I had a meeting with a young designer this morning. She's designing some creative for me. I said to her, "there should be a playfulness and a tension and a symbiosis in the typography like Lou Dorfsman's CBS wall."
A blank stare.
I understand this designer's point of view.
Dorfman's heyday was many decades ago.
The machinery of his craft is today obsolete.
There are new technologies today that allow you to do things you couldn't do just a few years ago.
There are new, hot designers who are winning all of the new, hot awards.
Do you need to know who Lou Dorfsman was?
Do you need to know Shakespeare?
Do you need to know Welles?
Do you need to know Durer?
Or Michelangelo? Or unknown Greeks.
One of the things I've seen more and more of of late is creatives who go to school for two or four years to become creatives. What are they teaching them if they are not teaching them Dorfsman? And in graduate Marketing curricula, do they teach Dorfsman? Krone? Tesch?
Or is it just trends and pie charts?
