Ilise Benun

Ilise Benun thinks self-promotion is like exercise: it’s something that should be done everyday for a healthy financial future, but that we almost always find excuses to avoid. As a top marketing strategist in the creative world, Ilise teaches people like you to promote themselves and their business in her own consulting firm, Marketing Mentor, as well as in her blog, newsletter, and numerous speaking events. She’s also the author of five books and various articles featured in magazines like Inc., HOW, Nation’s Business, Self, Essence, and Working Woman. Notes catches up with her here after the release of her most recent book, The Art of Self Promotion, the compilation of twelve years of advice and wisdom from her eponymously named site.

Q: Sometimes marketing seems contrary to the goal of visual communication (in this mindset, high impact work is the best tool for attracting new business, and promotion is merely extraneous effort). Why doesn’t good work just ‘speak for itself’?

Ilise: Good work does sometimes speak for itself, but the point I would make is that it’s not nearly enough. It’s unrealistic (and often wishful thinking) to believe, as many artists do, that one’s work would speak for itself. That’s putting the cart before the horse. People have to know about the work—hear about it, see it somewhere—in order for it to “speak for itself.” Marketing is everything you do to get the work in front of the people (your target market) who will appreciate it so that it can speak for itself. (more…)

Jean Perwin

Jean Perwin is a Miami based attorney who specializes in Intellectual Property Law, Entertainment and General Corporate Law. She is most recently a recurring author for Notes on Design, and has a just launched a new series of informational posts to answer all your burning trademark/copyright questions. For those unfamiliar with the genius of Jean, we asked her ten questions ranging from the widest-held copyright hooey to the reason she likes working with people like you. (more…)

…or is it?

I want! I want! I want! I want a new iPhone, and I want to take pictures with it, and download music onto it, and watch movies on it, and I want a million dollars to help me buy it and pay the monthly bill: one reason of several that only 146,000 iPhones were actually connected to service with AT&T in the first two days of its launch. (more…)

Lots of you, like me, freelance. Being a freelancer comes with all sorts of special perks, like working in your pajamas (don’t do this), having the freedom to pick up your dry cleaning during the work day (don’t do this either), and not paying taxes (if I have to say it, you don’t deserve the warning). Another totally not awesome thing about freelancing is the endless time logged alone at your desk without the daily motivating support of others in your field (unless you’ve done a very smart thing and invested in a shared office space, in which case you don’t need my tips about wearing pajamas).

Luckily, the Freelancer’s Union—responsible for other near Herculean feats, such as health care provision—has come up with a brilliant solution to the lonely freelancer’s dilemma. (more…)

Brian Edlefson

Brian Edlefson strives for more graphic thought and less visual clutter. As a lead designer in Whirlpool Corporation’s multi-disciplinary Global Consumer Design studio, Edlefson is responsible for infusing household brands like Whirlpool, Maytag, Kenmore, and Amana with smart graphic design strategies. Prior to moving to Michigan, Brian developed design solutions at Target, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Herman Miller, and McDougal-Littell Publishing. He earned his BFA from Western Michigan University (1996), studied color in Bali, Indonesia with Ohio University (2000), and achieved an MFA from Yale University (2005). Edlefson’s work has been recognized in many national and international creative competitions (New York Art Director’s Club, Communication Arts, Creativity, Graphis, HOW, Print, STEP Inside Design) and chosen for inclusion in the National Design Archive at the Library of Congress. Recently, Brian was a featured speaker at the 2007 HOW Design Conference in Atlanta.

A limited edition poster commemorating Charles and Ray Eames. 24×36in, hexachrome offset

I’m curious about your current position at Whirlpool. What are you doing now that you’ve left Target? I heard you’re no longer in Minneapolis- is that true?

