It is not true that the interviewer is only as good as the interviewee. While a generous and articulate guest is key to any scintillating exchange, the interviewer cannot be passive, laconic, or, worse, uninformed. Interviews must be tackled with zeal, and the interviewer must control the discussion while waiting for that unexpected revelation to eke out. A skilled host must therefore prepare exhaustively: Take James Lipton of “Inside the Actors Studio,” with his famously large stack of blue index cards, each containing a pointed question neatly integrated into a systematic progression; while he theatrically examines the narratives of his subjects’ careers, he is always flexible enough to flow with unforeseen currents of conversation. Lipton builds on surprising admissions while keeping the interview on track. And this is no mean feat.
Interviewing requires considerable acumen to enable both the expressive and, especially, the reticent guest to open up. The worst-case scenario, the monosyllabic subject who resolutely guards each pearl of thought or emotion, can be avoided with a battery of insightful queries that forces a kind of challenge—in the good sense.
Debbie Millman, who has hosted the Internet radio program “Design Matters” since 2005, always does her homework—and then some. With her dulcet intonations, she plies each of her visitors with questions designed to evoke the unexpected response. At the same time, she inspires their confidence, owing to her sincere interest in the life and work she’s exploring. Her style is certainly not of the “gotcha,” Barbara Walters variety, yet neither does she wear kid gloves. I’ve been interviewed by her on several occasions, and each time, her approach is somewhat different, tailored to the moment. Friendly yet challenging, she proceeds smoothly from the initial introductions to more free-form conversation. Debbie comes to the discussion well-prepared, not with cursory cheat sheets, but pages of incisive talking points garnered from extensive research.
Though she is the host of the only radio show devoted in large part to graphic design, Debbie was not trained as a journalist. The first time I saw her name was a few years ago on the then-fledgling design blog Speak Up, where she duked it out with founder Armin Vit about brands (which had become one of the forum’s bêtes noires). Debbie’s parries and thrusts with the critically skeptical Vit and his cohorts on the efficacy of branding made for a compelling debate, and her arguments were persuasive and eminently logical. But why shouldn’t she be convincing? Debbie is a partner at Sterling Brands, a New York–based brand identity firm, where her eloquence is well-utilized. She’s gracefully made it to the top of a male-dominated business, and her considerable strategic marketing savvy allows her to be an effective advocate of design.
In large part, this is because she is a devoted aficionado of design and designers, although her interests extend into realms of science and psychology (which she poetically examines in her own blog, http://debbiemillman.blogspot.com). Perhaps another reason she is so adept in conversation is that she truly enjoys learning from others. Her passionate concern for the practice and history of design makes her interviews captivating, though listening to designers talk about their craft could potentially be too arcane even for those in the field. Yet Debbie makes her program riveting by balancing, for instance, the real skinny on Michael Bierut’s obsessive tendencies with insights about his design for Saks Fifth Avenue’s shopping bag.
I often paraphrase Paul Rand’s statement about how he intuitively came up with an idea and then found the rationale for it later, which isn’t to say that comprehending the roots of a concept, or even learning about the technology behind it, is bad, but it takes oratory skill and an understanding of nuance to deconstruct a project so that the details are not banal. The virtue of interviews with designers—as opposed to prose narratives about them—is that they cut through the intellectualizing and get to the creative essence, whatever that might be.
While an interview is not inherently easy, the best enable the voice—the intelligence, humor, irony, even sarcasm—of the designer to emerge. Debbie has, through her tête-à-têtes with the designers in this book, managed to extract the nitty-gritty of their practices without sacrificing their respective humanity. She allows them to speak, but never too much—or too little.