Hi, my name is Richard Male,
and I'm a graphic designer, a photographer,
a writer,
and a teacher,
and I've been an adjunct instructor
at the School of Visual Arts for the last 20 years.
I grew up in the Midwest
in a small rural town in Minnesota.
My parents were in the greenhouse business,
and that's largely where I got my first artistic training.
I was like a lot of kids.
I drew as a kid.
I drew abstract pictures.
I did well in school.
I got all A's in art.
Didn't do so well in other things.
I got A's in geometry,
and I flunked out of algebra.
Maybe that's a common theme for a lot of artists.
In high school, I mainly studied ceramics.
I did a little bit of drawing,
a little bit of photography,
but my main teacher was a ceramics teacher.
I
decided to go to the art school that he attended,
which was very nearby where I grew up.
Once I got there,
it didn't take me very long to figure out I didn't want to be a potter or a ceramicist anymore.
Working with all that dust really bothered me,
but I was lucky to find photography,
and that's ultimately what I ended up majoring in.
A lot of my influences at the time,
people like Jerry Olsman,
Dwayne Michaels,
Ralph Gibson, Minor White, have been almost lifelong influences now,
just in terms of my photography.
I continue to be a photographer now,
and it all goes back to those early days of being in art school
and taking pictures mostly in black and white,
spending a lot of time in the darkroom,
doing a lot of interesting experiments with form.
Along with doing photography when I was in art school,
I did a couple of internships.
One of them was with the North Dakota State University Department of Publications,
where I worked on a lot of interesting things that had to do with newspapers and campus publications and campus signage.
I ended up working on a signage system for the campus,
which was one of my first experiences with typography.
Another experience I had with graphic design,
early graphic design, was working for the Prairie Community Design Center.
This
piece was actually the very first piece of graphic design I ever did,
just a little capabilities brochure talking about what their offerings were through the Prairie Community Design Center,
which was mainly concerned with architecture.
So after finishing art school,
I knew I didn't want to work as a commercial photographer,
and that just wasn't of interest to me.
I had friends who were doing that,
and they were mainly sweeping up the studios and handing people lenses and loading film backs.
All of that's very interesting,
but it wasn't what I was interested in doing.
I had had these experiences doing production and graphic design studios,
a little bit of work with the Prairie Community Design Center.
So I knew that graphic design was an option for me.
I just didn't have any training.
And that's when I began to do a little bit of self-study.
I found out about Piet Zwart,
went to the library,
started to work a little bit more specifically working with typography.
And eventually I was very,
very lucky to get a job at Walker Arts Center,
a small regional museum in Minneapolis.
And they were focused on modern art.
So this was a great introduction to graphic design for me,
because everything I did was about
designers and artists.
At Walker Arts Center,
I was the assistant designer,
and I basically did everything that needed to be done behind the scenes.
But it included a lot of great work,
great work as a designer,
great work as a production person.
And I kind of learned all the back end stuff of graphic design while I was working there.
Got to work on some major exhibitions like this one,
Artist and Printer,
and working with a cover design like this,
working with primary colors,
working with type and image,
working with photography.
So I figured out that I was able to combine all of my interests very early on, in graphic design.
My boss was a guy named Robert Jensen.
He was actually an alum of Yale.
And so I got to know a little bit about graduate school then as well.
But mainly I was concerned with just working as a designer day to day,
having this wonderful experience working in a museum,
getting to look at art and design every single day and work with it right on my drafting table.
In this case,
here's an exhibition catalog,
very typical of the kind of work we did.
Facing pages,
image on this side,
typography on this side,
and working with all the elements of graphic design.
I love being able to combine photography with graphic design,
really realizing those two skills in the same product.
In addition to working on exhibition graphics,
I designed the museum's newsletter.
I designed a lot of pieces,
promotional pieces, posters for performing arts,
dance, music.
It was a great experience.
Since my boss was an alum of Yale and I had expressed interest
in studying graphic design,
he recommended that I try going there and see what would happen.
So I did.
I applied,
I didn't get in,
I applied again.
The second time I got in,
it was pretty great.
I was very excited about going.
And this was the first time I had lived outside
of Minnesota as well.
So it was quite a cultural change for me
to move from the Midwest to the East.
The Yale graphic design program at that time
was very different than it is now.
First of all, we didn't have computers.
Well, we did, but it wasn't the kind of computers
that we have now.
It literally was a big floppy disk
about the size of a small record.
And you'd put it into a machine and you could actually hear it spinning up like a washing machine.
Inside of that, there were a series of lenses mounted on a turret.
