The Cheese Monkeys

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another.

Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas.

Kiddies, Graphic Design, if you wield it effectively, is Power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair. In this century, Germany chose to do the former with the swastika, and America opted for the latter with Mickey Mouse and Superman.

Never fall in love with an idea. They’re whores: if the one you’re with isn’t doing the job there’s always, always, always another.

Yes, Garnett Grey was an Architect. Were a psychoanalyst to approach him from behind, tap his shoulder, and say 'Humanity,' Garrett'd spin and respond, without hesitation, 'Solvable'.

Just who are the cheese monkeys? And what do they want?

Graphic Design for its own sake will never happen, because the concept cancels itself out — a poster about nothing other than itself is not Graphic Design, it's … makin' ART.

After age twenty-five, you're not a victim anymore — you're a volunteer.

Nothing worth knowing can ever be taught in a classroom.

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

My longing for someone to talk to made Himillsy the lightning bug in my honey jar. I punched holes in the lid so she could breathe.

But at the end of the day, you can't major in Making Stuff, so it was Art by default.

It's not Art. And Art is not Design.

(...) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. (...) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence — once they became an option — they mutated . . . into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.

Never let your mouth write a check that your ass can't cash.

Did they want what I wanted? Did they want to understand, to unlock it? To decode it? To glean, to touch, to learn, to get something, to proceed, to get somewhere, to graduate, to work, to thrive; to someday, sometime, finally earn the luxury, the permission to … stop, to stop all of this, to relax, and forget?

On the first day of class, the Visual Arts building reclined before me like an old brick whore, egging me to show her one, last, good time. I doubted I was up to the task, but regardless, I entered from the rear, just to give myself the slightest mental edge.

(...) I'm not much of anything, (...) besides bored and boring, punctuated by fits of scant self-amusement. And you are ...?

Twenty-six letters: Marjorie Morningstar or Ulysses. The man-made world means exactly that. There isn't an inch of it that doesn't have to be dealt with, figured out, executed. And it's waiting for you to decide what it's going to look like.

Penguin Classic, with the orange bands at the top and bottom; and the Gill Sans thirty-sixpoint title, all caps, centered and medium weight, in black on the white band in the middle. One of the designer Tschichold's prouder moments, when he finally woke the hell up and joined the twentieth century.