For this week’s Wednesday Indie Artist Fixx Alexa, one of the summer interns at Indie Fixx, interviewed twin sisters Ellen and Julia Lupton.
You may remember Ellen’s book DIY: Design it Yourself (2006) and Ellen and Julia’s jointly written follow-up book DIY Kids (2007) from several years back. Their latest title, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things is a irreverent and quirky look at the design of everyday objects. Peppered with original paintings by Ellen, Design Your Life is made up of short vignettes on everything from bras to blenders, ikea, clutter, the death of the living room and more. It’s a fun and thought-provoking read.
Want to win your own copy of Design Your Life? Leave a comment below & share an oddly or badly designed object that you have come across lately or some other quirky tidbit about design . I will pick one random commenter to win a copy of the book. This giveaway will end Friday, September 4th at 11:59 EST.
I’ll start…I hate wasteful packaging and shipping materials and recently someone sent me a little tiny itty-bitty thing in a great big giant box filled with packaging material. It was sort of like looking for a needle in a haystack…
The book: cover designed by Chip Kidd; paintings by Ellen Lupton
Interview by Alexa the intern
1. What’s the name of your book and what was the inspiration behind writing it?
Julia: Our book is called Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things. It began as a blog. We wanted to apply design thinking to everyday problems, like why other people’s roller bags are so annoying, or why baby carrots taste so … old.
2. I loved your analysis of the toaster. What do you consider the most useless devise people are told they need?
Julia: Electric coffee makers. They take up a lot of space and require an outlet. A French press is beautiful to look at, and it makes exquisite coffee. As for espresso, drink it in a café! We don’t like appliances that try to privatize pleasures better shared in public.
Hate it:
The electric coffee maker: the Ugly American.
Love it:
The French Press: nude, not naked.
3. I have piles of miscellaneous papers, half-done crafts, and clippings of projects yet to start strung throughout my home. For those who haven’t yet read Design Your Life, what words of wisdom can you give for effective pile management?
Ellen: The easiest way to clean up is to get rid of what you don’t need any more. Ask yourself, “Do I want do die with this unfinished decoupage flower pot sitting on my window sill?” Get a box for recycling, a box for donations, and a box for stuff that’s headed for the landfill. As for the piles and projects that you decide to keep, create a way to store them that’s easy to use. We like transparent plastic folders for papers—you can see what’s inside the folder, and you can reuse the folder project after project, year after year. For supplies, we advocate open bins whenever possible. Closed boxes look nice, but you’re more likely to put away your Sharpies, scissors, and glue sticks if you can toss them in an open receptacle.
Ellen Lupton’s desk: visibility rules.
4. How do packaging design fonts impact our purchasing selections? P.S. Does the R (which is the only huge difference between Gill, Futura, Helvetica, and Freight Sans) really determine what we choose?
Ellen: Good typography is like a well-lit room. When you a walk into a gloomy, dreary space (grandma’s haunted house? your neighbor’s acid-yellow kitchen?), you may not recognize that the poor lighting is bringing you down. It’s the same thing with fonts. Ugly, ordinary fonts and poor typography more generally give people a bad feeling, even if they don’t know why. We are instinctively drawn to well-designed packages, magazines, books, and web sites, which use typography to express a point of view and convey an upbeat authority about what they do and who they are.
5. The blogosphere is exponentially growing, and we bloggers talk a lot, but how do we design a better, more functional blog?
Julia: We like Twitter. It’s an easy way to let people know about a new blog entry of your own, while also sharing links and finding out what other people are reading. Simple technologies and simple design styles are what’s most effective on the web right now.
6. Often those that have a constantly creative occupation or hobby require breaks from over-stimulation of the “rapturous” flow of creative work. What are your favorite places to allow your creativity to thrive?
Julia: Airplanes. My car. A café. Taking a walk. Any place where I can get away from email and the lure of the internet.
Cafe culture: seeking inspiration in the comfort of strangers.
7. Tell us about yourselves—-what do you when not writing and what is it like to write a book with your sister?
Julia: I teach English at the University of California, and I have four kids. Writing with Ellen has made my world explode – I’ve gotten to access interests from a long, long time ago, and think new thoughts with them.
