How Internet Ruins Graphic Designing

Well, at the moment, the Internet is enormously limiting in terms of the capacity for innovation
and variation. I mean, if you look at it, everything is pretty much the same because of the
constraints of the screen and the lack of the peculiar things that happens with ink and paper—it is
an enormously limiting medium. Not to say that enormously limiting mediums cannot produce
great work. It can, I mean if you stop to think about making an etching when you realize you
have a plate of metal, you have to make little scratches, then you have to fill them with ink and
then you have to put some damp paper on top of that. And given all of that, you can still produce
the most extraordinary things.

You realize that limitation of materials and scale and so on are not the central issue, except for
the fact that when you look at the electronic world, you just realize that the amount of repetition
and images that are totally determined by the medium itself. Tools are tremendously powerful in
changing the nature of what you wanted to express. There's a big difference between doing a
drawing of something with pencil on a sheet of paper and trying to recreate that experience from
existing material that you assemble on a screen. And curiously, the pencil and paper turns out to
be the most potentially expressive medium for reasons that are very complex to understand.

So in truth, there is no profound limitation on what you can do in terms of the imagination on a
screen electronically, but as it turns out, the material that you produce is so dominated by the
peculiarities of electronic transmission that when we look at it, we see so many things that look
exactly the same. It turns out to be, as is often the case, first, it feels like the most enormously
potential instrument that any designer could have, and then it turns out to be something that so
dominates your thinking process that you have to be very wary and very suspicious of its power.

Well, it's a bigger development, I mean. And it exploits the innocent and it very rarely produces
good results. I mean, it's not that some very beginning person can't do good work or even
something about the fact that, statistically, if you get a thousand pieces you're likely to find one
that is excellent. My experience with all this sort of free work and general calls for submission is
that they produce very low-level responses. It is also a real exploitation of the innocent. And
people are so desperate to find a way of becoming visible that you can get anybody to work for
nothing.

One of the curious things that happen in the field is that, because our activity is linked to the arts
and the arts are not supposed to be concerned with money—after all, money is impure, it's not
fine—there's a tremendous amount of inquiry about free work. You can—as I probably have in
the last two weeks, you get 20 calls from people who want and expect you to do something
without being paid for it, because of visibility or because you're not supposed to be interested in
money. Well, that's not exactly the case. And so it is, I think, fundamentally exploitive. You
wouldn't go into a butcher shop and ask for a pound of steak without anticipating that you would
have to pay for it.

Well, that's a complex question. The question of the degree of skill and classicism in anyone's
makeup, it depends very much on context and capacity. People have different aptitudes. It is
possible to be self-taught in any area, but the issue of whether somebody should have a classical
education depends very much on genre. For instance, is it necessary to have a classical education
in music? Well, if that means to develop skills and understanding about composition and also to
be able to play a piano or any other instrument to where you can express your ideas, I would say
you would be severely limited if you couldn't do those things. I think the same thing is true in the
world of design.

I'm totally obsessed with the idea of drawing as being the fundamental tool and instrument by
which you understand what you're looking at, and there is no replacement for that. The idea of
looking at something, letting it enter your brain, transforming it, moving it down the neurological
path to your hands, moving your hand to create something that can be evaluated by your brain
and corrected, that iteration, that conversation between the mind and the hand, it seems to me, is
the way we learn what is real. And the issue in the arts, very often is that question, “What is
real?” And the distinction between what we pre-imagine the world to be and what enables us to
see it with clarity and understanding.

So there is nothing that I know of, or have experienced, that enables us to engage the world
better than the act of drawing and being able to create form as we see it. And people spend their
entire life trying to learn how to draw. And then, after years and years of effort, they discover
that they can successfully replicate what's in front of them. It's a kind of drawing that appears in
all the art classes and all the studios as people learn how to do it in the world. And then finally
you learn that you can represent what is in front of you accurately at the same time you learn that
it's not the point, that that is only the beginning of the real point, which is how to engage what is
real.