Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

Two Crows, by Gary Franceschini

On Wednesday January 4th at 7:00 pm I’m reading a piece of Flash Fiction — i.e. a short short story, less than a thousand words — at Blackbird Wine Shop (4323 NE Fremont).

The full lineup of readers is Joanna Rose, Sherri Hoffman, Jackie Shannon Hollis, Julia Stoops, Kitty Evers, Jean Hart, Scott Sparling, Steve Taylor, Sonya Zalubowski, Mary Milstead, David Pickar, Yuvi Zalkow, and Stevan Allred. Many of my favorite writing friends. My story is Morning Commute and it imagines a world in which the skies have become so crowded that birds have to wait their turn, by species, to fly.

Looking for an image to illustrate this post, I came across this one from Gary Franceschini’s sketching blog. It’s perfect for the story! This is exactly how I imagined my crows, full of personality.

The Blue Mouse Monkey team: John Redder, Shelise Gieseke, Jimmy Thomas, Julia Stoops

2011 has seen some bittersweet personnel changes at Blue Mouse Monkey. In July Jimmy Thomas, developer extraordinaire and my office-mate for 3 1/2 years, moved to Japan, where he’s persuing a new life teaching English. To live in Japan was a long standing ambition of Jimmy’s, and I wish him well. But I miss his generous good nature and most excellent CSS skilz. We made some wonderful websites together.

And this December saw the departure of John Redder. For the past year John has provided incredible insight and support with process analysis and improvements, and project management. I’m still amazed that we “hooked” John at all — he brought to my little company experience and expertise from a higher plane, and I feel so lucky. Blue Mouse Monkey is a better company for John’s efforts, and we are sad to see him return to the bigger pastures from whence he came.

But all is not lost! We have some excellent new freelance developers in our stable, and in-house, our studio manager Shelise Gieseke is expanding her role and ably stepping into John’s role as project manager. With new, streamlined systems in place, we’re even better positioned to take on larger and more complex projects. I feel really ready for 2012.

A poster contest. Where designers create designs for free (“spec work”) and submit them, hoping theirs will be picked. This from an organization that expects to raise a billion dollars in donations.

This kind of “volunteer your creativity!” attitude towards design undermines the entire design industry and the value of designers’ work. It’s a common attitude, the idea that designers somehow shouldn’t expect to be paid for their skills (unlike, say, plumbers, nurses, landscapers, programmers, urban planners, film makers, or any other skilled profession), and it drives me crazy. The attitude often goes hand in hand with another patronizing attitude, that designers are so desperate for “exposure” that they will give away their expertise in exchange for a mere chance of being noticed.

Can you imagine, say, plumbers being asked to donate their plumbing skills to a new wing of the White House, in exchange for a chance that their plumbing design will be chosen among all the others to transport water to and from that wing? Of course not. A plumber would be chosen via a traditional bid system, and they would be compensated for their work.

AIGA  (American Institute of Graphic Arts) executive director Richard Grefé wrote an excellent letter demanding the Obama campaign cancel the contest and consider other ways to bring the power of design into the reelection campaign. The text of the letter follows. Emphases mine.

October 21, 2011

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
130 E. Randolph Street
Chicago, IL 60601

Dear Mr. Messina:

AIGA, the most established and largest professional association for communication design in the world, urges the Obama campaign to immediately:

• Cancel the Art Works poster contest that trivializes the value of design by failing to compensate for it and assuming ownership of intellectual property rights, against standard professional principles, and
• Consider the role of design in creating social and economic capital as well as innovation and growth, treating it as an economic driver instead of a creative indulgence, and involve the design community in integrating design into an economic strategy for strengthening U.S. competitiveness.

The recent “Art Works: A Poster Contest to Support American Jobs” demonstrates a lack of respect for the design profession, violates global principles and standards for professional design practice, contradicts the intent of creating jobs for American workers and asks designers to give up intellectual and creative property rights.

As executive director of the oldest and largest professional association for communication designers in the country, I speak on behalf of a profession that is central to innovation and creative value in the U.S. economy. We urge you to cancel the poster contest and consider alternative, appropriate approaches to achieving your need for great design that communicates effectively. No creative community in the world is as talented as American designers and as eager to be engaged on challenging assignments to enhance understanding of complex issues. For instance, over the past decade, AIGA and its members have been active participants in enhancing the citizen experience and clarity in the election process through the Design for Democracy initiative.

The Art Works poster contest asks designers to work speculatively, creating designs without compensation for an activity that has value to a potential client, against established global principles in communication design. We are quite certain that public relations consultants, political consultants, networks, telecommunication providers and advertising media are not asked to donate their services and turn their ideas, research and work over to a campaign that is poised to raise $1 billion without compensation. This demonstrated lack of respect for the value of creative endeavors is exacerbated by the stipulation that ownership of all the creative property submitted, whether or not selected, is transferred to the campaign. And it is particularly contemptuous to ask the creative community to donate their services in support of a jobs program for other American workers.

There are ways in which you can seek proposals from designers that do not violate the integrity of the profession (and the client) and we would be willing to work with you in developing a process to solicit ideas leading to retaining a designer to develop an effective design and program to advocate your messages.

