“This book invites you to collaborate with 15 Minnesota artists—a project conceived in the spirit of Drawing Club at Walker Open Field, where artists and the public add to a pool of collectively created artworks. Rip a page out and color it for yourself, hang it up on your wall and photograph it, or tear it up and use it to make a new piece—but whatever you do, share it by uploading the results to mnartists.org/coloringbook. There you’ll be able to view, contribute, and comment on the work, participating in the social experience of art-making, collaboration, and play.”
For the cover we opted to reproduce all the works featured in the book in bright neon inks, all layered on top of each other. The typeface, Maple by Process Type Foundry, is designed by a Minnesotan. The book was printed in Minnesota. Everything about this book is straight Minnesota.
Each of the pages containing the artwork was perforated so the user could easily share or use the art in a way other than just simply coloring it.
We often have the pleasure of entertaining visitors to the Design Studio. However, this is the first time–to our knowledge–that said visitors sent thank you cards composed of deconstructed Walker print ephemera:
Now accepting applications for the Walker Design Fellowship–Deadline: June 8, 2012
Take our new Walker Art Center Design Studio ART TEST to see if you’re a good match–there’s a special message for candidates who answer all 18 questions correctly.
Since 1980, the Walker Art Center Design department has maintained a graphic design fellowship program that provides recent graduates (both undergrad and grad) the opportunity to work in a professional design studio environment. Selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, fellows come from a diverse assortment of graphic design programs, such as Art Center College of Design, California Institute of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, NC State University, Rhode Island School of Design, Royal College of Art, Werkplaats Typografie, Yale University, and many others.
Fellows are employed full-time for one year and are assigned a wide range of graphic design projects, from designing identities and related collateral for programs and exhibitions to assisting with large-scale initiatives such as catalogues, campaigns, wayfinding systems, and websites. Fellows are involved in all aspects of the design process, from conception through delivery, and everything in-between.
How to apply Please attach a letter of interest, a résumé with the names and contact information of three references, and a pdf portfolio containing 8–10 examples of graphic design work to walker.design.fellowship@gmail.com. Keep your files under 10MB. No phone calls please.
What would do you some good is an establishing shot or an articulation of the circumstances. Circumstances can’t be ignored, but they might happily de-intellectualize the approach. Any design, from weaponry to cobblin’ (not sure why, but it seems right to omit the terminal “g” here.) is a provisional response to particular and irreproducible circumstances. Our circumstances, in their barest psycho-skeletal detail, were to design and program a website for Yale Union (YU), an institution that hasn’t been around since the Pleistocene epoch or anything. Things are un-smelted here. Our arms are sausagey, our knuckles-drag, and we are trying to adjust ourselves to change, shifting our frame, looking for a position that doesn’t shoot pains down the backs of our thighs. Design plays its part; decisions depend not on their immutability but on their adaptability to all this change.
The attempt was low-altitude. We wanted to take in some ‘real life’ in the design, which is to say, we wanted to take up the real concerns of our institution. So, we made a website that was responsive, like responsive in the superficial it-adapts-to-the-size-of-the-device-way, but also responsive in the sense that the site—a very chopped and screwed Wordpress—can respond in real time to additional content and editorial changes. With the internet, everything too is un-smelted. Nothing ends. So you can make something and then change it and then undo that change and then change it again. We wanted to make that pliability a loud fact. We wanted to build something forgiving, you know, something that allowed us to think and make at the same time.
What else should we say? Should we say, “Well, the site follows the old modernist notion that anything is possible, the postmodernist notion that everything is exhausted, the post-postmodernist notion that since everything is exhausted, everything is permitted.” Bushwa. Not untrue. But a total stucco job. It’s always tempting to put this kind of response before stimulus, to sit back, make finger-steeples and retire into elaborate theoretical justifications for your work, but if we treat our work too ponderously we might negate the very qualities that give it oxygen.
Higher intelligence and special consultation arrived in the third act when Stuart Bailey, a close friend and kind of avuncular figure, invited us to speak to his class at Otis College of Art and Design. Even now, we aren’t all that inclined or enabled to counter the students’ insightful criticism and questions:
1. The pressure of language is perhaps too constant.
2. The site is afraid to let itself go. Better said, perhaps it pays too much respect to formal requirements.
3. (1+2). At worst it behaves like a kid in a tuxedo, at best, it behaves like a kid in a tuxedo.
