Alas, poor design, you're nothing without creativity

SAN DIEGO -- Despite the admonition that news design must "evolve or die" and a prominently displayed quotation from Yogi Berra that "the future ain't what it was," "Be creative" was the message delivered repeatedly at the Society of Newspaper Design's annual workshop and exhibition held here Oct. 9-11.

More than 900 participants from around the world listened to art directors and editors, page designers and publishers -- and poets. The message: Be true to your creative heart.

The organization proved its own creativity when it announced that members had voted to keep "SND" but change the name behind it. More than 60 percent endorsed implementing a recommendation made last year by SND's board of directors to adopt the name Society of News Design in recognition of the multimedia nature of publishing these days.

And the message of creativity was crystal clear in the organizers' choices for main conference speakers: Patricia Smith, a columnist at the Boston Globe, and David Carson, a graphic designer and avant garde art director.

Smith, who worked her way up the journalistic ladder from secretary to arts critic at the Chicago Sun-Times , is an accomplished poet. She told stories about her journalism and her poetry in an attempt to explain how she taps into her creativity.

"Think of what you do in different ways," Smith told the opening session's audience. "Never settle for the predictable."

Saying that the "writer and the story share the same heart," Smith explained how she rarely acknowledges holidays in her column, but that a recent Memorial Day was different. She looked at names inscribed on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., she said, and started to read them aloud.

"They sounded like a song," she said.

"I kept typing name after name after name and when I felt like it, I hit return," Smith explained. "When I hit 80 lines, I sent it into the paper."

Then the desk called. "Can we do this?" she was asked.

"Do you understand what I'm doing?" she asked back.

"It's kind of like poetry, right?" came the tentative answer from her editor.

Smith and the editor decided, yes, they could do this.

She received dozens of calls and letters from people who had read the names of their brothers and uncles, fathers and sons. "It meant more to them than if I had written a traditional column," Smith said.

"If you can be a writer," she said, "you can be a designer, you can be a poet, you can illustrate, you can sing a song."

David Carson, using a slide show of his work to illustrate his beliefs, spoke to a luncheon crowd about how he evolved from a high school sociology teacher to one of the world's leading graphic designers. In part, Carson said, it stemmed from the fact that he hadn't gone to art school and hadn't made a living as a struggling graphic artist.

The world first noticed Carson when he was the art director of Raygun magazine in the mid-'80s. Raygun, a magazine of alternative rock, allowed Carson latitude in his use of type and illustrations. He showed Raygun pages that were monuments to creative graphic design, if somewhat illegible.

"Frequently the stories weren't very good," Carson told the crowd. "So I would use the text as a design element."

Carson showed pages wherein he had done such things as reversed headlines out of illustrations that then bled into the text, so that characters and whole words were missing. "I don't think anything important was left out," he said.

In another instance, Carson was thoroughly unimpressed with an interview with a rock musician. As he tried typeface after typeface, he came across Zapf Dingbats (the last entry in his Macintosh's font menu, it is only symbols) and typeset the entire interview in that face, making it completely unreadable.

"I suppose someone could have decoded it, but it wasn't a very good interview," Carson said.

The author of The End of Print (a book in its fifth printing that has sold more than 125,000 copies), Carson is a creative director at the design firm Robert Greenberg and Associates in New York. He showed the group his recent works, which include art direction on Microsoft's latest corporate advertising campaign as well television commercials for Lucent Technologies.

On-line communities
New media took center stage at a special session held the day before the main conference.

Highlighting the day were dual presentations about building communities on-line, given by Lynne Bundesen of SageNet LLC of Pleasantville, N.Y., contractors to the Microsoft Network, and Wendy Govier of Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif.

Bundesen -- a former weekly newspaper owner, former foreign correspondent, former photojournalist and former magazine art director -- started building on-line communities for Prodigy in the early '90s.

"Make a place where everybody can go and drop out," she said. "You have to design it and build it from the commonalities, not the differences, though your first requests will be for the differences."

Bundesen said there is a life cycle in belonging to a community. At the beginning, she said, "it's much like a love affair." But then, community participants tend to "burn out."

"People usually come for 18 months and then they take off a month," Bundesen said. "Then they come back and say, 'I missed you guys so much, I'm back.'"

Govier, a former newspaper art director and an art director at Knight-Ridder/Tribune Graphics Service, is the web editor and publisher at Adobe Systems. She has been assigned to build a set of communities for Adobe customers where they can exchange information about Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker and PostScript.

"I have a basic definition of an on-line community," said Govier. "It's a space where people come to interact with one another."

Govier went on to call an on-line community a "social scaffolding -- a social trellis." The gardening metaphor was proper, she said, because it is the responsibility of on-line organizers to "allow the community to grow and flourish."

Govier, who is working with author Amy Jo Kim on a book about on-line communities, listed 10 social design principals every community should follow: