Kit Hinrichs interviews Delphine Hirasuna: Fellow Series
Delphine and I have been colleagues for more than three decades. During these years of collaboration on joint assignments, we learned to understand and value the skills that each of us brings to the process of creating good, effective and relevant communications. We have found that working together results in a stronger, more cohesive solution than either of us could have done on our own. It is the long process of collaboration, built over several years, that has made a strong bond between the writer/designer team we have become. Designers and clients often tell me, just how lucky I am to have found such an intelligent, insightful, and charming writing partner. I couldn’t agree more.

---

Kit Hinrichs:

Do you have any formal design training?

Delphine Hirasuna:

Absolutely none. What’s more, I had no natural talent for art. I can’t draw anything beyond stick figures. My kindergarten teacher did praise me for having clever ideas, but poor graphic execution with my crayons and fingerpaints.

KH:

When did you know that you wanted to become a writer?

DH:

I think I was around 6. I was tiny for my age and lousy at playground sports; I hated recess, but I loved to read. Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Eddie’s Red Wagon, etc. But the stories felt formulaic and I decided I could write better. My bedroom had a vanity with a frilly yellow chiffon skirt around it, and I’d crawl inside and write my stories in that private space. Even then, I was a realist. After all, I lived on a tiny farm in Lodi in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t know how to contact a publisher, much less have an adult one take my writing seriously. But I didn’t give up. In grammar school and high school, I was the editor of the school paper, and by college, I was determined to be a journalist.

KH:

What was your alternate career choice?

DH:

To be a tap dancer and dance with Gene Kelly.

KH:

What did your parents want you to be?

DH:

A teacher or secretary. My aunt told my mother that if she let me become a newspaper reporter, I’d soon be chain smoking, drinking hard liquor, swearing, and wearing lots of makeup and gaudy hats with feathers like Rosalind Russell, because that’s what women reporters do. My mother seemed to believe her.

KH:

What appealed to you about being a journalist?

DH:

I wanted to be where things happen and witness historic events firsthand. I wanted to be able to talk to the people who made the news, whether a famous inventor, an astronaut, an actor or composer. When I got my first job at a daily paper, I discovered the unglamorous, boring side of journalism. It wasn’t for me.

I was 17 when I was offered a temporary job as society and food editor for my little hometown newspaper in Lodi. The woman who held that post had an emergency gall bladder operation and the editor called the high school and asked to hire me for a week or so. The job lasted the whole summer, and during the school year I was hired to be the proofreader. The proofing job started at 6 p.m. and got off at 2 a.m. Then I had to run home for a few hours sleep and go to school. It was grueling.

After college, I got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle Syndicate. It wasn’t for me. Then someone told me about corporate writing – annual reports, brochures and the like. I didn’t know that such a profession existed when I was growing up. I gravitated to that, but my college friends who became “real journalists” considered me a “sell-out” and for years that’s how I thought of myself.

KH:

When did you start writing books and non-corporate pieces?

DH:

Believe it or not, my first book was a cookbook – Flavors of Japan – that I wrote with my sister, Diane. It featured Japanese American recipes we learned from our grandmother. It did very well, and people still tell me that it is their “go to” cookbook for Japanese recipes. It was nominated for a French’s Tastemaker award and went through five printing.

About that time I also started writing a weekly feature column for the two largest Japanese American newspapers in the U.S. I wrote mostly humorous observations about my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. I enjoyed poking fun at them, and kept up the weekly column for more than 25 years. After my mother died, I lost interest and stopped. I also wrote a couple of pieces about the World War II internment camps, which were picked up in high school textbooks.

Of course, we collaborated on several books, including TypeWise, The Pentagram Papers, Art Center Design Impact, Long May She Wave, The Art of Gaman.

KH:

Was design always on your radar for editorial work?

DH:

That happened later. After leaving the Chronicle, I worked in a financial public relations firm, then got a job putting out a tiny inflight magazine for a charter airline, then worked for Transamerica Corporation for ten years and followed the same process I learned in newsrooms – research and write the story, then hand it off to the “paste-up” people to put in place with pictures. They didn’t tell me how to write and I didn’t tell them how to design.