4. By nature, humans organize information hierarchically, so the absence of a hierarchy naturally makes a statement. Is that statement worth the number of readers that will defect?
Still, the nightmare is involution. The nightmare is that the site produces communication signals, but does not in fact communicate. Have you ever been to a party and someone is just talking at you, like really chewing your face off, and you don’t actually need to be there for the conversation to carry forward? And like, yeah, wow, we don’t want the reader to think it’s a great idea, but palpably an idea. We have a thing about ‘ideas’.
—A.Flint Jamison, S. Ponik, R. Snowden for Yale Union (YU)
Signage on the east wall at The Hollywood Burger Bar, 4211 Northeast Sandy Boulevard, Portland, OR 97213. One example of how in the course of this design we went a decent distance in a circle, to arrive not far from where we started, but considerably more informed. So much for being sui-generis, first to the apple, the original progenitor. I mean, dig how deeply sunk in our subconscious this place is. Clearly our copulation is simulated. Fraudulent. Deeply imitative of the Burger Bar!
David Pearson, who speaks in our final Insights lecture Tuesday night, celebrates the printed book in all its dimensions despite the publishing industry’s woes and its headlong dive into e-books and other digital platforms. He began his professional career in 2002 at Penguin Books, the venerable British imprint, where he fused a contemporary sensibility with classical bookish elements to reinvigorate the brand. His seemingly traditional designs can be both unorthodox and unexpected, such as all-typographic book covers for Penguin Classics, the rainbow spectrum applied to the book spines of Pocket Penguins, or the use of letterpress and tactile papers in the Great Ideas series. He formed White’s Books with editor Jonathan Jackson in 2008, repackaging classic texts by Shakespeare and Dickens as well as titles such as Jane Eyre and Treasure Island. He is also an avid collector of printed ephemera and maintains an overflowing Flickr site dedicated to print and typography.
Your work with Penguin references the breadth of 2D design, from clay tablets to computer graphics. How do you keep your designs from being overly derivative of the source material, and why is it important and relevant to work in these historical styles?
I think I try and gain a way in by presenting readers with something familiar (in the case of Great Ideas this was the history of the printed word). With this in place, it is then possible to layer interesting new meaning on top and to play with the form in unexpected ways. These minor subversions are essential in elevating the work beyond pastiche.
Readers can only enjoy the rules being broken if they have a strong sense of them in the first place and using historical models greatly helps on this front.
Working with Penguin afforded you a vast collection of iconic material to work with, how did you both build on and pay tribute to it with your work? Was it more inspiring or intimidating to work with designs and systems created by legends like Tschichold ?
Tschichold’s level of proficiency can be intimidating to say the least but the more I Iearned about his mission at Penguin, the more I realised the humble nature of it. His main achievement seemed to be that of brand re-affirmation and he attained this simply by refining what had gone before. Nothing more. That’s an incredibly powerful lesson for a young deisgner: that it’s OK to not reinvent the wheel.
Contemporary graphic design can have a tendency to be self-referential (for example, your amazing cover for The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Is there a distinction in your mind between that kind of work and the more historically influenced work?
Yes and no. All the (Great Ideas) covers are iterations of the rules we set ourselves e.g. using type as image, a limited colour palette and debossing. Within these parameters we just tried to create as much pace and variation as possible. This particular design was one of the most self reverential but of course, there’s no way the whole series could’ve behaved in the same way.
Your Flickr stream is full of beautiful examples of print ephemera from the first half or so of the 20th century. What was the impetus for it and how/where do you find the pieces you feature in it?
It is the spirit of this work and the visibility of the process that draws me in. It took me a long time to work out that something can be quite poorly-created technically but if rendered with enthusiasm and spirit, it can communicate every bit as successfully as something polished.
In the main, the pieces come from ephemera fairs but online auction sites also throw up a few gems.
Has this archive influenced the way you work and think about your own design process?
Only now, when I look back at the work I produced for Penguin, do I see how many lines trace directly back to what I learned in the archive.In fact, my talk will show just how few design choices have ever been my own!
Also on your Flickr page, you have some pretty impressive pictures of the Penguin archive. Could you talk a little bit about your experience there and how you as a designer utilized the seemingly vast collection there?
I joined the company as a fan and was already an avid collector of Penguin books. Therefore, the idea for producing a design retrospective (Penguin by Design) felt like a natural one. I’d always wanted to get into the archives and fortunately for me, this project gave me the perfect excuse. That said, I simply couldn’t take on such a project again as it was a true labour of love and involved too many all-nighters (the exclusive property of twenty-somethings, I’ve since found out).
