| 00:01 | (music playing)
|
| 00:09 | Marian Bantjes: When I am looking at a piece of
mine, I want to assess it by, is there a sense
|
| 00:13 | of wonder, does it invoke
curiosity, is there a sense of joy?
|
| 00:19 | Really, my ultimate goal is to get
people to notice it and to do a double take,
|
| 00:27 | to spend time with the piece.
|
| 00:29 | I think it's a really valid way of
working, of capturing attention and interest
|
| 00:36 | and getting messages across as well.
|
| 00:37 | Michael Bierut: What's really fun about
working with Marian Bantjes is that she has a
|
| 00:45 | capacity to surprise you.
|
| 00:49 | What she does is beautiful,
but it's beauty the hard way, it really is.
|
| 00:57 | People can look at that and whether they
like it or don't like, whether they get
|
| 01:00 | it or don't get it, they can tell
that someone really cared about this.
|
| 01:07 | Sean Adams: If you are forced to stop and
really pay attention to something, it sticks,
|
| 01:13 | because you had to do work.
|
| 01:16 | And that's where Marian's work I
think is so remarkable, in terms of, you
|
| 01:20 | have to work at it.
|
| 01:22 | It invites you to work at it.
|
| 01:23 | It seduces you into looking at it and
trying to figure out, how is this made,
|
| 01:28 | what is going on here?
|
| 01:29 | And the more time you spend on it, the
more intimate you become with the piece,
|
| 01:32 | the more value it has mnemonically.
|
| 01:35 | Because she puts so much effort into
it, and it's so intricate, it sticks.
|
| 01:41 | Debbie Millman: Marian has never
been interested in financial success.
|
| 01:46 | She is not motivated by that.
|
| 01:47 | I don't think she is unhappy that she
has some, but I think that she is really
|
| 01:51 | motivated by making a difference with her work.
|
| 01:53 | She is really motivated by uncovering
what is possible with art and design.
|
| 01:59 | (music playing)
|
| 02:08 | (applause)
|
| 02:14 | Marian: I'm going to begin by reciting a poem.
|
| 02:18 | "Oh beloved dentist.
|
| 02:21 | Your rubber fingers in my mouth.
|
| 02:24 | Your voice so soft and muffled.
|
| 02:28 | Lower the mask, dear dentist. Lower the mask."
(laughter)
|
| 02:34 | So I am one of those people
with a transformative personal story.
|
| 02:41 | Six years ago, after twenty years in
graphic design and typography, I changed
|
| 02:47 | the way I was working--and the way
most graphic designers work--to pursue a
|
| 02:53 | more personal approach to my work, to
simply make a living doing something that
|
| 02:57 | I loved.
|
| 03:05 | I left my company.
|
| 03:07 | I had a buy-out from my business
partner, and I had enough money to survive
|
| 03:10 | for a year.
|
| 03:13 | That year came and went,
and I didn't get any work.
|
| 03:17 | However, I did start to get praise.
|
| 03:20 | I started to get emails from
people saying, "Hey, I saw this.
|
| 03:23 | This is really great!"
|
| 03:25 | They still weren't saying, "We want to
hire you," but at least I was getting the
|
| 03:30 | feedback that I needed to know
that I wasn't wasting my time.
|
| 03:34 | When I was working with my design company,
Digitopolis, I worked in the same way
|
| 03:40 | that most graphic designers work,
which is what I call a strategic model, in
|
| 03:47 | that you don't have a particular style.
|
| 03:51 | Your job is to meet with the client,
determine their needs, determine what is
|
| 03:59 | the right strategy for them, whether you
are going to do a website or a brochure
|
| 04:04 | or whatever that is, and what is the
right approach and the right look and all
|
| 04:10 | that other stuff for them?
|
| 04:11 | I had already started making work
for the company that was essentially a
|
| 04:17 | precursor of the kind of work that I do now.
|
| 04:20 | I knew that there was a market for it.
|
| 04:23 | I mean, people responded very well to it.
|
| 04:26 | But either due to the market in
Vancouver or the type of business that we were
|
| 04:31 | in, we weren't really able
to sell that to our clients.
|
| 04:36 | And so I felt that I had this kind of
split between what I believed in, what I
|
| 04:43 | thought was interesting, what I thought
was progressive, the kind of work that I
|
| 04:50 | wasn't actually seeing in the
marketplace, and the kind of work that we were
|
| 04:54 | doing, which was very much
divorced from me personally.
|
| 04:58 | And I wanted to create something that
would affect people in a stronger way.
|
| 05:08 | So I no longer meet with the
client to determine their needs.
|
| 05:12 | I no longer deal with printers.
|
| 05:15 | I no longer do all those
really difficult things.
|
| 05:17 | I let the designer do that.
|
| 05:20 | That's what they get paid the big bucks for.
|
| 05:22 | And what I do is, they've
made a strategic decision.
|
| 05:27 | Part of that design has been,
let's hire Marian Bantjes.
|
| 05:31 | And I am sort of a little bit more
and a little bit less than what an
|
| 05:36 | illustrator is, in that I
often create custom typography.
|
| 05:40 | I am sometimes asked to work with
the layout, as well as whatever it is I
|
| 05:44 | am bringing to it.
|
| 05:46 | And on the less side, well, if somebody
wants something, a picture of a cat, I'm
|
| 05:51 | not the person to come to.
|
| 05:52 | That's not what I do.
|
| 05:56 | Paula Scher: What she is doing is
demonstrating that design can be personal, that you
|
| 06:03 | can have a personal voice in it,
that it can be specific to one human
|
| 06:10 | being, not general.
|
| 06:12 | She is doing something that only
she can do, and illustrators do that.