KH:

So what changed your opinion about design?

DH:

Actually, you did, Kit. I was hired by Potlatch Corporation to handle corporate communications – corporate magazine, brochures, the annual report – and I brought you in to design the pieces. Your methodology was first to understand corporate intent for the piece, the direction and tone of the story. You wanted to position the message. For you, design was part of the communications approach, not a decorative add-on. The design had to complement and support the message, the visual styling had to reflect the brand.

Some of my appreciation for how to use design was entirely self-serving – like the time I had twisted myself into a verbal pretzel trying to explain how glaciers formed Minnesota’s forestlands. You let me drone on while sketching on a notepad, then showed me a simple diagram of how glaciers work. Hallelujah! We not only had our visual for the spread, I didn’t have to write a ‘term paper’ on how glaciers work. Another time I was trying to write a story about how the razorback hogs that roamed Potlatch’s Arkansas forests evolved from the crossbreeding of domestic farm pigs and wild boars brought over by Spanish explorers. Your take was a cute female farm pig wearing a bonnet married to a Spanish conquistador hog. It was accurate and a lot more fun than the National Geographic-type story I planned to tell.

The epiphany that really changed my thinking about design was when we started doing annual report themes that presented various aspects of the forest products industry. You presented comps showing a vignette-style layout with images and captions that collectively told an encyclopedic story about the business. I saw that the only way we could replicate the comps was by collaborating closely from the start. I had to write to fit the character-count allocated in the design, and you had to find images that supported the text. The creative process wasn’t sequential or territorial, it was simultaneous and collaborative, give-and-take. The images and words had to support each other and belong together.

KH:

More than any other writer I know, you write a lot about the process of printing and design.

DH:

I find that fascinating. There is subliminal communication in choice and finish of paper, font, graphic style, etc. I like to hear accounts of how and why a design team arrived at a visual concept. That is really what made @Issue: Journal of Business and Design work. We did case studies, dissected brand touchpoints, and interviewed corporate CEOs about what they look for in design. @Issue wasn’t meant to just let designers tell each other how wonderful they are; it was intended from the start to create a neutral platform where business and design could talk about their objectives and show how good design is good business.

KH:

Although we know you as a Bay Area writer, you’ve worked with some of the country’s renowned designers.

DH:

Oftentimes I collaborated on paper promotions – my favorite assignments. At some point, I’ve written promotions for nearly every major paper company in the U.S., and worked with designers across the country – people like Woody Pirtle, Michael Weymouth, Peter Harrison, John Van Dyke, Michael Bierut, Dana Arnett, Carbone Smolan, Greg Samata, Lana Rigsby, Doug Oliver, Jim Cross, etc.

I like writing for good designers because when text is presented in an engaging, sophisticated way, people want to read it. If the design is unimaginative and flat, the reader assumes the text is boring too. Conversely, if a design is terrific, the reader has high expectations for the text. If the text turns out to be all “puff and promo” with no credible content, if it is poorly written, and/or if it appears to have no relationship or awareness of what’s shown in the design, readers will dismiss the validity of the whole piece.

KH:

Over the past 30 years, we did a series of print/design education pieces for various paper brands. I still see these series on the bookshelves of designers.

DH:

Yes. Paper companies, particularly, want to show designers, mar-com people and printers how to explore the possibilities of printing – use of color, coatings and varnishes, special techniques. What’s fun about these assignments is that we are like kids in a candy shop. We can try all kinds of things, and we can choose topics that wouldn’t be allowed on a corporate assignment. Some of my favorite assignments were Tools of the Trade, the Artists Series, and NEO, which were started under Simpson Paper and continued after Simpson was purchased by Fox River. Under Potlatch, we did the American Design Century and the Field Studies series. @Issue started with Potlatch and was picked up by Sappi. For the last several years, we have been producing The Standard, which focuses on teaching and demonstrating how printing techniques can enhance the design.

KH:

Let’s talk about @Issue. I think we both take great pride in its creation.

