Blog
4th December 2008: A very enjoyable meeting, as always, with my ex-boss Michael Bierut this morning, that is, with the man best able to describe how design relates to everything else in the world. We ended up in total agreement about the similarity between design and rhetoric. Turns out I had made this point very recently to our own seasoned and virtuosic rhetorician-Chief Executive, Matthew Taylor. He was curious to know why I’d painted the wall behind my desk a very dark blue, covering up the ubiquitous fish-belly white by which we are corporately surrounded. In reply I invoked the principle of contrast, dark and light – and fast and slow, big and small, the one and the many – “surely you recognise this principle from speech-writing?”, I said. Michael wrote about this on his great blog Design Observer a few months back.