Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

This is Design Matters with Debbie Milman from Design Obser.

This is Design Matters with Debbie Milman from Design Observer.com.

On this program, Debbie Milman talks with designer and illustrator Mirco Illich

about his early career behind the iron curtain his later

career in New York and why it may be good for designers to stick with what they're

best at that is boring and I didn't become artist to be bored by myself. If it's boring to me, how boring must be to people who consume that?

Here's Debbie Melman.

You think you know a guy, but then the past resurfaces, and you realize you didn't really know him at all.

That's when my experience of Merko Illich, the Bosnian-born graphic designer whose striking

work I've been following for many years in the New York Times and in various and sundry magazines.

He's also a colleague of mine at the School of Visual Arts,

where he teaches illustration.

But now there's a monograph of his work out called Fist to Face. It's really a visual biography sketching back to his days as a

comics artist in the former Yugoslavia. He was, it is now clear to me, a prodigy and a prodigious innovator.

Fistiface was written in Croatian by Dejan Kursik,

and it has now been translated into English and amended by Aaron Kennedy.

Aaron and Mirko are both here in the studio.

So Mirko, from what I understand, when you were a very little boy, your mother had a sewing machine and lots of crayons for drawing on

fabric one day you picked up one of those crayons when it had fallen down and after many hours of sewing your

mother stood up and saw a drawing of Santa Claus on the floor.

...