DH:

I like to think that we helped to raise awareness of the value of design to business success, both on the corporate side and the design side. If you recall, our first idea was to produce a Harvard Business Review-type journal of design/business case studies. That was in the 1980s and no sponsors were interested. Then one day, I got a call from our client at Potlatch who said, “Remember that proposal that you and Kit presented a while back? We want to do it.” Luckily I still had the original proposal in my dead files and noticed we wrote it about a decade earlier. I’m grateful that @Issue had a 16 year print run and still chugs along online, but I regret that as a blog, we don’t have the budget or time to do longer, indepth pieces.

KH:

In recent years, you’ve been engaged in another aspect of design – museum exhibitions.

DH:

Ahh,yes. It’s ironic that I have stumbled into this at this stage of my life. The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946 was published in 2005. I happened upon a carved wooden bird pin made in camp when going through my mother’s things after she died. That led me on a quest to identify other things prisoners made in camp and produced a treasure trove of objects made from scrap and found materials. The book led to an exhibition shown in 15 museums in the U.S. and Japan, including at the Smithsonian Museum of Art in Washington D.C. and the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe. The show toured Japan, and the Emperor of Japan came to the exhibition in Tokyo for a personal look. As the curator and organizer of the traveling exhibition, I learned a lot fast. Exhibitions are a world unto themselves.

KH:

Did the exhibitions give you new insights into the role of art and design?

DH:

I still reflect on why these prisoners who had lost everything and were forced to live in barracks in the middle of a desert turned to creating art for solace. How did creativity lift them from despair, how did it keep them from going insane? One internee said that depression and suicide rates were high in the camps, and an “art rescue squad” formed to scour the terrain for interesting rocks, mesquite branches, feathers to present things of beauty to brighten the person’s surroundings. It was a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes. For me, design is a way of seeing, bringing meaning to a subject. Good designers understand this. It’s more than incorporating the latest Photoshop trick and hippest new font.

KH:

Workwise, what are your major frustrations and satisfactions?

DH:

In every project, I reach a point after I’ve done the research where I don’t know how to approach the story. My mind is a jumble of information and I am absolutely, positively sure that this time my writing block is permanent and I am bound to fail miserably. I question why I ever entered the profession. Then suddenly I see a glimmer of light and timidly put down a first sentence, then another and another.

Satisfaction usually happens at two points. The first time when the client tells me that I’m hired. The second time about a month after the project is done and I’ve worked up the courage to read what I wrote more objectively and find that it’s not bad.

KH:

What are your favorite kinds of assignments?

DH:

I like the research aspect of writing. I like mulling over the significance of things. I’ve often thought of writing as an ingenious way to have conversations with interesting people and ask them probing questions. I also love delving into the background and history of things.

KH:

What part of your work methodology do you wish you could change?

DH:

I wish I could get over the “middle muddle” part. The point in every project when I decide I haven’t a clue what I’m doing and the only way I can save my dignity is by skipping town and changing my name.

KH:

What’s the best career advice you’ve received?

DH:

Make Swiss cheese. Don’t swallow a big assignment whole, but keep punching holes in it by breaking it down into little tasks until suddenly it all seems manageable.

KH:

Who were your major influences?

DH:

Even at the risk of inflating your ego, I’d have to say you. Our collaboration has taught me that the goal of any assignment is to communicate, tell a story in the best way possible. Sometimes that’s with words and other times it’s visually, graphically. If you are being territorial, or working in a vacuum, the story (text and design) may seem redundant or contradictory or just plain baffling. Text and design need to support and reinforce each other. The process isn’t sequential, it’s collaborative. That goes for the client too. It’s important to work as a team.

In recent years, I think more often of Saul Bass. I wrote an article about him about a year before he died. The easiest time to interview him was via his cell phone when he was driving to his studio and stuck in L.A. traffic. Saul was already in his 80s, and certainly didn’t have to work. What came through to me most was he loved what he was doing. He was selective about the people he worked with and the projects he took on, and he was still designing for the love and satisfaction of it all. For him, that wasn’t work, it was rejuvenation.

---

Kit Hinrichs is Principal and Creative Director of Studio Hinrichs. He served as principal in several design offices in New York and San Francisco before spending 23 years as a partner of Pentagram, the international consultancy. Kit is an AIGA SF Fellow, and a recipient of the prestigious AIGA medal. He is co-author of four books, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress.