Living, Breathing Brand Identities with Paula Scher | Adobe Creative Cloud

hello my name is Paula Scher I'm a graphic designer and a principle of pentagram design in New York City and I'm here at the Adobe conference where I'm giving a lecture living breathing identities I hope everybody who came enjoyed it [Music] good morning thank you for getting up I wouldn't I'm going to talk today about identity design in a really open way and it's really sort of my only thoughts about it and at the end of this there'll be some Q&A so I'd love some participation and you can challenge me or ask me anything you like and without further ado I'm going to start so a logo is the thing that everybody is highly interested in and sees is enormous like there's enormous value in it and it is seemingly the most important part of design accomplished by a corporation in relationship to what they do and the word logo comes from Greek it was actually developed by Aristotle he used it to describe making an argument for something and what it essentially means is how things are understood meaning how they're understood by other people and the literal translation of logo is word which is what a logo is so if you say the word Apple you may see the drawing of the Apple I find it fascinating right now that for the past maybe five or six years there's been so much press about logos when they were introduced to the public and so much criticism of their form but actually you would never look at a logo the same way after ten years and if the logos good like coca-cola it can last nearly a hundred so what are we really talking about I know when I ask clients what they think the best logo designs are they invariably say Nike or Apple and that's because they see them for a very long time and there already conditioned to think the forms look cool for example if you look at Nike you see that actually it was sort of dorky in the beginning the weights are weird the script is dumb it got a little more sophisticated then it got boxed and then suddenly some bright person realized it was better without the type but this is a 20 year period you're looking at this is something that evolves over a very slow period of time and it's coupled with advertising and promotion and that you come to understand it to mean something because it doesn't exist purely as a form by itself if that was introduced blindly by a company and you've never seen it before you might not even think it's particularly attractive or that it meant motion though everybody assumes it is because they've seen it in animation and they've seen it in connection to sport look at Apple's first logo I'm not amazing now I'm a lot older than most of you and I remember Apple records which was the Beatles label and I thought that this was sort of a bad rip and the Apple logo which was a photograph was much better than the silly rainbow that I looked at now it looks sort of like something left over from a Disney animation and you notice it it changes all the time they change it really every year the form is recognizable and the form is related to the product and that you it's inescapable that you would ever separate you would ever even begin to separate it you were always connected to Apple and the way you understand that company now in the 90 late 90s I started doing a lot of large scale identities and medium sized identities and I did things based on the idea that the form had to become recognizable and that things had to represent the company in some way for example I designed the Citibank logo in 1998 when it was a merger of the Travelers Insurance Company and Citicorp and Citicorp at that time was just blue and they had a logo that was a little bit of a they called a compass rose it looked like a little compass and some italic typography and travelers had a neighbor an umbrella so he said okay a perfect merger is we have a metaphorical umbrella over the word city and city is blue and after about a year and a half of trying to push this idea through which was I think as many of you know really the first sketch I made in the first meeting we got this thing through the company but not really totally it ran in an ad because fowling had a release and ad to the public and it was the last logo on the table and we stuck it on the ad and that's actually the birth of the Citibank logo which is now in existence for over 20 years the logo is recognizable not because of the Ark not because of the typeface but because of the ubiquitousness of the bank's you see them everywhere you see you see the cash machines everywhere you see the bank everywhere and you see a lot of advertising for it that's how big companies get known I can't say that they were as clever as Nike in terms of becoming recognizable because Nike really made much better advertising but when you look at these things together the way you feel about the mark is the way you feel about the company the High Line which I designed in 1999 and is now 20 years old was sort of an obvious logo and it lives in New York City and if you go to the High Line you see it otherwise you don't see at all there's some promotional materials for it but really not very much but New York City it's highly recognizable and I doubt they would actively change it though they attach it to things sometimes on eccentric ways and in the in the 90s and the early 2000s I mostly designed marks that had this kind of approach Jazz at Lincoln Center was also designed and about I think 2000 close to the High Line and this is the first logo design I did for it and then realized 12 years later that it looked very dated and it was interesting to me how you could you could design something and just small things about the letterforms would make it dated the worst thing about it was a stupid name I mean Jazz at Lincoln Center sounds us not really like good jazz it sounds like it's jazz for old people so when Marsalis didn't like that much either and ultimately we got rid of the at Lincoln Center but this was the first logo iteration I'll show you the second later criterion which I designed somewhere I don't know 2004 2005 was for an old film company and if I showed you this mark like this you wouldn't be able to at all know what this mark was for and when I show it like that then all of a sudden if you watch these films you begin to recognize it these smaller kind of cultural companies and and not for service not for profit businesses have a have a tough time being recognized because they don't have the money to do the kind of advertising that a place like Nike or Apple does and they don't have the building structures in urban places where you're going to see a lot of things that have their names on them so they have to be much more clever about it I worked with a ballet director in the middle of 2000 I think was maybe 2008 it's hard for me to remember the years and he never could stay with one logo and he kept changing them every three years so he had no recognized ability at all so I gave him three three versions of the same logo in different configurations figuring he'd get through nine years without changing his logo I don't think I it actually has lasted a lot longer than that it's still around the interesting thing is he was fired and nobody bothered touching it so I think that has more to do with the logo survival than any for this was a logo that was designed by virtue of its name what happened was that the met which was the Metropolitan Opera in New York used to be the met but then the Metropolitan Museum of art became the met because it had a better shopping bag this is true it's not the mark it was the scale of type on the shopping bag and the Metropolitan Opera the only place you saw the words of the Met were unfund raising items and not everybody saw them so I convinced the company to change their name to the Met opera and the logo really was better in this configuration now they use this still and it has been I guess fairly successful when you go to the Opera because in the in the the gifts you gift shop it looks terrific because all the products are done very elegantly and they they seem to subcontract the work to a very good