Clearly your work is often shaped by or acts as a response to the political situation, but after a record 24 subway posters for the College, where do you turn to for ideas? Visually speaking, where are these new designs coming from?

All these jobs are divided between the sensate and the logical. My logical path is to attack the assumptions that Trump has purveyed—propaganda, essentially. We have seen how susceptible people are to repetition. You attach an adjective to any word and you bend the word. And Trump [has been] a bit of a genius by planting things in people's brains and saying them over and over again until they can no longer tell the difference between what is truth and what is not. The logical [path] is to substitute other ideas and other words for what Trump has planted in our brain.

The other [path] has to do with form and the mystery of beauty and the mystery of art—which is we don't know what these images come from, we don't know where color comes from, we don't know, for instance, about shapes and typography and so on. These are in the realm of intuition and artistic skill, whatever that means. It sounds superficial but it's ultimately the only thing you have to depend on once you get past the logic of things, and logic is not as powerful as intuition.

Has your approach to the subway posters and designing for the College changed over the years?

[Yes], as everyone who is open-minded aspires to. You see a lot of work that, because it is commercially acceptable, becomes a pattern for repetition. That history of success, which is commercially desirable, is also personally damaging. You've not [had] to examine each situation as new or potential; you basically say, what have I done in the past, that works in some form. Of course inevitably that's a characteristic of everybody who works, but you must recognize the danger in doing that.

I use pieces from my history all the time, at random, but I don't feel [a need] to use what has succeeded just because it has succeeded, because work placed in another context doesn't adapt to the uniqueness of that context. I've basically avoided the question of style in my life because I realized that any form is subject to change as the times change. In some ways these last three are more abstract, and more simple-minded than a lot of earlier things. They are less narrative, less storytelling, and more dealing with abstractions.

In the video, you describe goodwill and doubt as two key characteristics of a good designer. Can you explain how those qualities serve your work?

Design is frequently used to be persuasive toward some objective that you want [the audience] to move toward, not necessarily one that they want to move to. You have to be very careful about what you do in the role of design, and particularly in advertising, which can be an extremely dangerous form—you see how Trump uses the form of advertising and entertainment as a means to basically improve his [profile] to people. You have to be very careful not to persuade people to do terrible things to themselves.

Art is something else, because in the realm of art you are in the business of goodwill and creating imagery and ideas that unite people and make [them] feel more that they're related to each other than antagonistic towards one another. The two activities, even though they overlap, design and art, they have very different purposes in culture and you have to recognize those differences.

Features