|
| 06:19 | I mean her work is probably more akin
to illustration, in terms of how people
|
| 06:24 | hire her, because it may be that an
art director, or somebody who has already
|
| 06:29 | shaped what something should
be, would hire her to do it.
|
| 06:33 | For example, my partner Michael
Bierut hired her to work on one of his Yale
|
| 06:37 | posters because the subject matter
required one of her Baroque forms of
|
| 06:42 | typography which she created.
|
| 06:44 | She is really functioning to
a degree like an illustrator.
|
| 06:47 | Now you can call that a graphic artist,
or you can call it a graphic designer.
|
| 06:50 | You can call it an illustrator.
|
| 06:51 | It really doesn't matter.
|
| 06:52 | It's that her work is so specific to
her, that she has a personal style.
|
| 06:59 | Sean: Quite often, I see people do
something that's really unexpected, because she
|
| 07:06 | will do something unexpected.
|
| 07:07 | Just last week a student came to me
and said, "I was thinking about Marian's
|
| 07:11 | sugar piece, and it occurred to me, I
didn't have to make this with paper."
|
| 07:15 | I am like, exactly, yes.
|
| 07:19 | It's not all flat-screen paper.
|
| 07:21 | There are other options in the world.
|
| 07:22 | Michael: I can remember a project I worked
on with her once where it was a--I thought I
|
| 07:27 | pictured in my mind pretty
much exactly what I wanted.
|
| 07:30 | And I sort of said, "
Marian, this is pretty simple.
|
| 07:33 | What we need you to do is just
something that's like this that has
|
| 07:36 | these characteristics.
|
| 07:38 | And the rule of the game is it has
like line up here and do this other thing
|
| 07:41 | and do that here."
|
| 07:42 | And as I recall, she actually did
dutifully--I think as a favor to me--the
|
| 07:47 | thing I asked for.
|
| 07:48 | And then she said, "Or you could do
it like this," and then she did this
|
| 07:52 | completely other thing.
|
| 07:53 | And of course that completely other
thing is the thing that everyone loved.
|
| 07:57 | You can always tell when it's
something that has someone's heart in it, when
|
| 08:00 | they discovered something
new while they were doing it.
|
| 08:03 | And I think the preferred option that
Marian sent, which everyone liked, had
|
| 08:07 | that kind of light inside it, that the
thing she just simply did under orders
|
| 08:11 | from me just did not.
|
| 08:12 | And I think that's sort of why she will
keep moving forwards, and why she will
|
| 08:16 | kind of keep making discoveries is
that she just resists the idea of kind of
|
| 08:22 | going on autopilot and doing that
thing she knows how to do so well.
|
| 08:27 | (music playing)
|
| 08:34 | Marian: I first came to
Vancouver to go to art school.
|
| 08:37 | I went to Emily Carr for a year,
but it didn't really work out for me;
|
| 08:42 | it wasn't the right thing for me.
|
| 08:43 | So after that, I was getting
fired from restaurant jobs.
|
| 08:47 | And let's see, I was nineteen years old,
I think, and I went into a bookstore
|
| 08:53 | one day to get change for the bus.
|
| 08:55 | There, in the bookstore, was a little
sign by the cash register that advertised
|
| 09:01 | a job at a publishing company.
|
| 09:08 | The job at the typesetting company
quickly led into training in layout and paste
|
| 09:14 | up and all the things that people
used to do before computers took over.
|
| 09:27 | I was not a designer;
|
| 09:28 | I was a typesetter.
|
| 09:29 | So I would receive instructions,
usually written, sometimes hand drawn, from
|
| 09:35 | the designer as to how they wanted the
book to look, what typeface they wanted
|
| 09:40 | it to be in, what sizes.
|
| 09:43 | The exciting part of book design is
always in the front matter, the half
|
| 09:48 | title, the title.
|
| 09:49 | You get to use some display type.
|
| 09:52 | You get to do something a little bit different.
|
| 09:54 | Contents page.
|
| 09:55 | You've got all sorts of various
decisions that you can make here, whether it's
|
| 09:58 | going to be flush left or centered, or
whether there is going to be anything
|
| 10:03 | between the title and the numbering.
|
| 10:06 | These are sort of very
exciting things to book designers.
|
| 10:09 | It sounds incredibly boring, but those
are kind of the moments of, when you get
|
| 10:15 | to make big decisions, as opposed
to the pages that are just text.
|
| 10:20 | Yeah, so this is the kind of thing
that I worked on for many, many years, and
|
| 10:28 | I really enjoyed it.
|
| 10:34 | Looks beautiful. Gold edges.
|
| 10:40 | You do what you are told, and you do
what you are told over and over and over
|
| 10:43 | again, and eventually you learn.
|
| 10:47 | You learn what is the right way
and the wrong way to do things.
|
| 10:52 | I mean, that's one of the things I
like about typography is that there is a
|
| 10:57 | right way and a wrong way.
|
| 10:59 | There are variations within that.
|
| 11:01 | There are personal tastes and various
things, but you can really--you can do
|
| 11:11 | it wrong; you can screw it up.
|
| 11:14 | And there is something about
that that I like. Don't know why.
|
| 11:19 | (music playing)
|
| 11:37 | I moved to Bowen Island
full time after leaving my business, and
|
| 11:42 | it was quite a bit of change, not only in
terms of the work that I was doing, but also
|
| 11:47 | in terms of my lifestyle.
|
| 11:50 | I had been living in the city and going
to work every day like a regular person,
|
| 11:55 | getting up in the morning, seeing people,
being in an office with other people,
|
| 12:00 | meeting with clients, doing all that stuff.
|
| 12:04 | I had the place here and
would come here on weekends.
