After a trip to Spain this summer, I’m convinced the effervescence that buoyed French nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s has been piped across the Pyrenees.
Sergi Arola is reinventing cooking. He is the son of a Barcelona house painter and is entirely self-taught. How did he do it? He ignored what everyone was doing around him. He invented.
“Picasso would never have painted as he did if he cared whether people liked his painting,” Arola told the New York Times. “There are only a few people who know about food. Maybe nobody likes or understands what I do, as nobody understands the way of painting of Picasso, but nobody says it is just nothing. In Spain, a minority cuisine can convert the ideology of a country and become the dominant ideology.’‘
Bravo! There are a lot of wonderful new designers out there who need to stop succumbing to the rules and the gospels of the past.
What is FIZZ? It is effervescent creativity. What is creativity? Very simply, not copying. But that is too simplistic a definition. It is daring to experiment, being courageous enough to look at the data around you, then set it aside and face the blank canvas of the page or screen.
Every publication needs FIZZ: an element of surprise that separates it from the rest. FIZZ comes from the instinct and creative ability of the designer or editor. It is a special touch that can lift a headline, a story, a page design, how a photo looks on the page. It has little to do with what one heard in the focus group and all to do with the emotion of the moment.
FIZZ is taking the visual detour, not following the straight path. (If all headlines are serifs, then a well-used sans serif font may add the element of surprise. It does not follow the stylebook; it follows the emotion of the moment. It saves the day. The reader appreciates it.)
FIZZ is a moment of discovery, with a touch of fun. (The magazine adheres to a strict four-column grid, but the designer breaks away, for a single instance, and designs the page with five columns).
FIZZ is using all the intelligence we may have about a publication, then making a decision that may be difficult to justify. (Focus groups tell us that readers do not like background colors for boxes. We respect that, except for this special edition, where we use lavender repeatedly throughout for backgrounds!)
FIZZ is a break in everybody’s routine: the editor, the designer and, most importantly, the reader.