David will speak on March 27 at the Walker Cinema.
As seemingly dissimilar as two cities could be, Minneapolis and Los Angeles have parallel histories in terms of public transportation. Minneapolis once had 530 miles of streetcar service, while LA’s extensive streetcar network was the envy of the country. Both have since been dismantled, and both cities are now working to rebuild their transitway systems. Part and parcel of that process is the communication necessary to promote public transportation options in these car-centric locales. For a discussion on the topic, we invited Michael Lejeune, creative director of Metro LA (and speaker at next week’s Insights Design Lecture), to join Hennepin County planner Lisa Middag to talk about transit, opportunity, and jettisoning “that road rage that’s sucking up your soul.”
LA Metro Rail and Liner map
Hey Lisa and Michael, let’s start by telling us what do you do at Metro LA and Hennepin County.
Michael Lejeune: I lead a team of talented designers who collectively are responsible for all things visible at Metro, the nation’s third largest public transportation system. We create every element of Metro’s visual communication, including brand elements, advertising, wayfinding, and environmental graphics, timetables, maps, fare media, and customer information, bus and rail fleet design, web, and mobile presence, and merchandising. Day to day, I design, I review and approve design, I art direct, I set strategy, I do a lot of writing as the primary author of Metro’s voice. And I cajole, plead, and bargain to keep a couple thousand projects per year moving toward deadlines.
Minneapolis/St. Paul transitway map that includes the planned Southwest LRT and Bottineau lines
Lisa Middag: I’m a planner working on Southwest LRT and the Bottineau Transitway—two major transit projects in Hennepin County. We work collaboratively with the cities along these corridors and other partners (including the local transit authority) to develop land-use policies and plans that will leverage the best economic development outcomes from these large transit investments. So, we’re working to provide a full range of housing options, stimulate business and job growth, and enable transit-oriented development along these transit corridors.
What got you interested in working in public transportation?
Michael: I cannot tell a lie. I wasn’t seeking a job in the public sector, or at an in-house studio, or in transportation. The position of creative director had just been created and a colleague let me know about it. It was the right time in my life for a change, and I threw my hat in the candidate ring. Now, nine years later, this job has brought me to so many interesting new frontiers (like having the thrill of speaking at the Walker). And I have grown to love the wonky side of public transportation, and all the vital ideas and advances that this sector brings. It’s proved, for me, a job with the perfect combination of high-level strategic thinking and everyday making. I’m really lucky: I get to roll up my sleeves and think about LA’s future and how transportation can make that future really work. And every day I also hit the boards and actually design as well. Plus, working with a smart, dedicated, passionate team. It’s heaven, mostly.
Lisa: It’s one of the most critical issues to the long-term sustainability of our region. With our growing immigrant and senior communities, we are becoming a much more transit-dependent population, and we can’t build our way out of our traffic congestion problems (we cannot even maintain the roads we have). People are spending increasingly higher percentages of their income on housing and transportation, so it’s really about equity and sustainability for me… and with boomers and the younger generation competing for housing in smart growth communities, the low-income folks are going to be priced out of these markets. And that’s not even touching on the health and environmental benefits, which are equally compelling.
Traffic on LA's 405...
vs.
...on a Gold Line train
How about your own experience? Any great stories on your daily commute?
Michael: Being here at Metro at this point in my life feels like karmic payback for all the time I’ve spent in LA traffic over the years. When I joined Metro, I went from two-plus hours a day in the car to the dream commute: many days, I walk or ride my bike to my local Metro Rail station, hop on board for a 16-minute ride, and then walk out of Union Station and into my office building. Of course, I am like most LA commuters: public transit doesn’t work for me every day, and I do still drive when the situation demands, but more often than not, I’m using our system and doing some great people-watching at the same time.
A sample of Metro LA's personality
No one story of my rides comes to mind, but plenty of colorful memories are playing across my brain as I think of my time on Metro. The thing that I love—and that may at first seem unappealing to the single car driver—is that you really see your city and all its varied inhabitants when you use public transit. I’m remembering many groups of young children, riding Metro on their field trips, shouting with glee every time the train would stop and start; the stout middle-aged man I saw last week waiting for the bus near my house, dressed from head to toe in bright gold Lakers shorts and jersey, including purple socks and matching wristbands and headband; the faces of people I see weekly, my fellow Gold Line riders, who I nod and smile with, though we don’t know each other’s names or stories; the woman shouting loudly about Armageddon and how today is our last chance to be saved from the fires of hell. To me, these snippets are icing on the cake, and I see them as part and parcel to being out in my city and sharing the ride.
