I just received a shipment from the Netherlands.
The act of opening cartons and cartons of books is probably the highlight of owning a bookshop.
Amongst all the Novums and Details and Forms I found the new issue of dot dot dot.
Every issue of dot dot dot brings surprises. It is anything but a design magazine, though the people behind it are highly respectable designers (Peter Bilak and Stuart Bailey). A scan through the contents reveals this issue covers Saul Bass to Marxism.
In the editorial piece examining work and life, Stuart Bailey writes and name drops Beckett, Kafka, Peter Sellers, Kurt Schwitters, Nabokov, Froshaug and many more. He quotes Milan Kundera (one of my favourite author):
“Characters from my novels are my own possibilities which were never realized. That’s why I like them all equally, yet, they all frighten me: all of them crossed a border in which I was circumnavigating. It is this crossed border (border, after which ends my own I) that attracts me. Only there begins a mystery which novel investigate. A novel is not a confession of the author, it is the interrogation of the nature of human life in the trap which became the world.”
In an interview Stuart Bailey further remarked,
I suspect what I’m really against is what that term “graphic design” has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I’m just not interested in. To me that idea of “graphic design” is as far removed from my interests as being a milkman or a lawyer. In fact, I’d rather be a milkman.
And food for thought, from typographer Anthony Froshaug:
“Why celebrate people in books if you cannot say what they did, and why, for what (and how much)? I should not like to celebrate my death, laid out on a coffee-table.”
I am attracted to the world beyond a normal graphic designer. This drives me to constantly seek projects that require more than “design”. Projects that demand collaborations with people from different sectors, and also projects that would lend new insights into people, market and trends, psychology and behaviour, and most crucially – providing new views on how people live their life.
I want to see the world from your eyes. I want to go to the places where you had been.
It is the border beyond “I” that I am fascinated about. That is the sphere where learning never stops, where work is always interesting, where complaints about people fade away, where enthusiasm about the next thing is aflame. Living life is a process, not a chore.
My views.