Welcome to this very special episode of Design Matters here at the School of Visual Arts, Masters in Branding Studio with me our D.D. Gordon, Josh Lieberson, Brian Ray, Paul Sair, and Malcolm Gladwell. When we're here to talk about the illustrated Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to Design Matters. So I, an illustrated Malcolm Gladwell. The conversation I started having with Malcolm was I really feel like these books need, they deserve to be thought about from a design perspective with the same care that you are bringing to the story time. You know at the end of the day I thought that Malcolm should be able to kind of put, you know, this thing on the table and have that be... Plunk value. Yeah, punk value, right? No, people don't put enough in the punk value. People talk about the tipping point. What was... there's a tipping point to the tipping point. When did the tipping point enter not the words themselves but the ideas that Malcolm put forth? Why do you think they've had this longevity and this... The story teller. He's taking something that's somewhat complex. If anybody else wrote about it, I don't know if people would actually respond to it in the way that they do. He takes things that are very difficult to understand and makes it entertaining. Sometimes these things take on a life of the realm and it has less and less to do with what you've done and more and more to do with an idea just getting a kind of independent cultural momentum and something. These things have kind of got off on their own and I... I'm scared to kind of recognize the phenomenon anymore. Can we talk a little bit about how this happened? First I want to know how you decided not that I have any question about why but how you decided to work with Brian and with Paul. I knew Brian and I thought that his style would be something that A, he would get Malcolm, right? It would be immediate intellectual understanding and I knew that if I brought somebody the table to Malcolm who was too much artist and not enough intellect, we were going to have a problem. He told me a little bit about the problem. He didn't tell me too much and essentially said what he was looking for and I thought, well, I kind of fall into that category. I sort of was like, how did Paul get involved? He's so committed to the art of a project and he's relentless in pushing through these ideas and his passion for these ideas makes the work that he produces within books really special and really unique and I thought you absolutely need to have him involved with something like this. I was in a great situation because I got to see all these drawings come in from Brian. Wow. Oh yeah. Yes. Wow. Nice. Now, did you ever be like, what? Brian, huh? There was one here. There was one here. There was one here. I just, I got to show this. This one, Brian, I kept vetoing this guy. Is that why you put the extra one? And then Brian is like, we need something to last page about. Brian's like, what about that? That's one of the stuff better than all right. Damn it. So, three years and hundreds of meetings later, you're finally ready to get started. I told Malcolm, I said, I don't want to illustrate your book. I don't want to, in a traditional sense, obviously want to do the work for it. But I wanted it to be something completely different than maybe what I'd done with my illustration work. So I said, this is kind of how I envision the project going. I actually brought this sketchbook along. It has pretty much notes from all three of the books. Can you put there in a little bit so we can see? But the one drawing that I remember doing while I was there, I kept it. I'm obsessive about taking notes and keeping lists and things. So I kept this drawing, which is essentially a drawing that I said, okay, so if we could describe your content, all the words, as a straight line, this is sort of, you know, and then this sort of drunk driver line that kind of skews wildly back and forth of the line, that's how I envision the artwork going. And so sometimes it would align directly on the content, and other times it would go so far to the left or right that it would be sort of more oblique or more abstract, but sort of take the reader on a parallel trip with what was going on in the book. The title pages were something that we had nailed down fairly quickly. We were thinking again in terms of finding a way of creating something that feels drawn into. So you have this kind of explosion happening here. This one was like a little fuse sort of that turns into, you know, I guess we're not going to call it fire works because it's a abstract. The words themselves, they don't need any, they don't need to be embellished anymore than what they do their job. So I need to do my job and not step on the toes of the book. And the connection between the visuals, the drawings and the writing becomes more obvious. Yeah, you know, it just, it's less interesting. So there is a little sketch for suddenly. Yeah. And Paul, can you go to the actual final image? You can't, the illustrations can't distract the reader from the story. They have to enhance the story, the experience of the story. And how do you think it's doing that? How does that happen? Well, I can only say that in the negative, that is to say if they become too unobstract and too specific and they have all kinds of word-based, then the reader is having to consciously pause and look at the drawing. And I've lost them. You know, as a writer, what fuels storytelling is all about is all fueled by fear. It's the fear of losing your audience. That's the thing that's the core of all storytelling. So you're constantly asking a question, how do I keep, how do I keep you engaged? Right? Because the minute you're gone, you're gone. It's over. And so the idea was, can illustrations help keep the readers engaged? And I think these do, as opposed to distracting them and, you know, once they're distracted. You know, it's came over. My father is a great. I influence on me in this regard. My father is totally, he's a mathematician, he's totally binary. He divides the world into subjects that he feels he knows more about than everyone else. And there's only three. Math, gardening, and dogs. And then everything else, which he feels he knows less about than the rest of the world. And when he's dealing with things that he feels he knows less about, he keeps his mouse shut and listens and never just accepts the fact that he's going to be in a subordinate position. And I feel that's, I thought that I feel it's an incredibly beautiful way to live your life. And to attempt to impose your will in areas where you're not qualified is foolish. And so once I had sort of accepted the fact that I was dealing with two incredibly talented people, my, my chief concern was if I get involved too much, I'll screw things up. The fact that we're sitting here talking about room full of people sitting here talking about a book. I mean, it's the least fashionable time in the last 4,000 years to be designing books. From the design, from just a purely designed perspective, it's totally true. But that also means it's the best time because all kinds of opportunities, this now has value it may not have had five years ago. In what way? The permanent object, you know. Books are going away. A lot of books will be going away. Physical books, I mean. But these are the type of books that are selling more than they were five years ago. Well, I am an officially calling this collection, the illustrated Malcolm Blackwell, but obviously it is the magnificent creation of Malcolm Blackwell, Paul Sair and Brian Ray. I'm Debbie Millman, and thank you for joining me on Design Matters.