In the very first Design Droplets video interview (done via Skype) Michael DiTullo chats about his new book Analog Dreams, Sketches of Michael DiTullo and his thoughts on Sketching.
Transcript
I’ve had this video transcribed (below) for those who prefer to get it that way.
Raph Goldsworthy: Hi, Michael. Welcome to the first Design Droplets video interview. Thanks for taking the time to be here and chat with us. You recently released your first book, titled Analog Dream: Sketches of Michael DiTullo. Can you give a quick rundown of what the book is about and what made you decide to write the book?
Michael DiTullo: I’ve always wanted to do a book, and I think it has to do with the way I found out about design as a child, I think. I learned about design when I was about 14 years old by finding the book Design and Rendering Techniques by Richard Powell, who is one half of the design firm, Seymourpowell, the British design firm. And I remember finding this book. It was down on the bottom shelf in the art section in this little book store in New York state, where I grew up. And I just remember flipping through that book, trying to have a photographic memory, just memorize every little page of it. And I was with my mom, 14 years old, and she says, you know, Michael, time to go. And I said mom, I’m not leaving here without this book. It was an expensive book, but I was a good kid and never really asked for anything. And I think she must have seen in my eye this kid is serious. And I still have that book, and you can see that the binding is ripped off. It’s well marked up. This was a little bit like my Bible for my teenage years. And chapter one is about how a magic marker is made. And that year for Christmas, I asked for a set of magic markers and draft paper.
So that was the start of it. So I think, for me, making my own book completes the circle a little bit. And I wanted to do a book that explains why analog sketching is important to me and put that back into the sphere.
Raph: …main reasoning for you, too, which is your fantastic new book, which I see you’ve got a copy of there. Do you want to hold it up? That’s … yeah. Analog Dreams, which is quite a fantastic book. I’ve had the time to finally sit down and have a good read through it. It’s actually great.
Michael: Cool, thank you.
Raph: Yeah, it’s fantastic to see. I mean, I’ve seen through Core77 a lot of your sketches online, and through various other interviews and stuff you see a lot of your sketches digitally, but it’s really nice to see them on a printed page, as well. From my perspective, it’s nice to see a more high level approach to the … I suppose, not really theory, but the practice of sketching. What you sort of talk about, I think, what it is, the eight elements of a good sketch, which really gives it that much more high level, instead of this is how you draw. This is how you can train yourself. And to actually publish it, you used Blurb, which is a self‑publishing service. Probably ten years ago, that’s not something you would’ve done. To do a book, you would’ve had to go through a publisher and it would’ve been a whole different process. Can you tell us a little bit about Blurb?
Michael: It’s definitely worthwhile. It’s pretty amazing, and I think it’s also amazing that several publishers have contacted since this book has gone live because of the response. And so online publishing is a great prototype, kind of test zone for these kinds of things. It was incredibly easy. I’d been toying with it, researching. There’s several different competitors to Blurb. I’ve been researching. Each of them has their own pros and cons. And Blurb actually reached out to me. They say I was digging around, and they said, you know what, try us out. Try us out for one print and see what you think. I love their tools. They have a great mini‑app called Book Smart, which is kind of in design like, if you will, but what’s great is it ties directly to their capabilities. So it knows how big an image should be before it breaks up. It knows when text and images overlap, like what can look good, what can look bad. So it was super simple, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone with a body of work or just printing up a portfolio. It’s pretty effective.
And it was fantastic to see the interest in the work from the public. I mean, it’s been about three weeks now. I think actually today is three weeks. About 60 copies have sold so far.
Raph: How many copies?
Michael: About 60.
Raph: 60? Fantastic. That’s awesome.
Michael: So that’s not too bad for a three week launch, and it’s been a pretty soft launch. We didn’t really do much PR around it so far. So it’s been fantastic, and the people at Converse, at Hugo design, whose simple sketches are in the book there, have been super supportive of it. And I think the idea of… For me, it’s just kind of bringing design to the forefront and hopefully it’s a little bit about what we do behind the scenes and hopefully, influencing people to value that a little bit more. And also, it’s a book that I would want. Like I said, it doesn’t really go into depth. It kind of touches on the tree tops, and hopefully it just provides a bunch of sketches that you could consider inspirational, to have value.
