Marian Bantjes: Intricate beauty by design

I'm going to begin by reciting a poem.

"Oh beloved dentist:

Your rubber fingers in my mouth ...

your voice so soft and muffled ...

Lower the mask, dear dentist,

lower the mask."

(Laughter)

Okay, in this presentation,

I'm going to be putting the right side of your brains

through a fairly serious workout.

You're going to see a lot of imagery,

and it's not always connected to what I'm talking about,

so I need you to kind of split your brains in half

and let the images flow over one side

and listen to me on the other.

So I am one of those people

with a transformative personal story.

Six years ago,

after 20 years in graphic design and typography,

I changed the way I was working

and the way most graphic designers work

to pursue a more personal approach to my work,

with only the humble attempt

to simply make a living doing something that I loved.

But something weird happened.

I became bizarrely

popular.

My current work

seems to resonate with people

in a way that has so taken me by surprise

that I still frequently wonder

what in the hell is going on.

And I'm slowly coming to understand

that the appeal of what I do

may be connected to why I do it.

These days, I call myself a graphic artist.

So where my work as a graphic designer

was to follow strategy,

my work now

follows my heart

and my interests

with the guidance of my ego

to create work that is mutually beneficial to myself and a client.

Now, this is heresy

in the design world.

The ego is not supposed

to be involved in graphic design.

But I find that for myself,

without exception,

the more I deal with the work

as something of my own,

as something that is personal,

the more successful it is

as something that's compelling,

interesting and sustaining.

So I exist somewhat outside of the mainstream

of design thinking.

Where others might look at measurable results,

I tend to be interested in more ethereal qualities,

like "Does it bring joy?"

"Is there a sense of wonder?"

and "Does it invoke curiosity?"

This is a scientific diagram, by the way.

I don't have time to explain it,

but it has to do with DNA and RNA.

So I have a particular imaginative approach to visual work.

The things that interest me when I'm working

are visual structure,

surprise

and anything that requires figuring things out.

So for this reason, I'm particularly drawn

to systems and patterns.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how my brain works.

This is a piece that I did for

The Guardian newspaper in the U.K.

They have a magazine that they call G2.

And this is for their puzzle special

in 2007.

And puzzling it is.

I started by creating a series of tiling units.

And these tiling units, I designed

specifically so that they would contain

parts of letterforms within their shapes

so that I could then

join those pieces together

to create letters and then words

within the abstract patterning.

But then as well, I was able to

just flip them, rotate them

and combine them in different ways

to create either regular patterns

or abstract patterns.

So here's the word puzzle again.

And here it is with the abstract surrounding.

And as you can see, it's extremely difficult to read.

But all I have to do is

fill certain areas of those letterforms

and I can bring those words out of

the background pattern.

But maybe that's a little too obvious.

So then I can add some color in with the background

and add a bit more color in with the words themselves,

and this way, working with the art director,

I'm able to bring it to just the right point

that it's puzzling for the audience --

they can figure out that there's something they have to read --

but it's not impossible for them to read.

I'm also interested in working with

unusual materials

and common materials in unusual ways.

So this requires figuring out how to

get the most out of something's innate properties

and also how to bend it to my will.

So ultimately,

my goal is to create something unexpected.

To this end, I have worked in sugar

for Stefan Sagmeister,

three-time TED speaker.

And this project began essentially

on my kitchen table.

I've been eating cereal for breakfast

all of my life.

And for that same amount of time,

I've been spilling sugar on the table

and just kind of playing with it with my fingers.

And eventually I used this technique

to create a piece of artwork.

And then I used it again to create

six pieces for Stefan's book,

"Things in My Life I've Learned So Far."

And these were created

without sketches, just freehand,

by putting the sugar down on a white surface

and then manipulating it to get

the words and designs out of it.

Recently, I've also made some

rather highbrow baroque borders

out of lowbrow pasta.

And this is for a chapter that I'm doing in a book,

and the chapter is on honor.

So it's a little bit unexpected,

but, in a way, it refers

to the macaroni art

that children make for their parents

or they make in school and give to their parents,

which is in itself a form of honor.

This is what you can do with some household tinfoil.

Okay, well, it's what I can do with some household tinfoil.

(Laughter)

I'm very interested in wonder,

in design as an impetus to inquiring.

To say I wonder is to say

I question, I ask.

And to experience wonder is to experience awe.

So I'm currently working on a book,

which plays with both senses of the word,

as I explore some of my own ideas

and inquiries

in a visual display of rather

peacock-like grandeur.

The world is full of wonder.

But the world of graphic design,

for the most part, is not.

So I'm using my own writings

as a kind of testing ground for a book that has

an interdependency between word and image

as a kind of seductive force.

I think that one of the things

that religions got right

was the use of visual wonder

to deliver a message.

I think this true marriage of art and information

is woefully underused in adult literature,

and I'm mystified as to

why visual wealth is not more commonly used

to enhance intellectual wealth.

When we look at works like this,

we tend to associate them with children's literature.

There's an implication that ornamental graphics

detract from the seriousness of the content.

But I really hope to have the opportunity

to change that perception.

This book is taking rather a long time,

but I'm nearly done.

