Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Paula Scher

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Paula Scher is one of the most influential designers of all time. A partner at Pentagram since 1991, she began her career in 1972 at CBS Records, where she eventually became the art director for the cover department, designing more than 150 album covers a year. Additionally, she has worked with a host of clients – Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, and the High Line – crafting identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs. Her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes  https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with your order. ------- House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Get a free box of Dry Roasted Namibian Sea Salt Macadamias + 20% off Your Order With Code TETRA Use code TETRA for 20% off at checkout

Tetragrammerton Tell me about the world that you entered as a designer, describe the work environment that you came into when you were starting. I was entering a world where there was a movement from calling commercial art graphic design. And that was something that I learned at Tyler's School of Art. Now, when I was in high school, I thought that was called commercial art,

things that were signs, things that were record covers, things that were book jackets, that was all part of a thing. And there was something in the word commercial that was a little bit of a put down. There was a designer named Dwaygens from the 20s who had coined the term graphic design and that if you were making graphic design you were a graphic designer. So in entering that there was an understanding that you were moving to a higher level profession

in terms of the way you might be perceived, though most people didn't know that yet. And that the world that I entered was the world of the 60s. And there were a lot of political posters, there were a Vietnam War protests. There were things that were, from Haydashbury, there was Victor Muscozo, a incredible designer who actually was Yale graduated and studied with Alpers on color theory, and

then was doing the wildest, most outrageous behavior that we all loved. And that was in the music business, it was the Philmorese type posters, and then there were a whole pile of devotees and followers. This guy's still around, by the way, he's quite wonderful. Incredible. And then there is my husband and Pushpin and Milton Glazer, Seymour Quast and Ed Sarell. And they were, they, they came at it from an illustration point of view, but Seymour drew an alphabet called, from a, of an ink box design he had done, where he had made an A that looked like an ink drip.

And it became like a 60s typeface. It was called Artone. And people didn't know it. It was really from a commercial job he had done. And it became this alphabet that I thought, because I didn't know him when I first saw it. I thought it was an allegus to bell bottom pants, because it was thin on the top and wide on the bottom.

And I thought it was a hippie type because it went with the fashion. So cool. But that was the world. And tell me about where the offices like Weed Sea and Mad Men. That was the advertising business, which was I think very different

from graphic design and tone and tempo. Those guys wore suits to work. I think very different from graphic design and tone and tempo. Those guys wore suits to work and they were much more clean scrubbed and they were dealing with big corporate clients and they would spend a lot of time in meetings and they had bottles of scotch on their wall. I remember going around to those offices and even later when I worked with gray advertising doing their corporate headquarters, I saw that still there. There was still the whiskey bottle sitting on the countertop for like a 5 p.m. snort

or whatever that was. There's still that relationship though between graphic design and advertising. It feels like they're related modalities, no? And so, they've become more confused lately because a lot of television advertising went away. So they've begun to sell identity and they sell it very different than design firms do because they're really looking to get the identity as a means to get whatever the promotion and the advertising is. But identity is foundational and theoretically, if you're designing an identity for a corporation, you want it to last 20 to 40 years. You don't want to turn it around like Instagram. So there are two fields coming at it,

sort of, with opposite directions. So graphic design is something that you want to have a timeless appeal, whereas advertising is really more of a of the moment. It's to catch your attention now. And tomorrow, if it feels old, it's okay because it's only for today. Is that, would you say that's right?

I think that's what happens. I don't think that that's the intent. I think it's the nature of the way they do their business because the thing is that if I think about companies I've worked with and I have logos that are around for 25 years, going on 30 and some, and they are foundational because they're designed, not really to go out of style.

Sometimes they have to be tweaked. Sometimes you design something and the weight is fashionable to say of typography in a given period and then five or six years later, it changes. And that you do need to tweak and adjust because you don't want it to look dated. It's like clothing, you know, Hems go up and down. But theoretically, there's got to be something in the logo

that is inherently recognizable. And what happens is that with the advertising agencies, they want to define what the positioning statement is and the theme of the organization. When an organization is new, or it has a new president, and that might last only five years. So then whatever they design and that capacity becomes irrelevant.

Where if you're looking for a, I would say, more of an abstraction of form and less about style, you can make something that's really lasting because people recognize it. And then if it has to be adjusted, it's very minor. And, you know, the Coca-Cola has a module of how you're supposed to think about these things, like in the Coca-Cola logo, essentially, was designed in the 1800s. Wow. I mean, there really is a script that was designed, that's evolved over the years to be the way you see Coca-Cola today.

And that in their quadrant, they say that the logo's sacrosanct and it stays forever. And that's in the upper left hand part of the quadrant. And the upper right hand part of the quadrant is packaging. And packaging stays for a period of time enough to become recognizable, but has to evolve in style or form or various things so it keeps it contemporary. Then below it is advertising, and advertising can be seasonal or it can adjust to be very quick if you need to, in certain instances, if you're launching a new product with it.

And there the logos in the corner are never changed, and on the package the logos are never changed. And then, though they have Coke and Coca-Cola, they've added devices to it, and then in the following quadrant is promotion. And promotion is the following quadrant is promotion. And promotion is the quickest changing thing. And that's Instagram. So something like the Coca-Cola green bottle of Coca-Cola that was what a Coke bottle looked like for a really long time. It was a design choice.

They stuck with it for a period of time. And then somebody decides either we don't want to use glass bottles anymore and we're going to tin cans or what happens when there's a decision to make a big change in a brand that's ubiquitous. I would imagine it's cost. I mean I think usually when there's that kind of a shift you're dealing with, I don't also convenience. mean, it may be that the glass was breaking or the kids couldn't handle it. I mean, I'm not inside Coke. I happen to have known that thing because I worked on a product that Coca-Cola produced called Travea, and that's the first time I saw the chart. But I

don't actually know the mechanisms of the corporation, but I would guess from other corporations when you make a decision like that to fundamentally change something that's classic then you do it because of cost issues. And that I think the glass bottles still exist but I think they become more promotional and they become this thing that they're putting out as specialty items, like anniversary bottles. I mean, companies that have legacies do that.

Now I worked for Tiffany and they have this very firm model. And what I did when I worked for them in the 90s was pick their blue color swatch that they already had, but it had to be universal because they distribute the product all over the world. And the dilats would change depending upon where you bought the box. So that was something that had to be controlled very tightly.

And that they had very big typography initially when I worked for them on their boxes, and it made them look cheap, and I just made it really small on the box. And it sort of changed the whole look. It looked like you could raise the price just by those sort of adjustments, because there were cues you learn in terms of how things fit in categories and what expectations are. I mean, that's part of working in commerce. It has it also has to do with aesthetics to a degree, you know, because it's sort of a statement of a certain kind of taste. But was there a time that the large Tiffany logo made sense? I'll tell you, when I saw the packaging, I was really shocked.