firm who does the gift store piece but the advertising is terrible and it really they tried they try to make it mass-market when it isn't and it looks like bad Broadway or advertising and I find it I find it frankly embarrassing as a matter of fact I have a hard time when identities I've designed I lose complete control of and they go to different places where you don't really have the same aesthetics and you don't have the same viewpoints about what the design should be when it works is spectacular and I'll show you some examples of that but I think that's happened with more than half of my logos where I actually disagree with the way they're executed I'm amazed they survived at all in 2012 I started to realize that the this sort of approach to identity design was not working for me and the reason the reason it wasn't working for me is most of the companies I worked for were not on the scale of City they were much smaller they tended often to be not-for-profits and cultural institutions and that if I couldn't control the way something looked with an in-house art department by being able to hire them myself and train them very often the identities really fell apart and I started to think about how you could make identity as a form much more interesting and much more interesting for somebody else to work with and I realized that it is the repetitive boring nature of logos stuck in a corner against a standards manual that tells you what size it's got to be that is really a brain number and that makes a design life very depressing for somebody in that situation so I did something I always do when I'm trying to figure out how to solve a problem and that is that I use a pro bono project to help me figure out how something might work if I change the rules a bit and in 2012 I got asked to design the type directors Club exhibit and and book and all the promotions for it which is something that goes on for about six six months if you ever get it and I thought well this is great because there are lots of promotions that have to connect and they need a cover for the book and let me see what I can figure out about what is recognizable now I think still about identity is is something that you come to recognize so here's where what I learned I did this TDC for the type directors Club that was sort of a you know these concentric lines and then I gave them to twelve different people who were working at pentagram and I told them to to redraw it and found that you would not recognize that it's the same thing as if it had curves or if the color changed but in fact you could do many versions of different concentric lines together and if you saw these things one after another in rapid succession you would recognize it as the same thing so it began to become a way I thought of them working now this is the type directors Club this isn't a major corporation therefore it's much more radical and more impossible to sell anywhere else I admit that but the fact of the matter is the premise works that you can make something feel like the same thing and very significantly so here it is used on the cover and by the way that's not the same TDC as the first one I showed you they vary in each in each instance so then I went to redress Jazz at Lincoln Center and I found that there were some nuances that really had to be changed with the logo that what was wrong with it aside from the at Lincoln Center part is that for some reason this this font which happened to be eagle light look too pointy and sort of too unbalanced with the a and it needed to be headed up and I don't know why timeframes do that but it does and the slight tweak made it more palatable without the a and you can sort of see it in the form that the balance of the a against the other letter forms is just a little less awkward than this and this is the sort of boring nuance that we do all day long that our clients don't understand that you have to do to get something done what's significant about jazz and what's recognizable is the a and that was designed in the first instance when I met Wynton Marsalis because I asked him what jazz was and he said jazz a syncopation and I said what a syncopation mean and he says it means when you got a bunch of things in an order and one things off and he didn't realize at that moment in time he told me how to design his logo but I look for things like that all the time it's what makes work terrific so if it works for a logo it could really work for the whole alphabet so we redrew the alphabet it was it was a bit heavy DUP and we created a situation where all the O's and all the rounds became the heavy font and you can see it in this form and it looks like there's a lot of it doesn't it it looks like there's just a lot of those O's but the fact of the matter is in the alphabet there really aren't in any many it isn't really anywhere like what you think it looks like over here because in this instance you realize that the rounds are used more than the straight lines and typography it's very fascinating I had no idea but I found that there were a lot of them and virtually every time we said somebody's name or anytime we set some language up take a look at that they sort of look like much more than one out of 24 in the instance and in typography but what was great is that you could just recognize it immediately you could recognize this without a logo and what was important is that these guys don't have a lot of money they can't promote they can't do this thing over and over again so this thing when it exists on the bus shelters and on their their announcements and at the theater it suddenly gives them an ability to be recognized and something that you can't buy if you have a non entity logo and system so here you start using it we started developing experimentally how you can play with this thing how you would use it in design and here the in-house art department starts actually commissioning photography and working with it and it was very strong you can see it right away on its first campaign a series of campaigns and the word Brubeck already means jazz the minute you see you see his name and that kind of typography this was a major subway campaign they ran and they still they still use it this sort of work is dependent very much on whether or not the in-house art department is up up to snuff and for two major periods they had a spectacular in-house art department and now less so it goes up and down and I find it because I'm no longer involved unless they bring me back there's really not much I can do about it but I find that even when I see the pieces they're still recognizable as jazz the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia has anybody ever just has anybody here ever been to Philadelphia from Philadelphia yeah okay somebody so this this place is a behemoth it looks like a giant old kind of institution that could be a courthouse it could be would be a science place it could be a museum you don't know what it is this is what it looks like it sits up on a hill in Philadelphia and it looks sort of terrifying but it became famous in the 70s simply because Rocky Balboa ran up and down the steps and jumped up and down so people come to Philadelphia to go to this museum to run up and down the steps jump up and down and then they leave they never go in how depressing is that worse yet the mayor Rocky Balboa the Sylvester Stallone presented a Rocky Balboa statue in gold to the Philadelphia Museum and the mayor presented it to the museum and the museum was so embarrassed and they had to hide it behind a tree and every now and then somebody comes in checks to make sure he's still there for the past for the past eight years Frank Gehry's been working on a major renovation of the museum it's really terrific he he tunneled through the the base of the building and opened up some light through the steps he's put in sort of glass into the staircase it's quite amazing what's going on and when you're downstairs it's really beautiful you can walk through the whole museum and about the point he started working on the project they hired me to redress the identity of the place they had a lot of