|
| 12:06 | And there is this kind of leaving
behind of the city and the tensions when you
|
| 12:13 | make this journey on the ferry.
|
| 12:15 | There is a very different
mentality between the island mentality and
|
| 12:17 | the mainland mentality.
|
| 12:19 | (music playing)
|
| 12:42 | I was working a four-day
week at the company and then coming
|
| 12:46 | over here on Thursday evening and
smashing and demolishing and building every
|
| 12:52 | weekend for over two years.
|
| 12:55 | So the first couple of years that I
owned the house, it was a work project.
|
| 13:02 | I mean, there was nothing
relaxing at all about coming over here.
|
| 13:07 | By the time I moved over here,
the house was ready to go, so it worked out
|
| 13:10 | quite well that way.
|
| 13:11 | (music playing)
|
| 13:43 | It's a living space,
but it also functions as partly a
|
| 13:47 | workspace as well.
|
| 13:49 | It's completely different than it used to be.
|
| 13:52 | The whole thing is opened up.
|
| 13:55 | These doors and windows didn't
use to be there, so those got put in. Um.
|
| 14:03 | I've got various pieces
of artwork along the way.
|
| 14:06 | These are by Ed Fella, on the side.
|
| 14:10 | This is my bedroom.
|
| 14:12 | I spend a lot of time in here, sleeping.
|
| 14:15 | I like sleeping.
|
| 14:17 | Sleeping is a really
important part of my creative process.
|
| 14:20 | It took me a while to figure this out.
|
| 14:22 | I used to think I was being very lazy
spending a lot of time in bed or just
|
| 14:27 | lying around on the couch.
|
| 14:28 | But I've realized that I actually do
a lot of thinking when I am laying in
|
| 14:35 | bed--not when I am sleeping;
when I am sleeping, I am dreaming.
|
| 14:37 | I am restoring that energy somehow.
|
| 14:41 | And so getting a lot of rest is,
I think, really important to me.
|
| 14:49 | When I worked at Digitopolis, I was
working almost entirely on the computer,
|
| 14:55 | basically the computer and with photography.
|
| 14:58 | And now I am using a wide variety of
materials, sometimes still involved with a
|
| 15:06 | computer and sometimes just
with the materials themselves.
|
| 15:10 | But having a space like this allows me
to obviously store them all, and to work
|
| 15:18 | on these various surfaces in different media.
|
| 15:24 | I've got my pencil crayons here.
|
| 15:25 | I actually have a vast pencil crayon
collection, which is growing, because I
|
| 15:30 | subscribe to these crazy, freaking
Japanese pencil crayon subscriptions.
|
| 15:35 | So yeah, there is a lot of
pencil crayons going on there.
|
| 15:40 | When I first came here, I wasn't
really getting any--I certainly wasn't
|
| 15:46 | getting any paid work.
|
| 15:47 | So I was spending my time working on
a number of personal projects and just
|
| 15:55 | things that I was interested in.
|
| 15:57 | So this was a piece that I did for a
kind of a magazine-type thing called
|
| 16:05 | Ladies & Gentlemen.
|
| 16:06 | It shipped with a vinyl LP, and the
piece I did for it--there's the LP-- the
|
| 16:15 | piece I did for it was this here.
|
| 16:17 | I was doing quite a bit of
ballpoint pen work at the time.
|
| 16:21 | It says, "HOW ARE YOU."
|
| 16:24 | This was the kind of thing that I was
doing, just contributing to things like
|
| 16:28 | this, that were
essentially for me free printing.
|
| 16:31 | So my goal at the time really was to
just keep putting stuff out there, keep
|
| 16:38 | making things, keep exploring these
ideas I was having, honing my skills,
|
| 16:44 | and just kind of stay busy during
this time when I wasn't actually getting
|
| 16:49 | any commissioned work.
|
| 16:52 | Welcome to my dirt collection!
|
| 16:55 | What is that, exactly?
|
| 16:59 | Bowen Island. It's just, it's dirt.
|
| 17:00 | It's got a lot of cedar
in it, so it's quite red.
|
| 17:06 | This one says, "South
Africa Mala Mala River Bed."
|
| 17:11 | This is actually probably my most
dangerous dirt, because it's unsterilized,
|
| 17:15 | came from an African riverbed,
and God knows what's living in it.
|
| 17:20 | Here's some little shells, shell
beach stuff, from Galiano Island.
|
| 17:27 | And you might wonder why
I have a dirt collection.
|
| 17:32 | I think one day I am going
to make something out of it.
|
| 17:35 | I will make something interesting,
something like a sand-painting-kind-of-thing
|
| 17:43 | using all my different
dirts from around the world.
|
| 17:46 | We will see. But for now, I collect dirt.
|
| 17:50 | (music playing)
|
| 17:58 | Marian: I remember having this kind of epiphany.
|
| 18:00 | It was quite early on. And I remember
I was flying into New York and looking
|
| 18:04 | down over the lights of New York, and I
had this sudden thought that everything
|
| 18:10 | I do, I do for love.
|
| 18:13 | And it was a really, like, kind
of a really big moment for me.
|
| 18:16 | And I think it was at that time that I
decided that to make Valentine's Day my
|
| 18:23 | thing, you know, to hook into this love thing.
|
| 18:28 | Debbie: Marian made a fundamental
shift in her life when she was 40.
|
| 18:33 | She had already practiced her craft
for many, many decades and started this
|
| 18:38 | entirely new body of work that was
much more heartfelt, that was much more
|
| 18:44 | meaningful, that was much more honest.
|
| 18:46 | She didn't have a body of
work prior to doing this.
