• Why Settle For Something When You Can Make It Shine? – An Interview with Hooping Fan Extraordinaire and Design-Award Winner Danielle McIntosh
• Brand Vision and Designing Corporate Uniqueness – An Interview with Bruno Schmidt of MetaDesign
• What I am doing is new and exciting - An interview with Tom Rossau
• Meet enPieza! and Some of Their Friends – or How to Help Daily Objects Forget Their Initial Destiny for Fun and Profit
• The value of the material determines the value of the act of cleaning itself - an interview with Jurgen Bey of Studio Makkink & Bey
• The Road is Clear for Colors – an Interview with Lieke Ypma
• I feel more alive in insecurity
• Try not to repeat what already exists
• A sense of balance between pixels and pencil
• The Magic at Sun Rise
• To create means to express your inner self
• Muses of a Midwestern Maker
• We are perfectionists …
• Always start from scratch
• Design is a consequence of the process, which in turn is a consequence of the material – An Interview with Max Lamb
• Concrete: Material of the Future!
• Finding Beauty in Problem-Solving – An Interview with Illustrator Jean Tuttle
• Complaining is Silly - An Interview with Stefan Sagmeister
• My starting point is the graphic reworking of surface
• Self-sufficiency, environmental protection and cultural promotion – All in a day’s work for Ute Hübler and Sonja Nitschmann of espírito brasilis
• Designs Unseen – An Interview with "Micronaut" Martin Oeggerli
• The Passagen Interviews – Katja Gehrke
• The Passagen Interviews – Doty Horn
• Taking Security from Effects – an interview with Dieter Hermann of Printcolor
• Designers, have your say! The XYMARA.com Passagen Interviews!
• Personal magic – the art of Alison Ann Martin
• Design Trends in Asia - Nature, Harmony and the Embrace of the New
• What color is a piece of string?
• Straight Lines, Hidden Value
• I feel I gave a little something, a little beauty to the world
• We believe it’s a new industrial revolution
• How about good things? Or interesting things?
• Design also always has a function
• Wood is a Very Modern Material
• I don‘t care what color a car is, just as long as it is black.
• Every design process is inspired by something else, what the designer has seen, heard or felt.
• Aren‘t our color preferences always based on our childhood memories?
• There is a strong need for richness
• We live in an inflatable culture. It‘s hard to know which values are real.
• Colors that create value are trendy ...
• There is a corresponding emotion to each color
• We would love to live outside the city. But we stay and use countryside colors ...
• There are too many colors around. I only need black.
• Interview with Warren Neidich, Artist
• Interview with Simon Husslein, Product Designer
• Interview with Clarissa Tossin, Graphic Designer
• Interview with Uleshka Asher, PingMag Chief Editor/Artist

"Don't Read This, Go Design Something!" – An Interview with Daniel Pelavin

By Ziggy Nixon

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Daniel Pelavin, has maintained a studio in New York City since 1979, where he creates illustration, lettering and typographic design for clients in publishing, advertising and packaging. He is best known for bold, precisely drafted shapes, unique color palette and original typography. He has earned recognition and too many awards to be listed here, both nationally and abroad, for his vast collection of work.

We were very happy to recently spend some time with Daniel discussing both a wide range of topics to do with his work and how he views some of the things happening on this blue-green ball we all call home: Daniel, you mention on your website that you credit high school industrial art classes and your job as an apprentice in Detroit art studios as your most valuable source of training and inspiration. Can you share a bit about these experiences?

In industrial arts classes, I learned to make precise drawings with drafting instruments and translate plan views into orthographic perspective.

As an apprentice, in addition to doing menial tasks, cutting mats and occasionally delivering jobs to clients, I had the opportunity to work with and learn from a full-service studio with artists of many specialties, including decorative, product, fashion and realistic illustration, layout and design, mechanical and technical illustration, retouching, and lettering.

How did you come to your particular style?

My "style" is a result of my choice of tools, my admiration for the simplicity and mathematical balance of geometric forms and my conviction that, since the camera has already been invented, there's no longer a pressing need to mimic or imitate purely representational forms in illustration.

Various book covers, reprinted with permission of Daniel Pelavin

What inspired or motivated you to develop your signature "retro" design form and even processing, including typography?

I find the term "retro" to be a condescending expression, used by those who have not had the opportunity, nor interest in exploring the history and evolution of design.

Ouch, sorry about that.

No, please don't misunderstand me, that's not a criticism of the question. It's just that far too often someone will ask me for a project and say: "make it more retro," or just the opposite, namely: "don't make it as retro as ..." This is where I get a bit frustrated about the term, namely, what is "retro" even supposed to mean?

Stock Illustrations © Daniel Pelavin

You've described your work as "(using) a restrained and simplified vocabulary of geometric forms, rich, flat colors, and letterforms inspired by a wide range of 20th century cultural ephemera."

I wrote that in an attempt to express accurately and honestly what inspires and drives my work.

Where do you see your own work in this regard?

In the freezer section of their local grocery store, ha ha (more later).

I quite enjoyed your "Robot" page on your website, where you've given other artists a chance to exhibit their own work. Why did you set this selection up?

The web works best when there is both give and take.

Stock Illustrations © Daniel Pelavin

What is the difference between "stock illustration" and icons, or clip-arts?

Stock Illustration is existing art available for license; icons (in their present-day sense) are symbolic drawings representing concepts. Clip art is a kind of stock illustration that was sold on an unlimited use basis and distributed in books in various sizes that could be "clipped" and inserted into printer's mechanicals.

Your "black & white standards" seem to be very true to your style of sharp, geometric forms and well-defined lines. However, there are other images on your site that seem to go through a bit of a transformation into a much "looser", but also more colorful format. Were these just experiments or how do they fit into your own design evolution?

In about 1995, I was tired of losing the spontaneity of my sketches in translation to rigidly geometric forms so I began reproducing the sketched lines with Illustrator paths and intentionally shifting the colors out of register to keep them from being too perfect.

Example of ITC Anna, created with permission of Daniel Pelavin

For a typographer, is getting a font actually in the "mainstream" – as your own "ITC Anna" is – important, at least financially?

The success of ITC Anna is pretty unusual and certainly phenomenal for a period display face. There was surge in royalties when it became part of the Adobe type library but, no, I am not set for life financially owing to this.

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