CCA News
Michael Vanderbyl: 2D, 3D, and Beyond
Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
How can the U.S. Postal Service be saved? Vanderbyl Design was one of three design firms recently commissioned by Newsweek to propose a rebranding for the beleaguered institution. Of the three propositions, featured in the October 12 issue (and in the slideshow at right) it was the most honorific visually, and also the only one that extended beyond the logo to a full suite of applications. Vanderbyl says he couldn't do just a logo; he had to see how it would play out on the mailboxes, on the airplanes, on the trucks, even (brilliant!) on the little metered-postage stickers.
"The postal service deserves more respect. What other company has been around since 1775? Its graphics should make a statement about its longevity, its history. And they should include a representation of a piece of mail, something that is conspicuously absent from the current logo."
Michael Vanderbyl is CCA's Dean of Design, and since 1976 the faculty director of the Graphic Design thesis course, the capstone experience for every student in the program. And he's got a reputation for being tough. Some students start thinking about their senior thesis projects on day one of freshman year—no kidding.
"By now," he says, "I recognize the stages the students undergo over the course of the year: from irrational fear to self-doubt to extreme confidence and pride. They have to do a lot of research. The project has to be personal. It has to work on many levels. It needs to be direct and understandable. Many of them have told me, years later, that it was the most gratifying thing they did in their entire student career."
Last month at the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) Design Congress in Beijing, where Vanderbyl was highly honored as an invited speaker, he centered his talk on educating the next generation of designers. He touched on a dozen different CCA thesis projects that have stuck with him over the decades. One was by Kappy Sugawara (1999, pictured in the slideshow at right), which involved hundreds of paper-sculpted boats, each representing a barracks building at the Tule Lake Japanese internment camp, where her grandparents were held during World War II. The only toys available to the children there were homemade paper boats that they floated in mud puddles. Each boat in her thesis show was made from a folded piece of anti-Japanese propaganda. Her CCA tuition, she revealed during her presentation, was being paid out of government reparations money paid to her family.
"There wasn't a dry eye in the room at the end of her talk," remembers Vanderbyl. "The aspects involving concealment, and quiet beauty, are very Japanese. Communication design can't be just about transmitting a message. It needs to imbue the message with emotional content. Design can make people laugh, or cry."
Vanderbyl is also a CCA alumnus. When he graduated in 1968, the Graphic Design department was geared much more toward practical training for careers in advertising; Vanderbyl himself has played a large part in the shift in the curriculum to emphasize concept and theory as much as technical skills. As a student his primary faculty influence was design legend Wolfgang Lederer; he also remembers doing a lot of self-directed study in Meyer Library, teaching himself about the history of the discipline, for instance the Bauhaus and Swiss typographic traditions.
In the years since, he has steadily risen to international prominence. He created his highly successful multidisciplinary firm in 1973. He is an AIGA gold medal recipient and a former president of the national AIGA. His work is in major museum collections around the world and has been recognized in every major design competition in the United States and Europe.
This week—just a slice of life at Vanderbyl Design—he’s working on a 12,500-square-foot New York showroom for a Canadian client; preparing for a tradeshow for his wife's textiles company, which involves transforming her fabric samples into a dozen different Chuck Taylor–style shoes; developing the graphics for a racing sailboat; rebranding Saybrook University; and creating the latest round of new labels for Scarecrow Wine.
During the course of our conversation, we find ourselves occasionally losing track of whether we're discussing faculty members or local designers or students. And it's entirely understandable: For Vanderbyl there's an awful lot of overlap among those categories. His peers include innumerable former students and current and former CCA faculty colleagues. He praises San Francisco as one of the best cities in the world for design—home to a remarkably vibrant, supportive, and forward-thinking professional design community. He was born and raised here, and it is where he, and his firm, intend to stay.