Lisa: I ride the train almost every day, but like Michael, it doesn’t work for everything, and there are definitely days where I have a meeting at the end of the day, and I’ll be in a nearby suburb, and I do the math. It’s just faster for me to get from certain point As to certain point Bs by car. But I really believe transit is something you practice, and you get better at it. I’m much more likely to take buses now that I ride the train than I use to be. And now I carry a system map in my purse—to fend off those notions of being stranded, because our bus system is pretty good, but our mobile app is really only helpful if you know the number you want to take.
One of my favorite stories is about a guy—I think his name was Clarence—and it was his 47th birthday. He was carrying his beer right with him on the bus celebrating. But he was drawing everyone around into a conversation in honor of his birthday, talking about his grandkids, and it gave all the other riders permission to participate (because in the Twin Cities, there is a cone of silence that people observe on public transit). And into this loosened atmosphere, a guy asked which bus he’d need to catch downtown in order to get to his sister’s place in South St. Paul. And I’m sitting there with this system map, and we all start discussing the best route. Many people offered suggestions about what to avoid, so a lot of folks know this system really well, because they depend on it. It’s a choice for me, but for a lot of folks it’s a necessity.
A simulated earthquake at Universal Studios Hollywood takes place in a subway station
Can you describe the public perception of these transit options in Los Angeles and Minneapolis?
Michael: Matt Raymond, our chief communications officer, who joined Metro just before I did, has observed that LA had a ton of great service, both bus and rail, but that it seemed that very few Angelenos knew about it. This is mostly true, and it made the first leg of our design journey clear: make Metro cool, and get people to notice. But we had to do more than just say, “Here we are, give us a try.” We had to start chipping away at this idea, born and bred in LA, that the car is king, that it’s the only way to go. (Of course, having the nation’s worst traffic 26 years in a row helps us a lot in this regard.) What we have tried to do is present Metro—our bus and rail service, the idea of carpools and vanpools and biking to work and in general, sharing the ride—as an option that beats the car. At the same time, a potent portion of our messaging has been aimed at shoring up support for public transportation as a fundable idea. This means that we have, with demonstrated success, advanced recognition of the need to invest in our infrastructure. LA County has voted to tax itself not once, not twice, but three times in the last 25 years, specifically to build more rail lines, improve our highways, add bus service, and expand and improve our system. And our designed communications program has had quite a bit to do with persuading people to support this idea over the past nine years.
Lisa: Hmmm. There are a lot of transit riders in Minneapolis—there were around 80 million rides last year. But most of our ridership is by city bus with lots of stops and transfers, which means slower service. We definitely have strong commuter express service to park-and-rides in the suburbs, but this is still a region where people “drive to qualify,” so there are way more drivers than riders. Although I think (hope) these attitudes are starting to change. I love our train—I get on the Hiawatha line every day to go to work, but until the Central Corridor LRT opens in 2014, it’s still a single, high-frequency line, not a real network. (We have Northstar Commuter Rail too, which is a great addition, but it’s limited service.) And I’m one of those peculiar folks who will walk a little farther for the reliability and quality of train service (over bus).
Northstar Train in Minneapolis
The political and public piece is so important. The Twin Cities area also was successful in getting a regional transit tax passed in 2008. In fact, transit referenda have been remarkably successful across the country—I think something like more than 70 percent successful—and even in more recent years during the recession economy. So people really see a need for public investment in a working transit system. And it’s not just the general public, but our business community—the local and regional chambers of commerce—who are speaking out these days on behalf of expanding our system. They understand how it contributes to the competitiveness of an entire region and their ability to build their businesses and attract first-rate talent. Unfortunately, some of our legislators are a little behind on grasping this connection, and at the federal level it’s really a challenge.
Michael: We think of it this way: everyone who lives, works or plays in LA County is a Metro customer. We operate transit, but we also plan carpool lanes (and build them in partnership with CalTrans). We plan bikepaths and promote biking as a mode. We are the bank that parses out money for small and large local transportation projects, from local dial-a-ride service to improving pedestrian pathways around transit. We are implementing LA’s first ExpressLanes toll roads. We have the largest vanpool program in the country.
So through all these programs and many more, we touch the life of every resident and visitor every day. We want people to share the ride, but we know that the majority of Angelenos don’t or won’t try transit. For them, the important message is this: the more people who do take transit, the less cars on the road with them. With the right storytelling, that translates into a compelling case for supporting public transit through legislation and more important, tax measures that insure a steady, unraidable fund for LA County. We have voted to tax ourselves three times, and we’re looking at another ballot measure for November 2012.
Metro LA ad
So yes, Lisa is right. The public “gets it.” Sadly, Congress isn’t altogether there yet, and the dialogue of balanced budgets and reducing the national debt becomes a tool for starving transit. The big idea we are pushing now (and one that has always been true) is that transit means jobs, both to operate and build. It’s good for the economy, and it will prove good for LA County’s economy in the next 20 years. The hard part in our business is timelines: people are put off by the idea that it will take 20 years to build our subway all the way to the sea, and it will be really, really expensive. But if we don’t start now, if we don’t make steady, sometimes painful progress, we will be in serious trouble later.
So we keep the dialogue going with a steady but varied toolbox of ideas. For some: “Go Metro now; you save money, time and jettison that road rage that’s sucking up your soul.” (Wording TBD!)
But what do you think it is about cars that draws people away from these other commuting options?
Michael: I don’t know if it’s the same in other cities, because I imagine every place has its own vibe and commuting “norm,” if there is such a thing. But in LA, when you are a regular car commuter, your vehicle becomes your extended home. I’ve seen women applying eyeliner, men using their electric shaver, kids changing clothes in the back. And there are the cell phone warriors, the folks eating any- and everything for breakfast while they drive, the smokers who toss their butts out the window (what, that car doesn’t have an ashtray?), the folks with their superduper titanium travel mugs of joe. My father used to commute just 12 miles to his downtown LA job, but he would read the paper in traffic, and that habit was the undoing of his beloved BMW Bavaria when he rear-ended someone while perusing the sports section. I think people cling to their cars because, spending so much time in them, they start to fill that time with the activity they don’t have time for because they are spending so much time in the car. Vicious circle, yes?
BMW Bavaria, circa 1974
But the irony is, you can do just about all these things while riding public transit. And it’s safer and more relaxing. And you can practically hear your piggy bank filling up with extra coin with each and every trip.
Lisa: Well, I know this is a generalization, and that it’s changing as we diversify, but I think, as Michael said, the car is an extension of personal space, and people around here like their privacy. If you engage as Clarence did, it’s considered aggressive, inappropriate, or just irritating. People don’t want to be bothered to deal with the public nature of transit space. It’s like the people on the airplane who have their earbuds in even when they can’t be listening to their players. They’re avoiding being part of a social space. But this is one of the things I love about public transit, that it is public in this sense of belonging to the community, and it’s an extension of the community’s space.
Pacific Electric Railway Map, 1920
This brings up something interesting. For the amount of time we spend in cars, and how heavily they’re advertised and promoted, both LA and the Twin Cities were actually known for their extensive streetcar systems before they were dismantled in the ’60s and ’70s. Los Angeles had the largest system in the world by 1925, and most Minneapolitans were within a few blocks from a station at any given location. Do you ever look to that past for insight on our relationship with public transportation today?
Michael: That’s a painful question. LA was truly the envy of the nation in the early 20th century. You could ride from the top of the San Gabriel Mountains to the water’s edge in Santa Monica, all on a Red Car. Today, we are at least moving toward that once-comprehensive system by building more rail, and the irony is that we are using some of the same rail right-of-ways that still linger from those glorious days. But LA, like so many cities, sprawled during the postwar boom, when housing was cheap and plentiful and everyone wanted a suburban lawn and a garage for their shiny new car. It was grand then, too, as you zoomed along mostly clear freeways and could crisscross Southern California with ease. Metro’s Transportation Library is one of the best in the nation, a treasure trove of maps, data, and photos from both those eras. The insight there is not a new one, but that doesn’t make it any less urgent: Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Twin Cities Rapid Transit Route Map, 1914
Lisa: Yes, so painful to lovers of transit. One of our transportation planners at Hennepin County had an old streetcar system map out the other day, and it was truly amazing—you could go all the way from Stillwater to Lake Minnetonka.