|
| 18:48 | She created the body of work as she was
doing it, and she got people's attention
|
| 18:53 | by sending out promotions for
Halloween and for Valentine's Day.
|
| 19:01 | Michael: My first encounter with
Marian Bantjes was in the mail.
|
| 19:05 | It was unsolicited junk mail,
essentially, but I didn't do with it what I do
|
| 19:10 | with the other pieces of junk mail,
which is throw away right away;
|
| 19:13 | instead, I kind of stood it
up on my desk and saved it.
|
| 19:17 | Stefan Sagmeister: I remember the first thing
that I saw, I immediately saved it, which in this
|
| 19:21 | office at least is not very usual,
because we tend to get designers' junk mail
|
| 19:28 | by the bucketful, and
photographers and illustrators and all that.
|
| 19:33 | And what made it really special was the
obvious obsession of the person who had
|
| 19:37 | done it, how much time, love, and
attention was spent to make this typographic
|
| 19:44 | form really gorgeous.
|
| 20:00 | Marian: So the first valentine, it was
printed on this really, this glassine, very, very fine.
|
| 20:09 | And so it's like that. So people got
it in the envelope, and they could see.
|
| 20:13 | You know, you could kind of see the
layers through it, in the translucent
|
| 20:18 | envelope, and then they would unfold it,
and it was like that. That was the very first one.
|
| 20:25 | The second year I did--I worked on that
glassine again, and that was True Heart.
|
| 20:37 | I did the letterforms that look like hearts.
|
| 20:41 | So I drew these.
|
| 20:42 | I would assemble the person's name and
some Xs and Os and an extra M for myself,
|
| 20:50 | which I would sign, and stuck that,
again, in a translucent envelope like that.
|
| 20:57 | Basically, this pile of letters would
tumble out, and they would go, "What
|
| 21:02 | the hell is this?"
|
| 21:04 | And the thing is that people have a
good--you get something like this, you
|
| 21:09 | realize quite quickly that they are
letterforms, and people have a pretty good
|
| 21:15 | affinity to figuring out their own name.
|
| 21:18 | If this was a word that said something
like, I don't know, "adore" or something,
|
| 21:22 | they probably wouldn't really get it.
|
| 21:24 | But people have this--this, for
instance, says M-A-R-I...M-A-R-I-A-N, my
|
| 21:36 | own name.
|
| 21:37 | So I was really counting on
people having that recognition.
|
| 21:44 | And then the next year I had a bunch
of the paper left over, so I used the
|
| 21:48 | same paper again.
|
| 21:50 | But this was a completely different concept.
|
| 21:53 | It kind of doesn't make sense.
|
| 21:55 | It doesn't start with "hello" to them.
|
| 21:58 | It starts in the middle of a sentence.
|
| 22:00 | It ends in the middle of a sentence.
|
| 22:01 | And this one says, "You've never really
been sure of this, but I can assure you
|
| 22:07 | that this quirk you're so
self-conscious of is intensely endearing.
|
| 22:11 | Just please accept that this piece of
you escapes with your smile, and those of
|
| 22:15 | us who notice are happy to catch it in passing.
|
| 22:18 | There is no passing time
with you, only collecting:
|
| 22:22 | the collecting of moments with the
hope for preservation and at the same
|
| 22:25 | time, release.
|
| 22:27 | Impossible? I don't think so.
|
| 22:30 | I know this makes you embarrassed.
|
| 22:31 | I am certain I can see you blushing, I know it.
|
| 22:33 | But I just have to tell you because
sometimes I hear your self-doubt, and it's
|
| 22:38 | so crushing to think that you may not
know how truly wonderful you are, how
|
| 22:42 | inspiring and delightful and really
truly the most completely," and that's
|
| 22:49 | where it ends.
|
| 22:50 | This does speak to them in some
personal way without being specific.
|
| 22:58 | It was actually really difficult to
write that, really difficult to get just
|
| 23:01 | that balance of the universal and the personal.
|
| 23:07 | Last year I got this really great
idea to use used Christmas cards for
|
| 23:14 | the valentines.
|
| 23:15 | Here are some leftovers here.
|
| 23:17 | So there's just all sorts of different kinds.
|
| 23:22 | And I knew this was a good idea.
|
| 23:25 | I knew it was a good idea.
|
| 23:26 | I just wasn't prepared for what an
incredibly good idea it was, if I do say so myself.
|
| 23:36 | So these are some of the valentines that
I have left over. And I was down at the
|
| 23:44 | shop that does the laser printing when
they were putting these things through
|
| 23:47 | the printer, or through the laser
cutter, and I was just blown away.
|
| 23:52 | I am still blown away by them.
|
| 23:54 | I drew this design.
|
| 23:56 | You can kind of-- it's easier to
see the design itself on the reverse.
|
| 24:01 | I mean, the thing about it, one of the
reasons that I did it, and one of the
|
| 24:05 | reasons that I think it works as well,
is that Christmas and Valentine's Day
|
| 24:11 | share this--share a kind of--they
share a color palette, and they share a
|
| 24:18 | kind of sentimentality.
|
| 24:22 | Look at this one with the bird.
|
| 24:23 | That is just--I mean, that is stunning.
|
| 24:27 | That's just--it just worked out so beautifully.
|
| 24:32 | And this was some crappy, ugly card with
a bunch of sprinkles on it, and it just
|
| 24:37 | turned out into this incredible thing.
|
| 24:42 | I mean that's beautiful. And I don't know.
|
| 24:45 | I just--the foil--all these cheesy
effects that went onto the original Christmas
|
| 24:52 | cards just came out so
beautifully in the valentines.
|
| 24:56 | It was sort of serendipitous and
planned and everything else all at the
|
| 25:02 | same time. I was just overjoyed.