problems with identity the first thing is they don't call themselves by their name if you get to Philadelphia and you say take me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art you say that to a cabdriver he says what and you say Philadelphia Museum of Art he says what you say Philadelphia Museum of Art and he says oh the art museum and then you say yes and look at the signs that's what the signs in Philadelphia say so that there's no reason to even know what the place is called they had a logo that looked like this there's nothing wrong with the logo it looks very institutional it looks like it could be a college it looks like it's an Institute of art it looks very very serious it doesn't look like it's much fun especially in a building that's just like that on the top of the hill and you don't know what kind of art it has it looks from this logo that it probably has art that's that's fairly historic and not necessarily contemporary and the Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of the best contemporary collections on the East Coast it's really staggering Drexel University is right next to it and they have banners and they've got another animal certain doesn't look too different from that animal unless you're into you know sort of these kinds of you know fantasy animals but this was a problem for them we proposed that they emphasize art because the fact of the matter is nobody calls up the Philadelphia Museum of Art they call it the art museum and that this per gave them permission to at least understand what they were talking about it's art and its art with a capital A so what we did is give them a million a's and that the a's would represent every form of art that they have in the museum and that they could continue to change and add to them and this situation was happier for me because there's a gentleman named luis bravo that i hired who is the creative director and he keeps this thing pretty tight and it's really grown well which is very very exciting and over the years we've added many components to it there rules for it and the rules are that with the a's if you're showing a piece of art you don't use the art that's an a you use the straight art and if you have things that don't have the art like tickets and badges and other things that are given away in a museum then you can use all the A's as you chose the biggest problem is that there's always somebody who has to approve which egg goes on which thing and that's when everybody goes a little crazy and they can't make decisions it becomes a little bit of a nightmare here are badges children's programs and when the Frank Gehry exhibit of what he was going to do to the museum opened he a whole series of A's for this purpose which was wonderful and that we try to do all the time to either get an artist whose work is showing to either donate something make something or you make it from it and of course the stuff becomes terrific merchandising and you know what I call crap bola crap all is the stuff that makes people remember who you are when they think they're getting something but it's really something they're going to throw away we all make a lot of crap oh that's a good thing to do you got to get good at it the world needs it my goal in craphole is when somebody's really saved it I'm always mystified but here you see all the all the ways we use the A's and we made a lot of it wrapping the store is big these things were all I think the project I showed you we're all between 2012 and about 2013 and it was really right after I did that type directors Club work where I was very keen on these moveable components but when I began working on Windows I didn't actually expect to be doing something that was like that and it showed me another way to think about about the notion of finding components for the same thing Windows was was a much more difficult problem they up I went the wrong way and I do that oh I want to do it here sorry push my computer by accident Bill Gates founded Microsoft so that engineers would lead these various companies and that the companies would be more like individual fiefdoms within Microsoft and that the companies would be able to thrive because the engineers would be excited to be inventing new software all the time and that the the software would be more powerful and more innovative than company's software because of the structure and he was right about that but then Along Came Apple that had this monolithic structure where one person really made all decisions for the whole company what you're looking at when you look at all these different companies from from Microsoft is sort of companies not talking to each other at all when they when they make their identity so that the individual sub brands are all you know terrific but when you put them together it doesn't really add up to anything and it was a problem for the company and they they wanted to have me use Windows 8 to design what they called a principle based identity system you know I never thought of it as as principles driving the thing but actually the type directors Club was exactly that it was a principle about weight of lines that existed straight in one color that could change form the thing was because there would be all these different companies that had some individuality what would be the thing that would drive making them look collective and aunts and similar at the same time and at this end also had their own unique personality so I started with Windows which was really the elephant in the room because it was the biggest company and made the most money and I looked at the history of the windows logos which I found really interesting like the first logo is not terribly different from where they are now if you look at it it was an eccentric window the notion of Windows was always that it was just by virtue of the name of it it was a tool that gave you a look at something where Apple made makes objects of desire Microsoft makes these tools that that enable you to do specific things and that you are the driver of the tool then you can see you can almost hear what went on in the meeting in the next in the next series somebody says yeah that's a nice eccentric window but you know it doesn't it isn't digitized you need to show it's digitized we're digital you know so that they did all these bit marks and then somebody elseís yeah and it doesn't have any motion it really should have motion that thing looks addict so then you can I've been in these meetings like that and you wind up with something like that when you have that kind of a conversation they stuck it on a phone and somebody was afraid you wouldn't know where to push the button and then the final one looks sort of like three bent tie Ford bent tiles that are waving in the breeze I couldn't I couldn't quite figure it out they were introducing a piece of software that had these very flat modernist back backgrounds at the time that I was designing it and I thought well that didn't relate to you know sort of the the you know curved and highlighted graphic there so I said to them at the time of the meeting this is a true story I said your name is Windows why are you a flag I thought what they meant was this that they really meant it was a window and perspective but they were you know confused by motion highlights mount of colors all that sort of stuff and when I looked at this it dawned on me that perspective was really a good way to think about the whole company of Microsoft because they are making tools that people operate from their own perspective it seemed like a nice analogy and it certainly would make a better window so this in fact for drawing these things is the standards manual for Microsoft it's a perspective chart Windows can live over here but everything can live out of it the fact of the matter was that I gave them the chart and the windows logo they already had the type and that was the end of my stay I did it for six months and all of the logos came after I left and they were done by in-house art departments or by people who might be working against the chart but it was really kind of miraculous because they were measuring