INTERVIEW: LORRAINE WILD
by Jon Sueda
Published in Tweak: AIGA Graphic Design Journal for the Carolinas, (Raleigh NC., Issue 4, 2003)

I first became acquainted with Lorraine Wild in 1998 when attending her presentation at the opening of “Lorraine Wild: Selections from the Permanent Collection” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition featured a handful of the notable books she had designed on subjects such as art, architecture and photography. It was only the second graphic design lecture I had ever attended, the first being David Carson a few months earlier. While Carson’s talk was more like a “rock concert” led by an intuitive “unschooled” designer, Lorraine’s lecture was a precise history lesson where each project was contextualized by a particular design approach based on academic research, in-depth knowledge of the subject matter and reverence for design as a craft. Rather than a overt style, her signature approach resulted in design that was adventurous, yet sympathetic to the subject matter. I never foresaw that two years later I would be literally sitting in her Graphic Design History class at California Institute of the Arts as a graduate student. CalArts gave me the opportunity to peek into her process and gain a fuller appreciation for the remarkable books she designs working with traditionally conservative cultural institutions. In the mid-90’s many predicted that printed books and traditional publishing as we know it would be superseded by hypertext and electronic documents made possible by digital technology. In 2003, Lorraine Wild’s thriving practice suggests otherwise.

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INTERVIEW

Jon Sueda: What initially attracted you to book design?

Lorraine Wild: What originally attracted me was my own love of words and pictures. This started as a kid: I was always an “artist,” but I often thought of my work as stories (in book form). But I didn’t have a name for it that wasn’t “advertising,” so I wasn’t sure of what it was I was interested in. When I look back at high school, my most creative teachers were the writing teachers: they got me very hooked on literature, history and even criticism, understanding how all of those things worked in our culture. And I was both an editor and the designer of my high schools’ poetry magazine and newspaper. (My most memorable newspaper project was an article I wrote about the rotten conditions in the lavatories throughout my large and not-very-well maintained high school. I accompanied the piece – a tirade about how there were so few working toilets in the building that students could not go to the bathroom between class periods and still get to classes on time – with a parody of “information design” complete with charts and graphs, which I thought was hilarious and the Principal thought was an outrage. So I guess I was thinking visually and I guess, “ironically” early on).

Was graphic design your focus in college?

I started out in college as an “fine” art major, and somehow I ended up designing another campus literary magazine and I realized that what I wanted to focus on was visual work for publication. But in Detroit, where I lived, there was not very much book publishing happening there, and again graphic design was defined largely as an advertising-based practice (for cars, mostly!). It wasn’t until I got to Cranbrook that I realized there were ‘book designers” and I assumed that you had to go to New York to do that: which I eventually did, and yet it still took me a while to start working on books (really not until I went to grad school). Besides my love of books for what they are, I always liked the idea that books did not disappear, for the most part; that it was the one “product” of graphic design that was not ephemeral. And the media of the book seems to be directly wired into the brain of the audience: you have more of their attention than in more ephemeral forms, you can work with a more subtle voice and with greater variety. I know that this is all wildly general, but there you are.

How do you approach designing books?

My approach has not varied in that I have always tried to make the form of the book come out of the subject. I look at tons of stuff, and I always feel that I am under the influence of one thing or another, but then I try to peel that all away when I am making decisions about what the thing that I am designing is going to look like. I’m also not interested in making something beautiful, which I know is a weird thing for a graphic designer to say. I don’t really think I have a very strong aesthetic independent of the project in front of me: instead I’m interested in the relationship between an idea and its form. Sometime that action produces something great looking, sometimes it produces something that is awkward. Context is pretty much everything!

It’s interesting that “beauty” as a end result is not a main goal for you. I think most people who have flipped through a book you’ve designed would describe them as being very beautiful. What is an example of a project where the design process produced an awkward but successful result?

