As I mentioned in a previous post, about 80% of the work submitted for consideration didn’t make the final cut. Some of those projects just weren’t very good, but a lot of them were and more than a few probably deserved to be included. But there are only so many pages so some hard decisions had to be made. You can read about the initial selection process here. Those choices were pretty easy. When it came down to the final curation the process was slightly different.
First, we put everything that we liked in, giving each the space we felt appropriate.
Next we determined how many pages had to be cut. Turns out, about 100. Ouch.
I sat with my designer and our intern and we went through every page of the book, knowing we had to be aggressive about paring it down. The supporting section was by far the most robust, so we focused a lot of our efforts there. For those who submitted a project in that section the bar and competition was especially high. There were also certain projects that were declared “sacred.” I wasn’t going to cut Emily Pilloton out of the book, for example, or Brian Collins’ WE campaign or David Garcia’s amazing “Runners.” For others I had to re-read the submission questionnaire, do a little research or sometimes call or email the designer for more information. Projects that had compelling stories, tangible outcomes or which were surprising, innovative (or yes, beautiful) got the nod.
That still left a pretty hefty supply of worthy work still needing to be trimmed. We looked at how to reorder some of the projects, sometimes fitting a few to a page. My bias from the beginning was to keep the work as large as possible, and to give each project the dignity of its own space in which to be considered. Besides that, there is an aesthetic need to ensure the book doesn’t become a high-density design dumping ground. So Sean Adams’ poster gets an entire spread, James Victore’s sticker gets a full page, and Stephen Colbert’s WRISTSTRONG campaign is granted ample breathing room as well. And don’t think you had to be a household name to get special treatment either. Isabelle Swiderski, Andrea Wilkinson, Masood Bukhari, Ashley Ciecka, Michael Jeter — full pages all. Part of the joy of writing this book (and hopefully the value of reading it) is that the projects are united by how interesting, effective and “good” they are, not how well-known they or their designer are.
After making three or four passes using the criteria above, the last, hardest decisions had to be made. Often we would be faced with two excellent projects but simply be unable to decide which to let go. This is when I asked two questions: Who designed it and where are they from? If one was designed by a woman and the other not, the guy had to go (Sorry boys, we men are over-represented in books, magazines, speaker lists, judging panels, etc. You’ll get another chance). And if anyone sees this as patronizing or as some form of charity, they’d be way off the mark. Remember, at this point all the work is excellent, someone just has to get the short end of the stick and it seemed me it might as well me someone else’s turn.
As for location, again I tried to use one bias to combat another. We received more entries from California (particularly San Francisco, where I have my practice) than anywhere else. A combination of my personal connections, the high concentration of designers (the highest ratio per capita in the US), the high number of nonprofits headquartered here (the most of any area, save DC) and our left-coast, left-leaning politics conspired to weigh the book a little too heavily in the Bay Area’s favor. There are still quite a few Bay Area-based projects and firms, but I didn’t want this to be How To Design Like a Good Graphic Designer Who Works Within Six Blocks of My Office, so more than a few friends and close colleagues were thinned out as well (although somehow Volume Inc. still ended up with five projects in the book).
So there you have it. The full, dirty, possibly boring but totally candid and honest truth of it. If you find yourself in the book you should feel pretty good about it. We gave it a lot of thought, and you had a lot of opportunities to meet the axe. If not, its quite possible that at one point you were. The good news is nobody does these projects for the recognition, and amy project that helped someone have a slightly better life is “Good Design” whether or not its in a book that says so.