this thing based on a principle and when I look at windows in relationship to where this thing started it's not really so terribly different and making it flat in 2012 was sacrosanct there was about a week where I was afraid to go out of my house when I redesigned that logo I mean people were just screaming about it I got rid of the colors I got rid of the gradations how could I do that but then only a year later Apple started flattening things out and then Google flattened everything out and that's the way it goes and sometimes you know more than the public does because you've been working with it and you've been thinking about it longer so imagine what happens as things are launched and the sort of brouhaha about them you sort of have to step back and just give it a little more thought this was another one of my favorite projects actually of this past decade and the the project really like Windows had a lot of pushback I mean people really hated it and I I loved it in all its glory and I'm gonna sort of take you through what happened the new school is a school that you may not have heard of in New York City it was originally the New School for Social Research it is a progressive school it has an incredible history it was I think founded in 1990 and in 1972 it bought a school you have heard of called Parsons School of Design and Parsons School of Design has more students than all of the new school together these are all the logos they've had over the years that we could find and as you can see it's a you know it's a real dog's dinner of things they seem to move too moved around in a lot of different directions we did a study to find out what various schools look like and why they looked that way and the best we could determine was that if you were trying to be an Ivy League school you had serif typography and if you weren't you had sin serif typography that's it folks no other no other point of view there we agreed it was going to be a sans-serif school and also it went well with a modernist history of the school the new school had this beautiful square type which I originally used in one of the identity signs in this Joseph urban building that was I think built in 1927 on 13th Street where it still stands it's really a landmark beauty and and should never be touched and very much reflected the spirit of the school if you notice on the top there a series of bars that run across the building and that the bars would be something that I would pick up on for connecting the schools together now the new school was about to reorganize all its programs and make it so that students at Parsons could could be capable of attending anything that related to the art or design practice they were in for example if you were an editorial designer you might take a journalism course or if you were going to be going to branding you would go into the Anthropology program things like that which put in a tremendous advantage because they had it all there and the school is a campus on Fifth Avenue it's an area that's very connected and very a very successful urban school that has most of its buildings right next to each other there was another building that went up on fifth on Fifth Avenue that was a new student dorm and facilities area that had a big auditorium and some labs and it also had the same kind of striped structure that the joseffer bond building did this building was built by Skidmore Owings Merrill and I decided that the stripes were a good thing to use because it represented both forms of architecture in the Joseph and not in the Joseph urban building in the new building there was a font that was designed by a Dutch type designer I love named Peter B lock and he had designed these fonts for the new school so that every different school would be represented by a different kind of typeface the problem was that in directories together you couldn't read anything it was just too complicated so I thought maybe the obvious thing to do would be to pick this thing up fill it in use the two bars to set up a logo for the new school let the new school work and a couple of configurations for all spaces and I was sort of sort of thought this was a nice situation where I had paid attention to the history of the school and and actually used things that already existed instead of being an egomaniac and completely reinventing them and I thought that then these bars could extend and different areas of the school could be highlighted and I thought that was that was kind of a nice system and I presented it to my clients who were 40 people in a room at a time I don't exaggerate the head of every single school and they said too boring they wanted to look like they went to the school to be a breakthrough school than it wasn't so I went okay what if I do that and they said for so then I did that I didn't know what I was doing we were just sort of a long gating letterforms because it made the type more eccentric looking and not so restricted and it seemed to represent the spirit of the school a bit I really wasn't quite sure what was going on there and then I went back and showed them the logo with a new with the new typography for the names and they said well the O's are too round in the school so I took him back they said they were too wide so they went back not all the way just a little bit and then I looked at this thing and I had a complete nightmare on my hand because I had three O's and those were sort of the widths of the letter forms and I kept staring at this thing deciding if it was incredibly stupid and ugly or if it was something that could be extended into a really strong visual language and I realized that it was the perfect time to do this because you could in fact program types of different weights to work together and that it could create a whole new font that would be unexpected which we named Noah so the new school and you'll notice the eccentric W was built out of the three weights and the W is the most eccentric letter form because of the nature of the way type has to be redrawn when it's expanded but with all of these different schools and components you began recognizing them as one thing and it had this kind of crazy modern look to it when you put it together and this was exceedingly important you could look at the list of the the courses that would be offered and then in within three years all the courses and all the schools changed names because they were reorganizing it and it happened very seamlessly because people were too busy looking at the overall look and not actually reading which was great for this so here are the letter forms and you see the three weights and it created a whole new spirit of typography when you put them together and it became highly recognizable unlike that other font I showed you called irma which is actually very classical and not at all eccentric this is Peter Deluxe drawing of it and you'll look at the W and you'll see that the reason he had to make the W flat on the bottom is that when you take something and you just you change the width of it it creates hotspots in the typography that would have shown up and he gave me a whole lecture on why that was there and I said alright let's go with that w everybody hated the W they called it the NEM school they thought it looked like two V's it was very embarrassing you see you see the issue but I kind of love it and I thought all right let's stick it there go all the way for it and people get used to it and the 40 people who had approval really actually agreed to that they liked the eccentricity of it because they felt it really expressed the spirit of the school which is a feisty place and that as we began developing the other weights we have a lighter weight still they they draw a new weight each year and Peter Belak still does it and it has one of the best in-house art departments in New York City and the work is just spectacular it's better than when we first launched it and makes me exceedingly happy but look at the all the different ways you can say one word how many different configurations and widths there are so that you put information together differently each time and then we