A bit late

Seasons Greetings

Is there anything less contemporary than a Christmas card? (As the daughter of a Jewish father I only send cards that read “Happy New Year!” but I call them Christmas cards anyway.) In my memories of childhood December brought a flood of two types of card: the folded kind, with a red or green background and Santa-snowmen-snowflakes-pine trees embossed in silver or gold; and the photo card, long and thin, with a white right-hand strip reading “Joy!” or “Happy Holidays!” from my parents’ graduate school friends, my aunts and uncles and cousins. The first kind sometimes had a school photo or a high amusing Xeroxed Christmas letter inside. The second kind simply was. As I became a teenager I began to make fun of the photos, which often featured matching outfits, one sulky family member, or wildly inappropriate out-of-season snaps.

Then the cards began to taper off. My mother can now count on two hands the number she receives but she, as a graphic designer, continues to send a card of her own design each year. They used to sometimes feature me and my brother. The year she welcomed two (!) grandchildren, they got pride of place. But I always thought, once I had a child, I would send a photo card.

Two years ago I did, and I did. The “Joy” cards seemed to have disappeared by then, to be replaced with a mash-up of types 1 and 2, photos floating over red and green (and sometimes blue, for the Jews) backgrounds patterned with Santas-snowmen-snowflakes-pine trees. But sprinkled amongst the traditional designs, with their scripty fonts, and their cutesy family appellations, were a few tagged “Modern”. These never seemed to me to actually be modern, as they replaced snowflakes with wallpaper, and red and green with baby blue and brown. What they were were Domino, made into a card. The faux scallop-edge label, the voluptuous serif lettering, the new traditional color combination. Domino freed women from the traditional, moved them to transitional, and Shutterfly and Co. noticed.

This year, some smaller sites have gone further, but only in a small way. Minted, which seems to be winning the UrbanBaby race for hip alternative, has only two designs I would consider. The rest still suffer from script, or stars, or foliage. One is above, the other my friends and family will soon receive. (I feel a pang about not designing my own, using VistaPrint, but decided my husband could use a break from our design process. I get to be art director.) Mango Ink is the other alterna-provider, but when I looked at their cards I realized that I do have a traditional side. Graffiti-style lettering, sullen-on-purpose kids, faux-antique lettering? Or big type and white backgrounds? The first seems like the Freeman’s of holiday cards, and I think its moment has almost passed. The second seems like inserting your family into a Gap ad. I would rather just spread some joy.

Where Have All the Type Geeks Gone?

Something has been bothering me about the Up In the Air ads. Not the cute teaser ads with little airplane, jaunty and retro, like the branding campaign JetBlue wishes it had, Alexander Girard’s Braniff extravaganza. The ones with George Clooney—nothing wrong with that, haircut looks good, better cast as a soulless man—and yet, they seemed to be lacking something.

It finally hit me when I saw one on top of a cab. In Queens, no less. The title, it’s in Helvetica. And it just looks wrong.

First I had to check with some of my lovely second-year SVA students just to make sure it was actually Helvetica, not one of the imitators. A false call would have been embarrassing, and I am never sure of my descenders. One of them suggested it was type for another sort of transport, the dream signage of Massimo Vignelli for the New York City subways. But then again, Vignelli used it for American Airlines, still in use, still using (some) Helvetica. It is printed on a signboard in the ad, and it might have been cleverer to split the type down the middle as homage to those now-obsolesced flip-boards—or to digitize it like their replacements. It might also have been cleverer to make typographic reference to whichever airline it is that George has a million miles on. Or to real airport signage, which suggests but rarely uses real Helvetica.

To me, the type in the ad looks undercooked. I couldn’t believe one of the design blogs I read had not called this misuse to my attention before my cab epiphany. Has the film made piling on Helvetica passe? Has it been out so long it is in again (and it is always in the hearts of architects)?

I rely on you to tell me.

DWR = D/R?

I read Fast Company’s story The Rise and Fall of Design Within Reach with great interest. DWR founder Rob Forbes wrote the introduction to my book on Design Research, and said that D/R was his original inspiration (he even tried to buy the name—might have been a good thing, given all the snarky variations on “within reach” out there). And now, like D/R in the late 1970s, DWR is suffering from over-expansion, loss of specialness, and the lack of a leader with personal design vision.

I am not really qualified to comment on matters of business, but I have been critical of DWR from a design perspective for some time. In the beginning, it had personality: Rob Forbes’s newsletters were folksy and community-building, making the shopper feel like they were part of a club. The products in the catalog (blessedly simple and devoid of personalized anything) were things I either hadn’t seen before or hadn’t seen for a long time. It felt fresh. But then—and I am not sure of the sequence—many things happened. Mid-century modern homes, looking just like the DWR catalog, began to appear in all the shelter magazines. Online outlets began selling all the same products as DWR, for cheaper prices. Mainstream furniture outlets started mid-century-esque cheaper lines (CB2, West Elm) and improved their own design. Design was within reach, in an economic sense, and not at DWR. I began to feel like my DWR George Nelson bench was a cliche, rather than an icon. And Rob Forbes, the character, went away. DWR became just another catalog for me to instantly recycle.

Meanwhile DWR started opening stores. But the stores weren’t any better than the catalog. Sure, you could sit on the chairs, but you couldn’t take anything home with you. The accessibility that was the original meaning of “within reach” seemed to have returned; you didn’t need a designer to take you to the showroom, but you still needed to pay exorbitant shipping. Also, the stores had no personality. They were cool, clean warehouses (however nice the buildings) for DWR’s cool, clean furniture lines. You couldn’t learn anything there about putting your living room together differently than every other banker who had just bought a modern condo. You could just go down the street (in Soho) to Vitra, or Kartell, or Moss, and see the same things, or things that looked practically the same. Again, there was no reason not to buy the same thing elsewhere. Preferably from some nice young person in Brooklyn whose store was a labor of love.

That’s the way it was at D/R. Ben Thompson handpicked each item from a designer’s line to fit his vision of the comfortable home, and then he mixed it up: different countries, different price points, different levels of fame, different levels of design. He had textiles that were truly ethnic and authentic, rather than denatured contemporary versions of “colorful” and “wooly.” He had items that had no designer, but were perfect just the way they are, a la Kiosk. He and his Marimekko-clad saleswomen propped those rooms every week in different ways, so there was a reason to come back. Education wasn’t just about knowing and citing the designers’ names, but about putting it all together.

What DWR needs is a mash-up of their warehouses and a distribution and some idiosyncratic visions. I agree that the new term “curated” is hateful, but if there is any reason to keep the Studios open, they should be expositions of ways to use DWR’s stock as a decor tool rather than an end point. Bring in some design writers to resuscitate the newsletter. Find some young designers, don’t knock them off, and promote their reasonably-priced wares. (I know the Eames Lounge chair is made with the finest materials, but you are still paying for the name.) Find some reasonably-priced undesigned wares and sell them at the stores—but not forever. The design world needed DWR at the beginning, but it doesn’t anymore.