|
| 25:04 | So that is a project that I am going to
have a very, very hard time topping this
|
| 25:11 | year, or any other year.
|
| 25:22 | This year I am going to create kind of
modular hearts that are made up of pieces
|
| 25:28 | and then those pieces will
be able to mix and match.
|
| 25:31 | But the idea is to be able to have
different colors and different pieces of the
|
| 25:36 | hearts that fit together, so that I
can get a variety of different hearts.
|
| 25:42 | (music playing)
|
| 25:57 | So I want each part
to be quite different from the others.
|
| 26:05 | These shapes and designs are
kind of deliberately not beautiful.
|
| 26:10 | I'm very purposely not making
what you might call romantic shapes.
|
| 26:15 | Because I really like the idea of
juxtaposition and I like the idea of kind of
|
| 26:21 | like working against what's expected.
|
| 26:27 | I think it will be more surprising when
they come together and they look great.
|
| 26:32 | They are going to look great.
I'm quite convinced of it.
|
| 26:36 | (music playing)
|
| 26:49 | All right! So I am going to put this in the
scanner and bring it into Illustrator.
|
| 27:01 | One might wonder why I wouldn't
just draw this directly in Illustrator.
|
| 27:06 | I can't think in Illustrator.
|
| 27:09 | Very occasionally I work directly on
the computer, but most of the time I find
|
| 27:14 | that the computer somehow controls my brain.
|
| 27:21 | I can't understand how
it does or why it does it.
|
| 27:24 | All I know is that when I try to skip
the step of sketching, most of the time I
|
| 27:33 | just end up with garbage.
|
| 27:36 | So here is my finished section, and
here is a bunch of different sections, and
|
| 27:42 | I've made them different colors.
|
| 27:44 | And my new section, I am going
to make it a different color.
|
| 27:49 | So you can see with this one section
here, I've got three different shapes
|
| 27:52 | for that section:
|
| 27:53 | I've got this one, this one,
and I've got the one I just made.
|
| 27:59 | So I can have a combination of those
two, or I can have a combination of
|
| 28:03 | those two, or these two.
|
| 28:06 | And the other added thing as well is
that the colors are set to overprint.
|
| 28:12 | They multiply in these sections so
that where two colors combine, where, for
|
| 28:17 | instance, where magenta and
yellow combine, they can create red;
|
| 28:21 | where blue and magenta combine,
they create purple in the center.
|
| 28:25 | I get more than the three colors;
|
| 28:26 | I get this range of colors that is
somewhat random because of the way these
|
| 28:32 | things were designed to kind of fit
together but not really fit together.
|
| 28:36 | So they have intersections that are
really these unusual shapes, and that makes
|
| 28:44 | it again, I think, more interesting.
|
| 28:46 | (music playing)
|
| 29:14 | Working with the shapes
and the forms that were not necessarily
|
| 29:18 | beautiful to begin with, they
came together exactly as I wanted.
|
| 29:23 | I think they are good non-traditional
valentines, just the way I like to have them.
|
| 29:27 | (music playing)
|
| 29:41 | (rain falling)
|
| 29:47 | Marian: When I worked as a designer,
I worked very locally, as most Canadian
|
| 29:51 | designers that I know of do.
|
| 29:52 | It's a very kind of
closed, insular design scene.
|
| 29:58 | When I became involved in Speak Up I was
spending a lot of time on the web site,
|
| 30:04 | and I honestly thought I was wasting my time.
|
| 30:06 | I mean, I was spending hours and hours
and hours on this stupid blog, commenting
|
| 30:11 | and writing and being
involved in this community.
|
| 30:14 | What a waste of time!
|
| 30:16 | But what I didn't realize was that at
that time Speak Up was a real focal point
|
| 30:23 | for a broad range of
people in the design community.
|
| 30:27 | Michael Bierut: Like other people, I sort of
also encountered Marian's name as a writer, not an
|
| 30:33 | artist or a designer.
|
| 30:35 | She contributed then to this blog,
Speak Up, for the graphic design community.
|
| 30:39 | She is a very articulate writer,
very opinionated, fun to read, always
|
| 30:43 | well argued, well thought through,
and surprising in many ways on her
|
| 30:47 | choice of subject matter.
|
| 30:57 | Debbie: Speak Up was like a bar.
|
| 30:58 | Speak Up was a bar where everybody knew
your name, and you can go in and there
|
| 31:01 | were fistfights and brawls and
soapbox opinions, and it was incredibility
|
| 31:06 | momentous, because it was
the first serious design blog.
|
| 31:11 | Marian's posts had an ability to both
appeal to larger, broader life issues, but
|
| 31:22 | also there were very small precious
experiences that are incredibly universal.
|
| 31:31 | Marian deconstructed Santa.
|
| 31:35 | Marian showed me that the only
difference between a garden gnome and Santa is
|
| 31:41 | the white fur around the hat.
|
| 31:44 | And she wrote about the alphabet
in a way that nobody else could.
|
| 31:48 | She deconstructed the alphabet.
|
| 31:50 | Who does that?
|
| 31:53 | (music playing)
|
| 31:59 | Paula: I enjoyed reading her on Speak Up,
but I don't trust anybody's opinion on a blog
|
| 32:05 | unless I know if they are any good,
because what difference does it make what
|
| 32:08 | they say if they don't design well?
|
| 32:11 | So I was really delighted when I
found out how fantastic she was.
|
| 32:19 | Marian: I thought I hated graphic
design, and I thought I was leaving graphic
|
| 32:24 | design forever.
|
| 32:25 | And what I found in Speak Up was that I
actually loved graphic design, and that
|
| 32:30 | I knew a hell of a lot about it,
and I was very opinionated about it.