started making things and the thing that was terrific about that is that you could recognize this thing without a logo that means that everything they do everything they say becomes a logo because you write you read the type here if you look in the corner where it says the new school and you see the color color differential it's because they're having their 100th anniversary and that was the way they treated the logo and they did that in house without my involvement and I love it I think it's just great the website's been redone since we first did it and it's terrific these things are still pretty much the same and the buildings and the campus is very strong this is on 14th Street students did this with me we brought the students in to do a lot of the work as we were rolling it out at Parsons and this just was just finished about a month and a half ago this is an elevator cage that we painted and strung signage on it's a donor signage for this school that sits on top all built out of metal and the metal goes around the corner of the cages but this thing that thing really extended and still remains one of my favorite projects when when it launched and everybody hated it and I had about a week of terrible press and people thought I got paid three million dollars and stuff like that I mean you know he said it was a school what do you think you got paid nothing so anyway when when that happened I was I was really devastated because it's an art school and I wanted the students to to feel ownership over it and I just hated it and I was forced to answer mean tweets at Parsons which was just humiliating and then a year later it all went away and I didn't know I didn't know why it went away so fast and I realized what happened was the students graduated I wasn't designing for them I was designing for the next year I just didn't know it and that that's a that says a lot to me about identity design that those who were there and have ownership over it will resist and the next the next group will not have the same the same problem about it and it's true in companies it's true really and almost anything you design if the expectation is there that it has to be something you're kind of dead this was a project that was both identity and packaging and advertising and it came from Korea it's a Korean company and they asked us to what they called correct their logo which which really meant fixed the spacing of their Helvetica and to find a way that they could use it to promote their product and to redesign their packaging their packaging is a whole thing in itself and I don't want to show you that I designed it with a man named Peter Brockovich and it's quite terrific it had some very simple elements it was just really simple Helvetica on some beautifully designed packaging that had a great shape and the top of the packaging has a plus sign that is indicative of the kind of product inside it that we created as a promotional system and as something they could extrapolate from there otherwise bland identity to really say something so there are series of about 40 different plus signs that are made out of different designs that all mean something and that are related to specific products here are some of them together this is something called ceramide eye mattress - ease restores moisture to the innermost layers of your skin this one even skin tone and restore skins strength this one minimizes pores this one targets acne this this is a cleansing system that's the first one I showed you this is a basic step-by-step system for men anti aging I can't quite get that on this one increases collagen production that I get provides moisture for sensitive skin by the way this stuff isn't bad I've used it I didn't break out it was good seven vitamins for skin-removal well we only had four places that one didn't work so well and then that then it became the way they can promote themselves and package themselves and show themselves on the store and this thing really worked as a promotional system the thing is that the packaging itself is more iconic here than the graphics and I find that when I'm doing packaging design I usually let the package drive the graphics because it's always phenomenally recognizable when it's 3d and if it's not graphically based so it's sort of an interesting thing to work on but the plusses helped us out just took us a little bit farther this is a completely 3d project and I look at my 3d work as identity work also and it's the same approach as what I took to the type directors Club which was really finding one dumb thing and finding a pile of different ways to do it so that you always recognize where you are and what the place is and it may be the most brand and cinema ever if you ever need that I'm not quite sure that you do but I like the project not terribly original it's a you know it's the quad cinema the type is made out of squares it makes sense the building sits on 13th Street just right down the block from Parsons by the way and it's a little jewel box of a theater that has four cinemas in there they used to have fantastic art films in the 70s and the 80s and if you wanted to pretend like you were an intellectual it was a great place to go on a date back in the day I still go there they have great movies they do a lot of foreign movies and they have a lot of movies by independent directors it's owned by a man named Charles Cohen who also owns the Pacific Design Centre in LA he he's a movie buff and he has a company called Cohen media and they bought the quad so everything is you know straight graphic design based on the square typography we made square tickets that was unusual but what was really wonderful was that the typography could become part of the building and on 13th Street the awning extends out into the street like for air-conditioning ducts and it goes through shoots through the building and turns itself backwards so it creates the words on the other side this is the front and that's the inside and it sort of slips up and down there and then of course it's used near the ticketing windows and these this Jumbotron that we made out of a series of screens that are really one screen but it's a mat over the screens that creates the the rounded cube shape and these are programmed so that they play a number of movies in different configurations and they change form based on the movie best of the if it's a silent movie it gets one kind of treatment if it's a full color movie it gets another and these things sequence they have a better 20 minutes cycle and then they change out the movies sometimes and they they won't become a different thing we love doing this it was great because we had total control here this this is the entry to the cinemas and there are four theaters and the theaters are the Q the U VA and the D so this sort of directs you to them and these are the inside of the theaters that's the cue the you the a and the D don't you love when that happens what if it had another letter in there I'd never be able to do that theater Expedia group which we did last year and Jeremy Mikkel is going to be speaking here so he'll show this work he did for me and he's actually done we've done a lot of work together and he's wonderful to work with is what I'd like to do is find a hook within a letter form that can be established into a typeface and it's usually I usually start by working with traditional letter forms and doing something bizarre with it like we did with Parsons and then you find the way to draw the whole the whole thing and what the expedia group is is what's called Expedia Inc it oversees a million companies like hotels.com and Expedia and a million travel agencies and it also has a large department of different functioning businesses within it that people don't know and this is what they look like they're really what my old partner would have called a dog's dinner you know just sort of this mess of stuff that doesn't you know sometimes they have a logo next to it sometimes they have that sort of cloud like II sometimes they just have the word Expedia there but it was a mess so mostly we saw this as a graphic cleanup and we thought what