“Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.”
“Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.”
“One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. Indeed it’s probably a good idea not just to avoid buying brand, but to avoid selling it too. Sure, you might be able to make money this way — though I bet it’s harder than it looks — but pushing people’s brand buttons is just not a good problem to work on, and it’s hard to do good work without a good problem.”
“’Selling out,’ I’ve realized, isn’t an artistic death. For most of us, it amounts to parceling out bits of our creative talents in order to live, in order to give ourselves time to make the art we want to make. The work can be joyless, iterative and enervating, but rarely is it pointless. I was foolish to presume that ‘real’ art, insofar as it exists, was so fragile that it couldn’t withstand gig work. If anything, my taste of selling out showed me what it might look like to work truly dispassionately, to create in the absence of emotional and intellectual implication. It’s this glimpse that has shown me exactly what I’m working to protect.”
“Today’s music is treated like a free-flowing utility: It’s added to spaces the way air-conditioning is, providing the right vibe for TV shows, YouTube tutorials, stores, study sessions. That means many of today’s musicians, instead of selling records, operate more like the people who once played the piano in department-store lobbies, the organ at baseball games or the accordion in 19th-century cafes: Their job is to provide the appropriate background noise for some other experience. For a time, Callaghan said, ‘there was this thing called artistic integrity, and sync music was very much frowned upon — and now it is the revenue stream.’”
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