|
| 32:35 | The level of discussion was so
much higher than anything I had
|
| 32:42 | experienced before.
|
| 32:44 | I can remember a couple of knockdown
drag-out fights that I had in here that I lost.
|
| 32:50 | One of them I lost to Michael
Bierut and to Mark Kingsley;
|
| 32:54 | they totally changed my mind.
|
| 32:57 | And that's something that I never
could have done in any other way.
|
| 33:00 | It was a real being-in-the-right-
place-at-the-right-time kind of thing.
|
| 33:05 | Then the other thing that
happened with this was Speak Up held a
|
| 33:10 | T-shirt competition.
|
| 33:12 | I almost didn't enter the T-shirt
competition because, you know, having been a
|
| 33:17 | designer for ten years, it was like it
was something that was beneath me, and
|
| 33:22 | who am I to enter a
T-shirt competition, is my ego.
|
| 33:26 | But because it was my community, because
I was so involved with it, I decided to
|
| 33:33 | enter the competition, and I won.
|
| 33:38 | I developed this kind of pixilated type,
which was actually based on--Speak Up
|
| 33:42 | used to use a pixel font for most of
its graphics, so it was based on that
|
| 33:47 | pixel font--and then elaborated on it
and changed and turned into this more
|
| 33:54 | organic thing.
|
| 33:56 | So this was sort of the beginning
of what became known as my style.
|
| 34:01 | So, you know, this T-shirt led
directly to my first assignment with
|
| 34:06 | Details magazine;
|
| 34:08 | it led to a connection with Rick
Valicenti and doing a project with him, an
|
| 34:12 | unpaid project, but a project nonetheless;
|
| 34:15 | and it became quite a
widely-referenced piece, and in that sense this lowly
|
| 34:22 | T-shirt launched my career.
|
| 34:24 | (music playing)
|
| 34:31 | Debbie: Marian really created a body
of work that has inspired a generation of designers.
|
| 34:39 | But Marian is not content to settle
for this style that she has created;
|
| 34:44 | she has already moved on.
|
| 34:46 | She is already creating new things.
She is creating new styles.
|
| 34:48 | Every time she does something, there
is something new in it that takes her
|
| 34:51 | somewhere else, that takes her
somewhere else, that takes her somewhere else.
|
| 34:59 | Sean: And the spirit of her work is always
going to remain the same, and that spirit
|
| 35:03 | is backed up with the
incredible craft that she has.
|
| 35:05 | She is able to think it through.
|
| 35:08 | So I may not get the squiggly thing that
I had thought I might get from the last
|
| 35:13 | project, but I'll get
something equally as wonderful.
|
| 35:17 | She's not just there to, like,
replicate the same style over and over again.
|
| 35:22 | She does it because she believes in it.
|
| 35:24 | She just feels like, I am
moving in this direction now.
|
| 35:30 | Stefan: In any creative roles you
have basically two types of artists.
|
| 35:34 | You have the people who basically do the
same thing over and over again, and you
|
| 35:40 | have the people that change all the time.
|
| 35:43 | I like Warhol better than I like Roy
Lichtenstein, or I like the Beatles over
|
| 35:48 | the Stones, simply because the
trajectory of the Beatles from the beginning to
|
| 35:54 | the end is a much wider
one than with the Stones.
|
| 35:58 | And with Marian, she
definitely would be the Beatles.
|
| 36:05 | I think there is a red line that goes
through it, which is probably somehow
|
| 36:10 | centered around obsessiveness, but
outside of that, the visual breadth of her
|
| 36:16 | output is a fairly deep one.
|
| 36:19 | (music playing)
|
| 36:32 | Marian: I have been interested in
illuminated manuscripts for quite a long time.
|
| 36:36 | I am not an expert on illuminated
manuscripts by any stretch of the imagination,
|
| 36:42 | but there are a couple of purposes of it.
|
| 36:46 | But one of those purposes is
definitely to invoke wonder in this way that was
|
| 36:52 | very interesting to me and was
feeding directly into my ideas about that
|
| 36:56 | symbiotic relationship
between graphics and text.
|
| 37:09 | Three years ago now I was approached by
Lucas Dietrich at Thames & Hudson, and
|
| 37:14 | he wanted to do a monograph with me.
|
| 37:17 | At that time, I didn't really feel
that I was ready for a monograph.
|
| 37:23 | So I didn't want to do that,
but you don't turn Thames & Hudson down.
|
| 37:29 | And I had had some ideas for a book kind
of floating around in my head that were
|
| 37:35 | somewhat incoherent.
|
| 37:36 | I had a number of writings
that I'd written for Speak Up.
|
| 37:40 | I really felt that there was an
opportunity to not just reprint a weblog article
|
| 37:48 | in a book, but to actually change it in
a way that could only be done in a book,
|
| 37:53 | and to be able to illustrate them in a
way that was integrated with the text.
|
| 38:01 | And as well, I had a number of thoughts,
things that I had been thinking about
|
| 38:06 | for a while, around the role that
wonder plays in communication, that feeling
|
| 38:13 | of awe, of wondering at something that
is so magnificent that you can't quite
|
| 38:20 | understand it;
|
| 38:21 | and the other being, I wonder, as in
I think, or I wonder what will happen.
|
| 38:28 | Trying to explain this to a
publisher was quite difficult.
|
| 38:32 | I had to do quite a bit of work to get
some samples together and illustrate what
|
| 38:37 | it was I was trying to do.
|
| 38:39 | One of the examples I give is the
wonder that you feel when you look up at the
|
| 38:43 | night sky and you know that those
are stars up there, but it's so hard to
|
| 38:48 | really grasp that.