they need is a marque they can live with and then a name that would make them recognizable so we gave them this typeface that had this eccentric e and that became the logo for expedia group this is the e by itself and this is their mark and they can use their mark on anything or they can just use the type this is the alphabet and the alphabet is bizarre because there if you look at the A's and the B's the thinness it matches the sort of thinness on the lowercase e so the lowercase e looks like it belongs but the lowercase e was drawn first before the alphabet and that was the mark and then it goes to the u that's when I worked with Jeremy to get it worked to work back and forth until it made a great fun so here's how it works as sub-brand headings in that system corporate stuff as an app always got to do the app and as promotion and that this is another one of these things that you can actually recognize without the logo the logo is there the EES is a signifier but the fact the fact of the matter is that the font becomes eccentric in eccentric in this way that once you make the connection you never have to use the logo type the logo by itself this is one where we just had fun we were doing a restaurant in it opened in Chicago it was originally in New Orleans and there they're going to be a chain of them and it's it's a restaurant that's a food hall where there are lots of little divisions where they sell different kinds of food and they wanted them they wanted a lot of sub branding and it was the kind of project I took on because they oh they could they only had three weeks to do it I like that that means I'm done fast and that the fact of the matter was that they didn't have a lot of money so they had to do what I say which I live my favorite way of working so we gave them a series of peas that by virtue of the style of the typography and the period in which the type was drawn you recognize it even if the weight and scale changes as one thing which is amazing because actually individually the heights are different the widths are different the treatments of them are different but yet in the organization of them they function like the same thing it really was right out of you know like a an 1880s wood type book if you took a look at the way fonts were drawn and how many different configurations they had and how wide they could be you know that if you look at if you look at these three levels of things and when you veer too far or you add a curve or even if you you start to do things like doing too extensive a drop shadow like the type Directors club it doesn't it doesn't work but the play is the fun part and I love doing this sort of work because I learned from it so I learned how much something can handle and it's good for the client as well they were really ecstatic with this I have to say there were great clients it was a very happy three weeks and we made everything for the place and it was there's the crap ola can't leave that out and there you go the last project I'm going to show you I've been working on for 25 years actually 26 this year I wrote a book about it it'll be out in March and it's really my understanding more than anything about anything else of how identity works and that the Public Theatre for me is my lab because I actually have been able to be involved with it long enough to know what works and what doesn't and I've been able to export what I've learned to other projects that I work on it started with my affinity for wood type not unlike Politan but this is 1994 before any of the stuff was computerized and the Public Theater logo type designing that period was going from a source of wood typography that existed long before all of you were born and that came in a series of different weights now we redrew the letter forms on a few of these because there weren't five competing weights but I found something that had the width of the P and ended with the C and the rest were sort of filled in and related to it related to other things that worked and that this became the logo of the theater and that it also became the basis of its communication system and that the theatre would be represented in this wood typography that would give you the list of programs and shows and things that were going on in a communicative way that wasn't like theatre advertising like then have cute slogans it would just give you the time in place who is in the cast in just the facts then it would be represented by these individualistic posters for different plays I'm sure a lot of you have seen these they've been around but the fact of the matter is other than graphic designers are the people who went to that little theater nobody saw these they weren't out on the street there was never any money to really promote with them there were black and white newspaper ads but the general public didn't see if they got into a lot of graphic design annuals and so graphic designers saw them then they started being collected by people who collect graphic design but I can't say they really functioned as promoting a play ever the one thing that everybody did see were these Shakespeare in the Park posters that are in New York City in the summers and they buy Subway space and train station space and these are pretty ubiquitous but they only go on once a year so I don't know how many people really recognize them either I like what they look like and I liked working for the theater and then this crazy thing happened they put on a show called bringing the noise bringing the funk and I did a poster that looked like this and there were actually many posters like this that we did we did about I think a campaign from 1996 through 2000 where the type changed subtly but it essentially had to look like this and something terrible happened what happened was first of all it was displayed in New York because it was on Broadway and people didn't connect it to the public theater and secondly people started imitating it and it became a popular style it's a terrible thing when your identity becomes a popular style because it means they don't recognize you you're just one of them that was a bad thing to happen to a theater where I was in charge so I had to figure out what to do so I started changing it and I started doing these kind of posters so these are more of the noise funk posters just so you can see but they're connected they're the same thing there are a million things like this in New York and in the late 90s and early 2000s and that of course it was already dated so I changed them to something that looked like this and I remember I brought them in to the director of the theater a man named George Woolf and he looked at them and at that point in time I was turning fifty and he said oh Paul was turning fifty let's have a year of depressing posters but I just I wanted them not to look like anything else then I started doing anything I could then the type got bigger again but it wasn't the wood type I would change it each year then I do any damn thing I felt like you know I mean I just I just went out then then this director left and another director Oskar Eustis who's still there came in and I really thought he was going to fire me but he didn't he asked me to read to just redress it again and I did and we did some posters that were different but not really strong enough on their own not my favorite period and then I thought what am I doing wrong why don't these things why aren't they recognisable why don't ordinary people know what the public theater looks like at this point in time I'd been doing designing for it for about you know 15 years and I felt like I'd made no impact because first you didn't see them then they were knocked off so everybody saw them so they didn't look like the public and then then there were these one-offs there was never any money to produce enough of it and it dawned on me that I could take a season of the summer which everyone did see and turn it into a system by which every play every program everything at Joe's Pub and the Cabaret could be designed against so the first season we did it we did this poster for the summer that was for Love's Labour's Lost and