Design is everywhere. Product design. Furniture design. Graphic design. Clothing design.
If you brushed your teeth this morning, if you drove to work, if you used a smart-phone, if you obeyed a road sign, if youre reading this article, if youre sitting in a chair, if youve ever filled out a ballot, if youve dined beneath the Golden Arches, if youve ever picked one wine over another because of the label, if youre wearing pants and please be wearing pants then youre an active participant in the design economy.
Basically the only prerequisite for being a consumer of design in the 21st century is to not be dead. And even this isnt a hard limit. For instance, if you hand-select your own coffin or urn before you kick the bucket, then your mortal parts will remain the everlasting beneficiaries of that final design choice.
Many of the greatest items of design are the ones we take for granted. The stop sign, for instance, or the stick-figure restroom sign. Their presence at this point is so ubiquitous, and their meaning so plain, that we dont pause long enough to consider their origins. And yet every component of our constructed world began as a humble droplet in the wellspring of one persons imagination.
Often simple, sometimes elegant, the very best designs manage to communicate a swift, lucid, often reassuring message the gridded layout of a newspaper, for example, the American flag, the PBS logo, a yellow school bus. These items orient us, their familiarity is comforting, theyre the unchanging markers on our ever-changing landscape.
But to whom do we pay the credit for these ideas? To the designers, of course. To the Massimo Vignellis of this world (creator of the famous New York City subway map). The Paul Rands (IBM, UPS, and ABC logos). The Paula Schers (Citibank logo, the Museum of Modern Arts iconic lettering). The Milton Glasers (I ? NY). And this is to list only the graphic designers. Men and women whove combined equal quantities of research, arts training, behavioral psychology, instinct and basic nous into finding a visual idiom capable of squeezing the richest meaning from the nub of a simple idea.
And Michael Ruberto hes one of those guys, too.
RUBERTO is Allen Community Colleges new graphic design instructor. A native of Lockport, N.Y., a small town near Buffalo, the 39-year-old educator arrived in Iola via Chicago (where he received his MFA in 2008) and Denver (where hes lived and taught for the last decade).
And while not the usual next step for a longtime urbanite, Ruberto sees in this pocket of southeast Kansas the makings of a simpler life. Chicago, Ruberto said, was too much for him, and Denver, with its status as one of the fastest growing cities in America, threatened to overwhelm his senses, too. The pull of a smaller community, said Ruberto, was real.
Plus, the opportunity to teach at a small, rural college like ACC will present Ruberto with new chances to influence a student population that may not even know what graphic design is or how it affects their everyday lives.
So, what is graphic design?
Graphic design encompasses all visual communication, Ruberto explained. And graphic designers play a critical role in the way people receive data. It influences how people perceive the personality of a business and the personalities, too, Ruberto might have added, of civic and governmental entities, which these days depend just as heavily on brand management.
A devotee of the Swiss Style of typographic design he even studied for a time at a school in Lucerne and a self-confessed type geek, Ruberto is a font of knowledge when it comes to, well, fonts.
Does he have a favorite among the endless tally of fonts that every day oppresses the casual user of Microsoft Word?
He does. In fact, he said, most graphic designers restrict their palettes to an easy handful of best-loved choices. Sitting behind his desk on Thursday, surrounded by the blank walls of his new ACC office, Ruberto quoted one of his heros, Italian graphic design pioneer Massimo Vignelli: Vignelli said, I only use two fonts: Helvetica during the day and Bodoni at night.
