“I hate logos,” Abbott Miller confesses in Design and Content, a new monograph on his graphic design work, which includes plenty of logos. “…[E]veryone gets obsessed with the logo when they should really be more concerned with how it’s used.”

It’s a gentle bit of contrarianism from the Pentagram partner who has built a career eschewing dated design conventions. As Miller sees it, design is about creating narratives, not just beautiful shiny objects. He describes the luxurious, lovingly crafted books he has made for the likes of artists Matthew Barney and William Kentridge, photographer Ansel Adams, and Swiss design company Vitra as “movie[s] you hold in your hands.” He conceives of an exhibition as “a room with a plot,” as storytelling occupying real time and space, a notion he’s applied to shows on everything from Freud’s Vienna to John Lennon’s life and work to Valentina’s fashion design.

Timothy Hursley and Abbott Miller

On the occasion of Design and Content‘s release, Co.Design caught up with Miller about the oppressiveness of branding, how graphic design used to be a “dark art,” and how he designs books to seduce you.

How has the graphic design industry changed since you started out in your career?

Graphic design has completely changed. It’s remarkable. As I was coming out of school, desktop computing was just beginning. I lived through this major digital revolution. The big impact has been that design is more widely discussed. It seems less arcane. When I studied it, it was almost like a dark art. Very few people really knew about typography. In school, at Cooper Union, if you were studying type, it was seen as slightly esoteric as a subject matter. Now, there’s just this incredible breadth and public quality to people’s awareness of what graphic design is and its importance. Branding is almost too well-regarded–it’s become so important. Before, you almost had to argue the value of design to a client. Now, it’s almost the opposite. It’s taken completely on face value that branding is critical to the success of a company. I’m not saying it’s not, but the belief in design has gotten stronger and stronger.

James Shanks and Abbott Miller

I think the phenomenon of branding has become oppressive. As “brand” colonizes more and more experiences and places (and even some people who have achieved brand status) you get a zombie-like effect, a placelessness and over-determined experiences. I prefer the word “identity” to brand because it suggests something more mutable, more contextual. Branding is about a consistency of impression and experience, whereas identity can be about a sense of personality or a sensibility. I think people use the word brand for most things involving design for services and products, but often the things they are referring to are really individual instances of design: a package, a sign, a website, and yet they all get swept into a bigger abstraction called brand.

I think “brand” has a tendency to smother the consideration of the individual components of design. There are very big brands out there that have very cynical attitudes about design, but are nonetheless touted as major brands.