They had, at the time, that they hired me, they worked mostly with manufacturers, and the people who ran the jewelry stores were just sort of making the decisions. They had a blue, but the blue wasn't their big problem with it, was it didn't look the same in all places. So that was one problem, but then they had made decisions that were sort of surprising on something that's essentially an upscale product.

And they had a ribbon, not a ribbon, it was some kind of cord they had that was really fat and sort of clunky on their shopping bags. And then they had the very big type on things. And essentially, if you look at a Tiffany ad, you don't even see the logo. They use the blue box, and they have a white ribbon around it. And that's their classic. Never have to change that.

Isn't that fantastic? Absolutely. You worked at Columbia, I guess you worked at CBS Records for a period of time. And was this in the 70s? Yes. Describe that environment. Well, it was very male.

I was one of very few women on the floor. I worked there twice. I worked in the advertising department first for about two years and I was making ads for records. And that's where I learned everything I know about office politics. And then I had designed an ad campaign that the head art director at Atlantic records liked

and he hired me and I got to do ads and record covers because they were done in the same department. So that's when I started designing album covers. And I did them for a year and they won awards and got in some design annuals and things like that. So I was hired back by an art director named John Berg to be East Coast art director. What were some of the covers you did when you were in Atlantic? Charles Mingus changes one and two, which are kind of classics,

John Prime, Common Sense. Then there were artists like Dee Dee Bridgewater, who were like lesser known. It's funny, because I just went through them because I'm giving some work to a museum and Munich. And there were 25, I can't remember them all. There was a guy named, I think his name was, maybe Steve Wright.

There were sort of, they weren't big. And there were jazz musicians and quite good. And I did a lot of jazz work at CBS as well. So at CBS, I think the biggest people I did, I did a Dylan album, I did a Bruce Springsteen album, and I did a bunch of Billie Joel albums that were probably the most famous artists. And then there was Boston, which I hate. But it's, but it's, but it's, but it's an important, I

mean, it's, it lives on in the culture. There is, I had a friend named Marty Pekar, who was a copyrighter at CBS. And he says, you know, when you die, your, your tombstone is going to say, design the Boston cover. And I've lived in horror forever. That might even be a picture on the tube. The UFO. Oh God. At that time, CBS was huge corporate entity and Atlantic was still it was big, but it was an independent label. Did they feel like different places working at the two?

They were totally different. Atlantic was very much driven by Amit and Nessa Weirud again. And Nessa Weir, I worked with directly because it was a very intimate place and he was in charge of the taste-making decisions that had to do with the corporation. So he so he approved every album cover I worked on. And he was lovely. He was a very elegant man. And he really cared about craft. And they were small. And they could not afford to spend more on album covers

or hire big photo sessions. And they were they operated with a kind of economy, even though they were a part of it that time, they were a part of Warner Brothers. And CBS was big and corporate, and there were a lot of hierarchy within the company, but I had already learned to manage it. And when I worked in the advertising department at CBS,

I used to design trade ads. Those are the ads that went into cash box and billboard, and then occasionally you'd get to do rolling stone. And they would come out for every, every album. And the way the ad system worked is, I was assigned a copyrighter who was this person I mentioned before, named Marty P. Carr. And we'd be given sort of a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, bases of the way they wanted to talk about the album, which usually meant breaking out in three radio stations or what have you. And then you'd have some sort of terrible shot and then you'd have something called a mini, which was an album cover that was cut in half and made the title of the album really big on the top.

And that was done in its own department, and they were really ugly as hell. And you were supposed to put them on the bottoms of the albums, and you wrote some kind of copy line on about them, and they went into the trades. And the way they were approved was they were attached to a routing slip. And the routing slip was stapled to whatever the paper was that your ad layout was on. And in the first day on Monday, you do it in the morning. And on the afternoon, it would go from the head art director to the copy chief to the guy who is the department head of creative services.

And somewhere in there, it would go back for changes. So the next day, you'd change it. And it would go and it would go past those three people who already made a change. And then it would go upstairs. And it would go upstairs to product managers and producers and people like that. And then, verily, it would have some more changes. And then it would come back downstairs. And by the time it came downstairs, because they were out to lunch or in meetings, it would be the end of the day and you didn't do anymore. So then it would be Wednesday, the thing that the day it was due,

and you'd finish it at about seven o'clock at night and get it out to the trade. And then I realized, what was the point of doing anything at the beginning of the week? the day it was due and you'd finish it at about seven o'clock at night and get it out to the trade. And then I realized, what was the point of doing anything at the beginning of the week? You might as well wait till Wednesday and do the whole, I just said, be out of time. And that's when the work got good. I have to tell you. Great. It's good to know.

It's useful. I've been on those CCs, on those art pieces that get sent around and it's a bizarre method in a big corporation. It had nothing to do with anything. Nothing to do with the quality of anything, or whether or not an audience would perceive it, or understand what it was. It was just a method they had that they adhered to. And it was like that when I started.

And it was like that when I left it. It just stayed the same. That speaks to what you said before about Tiffany, probably at one point in time, when the record company started, it was built with few people and based on taste. And then as it gets bigger, it becomes this other thing. And people who are more concerned with commerce than art take over. And then things like, well, let's put the logo big on it because we're selling it and the bigger the logo is,

the better it's gonna look. You know, the more chance we'll sell it, if it's big. It's like that mentality of people who don't understand what they're doing, making these choices. That's exactly what happened at CBS. There was a, the founder was a guy named Goddard Liebersen, who was an incredible, tasteful man. And essentially, they were publishing classical music.

And then they had John Hammond, who discovered Billy Holiday, along with a myriad of other Dylan. I mean, the list is staggering. Yeah, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan. Yes, St. Bob Dylan. There was a very long list that I used to know by heart, and he was a really lovely elegant man. Stevie Ray Belon.

And they were like a wide range over a long period of time. Even Benny Goodman. Yeah, incredible. He said I wanted his first discoveries, and then decided, okay, he's moving on. He was a guy who moved on, And his taste was just impeccable. And if you can think about Goddard Lieberson and John Hammond, what happens somewhere along the way

is I think Mitch Miller became really powerful in the company. And he had a television show. And so the music taste became very mainstream. And there was a period I think where they were very late into getting into rock and roll. You know, I mean where they were very late into getting into rock and roll. I mean, they were, I think that wasn't until the film more concert where Janice Joplin played and got signed in. I think my dad.

Madurai pop. Yeah, that was it. And it was, it was amazing that the company had changed because it was a really middle of the road company after Goddard Liebison had died. And then it became, then it became a bit of a rock and roll company, not so much. But they had foundational artists, you know, they had artists who were songwriters who were going to sustain periods of time like Bob Dylan, like Bruce Boingstein, like Billy Joel, you know, they sort of, which was smart. And that was Columbia Records. That was that label.

Epic Records was more like Boston. It was sort of, you know, hits, and then they would fade, and they'd get the next guy, and that's how they operated that. Did you work in the Black Rock building? Yep. What a beautiful building. Eroser and Gorgeous.

