on 30 April 2004I happen to be a bit of a fan of creative accidents. The only time I was ever in a recording studio, I improvised exactly what the producer wanted on the first take, which was not recorded, and then failed to reproduce it for the next hour and a half, during which pub closing time, the deadline, and the hapless band member who’d invited me all quietly slipped away.
One of my most recent graphic design jobs was altered after the client printed the first draft on an inkjet with a failing ribbon and thought it was supposed to be like that. Among the few pictures on the walls of my office is an image nicked from an illustrator who’d randomly cut up a box of old movie footage; it shows a US flag tinted red under a skyscrapered city turned on its side, and dates from three years before 9/11.
So I dived into this book hoping to find a cornucopia of lucky mistakes, the miscegenated love-children of careless pens and mice. Such naïve agendas, however, have no place in 21st Century graphics commentary. Most of Gerber’s lavishly illustrated examples are not of felicitous error, but of explorations by other designers of the concept of felicitous error. Some are rooted in genuine accidents but developed so artfully that any sense of the original random event is lost, while others are merely distressed or deconstructed. The book could more accurately have been titled Deliberate Mistakes: Navel Grazing Graphics.
The author, London-based designer and academic Anna Gerber, plunges straight into self-reference by listing her galley corrections on the endpapers, leaving the ‘mistakes’ intact in the text. (Notice how it’s impossible even to review the book without resort to inverted commas.) Are these real mistakes, or did she put them in to give herself something to list? What about the mistakes she hasn’t listed? Sometimes the ‘mistakes’ are graphical devices that are clearly intentional, so we’re presented with a pretended correction of a pretended error. Maybe that title should be All Made Up? The book is already in danger of disappearing up its own artifice, and we’re not even on page 1.
If this book had been more about genuine mistakes and their fortuitous results, it might have provided a fascinating insight into the creative process. As it is, all we get is a reminder that, while real accidents can produce something completely new, pretend ones are often clichéd.
The archness of the work featured, combined with the archness (arch-archness?) of its curation, gives the body of the book a tendency to smugness that’s at odds with the promised celebration of clumsy iconoclasm. The compilation serves partly as a warning that truly creative accidents are hard to fake: by the time you’ve flipped through this lot you’ll never want to see anything torn, overprinted, misregistered, hammered out on an old typewriter, xerographed, stencilled or handwritten ever again.
Still, there’s more than enough good work on show to make Gerber’s point, which is that you should always be ready to embrace mistakes rather than rejecting them. And it’s significant that, among all the scratchily tactile attempts to reconstruct a sense of vernacular authenticity, there’s no shortage of material generated using that alleged killer of creativity and enemy of original thought, the computer.
In a short series of questionnaires at the end of the book, April Greiman, who famously exploited the Mac as a graphics tool before it was really ready, affirms that ‘technology definitely encourages accidents’. Stefan Sagmeister, whose reputation rests on out of-the-box approaches including a poster carved into his own body, agrees: ‘The more complicated the tools, the bigger the possibility for total fuck-ups.’
Update (19 April 2009): also see David Carson’s Lucky Disasters, in press.
adambanksdotcom @Herring1967 "watching on screen"?! That's not a subeditor, it's a butcher with English as a third language