The Lost Art of Art Direction

Alexey BrodovitchFor a year-end round-up on the state of Web design that ran last week over at Publish.com, I provided, among other quotes, this little bit of crankyism: “There’s so little illustration, photography and adventurous typography going on [in Web design], that I genuinely worry that we’ll never match the heights of graphic design achieved in the last century.”

Now, I know that there are lots of terrific designers out there doing genuinely daring work today; I grant that freely. But it’s reasonable to say that the vast majority of that work can be tagged with the familiar descriptors ‘personal’ and ‘experimental.’ There’s absolutely nothing wrong with design created for those ends; I applaud and admire those who are making genuine efforts to push the medium forward with excursions into the non-commercial, because they’re doing important advance work upon which the rest of us will eventually feed.

However, with respect to what I was talking about — the commercial application of our craft — there remains, to my mind, a somewhat conspicuous gap in its practice: almost without exception, the Web is a medium in which all of us design and almost none of us art direct. I think of the former as a mode of work that’s closely wedded to execution, whether that means pushing pixels in Photoshop, bringing ideas to life in code or even ‘directing’ teams of designers in the development of a design solution.

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Strike Force Delta

NYC TransitWithout getting into whether I side with New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority or Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union in the labor strike that has put a halt to most commuting in New York City this morning, and at the risk of sounding too easily dismissive of the genuine hardship that this situation has dropped in the laps of average New Yorkers as well as the striking workers (who are, after all, average New Yorkers themselves), let me say there is a silver lining in this cloud: Manhattan, today, is less like its usual convergence of angry rivers of traffic, and more like a peaceful countryside of gentle streams of cars. It’s nice. And, to top it off, there are cones lining the major avenues running north and south along the length of the island — believe it or not, these are bike lanes, intended to let human beings get to and from without the aid of automakers or oil companies. I’ve always wanted to see cars sharing the city’s major thoroughfares with bicycle traffic.

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