One takeaway for me from the streetcar history is the persistent connection between transit and business/development. Many streetcar lines came about as the result of collaborations between would-be transit operators and businessmen or developers who were interested in the opportunities along and at the end of the lines. And this is part of what made building and operating transit affordable back in the day—not just farebox revenues. (We struggle against perceptions that transit operations should be self-sustaining, when roads and bridges are anything but, and transit is such a public good.) At least the new federal guidelines for transit projects seem poised to make streetcars more fundable in the future, which is a really interesting change.
Then how do you go about engaging the public in promoting these spaces and options?
Michael: This idea of engagement is a very real, everyday thing for us. I look at what we do as this ongoing conversation with everyone in LA County, whether they use Metro service or not. And lucky for us, we have a pretty big canvas. We use our livery, the interiors and exteriors of thousands of buses and trains that traverse the landscape, as space to engage. We use the web in a much more robust way now, and with a million unique visits a month, there’s a lot of opportunity. We use public art and marketing messages in our stations to inform, engage, delight, and challenge riders. We tweet; we post; we make little films. And more and more, we are deputizing our customers to contribute to and expand the conversation, from sponsoring a video contest on “Why I Ride” to commission original works from artists who have never “published” before. Our English- and Spanish-language blogs are read avidly and we use these to make sure all sides of the transportation conversation are being heard.
Metro LA ad featuring local artists
We do all this because we know that adopting transit as your “ride” isn’t easy, certainly not at first. You have to change your routine. You have to open up a bit, learn how to use the system, and then move beyond the cocoon of your car and share the ride with others. So when we do convince folks to try it and then stick with it, we want them to have an experience that is safe, reliable, friendly, and feels as unique and of-the-place as LA does. LA is this sun-drenched, colorful polyglot. We want what we say and design to feel that way, too. Our first art director, Neil Sadler, used to say, “Let’s not make anything boring.” And for the most part, we’ve lived up to that as best we can.
Above the escalators to the Metro Rail subway, artist Bill Bell has installed 12 vertical light sticks producing varying patterns of light and color. Passersby may discover unexpected images that are hidden in the light patterns, and by speaking near a hidden microphone can activate a responsive sound system. Among the over 300 electronic images viewers may see and sounds they may hear are a passing freight train, taxis, Duke Ellington, Rin Tin Tin, and Marilyn Monroe. “Some will get it, some won’t,” Bell says. “Don’t worry, it’s supposed to be fun.”
Lisa: Well, they are public spaces—owned by the public, really—so you have to if you hope for their support. But you also need quality community engagement if you want the best possible outcomes. If you’re hoping to provide great access to jobs, affordable housing, businesses, services, natural amenities, etc., you need to talk with folks about how they hope to use the service, how it should be woven into the fabric of their existing communities, and what they want for their communities in the future.
I was really intrigued by your comments about creating a felt sense of the public transit “space” and a transit experience “that is safe, reliable, friendly and feels as unique and of-the-place as LA does. LA is this sun-drenched, colorful polyglot.” Because Metro LA’s work on their neighborhood ticket stations/kiosks and obviously their campaigns really embrace this idea. I think we are so utilitarian in terms of our view of transit as a public service here locally, but we really don’t embrace the platforms, the vehicles, as this great opportunity for creating public spaces. We have some interesting stations with public art that attempts to do this, but I don’t think we’ve been terribly successful. It’s kind of the old idea of poetry on the subway will change the nature of the ride, right?
Michael: We’re changing the face of LA County. We’re going to make a bit of a mess doing so, and it will take awhile, but it will be worth it, for the long-term growth and health of this amazing place we live. Stay with us while we build the future. And here’s another, so important for our core group of “transit dependent” riders who are with us day in and day out: we’re going to give you the best system of bus and rail transportation we can. We’re going to enliven your day with beautiful and thoughtful art, with poets reading on your bus, with engaging reminders of how you can save even more or where Metro can take you. We’re going to give you progressive digital tools that help you know when your bus or train will arrive, where your next stop is, and how you hop from this line to that. (Including a smartcard that you can load and reuse every day, that you can lose without worry about losing your balance, and that you can also use for other purchases.) And we’re going to do all we can to make your ride safe and pleasant, and get you there on time.
And finally, what’s your goal at the end of the day?