comedy of errors which was a backwards-facing thing and we decided how we would make it work for a season we also did the signs in the park for it using that as a basics of the graphic where the poster itself essentially became the identity for the public for one year so this was purely for the park after we completed the park that the Shakespeare in the Park stuff we thought well how do we make a season and we decided that we'd make a manual out of it and pick up elements about the poster and translate it and flop the emphasis of the color so we began creating posters like this at this period in time I'd sent one of my students down to the public and she had risen from being an intern to sort of the major art person there controlling it and she hired more people so they could do this really in-house and what happened was this ability to create complete seasons we did it the next year with this poster that was skewed now here's what's interesting if you look at the the black and yellow poster you'll notice a lot of names of plays and right there is a name of a play that you've probably heard of called Hamilton we didn't do the Broadway poster for Hamilton this time because based on what happened with bring in the noise bring in the funk we thought we'll make the money from Hamilton at the theater but the theater that produces it on Broadway gets to own it after it leaves the public so when it launched at the public it got phenomenal press there was a huge contract with a Broadway theater and the public theater gets a couple million dollars a year from the shows there's some such thing that promotes the theater and we just let it go so that this thing maintains its individuality and there aren't as a season but not letting shows stand out one out after another we've been doing this now for I think six years and it's been incredibly successful the reason it's been critically accessible is people seem to know what the public theater looks like but what happened which I hadn't expected was that the membership went up as a matter of fact it went way up and it went way up partially because of what they were producing but partially because of the connectivity of it all that instead of making these individual sub brands that were these posters that were one offs that you saw this thing as part of a whole and that that mattered each year it changes so now people look and they if you saw abstract this is what I was working on two years ago people look at this thing as one season and they want to go for the whole season because it all looks exciting it isn't like they're choosing one show over another which is also the danger of these not-for-profit places there's a we started animating them just two years ago because we could because there was a place to show them in New York City and now they're in the backs of taxicabs and in the subways in certain spots but it's been fantastic to do it but what's even better and this is this season is that the public participates that we only have to do a limited amount of advertising really to show what these things look like in the real world because after we do them people show them on Instagram and you get a double bump and that's it and I'll take some questions and I love questions so please ask them don't be shy I know it looks like there are a lot of people here but yeah okay there was microphones in the aisles for the Q&A I started as a freelance identity designer for a company that it out employs me full-time I can't hear you you can't hear me no garbled okay sorry is that better yes lower good I designed an identity for a company about ten or twelve years ago as a contractor I'm now employed by that company we like the adage never look back but I'm curious about your thoughts about when you know - when it's time to update an identity when youth what what are the signs are the indications that you should refresh I personally have feelings about that about my work ten or twelve years ago that I'd like to update so I just want your thoughts on that would you what you worked there so I was hired about four months ago to join the company that I was contracting with about twelve years ago and do you think it looks busty yeah it's it's dated definitely do you know how to fix it I have some ideas do you have a connection to somebody you can talk to about it in the company who has yeah yeah actually I have a really good relationship with the president of the company talk to him tell him say hey this looks fusty what do you think can I show you some things cool that's all you did second it no good I can't there you are when you redesigned the Parsons font with multiple weights of letters how did you write with it like how did you know which weight to use if you know it's an algorithm but it's not based on anything okay so in other words that that you don't they're cut they're a couple of glyphs like you're not you're never allowed to make two like different sizes next to each other or any kind of rounds next to each other at different sizes so that it'll automatically correct that but but the the rest of it is accident when we when I showed you that page that said flexible I was amazed at how many variables there were that you correct you could create with that font and other people have been doing it I've been seeing a lot of fonts like that lately because because they have if the font itself is beautifully drawn I develop an interesting rhythm I'm amazed at it by the way I just I didn't know it was gonna work that well that was half accent that was half accidental from the meetings thank you thank you I have kind of a follow-up to that to me the new school type is so part of New York now at least in my experience and it was a product to some degree of clients to saying this is boring right so how do you know when to listen to that and when to not listen to that well I didn't want to argue with forty people you know I mean there's like it offends me people in a room I have a shop and a forty people were yelling at now that's too boring we don't want to be boring that looks like Helvetica why did you do that you don't do that they were right they were right I thought because there were 40 of them I better be you know sort of manage the process and me be very careful about what I would do and that but what was wonderful was when I got all that criticism they really stood by it because it was it was intense for a period of time and that's the kind of thing as school would be very nervous about but I had 40 sign and they're happy now it's great but you know these things that really the point I want to make is that identity is for the long haul it's not the immediate reaction it's the long haul thank you okay morning Paula thank you for being here so early I'm from New York it's not that early okay so I showed your TED talk in one of my classes and it was very meaningful for a few of the students too who really want to be perfect the first time my question to you is that when you're having meetings with 40 decision-makers and nerdy graphic designers like us are collecting your crap on bags how do you keep your work from being solemn and how do you stay serious and that's more of an update I I'm tracking you like a stalker but currently I mean I know I don't know if you're painting maps anymore but how do you do it well I really like making things that's why I never had any doubt about what I wanted to do and it's important for me to feel like I'm growing and I try I want to try new things I mean the thing I was showing you with about that type the trap directors Club was very it's a very significant part of the way I work which is to find something that I experiment with to see what's possible to then bring into a commercial project and that for me that's exciting now I have to reinvent again because I've been doing that since 2012 so you know like that's a little grim but I find that I have really three lives that I balance my graphic design with three-dimensional design I do a lot of environments and I also do the painting and right now I would say in the past two years the graphics have taken over because I've had some very scalable