I love it. And there was, that's the first time I saw Ames furniture, you know, in that building. And Lou Dorsman, who is the design director of the whole company, had designed the elevator buttons. And there's a typeface called CBS Dito that's on all those buttons, and they are gorgeous to this day. The CBS logo was incredible.

There's a book of all the CBS, the language of the CBS logo that's beautiful. Do all companies have that style guide of how to use what everything looks like associated with it so that you know it's coming from this brand? Well, we make them all the time. Every time I design something, we make them. And I think most companies do. Most organizations, when they buy design, if they know what they're

doing, have to understand how they're going to execute it. And if they're a large company, though, they may have a, they already may have a built-in in-house art department that you train and work with to begin to get them to understand how to work with the identity and the typography. And we were just, just finished an identity where they had a very practiced in house art department and we worked with them You know when developing it so so it's a collaboration so they know they can execute it I mean these things really do matter What was interesting about the record business floor which was 10 through 12 those floors is they didn't conform to CBS graphics.

We did crazy stuff because we were the record industry. So we hung all kinds of stuff on the wall, and the walls were metal. So you had to hang them up with magnets because that's the only way they stayed on the wall. And then sometimes somebody from Corp. Corp. would come down and write a little report that you had messed up the wall. But the corporation on the whole was just very design-conscious and very caring about it. There's something about design.

In my case, I was a kid, I was going to NYU, and I was lucky enough to go to the Black Rock building on a regular basis. And when I, from stepping down into the sunken area before you get to the lobby, you could feel like you're in a special place and riding up in the elevator. You felt like you were in a special place. This wasn't an apartment building. This wasn't even an office building.

My aunt worked at Estee Lauder and I would be in that building all the time and it was nothing like BlackRock. BlackRock had a seriousness about it. An attention to detail that I'd never had never experienced before, and I loved it. And I felt like it was almost like a cathedral in a way. Yeah, it was Bill Paley, who was the president of CBS. He had a second in command, who was a design.

He's the person that hired the architect. He was the person that decided to be Eames Furniture. He was the person who oversaw Lou Dorsman when Lou Dorsman was doing the DDo CBS logo that's still on everything. And it was really amazing. And that was the philosophy of the company and it was incredible to work there because it mattered and you knew it was different and those things you experienced were planned. So when you work in a place like that,

I imagine it has to have some impact on your work of like, okay, this is real, like this is the big time, I have to do my best, look where I am. We were introduced like if a recording artist came and I actually had the position for a period of time is when Paul McCartney came and a few other recording artists were sort of checking us out to see if they they wanted to sign with CBS and they would they would come down and they would say, well go to our award-winning art department. And they were very, the company promoted it as part of the CBS image. That this was gonna be this very classy operation, that we didn't do things on the cheap, that the people were highly trained professionals,

and that the work was gonna be at this very high level. And that was implicit in the offer. And some people joined the company because of that. Beautiful. When you were working on album covers, did you get to meet artists ever or was it more just dealing with product managers? No, the artists had contractual cover approval.

You met with all of them. Or they did it by phone. I mean, I never met Bob Dylan in person, but I talked to him a lot when I did hard rain. I rubbed down some press type in the corner of the photograph and it sort of looked not very straight. I told him it would be straight when we type said it and he said, no, I like it that way. I like messy.

I'll never forget that. It ran like that. It's always been like that. I mean, there are things like that that happen that were wonderful. But you, you, you, they had contractual cover approval and it they would come sometimes individually, usually with a, if they were coming individually, usually there was a project manager with them. Then there would be wives, then there might be the manager, then there might be a whole

band and the whole band's wives and everybody's, you know, favorite sidekick to come along and look at it. You never knew. You just never knew who was going to come. It always worked. Some were more frustrating than others. It really depended upon what their expectation was. I found some of it boring and repetitive,

because there were so many new artists that were continually signed and they were very concerned about their photos on their covers and they wanted, you know, to be styled and make up and hair and lots of money spent on this thing. And then they would be very stilted in the photo and it would be sort of hard to put together. And I remember on the dream police album for cheap trick, we had a lineup. They were dressed as police on the front and the back covers. And then they were in a line up on the inside. It was one of those open up packages. And I had

it. I had to replace different heads on different bodies. In those days, there wasn't Photoshop. So you had to take a dye transfer and you had to have the retoucher sand it so we could cut it out and put it on the photo and retouch it so you didn't see the cut lines but all the heads were transposed. Amazing. A concept for a cover would it often come from an artist, would it come from a designer? How did covers come to be? If it was a jazz album, it was usually me. I would come up with an idea because it would be based on the title.

Jazz artists tend not to be vain, they didn't especially want to be on the covers. I bought a lot of illustration for jazz, and that's where I really also became a type designer in a strong sense because I did, particularly when we ran out of money in the late 70s, I began doing covers just purely in type. And they were wonderful to work with the jazz artists because they really liked the idea that I was going to be creative with their cover. And sometimes they came in with wives, sometimes they came in alone. I used to work, I think I did four or five covers for John McLaughlin. And he was first Mahavishnu John McLaughlin when I met him.

He came in like a Hari Krishna in the robes and the thing. And I actually did not like fusion jazz, and I hated listening to his music. And he came in one day after, I don't know, three years of working with him where he was a Hari Krishna, and he came in, and he was wearing a leather jacket. He cut his hair, and he's like, one of the handsomeest guys I ever saw. And he said, oh my God, and he said, I'm into materialism. Then he locked my door and made me listen to a full two record set he was putting out. It was very funny. Stuff like that happened all the time. Wow. The fun of the record business. That was great. They were all over the map, though. I mean, that sometimes the artists were terrific

to work with Bruce Springsteen. I did darkness on the edge of town. And Bruce Springsteen, then you know, had the appointment, it came up. And he pulled out these two polaroids that were taken by his butcher. And he just saw, he gave, they were great. I mean, they were really, they were, they were, they were sort of beautiful. And, you know, the album was a darker album. And if you take, I think it followed, born to run. And if you consider the difference in the two covers, one was sort of like, okay, this pop wonderful guy

who's on stage moving around and playing with his saxophone ist all the time and all of that. And the second one was a little deeper, and it was sort of easy to design because it had to be rough. You know, that you knew this was rougher, and it's not pretty, but it's beautiful. And I always liked that cover, I thought,

and it was really him. He came in with the shots. How would you decide between a typographic cover, an illustration, or a photograph, and do each of those things, whether it be on an album cover or in an ad, do they communicate different things? That's really a good question. I never quite had a handle on it. You know, they would say, I couldn't use illustration on a pop cover

because that was the signal it was a jazz cover. Except for the reason it was a signal it was a jazz cover, as I used to buy illustration for jazz covers, just because I didn't have to do the shot of the recording artist and I liked it. I liked them and I thought they were terrific looking and memorable and the other ones look more or less the same. So then it became defined by the company as a jazz cover, and then it became difficult

to use. But of course, there was Boston, and there was something that was called Heat Wave Too Hot to Handle, and I had used the same illustrator, I used the same illustrators on jazz covers. I mean, I really didn't see that that way. But I do think the public, actually the public had its own rhythm about what they liked. You know, and when I think about it, there was no market research, there was no testing in those days. I just heard a story recently about Andy Warhol, and he became a commercial artist, because at the time it was unfashionable and advertising to use photographs. It was unfashionable and advertising to use photographs. So there was a lot of work for straight illustration of products,

and that's what he did. But it wasn't at a choice. It was more like, well, that's what the market needed, and he was able to do that. That's how that works. It's funny, because we're all, I think, at least the people I respect, are really serious about the craft, you know, that the

making of the thing and keeping it at a high standard and pushing the industry forward is really our overall goal in doing it. So when you can elevate the expectation of what something can be, that's a breakthrough. And you know, he was, He was actually a terrific illustrator. Those drawings were great. That lifted up that part. And of course, he became the way we know him. But that is not an unworthy achievement. When you decided to become a designer, was it a popular thing to do at the time? When you decided to become a designer, was it a popular thing to do at the time?

