I have a chronic and long-standing hatred and contempt for my own work. It’s endemic to the profession, generally… like the common cold of design. Or really, any field where making things out of ideas is the stock and trade.

But so: my dear friend GAC, if you don’t know him, is a supremely excellent photographer based in PHL. He can really point a camera at stuff, and he can really whip a llama’s ass with a belt. After I fretted publicly about not having decent photos of my design crapola, he suggested that he might assuage my stated disparity, and we hatched a plan. We had a raucous 24-hour work-bender-photoshoot, some of the results of which you see here.

But yeah: so it’s really really really fucking nice to see someone else seeing your stuff. Whatever one might say about the stuff in question (and a lot of this is debatably not even “my stuff”), it feels SO GOOD to see it from a point of view that is somehow liberated from your own weatherbeaten prism. Like an eyeball massage or someshit. Yes.

Anyway. I’m just sayin’. Wanted to share and all. You should do this, really, if you’re stuck: have your friend do your portfolio, and do theirs in return. It’ll be awesome.

And yeah I’m sure you already know all this shit already, but I am nothing if not grotesquely naive. I mean, I got swindled out of my gizmos by a pituitary mutant. So you probably saw it all coming a mile away. C’est la guerre, no? Yis!

Figure 1: Phillipe Apeloig.

So yeah, I am totally ripping you off. Really, when you look at my design work since day 1, it’s what I’ve been doing all along; I’m just being as brutally honest as possible about it, for this project. Yeah. If you want me to totally rip you off, or if you have suggestions on who I should totally rip off, do let me know. I find the most satisfying things to totally rip off are things that are already, in some fashion, total ripoffs themselves… like when early tDR starts to creep into Wim Crouwel’s territory, or Bruce Mau shamelessly aping Quentin Fiore; that sort of shit.

Figure 2: Karel Martens.

Naturally I already tried to do Paula Scher’s swatch posters, but I can’t cram the phrase “I am totally ripping you off” into them, typographically. This is fine with me because the Public Theater stuff is so much more fun to emulate. But yeah, using that same phrase (more or less) on all the posters is part of the game; my friend Christian pointed out that this made it into a sort of All Your Base type of thing, which I agree with. I am all about such image-macro meme stuff these days, anyway (see last image here) so that’s just dandy.

Figure 3: Stefan Sagmeister.

Blech. Yeah. Also I was rereading the first half of Design Writing Reseach and it occurred to me that so so so much of the last, oh, maybe 80 years of critical theory is essentially a bunch of fumbling around in the dark towards an understanding of neuroscience. Like, instead of going right to the source and preparing histologically stained cross-sectioned rat brain samples, and all that, people have been content to sit around in corduroys and talk about indexical signs and that sort of shit. Like, you get the feeling that eventually, theorists just might stumble through all the issues and arrive at something relatively demystified, that acknowledges the whole perception-is-cognition thing without quasi-religious rhetoric getting in the way, et cetera. Wouldn’t that be interesting, if that happened? I think that’d be fucking interesting.

Like, there was this one time I was talking to a professor from MCM at a bar, and he was going on about some logical paradox he had claimed to glean from Derrida, or somesuch, and I mentioned something about V1/V2 and how you can’t look at any one part of the brain as the “soul” or “seat of consciousness”, which really I thought was pretty basic, and he was all like, “oh yeah, neuroscience”, and looked at me like I’d taken his toys away, and the conversation was pretty much dead in the water at that point. I dunno. Funny, yes? Maybe. Another angle on the pseudoscience conundrum; maybe the opposite angle, even.

Anyway. That’s all I got for now, I have to go totally rip more people off now, so I will talk to you later. Yes. Salud.

-fish