of their own experience, but parts of the collective experience of the rest of the society that consumes them, as well. Because brands are not just about profit (or shouldn’t be); they’re about hearts, souls, and memories, as well.

It turns out there’s an awful lot in a brand. And it would behoove a lot of people, particularly those who are directing and manipulating them, to keep this in mind.

My Favorite Day Of The Year

Churchill Downs - Louisville Kentucky

Derby Day.

The mere thought of the day conjures poignant road markers from memory. The scent of my mother’s rosewater; and that of the peculiar mixture of mint, bourbon, and tobacco on my father’s breath, as he knelt to properly tie my bow tie; and that of the Kentucky grass, and earth, on every first Saturday of May that my childhood memories still retain. Flashes of scarlet: my mother’s Chanel hat, reserved for wear only once a year, at Churchill Downs; the single, perfect rose affixed to my father’s jacket; and, of course, the fabled shawl of roses draped over the winning horse. Laughter. Excitement. Words.

“Nothing else exists but that shawl of roses.”

Indeed, it does not.

My inner circle of friends and those more regular readers of Curious Affairs will already know that horse racing is the only “sport” that truly inspires any sort of meaningful “sports writing” from me. Except it’s not even really “sports writing” so much as it is an excuse to wander through happy memories of my childhood, when my family’s annual triptych of trips to watch the Triple Crown races each year smacked of nothing but excitement. Even later, as an adult, when the Triple Crown races began marking prominent events or statuses in my life that were not always happy, I still welcomed the beginning of the races with gladness. For it is usually on Derby Day, that day on which any horse, really, can win, and on which no one is yet rabidly rooting for the next Triple Crown Winner, when I most adore wandering through memory, and winning, and…hope.

Because for me the tradition of the Triple Crown was not ever about how much money one could make from their picks (although my father seemed to have an almost preternatural talent for picking precisely those colts that would win, including the last three Triple Crown Winners). It was about the pride that one had in their picks, or in the horses they had raised, and trained, and sent to the races. It was about the validation that one would feel when their horse did, in fact, win the race. And it was about hope, not only that ones horse would win the Derby, but that this horse would go on to win the next two races, thereby gracing the world of horse racing with its next Triple Crown Winner.

Over the years, for better but also sometimes for worse, these values have crept into other areas of my life, as well, until Derby Day has become a day of celebrating those three tenets of horse racing, and of life. And although sometimes, as for this 135th Derby Day, I may not be in the most fabulous of places in my life, this day still always inspires me to take pride, no matter how unfabulous things may seem at the time, in my life, and to endlessly hope for the acquisition of my own figurative shawl of roses, and, perhaps most importantly of all, to never lose sight of winning.

And so that is why, tomorrow, on this first Saturday of May, as I scream hysterically rooting for jockey Gabriel Saez to ride trainer Larry Jones‘ colt Friesan Fire to victory in The 135th Running Of The Kentucky Derby, I shall be smiling.

For the memories of Derby Days past.

And for the hope of those to come.

Friesan Fire - Image Copyright Andy Lyons / Getty Images

In Praise Of The Pixel Pushers

Design by Hannah Ljung - Grafisk Utbildningsfonden - Uppsala Sweden

I first became aware of the significant importance of visual communication the day I helped banish all art on my college campus.

It was during my sophomore year of my undergraduate schooling, when, as a member of both the lesbian, gay, and bisexual student group, as well as the AIDS awareness student group, I assisted in the implementation of Visual AIDS‘ Day Without Art, in observance of World AIDS Day. Launched on the first day of December in 1989, the observance (since renamed “Day With(out) Art”) was intended to make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and in order to inspire positive action, some 800 art and AIDS groups in the United States participated, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, and sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. On my college’s campus, we raided the theatre department’s stash of black fabric, and covered nearly the entire campus with it, draping every sculpture, every art installation, and every painting (even the portraits that were displayed in the administration building of our college’s founder and of his wife, our school’s namesake) in the heavy black cloth.

On a campus such as ours, noted for its art and artists, it was a visually arresting display of how much a part of our daily lives art actually was; it was profoundly compelling, to see all of those expansive swatches of black fabric obfuscating the art that was all around us.

Years later, having graduated from college and fallen rather unexpectedly into a career of graphic design, the importance of visual communication was made abundantly clear to me once again, upon my first reading of what is still one of my most treasured essays on the practice of graphic design, by designer Jessica Helfand. Although excerpts from this essay appear in many places throughout this blog, it seems fitting to repeat them here, again, today, on the anniversary of the founding of Icograda, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, and on the 15th annual observance of World Graphics Day.

Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars tucked inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children’s chubby board books.

Now, as a jaded designer who has practiced the craft of graphic design for nearly fifteen years, this passage may read like a no-brainer. Of course graphic design is everywhere, all around us, communicating its messages to us either explicitly or, if it is done very well, implicitly. However, as a designer who was relatively new to his field when he first read this essay, its message was one of awesome importance; it is not every day that one realizes what a profoundly privileged place one inhabits, when their career is entirely about the effective communication of messages, both textually and visually.

This realization was almost as powerful for me, if not more, than the realization of how profoundly important art was in my everyday life, on that first Day Without Art of years before.

Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by numerous disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, politics and performance.

It is this power, this special, ubiquitous nature of graphic design and visual communication, and its ability to effect change in the world around us, that Icograda’s World Graphics Day celebrates. Informed by and informing countless disciplines and practices, design and its designers wield the power to effect change in equally countless arenas of daily life. We see this power in TEDTalks that link design to technology and innovation; in the branding and rebranding of corporations, products, and services; in the efforts of designers to practice their crafts with gazes toward the future, and sustainability; and in the work of experience designers, designing to effect change in the way in which an audience interacts with content on the Internet.

Graphic design is a popular art, a practical art, an applied art, and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the visualization of ideas.

Ideas that, when executed effectively, may facilitate real change. Everywhere. And all around us.

I am aware, on a nearly daily basis, of how fortunate I am, and of how proud I feel, to be able to call myself a designer, and to practice the art that I practice.

But it is on this day, every year since I first became aware of this design “holiday,” that my pride swells just a little bit more than usual.

Happy World Graphics Day!

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NOTE: The above-quoted passages are excerpted from Jessica Helfand’s stellar essay, “Paul Rand: The Modern Designer,” which appears in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture.