LGDA

Saturday, October 25, 2008

In his book Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design Michael Bierut wrote about David Carson’s book The End of Print which he summed up, along with Carson’s work, thus:

The end of print, the end of think­ing: I’m not sure about the first, but the graphic design of David Carson has got me pretty con­vinced about the second.

Nei­ther do I want to fall into design­ing per whim and with­out care. 

Ear­lier this year I emailed some­one to ask their opin­ion on whether it’d be worth it to join the Louisville Graphic Design Asso­ca­tion. They wrote me back with this:

From what I have expe­ri­enced with LGDA in the past it is pretty safe to say that it is a bull­shit orga­ni­za­tion. My work paid for my mem­ber­ship for a year and I attended a hand­ful of meet­ings but did not get much out of them. Net­worked a little, met some decent people, but over­all it was really cliquey. Maybe they will put on a decent speaker this year again? Don’t join em’.

Then, just a couple months ago at Con­sum­ing Louisville, Michelle wrote about an upcom­ing event sponsored by the LGDA, and at the end of the post she made short men­tion of the status of their website:

An aside, how inter­est­ing that the LGDA web­site is hosted on Type­pad yet they don’t have a blog. Fascinating.

It’s true. Their web­site could be, or should be, the epi­cen­ter of design-​thinking in Louisville. It is instead des­per­ately out­dated. We still have to choose between HTML and Flash ver­sions of their site. There is an RSS feed, but it doesn’t actu­ally deliver any con­tent. Since there is no blog, is there some kind of design journal-​publication that’s sent out? I haven’t seen one.

I want to want to join the LGDA, but I have seen noth­ing of it that seems worthwhile. Give me some­thing more than par­ties, more than net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, more than award shows. I’m told there are lec­tures held, but there is no web archive to show me what I’ve missed out on. 

So, am I miss­ing some­thing? Is LGDA really prof­itable and I’m just not seeing it?

UPDATE: LGDA Pres­i­dent, Bran­don Bass wrote in to clar­ify a few things.