I actually think it almost works the other way sometimes: making a college textbook, say, look really "user friendly" tends to also make it look less "serious," even if nothing changes other than the design treatment.

I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.

If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.

When it comes to working on identities, a lot of the time I find myself working with a company that has been around for a while. No matter what they say their goal is, the history and the impression that they have already made in the minds of the public is a real thing that you have to deal with.

The truth about logos is that they are not that hard to do.

Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.

It was 4 or 5 years into my first design job before the idea of doing graphic design on computers started taking hold. I started working in 1980, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, then the real desktop publishing only started coming around in 85-86, but it wasn't really until the end of the decade that the transition became irresistible.