Raph: Sweet. Can you tell us a little bit about your philosophy on sketching as a language?
Michael: I think for me, I didn’t want to duplicate some of the great work that’s been done, and there’s been some fantastic books by Scott Robertson with Design Studio Press, and great websites like idosketching.com that go through the technique on a tutorial level of how to. And I think in this digital age, I wanted to step back a little bit and talk a little bit about why sketch at all? Why do we do this? And I use an analog medium versus a digital medium. And I’m thinking of, like, Scott Robertson, Design Studio Press books, and he’s sketching. There’s so many resources for step by step tutorials, both in book form and online. And in today’s digital world, I wanted to take a step back from that, not duplicate the great work that had been done by others, but think a little bit about why we sketch in the first place.
I mean, a few weeks ago ‑‑ and I think we’re seeing a lot of resurgence in the interest of analog sketches ‑‑ I know a few weeks ago, personally, we had a designer view in the studio. And most of my designers sketch digitally at this point, but I sketch still primarily in an analog fashion, at least in the early stages. And we put all the sketches up on the wall, and everybody goes straight to the analog sketches, and there’s a reason for that. And I’ve been noticing this pattern over the past five years. I think the fact that an analog sketch is so much more humanistic, and to define analog sketch, I’m almost even considering part of that, like, tablet sketches, like with sketchbook pro, that feel more analog, I guess that’s just a lower fidelity sketch, versus a higher fidelity digital sketch.
And so I wanted to back up a little bit and talk about why I thought that is. I think that there’s something hardwired in our brain as humans that allow us to respond to that level of communication. I think it’s really not a surprise that our early written languages were pictograms. And I think our brains are really hardwired to read really abstract visual communications and put together common symbols or things. And I think sketches allow designers to take advantage of that and communicate a maximum amount of information with a really minimal amount of work, allowing us to focus more on the idea and less on the vehicle for the idea.
Raph: What sort of main tips would you give to designers who do want to improve their sketching visualization skills?
Michael: The biggest tip of all, and it’s not going to be anything shocking, I’m just probably going to reinforce what professors around the world are saying, is just do it all the time. And you’re going to do a bunch of horrible work, just really shitty. Just churn through it and develop that visual language. Like any language, if I were to learn French or Spanish, to become fluent in sketching, in visual language, is no different. You’re going to need to be with people who are already fluent in it. And I’m going to need to speak that language as much as possible to gain that fluency. Visual language is a little different because most of us, or a lot of us at least, know how to read that visual language. We don’t necessarily know how to write it. So, spending as much time with fluent visual authors as possible, learning that benchmarking, what worked for them [audio skips] you would improve on.
Then working with a peer group that’s at your level, you push each other and working with those even at a level below you so you get that interaction, is really ‑ and just forcing yourself to get in the habit. And at this point, I feel like I really think on the page, there’s not a lot of filters between here and here.
And I think one of the reasons why I do it in analog fashion is because I really don’t like to sketch at my desk. I like to sketch away from my desk, at home, in the park, at a table with a bunch of other designers, in our design library. So I think, for me, it’s really important to get my brain out of the static environment where implementation work is done and to get more into a [audio skips] environment. So I think I work analog.
I don’t know. We’ll see what happens when the iPad
Raph: OK. Apart from the other half of Seymourpowell inspiring your sketching were there any other designers that really inspired you to sketch and, I suppose, get your sketching to the level you are right now?
Michael: I’ve always been a little bit of a nerd about it. I think, as a kid ‑ it’s a really tangible form of design. Really, it’s like five percent of what we do.
Raph: Yes.
Michael: And five percent might even be an exaggeration. But, in terms of a tangible, visible where others can see what we’re doing and see our impact in our process. In process it might be more like 75 percent. So I think, as a kid, when you’re seeing all the drawings in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, Motor Trend, I just really wanted to do that. I remember as a 13‑year‑old when my parents said, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” not knowing the word “design,” I said, “I want to draw stuff from the future.” And I just thought, “That has to be a job.” [laughs] “Somebody’s role in this culture has to be to imagine and visualize the things from the future.”
