I think I’m gonna switch my major to advertising.”

“Why? It’s not like you have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Advertising is for people who can’t design—they switch to bypass the more advanced studio classes. That’s not you.”

“Yeah but... I’ve already taken a lot of design classes. I want to take advertising ones too and I’m not allowed to take certain ones if I don’t declare.”

“Do you want to end up doing Clorox commercials, and ugly print ads that people don’t read?”

“I also don’t want to end up designing the new and improved package for Clorox either. I thought maybe I could think, write, and then design. I can obsess over type and layout as much as anyone but to what end? I feel like I need more of a purpose. (I should have stopped divulging then...but I didn’t!) And I want to write TV commercials too. Does it say somewhere that thou shall not be a writer and a designer...”

“Oh, so you wanna write... (sarcastically delivered). Which do you prefer, jingles or puns, or how about jingles with puns? They like those in advertising...”

Paula knew how to get to me. A genuine punk goddess, with perfect skin, clear eyes, tattoos here and there, a ferocious reader who happened to be a fellow major at School of Visual Arts who befriended me only after approving of my design work and sensibilities. I respected that. She backed off a little, following up with:

“So, have you talked to Richard yet?” (Richard Wilde was our department chair.)

“It’s not like I’m switching to painting. Advertising and graphic design are in the same department—his department.”

“So, what did he say?”

“He asked me to keep thinking about it.”

“So?”

“I’m gonna do it. It’s not like everything I know about design is gonna go away just because I’m taking more advertising classes.”

“I don’t know about that... have you seen their portfolios? All they care about are headlines. They just throw stuff together and get it laminated.”

“Advertising isn’t good if it’s not well designed. I can’t believe they’d let students get away with doing ugly work no matter how smart a headline is...”

“Suit yourself...” She was done. Almost. “Jingle Girl!”

It stung. And it stuck. I was Jingle Girl to the diehard design majors who were indeed, for one reason or another, more visually astute and artistically inclined and, for the most part and for good reason, found advertising to be crass. I was Designy Chick to the ad majors who thought they had the idea market cornered. I was in the right place, but I didn’t fit in—again.

I was born in Tehran and lived there until 1979. I am Persian, like most people born in Iran and my first language was Farsi. I came to the U.S. during the Islamic Revolution. I didn’t realize it, but I wasn’t just coming to the U.S., I was moving here. I spent the long flight dealing with how different this trip was than the last time I came to the States. While black-clad demonstrators were on the streets of my country chanting “Death to America,” I was actually going there. It wasn’t my idea to move there, but I’m glad that we did. When you’re ten, you don’t have much say in where you go. If it was up to me I would have stayed and watched everything continue to unravel out of sheer curiosity and hope that eventually things would settle down. That my school would reopen and I would see my friends again. I couldn’t imagine that things could get worse than I had already seen them become.

I don’t know if I remember enough or too much about my first experiences here. I remember my first supermarket visit. A Giant in a DC suburb. I thought it was pronounced Gee-Yaant. I remember aisles and aisles of products that I never knew existed or were necessary before. Most of all I remember racks and racks of magazines. My reading comprehension in English was nil back then, and since kids avoided me like I was a stinky boiled brussel sprout I had a lot of time to myself. The worst thing you could be in 1980, ’81, ’82, ’83 and a good chunk of ’84 was an Iranian girl in a suburban U.S. town—or maybe the worst thing you could be was me. I was a human repellent. Frustrated and bored don’t begin to describe how frustrated and bored I was. Magazines with page after page of pictures, pithy captions and headlines with word plays became my respite. From the beginning I liked the big ones with distinct mastheads, beautiful type, interestingly-cropped photographs, soulful portraits and what I’d later learn to be generally better design than tabloids and weeklies. Rolling Stone, Life and Interview were accessible favorites. In the early ’80s Life and Interview were still printed in large format. Interview was seventeen-plus inches high, printed on newsprint and saddle-stitched.

Here’s another withdrawal from my memory bank that relates to toeing the line between design and advertising. Not that I knew what that meant at the time.

It was in the airport, soon after I first got off the plane. I remember a man wearing a white Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Mickey was making a hand gesture that I didn’t understand at the time—he was giving “the” finger. Underneath there were two words, eight letters total, in cartoony type: F, U, C, K, I, R, A, N. An exclamation mark punctuated the sentence! Recognizing Mickey from my trip to Disneyland the previous summer and the name of my country instantly and instinctively pleased me. I can’t explain this, but I remember it clearly and yes, I’m embarrassed by that fact today. Obviously the irony of the image and message was initially lost on me. A fact that I reference to this day when judging creative whether I’m working under the umbrella of “design” or “advertising.” What do we see first? How does it affect us? And where do we go next? What’s the point and how quickly do you get to it? All that assuming something was interesting enough, stood out enough, for us to look in its direction, to truly, not just peripherally notice it.

Back to Mickey. Why was Mickey making that gesture and what did FUCK mean? I asked my brother, seventeen years older and a graduate student at George Washington University at the time. I could tell he wished that I hadn’t asked. He produced a generic and clumsy answer about how that word wasn’t a “good” word, and the gesture wasn’t a friendly one.