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| A deleatur symbol, from Martin Vogel's freeware TrueType font, MarVoSym.ttf, available at http://www.marvosym.com |
People have strange ideas about the arts, sometimes based solely on the flawed premise that Hollywood cares about getting it "right" over making movie sales. Witness on any given day the striking differences between the book version and the movie, or the actual way historical people look like over, say, the "sexy" movie-version of Stephen Hawking. Yeah, that vast. The same goes for me in my artistic life with art, design, publishing, and just about anything else, which are dependent on one solitary truth: I work at it until I get it right. The idea of hard work is something that's usually glossed over in a movies' musical montage, spanning over the soul-crushing hours of repetitive monotonous labor, but the truth is, once I learn the basics, I move through the rather pedestrian qualities behind my work onto the more difficult and infinitely harder intellectual questions that are at the center of each business, person, place, or thing that I meet with.
Take, for instance, my graduation from the world's best art school into the "real world" of work: I expected it to be a bumpy ride between student life and my apprenticeship, and so it was. I'd never used a fax machine with any sort of regularity before, or worked in an office environment, nor measured out a mechanical for its' adherence to printer's specs (which changes with country of origin and measurement systems), nor did I have any idea about how to price out a book for manufacturing purposes (with equations for paper weight, spine width, trim sizes, and their individual bulk), but soon I did know all that and more. I moved quickly through production to the art department, because as a RISD grad, I could breach the gap that existed between different departments with relative ease, unlike the rather rote qualities that mark the average "designer": typically a skilled craftsman who is highly dependent on the work of others, along with a strict sense of hierarchy that is guided by the Maestro sitting at the top of the pile, someone who supposedly also worked their way up the same corporate ladder very slowly.
But, I was different than the other people around me....very different.
If designers couldn't guess the font used in a previous edition (which was supposed to be their "expertise"), they came to see me in the production department working as an assistant, so that I could give them my best guess, and I have never taken a type class in my life. One "designer" told me she went through art school and couldn't draw. Yep. She went to (and was accepted, and then, this is even weirder, graduated from) a noted New York art school knowing that she would never draw a single decent picture on any day of her professional life to come. Can you imagine that? I couldn't then, and I still can't now.
I did, however, quickly pick and choose which work qualities I liked, and what tasks I would farm out to that rather scary dull Asian girl from design, the one who always seems chronically tired and depressed. These were necessary assessments that I began right away in my career, so as to avoid boring tasks that were better suited to lower minds, like taking wild guesses with fonts. Gifted people suffer from other people's boredom rather quickly, and the effects can be markedly excruciatingly for us. I could never be a book designer in the last century. They ruled up boards, made sheets of black type on white photo paper, and then pasted them into lines, day after day after day after day. Always the same thing, over and over and over again.
If we didn't have desktop publishing now, I wouldn't be a book designer at all. I'd have been a children's book artist, or a greeting card painter, or a nature photographer. But I soon learned the key components of graphic design, text, and books during my apprenticeship by combining them into the rather unknown and new art-form that has become the rock star genre it is today, and the leading creative intellectual at any house: that of Lead Book Cover Designer. It was precisely because I could draw, and photograph, and then set the type, while mastering manufacturing materials, with an understanding of computer programming (for your innately disordered brain), that allowed me to rise above it so easily, carefully avoiding those currents that trap minor artists and craftsman into eddies they can't get out of, without spending a lot of money on other people for help.
I'm glad I don't have a compulsive disorder, or a lack of will, or any other sense of entitlement about myself, because if I did, do you know what I'd be today? I'd be the "President of a Paragraph", like the bitchy admin who uses the stockroom supplies to yank yer chain on any given Monday: a rather small unpleasant little pissant who hates their life, but does absolutely nothing to get out of it. That's why I made coffee before anyone else was in the office because I got there first, then I changed the water tank on the cooler by myself, put new toner in the color copier and ordered more cartridges, opened up the design department by turning on all the equipment, put on some tunes, and began working the keyboard through your lunch break and after you left at 5 p.m., to sit here today at a public library to absolutely no applause whatsoever, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Like any high-minded human, I wanted more from life. I still do. Don't you?
