ABOVE: 2007 | TASK NEWSLETTER #1 | SELF-INITIATED WITH JON SUEDA AND ALEX DEARMOND

As an accomplished designer, writer and composer—he has scored several documentaries—Emmet Byrne answers inquiries into his Renaissance-man tendencies with thoughtful resignation. “I’m interested in the notion of eclecticism as a dogma, and whether it is ever really successful. I doubt it, but it looks as if I’m condemned to find out.” Byrne puzzles through this issue and many others in his position as a designer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapo­lis, working for Andrew Blauvelt.

Byrne also edits and designs the Task Newsletter with fellow designers Alex DeArmond and Jon Sueda, the second of whom offers, “The strength of Emmet’s work comes from the fact that he’s not strung out on GRAPHIC DESIGN; his general cultural awareness and obsession with astronauts, composing music and science fiction fuel his quirky approach to making stuff.” Indeed, Sueda’s first meeting with Byrne provided a strong indication of who he was dealing with. “When I first met Emmet, he was a design student,” Sueda recalls. “He was composing music for the Mars Research Lab and told me his dream job would be working for NASA someday.”

Born in Raleigh, N.C., Byrne attended North Carolina State University College of Design. While in college, he studied for a year at Nagoya University in Japan and spent five weeks at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. He has done work for the Public Art Fund in New York, the Rochester Art Center, Chronicle Books, the Soap Factory and Nothing Moments Publishing. Currently, Byrne is working with Walker Art Center Design in Minneapolis on the identity for the Design Criticism program at SVA. Since 2005 he has taught as adjunct fac­ulty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

“As an undergraduate, Emmet was that rare student who could—and would—explore form-making within project brief parameters as well as in self-initiated work, always with provoc­ative results,” says Denise Gonzales Crisp, associate professor of Graphic Design at North Carolina State University. “Today his design work has evolved to exude beauty, critical subtlety, wit, grace and flat-out cool—a combination of qualities that mark design sophistication.”

Byrne says he enjoys design projects as “an excuse to research a particular subject, person, idea and its visual history,” adding that, “ideally this research gets channeled into a distinctive visual look, whether through appropriation, distortion or blatant antagonism—I can’t imagine a design that isn’t based on research and that doesn’t address the reality it will be experienced in.” He pre­fers to work by “setting into motion strategies that keep me blind as to the outcome until late in the process. I’m rarely satisfied with clever details and often look for emotional impact ... but how emo­tional can design be? I need to design more things for my mom.”

http://blogs.walkerart.org/design/author/emmet | www.tasknewsletter.com