And I play when I design.

I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure

that I actually do that,

and the definition of play,

number one, was engaging in a childlike

activity or endeavor,

and number two was gambling.

And I realize I do both

when I'm designing.

I'm both a kid and I'm gambling all the time.

And I think that if you're not,

there's probably something inherently wrong

with the structure or the situation you're in,

if you're a designer.

But the serious part is what threw me,

and I couldn't quite get a handle

on it until I remembered an essay.

And it's an essay I read 30 years ago.

It was written by Russell Baker,

who used to write an "Observer" column in the New York Times.

He's a wonderful humorist. And I'm going to read you

this essay,

or an excerpt from it

because it really hit home for me.

Here is a letter of friendly advice.

Be serious, it says.

What it means, of course, is, be solemn.

Being solemn is easy.

Being serious is hard.

Children almost always begin by being serious,

which is what makes them so entertaining

when compared with adults as a class.

Adults, on the whole, are solemn.

In politics, the rare candidate who is serious,

like Adlai Stevenson,

is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower.

That's because it is hard for most people

to recognize seriousness, which is rare,

but more comfortable to endorse solemnity,

which is commonplace.

Jogging, which is commonplace,

and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn.

Poker is serious.

Washington, D.C. is solemn.

New York is serious.

Going to educational conferences to tell you anything

about the future is solemn.

Taking a long walk by yourself,

during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Tiffany's,

is serious.

(Laughter)

Now, when I apply Russell Baker's definition

of solemnity or seriousness to design,

it doesn't necessarily make any particular point about quality.

Solemn design is often important and very effective design.

Solemn design is also socially correct,

and is accepted by appropriate audiences.

It's what right-thinking designers

and all the clients are striving for.

Serious design, serious play,

is something else.

For one thing, it often happens

spontaneously, intuitively,

accidentally or incidentally.

It can be achieved out of innocence, or arrogance,

or out of selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness.

But mostly, it's achieved through all those kind of crazy

parts of human behavior that

don't really make any sense.

Serious design is imperfect.

It's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being

the first of its kind.

Serious design is also -- often -- quite unsuccessful

from the solemn point of view.

That's because the art of serious play

is about invention, change, rebellion -- not perfection.

Perfection happens during solemn play.

Now, I always saw design careers

like surreal staircases.

If you look at the staircase, you'll see

that in your 20s the risers are very high

and the steps are very short,

and you make huge discoveries.

You sort of leap up very quickly in your youth.

That's because you don't know anything and you have a lot to learn,

and so that anything you do is a learning experience

and you're just jumping right up there.

As you get older, the risers get shallower

and the steps get wider,

and you start moving along at a slower pace

because you're making fewer discoveries.

And as you get older and more decrepit,

you sort of inch along on this

sort of depressing, long staircase,

leading you into oblivion.

(Laughter)

I find it's actually getting really hard to be serious.

I'm hired to be solemn, but I find more and more

that I'm solemn when I don't have to be.

And in my 35 years of working experience,

I think I was really serious four times.

And I'm going to show them to you now,

because they came out of very specific conditions.

It's great to be a kid.

Now, when I was in my early 20s,

I worked in the record business, designing record covers for CBS Records,

and I had no idea what a great job I had.

I thought everybody had a job like that.

And what --

the way I looked at design and the way I looked at the world was,

what was going on around me

and the things that came at the time I walked into design

were the enemy.

I really, really, really hated

the typeface Helvetica.

I thought the typeface Helvetica

was the cleanest, most boring, most fascistic,

really repressive typeface,

and I hated everything that was designed in Helvetica.

And when I was in

my college days,

this was the sort of design

that was fashionable and popular.

This is actually quite a lovely book jacket by Rudy de Harak,

but I just hated it, because it was designed with Helvetica,

and I made parodies about it.

I just thought it was, you know, completely boring.

(Laughter)

So -- so, my goal in life

was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica.

And to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica

was actually kind of hard because you had to find it.

And there weren't a lot of books about the history of design

in the early 70s. There weren't --

there wasn't a plethora of design publishing.

You actually had to go to antique stores. You had to go to Europe.

You had to go places and find the stuff.

And what I responded to was, you know,

Art Nouveau, or deco,

or Victorian typography,

or things that were just completely not Helvetica.

And I taught myself design this way,

and this was sort of my early years,

and I used these things

in really goofy ways

on record covers and in my design.

I wasn't educated. I just sort of

put these things together.

I mixed up Victorian designs with pop,

and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else.

And I made these very lush,

very elaborate record covers,

not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist --

because I didn't know what those things were.

I just hated Helvetica.

(Laughter)

And that kind of passion

drove me into very serious play,

a kind of play I could never do now

because I'm too well-educated.

And there's something wonderful about

that form of youth,

where you can let yourself

grow and play, and be

really a brat, and then accomplish things.

By the end of the '70s, actually,

the stuff became known.

I mean, these covers appeared all over the world,

and they started winning awards,

and people knew them.

And I was suddenly a post-modernist,

and I began a career as -- in my own business.

And first I was praised for it, then criticized for it,

but the fact of the matter was, I had become solemn.

I didn't do what I think

was a piece of serious work again for about 14 years.

I spent most of the '80s being quite solemn,

turning out these sorts of designs

that I was expected to do

because that's who I was,

and I was living in this cycle of going from serious to solemn

to hackneyed to dead, and getting rediscovered all over again.

So, here was the second condition

for which I think I accomplished some serious play.

There's a Paul Newman movie

that I love called "The Verdict."

I don't know how many of you have seen it, but it's a beaut.

And in the movie, he plays

a down-and-out lawyer

who's become an ambulance chaser.

And he's taken on --

he's given, actually -- a malpractice suit to handle

that's sort of an easy deal,

and in the midst of trying to connect the deal,

he starts to empathize

and identify with his client,

and he regains his morality and purpose,

and he goes on to win the case.

And in the depth of despair,

in the midst of the movie, when it looks like he can't pull this thing off,

and he needs this case,

he needs to win this case so badly.

There's a shot of Paul Newman alone,

in his office, saying,

"This is the case. There are no other cases.

This is the case. There are no other cases."

And in that moment of

desire and focus,

he can win.

And that is a wonderful

position to be in to create some serious play.

And I had that moment in 1994

when I met a theater director

named George Wolfe,

who was going to have me design

an identity for the New York Shakespeare Festival,

then known,

and then became the Public Theater.

And I began getting immersed

in this project

in a way I never was before.

This is what theater advertising looked like at that time.

This is what was in the newspapers and in the New York Times.

So, this is sort of a comment on the time.

And the Public Theater actually had much better advertising than this.

They had no logo and no identity,

but they had these very iconic posters

painted by Paul Davis.

And George Wolf had taken over from another director

and he wanted to change the theater,

and he wanted to make it urban and loud

and a place that was inclusive.

So, drawing on my love of typography,

I immersed myself into this project.

And what was different about it was the totality of it,

was that I really became the voice, the visual voice, of a place

in a way I had never done before,

where every aspect --

the smallest ad, the ticket, whatever it was --

was designed by me.

There was no format.

There was no in-house department that these things were pushed to.

I literally for three years made everything --

every scrap of paper, everything online,

that this theater did.

And it was the only job,

even though I was doing other jobs.

I lived and breathed it in a way I haven't

with a client since.

It enabled me to really express myself and grow.

And I think that you know

when you're going to be given this position,

and it's rare, but when you get it and you have this opportunity,

it's the moment of serious play.

I did these things, and I still do them.

I still work for the Public Theater.

I'm on their board, and

I still am involved with it.

The high point of the Public Theater, I think, was in 1996,

two years after I designed it,