Mixing Messages | Essay


`INTRO THE STREET TYPOGRAPHY The Familiar The Modern IDENTITY Corporate Culture Subcultures Design Cultures PUBLISHING The Book The Magazine Electronic Publishing` `INTERVIEWS`

Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett
Bureau

New York, June 1994

How did you come to found Bureau?
MM: Don and I met at Gran Fury, doing design together. We worked well together. I was already involved with Gran Fury when I went to work at M&Co. in 1987. At that time, they were working on some latter-day Talking Heads stuff, Florent ads, and so on. There was this "language of the vernacular" thing going on at M&Co. Suddenly, Tibor [Kalman] started this rhetoric about design being political. I feel, perhaps possessively, that this rhetoric was largely appropriated from Gran Fury. At one point after Don and I had founded Bureau, Michael Bierut called me to interview me for an article he was writing. He wanted to find out if Gran Fury had evolved out of M&Co. I was personally outraged that this perception was out there, and I declined to participate in the article. Don and I founded Bureau in late 1989.

Tibor Kalman has often said that there was the crap work at M&Co. and then the projects he really cared about. Is there a divide like that here at Bureau?
DM: I love doing the work for Clinique. Although it helps pay the bills, we don't treat it as a secondary project at all. We don't want to do uninteresting work. We try to keep boring projects from coming in the door at all.
MM: It's important to find ways to have fun doing all of the jobs we take on. It's a disaster if you don't enjoy working on a project--everyone comes out of the situation unhappy.

Where does your formal vocabulary come from?
MM: We just do what we can. I studied at the School of Design in Basel, where I learned a formalist approach to design. Deep in my heart, I trust that I can make anything turn out okay formally. There's no fear here about form.
DM: My background is art and biology.
MM: I have an ingrained formal ability--I can make it work. Don's more emotional--he says to "make it louder."

Are you treating the mass media as a vernacular?
For example, in the Elektra ads, you use stock photographs and harsh gothic typography.
In Gran Fury we talked about the "authority of the media." Our idea was to use that authority to sell a different agenda. The Elektra ads aren't the best example, since that's a commercial message. But for all the theorizing I could do about design, it often comes down to "what we like." It's often just intuitive, blind faith. "I like the red letters better," and so on.

How do you connect your art practice and your design practice?
DM: We used to try to integrate them more. It's not that one contaminates the other....
MM: A lot of it has to do with economy. We both draw a salary from Bureau, which we didn't do at first. It's hard to define how you divide art time and Bureau time. The fairest thing is to say that the first eight hours are Bureau time. This causes its own problems--when do you do your art? Maud Lavin did a piece in Art in America that "outed" me as a graphic designer. It was a great piece. We used to spend more time trying to make the two merge. But people need to categorize; they need to keep the two worlds separate. One group doesn't understand the other.

Are you interested in anything happening in graphic design right now?
DM: To be honest, no.
MM: There's a lot of nice-looking design going on, but there's so much more that interests me in the art world.
DM: Art and film are the areas that vitally interest us. Film is an art form I truly love.
MM: People hate art because it's boring, dead, and closed in on itself. And people just don't understand what graphic design is. It's devalued because it's ephemeral.