Design is stupid.

This project is an outgrowth of my own frustrations with the nature of design vis-a-vis book design. Design is authoritarian. It’s object-oriented: has a particular goal in mind. Absent other things, design doesn’t exist.—This isn’t true in the same way for, say, painting or sculpture. Without the materials required for these artforms, of course, they couldn’t exist, but there are no other material or content-related pre-requisites for their existence. Design cannot exist without something to design. Designers often frame their work as offering “solutions.” The term is both apt and not apt. An algebraic equation may have an infinite number of solutions; likewise, designers usually create multiple so-called solutions for a single “problem.” But the existence of the “problem” is suspect. If a company has a “bad logo”—is that really a problem? Suicide is a problem. Disease is a problem. A busted spark plug is a problem. A bad logo isn’t a problem in the normal sense. Problem means something that should be working, isn’t. If your spark plug doesn’t work, your car doesn’t go. The car is made to go. So, it’s a problem if the spark plug doesn’t spark. It seems like the point of living is to live, and not to die (although that inevitably happens). So if a society has a high rate of suicide or is ravaged by disease, there is a problem because these things cause life to stop life-ing. But plenty of successful companies have bad logos. Further, if a good logo is a solution, then it shouldn’t cause more problems than it solves. Let’s say that a good logo is a solution, and let’s say that all companies had good logos. Where would we be? To the extent that a good logo suggests a good company, we would be already worse-off. Since most companies are dishonest—offering solutions to problems that don’t exist—we can assume that a good logo will serve to make them seem more honest than they actually are. Worse, a supposedly good logo might obfuscate the identity of the company entirely. The logo for Altria, formerly Phillip J. Morris, says nothing about the nature of the company. It is a pixelated field of color and a serif font. In a way, by saying nothing it says everything. It does not want to be considered. “Stop looking at me! There’s nothing to see.” The CIA’s website makes it seem like a Marvel-esque superhero organization. Do most designers—who lean left—think this is honest? If it’s not honest, is it still good? Something seems wrong here. What is it? An actually good solution, as in an honest solution, may be the recent JM Smucker corporate rebrand. Sans-serif, abstract, it is identitiless. As a corporate body, it has no identity. This is good branding because it reflects the reality of the company at a corporate level. Yet designers widely criticized the rebrand because of these qualities. What gives? Another example: there is nothing that doesn’t work about Times New Roman. A book set entirely in Times New Roman would be perfectly fine, perfectly readable, and arguably more legible since its font choice is so invisible. That Times New Roman is so famous is proof of its perfection. People everywhere seem to have chosen it, essentially democratically, for its non-intrusiveness. It’s the solution to the readability problem. But you can’t use it if you’re a designer. Because design is not about solutions. Designers have a will to express. Democracy gets in the way. The truth is that designers don’t offer solutions other than exactly the same solution/s that the arts in general offer. The one and only solution that a design can ever offer is to make the world more beautiful. To take something ugly and force it to be pretty; to imbue lifeless clay with life. This task is promethean and divine, but scorned by design education. Designers, in their haughty way, think they find beauty a result of some idiotic obsession with “solutions.” As if design were in the realm of STEM. If it were, then it would have no role at an art school; if design were really about finding solutions, then it would be taught in trade schools. But it’s taught at art schools because the reality is that it’s just about beauty. An electrician is taught to solve problems; not to make wires beautiful. A design student is sold they’ll be solving problems, but they’re just making things look cool. An electrician’s wires may have a certain order and therefore beauty to them, but that’s ancillary to the original goal. But if a designer’s work isn’t pretty then it’s useless. The printed book was most beautiful when Gutenberg was printing. Every following century saw people attempting to “solve” the book in different ways, or with different typefaces, but we have never meaningfully transgressed or ascended beyond what old Gutenberg produced. But what if we did? That’s where this book comes in. It’s my honest attempt to transcend the form of the book. I want to go live in the woods. But I can’t right now. So I made this book instead.