Transcript: Design series — Debbie Millman on how brands impact culture

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Design series — Debbie Millman on how brands impact culture’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life & Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and this is the fourth and final episode of our special series on design. Design is everywhere. But these days it feels like the word brand is inescapable. We chat with brands in the comment sections of TikTok videos. We see celebrities launching perfumes and new tequilas. We’re even being pushed to develop personal brands for ourselves. It can be a lot. Someone who has thought deeply about this is my guest today, Debbie Millman. Debbie is a legend. She’s a designer and a teacher. She’s chair of the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts and she led a branding consultancy for 20 years. Debbie also created the first ever podcast about design 19 years ago. It’s called Design Matters, and it’s now an institution with more than 500 interviews with creative people. Debbie is here with me today to talk about how design impacts all aspects of our lives. Debbie, hi. It’s such a pleasure to have you here.

Debbie Millman
Thank you. It’s really wonderful to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Your show has had a real influence on so many people, and, it’s helped them see the world around them a little clearer. It’s encouraged a lot of people to even pursue careers in design. And I’d love to start just by asking, what did that for you. Like, what kind of pushed you towards branding and design in the first place?

Debbie Millman
Desperation. I went to college and got a degree in English literature and a minor in Russian literature, and so the job prospects coming out of college were not as inviting as you might think. I did have a skill, though, and that was doing what is now considered to be old-school layout and paste-up on a drafting table because I worked at my student newspaper. And all of the editors of the student newspaper were responsible to also put the paper together. And so that was my one marketable skill I could put on my resume and have people take me seriously as a job prospect in some discipline or another.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So desperation is what led you to it. When did it start to sort of excite you?

Debbie Millman
Well, it always excited me in that I have always been fascinated by culture. And design in many ways helps create a foundation for culture, and it’s a highly creative endeavour. And so I’ve always been deeply, deeply interested in the discipline, but didn’t feel like I had anything important to contribute to it for many decades. And that made for some difficulties.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s something actually heartening to hear that it was that many years that felt like floundering.

Debbie Millman
Oh my God. Floundering would have been nice. It was just heartbreak, face down on the floor and depression and rejection.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. I would love to back up a little just to ask some like pretty basic questions. So forgive them. But just so that it sets the scene to help inform the rest of our conversation about design and brand. In the broadest terms, what is a brand to you?

Debbie Millman
A brand is what I consider to be meaning manufactured. It’s a process of manufacturing meaning through some type of man-made device — a symbol, a wordmark, any type of representation that stands for something else. Brands don’t grow on trees. Humans create brands. We’re the only species on the planet that use our imagination to construct meaning that we then embed in some object or thing or person.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. So what would be an early example of that?

Debbie Millman
So for example, 2024 years ago, we as a human species experienced an event that led to the creation of a very specific set of beliefs about a higher power. The belief came first. But humans are pack animals. We like to feel safe and secure with other people that believe the same things we do, and so we develop a shorthand to signify that safety. And those beliefs then were represented by a symbol. A symbol, of course, I’m talking about is the crucifix. And that then becomes the brand of Catholicism. There’s a place to worship. There’s a symbol, there’s a shorthand, there’s a way of discussing things. There’s a community, there’s a tribe. I could say the same thing about Apple computers. There’s a logo. There’s all sorts of ways we engage with this brand that’s actually very, very similar to Catholicism. It’s just a completely different set of beliefs.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I never thought about the cross as an early brand. Great. Very effective.

Debbie Millman
All of our early symbols were religious. All of our symbols.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. And how did the ideas of branding and design relate to each other?

Debbie Millman
Design is actually used to build visual equity for any brand or product. And so we come, we become accustomed to the way things look. So for example, we all know that a red curvy bottle with carbonated brown liquid in it is Coca-Cola. And so Coca-Cola has a number of design elements, or what designers might call iconic assets, that people will recognise, just shown even in isolation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right. At what point did we start to talk about ourselves as personal brands? Like, when did that happen?

Debbie Millman
Yeah. I think that probably started well before the internet with the explosion of celebrity. But celebrity as brand, selling things, that started with endorsements and sponsorships and, you know, I worked for a concert promotion company for many years in the 80s. And the artists that were doing that, they were accused of being sell-outs when corporations were sponsoring their concerts. Now, if you don’t have a sponsor, you’re considered a failure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s really changed.

Debbie Millman
But I do find the notion of aspiring to be a brand somewhat troubling in that brands don’t do anything without self-direction, without our directing. The brands aren’t going to behave in any way on their own.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Brands are not sentient, right?