Michael:
1. Create something, anything, that compels some part of our vast audience to try going Metro.
2. Meet deadlines.
3. Be kind and have fun.
Lisa: I like Michael’s pattern here: 1) what are we trying to do?, 2) accountability strategy, and 3) philosophy. So, what about:
1. Connect people to more opportunity via transit and transit-oriented development.
2. Listen better.
3. Do something that intrigues you and has the power to change the world (even if it’s just your slice of it).
***
Michael will speak on March 20 at the Walker Cinema. You can take the 4, 6, 12, or 25 Metro Transit buses here, or plan your own trip!
Update: Watch Michael Lejeune’s talk on the Walker Channel:
I was able to catch up with graphic designers Zak Klauck and David Yun to talk a little bit about WAX, a bi-annual print magazine with writer Aeriel Brown that explores the unique intersection of art, culture and surfing in and around the city…New York City to be specific. Growing up in Los Angeles and living in Laguna Beach for a fair bit of my life, skate and surf culture influenced the way I dressed, the music I listened to and the things that I read. Being familiar with a lot of the publications that have come out of these cultures, I’m excited to see that WAX gives voice to an entirely different demographic.
They’re currently raising funds to make this all happen, and with less than 10 days to go, help them reach their goal by backing them on Kickstarter here!
(1) Who are you and what do you do?
My Name is Zak Klauck and I’m a freelance graphic designer living and working in New York.
I’m David Yun, a graphic designer living in Brooklyn, NY. I’m an Art Director at 2×4 and I also teach graphic design and do some freelance work for galleries and artists I know. I started WAX Magazine with my partner Aeriel Brown and our friend (and neighbor) Zak.
(2) What came first, surfing or design? Over the years how have the two influenced each other in your lives?
DY: Skateboarding came first for me — along with its associated aesthetics, ideologies and subcultural values. As a teenager living in the suburbs, you would put on baggie jeans, listen to Op Ivy and hang out on the loading docks behind the local Dunkin’ Donuts. It helped you feel like you were a part of something bigger and more meaningful than everything else that was being sold to you on TV or in malls. It was the combination of resistance and style, or resistance through style, that attracted me. The visual culture of skateboard decks, t-shirts, skate magazines like Thrasher, all channeled my interests into something productive, visually compelling, and community-driven.
(top to bottom: Operation Ivy logo, Black Flag flyer by Raymond Pettibon, THRASHER Magazine logo, Artwork by Jim Phillips)
Graphic design offers a similar venue for channeling my interests. It’s always been a lens through which I can filter (and participate in) the things I’m drawn to, whether that’s contemporary art, music, or design. And so while surfing was a natural progression from skating, I’ve naturally been looking for a way of participating through design, but from a different angle (than making tshirts or surf art). I’ve had a growing interest in editorial work, especially in the last few years at 2×4, and so starting WAX seemed like the perfect next step for me.
ZK: For me, design came first. Surfing started as a weekend activity to escape the city. When we first started talking about the idea for the magazine it was more about the community surfing in NY than about the act itself. We were meeting so many designers, artists, architects, writers and just interesting people who happen to surf. The connection between the activity and the people seemed worth talking about. In this case we wanted to act somewhat outside traditional surf culture, not that we want to ignore it, but rather define our own interests within this community. This became the catalyst between varying creative practices and disciplines to occupy a single magazine.
I had always been aware — somewhat remotely — of traditional surf culture on the west coast. The magazine wasn’t initially intended to cover that. I am more interested in the unexpected and difficult nature of surfing in New York and how that inspires the people who are doing it. I think all surf culture is inherently visual, it’s such an experiential activity that demands a certain respect for the natural surroundings — which is why urban surfing is particularly interesting. This is something we are exploring. We want a magazine that is very visual, but that also directly reflects the community we are surveying as well as our interests.
(Learn to surf by Raymond Pettibon)
(3) What inspired WAX Magazine? How is it different from other surf magazines like Surfer/Surf/Surfing Mag, Transworld, and more recently STAB and Liquid Salt Magazine?
DY: Like Zak said, our initial inspiration came from the people we’d met while surfing in New York. We didn’t even realize it at first, but then we started thinking about how many great people we were encountering through our small surf community here in NYC. A friend of ours got us, almost as a joke, subscriptions to all the major surf magazines at once — Surf, Surfer, Surfing. We looked through them and realized at once that there was very little representation of east coast surfing, let alone New York City, and also that these magazines primarily focused on sport. There’s a place for that, but it’s not really where our interests lie. Liquid Salt has a lot of quality content — they profile a wide range of people behind the surf world and ask thoughtful questions. We want to build upon that, to inject the unique voice and culture of the New York surf scene into the conversation. Putting it all together, we see a tremendous opportunity to make a magazine that tells the stories of urban surfers, and ironically doesn’t focus on the act of surfing — we’ll leave that to the above-mentioned magazines. We also see a tremendous potential in the metaphors embedded in surfing, the inspiration of nature and ocean, all in relation to the creative practices of art and design.
