The Canadian-born graphic designer turned crusader is heading to Sydney to spread his upbeat vision of a planet saved by good design.
When the planners of Mecca – not the cosmetics behemoth but Islam’s holiest city – decided to tackle the overwhelming influx of pilgrims during the annual Hajj, they called in designer Bruce Mau. When the government of Guatemala, after 36 years of civil war, realised the country had self-esteem issues, it turned to Mau for help.
“If you think about what happens when you’re lost in the forest, you have to process the environment, process information of all kinds,” says Mau via Zoom from his Chicago studio . “The moment you have a particular outcome in mind – a way of getting out of the forest – you become a designer. “I saw the computer coming,” Mau recalls, “and since typography was one of the first applications of computing, I became a ‘writer’ – considering images and text together, as a language.
“Zone was a life changer for me,” says Mau, “because Sanford put my name on the spine of the book as a contributor, not just on the inside cover as a designer. He reinforced what I knew: design is about more than just making things look good.”– the first issue took only seven days to design, Mau admits – led to five years working with Rem Koolhaas ona 1300-page tome that documents the Dutch architect’s projects from furniture to cityscapes.
“I mean, we know everything about Lady Gaga but almost nothing about Larry Brilliant, the guy who wiped smallpox off the face of the Earth only a few decades ago. I mean, Lady Gaga is brilliant, but Larry Brilliant is truly brilliant!”, presenting thousands of square metres of problems and potential solutions, including pedal-operated cars and featherless chickens, was a manifesto of the kind of “radical optimism” most often associated with Brand Mau.
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