projects that have eaten up my time but I think I'm about to move back into a painting phase you know I can move back and forth does that help it does thank you okay good morning Paula great to see you again on stage last time I saw you was in Berlin at be on telly then two years ago so it's so great to see you again thank you for being here this early I have a question actually two questions the first question is have you worked obviously worked in a lot of English context have you worked in any other language apart from English if so is there any fun story to share i working in a job with an israeli company right now and i had some type drawn for them that i think was completely wrong i think like they couldn't read it i mean i and i didn't know what I had done wrong you know they said they were sort of very angry at me because I we really you know completely messed up the letter forms but but a lot of the work is translatable I do a lot of projects that translate into a lot of languages so you know I it depending upon who's working with me it's a problem or not a problem you know I just need to be informed properly decide work with a lot of local people I'll get you know if it's typography and it has to be drawn in a different font I'll hire the appropriate people and they're supposed to know what they're doing and they tell me that it's right and it works in the particular Israeli instance it didn't but generally it does and I'll get a high or whatever consultant I need to do the job properly but I certainly can't read it gotcha and I said that's problematic it's always good to work with other people thank you thank you cheese can I ask a question over here sure so when you approach an organization about can you hear me yes okay like the Philadelphia Museum of Art if the identity already in the city was the art museum did you propose a new name like the adelphia Art Museum no we wanted we wanted to call it art museum Philadelphia uh-huh but the trustees when allow it they just they just it was too it was too big a deal their charters there's all kinds of stuff that exists within a city right with something that's existed there that long so and there's an it there was always an inside outside problem with that Museum in that philadelphians don't use it anywhere nearly the amount that New Yorkers use the Met right so it's really sad in a way and I think some of it is its location up on the hill because it does seem off-putting and so the whole I've been working with them now for six years I still could consult for them and I didn't show parts of the interventions we did where we put up things in the street so it would engage people so they would go up into the museum it's it's rough they have that location is a rough thing for the for the museum though there their attendance has really gone up yeah okay so in other projects do you have any success rate getting them to change their name oh yeah and sometimes I just name things I mean yeah it isn't that I that you don't have a success rate the problem is that it depends upon what your what name you're changing you're changing something that's been in the city for a million years and there's there's a serious Board of Trustees that just aren't going to allow you to do that you can't do that you can do it with a startup company you can do it with something somebody who where you just shortened the name by virtue of the way you design it like we lop Lincoln Center off jazz that's a name change the public theater is now called the public because I decided it got to think of setting theater and type and so let's just get rid of that nobody cares anyway you know I mean there's stuff that you can do because because you you you are using the public for an Acula and that's what shouldn't happen in the Philadelphia Museum of Art but it just couldn't happen right Thanks decide hi hi how do you deal with or do you get upset that everyone's copying you all the time well not all the time now the the Public Theater thing was unnerving because I never had that before I never I never designed anything for that was specific for someone where it became a popular style of graphics and that that was unnerving because it meant that this Little Theater lost its identity to popular culture now if I had designed the identity and that was a popular style and I'd put it into the theater that would be my responsibility but it happened the other way and it was I don't really care it if somebody copies I just care if everybody in New York City is doing it at the time I'm promoting a theater that was scary it was really really not it never happened before it hasn't happened since expeced Ahmet even what you have on the board right now people pinning things on Pinterest and then making the posters yeah that doesn't go anywhere yeah it just really doesn't I think that people people's originality always shines through in the best things you see made and and that the second and third versions are forgotten really I wouldn't worry about it too much all right thank you okay okay which microphone okay this guy oh it's okay my question is and thank you for being here by the way Paula what is the what is the first thing you do when after you get a brief what is what is your creative process and look like and that's a loaded question but well I really don't do well with briefs okay because I don't like reading either generally generally what I want to do is have enough questions to ask the client face-to-face or on the phone mostly mostly face-to-face when I can do it if not WebEx where I really get a sense of not what the brief says but where they're coming from and in writing the brief what made them do this thing in the first place what's why are they changing where are they getting a new identities a new president is that's usually one reason another reason is they're about to go out of business I mean you kind of want to know what what the story and the lay of the land is before you even jump into the thing and then then I ask a lot of different questions and generally what they like and what they think they like what what what milieu do they live in who were there who was there who are their customers what are their customers like that sort of thing thank you but face to face it's better okay we can do one more hi just over here so I noticed that you have a very interesting kind of skill for finding those niches in your clients identity and I you've kind of already touched on it but I was wondering like how you create that dialogue like you're talking about face to face and kind of getting to know your client as opposed to the brief like do you have any typical questions you ask or is it more so just like a conversation I guess I have some typical questions that usually goes into a fairly individualistic conversation they're pretty much the things I just told you is it's really the circumstances that got them there is more and and where where do they want to go but where do they want to go everybody wants it they want to be more successful you know they want more customers they want to they want to break through some area that they're not covering but when you find out why they're in that position they've really already told you the answer about what you need to do so so and then the other thing I like to do though others are different is I don't hire a strategist I go in by myself I don't like a lot of assistants I usually go in with my project coordinator rusty and we have try to make the thing really intimate and not complicated if even if it's a bigger group I keep it very small absolutely I think that dialogue is like the most important part so thank you okay guys [Applause] you

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 39,898

Keywords: Adobe Creative Cloud, Creative Cloud, Adobe CC, Adobe Cloud, Adobe creative suite, #MakeAdobeCC, #AdobeCC, #ACCTags, adobe max, max session, adobe max session recording, max sessions on-demand, design, how to make a logo, build a brand identity, pentagram design, pentagram, paula scher

Id: HUx-bmZQsS8

Length: 77min 1sec (4621 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020