ZK: Yeah. The main difference is that we don’t want to focus on the sport of surfing. By that, we mean the actual maneuvers. This is one way in which we’re very different from Transworld Surf in particular. This is meant as a cultural magazine — we’re looking at the people and their creative output. We’re also interested in the curation of this content, by finding people and work we admire through this community.
DY: We are trying to demonstrate some of these ideas in our first issue, which is loosely based around the theme of “dialogues.” We take the idea of dialogue and use it (quite literally) to have a conversation between two people, but also visually between somewhat disconnected imagery. A good deal of our content for this issue is about art-making and creative processes that happen to be discussed by people who surf. I’m excited and inspired by the way something so specific as “urban surfing” has lead us to such diverse and unpredictable stories.
(4) The term “urban surfing” is pretty interesting. I remember the first time I saw a surfboard in the subway I thought it was completely insane, but it made more sense to me as time grew on. The city is so dense you forget that it’s surrounded by water, that the Atlantic Ocean is just a train ride away. It makes sense that people, especially in a city like New York, would make the effort to reconnect with their environment and natural landscape. Do you think it’s a rebellious act or a cathartic one or can it be both?
DY: Surfing in New York City was indeed a rebellious act until 2005, when it became legal to surf Rockaway. Now it’s trendy to have a bungalow out there and spend weekends with your friends passing time at Rockaway Taco. But I agree that there’s still something very special and rarefied (feeling) about it, which I think has to do with the density and roughness of the city and the speed of work life. There’s such an extreme contrast to that experience when you’re sitting out in the ocean, in between sets, kicking your feet around and scanning the horizon for the next wave. I would call it cathartic in that I’m able to release every-day anxieties and replace them with the rather singular mission of catching the next wave. It inverts all of those intense feelings with an enormous rush of adrenaline. Like a drug, there’s an immediate need to re-create that experience. So in a way it becomes a dialectic of extremes — the extremity of work life and the extremity of ocean play. I also think of it as a dialogue of eccentricities — from the fantastical fever of buildings and motion of the city to the thrilling potential of the vast amounts of water, with its inherent salt, cold and dizzying power. It’s interesting to think of WAX as being born out of those contradictory scenarios, and always modulating between the two.
ZK: The dialectic of extremes that Dave mentions I think typify the urban surf culture — and the intentions of WAX — quite nicely. It would seem like a natural progression for the urban experience to cross over into the surf experience. They both can contain stressful and overpowering environments at times, but also offer a great deal of joy and reward. The reward with surfing is a momentary escape by experiencing something completely freeing and outside ourselves. This also shares similarities to art. Ranciére called this experience “the autonomous form of life,” by pushing our thoughts beyond their current state.
(5) Who is participating in the first issue, how did you come to their work and from an editorial standpoint decide who was in conversation with who?
DY: We’ve come to the participants through a myriad of connections. For instance, the first artist I stumbled on, Ann Pibal, was actually featured in a catalog I was designing for an unrelated art show. I was researching her work (which is abstract and geometric painting), and came upon a set of collages she made with found surf photography. I called her up and she was immediately interested in working with us. Her “dialogue” is more of a comparative essay on the history of modern surfing in relation to modern painting. Other artists we have known for years, such as Luke Stettner and John Houck, whose photography will be a visual dialogue. They led us to Danny Gordon and Garth Weiser, who will be featured in conversation together. Overall, the first issue should be a very rich and broad take on the idea of the dialogue.
ZK: Although this issue is somewhat of a testbed for subsequent issues, we see them all forming in a similar way. We wanted to start each issue with a central theme, whether conceptual, visual, spatial or otherwise. This allows us to become more organic within that structure, we can start maneuvering through those ideas by the collaborations we are interested in pursuing. From that point on we hope to see the experimentation and juxtapositions fall into place somewhat naturally.
(6) Where are the spots you guys go to surf?
DY: Like many New York surfers, we go where the conditions are best — whether that’s out to Long Island, down to Jersey, or staying local in the Rockaways. We ride the train, carpool with friends, or hop in a zipcar. Whatever it takes!