Brian: Yes, I left Target and Minneapolis to accept a position with Whirlpool. Although I love Minneapolis-and my time at Target was rewarding-this new role offered the unique opportunity to help lead a multidisciplinary design team. It has been a very natural professional evolution. My most rewarding design experiences have involved collaborations with colleagues outside typical graphic design practices: architects and interior designers at Herman Miller, curators and historians at MoMA, marketing strategists and interior architects at Target, and now consumer product designers at Whirlpool. My current role also builds on my interest in defining and differentiating a collection of brands. Whirlpool is a big, global company with many household brand names (Whirlpool, Maytag, Amana, Kitchen Aid, Jenn-Air, Magic Chef, etc.). Making compelling design solutions-in collaboration with product designers—on a collection of ‘un-sexy’ products—offers a lot of challenges. In some ways it is different than Target because the ‘bullseye’ caché is almost universally appealing. Target uses design as a powerful marketing tool-whereas Whirlpool uses design to make tedious tasks like laundry and food preparation more pleasurable, easier. (more…)

The Sensate wearable female condom, Tonita Abeyta, 2001

Skin: Surface, Substance + Design was originally published to accompany the 2002 exhibition of the same name at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. The recent reissue includes a new introduction, ‘2nd Skin,’ by the show’s curator, Ellen Lupton. This updated prologue takes into account new work that’s in the traveling redux of Skin, called Second Skin and being produced in conjunction with Vitra Design Museum. I wasn’t able to go to the initial exhibit, so can’t vouch for the experience, but if the catalog is any indication of the show, then I am probably justified in being peeved at missing it. However, in the manner of other exhibition publications with Lupton at the helm, Skin is worthy of consideration as its own self-sustaining entity, not quite replacing the exhibition, but at least offering something substantial in its stead. (more…)

This blog has seen a rash of posts addressing the issue of design snobbery, from typography to magazine readership. I always find this an interesting topic because design is ostensibly art put to marketable use ‘for the people’, yet often tows a pretty snooty line when it comes to defending itself against aesthetic and professional impurities. (Several terrific fights in the design world that have erupted over this issue immediately come to mind: 2006’s spectacular James Dyson vs. Alice Rawsthorn blow-out over her inclusion of ‘fluffy’ exhibitions at the Design Museum in London, and of course the ongoing battle of type designers against comic sans discussed recently by Tara McKay).

Everyday design—not the trendy DIY kind produced by professional designers, or the kitschy vintage graphics theorized as ‘vernacular’ forms of pop communication, but the self-styled websites, signage, and branding created and consumed daily by millions of Americans—isn’t always OK in the design world. This might be because while vintage kitsch now appears charming, contemporary kitsch seems just, well, ugly.

I present to you the cult sensation www.dottisweightlosszone.com. (more…)

Every year, the New York Chapter of the AIGA stages a podium discussion of emerging designers as part of their Fresh Dialogue/New Voices in Graphic Design series; each event is subsequently recorded in a publication put out by Princeton Architectural Press. It’s a handy little paperback with big print, a running side margin documenting incidents of audience participation (sometimes laughter, sometimes applause), and down-to-earth dialogue between the moderator and speakers. Fresh Dialogue Seven: Making Magazines, the most recent offering, covers the June 7, 2006 conversation between maverick magazine editors Lisa Farjam of Bidoun, David Haskell of Topic, Tod Lippy of Esopus, and moderator James Truman. In the book, each editor/publisher offers their own fantastic, truncated genesis story, and then answers questions from Truman and the audience that have, in written form, none of the meandering hopelessness that so often induces despondency in live audiences. (more…)

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the head of the Graduate Program in Graphic Design at Yale since 1990, is also a practicing designer, public artist and Feminist.

In 1971, de Bretteville founded the Woman’s Design program at Cal Arts, and later co-founded the historic public space ‘The Woman’s Building’ with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven 1973, and the Communication Design program at the Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design in LA in 1981. Her many public works reflect a deep commitment to social activism through the engagement of community voices and respect for collected local memories. In 2004, she was awarded an AIGA medal for outstanding contribution to the field of design. (more…)

If there is a utopic, sun dappled wonderland for nerds—the kind of place abundant with old circuit boards and sympathy for anachronistic societies—it would probably feature lots of free copies of Make magazine.

Make: technology on your time, published quarterly by O’Reilly Media (of Tim O’Reilly, champion of the open source movement and all forms of tech related publishing), offers instructions, tips, and inspiration for DIY hard and software projects. The most recent edition (Vol. 10, ‘Home Electronics’) features such compelling projects as: a Solar-Powered Bike GPS made of fully recycled parts, Mini High-Powered Laser made from an old DVD burner, a Tabletop Biosphere (sorry- ‘Shrimp Support Module’), and, phenomenally, a Brain Wave Machine (pp. 134,140, 110 and 88, respectively). (more…)