Debbie Millman
Right. And so if you’re aspiring to be a brand, you’re aspiring to have your meaning manufactured by someone else. And yes, you can own a brand, you can direct a brand, you can promote a brand, you can represent a brand. But to aspire to be a brand takes away everything that I think is most glorious about being human. Our own imagination, our own self-direction, our ability to change our minds, our ability to . . . I think that if somebody is looking to build their brand, what I prefer that they think about or consider is building their reputation or building their character. And then let the brand come from that.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
So Debbie why do people love brands?

Debbie Millman
People love brands because brands help people understand reality. They help them understand where they are in the world. It could be through signage. It could be through clothing. It could be through universities or institutions. It could be through cities or countries. People understand where they are right now through the language of branding.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. How do you feel? I mean, I know you’ve worked with so many big corporate brands like Burger King and Tropicana and Kleenex, and I wonder if that made you cynical. Like, everyone’s trying to sell me something or sort of curious, like, you know, there’s so many ways to see the world.

Debbie Millman
I don’t know that it would necessarily make me cynical, but it does make me sceptical in that if you’re working with a publicly traded company, that company has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. And it’s very hard to balance doing good in the world while also being responsible to your shareholders. And there are very few companies that are willing to risk their stock price. By doing something that might in any way jeopardise the reputation of the brand to a significant number of people.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. And can I ask if there’s anything these days that you see in branding and design that you really are excited by or that you really are . . . don’t like?

Debbie Millman
Well, in terms of things that I’m excited by, the world of branding through technology has changed more in the last decade and a half than it has in the last thousand years, or maybe 10,000 years. So if you think about what we were talking about earlier, we designed symbols to be able to differentiate our beliefs. Fast forward the 10,000 years and through the industrial era and through the technological era we’re in now, brands were created for primarily profit. And so design has been in many ways hijacked as a capitalist tool to be able to fuel branding.

So what happened in 2010 is that through technology, people, non-designers, non-brand consultants, took some of that power back with the creation of movements. So we saw that with Livestrong. We saw that with Occupy Wall Street. We see that now with Black Lives Matter. We saw that during the Women’s March. And suddenly humans, non-professional designers or creators, took back this power to create identities and symbols to signify beliefs again and not to differentiate one product from another, one carbonated beverage from another or one sneaker from another, but to signify beliefs. And that, to me, is the most exciting aspect or evolution of branding in recent times.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Debbie, I’d love to ask you a little bit about your podcast Design Matters and how it teaches us to look at the world. You started it almost 20 years ago. Your guests really span . . . they’re not just designers. They’re also, even in the past few months, a magazine editor, a comedian, a stage designer for the Super Bowl halftime show, a graffiti artist. They’re telling their life stories. They’re very open. And I’m curious, in your mind, what the connective tissue is through all of your interviews? Do they all sort of return to a definition that you have of design in some way?

Debbie Millman
I love this question and thank you for asking me. When I started it, it was very much centred around design and I spoke to designers. And over the years as I started to talk more deeply with people, I realised I was actually more fascinated by how they had constructed and designed their lives. How did they construct a path for becoming the artist that they are? And in many ways the common denominator is that they’re making things. They could be making a Super Bowl halftime show or a magazine or a product that’s on a shelf somewhere, or a garment or music or theatre or books. It’s all about what they are making from nothing. Something from nothing. And for me, it’s about how they’ve designed the arc of their lives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s interesting to think about design in that way, that they’re designing or designing our lives, especially people who are making things creatively. You’ve spoken to so many people. I wonder if you find . . . How much of that designing feels conscious to you?

Debbie Millman
Well, in some ways, all of it. And in some ways I’m not sure because in order to make something from nothing, they’re risking everything. And where does that tenacity and resilience and belief in oneself come from? And that is, I think, something that deserves to be understood but is also really mysterious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Debbie this was a real honour. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Debbie Millman
Oh my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to the final episode of our special design series on Life & Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have put links to everything mentioned today, including the podcast episodes we mentioned and links to Debbie’s books. Also in the show notes are ways to stay in touch with me on email and on Instagram. I love hearing from you! Finally, there’s a link and a discount code for the US FT Weekend Festival, which is happening in Washington, DC on Saturday, May 4th at the Reach at the Kennedy Centre. Nancy Pelosi will be there with lots of other guests, and I’ll be there and I would love to meet you. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here is my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Zach St Louis is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely few days and we’ll find each other again on Friday.