This web-project was started some six years ago by Megan Verdugo, a relentless and selfless design and typography enthusiast, an UMassD alumna, graduating successfully from the Design Department of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, in which I held a position as design educator since 1973 until retirement. Megan Verdugo owns the total archive of my design work and writings from the beginnings in 1957, as design practitioner, later also as educator and university administrator, a career that sometimes seemed successful and at others baffling, very rocky and also disconcerting at times, but in hindsight I found my relationship with faculty colleagues of the major university disciplines and the amazingly very open-minded students we shared across all of the colleges, as very rewarding and energizing. In fact, at UMassD, there was a dedicated group of faculty and administrators, through whose sense of altruism, many projects were made possible and who truly changed this small college into a university. After I retired from UMassD, I taught at several other so called flagship-campuses in the arts and design, and found out the hard way, that none measured up to the same commitment and dedication of UMassD in relationship to the inclusion of all ethnic groups in a very positive social and economic experiment, dedicated to the survival and benefit of the surrounding communities.

Giving over my total archive was the extent of my contribution to this very time-consuming web project.

Megan Verdugo enlisted Joanna Gammel, Web developer and designer; Susan Lindsey, writer and editor; Christopher Harting, photographer and videographer; William Harting, photographer; and Pedro Verdugo, for web support and security, to join in this positive collaborative venture.

The drudgery was discouraging. Just trying to reshoot each work in the various collections. Time had taken its toll with the thirty-five millimeter slides, which had faded or been distorted by humidity and dust. All had to be rejected. Every image was reshot to the highest standards of today’s digital technology and can be presented at full original size. The texts had to be filtered through aggressive spelling and grammar checks. Many of the letterpress, lithography, and digital originals had suffer yellowing, scratches and fingerprints through time, and because they represented the originals, had to beckoned up, rough edges sharpened.

Joanna Gammel is a web developer and designer. She lives in Brighton, Massachusetts. Gammel is a RISD alumna with a degree in Illustration, graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and is looking forward to graduating from the Harvard Extension School with an ALM in Digital Media in May 2019. She works at Berklee College of Music but doesn’t play an instrument other than an Apple keyboard. Her next projects include a virtual fitting room, creating floral arrangements for a friend’s wedding, and turning her city porch into an urban vineyard.

Susan Lindsay is a writer/editor and musician/music teacher. She is the author of “See You at the Hall: Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance”, published by the University Press of New England in 2004. Susan is a member of the music group The Lindsays and plays sax, Irish flute, and whistle. The Lindsays play a mix of contemporary songs, old ballads, and Irish traditional jigs and reels.

Christopher Harting of Christopher Harting Studio in Plymouth, Massachusetts, produces “Minute-Movies”, under the motto: “Short. Sweet. Smart”, and they definitely are. He offered his technical and creative advice, the space of his studio and his state of the art equipment. He promised to make a “Minute-Movie” about my major interests in collaboration.

William Harting is a wordsmith and editor, but in addition a very outstanding photographer: “All these years with my photography I’ve been trying to tell stories, to express admiration or dismay, to ask questions, thinking that I was taking pictures for myself . . . But I’ve discovered that I’ve been shooting for an audience, wanting to tell an an audience: look at this, look at this face, look at this place, look at this time . . . Funny how a fascination with photography over years can add up to a considerable body of work. All those assignments, given and self imposed, have yielded some themes – light and shadow, travel reportage, lives of children, pain of bicycle racers, ballet students, the dignity of trees – always in an attempt to catch a moment of effort, grace, emotion, or to find what is revealing in the face.” William Harting offered moral support, technical and creative advice and his facilities dedicated to photography (http://williamharting.com/about).

Pedro Verdugo in the real life that truly matters is a committed musician. In addition he is quite aware of the aspects of the emerging digital technologies. He understands the issues about web support and security. He works at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Megan claims that of all other things he likes corny “dad” jokes.

My greatest thanks of course goes to Megan Verdugo. She put her professional life on the back-burner, spending a great chunk of her time on the web-site, constantly to improve it, while also keeping ways for the design to resemble my characteristics. If she had not tried to persuade me to make my work public, it most likely would have disappeared in near future years. I will always be indebted to her. While we were working together to assemble the work, we had long conversations. I believe, at this point she knows more about me than members of my own family. She allowed me to look into corners of my past, about which I never had time to think.

To all of these collaborators I owe my many thanks and gratitude, especially as in the beginning I saw this personal website just as an unnecessary ego-trip, of which the world has already an overload. But designers like George Delaney would constantly remind me of my professional responsibilities, which finally persuaded me, because I respect the processes of design and typography, their social responsibilities, their capabilities to inform, educate as well as entertain, even though the latter is being practiced without concern about the mental health of the public. I find that on these simple respectful levels these two disciplines have quite a lot to offer. On the opposite side, I find today’s practitioners disingenuous, arrogant, claiming skills, accomplishments like never before, when in reality they are not very different than their peers. They stand like all of us on the shoulders of pioneer designers and typographers, on concepts and ideas not raised on their compost heaps. I never liked the word “better”, because it assumes that one can comb the hair with the same comb, when in reality the concept should be “different”. If we were social anthropologists and would assess the various groups of about 300,000 graphic designers in the US, the question of better would never arise. They are what they are. They do what they do. They are making a living like all citizens. They all have clients, they more or less produce the same work. They make a living and support the various local and national economies with different objectives. They are different from each other, just like everything else in the US. Some are more privileged than others, some with larger budgets, with greater opportunities for experimentation; some with longer time frames.

If I could have chosen a a role-model for my life, I would have preferred to follow Aldus Manutius, the proprietor of the Aldine Press, the Venice printshop and publishing house, he started in 1494. He was a humanist, scholar, educator, in addition to being  printer/designer/typographer and publisher of meticulously crafted, and accurate publications. His motto was “Festina Lente” or “Make Haste Slowly’, which I always interpreted as a warning to young craftsmen: Be deliberate. Don’t let convenience or expediency divert you away from your craftsman’s goal of exactness and accuracy, quality and fidelity in all aspects of what you seek to accomplish.