Ellen: I am director of the graphic design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art. I’m also a curator at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. I do a lot of instructional and scholarly writing. This book was a lot more fun, and it’s opened up new voices for both of us.
8. What are you working on now?
Julia: I am writing a book on Shakespeare and the dark side of housekeeping. Martha Stewart meets Lady Macbeth.
Ellen: I’m writing a novel about a young designer coming of age in the 2010s. It’s spicy, spoofy, and sharp. The story’s not worked out yet, but it will include the basic ingredients of all my favorite fiction: sex, crime, and betrayal. Working title: Miss Helvetica.
One thing that is starting to bother me more and more is seeing land cleared to put up some random, ugly strip mall whose units stay empty for months, even years. Or worse, a giant public storage facility.
Please add me to the drawing. What a great giveaway and interview. We have recently discovered the beauty of the French Press ourselves & are getting rid of the old coffeemaker on Freecycle.
One of my pet peeves is very similar to your comment. A couple of our local delis wrap their sandwiches in plastic wrap, put them in a styrofoam container, and then place it all in a plastic bag.
I don’t really understand the design trend of arranging books in a bookshelf by color. It just seems so over-designed.
I really enjoyed reading this post, it made me think about all of the crafty clutter I should probably either organize or get rid of.
The one poor design that used to drive me crazy was this vacuum. Where I used to work there was a vacuum with a base shaped a lot like Oklahoma. It was a regular square but with a pan-handle type shape that jutted out of the side. It was always getting caught on things when I would try and roll it anywhere. Chairs legs, tables, wall corners, you name it!
I loved the article and I love following the conversation about design that Ellen and Julia have initiated. My design pet peeve — and I’m not really sure how to solve it, but I will try clear envelopes for projects–is the three ring binder. It seems wildly inefficient and somewhat dangerous in the force that it packs once you progress to 2 1/2 or 3 inches or more. The issue of pockets for smaller items and index cards has to be addressed by including a bulky zip pouch or by using pockets that are not spacious and that often transfer ink on the inside covers. The design of the binders themselves, over a short amount of use, actually damage the papers so that hole protector stickers were invented and are labor-intensive to apply.
There are more elegant European versions of the binder that have a thumbhole to pull them easily off the shelf and a kind of binder that will secure the paper down when not in use so it doesn’t flop around and damage itself.
Thanks for the opportunity to think that through a little.
very interesting, cant wait to read the book. thanks
I don’t know if it’s so much a design thing, but I’ll never understand how we’re able to build a small community in outer space, but we still don’t have an easy, time-efficient way to mop a floor.
Let’s reprioritize NASA.
I’ve already bought (and finished) this book, so count me out for the drawing. I just wanted to say that this book was such a interesting read and Ellen’s illustrations made this book so much fun. Even if you don’t win it, I would highly recommend buying this book.
I hate having ‘stuff’/clutter/tchatchkes around and am annoyed when other people give me those things. I have a friend who always brings me a tourist trinket from her travels – I would rather just get a beautiful postcard! What do I need with monogramed beach sand or keychain or bracelet? I don’t abide by faux-sentimentality and it always ends in the trash/goodwill bag.
One thing that makes me nuts when it comes to design on a page…the use of too many fonts. Weird, I know, but I do love a good, clean message.
Parking lots drive me crazy. Universally, Walgreen’s parking lots are awful. Tiny stalls, tiny back-up space (straight back instead of angled), and the elderly do NOT mix.
I don’t really have a quirky desinging tip, other than Ive been buying random owl themed things, or little owl knick knacks and hiding them in various places throughtout the house.
But I enjoyed the interview, and I would love the chance to view this book!
I like the idea of keeping everything visible. It might make me either ditch an idea or step up to the plate and get it done. Either way, the clutter is gone.
There is a design trend now that sort of baffles me. So many desks that I see in magazines and catalogs are more like the old style writing tables with no drawers. Where do people put all of their stuff? I mean, I pay most of my bills online and try to keep paper/clutter to a minimum, but seriously, I still need some storage! They look beautiful, but real life, at least my real life, isn’t that “stuff” free!