Ok ok, so we actually made a tee shirt with +/- 80% of the logos we’ve designed over the past 25 years.

The shirt also includes a short essay on the left sleeve. The essay follows…

Mono-graphic*

From sixty-or-so years ago to twenty-something years ago, the way to know that you’d “made it” as a graphic designer was to have a monograph published collecting the body of work you’d made over your lifetime. If you were prodigious/productive enough, maybe that would stretch into another volume or two of your work, but that was about it.

Today, the career mantelpiece is gone, usurped by social media. This is problematic, and thus I’d like to quote designer David Bennewith, “Social media dissolves our facts into processes, and our being into perpetual becoming.” The tentpoles have been kicked down. The milemarkers fastened into “Hang in there, kitten!” animated gifs. The vocation has been reshaped into a hamstrung Moebius strip-like hamster wheel.

Did you do it? Prove it. Can you do it again? Post it. Virality = vitality.

And you’re not allowed to stop, apparently. And that makes sense, because things change. It’s inevitable. For example, yesterday I was scrolling through Instagram and a post of my youngest cousin and his wife came up and I thought to myself, “Fuck, did they use one of those aging filters on themselves?” before catching myself… they hadn’t. We’re just older. He and I saw each other every few years as kids, but only twice in-person as adults. I’m far from young now, but the idea of an eternally youthful Justin aging seemed impossible.

These.
Things.
Happen.

With relations. With relationships. With ship ships. Rust. Barnacles. Wrinkles. Liver spots. Eye pockets. Flab. Sag. Droop. All of it, the gravitational/durational effects of time and wear.

There are things that people chase, often wealth and fame. I will have neither. I know this at age 52. The only monuments will be those that we build to ourselves, but perhaps this can be done in a way that is not 248 to 500 pages long as our graphic design predecessors have done. Perhaps it might take on a new format that is more timely and might appeal to others due to the sheer visual form, as was the initial expectation of the work… perhaps a “portfolio” might be a garment? And without overwrought explanation, perhaps the appearance of said garment might be enough to appeal to others, rationale unseen? Or perhaps, more accurately, vaguely discernible?

Like with anything, only time, that motherfucker, will tell.

Footnote:
In Japanese, “mono / 物” means “object”, thus this graphic thing, though if worded correctly, it would be “graphic no mono / グラフィックの物”. Oh well.

Mono-graphic is available at Sailosaibin.