No, most people didn't know what it was. How did it work out that you did it? I Wasn't good at really anything else. My mother wanted me to get my teaching certification So I could teach public school like she did and she thought I remember when I told her I was going to move to New York and Be a designer. She says oh Paul, you can't do anything like that. That takes talent. You know, I mean, it was sort of... So you were an abuse child. Yeah, I did have that. When did branding become a big deal?

Has it always been or is that a newer thing? You can't really brand something. That's sort of silly in terminology, because a brand is not what you make it. A brand is what you make it plus the way everybody else perceives it plus everything that happens along the way. Like if you take Chipotle, which is a nice fast food place

and it can have nice graphics and the food is reasonably okay for the price, etc. But there was food poisoning. The brand owns food poisoning and you can't take that away. If you say, I branded Chipotle, that's sort of like branding food poisoning. You have to be care. I'm using an extreme example, but the assertion that this thing that you work as part of is going to stick forever and be this

thing is, is just not possible because you can't predict. And I don't like to say that I do branding. I like to say that I'm an identity designer of visual identity designer and that What that means is that you're gonna see something and you're gonna associate it with the product and That that is gonna be what that thing looks like it doesn't mean that that's what the product is or becomes It's just that's what that looks like which is different. That's what logos are and it's just that's what that looks like, which is different. That's what logos are. And you very rarely now design just a logo, usually designing a visual system. So you have the logo and the logo can animate and the logo can become large and small and exist in three dimensions and all of the things that needs to do to be recognized.

But it's really a system. While we're on fast food, You designed the Shake Shack logo. And it really looks different than everything else. When you see a Shake Shack for a fast food place, it has an air of sophistication just based on the signage. How did you come to work on Shake Shack? Well, Pentegrin's office used to be on Madison Square Park. We had bought a small building there.

And Danny Myers was a terrific restaurant tour and he had two restaurants across the park. And he was on the board of Madison Square Park. And I did the identity for Madison Square Park because they brought it to me and wanted me to do it for free and told me if I I if I didn't want to do it it was okay and they'd bring it to the competing firm around the corner and I thought oh no I'm gonna have to get up and look at their logo every day. So I had become involved with the park and then the park began having art shows in the park and really building up this incredible art shows in the park and really building up this incredible system of shows, exhibits, and events in that park. And one of the events was Danny Meyer put a taxi in the park and made a hot dog stand there because he always was inspired by his childhood in the Midwest where

he remembered all these kind of fast food places where he felt he got a good meal. West where he remembered all these kind of fast food places where he felt he got a good meal. And he felt that was missing today. So his goal, if Danny Myers had a mission statement, I mean, he is a hospitality person, but his goal was to make a better fast food place, charge two dollars more for the hamburger and put brisket in it so it stayed soft, you know, that it didn't get hard like a bird does. And he succeeded, it was great. But the building was a prefab building that was put together by a terrific architect.

He was a postmodern architect who did all the best stores in Virginia that had sort of buildings that came apart from each other. And what he designed was the structure that was dropped in the park because it was prefab, so they didn't have to build it and disrupt the park. And they originally, I think they were, when it first opened, they were bringing water over from the restaurants, and then they had the plumbing put in. And that was the first shake-shack.

And the structure of the building, which had an awning that came out, looked very what I would call mode-dern, which is sort of a style from the late 40s that looks like streamline. It was sort of the design of trains and the kind of things Raymond Loewy would make. It's like post-deco. Right, right. It was more modernist, but there was a typeface that was introduced called Neutra, which came out of that period.

And you could tell it was a streamlined typeface because the middle bar on the E drops lower, and it creates the sense of periodness about it. And I used that inside this band that was in the dropped-in architecture, and we had said shakes and sodas, and they actually call that the purple cow, and I don't know why. They named it that.

Maybe they were going to put something that was called the purple cow, and they were never did. And it runs around Shake Shack, and then the type on the top is big. And at first, we did it without the icons in the park. And then Danny said he missed the neon and it is childhood. So we couldn't put neon in the signage because we didn't know what neighborhoods would allow it,

depending upon ordinances. So we just made neon icons. And then sometimes they were neon and sometimes they're not, but that's part of their packaging and their system. And we did it twice. We did it for the building. And then when he decided to make it a chain, then we added the other, you know,

the menu boards and all the other stuff that went with it. And it did, it looked different from everything else. And they didn't call it fast food. They called it fast casual dining. It's all category. It's great. Yeah, I always loved it. It's all category. It's great. Yeah, I always loved it. It was fun doing it too, because it's wonderful to work with somebody else who's inventing

something. Yeah. And that's what he was doing. L-M-N-T. Element Electrolikes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? You want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper.

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Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmant.com slash tetra. And stay salty with Element Electrolite. What's it like being out in the world and coming across something that you've designed? You know unexpectedly, what is that feeling when you're just out and about and there's a sign or something goes by and it's like, oh, I did that. What does it feel like? Well, right now I forget.

You know, like I mean, 20 million city banks all over the place I walk by and every day, I don't even think about them. You know, so that it's strange. And the same with sometimes what I really like are the Shake Shacks in Europe. Because they're all designed differently, which was part of our thinking in the place. And there's a woman who came out of the architecture firm who built the original Shake Shack and what she does is position the type on the building. So it works with the architecture like the

first one did. So they're all different, but they're all the same because it's the same thinking about it, but they're different sizes, they're different, sometimes they're a neon, sometimes they're built out of something else, sometimes they have light bulbs in them. I mean, they're all over the place, depending upon where they are. And so that when I'm in Europe, they even get more distinguished,

like there was one in Covent Gardens where it was barely branded at all, but it was all in the right places. Or you'll go to another place in London and in a suburb, they have this enormous sign on a very little building, you know, and that's sort of charming. And I'm always, I always love seeing that, you know, because you don't know what it's going to be. But I don't, I don't have the same thrill about it that I did when I was much younger. What I do like is that I have a former assistance, particularly who go to old record stores and

buy up my album covers. And then sometimes I have to buy them back from them. Great. It's great. Have there always been logos and marks? Well, a trademark is a mark that stands by itself or can be combined with type. Like the swoosh, for example. Well, the swoosh is Nike's mark.

