Dr. Mario

Last week I was listening to WAMC (my local NPR affiliate) and a show called “The Media Project.” It’s a panel of local media professionals (usually an editor, a publisher and a reporter), and they spend a half-hour each week first making inside jokes about each other, then disassembling the latest news and how it was covered. I believe it was modeled after a similar show on CNN. Except without the inside jokes.

Anyhow, someone on the panel brought up the recent redesign of the Wall Street Journal to add color and make it more readable. They debated the pros and cons of color in newspapers, a trend started by USA Today. The publisher on the panel said that the redesign was done by, and I quote, the “peripatetic Mario Garcia.” (He’d also recently redesigned the San Francisco Examiner among many other papers)

And somewhere from the rusty archives of my memory a bell rang.

Mario Garcia was my Graphic Design 101 professor at Syracuse University.

He wasn’t just any random professor. Dr. Garcia was the reason I became a graphic designer.

On paper, my major was advertising and psychology. In Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications, you have to take a few semesters of survey courses in other types of communications before you get to focus on your major. I took journalism (I enjoyed this; could picture myself as Lois Lane, and while later in life I called upon these rudimentary skills to make few bucks, back then I didn’t have the passion to make it my life’s calling), something called Comm 101 (which was a pretty dull overview of every type of communication from the moment some Cro-Magnon scratched fleas out of another’s hide to the present, which around that time was this “fad” (as the professor proclaimed it) called cable) and few more course that have disintegrated into the cobwebs of time.

But Graphics 101 was one of the course that didn’t. I was riveted. To Dr. Garcia’s stories about Cuba, his past, and his design career (at that time he’d just completed his first redesign of the Miami Herald), to the samples he put up on the screen for us to praise or tear apart, to the very fact that there was a profession called graphic design that combined just about every skill in my brand-new toolbox and everything I enjoyed doing.

Talk about eyes opening, horizons widening, mental doors being ripped off their hinges! I never missed one class. I was never late. I enthusiastically did each assignment, including putting together my sample book, an assignment he asked us to complete not just for this course, but for the rest of our professional careers. It was a notebook of blank pages upon which we'd paste examples of print design and typography that we particularly liked, and why we liked them. I still have that original bright-red notebook – somewhere – which I’m glad was bright red because JUST as I was putting the finishing touches on it at my dorm room desk on deadline day, I spilled a glass of tomato juice across the cover.

I even used this sample book as an example for my continuing ed students when I taught graphic design at Northeastern. (After I'd cleaned off the rest of the tomato juice stains, of course)

And even though I eventually changed careers, for a long time I collected tidbits of things – a font, an ad from a magazine – until I just had too many little things floating around and had to pare them down to my very favorite little things. And then I collected things in my head. Anyone who accompanied me to a movie groaned when I told him or her the names of the fonts used in the credits.

They still do.

Here’s to Dr. Mario – may he ever be peripatetic, for as long as newsprint keep rolling.