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea

to put an intermission

in my talk.

And this is it -- just to give you and me a moment to catch up.

(Laughter)

So I do these valentines.

I've been sending out valentines

on a fairly large scale since 2005.

These are my valentines

from 2005 and 2006.

And I started by

doing just a single image like this

and sending them out to each person.

But in 2007,

I got the cockamamie idea

to hand-draw each valentine

for everyone on my mailing list.

I reduced my mailing list to 150 people.

And I drew each person

their own unique valentine

and put their name on it

and numbered it and signed it and sent it out.

Believe it or not, I devised this

as a timesaving method.

I was very busy in the beginning of that year,

and I didn't know when I was going to find time

to design and print a single valentine.

And I thought that I could kind of do this piecemeal

as I was traveling.

It didn't exactly work out that way.

There's a longer story to this,

but I did get them all done in time,

and they were extremely well received.

I got an almost 100 percent response rate.

(Laughter)

And those who didn't respond

will never receive anything from me ever again.

(Laughter)

Last year,

I took a more conceptual approach to the valentine.

I had this idea that I wanted people

to receive a kind of

mysterious love letter,

like a found fragment in their mailbox.

I wanted it to be something

that was not addressed to them

or signed by me,

something that caused them to wonder

what on Earth this thing was.

And I specifically wrote

four pages that don't connect.

There were four different versions of this.

And I wrote them

so that they begin in the middle of a sentence,

end in the middle of a sentence.

And they're on the one hand, universal,

so I avoid specific names or places,

but on the other hand, they're personal.

So I wanted people to really get the sense that

they had received something that could have been

a love letter to them.

And I'm just going to read one of them to you.

"You've never really been sure of this,

but I can assure you that this quirk

you're so self-conscious of

is intensely endearing.

Just please accept that this piece of you

escapes with your smile,

and those of us who notice

are happy to catch it in passing.

Time spent with you is like chasing and catching small birds,

but without the scratches and bird shit."

(Laughter)

"That is to say,

your thoughts and words flit and dart,

disconcertedly elusive at times,

but when caught and examined --

ahh, such a wonder,

such a delightful reward.

There's no passing time with you,

only collecting --

the collecting of moments with the hope for preservation

and at the same time release.

Impossible? I don't think so.

I know this makes you embarrassed.

I'm certain I can see you blushing.

But I just have to tell you because

sometimes I hear your self-doubt,

and it's so crushing to think

that you may not know how truly wonderful you are,

how inspiring and delightful

and really, truly the most completely ..."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

So Valentine's Day

is coming up in a couple of days,

and these are currently arriving

in mailboxes all around the world.

This year, I got, what I really have to say

is a rather brilliant idea,

to laser cut

my valentines

out of used Christmas cards.

So I solicited friends

to send me their used Christmas cards,

and I made 500 of these.

Each one of them is completely different.

I'm just really, really thrilled with them.

I don't have that much else to say,

but they turned out really well.

I do spend a lot of time on my work.

And one of the things that I've been thinking about recently

is what is worth while.

What is it that's worth spending my time on

and my life on in this way?

Working in the commercial world,

this is something that I do have to struggle with at times.

And yes, sometimes I'm swayed by money.

But ultimately, I don't consider that a worthy goal.

What makes something worthwhile for me

is the people I work for or with,

the conditions I work under

and the audience that I'm able to reach.

So I might ask: "Who is it for?"

"What does it say?"

and "What does it do?"

You know, I have to tell you, it's really difficult

for someone like me to come up on stage

at this conference

with these unbelievably brilliant minds,

who are thinking these

really big-picture,

world-changing, life-changing

ideas and technologies.

And it's very, very common

for designers and people in the visual arts

to feel that we're

not contributing enough,

or worse, that all we're doing is

contributing to landfill.

Here I am; I'm showing you

some pretty visuals

and talking about aesthetics.

But I've come to believe that

truly imaginative visual work

is extremely important in society.

Just in the way that I'm inspired

by books

and magazines of all kinds,

conversations I have, movies,

so I also think,

when I put visual work out there into the mass media,

work that is interesting, unusual,

intriguing,

work that maybe opens up that sense

of inquiry in the mind,

that I'm seeding the imagination of the populace.

And you just never know who

is going to take something from that

and turn it into something else,

because inspiration

is cross-pollinating.

So a piece of mine

may inspire a playwright

or a novelist or a scientist,

and that in turn may be the seed

that inspires a doctor

or a philanthropist

or a babysitter.

And this isn't something that you can quantify

or track or measure,

and we tend to undervalue things in society

that we can't measure.

But I really believe

that a fully operating, rich society

needs these seeds coming from all directions

and all disciplines

in order to keep the gears of inspiration

and imagination

flowing and cycling and growing.

So that's why I do what I do,

and why I spend so much time and effort on it,

and why I work in the commercial, public sphere,

as opposed to the isolated, private sphere

of fine art:

because I want as many people as possible

to see my work, notice it, be drawn into it,

and be able to take something from it.

And I actually really feel that it's worthwhile

to spend my valuable

and limited time on this Earth

in this way.

And I thank you for allowing me to show it to you.

(Applause)