|
| 38:49 | And so it goes from that
into this piece about the stars.
|
| 38:54 | I had written this after going to
visit the Griffith Observatory in L.A.
|
| 38:58 | I discovered a display that they have there.
|
| 39:01 | It's a permanent display of
jewelry with a celestial theme.
|
| 39:04 | When I started to write, I had this
kind of imaginative leap where instead of
|
| 39:11 | writing about the observatory or
writing about the display, I ended up writing
|
| 39:16 | this kind of imaginary piece as though
when you look through a telescope, what
|
| 39:22 | you see are these pieces of jewelry in the sky.
|
| 39:28 | When I took the photos I never
imagined that I would be using them for print.
|
| 39:32 | I mean they were shot with a
rinky- dink digital camera through glass. And so I
|
| 39:40 | was picking out these little pieces of
jewelry out of larger photos, sharpening
|
| 39:44 | them, and then printing them at the
largest size I could possibly get them to.
|
| 39:50 | It's illustrating what I'm talking about,
without your eye ever having to really
|
| 39:55 | leave the page and go look at figure A.
That sense of wonder at what these
|
| 40:01 | things are comes through in that, and
these themes go throughout the whole book
|
| 40:06 | and really, in a way that was even
surprising to me by the time that I was done.
|
| 40:11 | (music playing)
|
| 40:54 | Marian: Are you Lisa?
Lisa Smith: Yeah.
|
| 40:55 | Marian: Great! Nice to meet you! Yeah!
Lisa: You too!
|
| 41:00 | Lisa: So this is the gallery.
Marian: Uh huh.
|
| 41:02 | Marian: Oh my God!
|
| 41:05 | Lisa: So is this the first time you've seen the wallpaper up?
Marian: I have never seen the wallpaper up.
|
| 41:10 | Marian: This is fantastic.
|
| 41:12 | Lisa: It feels rich too.
It's really--it's on vinyl. It's nice and thick.
|
| 41:16 | Marian: Oh, I'm so going
to get this for my bathroom.
|
| 41:20 | This is so great!
|
| 41:22 | Lisa:--know where to go, and those are all valentines.
Marian: Right.
|
| 41:25 | Marian: Lisa Smith from Ontario College
of Art and Design contacted me to have the
|
| 41:30 | show here.
|
| 41:32 | She had a vision for the show being
as interactive as possible, and that
|
| 41:36 | doesn't mean in terms of digital
interaction, but to be able to have people see
|
| 41:41 | and touch things.
|
| 41:42 | And she really had this idea to have the
wallpaper on the walls from Maharam and
|
| 41:50 | as well the Maharam fabrics that I had designed.
|
| 41:56 | And then there was the one piece that I
was really excited about, which is
|
| 42:00 | The National poster, in a place where it
could be seen under the three different
|
| 42:05 | lightings that it was designed for.
|
| 42:09 | Lisa: We tried about four different lights.
Marian: Oh, that's great!
|
| 42:14 | Lisa: And so it's on a seven-second circuit.
|
| 42:19 | Marian: That's great! I love that!
Oh, look at the dress. That's amazing!
|
| 42:30 | Lisa: Yeah, yeah.
Marian: It looks so great there.
|
| 42:38 | Marian: I've been really into
patterning for quite a long time.
|
| 42:42 | It's a really, really
interesting thinking space.
|
| 42:44 | You really have to--Some people think
of pattern, and technically it is, if
|
| 42:49 | you just like take an object and go
plop, plop, plop, and repeat it over, and
|
| 42:52 | there it is.
|
| 42:54 | But for me, a really good pattern is
something that is integrated and becomes
|
| 42:58 | a full image.
|
| 43:01 | And you have to figure out where things
are going to cross and what holes need
|
| 43:05 | to be filled after you fill it out.
|
| 43:07 | So it's a lot of figuring out and back-
and-forth work in and out of the computer
|
| 43:12 | trying to get that thing to work.
|
| 43:15 | But for me it's just so much fun.
|
| 43:18 | It's puzzle making.
|
| 43:19 | It's like people who like to work on puzzles.
|
| 43:21 | It's the same kind of thing.
|
| 43:23 | It's figuring out how everything is
going to fit together, and what's going to
|
| 43:27 | happen when it gets bigger.
|
| 43:31 | One of the reasons that I like
working in graphic art or the graphic design
|
| 43:35 | world is that public access.
|
| 43:40 | When I create something and it goes out
in however many thousands of copies of a
|
| 43:45 | magazine or seeing it all over the
streets of New York or whatever, I'm creating
|
| 43:50 | a visual piece that thousands or
millions of people can see and appreciate that
|
| 43:57 | they don't have to pay for, and they
don't have to walk into a secluded gallery
|
| 44:03 | and see only in that place at
that time, or in an art magazine.
|
| 44:08 | There's brilliant fine artists;
|
| 44:10 | they're just doing amazing things.
|
| 44:12 | But unless you're really paying
attention, you're never going to see it. And I
|
| 44:15 | think that's a tragedy.
|
| 44:17 | It's something that we really need to
overcome, and I would love to see graphic
|
| 44:26 | designers being able to embrace that
artistic side of them and bring that in.
|
| 44:31 | And I would love to see people who
are in fine arts, instead of struggling
|
| 44:37 | away in their garrets, earning some
good money in the commercial world for
|
| 44:43 | doing great work.
|
| 44:44 | We really need that art in that space.
|
| 44:47 | If you look at the grace of
modernist design, I mean that is art.
|
| 44:54 | I mean, it's just so beautiful.
|
| 44:57 | It's so perfectly composed.
