Jambalaya^353
Stefan SagmeisterDesign organizations are the short-order cooks of printed ephemera, and
the posters and flyers that they produce announcing myriad events—from
competitions to conferences—are the graphic designers’ equivalent of two
eggs, bacon, and side of whiskey down. Served up at such a prodigious
pace, design for designers could constitute its own industry within an
industry. Since members of these organizations are asked to donate their
talents, their payback is a license to experiment. But despite the latitudes in
designing for designers, one requisite is absolute: the need to visually
represent designitself. Can anything be more mundane?
Unfortunately, unique solutions to this problem have diminished
as clichés have risen. And the most common of these are the tried-and-
true, including light bulbs, pencils, T squares, drawing tables, loupes, and
computer monitors—as well as combinations thereof, such as pencils with
light bulbs as erasers, or computer monitors with light bulbs on the screen,
or light bulbs with pencils for filament. Add to this a lexicon of somewhat