Well, in many of the books I let the narrative of the writing drive the placement of the images. And that results in a visual composition for pages and two-page spreads that at first glance looks sort of random and un-aesthetic. But, if you read the text, it’s extremely tight, and I guess I find beauty in that interwoven relationship. An example of this would be the monographs on either Gabriel Orozco or Charles Ray, especially the latter which uses space and proportion in a visually ungainly way. Charles Ray would flunk any classical book design criteria (and would never be reproduced in a book like Richard Hendel’s “On Book Design”) but it’s absolutely right for the subject. It represents hours of conversation between myself and the artist searching for meaning and clarity in regard to intent: beauty was certainly besides the point.

Are you involved at a editorial level on most of your projects?

N0. I try to be brought in early, but often I’m simply called in too late to have an editorial impact; yet the project is still interesting enough to want to be involved, so I sign on anyway. Many of the editors and curators that I have worked with know that it is useful to work with me sooner rather than later, and it’s an honor to be included. On the other hand, I am a co-editor of most of the Greybull Press books (the imprint in which I am partners with Lisa Eisner and Roman Alonso) but the funny thing about that is because I am a designer, it seems to be very hard for outsiders to understand that I perform a conceptual role! Creative director, art director, editor, designer, no matter what, it’s confusing: I do love the Japanese term that translates as “conceptor” though that probably would not clear things up any further, either.

Because of your love for books,  designing the exhibition catalog for The World from Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles, must have been a dream project but also a difficult one. You essentially designed a book about books. Can you talk a little bit about your strategy for this project?

It was very daunting for a number of reasons, ranging from my complete lack of objectivity about the subject – each and every thing in that exhibit seemed spectacular, to me – and my respect for the humongous team of people who generated the project. Because the team was so large, I really had to “scale” my intervention, and the first simple request was that we spend the money on all new photography of the books. This sounds so obvious, but most books about books are visually dull precisely because the books are not often photographed with respect to their physical and visual presence. Many images in books on books turn out to be pictures taken for collection records, where the picture quality just doesn’t matter. And, a lot of librarians don’t like having their books photographed because of issues pertaining to paper and binding conservation. So, my simple request required a serious commitment to spend money and time. A lot of visualization had to be done before we ever really started working on the book proper: we (myself and the editors) had to review each object at each library, decide how it should be shot, and negotiate over which view was most important (a hint: it’s not always the title page!). Again, I was lucky to be working with such an amazing team. But that process of deciding the photography was so important, because it led to all of these conversations, which I knew the librarians were not used to having, of how the visual nature of the book was the vehicle for the content, or the delivery system of its meaning. This idea is clearly established in the area of books that essentially document advances in visual technologies (like Geofroy Tory’s Champfleury of 1529, for example) but is less well understood in books on other subjects.

How did the exhibition aspect of the project affect the design of the book

We were incredibly lucky to work alongside Louise Sandhaus (of CalArts and Durfee Regn Sandhaus, the exhibit design team). We spoke a lot about the desire to make the visual nature of these objects, which if they are reproduced badly in many books, are also usually shown pathetically in badly designed vitrines - what is worse than looking at books that you can’t touch? Our goals were the same - to highlight and clarify the reasons that one would look at the chosen books and objects - and this was done (in the book) thorough a subtle interpretation that played itself out though juxtaposition and scale. Similar tactics were deployed in the exhibit, but with a more up-front approach to simple interactive devices. The whole thing was a smash hit, which was so gratifying! I guess books are just not quite as dead as they are supposed to be.

You’re currently developing a studio web site greendragonoffice.com that chronologically presents a decade’s worth of your work. After organizing and reflecting on all the books you’ve designed, do you recognize any points where you made discoveries or your ideas evolved?

Looking over the “archive” in all it’s variety (to be posted soon!) I am amazed that there are still a lot of things that I have yet to try, so I do not really feel like I’ve played it out yet. Looking back, I think a turning point came for me in the mid-90’s, when I designed a range of more complicated exhibition catalogues. (These were projects where the curators and editors began - I think - to be affected by the Internet and multimedia, and were bringing in more diverse sorts of material into the books). I realized that the more complicated the books became, the more interesting they got as design problems, and I really felt that I was able to take all those complications and give them a visual form in the book that was as comprehensible and as intelligent as the subjects (and the readers) deserved. And at that point I felt that I knew the form well enough to proceed with confidence, although it continues to astound me just how much there is to learn - every book has it’s story, definitely.