NAOMI YANG: I was a visual art major at Harvard; my senior thesis was
in painting but I also did projects in photography, industrial design
and landscape studies. I took one class in graphic design, but
otherwise it was something that I did more outside of school. I
designed posters for plays and concerts, and even a logo for the band
that Damon and Dean were in (it was with another bass player—this
was years before we started Galaxie 500). At that moment in rock
history, every band needed a logo!

The summer before I went to Harvard I worked as an apprentice in
Milton Glaser's office in New York. In high school I had done a lot
of poster design and Milton Glaser was my hero. I spent most of that
summer making photostats. It was the only way you could change the
size of the type that you ordered from a typesetter—otherwise you
had to reorder all new type. The photostat machine was a huge
camera-contraption with which you took a photo of the type, altering
the percentage of the original, and then developing it inside the
machine by sticking your arms through these holes and looking through
a little light-safe window. And then, if you changed your mind, and
decided you wanted yet a different size of type—you had to make
another photostat!

But by the end of the summer they were also letting me do things such
as letter spacing, which meant I took a strip of display type and
glued it down with rubber cement to a board. And then I had to cut
along the top and bottom edges of the type and between each letter,
and look at the relationship of each letter to each other and if the
spacing was even. If not, I had to slide each letter over a tiny bit
until the spacing was perfect—then you made a fresh photostat of
it so you had one without the cut lines to paste-up in the final
artwork.

So, I guess I had a little formal training in some very old fashioned
skills! When I first got a computer and Quark XPress, I was so happy—
I couldn't believe how easy it was to change the point size and
letter spacing of the type!

JOE: I am familiar with your designs for Exact Change and the
packaging of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi albums. What other design
jobs have you done? Is there any one project that stands out?

NAOMI: I've done a bunch of freelance work over the years, but I
enjoy working on my own projects the most. Although I know part of
the job of a graphic designer is to meet the client's needs with
fabulous invention, I tend to just be bummed out by a client's needs!
I am rarely inspired unless I can just do what I want. That said,
many of the jobs I have done are for friends or people who like my
work, which is always fun. They tend to let me do whatever I want.

JOE: What is your design philosophy and/or process? How do you work?

NAOMI: I am always drawn to the simple and the well-proportioned
rather than the flashy. I often joke with Damon that if I started a
design movement I would call it the "Plain style."

For covers, I tend to start with an image. I am always looking for
one that has meaning and power on its own, and then usually give it
center stage. I let the image dominate the design without a lot of
interference from the type or other elements.

As for process, I imagine it's not so dissimilar to anyone else. I
try a lot of things in order to find what seems to work best—
different fonts, arrangements, etc. But I think, in trying to work
out a design, that I tend to edit down, to remove things and change
the proportions and placement, rather than add random elements. If I
use something ornamental I like for it to have a "purpose" as well as
being decorative–be it using a dingbat to set type off, or a
barcode. I always aspire to have things look effortless and natural—
rather than calling attention to the fact that it has been DESIGNED—
hence, the "Plain style!"

JOE: As a publisher of experimental literature, what is your
relationship to typography? How do you decide upon a particular
typeface for a book?

NAOMI: I love typesetting prose; I enjoy a well-proportioned page so
much! I worked in the rare book library at Harvard, in the manuscript
department, during graduate school (well, as I was in the process of
dropping out of architecture school…) and I have a real love for
medieval manuscripts and early printed books. The proportions of the
type to the margins and the way the letters, printed with metal type,
look are just so beautiful—they are wonderful objects.

So I try and create that kind of feel in our offset-printed
Mac-typeset books and in our CD packaging. I try to have a luxury to
the proportions of the page, a ceremony to the flow of the front
matter, and a bit of whimsy in the details, like the running heads
and the page numbers. I always hope that the packaging of the book or
the CD will be a little world unto itself (not to mention that music
will be too).

Choosing fonts is usually just a matter of feel. I love both the
old-style fonts with a lot of contrast between thicks and thins and
eccentricities, such as Didot or Centaur, while I also love a lot of
sans-serif types, such as DIN or Gill. I hate Times Roman and all
those types that have no personality!!!

JOE: Who are some of your favorite graphic designers, past or
present, and what in particular attracts you to their work?

NAOMI: Well, as I said before, when I was very young Milton Glaser
was very important to me. I think that my love for the powerful image
resonated with his incredible drawings. With just a few simple lines
he could express so much. And his work is always so clever and funny
too.

Later, as I discovered post-punk music, the work of (Factory Records
designer) Peter Saville was very important to me. Everything about
his work always is so elegant; so few elements but chosen so
carefully. I always think of Peter Saville's covers and (Joy
Division/ New Order musician) Peter Hook's bass lines at the heart of
my early thinking about design and music.

Another designer that I have always loved is Bruce Rogers—there's
not so much information available about him, but he was a book
designer from the early part of the century who did incredibly
whimsical and inventive things with type ornaments. He also designed
the typeface "Centaur." I have always loved everything I have seen of
his, especially his great title pages (if you can find a book called
Books and Printing: a Treasury for Typophile by Paul A. Bennett,
there is an essay about Bruce Rogers in it with some samples).

And also on the list would have to be: Bruce Mau (Zone Books);
Louise Fili; and Illiazd (European, worked with the Surrealists—did an
amazing book with Max Ernst called Maxmiliana), and the
Bauhaus graphic designers. Not to mention a long list of architects,
painters, photographers, whose work I love!

JOE: As a musician, does music also influence your visual work? Do
you find you approach music and design in a similar fashion, or is
the process quite different for each?

NAOMI: I don't think my music necessarily directly influences my
visual work or vice versa. They are such different media. But I do
think that naturally a lot of the same aesthetic principles are there
in both. I am the same person, after all, making all the choices—
bad and good! Making something that is beautiful is always my number
one desire, and in both making music and art I definitely favor a
process of tinkering, stripping down the elements, hopefully leaving
just what is lovely and valuable and direct.

JOE: Among fine art circles, and perhaps even art schools, there has
often been a disdain for graphic design because of its underlying
commercial orientation. What are your thoughts regarding the line
separating fine art and graphic design?

NAOMI: I had that question myself for years—but, for me, it was
not just about graphic design vs. fine art, but about music vs. fine
art too. I had originally wanted to be a painter and when I dropped
out of architecture school it was to paint as well as play music.
But, as Galaxie 500 was doing so well that I had no time to paint, I
felt worried that it wasn't really spending my time making art, it
was pop culture, and somehow a much less valuable pursuit than
painting. I suffered a lot of anxiety about that as we toured and
spent all our time on music—that I was not attending to the real
art that I hoped to make. Graphic design certainly posed a similar
problem to me. It was fun, like music, not solitary and miserable,
like painting, and therefore not as worthy.

But I came to realize, slowly, after G500 broke up, and a lot of
thinking about things later, that really everything can be art and
everything can be turned into a commodity, so that it's up to you
just to choose what you want to do and do it well and with soul.

The fine art world CERTAINLY takes commerciality into consideration
and, it is certainly true that music and graphic art can be beautiful
and moving. So in the end I think it's just about trying to do
something real and sincere.

JOE: Do you have any advice in particular for a young designer just
starting out?

NAOMI: I have never tried to make a career out of graphic design;
it's just been something I have always done, so I don't know if I
have any wise advice. . . I guess it would just be "please make
beautiful things—the world needs them!"