|
| 44:59 | And somewhere after that, that
modernist idea of things being functional and
|
| 45:08 | accessible and direct really infused
design to an extent that it began to really
|
| 45:19 | divorce itself from the personal investment.
|
| 45:23 | And it's something that's very
difficult now for people in design to set aside.
|
| 45:32 | They still have this idea that there is
no place for the personal artist in that
|
| 45:38 | commercial sphere, and I
think they're absolutely wrong.
|
| 45:42 | I have said that my ego is involved in my work.
|
| 45:47 | People hear the word ego and
they think it's a bad word.
|
| 45:50 | It's not.
|
| 45:51 | But I really think that that personal
involvement of mine, yes, it is about me.
|
| 45:58 | It's about furthering what I want to
do and what I think is interesting.
|
| 46:03 | But it also aids the client.
|
| 46:06 | I mean, it is a partnership.
|
| 46:07 | If I was a client, I would much
rather have something that had a longevity
|
| 46:13 | outside of its initial purpose, that was
good enough that it would be reproduced
|
| 46:18 | in books and end up in an
exhibition and end up in museums.
|
| 46:26 | This is a more recent poster.
|
| 46:28 | It's a company that distributes wine,
and they have somewhere around two hundred
|
| 46:33 | different vineyards that they
buy wine from to distribute.
|
| 46:37 | And so they wanted to have a
commemorative piece to be able to give to
|
| 46:42 | the vineyards.
|
| 46:43 | They were having a party, and they
wanted to have something that had all of
|
| 46:47 | those people's names on it.
|
| 46:49 | And I'm quite convinced that when they
hired me, they were expecting something
|
| 46:53 | that would be kind of scripty, so like
some kind of scripty thing with a bunch
|
| 46:57 | of flourishes with all their names.
|
| 46:59 | And so I knew I wasn't going to do that,
but I--my first thought was, what am
|
| 47:07 | I going to do?
|
| 47:08 | And my first thought was, well, I'm
not going to do anything with grapes,
|
| 47:12 | because it's too obvious.
|
| 47:15 | And my second thought was,
grapes, what a good idea!
|
| 47:21 | So I decided--I started, I did a
little online research into grapes and
|
| 47:28 | discovered that they come in all sorts
of different colors and shapes and sizes,
|
| 47:31 | and I was really, really excited. And so what I did
was I drew, in pencil crayon, all of these different grapes
|
| 47:39 | with the letterforms in the skin of
the grapes in a way that is meant to
|
| 47:45 | look as somehow natural, as
though it could've actually happened.
|
| 47:49 | And then I scanned that, and in
Photoshop assembled all of the names of
|
| 47:56 | the vineyards.
|
| 47:57 | And I heard from the client that when
they gave this out at the function that
|
| 48:04 | the reaction was exactly what I
wanted to have happen, which is, first they
|
| 48:09 | thought, oh it's a pretty poster.
|
| 48:11 | And then they were, oh, it's grapes.
|
| 48:14 | And then they even like oh,
there's letters in the grapes and they
|
| 48:17 | say something.
|
| 48:19 | And then they figured out that there
were names, and then they looked for
|
| 48:22 | their own names.
|
| 48:24 | I mean that is the multi-layered
payoff that I'm totally looking for.
|
| 48:32 | There's a huge amount of
competition in the design space in our
|
| 48:38 | surrounding world.
|
| 48:39 | And everybody is kind of shouting and
trying to make their message as simple and
|
| 48:45 | bold and big and direct as possible
to sort of out-shout everybody else.
|
| 48:50 | I think that there's this feeling that
anything that doesn't do that, that isn't
|
| 48:55 | "hey, buy this now, big picture,"
then it's not going to work.
|
| 49:00 | And I think that they're really
underestimating the audience and really
|
| 49:04 | underestimating people's curiosity.
|
| 49:06 | (music playing)
|
| 49:40 | Debbie: I don't think you
hire Marian for her style;
|
| 49:43 | I think you hire Marian for her brain.
|
| 49:46 | You have to know that she is going
to be able to deliver and answer to a
|
| 49:50 | creative brief because she
fundamentally understands it.
|
| 49:53 | (music playing)
|
| 50:04 | Sean: I think it's a shame that a lot of
young designers feel like all of sort of
|
| 50:08 | traditional graphic design is less
relevant or inadequate to the personal.
|
| 50:14 | And I just don't buy that.
|
| 50:16 | I see so much incredible work out
there that would fit under the banner of
|
| 50:21 | graphic design that is
personal and is smart and compelling.
|
| 50:27 | (music playing)
|
| 50:38 | Michael: What makes Marian
unique is her own uniqueness, in a way.
|
| 50:42 | She developed that voice that first
time I saw it I had never seen it before.
|
| 50:46 | The second time I saw it, I realized
that it was the same person who I had
|
| 50:49 | seen the first time.
|
| 50:51 | And the things may have been completely
different, but they sort of are unified
|
| 50:54 | in this kind of Marian Bantjes's way
of looking at the world, of translating
|
| 50:58 | forms to surfaces, of taking a simple
message and making it rich and embroidered
|
| 51:05 | and complex in a way that invites you in.
|
| 51:08 | And anyone out there, your
way may be completely different.
|
| 51:12 | It could be completely the opposite.
|
| 51:13 | The thing to be inspired about with
Marian and her voice is that it's her voice.
|
| 51:18 | But we're in an era where people can
publish in so many different ways that if
|
| 51:22 | you are willing to work hard and you've
got that voice, the channels for you to
|
| 51:26 | amplify that voice, to broadcast your
message, are so numerous, and in a way so
|
| 51:31 | hungry for what you can offer, that
they really just are waiting for the next
|
| 51:37 | Marian Bantjes to come along.
|
| Collapse this transcript |