And in my 13‑year‑old childlike way, it was the most efficient way to describe that. And I think I’ve always been a student of those kinds of designers, starting with Raymond Loewy and Teague who ‑ Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague both started as illustrators and basically became so proficient as illustrators for product catalogs that companies started approaching them to visualize ideas for products, instead of products, and the birth of industrial design.
Up until Seymourpowell, JoJo Brujaro ‑ and I’ve always been very fascinated with these prolific designers who ‑ I don’t think they see themselves as, “Oh, I’m a car designer. I’m a footwear designer or a medical product designer.” They see themselves as a designer, as a creative that can work anything and apply their skill sets to any problem.
Raph: You’ve got such an amazing backdrop there. Can you, maybe, give us a quick rundown on some of the bits and pieces? You’ve got, I assume, some of your shoes, some amazing books and then a kettle as well. Maybe you can give us a quick rundown on a couple of things? Maybe a couple of great books that you’ve got, maybe tell us a little bit about one or two of the shoes. Is that alright?
Michael: Yeah, definitely. This is actually the first shoe I ever designed in 2003. It’s the Zoom Street Miler. It actually launched with the Sydney Olympics. So another designer designed a track version of this shoe, which was worn by various track athletes at the Olympics and then I took that upper and tweaked it and did a street version and designed this new bottom. I thought it was kind of an emotive abstraction of track [audio skips] where these are placed. Internally it has a full length Zoom airbag, so it’s a super comfortable street product that’s inspired by sport.
But, as my first shoe ‑ it’s kind of like the place where you met your wife or something. This is the first one I did. So, it’s always special to me. This tea kettle, I worked on this tea kettle with the team at Evo Design while I was working there, with Aaron Szymanski and the team there. And this was for Chantal Cookware. And I think this product is one of my favorite products because when you’re working with a client like Chantal, they’re really specific about what screw head you’re going to select right here.
And working with a client that pays as much attention to detail as you do is a real pleasure, but it’s always just been a marker of a great product experience. When everybody’s putting the same amount of care into every little detail, you can’t help but lead to a great product. And I think we designed this product in 2001 and it’s still in production today in a variety of colors.
That was the goal of the product, in the brief, was to make a timeless piece in design and so far we’ve done it. We’ll see.
Raph: Fantastic.
Michael: I think the newest book on the shelf is probably this one, which is a retrospective of Marcel Breuer’s work by [audio skips] .
Raph: Ok.
Michael: And to me, again, being a student of design and art in our culture is really important. It’s easy to make a product that satisfies a wrong need. I think, at this point, most products are pretty good, but designing a product that’s great or above average is increasingly difficult ‑ that ties to culture. And for me, it’s always been really important to be a student of those designers. I’ve just been able to do that consistently. I think if you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, let’s say, in New York and you to the Asian art section at the museum, that floor, the Egyptian art section of the museum; you actually don’t see a lot of art. You see a lot of artifacts from daily life, objects that made life better at the time, vases and spoons and pottery.
I think it’s important for designers to think, “Well, how are our objects going to fit in? How is what we’re doing right now going to convey what is important to our culture 500, 1,000 years from now?” Because, it’s going to be there. It’s going to be buried somewhere.
Raph: OK. Fantastic. That’s the whole interview. So thanks for taking the time to sit down, chat with me, share about the book, share about your design process and sketching process, and philosophy and all the bits and pieces we’ve talked about. Have you got any final thoughts before we wrap it up?
Michael: I just want to thank you, Raph, thank Design Droplets for all the support. And I really believe in everything that you’re doing there.
Raph: Oh, thanks. That’s fantastic to hear. [crosstalk]
Michael: [audio skips] So, I’m really excited to be the first video interview. I hope that everyone that has bought the book enjoys it. And hopefully it’s just the first of many for me and from other designers out there now that these tools are available.
Want a copy to put on your iPhone or iPod? Right click & Save As…. on this here linky.
Nice to put a voice to the face Michael, and “Design Droplets” is a much needed local design motivator, much appreciated Raph.