Dennis Miller

Statement:

My so-called career is driven more by shifting obsessions – and maybe a short attention span – than by money, fashion or status. I pursue the things that interest me.

The work in my portfolio includes product design, exhibition design, corporate identity, annual reports, textbooks, typefaces, Web sites and CD-ROMs. I have worked for Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations, and bankrupt entrepreneurs with substance abuse problems. Some of these efforts were lucrative. Some of them were stimulating enough to make me want to continue practicing my craft.

All of my experiences as a graphic designer have been pushed forward (and sometimes backwards) by questions. Many of the questions are stupid. They’re the ones that float in cartoon balloons over my head during three hour classes, three day meetings and 3:00 am bouts of insomnia: Is it new? Is it old? Is it International School? Can it be Techno? Will it sell? Will it make money? Will it win an award? In a relatively short time, these self-inflicted sucker punches become all-consuming distractions. The work disappears. My interest disappears. I disappear.

There are also questions that change everything about the way I look at my work:
Does it change anything for the better? Does this thing solve that (or any) problem?
Will anyone benefit from this effort? Me? Somebody... anybody else?

I care greatly about the difference a designer can make in the life of another person. The effect may be temporary or permanent; it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is movement towards positive change.

The Digital Revolution (which is less a revolution than it is simply a continuation of communication’s evolution) is shaking my field to its very foundations. To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as graphic design will be gone with 10 years –
vanished without a trace. The graphic design profession is now at a place in its development, which demands more from its practitioners: more awareness, more knowledge, more independence, more invention. Boundaries that used to define graphic design as a Ÿeld are being blurred, if not entirely dismantled. If graphic designers are to avoid becoming anachronisms, we must look outward. I believe that new definitions will come through proactive collaborations with education, business, engineering, industrial design and psychology. Designers who possess interdisciplinary skills and interests will keep this field relevant in the coming millennium.

As I move more deeply into this odd, hybrid life as combination artist-designer-teacher, teacher, I look forward to working with people in the search to find answers to new questions. They will be the ones who also find ways to make positive changes happen.