Interview: Warren Berger, Award-Winning Author and Journalist, Glimmer book

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011, posted in Interviews with No Comments

Warren Berger is an award-winning journalist and author who has written for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, Reader’s Digest, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Business 2.0, and New York magazine. His work appeared in the 2001 edition of Best Business Stories of the Year. He is the author of Glimmer (a book that we recommended), Advertising Today, Hoopla, and co-author of Nextville and No Opportunity Wasted, which appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is also the founder and editor-at-large of ONE, an acclaimed national magazine focusing on advertising and design. Designolosophy set out to dig inside the mind of the “GlimmerGuy” to uncover his passion in writing and what made him so intrigued by the design world. A few years ago, he began to immerse himself in the world of design in order to answer the fundamental question, “What is design?” With Glimmer, Warren Berger had set out to help demystify design and brought the philosophies and principles of some of the great thinkers of the design world straight to us and made it more accessible to designers and non-designers. Read his candid answers below and learn more about this wonderful author.

In college, I learned a lot of good lessons about journalism and writing that still apply today. I learned how to do good research, which is still a big part of what I do. When I work on a book, in the early stages, it feels like I’m starting work on a big term paper. But I’m also really glad that in college I took things that had nothing to do with my major — like philosophy. College is a great time broaden yourself, I think. And it’s a good time to learn the art of learning, which you’ll need for the rest of your life.

I knew in high school that I was interested in writing, but it took me a while to figure out what form (fiction, journalism, etc). To some extent, I’m still figuring that out, because I’m interested in all kinds of writing. For instance I don’t just write about design, I also wrote a historical novel about gangsters in Detroit in the 1920s. (It would make a great movie, by the way.)

As a journalist, voice is more subtle — it’s really more about reporting, and then presenting your reporting in the most compelling way. With books, voice becomes more important, and especially with novels. But I find my voice changes, depending upon what I’m working on — I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

As a journalist I like Malcolm Gladwell – his ability to take complex subjects and make them accessible and interesting. As an author, I like E.L. Doctorow.

Because they both bring creativity and art into the world of business — design more so than advertising, although if you focus on the most creative people in advertising, they are wonderful communicators and storytellers.

It has not changed my life much, except that it has deepened my interest in design as a way of solving problems. I am now pursuing that on a deeper level with my next book. I have been very pleased that the book seems to be inspiring a lot of people – especially younger people, college students, people starting out in business, social activists, etc. It may be too strong to say it has changed people’s lives, but I think it has helped clarify some important issues for some people – about why design is important, and what it can achieve toward making a better world.

Meeting all the great designers in the book, especially Yves Behar, Dean Kamen, Stefan Sagmeister, Deborah Adler, Bruce Mau, etc. Their creativity was very inspiring to behold.

Trying to get my head around the subject — because it is such a big subject & there are a million directions you can go in. So the challenge with Glimmer was to try to stay focused.

It was good and bad. He is so creative, so inspiring — that was the wonderful part. The hard part was that because he is so busy, sometimes he didn’t commit to the project as much as I would’ve hoped. I would have liked him to be in the book even more than he was. But the time I did spend with him was always well-spent.

More writing about how to think creatively, how to innovate. How great ideas form in our heads, and what to do with those ideas.

In the book I talk about T-shaped people — my advice is make sure you are a T-shaped person. Meaning you have expertise in one area (the base of the T) but you branch out & learn lots of related skills and specialties (which forms the top of the T). In today’s complex, converging, multidisciplinary world, we all should be T-shaped.