But you know, it's not Nike. Originally, it was with not Nike. Now, you can understand it without words. And it only takes 30 years to do that. It's built up with a sort of brilliant advertising campaign by Wyden Kennedy. So you associate with that. It's built up with a brilliant advertising campaign by Wyden Kennedy. So you associate with movement. It's all about sport.

You look at the thing, you know what it means. So you don't need words. But corporate marks do because they may have initials and then you don't know what it is. And you need it labeled. I mean, I think that marks that completely worked on their own, the Westinghouse logo with the dots on the W. But there was a whole type family for Westinghouse that existed with

it that Paul ran designed when he did the Westinghouse logo. And these things become iconic and you know what they are. When you introduce a logo, if it's a mark, you generally need type to express it. But a logo and a mark also, you don't need to have a mark. You can just have a logo, which is just the name, and the name is designed in some font. And that can be as understandable, usually, a lot of times, there are initials.

And you look at it, you know, exactly what it is, and you know what the company is. And then you don't need the secondary type. You need the secondary type, if you need to register it, you know, exactly what it is, and you know what the company is. And then you don't need the secondary type. You need the secondary type if you need to register it, and there are other things that look like that slightly. So there's the Apple Apple, and then there's the type that says Apple, and it says it the same way all the time, and sometimes we're together, but often separately, and either one works, depending on the use, yes? At this point in time, you would recognize it on almost anything.

You know, I mean, you could take the Apple logo and buy a white box that looks like it's for lunch and stick the logo on the metal oven. You would think that Apple started to go into the food business. I mean, you could, in fact, do that very easily. I mean, things have, they become iconic and use and fame and promotion. And it's really, that's what you want them to do. That's the goal of it. Was there every time in the record business where the person who designed the album cover also designed all the advertising and everything that went around, everything around it, or

was it always separate? Well, it's CBS or the separate because that's the way the company was set up. Sometimes I would do a poster for an album I worked on. I did some of that with Billy Joel for a while. But usually the departments were very specific and they didn't like that because it would take away the power of one of the departments because the cover department was always more powerful than the advertising department. So they wanted to make themselves felt as the only people who understood advertising. And that was all political. And I don't know if it mattered one way or the other,

they'd be quite honest with you. I think if anything, the opposite. It sounds like whoever came up with the creative feeling for a piece, the more involvement they had in the whole campaign, would probably be a good thing. Seems like, no? Well, it's hard to say because it really depends upon what kind of money was budgeted for it. If you had a major artist very often, they went outside firms to do that sort of stuff, because there was a lot of pushback on the advertising department. Now, I used to make a lot of promotions for record stores,

which were posters, not ads. And there was a series I did called The Best of Jazz that was all constructivist design on craft paper. And there were, I think, 20 albums in the series and that all the albums were packaged like this, the posters were in the store. And you saw that, that's what you were talking about, but that was really, really rare.

Largely, because you couldn't even know what kind of space you were going to get in the record store for it. And a place like Tower Records used to, the owner of the store actually used to select how much space something would get based on whether or not he wanted to hang it up in a store. So you just didn't know and that there would be promotional men from the field who would be going out and trying to get positioning in placements. but they were never seen very successful to me in my memory of it. Who would set up the photo sessions for artists?

Well, the art directors did. I did that. I mean, a lot of the job, I think, was really, really management. You were setting up photo sessions. You were getting makeup and hair done, you were hiring sometimes a stylist for the clothing. We went through a series of genre photographers, like there was this wonderful photographer named Bill King, who was a fashion photographer, and he would get, he would always shoot the performing artists in motion, and you can tell

his shots right away from the 70s, who is very hot for a period of time and Norman Seath and a pile of others who had huge styles that were popular and then sort of, you transferred out of them. I actually had some of my best cover shot by Richard Avedon, he was amazing. He took muddy waters and muddy had come up into his studio and we were going to photograph him. And Muddy was wearing a hat and a coat and he wouldn't let Muddy take it off. He pushed him

against a white wall, took six pictures and said, I have it. And he did. It was gorgeous. That was hard again. Amazing, beautiful, beautiful photography. The difference in type that's hand drawn versus type set or machine set. Tell me about the difference in what they look like, what they feel like, the perception of them. Well, you won't see that anymore. There won't be the difference in it in the old days you could, because it looked like it was handcrafted and you could see error.

Now, and this is actually very exciting, almost everything we design is a bespoke font, and it is because the computer software really has grown to the point that it perfects as you're doing it. And there's a course called type at Cooper Union. And the art students go and they take the courses and they not only can draw complete alpha bets, they can program them. So we compete with the type businesses because the type businesses sell licensing.

And what they do is, this is really, I think it was a mistake, but they instead of being partners of the designer, they became competitors of the designer in that they want you to purchase the font for some use for a corporation, and they sell the corporation a license, and they have to rebuy the license every three years. So they're buying the same thing that they were using over and over again, where a type designer is more likely never to do that, an individual over and over again, where a type designer is more likely

never to do that, an individual type designer, but to create a font and create one fee for the use of it and let the company have it. So the graphic designers who have become type designers, which are really young people starting out and they do great work, and then there are the older type designers who made foundries and started selling them and they're selling licensing fees. How do you find young design talent to work in the company? Well, I teach. So through students?

Absolutely. Students and referrals from other teachers who have good students. That's generally how I found my staff. My associate is a woman in Christen, Uber, and Christen was my student, and then she worked as an intern at Pentegrin for me, and then I centered down to the public theater to be their in-house art director, and she had worked on the public theater for me internally. So she knew the public theater and if you ever saw the film abstract, she's the woman on the computer doing. And then she went to the wing when it was open and

which was designed by another pentagram partner, Emily Oberyn, and then came back to me during COVID because my senior designer, who was also a student, had gone to Apple by storm. I couldn't compete. I was COVID. I had no one to know who to hire, you know, because we're all sitting in rooms by ourselves. And then I realized that the wing had folded and that Kristen was available, so I grabbed her back. Great. That was great. Tell me the story of pentagram from the beginning.

Well, pentagram is a really unusual design firm. It was founded by three men in London and it was originally called Fletcher Forbes Gill, Colin Forbes, Alan Fletcher and Bob Gill. And they had an idea that designers should share profit and come together and not worry about who got the job that paid the most, but that the combination of talent would make everything elevate.

Actually, it didn't work in the first year, and Bob Gill left. And then an architect named Theo Crossby joined, and so they decided to make it Crossby Fletcher Forbes, always an alphabetical order. And architecture is on a different time frame because the projects take much longer, so that Theo would have very big projects, but they might go on between two or three years, and the graphic designers are turning around things more quickly, but the fees are lower. And that worked all right, and then they decided to make an associate who worked for Alan

Fletcher, a partner in his name as Mervyn Kralansky. But they didn't put his name on the firm because he had a big, long Jewish name, and they didn't want to put it on the firm. He was sort of annoyed by it. And then Kenneth Grange joined, and he was a product designer. And he's actually Sir Kenneth now. He designed all of the Kenwood appliances in Great Britain, the washers and dryers and things that everybody had in their kitchen that they grew up with.

And he did that at Panagram. And he became the fifth partner and Mervyn got annoyed because his name wasn't on the firm. It was going to be Crosby Fitch Fletcher Forbes Grange and No Krulanski. So they went off, I think, to a little partner's meeting and they had a fight about it. And Alan was reading a book on black magic

and he said, let's name it pentagram. There are five of us. So that's how the name came to be. And then that was stupid because the next year John McConnell joined and then there were six, but they didn't want to go how the name came to be. And then that was stupid because the next year John McConnell joined and then there were six, but they didn't want to go through the name change. So, I think part of the reason for Pentegrin's longevity is the sort of moving ownership of it through different people who decide not to change anything and to use the formula for

it. And we've never changed the logo since the logo was designed. And we have all these designers. You'd think, no, we don't want to touch it. No one will ever agree. It's pointless. Right now, there are 21 partners. We have offices in New York, in London, and then individual offices, one in Berlin, and one in Austin, Texas. And that had to do with just sort of happenstance of people who were in a bigger office or something moved around and they wound up on their own, but they still are part of the system.

What's unique is that the partners are essentially running their own business and sharing. And that the sharing is very important because it understands that design business is not predictable. Certain industries go up and down. For example, somebody was working for cryptocurrency company, uh-oh, you know, things like that do happen. So, but collectively, you're much stronger. And the likelihood we're all going to go out of the business at the same time is not real. So that means that there's a certain security in the numbers and that also we own

the business and we've developed stock in the business so that you don't get old and just be left with your drawing tables like so many designers were. But the significance of it is that if you're responsible and you run your business and you take on enough work where you're profitable and you also can control the work you do, you can do pro bono work or do things for free because you want to and you can grow your visual vocabulary and really do things that can elevate the profession, which I think is the goal. What year did you join? 1991.

It's been a good run. 32 years. Incredible. And how do new partners join? Did they get invited? Is that how it works? Yeah. Yeah, you are. Generally, we know. You know, like you're watching other people's work. And then you might meet them socially because you're at a design conference and you sit down and say,

gee, this is a terrific person. Their work is great. They'd be a good asset to the organization. Sometimes that somebody you've just worked with on a project and you've collaborated for some reason or another, they bring a special talent like a product designer would or they were the star of the New York Times being the art director of the magazine, like our newest partner Matt Willie was. You know them a little bit socially and you know who they are and if you like them and they want to join, that's how that happens.

Nice. And is the partnership mainly financial or is there any crossover creatively? Can you ask one of the partners that you think is particularly good at one style of something that's different than your taste and to be involved in something that you're working on or to give you an opinion? Do you ever do that? Is there crossover? Yeah, there's a lot of it. I mean, there's some, my partner, Luke Kamin and Emily Obramon, serving, I guess, as our director and designer. I've been doing Netflix for magazine for

months and months and then they collaborate on an ongoing project. I've collaborated usually across disciplines, like somebody who doesn't do what I do, you know, like I'll collaborate with a product designer or I collaborated with my partner Abbott Miller on some exhibition designs where we are talents really complemented each other. But I'll tell you, graphic design, like picking typefaces and that stuff's very personal, that's really hard. You know, there are sort of areas where you do it very I think easily in other areas where you don't.

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Back to record design from you designed album covers. And then we've gone by the time the CD came in or were you still doing CDs? I left when the CD came in. I thought I'd better do book jackets. They were bigger. I'm serious. I really. I don't want to design these little things. It's funny. We went from 12 inch oven covers to five inch CD squares to now a thumbnail. And it seems like there's an opportunity that no one has yet done. I'm still waiting for it where we went from this physical object that had to be a certain size. So that was the limitation and that limitation got smaller. But now in the digital world, we have endless space.

But it seems like we're just still doing a thumbnail. It's odd that no one has decided to create the world that's the moving visual images, whatever it is, for the collection. Well, I think that's not that difficult to do if you think about it. I mean, it may be that you download, you know, a movie with it or you download some kind of film or something that you can either project or that you can, you know, that you can look out on your TV. I mean,

what I've noticed is there's a lot of, there's a lot of record covers that are back. And it's because people seem to love vinyl. And I think part of the experience of vinyl was when you got the new album, you held it and you looked at it and you read the liner notes and you had this other point of relationship so you could really absorb it. But, you know, I have my record collection on my iPhone and I drive my car when my albums come up and I see my little cover and I'm still happy. I'm still in the little cover on the screen of the car. When you work for a legacy brand like New York Times or Coca-Cola or

Saxifab and you're one of those big companies and you're refreshing what they do. How much obligation is there to stick with what's familiar and how far can you go in terms of making it new? There's a lot of tweaking going on. The reason most people change a brand totally is something really bad happened. Either there was some kind of corporate malfeans or they made a product that was a failure or they're trying to change their image. And that's when you may be hired to do something like that, which is really rare. In the magazine industry, all magazines will change their logo right before they folded.

You know, they were sort of, they were last ditch effort to save the thing and then it would go down. A company that's evolving will sometimes tweak their logo to make it look more contemporary. Like, if you look at Michael Beirut's work for Sax 5th Avenue when he first did it, he got rid of a lot of the very flared stuff but stayed with the script because that was inherent in what the company looked like. And they've changed his identity. Since he did it, I think probably about 15 years ago, or 10 years ago, I can't remember how long.

And they went to something even simpler, so that there was this evolution down and it still looks very contemporary. The thing is that you want it to be recognizable. I don't think the public recognizes on a regular basis these kinds of tweaks. Sometimes if it's radical, it's not a tweak, but they accept them and they recognize the company because you don't want to lose that recognizable. If you change something drastically, it usually means the products changed. The ownership changed,

the management changed. Things can really elevate their identity by doing that, you know, tweaking something to a way that you think it's the same thing, but it's not, but it looks more expensive. I mean, that's actually the thing that usually is happening, or more fashionable, or more hip, or more whatever it needs to be to work in its milieu. I believe it was part of Michael Bayroot's work with Saks. The thing that blew my mind was he took the new logo and he cut it into squares and then rearranged the squares so that he couldn't actually read it. But the curves of the letters were so familiar that just by seeing a postage stamp center, you knew what it was.

And it was, I thought it was brilliant. Beautiful. The, the, the new management came and they got rid of it. Wow. Because they actually found it, I think, challenging. You know, that it has to do with the sensibility of the president of the company and what they're willing to accept. He did all the packaging with it. It was astounding, really, really wonderful system because you could recognize it and yet it was modular

and you could move it, you could put it, you could make it large, you could make a small, you could make ad campaigns with it, it totally worked. And then somebody just changed it. When you start a new project, come much research do you do in advance? Sometimes I do, you know, a lot of research online to see what they are, see what their competitors are. And there's also a, we have a woman, a new business who also gives me some foundation about that. But it's not really, it's not really, that's not really when I'm pitching for the project, when I get the project, where the real research comes from,

is really interviewing and finding out everybody who's working on it and who had a hand in it and what the history is, and most importantly, what the politics are. The politics of the organization and how decisions are made is going to affect the way you handle and do the job. There's no way around it because you have to know who the key decision maker is and how to begin to organize how you're going to show and explain work to them.

