~ Alan Lawrence
Perhaps my most significant achievement was obtaining my teaching credentials in high school English. The most challenging part of teaching is primarily taken up with making the subject compelling and interesting to a captive audience of high school aged children. You have to subtly tell stories that draw them in. I was wholly unprepared. As a fiction writer, I threw everything against the wall without any seduction, but as a teacher you can’t do that. I have to convince the students that the subject is relevant, that it matters. For example, I had to oversee a project on poetry. I’m knowledgable, but not interested in poetry. For 2-1/2 months, I had to convince the class that it was vital. I used poems, songs, lyrics, then had the students establish criteria for themselves as to what is or isn’t poetry. In the end, I found that I really liked poetry for first time, and the kids did too — it was a success!
Why am I telling you all this? It’s to help you understand how and what I do in the process of graphic design. In design, there are a list of givens that are needed to accomplish the values that the client wants to be communicated, a number of things that cannot be changed. You cannot invent or re-invent/ essentials, like the colors in the palate, the movements a dancer can achieve, the notes a piano can play, or the words of a classical poem. It’s our function to coalesce ideas that have never hung together before, to bring them together to give narrative and clarity. It’s the same approach in writing copy for a client.
Graphic Design and Marketing entails telling stories and communicating ideas. It’s the way in which you bring people around to see an idea in a particular light.
In jazz, we’re often playing a song that hasn’t been prepared, and getting something rich, energetic and moving out of a collaboration that is (definitively) in the moment.
This is reproduced in the graphic design process at IMAGE: Global Vision. We’re people with diverse backgrounds, pooling our collective resources, experiences and influences to communicate our ideas vividly. Regina Rubino assembles the multiple ideas from various viewpoints and relates them to multiple platforms. The result that you see is the development of a project that is richly involved, multi-faceted and detailed. It’s a unique methodology that is at once personal and universal.
