Next week, the School of Visual Arts Masters Series Award, it’s highest honor, will go to one of design’s most prodigious talents: Steven Heller, the legendary art director, educator, author, editor, critic, curator, collaborator, and entrepreneur. Yesterday Steve took time out of his packed schedule to talk with me, in his office at The New York Times.

Peggy Roalf: What qualities do you look for in a young designer that would make for a great art director?
Steven Heller: Good question, because sometimes art directors aren’t designers. They might be illustrators, sometimes they just come out of the miasma. But I think a good art director is discerning, has an eye, has some taste, has some backbone - because the art director has to be the mediator between the artists and the powers that be. An art director doesn’t have to work with artists or photographers but most of us do. And work with other designers, too. There has to be an ability to collaborate and not to feel overwhelmed by other people’s talents, but to bathe in those talents. Left: Portrait of Steven Heller by Milton Glaser. Courtesy of School of Visual Arts.

PR: When you see students who have the gift, what advice do you give them?
SH: The students that I work with in the MFA Program at School of Visual Arts (SVA), which is called Designer as Author, and which I co-chair with Lita Talarico, are those who can create their own content and manage their content and research their content, and sell their content and promote their content. This is essentially what a good art director can or should do. When we see it working, we just encourage it. If we don’t see it, we try to point them in the right direction. Not everybody has the aptitude to do this, though.

PR: There was a time when jazz was a major influence on design and album cover design was something to aspire to. What are the plum assignments today?
SH: There are lots of plum assignments, depending on what you do. I think now there is not one particular thing that’s a one-off specialty like albums were. My wife, Louise Fili, does restaurants. So if she gets a good client she can create a masterpiece. It depends on what you want to be and what you want to do. There are some great assignments in the restaurant and the food packaging industry, there are great fashion shoots to do, there are still terrific magazines,

For example, Michael Beirut [of Pentagram] did the signage for this building. He might not think that this is the high end of what he does but it’s certainly a monumental feat. It’s harder to make an opus out of a website, though, because you’re dealing with templates, and you’re fitting content into spaces rather than designing space to accommodate content. But that’s sure to change so that you can design in an ad hoc way. Eventually, everything is possible. It’s more a question of making the technology available.

PR: Is branding still a buzz word in design education?
SH: There are still people who only talk about branding. It used to be identity or CI, corporate identity. But branding means much more than a simple identity. So I think what you find is that graphic design as a discipline has become somewhat overshadowed by other design forms, so you therefore have to do more things. And there’s nothing wrong with that because you have larger skill sets. In our MFA program, branding is one part of the entire program because the students have to package their products, they have to do nomenclature, they have to create a logo, they have to develop a brand platform, and it goes on.

PR: With that in mind, does the quill pen have any place in today’s design world?
SH: You’re seeing a lot more hand lettering, and with the computer, designers are turning to hot type specimens and hand drawn elements and they scan them and incorporate them into their overall gestalt.

PR: Do you see very much original hand drawn type or calligraphy being done today?
SH: I recently interviewed the master calligrapher Bernard Maisner for AIGA Voice, and he sent me a thank you note that was so beautifully hand lettered I have it displayed at home and people who come in say how gorgeous it is. There are a lot of people who love that kind of thing and I think there’s a new sense of decorative sensibility that’s coming in. Or you could say it’s back again. Things come and go, and people always marvel at things that are hand worked. But still, basic calligraphy is kind of boring to me. But when it becomes more than just lettering, when it becomes more complex, more intricate and systematic, it can be really cool. And I admire it no matter what, even when it’s just lettering.

PR: In the exhibition of your work opening next week at SVA, I see that there’s a display based on your library. Can you tell a little about your collections and your favorite haunts for finding stuff?
SH: Every book that I do includes a certain part of my collection, which I’ve basically amassed in the process of doing the books. For my next book, Iron Fist: Branding the Totalitarian State, I collected a huge amount of material on propaganda and military stuff. When that book is done, the entire collection is going to the Wolfsonian museum, in Florida. I also have a lot of mini mannequins, which ended up in a book I did called Counter Culture - about these intricate clothing models that used to be a vital form of in-store advertising. I’ll hang on to those because they’ve just become too valuable to divest.