And if you're working bottom up, it's a disaster. You want to get to the ultimate decision maker first and work the other way around. Otherwise, you're going to be doing the thing two, three, four, five times, and not necessarily making it better. So that's, that to me is, what do they do? What do they want to do? Where do they want it to go?

And who is the ultimate decision maker? Those are the things I have to know the most of. And then things like manufacturing and other stuff that are more technical and executional, which are never political really. Have you ever pitched just one idea, or is it always multiples? I have, and sometimes,

so I have to be just absolutely sure that's gonna work. What I do is I have a philosophy. I always show three. And I want to show, I have to determine when I show that I do more than three, but I have to determine that I'd be happy with any one of these that they take, because I don't want to be designing something I don't respect.

So I will generally show one that is pushing a boundary and could be a little scary. One that is more classic to the areas in maybe more expected but done better. And one that's somewhere between the two. And I find that inevitably nobody picks the middle one. They pick one end or the other. Very rare that they pick the middle one. Interesting. I'm taking that as a good, I think that's a good sign, some reason. That feels like a good, that sounds like good news. I have, I have different strings of luck. Right, right now now, there are a bunch of identities that I really am incredibly pleased with. After doing this all these years, it's hard for me to think, oh, this is better than

other work I've done, but they are. And I think some of it is that the level, either the level of client is better, the level of taste of execution is going up. When a client comes in, is it ever, here's a new product, we don't even know what the company is called. Give us a name and make a design, or is it always, this is what we're called and you make the visual for it. I think I've been involved in naming processes and it's usually in doing the logo.

So sometimes we hire consultants who are purely naming consultants because you got to do a lot of research with that. So we'll come in with a list of names. I've never had a lot of success with that, to be honest with you. Most people make up their own name and they do a better job with Shake Shack was Danny Myers' idea. He had that idea. He had that idea.

He'd been wanting to do it for years and that was his idea. It was a great name absolutely great name the naming thing is Is good because it protects you from a lot of competition and I would say Probably the name is a consideration on 50% of the startups How have clients changed since you started till now? Tell me about the people who were the clients. Expectations. I'll tell you what has changed.

Time. When I go back to the record industry, we were working with very limited technology, you know, that I would produce a record with the recording artist and to figure out what the cover would be, would be a period of maybe two weeks, not more than that really, because you wanted to get the album to the printer, so it could be released on the schedule. So it meant that you would sort of decide in one or two meetings, and then you would set up a Photoshop or make up for hair. You get an illustrator to do the project, or you would design the typography, or whatever you would do, and they would come in, and they generally made some comments,

and you might do some iterations to it. And then you would type-set it. And then when you type-set it, it would go out to a typ house, and it would come back, and it would be these pieces of paper that you had to rubber cement down on a board that was called a mechanical. And the mechanical was the blueprint for making the album cover. And sometimes you always had a proof reader read the copy, and then the proofreader would find errors in the copy, and there wouldn't be enough time to reset the type. So you would cut in things like exclamation points or commas or things that were left out by hand, and they would be put into the

thing, and then they would be photographed and color separated, and that would come out, and that would be the album cover. Now, I would say a process of that would take maybe close to a month with the sort of trial and error of the cover and then setting the type and getting the thing out. All of that time, except for the meetings with the client who is usually the recording artist, was production time. Now we have all this equipment. We have all these fantastic computers and things. We can show things and demonstrate things.

We can do retouching. They've got Photoshop on the thing. We can set the type instantaneously if the type is all the wrong copy. You can replace it in five seconds. But the things take even more time than they did back in the record days. And what do you think is taking up all that time? Clients, making changes, people's opinion, people come in. They don't read, they don't give you the right copy.

They're lazy. They didn't do the thing. They had seven people look at it, and they sent you the wrong thing. Or you had a whole meeting, and you had gone through every single piece of whatever it is you're designing on the identity, and you show show them and then they decide, oh no, no, we don't want to do that color, we're going to change it to this, we've got to see it

this way, and you do the whole thing over again. And they never seem to run out of time. And because you have the equipment and they know you can make the change, why not? I went up to Sony records, I think maybe it was 15 years ago, about something or other. And Sony, which used to be CBS records. Now, CBS records is now Sony records. You're a company. It's now Sony records.

My old company, I went up there, as a matter of fact, they call me all the time because they get calls still for permissions to use some record recording artist art. And they don't, I think they've assigned me the copyright because they don't know where, you know, they bought the company, but they didn't actually buy the art and they don't want to deal with it. So that's going on. But I went up there about something else. And there were a hundred people working in the department. And when I was in the department, we made record covers. We made eight track tapes. We made cassettes. Sometimes they were operas with the libretto's. And the department that I worked in,

what I personally was responsible for, was about 150 covers a year. And some of them came in from Nashville. I didn't design them all, but I designed a lot of them. And there were 35 people in our department in total. And a lot of them. And there were 35 people in our department and total. And a lot of them were in the mechanical room and they're the people that cut out the little commas and stuck them on that, you know, et cetera. So I asked the art director at Sony, I saw this big department and I said,

how many covers do you guys produce a year? And he says about 150. And I said, we have 100 people working here. I said, what do you do with the extra time? I needed to know what I was talking about. And then I realized they're making changes. Yeah, amazing. Tell me about your relationship with typography. I think we moved from a verbal language to a visual language. And I think that people recognize type without reading it, that they can recognize a brand without reading the name of the brand, and that it signifies something that they attach to it.

I think that's so much what Nike helped us do in that absolutely brilliant 30-year campaign, widened Kennedy did. And it was progressive, but the computer did it as well, because they started to have to recognize typefaces. Like before, people didn't know what a typeface was, they thought it was the lettering. Oh, they didn't even say lettering.

Oh, that's like the alphabet, or they didn't know it had a name, or that there was a serif one and a sand serif one and all of those things. Now they know all of that. And that it means that you can shorthand communication in a way you couldn't do before. And you can also abstract it. Most of the work I do now has a lot of animation. They're digital signboards

outside. I do the public theater in New York City every year and now it's all digital in the subways, even though they're still the posters. It's digital on the street. These things move. People recognize it. It's type and motion. And I'm amazed at what people see and how they know it, what they can understand. Tell me the difference between something still and something moving. When something is still, it's easier for you to recognize the form of it.

