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Veer:

What differentiates art and design?

Marian:

I had a little argument with Milton about this. To me, and Milton disagrees, art is very closely related to obsession. If you’re obsessed with something and you do it obsessively, it’s art. I guess I have to qualify that. If you obsessively arrange the soup cans in your cupboard, it’s not art.

Design doesn’t have that obsession. Design is colder. It’s not that people aren’t passionate in design – they can be passionate about it and believe in it and be totally into what they’re doing. But it doesn’t have that obsessive edge. It’s commercially driven. Obviously art is often commercially driven. I think that if the artist is just doing it for the money, they’re not making art. They have to be obsessed with what they’re doing.

Veer:

Where do you turn when you have no ideas?

Marian:

I don’t really turn anywhere. I’m not one to flip through books looking for reference material. When I have no ideas, I usually just suffer and cry. I go for walks, I take a bath, I go to sleep. I’m frequently lucky enough to wake up in the morning with the idea.

 

It’s not that I don’t get stuck. When I did the cover and interior for PRINT magazine, I had a massive case of stage fright and completely freaked out and spent quite a bit of time crying and banging my head on the floor, which doesn’t really help.

My biggest problem is trying to make things make sense. Trying not to just do something in a style but to come up with something that has some form of logic underneath it. That’s a matter of thinking about what it is I’m working on and trying to make some sort of relationship between that and an idea.

Veer:

What do you do to stay creative?

Marian:

I like art. I get a lot out of contemporary art and art of all kinds. To stay creative, I look at books of art, and when I go to New York, I go to contemporary art galleries and look at museums and stuff like that.

Anything, really, can trigger me. It’s just a matter of looking around and seeing stuff. Looking at signage or whatever. It helps to be in an unfamiliar environment. If I’m in London or New York, I’m totally fired up all the time. When I’m at home, I have to rely on books. I don’t flip through books looking for ideas, but quite often I’ll be looking at something that’s not particularly related to what I’m doing – it might be photography or painting – but it will make me think of something.

Veer:

Can design be taught in school?

Marian:

I absolutely think it can be taught in school. But, by and large, it is taught incorrectly. The emphasis on conceptualizing over skill is perhaps misguided. It’s not that I think there’s no room for teaching people how to conceptualize, it’s just that there’s too much emphasis on that.

 

I really think there is a big lack of teaching logical thinking. When you think of how much of design is figuring out what is the most logical way to get from point A to point B, whether that is setting up the structures of subheadings in a multi-page document or way-finding signage or navigating a web site. I never see that being taught. I never see anybody talking about it, and there’s an unbelievable lack of it in our graphic society. There’s so much dysfunctional shit out there. That’s definitely something that should be taught – the world would be a better place.

Veer:

What experiences in design have been the most educational?

Marian:

I’m going to say teaching. Before I started teaching typography, I had to cram because there was a lot of stuff I didn’t know. I knew a lot about how to use type, but I knew very little about the origins and the history of type. Being with the students and seeing how they learned and what was enjoyable and what kinds of things they came up with was hugely educational and inspiring. For myself, based on what I was teaching them, I started to re-examine my own work and became a lot stricter with it by looking at it and thinking, “Well, marks off for that.”

Veer:

What’s been your biggest failure?

Marian:

It would have to be the nine years I spent with my former company doing straight-up graphic design. I did learn a lot from it, but it essentially killed my interest in graphic design. It stole many years of artistic freedom from me. It destroyed a good friendship. And I produced, I think, absolutely nothing material that was worthwhile or worth keeping.

Veer:

What role does design have in society? How important is it?

Marian:

You’re catching me at a time when I’ve become extremely lenient in my aesthetic taste. I know there are a lot of designers who feel they’re fighting some sort of good fight to win the battle against ugliness and eradicate all the really horrible stuff we see. That horrible stuff is proliferating at an exponential rate as more and more people take design into their own hands and create their own flyers and menus and signage.

I’ve started to kind of like it. I’ve started to shrug my shoulders and say, “Eh. It does its job. It tells me that this plumber is at this address or that this stupid little store is having a sale.” So I no longer have this kind of abhorrence of this really ugly shit that’s floating around out there.

 

From an aesthetic sense, in a way I don’t really think design matters. Sure, there’s a place for it. If you’ve got a fancy store, it takes a lot of skill to get that message across. You can’t do it in Comic Sans. From an in-the-trenches perspective – and I say this somewhat reluctantly because I feel like a total traitor – people can just do it themselves.

But I’m going to go back to that thing I said about logic. I really think that’s where design matters the most. In structuring information in such a way that people can understand it, and it’s the one area that most designers have the least skill in.

Veer:

What do you see yourself doing in the future?

Marian:

I really want to get involved in architecture, and I really want to get involved in stage design, and sculptural kinds of things. Even motion graphics, though I would have to partner with somebody on that. I will never in my lifetime have time to learn motion graphics.

I’m really hoping to get off the printed page. Not forever – I love print and I love making printed things – but I do want to get into more of a three-dimensional, ethereal environment and do things that are more permanent. That’s my hope and my little dream, so we can be optimistic and say I see that in my future.

You can view Marian’s work on her web site, bantjes.com.

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