The Obama for America campaign would also be well served to shift to a strategic perspective in involving the design profession by exploring with us the means to develop policy proposals to enhance the support of design as a key driver of innovation and economic growth in the U.S. economy. The government, in aggregate, is undoubtedly the largest single client for design services in the economy. Design provides a highly leveraged, relatively low cost means of enhancing the competitiveness of the nation’s products and services as well as a critical element in enhancing effective and efficient citizen-based government services. Recognizing this would follow the example of countries like Korea, China, Singapore and the UK in advancing productivity relevant to the 21st century.

If you choose to proceed with this contest, we will feel compelled to single it out as a reflection of your lack of respect for designers and your perception that design has little value, even while you are encouraging creating work for other workers and professions. Incidentally, it is also undoubtedly injudicious to seem to politicize the current NEA initiative entitled Art Works that is a well-conceived effort to demonstrate the value of art to communities.

Yours truly,

Richard Grefé
AIGA executive director

cc: David Axelrod

Bravo, Mr. Grefé. Thank your for standing up on behalf of all of us designers. Little do some non-designers realize how ugly and non-functional the world would be without us. Our work is not just decorative afterthoughts. It is essential to high quality communication.

Okay, there I said it. Yes, I am working on a second novel. The first one, which took me 10+ years to write, is in the process of being queried to agents. Many readers tell me it’s an important story that needs to get out there, and I do hope it finds its way in the wider world. Learn more about Parts Per Million here. This second novel won’t take me 10 years. This time I’m starting with plot and moving towards crafting sentences, instead of the other way around. And its going to be more of a literary thriller. Parts Per Million has some thrillerish aspects of uncovering secrets and facing dangerous repercussions, but I wouldn’t call it a bumper-to-bumper thriller.

The new novel is going to be about a rogue biohacker. I’ve started research (which means amassing folders of related articles Thank you New Scientist) and am sketching out plot. I’m also working on making my rogue protagonist sympathetic. You’re going to be on her side, even while she wreaks havoc, because, well… I don’t want to give it all away!

And as the summer closes there’s time for pickling cucumbers and steaming home-grown edamame, and drawing on rocks with a 15 lb yellow-orange crayon. We were at Crescent Beach last weekend, and at the patch of basalt scree at the far end of the beach I discovered a rock, a piece of sandstone perhaps, that had oxidized (or something – I have no idea what I’m talking about, really) and was coated in a 1/2 inch layer of soft, crayony bright yellow…stuff.

Basalt, which Oregon is full of due to the massive basalt floods of 17–14 million years ago, is dark gray. Rather a somber stone, and not particularly inviting. But when columnar basalt breaks off it does so with smooth, slightly curved planes. Nice to draw on. I had fun brightening up the jumble of gray at the end of the beach.

And now that the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis has passed, I’m ready to put that difficult year behind me. When my GP broke the news to me last July, she said, “This will dominate your life for a year.” And she was right. And now I’m better, stronger, healthier, and so happy to find a soft yellow rock to draw with.

But last weekend I stayed in a log house in the Hood Canal (which is really a fjord) with three other women. We were there to share creative solitude during the day, and friendship over dinner in the evenings. The others worked on writing projects, and I made art. I expected to write, too, but earlier, while cleaning out our basement, I found a bunch of leftover bits and pieces from grad school. Plaster casts of hands, rolls of colored string and cellophane, paper cut-out shapes. On impulse I decided to take this flotsam and jetsam of a period of intense art-making up to the Hood Canal to play around with it and see what happened.

At my friend’s place I chose to work in a small meadow next to an old shed. It was more like a clearing in the forest, and filled with buttercups and light slanting through the trees. I didn’t have any particular plans other than I’d make site-specific sculptures and leave them there. (Or dismantle and discard them in my host didn’t like them, but it turned out she did :-)

The first piece I made was inspired by sun hitting tendrils of tall grass in front of the shed. They made bright vertical lines of light against the dark background. I created a set of horizontal lines to complement, using embroidery thread. Keeping the tension in the thread was the hard part, since I couldn’t pull too hard on the grass stalks or they would snap.

Then I hung from a tree pieces from an installation I did years ago called The Myriad Things. Now the very cool thing I discovered, which I had never seen when this work hung in a gallery, was how it moved in the wind. Each strand has three collaged paper or glass vesica piscis shapes strung together with fine monofilament. Instead of flapping around like a wind chime, the shapes acted like paddles, and they spun in place. It created a beautiful floating, flickering effect, especially, when seen across the clearing. (Please excuse the crappy iphone video.)

Other pieces I made included burying gold foil under the duff so it glinted through, making the earth look golden. That one was hard to photograph. I also wrapped a sapling trunk in bands of gold foil, and placed plaster hands among the buttercups.

The other more visible piece I did was a large “cellophane fin”, made by wrapping colored cellophane across the delta-shaped spaces made by low, nearly horizontal maple limbs. The cellophane was left over from some 4-color printing process, with alternating magenta, cyan, yellow and black frames. The effect was like stained glass, but delicate and fragile, and in a tree.

I got to make a sculpture garden! It was the most satisfying thing I have done in a long time. I need to get out and play more often.*

* Bucket list:
1. Experience the Calabi-Yau in all ten dimensions
2. Play outside regualrly