It was very primitive,
but it was enough to enable us to work with typography in a somewhat computerized setting.
So it was the beginning for me of working with computers.
A lot of the work we did,
though, even though it was somewhat based in a little bit of computer technology,
was very hands-on.
We drew letters.
We did handwriting.
We did photography.
Did a lot of work with typography of different kinds,
from letterpress printing to working with cutouts.
Eventually, we started working with some really amazing teachers,
and one of them was Bradbury Thompson.
Professor Thompson is not that well-known.
He's got some books that are pretty amazing,
but he's not well-known like Paul Rand or Herbert Matter
or Armand Hoffman, some of those other teachers from that era
who are very well-known.
Bradbury Thompson was an American,
had a lot of work from New York,
but I didn't know who he was until I met him.
And then I realized that this guy was one of the kindest,
most beautiful, most gentle person I ever knew, very humble.
We would always say during critiques
that he would kill you with kindness.
It's kind of a funny
way of critiquing.
His project,
now this is in the first year of my two-year program,
his project was to create a book that was based on different eras of typography.
So by doing that,
we would study typography from the Renaissance all the way to the present.
And he allowed us to choose whatever subject matter we wanted to.
At the time, I was dating a student from the drama school,
and I had access to all the costumes and information
in their drama department,
in the costuming department.
So that became my subject matter.
Every week I would go to the library,
I would check out amazing books,
really old books.
At that time, you could actually check them out.
I would take them back to the studio,
photograph them,
and end up using some of the content that I would find, including the text,
in my own book
for Bradbury Thompson's project.
And
this is the book I made.
It's very primitive.
It's made with what are called photostats,
photostatic enlargements
that are made on photo paper,
but not through a camera,
through a process camera,
a different kind of camera.
But it was still photographic.
As I said, the subject matter was costumes.
So we open this,
we have a little bit of a window here,
and you can barely see some eyes.
So when we take off the cover,
we see actually a group of people,
and they're all wearing slickers.
It's actually called the Macintosh Society.
This is a real thing.
People who are rubber fetishists.
This is actually the end of the book,
but I show it here on the cover just
because I thought it was so interesting.
And as we move to the inside,
we have the title page.
So we were learning about the design of books.
What comprises a book?
How you enter a book,
how you get in from the outside to the inside.
Thompson would always talk about how entering a book is like entering a house.
You see the outside first,
and if there's nothing to invite you to come in,
you won't come in.
You won't pick it up.
So once you enter that front door,
you're in the hallway,
you're in the entryway,
and that's kind of what the title page is all about.
So we have a small image,
a repeat of the cover image here,
and then we have the title of my book over here,
The Tip Hoik and The Androdyne.
Really two forms of fashion very far apart.
We have the contents page over here,
a little bit about the subject matter over here,
and a beautiful engraved image of a man in costume from several hundred years ago.
Embellished
with a little bit of what was then called Zippitone.
It was a kind of imagery that was
put on film that you could cut out,
and it had an adhesive backing that you could apply.
Here we have the table of contents,
set up flush left, ragged right,
and then we have the first spread.
So this is all about costumes,
what people wore during the Renaissance.
The typography is based on the style of typography that was prevalent at that time.
The imagery is based on images that were prevalent at that time.
And all of these images came out of books that I was able to check out of Sterling Library.
One of the things you might notice as you look through this book is there's a similarity to the layouts.
This was the first time I realized that a spread in a book is very much like a landscape.
You can see it as a foreground,
a middle ground, and a background.
And
so these pages are all designed according to that principle,
something really big,
something really small, and something in between.
With the typography occupying a space,
it was sort of in between the big and the small.
I became very conscious of negative space,
of the relationship of parts,
thinking about different ways of using photography,
all the way down to the Macintosh Society in the end.
And then ending the book
with a bibliography,
and some people in formal wear jumping out of a building.
I don't know what that's about.
This was a great experience for me,
the first book I was able to actually design and conceive and kind of be the author of.
I had many great teachers at Yale, including Armand Hoffman,
Herbert Matter, Inger Druckerie,
and Paul Rand.
And this is the cover of the project
that I created for him in his class.
He gave us a text for an essay that he had written
called Design and the Play Instinct.
And this text was more than just a design project.
It was really about thinking about design, reading his words,
doing research,
and beginning to understand that notion
that play equals experimentation.
So in art and design,
this whole idea of play,
it's not about just play is for the sake of play.
It's really playing to learn.
This cover is a photographic manipulation
of a photograph that Rand gave us.
