William Drenttel and Stephen Doyle
Drenttel Doyle Partners

New York, July 1996

Describe the design world in the 1980s.
SD: Not being a critic or reviewer, that's a question I can only answer from a personal perspective. The mid-1980s were a turning point for me‹we started Drenttel Doyle Partners in June of 1985, smack in the middle of the decade, about same time that Apple launched the Macintosh. I had been at M&Co. for about two years. The design totems of the day were Milton Glaser, Ivan Chermayeff, Massimo Vignelli, and Pentagram.
WD: Don't forget that the mid-80s were boom years. An economic heyday coupled with a very optimistic business outlook spawned lots of ad agencies and design studios. I was at Saatchi & Saatchi, and we were mushrooming out of control, swallowing up other agencies. And there were a ton of start-ups, all paying high rent.
SD: This was the time when M&Co. was coming of age, getting attention for going against the prevailing flow of "good-taste" design. The design climate was heady, glossy, die-cut, and foil-stamped. At M&Co. the design idea took precedence over the flourish of the finish. The work was grubby-but-smart. It got people's attention. The idea was to allow things to be quirky, to let reason take a leave of absence, that certain flaws were more memorable and more personable than the smarmy majority of slick design being done. Remember all those real estate brochures?
WD: But another thing was going on, on a different level. The masters of the day were perfecting the structures of corporate identity: pure, perfectly organized, unassailable. The problem was that these attributes were focused on system over personality--and some corporations wanted both. Thrust Tibor Kalman into this void, and the story gets interesting. The buzz over M&Co. wasn't based on a huge body of work. The work itself had an uneasy relationship with the idea of the client--as if M&Co. were trying to turn all these systems inside out for the client's own good. Out of this conflict came some of their best work.
SD: As soon as it came to be expected, the prevailing good--which was great--wasn't good enough anymore, so the un-good of Tibor and his pranksters became the rage.

If you are describing a generational shift taking place, who represents the previous generation?
SD: Milton Glaser, once a rebel and iconoclast, seems to represent the reasonable parent, doesn't he? The calming godfather of design, and teacher of just about everybody.

Including you?
SD: Not only was he my teacher at The Cooper Union, but also my first boss at Esquire magazine. It was Milton's illustrations on the Shakespeare classics that got me interested in design in the first place, back in high school.

A lot of interesting people came out of The Cooper Union between the late 1970s and mid-1980s--you, Tom Kluepfel, Alexander Isley, Emily Oberman, and some others. What was the school's influence on you?
SD: My cathartic experience at Cooper, honestly, was being thrown out of the painting classes. Left with only design classes to choose from, I was amazed that the teachers weren't threatened by humor. Humor and personality and quirkiness were actually encouraged as devices of attention and tools of comminucation. This kind of thinking--from Rudy de Harak to Milton Glaser, Henry Wolf, Seymour Chwast, and Walter Bernard--culminated in George Sadek, head of the design program. He's the unsung instigator behind this off-kilter modern-classicism. Tom refers to George's genius as "lunacy over logic, within the context of literacy." It's those same ideas that we are still chasing today. We're interested in what words say before we're interested in how they look, but then we try to bring meaning and presentation together in a way that makes room for irony, humor, subterfuge, and surprise.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum