|
Pablo
Medina wears a suit to work. He says it's his New Year's
resolution. Wear more suits. He looks good in it: skinny black tie,
white shirt unbuttoned at the top, clean black sneakers, not too
shabby. On his desk at Cubanica, his studio based
in New
York's Tribeca, are MoMA catalogues, monographs, Sagmeister's
Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far—standard fare on
designers' desks around the world. Don't be fooled.
Ask him about inspiration—his real
inspiration—and from a pile
on the floor he'll pull out a beat-up green folder overflowing with
cut-and-scotch-taped pages from Read this Zine, a hardcore
zine he published in high school. He put out four issues, and he
still has them. He even has the letters-to-the-editor he got in the
mail. He'll show you a roll of posters for his band the Deviators,
formed with his buddy Tom Rosenthal when they were in school at
Pratt. Some of them he didn't even make. Medina and Rosenthal
worked on their aesthetic and would send out press kits, and when
they'd show up for shows in cities they'd never been before they'd
see posters up already, filtered through their look. They liked
that. Like a lot of hardcore bands, the Deviators was about
grassroots marketing as much as music. Punk rock was Medina's first
taste of graphic design.
"Buying
hardcore albums, it was never just about the album
cover," he says. "I remember when I bought the Dead Kennedys'
single 'Nazi Punks Fuck Off,' it came with an armband. Sometimes
you'd get stickers or a poster, this whole kit, just for spending
three dollars. All these symbols and logos and stenciled
typography. I was mesmerized by it."
On
learning the job of design:
Most of my creative and technical learning came from practice. "Wax
on, wax off" kind of stuff. Failures and mistakes have also been
crucial to my learning.
Punk
was something you wore—Sharpie'd Chuck Taylors, slashed
jeans—and it was Medina's uniform at Hopewell Valley Central High
School in Pennington, New Jersey. Medina's father, a poet, moved to
the United States from Havana, Cuba, and his mother from Bogotá,
Colombia. He was born in Washington, D.C., and moved to New Jersey
with his father soon after his parents divorced. He remembers
feeling like the only Latin-American kid in school. "I was
searching for an identity through the lens of Anglo culture in high
school, and I wasn't finding it," he says. "Then one day I went to
a hardcore show at City Gardens in Trenton, and I found that
missing piece." He would listen to the Descendents and 7 Seconds on
DJ Randy Now's infamous WPRB hardcore show, and every other weekend
drive down to D.C., the epicenter of the East Coast punk scene, and
where his mom still lived, to see bands like Scream, Gray Matter
and Dag Nasty. "It was about rebellion," he explains. "Rebellion
and anger. And getting that anger out in a creative way: dancing,
beating the hell out of your guitar, making fan zines, drawing
T-shirts, ripping your jeans." It was his self-expression: His dad
had poetry, he had punk.
Medina's
early years as a designer—though he'd hesitate to call
himself that then—were messy and exuberant. He'd found his missing
piece, but he didn't quite know what to do with it. "I would really
struggle," he says. "I was just throwing it together." He cut up
issues of Time and used its type in his zines before he
stumbled upon a Letraset in an arts supply store. As an undergrad
at Pratt he learned how to screen print and how to play the guitar,
and stayed up until 4 a.m. in the studio churning out T-shirts and
band posters. "I realized I was gifted in the arts," but, he
admits, "I didn't have the skills. I didn't know the rules. I
didn't know the grid." So when the band broke up, he went back to
Pratt for grad school to focus on graphic design.
On the influence of culture on his
work:
I'm infatuated with my cultural background. Studying and
interpreting a Latin American aesthetic is one of my obsessions.
Many of my projects are influenced by that passion.
What he found was a department steeped in
modernism's bitter
tea. "It was all Bauhaus. High levels of communication and clarity
and low levels of self-expression. It was a complete conflict to
what I had been doing," he says. "But I'm stubborn. I said I wasn't
going to let that infuse too much in my work, but I need to know it
if I want to make a living. I played the actor."
He was a good actor, too. His first paid gig
was a logo for
Serengeti sunglasses: a solitary orange circle, nothing more. "Like
the Japanese flag. That's it. And a couple weeks later I got a
check. I was pretty psyched."
In 1990,
while Medina was in college, his mother moved to
Cartagena, Colombia. Through his annual visits to see her he
discovered the heritage he had known little about. "I was on a
search for my own culture, and here was a treasure chest of it," he
says. He re-learned Spanish and started digging into Latin American
art and culture, which in his Guevara-inspired vision of the
continent, encompassed all his heritage: Cuban, Colombian and
everything in between. "The first piece of gold in the chest," he
says, was typography—the wild, hand-painted signs that he would
gawk at in Bogotá, and the ones he would hunt down and photograph
in the Spanish-speaking parts of town in North Bergen, New
Jersey.
What he found there became his
MFA thesis: three
typefaces—Vitrina, Cuba and North Bergen—inspired by the signs.
Part punk-rock's found-type quirk, part slick modernist styling and
part cultural documentation, the project heralded a new era of
graphic sensibility that warped the grid and broke the rules in
favor of expressionism, edge and style. David Carson, usher of that
new wave, knew it, and bought all three faces as soon as Medina
graduated. Ellen Lupton saw it too, and exhibited them in the
Cooper-Hewitt's inaugural design triennial in 2000. "I understood
that this stuff hadn't been done before," Medina says. "I was the
youngest one at the Triennial. I was there with Rudy VanderLans and
Emigre. The Air Jordan and the iMac. It was ridiculous."
On diversity:
I hate the word "minority"—it has never been more clear that what
is considered the minority is very much the majority.
These days, Medina is getting ready to
publicly release Playoff,
a 20-style typeface he designed for ESPN, and two new faces called
Calaveras y Diablitos (skulls and devils), inspired by Fileteado
signs in Buenos Aires. He teaches typography and communication
design to undergraduate students at Parsons the New School for
Design. And he is always on a quest for the next source of
inspiration, the next piece of gold from that chest. He's gotten
into filmmaking, too. His short documentary, El Play (2008),
about a young baseball player in the Dominican Republic, has
screened at festivals internationally and won two awards. He plans
to direct more film projects in the future. A daily schedule taped
above his desk divides up his time. Working on a new documentary
(probably about graffiti, he says) is given a 19-percent chunk.
"When I'm curious about something," such as
hand-painted signs
or baseball, "I have to ask, 'Now what do I do? Do I make a film or
a typeface?' It's like saying, 'Now who am I? Colombian or Cuban?'"
For Medina, graphic design and filmmaking, like Cuba and Colombia,
are cut from the same cloth: They're ways to understand culture—his
culture. "It's not pushing type around. It's living," he says.
"It's important for designers to recognize what they've grown up
with, what they connect to, what languages they speak. You have to
surround yourself with that culture. Be in it. Not an outsider—in
it."
|