In addition to the text that he gave us for his essay,
he also gave us a stack of images to use
to do whatever we wanted with,
as long as it was expressive.
Rand loved this cover.
When he saw this,
he said, now that's play.
So what you're seeing here is really the final result of this project.
There were many sketches in between,
many meetings at Rand's house.
He would have us to his house,
where we would talk about the work.
And in the end,
I adopted his color palette,
his style of typography,
and most specifically,
the use of the grid.
This idea of grid design was something I had learned when I was working at Walker Arts Center,
but I really began to understand it here.
These are all examples of art and design that I was sort of familiar with.
Picasso and Matisse,
Duchamp, there's that famous abacus image,
the Persimmons photograph that he talked about.
So this project was a history lesson.
It was a lesson on design philosophy.
It was all about teaching.
It
was about imagery.
It was about the grid.
And there's that image
that I manipulated for the cover.
Rand's project was one of the essential things
I did when I was at Yale.
I also did photography while I was there,
and I worked on posters for the School of Art
and the Yale Philharmonia.
All of that experience together added up to quite a bit.
It was a great learning experience.
I remember when I graduated,
I thought, I could spend a whole lifetime here
and really never get it all.
It was quite a thing.
I had always been interested in teaching,
but I made the decision to work for a few years
before I got into it,
just so I would have something to teach,
I would have some background
in professional practice before I went back into theory.
My first teaching job was at Kent State
in Ohio,
and from there I went to Purdue in Indiana,
and finally, I settled at Portland School of Art,
which is now called Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine.
And while I was there,
I did a lot of work for the school,
and I also started working for one of the
colleagues, one of my colleagues,
who is a metalsmith,
a guy named Tim McCrae.
He got me involved with this magazine,
Metalsmith.
At the time, they were looking for a new designer.
I decided to throw my hand in the ring,
ended up designing this magazine for eight years.
This is a beautiful cover.
This is the work of Ted Muehling,
a very prominent New York designer of jewelry.
This is his own photograph.
The covers of these magazines were all integrations
of the typography with the image.
It was a beautiful experience.
The inside of this magazine
was full of images of the jewelry that these designers were producing,
but it was displayed as wearable art.
So I started working at the School of Visual Arts as an adjunct instructor,
initially with just two courses.
One, the Principles of Visual Language course that I still teach,
and a basic typography course that I still teach.
Since then, I've diversified into many, many different courses
over these 20 years.
After teaching for 10 years,
I got the great opportunity to create a book
for Rockport publishers
called Playing with Color,
all about my teaching experiences working specifically with color.
Why they chose me,
I still don't know,
but I was lucky.
It also coincided with a sabbatical,
so I was away from teaching for almost a year,
and just gave me an opportunity to think about color,
think about design,
and to put together a book about my experiences.
This is the cover.
And here we see these images that are punched out of color.
We see the primary colors being used.
They're very fundamental, very foundational.
The title, Playing with Color, really summarizes the content of the book,
really based on that idea that playing equals experimentation.
And there's a quote here.
At the time, I thought it was Albert Einstein's quote,
but since then, I've realized it's not him.
But it's paraphrased.
Play is the highest form of research.
Think about that.
It really is, right? If you're playing,
you're really researching.
You're figuring out things.
You're trying things out.
You don't know what the outcome's going to be,
but you basically know sort of what you're doing.
You're very much like doing art,
right?
When you're art,
when you're making art,
you're making design, you're experimenting, you're playing with form and color.
It's a great image of what the classroom looked like
at that time with work on the wall,
lots and lots of work being simultaneously critiqued
by students, teachers, and students, and students being simultaneously critiqued,
teaching the Witten and Elbers,
and the experiments.
And the whole book is based on that,
just many, many, many different kinds of experiments
having to do with typography,
collage,
lettering,
working with leaf collages like Elbers,
patterns,
patterns, and patterns. Stripe compositions,
tangrams,
color illusion,
making three colors look like two.
All ideas that have been so much a part of my life since then,
one thing I'll say for sure is that writing this book
taught me so much about color that I didn't already know.
And since writing this,
which was now 10 years ago,
almost,
I feel like I've become a much better teacher and a much better colorist.
Since writing this book, Playing with Color,
I continue to teach.
I've had one more sabbatical in which I studied guitar design.
I've also done a lot of work for myself,
personal work, including a set of projects called Color Chords,
where I combine my love of color with my love of music.
In this lesson, I talked a little bit about me,
where I've been, what I've done, how I've gotten here.
In the next lesson,
I'll talk about my main influences.
In the next lesson, I'll talk about my main influences.