PR: How did you get interested in propaganda?
SH: Ever since I was a kid I’ve been interested in this kind of thing, I went to military school in the summers and at one time wanted to join the Air Force. But later on it became an intellectual fascination. The military, like all organizations, uses graphic design. Totalitarian regimes use graphic design, and graphic designers to promote ideas and products. It’s all part of a culture that I tend to be obsessed with. It really comes from being exposed to this as a kid and being exposed to who and what the Nazis were and seeing how it was manifest graphically. Even before I knew what graphics were. I was affected by it and when I learned the language of design, I realized how they were using this language to speak their so-called truths.

PR: When you begin doing research for a book, and need to start collecting material, do you have some favorite haunts?
SH: It depends on what it is. The haunts are disappearing fast, because of eBay, and I don’t go on eBay. If there’s something I really need there I have someone else get it for me. There’s something I just don’t like about it, but I like the haunts I used to have. Now there are a few places outside of New York that have online catalogs, and I’ll develop relationships with the dealers I buy from. My wife and I used to go to Paris and Italy often, and we ended up buying a lot of books and objects on the theme of Art Deco, and that’s where that series of books began. We started researching more and began to borrow objects from different institutions, so it’s not always all from my own collection. I love going to libraries but don’t have enough time. But I still go to smaller libraries where I can have access to the stacks and bring my camera setup and make the photographs and scans I need for the books.

PR: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found on your prowls?
SH: The first real surprise I had ended up becoming a book. It was a collection of typographic specimens owned by Clarence Hornung, one of the great trademark designers of the 1930s. I was able to buy them for a song and this collection became the basis for a number of projects I’ve done on typography. That was cool. But once you find something interesting, like the mannequins, even if you’ve never seen them before, you keep finding them and you find variations on a theme. And with the Nazi material, I certainly found some unique objects, and that was a thrill. But I guess the other thing I found that was totally a surprise to me was nacht gelt, or ersatz money produced in Germany during the Depression. Every town, city and province would issue their own script, and they were beautifully designed. I did a story on them for Print and did a section in my book on German Deco on them, and now they’re in a drawer somewhere.

PR: If you could art direct any magazine in the world, what would it be?
SH: I wouldn’t at this point. I was an art director for 33 years, and I can answer the question and say: I’d like to art direct a magazine that’s something I could put anything into, which means I’m also the editor. But in truth, my days as an art director are over. While I say that reluctantly, I still say it. The fact of the matter is, the only magazines I read now are some of the graphics magazines, and I read The New York Times Magazine, which is well done, very well done. But there’s nothing out there that exists that I would want to do. The only magazine I would want to do is to start something like Frank Zachary’s Portfolio, which Alexey Brodovich designed. But I would have to be the editor, not the designer.

PR: So what’s coming up at SVA, apart from the new MFA Design Criticism program next year?
SH: Well now that I’ve essentially flipped careers, I’m at The Times one day a week, and at school I’m there, like, eight days a week. We’re coming up on the 10^th year of the MFA Designer as Author program, which I co-chair with Lita Talarico, and we just got approved to do an MFA Social Documentary program with Maro Chermayeff, so now we have to get that rolling, and there are also a couple more new programs in the works.

To hear more of Steven Heller’s thoughts on design and life, plan to attend a conversation with Michael Beirut next Tuesday, October 23, at 7:00 pm, in the SVA third floor amphitheater, at 209 East 23^rd Street, NY, NY.

The opening reception for the retrospective exhibition at SVA opens Monday, October 22, 6:00 to 8:00 pm, 209 East 23^rd Street, NY, NY. The show continues through December 1, 2007.

Writing in Print, Veronique Vienne, who has collaborated with Steven Heller on a number of books, says, “As if experiencing the prodigious talent of Steve Heller in print was not unnerving enough, we will soon be able to experience him in multimedia-a dizzying prospect, indeed. Curated and designed by Kevin O’Callaghan, chair of 3-D Design at SVA, the exhibition is conceived as a sensory immersion into the mental universe of Heller. The high-spirited and interactive exhibition will showcase his work as art director (including over 100 covers of the New York Times Book Review), and highlight his contribution to the visual arts as an author, critic, educator-and unrepentant collector of unusual design ephemera.

“The event will also draw attention to the collaborative dimension of Heller’s oeuvre and to the countless books he has co-authored with people whose authorial voice he has encouraged. Steve’s empathy with his peers, colleagues and students is legendary. “He has been graphic design’s biggest fan,” said Paula Scher. More than a one-man show, the exhibit will be a love fest paying homage to the artists Heller has discovered, studied, reviewed and published.”

For more about Steven Heller’s books, visit his website.
To read Paula Scher’s article, visit the AIGA Voice.
For more about School of Visual Arts, visit the website.