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Quote for the day
“I don’t believe those neat stories about how one arrives at ideas. What happens in my view, is that we maske the process with a rational overlay.”
“When I began to work as a designer I had a very determinist point ov view, I really believed I could develop a rational process for produciong good work. When I did a pice of good work which occurred outside that rational process, I distrusted it. I felt it was an accident – that in my flailing around I merely got lucky and hit on something that worked. Finally it dawned on me that maybe these were not accidents, but sprang from some wellspring withing me. I began to work in inutitive modes. I entered hypothetical worlds and lived freely within them. I became comfortable with premises that were irrational. I frequently set up some sort of absurdist condition that forced me into considering relationships and ideas and experiences which would not be conjured up within restrictions of the familiar world. I would also set up some reductive, provocative condition that freqauently involved metorphor or ambiguity or both.
I could then use that juxtaposition to startle, stimulate or seduce the viewer into examining the work and giving it a few moments of their time.” Saul BassThe quote came from a book “A Smile in the Mind” compiled by Beryle McAlhone and David Stuart.
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1 Reply
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“A Smile in the Mind” is a classic. It’s interesting how Paul Rand had the complete opposite approach. He advised his students to get everything worked out in their head before picking up a pen. He thought that starting to draw beforehand introduced too many possibilities, and made the process too long. Maybe the different approaches are because Bass was doing motion graphics, and Rand worked with stills.
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