But once you recognize the form of it, you can stretch it and you can turn it at different angles. If you go to our website and you look at landmark theaters, you'll see that we did the logo for it as this L that's dimensional, the strong and line. And then when we begin to use it with movie graphics inside, you know, like the person who's in the movie, the star who's in the movie, or some image from the movie, were changing the angle and distorting it. And you begin to read it both as an L and as this other moving object, but you understand the object in motion. I don't think people were capable of doing that maybe 30 years ago, because it wasn't common enough. I mean, there are always motion graphics in movie titles, but they weren't as daily and as predominant

as the kind of motion graphics that exists, say, on Instagram. The people are looking at their iPhone every minute and seeing that stuff. So I think that that's a huge change in visual understanding. That's why I think people recognize type and they don't really need to read it. Unless, of course, you're reading an article. I'm not talking about text type.

I'm talking about things that are communicating a place or a service or something you need or want. That kind of telegraphing of information. You can recognize color and form on a sign that might be a gas station without actually reading it. You don't do that anymore. You recognize. Tell me about how you came to work with the public theater.

This was really right around the time I joined Pentagram. I had, there was a book that came out called New York Design. And before Pentegrin, I had my own business called Copel and Share. And I had bought pages to promote Copel and Share in this book called Graphic Design New York. And I had done it before I was asked to join Pentegrin. So the pages were stood, and my work was in this book. And I had posters in it. And there was a trust Elvis poster,

which is sort of a classic now. And then there was a poster for a printing company called Ambassador Arts, which is the big A, was this thing I did that was a cut up A that was put together with Xeroxes. And they were side by side in the book. And George Wolff, who was the director of the theater, saw it. But he wanted to change the graphics of the public because they had been these classic

Paul Davis posters for years, highly recognizable, but he wanted to cleanse the palette. So he changed the identity. The public theater didn't have an identity, then did not have a graphic design identity, didn't have a logo for the identity. Public theatre didn't have an identity. They did not have a graphic design identity. They didn't have a logo for the place. It was known as the New York Shakespeare Festival or the Joseph Pat Public Theatre, but it was never called the public. And that's what we actually did with it and changed sort of the spirit of the theatre. And it became very New York, very loud and proud. And I've been doing it for 29 years. Amazing. When I lived in New York, it was always loud and proud. I lived down not far.

And you really felt the feeling of, this is something special. Just based on, I've never been it. I never went in. But just based on your work, it was ubiquitous in my life and felt substantial. That's branding. That's what that part is.

It's graphic design branding. The thing is that the product matched it. I mean, they have been the inventor of so many terrific plays and writers and things that have gone to Broadway, I mean, there's Hamilton or bringing the noise, bringing the funk or, you know, hair back in the day. I mean, that's the basis of the theater and they should be loud and proud. They are. What sector of business do you think has the best design? Where do you see the best design

in the world? Oh, that's a great question. I think there are fashion brands that have done incredible things and it really set standards and I really admire what Burberry did recently by taking their classic brand that was tired and sort of fussy and then flipping it around so it looks as cool as can be. I mean, I just love that. I thought that Louis Vuitton, there's stores and the sort of the embrace of the pattern that they already had, fantastic.

And I think that there has been a trend in fashion branding where good old fashion graphic design has pushed, pushed these brands forward in a way that I never saw before, like the Spanish brand. I think they're Spanish or French, I'm not sure. Le way, they do you know this brand? I mean, their stuff is so beautiful, it's so well branded and it's graphic design in the purist form. So I think that's very terrific. And I wish it was in more mainstream brands that are sold in Target. I wish that that would happen as well.

And I don't see that. At first, I thought Target was terrific because it was a cheap brand that made itself fun. But it seems to have fallen into kind of a, just a discount store category. And it really should come back up. The tech industry is very erratic. I think that Apple is sensational and that was, you know, it began with Steve Jobs and

it seems to have been channeled into the company in their attitude about their packaging, their advertising, and their product. I mean, I just think that their stupendous that way. Microsoft Lesso and they were my client. And some of that is, it's the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that Steve Jobs thought he was a Titan

and he was an autocrat and he ruled and it was top down and it works, top down does work if you've got sort of obedient forces, but there's a downside to it if you leave or if the company rebels. Gates believed that his business ran better if the engineers who designed the products ran the individual areas. So that when I worked for them doing Windows 8, there seemed to be like kind of anarchy in that. And so when I worked for them, I started trying to create a system that would make things

be collective, which worked a bit. Like the Microsoft logo itself comes from the center of this diagram I did that had to do with the relationships of products so that Windows 8 was they had this curvy logo with four boxes and what it did is it put it into perspective because it was off this perspective chart and all the other icons were drawn off of that with the Microsoft logo and the window being flat. And that actually took force, but they didn't do the other logos that I drew. Just because they don't, you know, they don't talk to each other. No, it's amazing how that accidentally becomes because it sounds like it wasn't, you didn't

set out to design that part of the design. You, you, you found it within the design. You found it within the design. Well, it was funny. When I went there, they had a logo that was in the colors of the Microsoft logo. It was curvy, if you remember. What the windows logo looked like, it had evolved originally. I have somewhere I have this chart of all the Microsoft logos.

And the Windows logo, the first Windows logo was an eccentric window. It was linear and it had pains that were uneven. Then somebody said, wait a minute, it's gotta be in motion. This looks like it's too static. So they sort of made it an angle. But the angle curved, then they bit mapped it. So they had like bit bit maps in it. Then they had this thing that looked like a flag.

It had four four logos. It was sort of an angle, but it was a curvy angle. Like it was a waiting flag. And when I met with him the first time, I said, well, your name is Windows. Why are you a flag? You know, I can be I didn't understand the thing. So that's when I thought that they didn't mean to make a flag. I thought what they were really drawing badly was a window in perspective because what windows is as a piece of software is an ability for you to see. You see through the window. And that's an appropriate name for that product and that the difference between Apple and Microsoft as companies is Apple is top down and Windows is your own perspective. So that it made sense to put the window and

perspective. And that's why I did the chart. and that was the whole invention of that thing. They changed for Windows 12, and they sort of brought back this very dimensional thing that moves that has light coming through it, and it's very strange. It was like fine. I think it was fine. I think they should have just left it alone. But it's still around in its own way. And the center is the logo. I don't know who actually made that the logo because I was long out of there. I think I designed that in...

I got 2014, 2012, something like that. I'm asking you this question as a partner in Pentagram. How do different designers approach the same project? You can use examples if you want. But think about how would the different people come to find a way and to solve a problem, and how different would the results be? We all have our own style, and that there's the part of the process that is getting the client to learn how

to see that you have to, to learn how to see, that you have to, before you can even work, you sort of have to set the stage for what's plausible when they explain what they think they need. And sometimes they think they need something and they actually need something else. So you have that analytical part of dialogue.

Michael Beirut can talk anybody into anything. He's also, he's just a great salesman in the nicest sort of way. And he makes sports analogies. And he sort of brings things into a language that his clients understand. I could never do explain things the way he explains things. So I would act more like a school teacher, and I sort of would show them things and explain why one thing works and one thing doesn't, which is not as compelling I think as what he does, but I do it in the most compelling way that I can.

And then I think there are two very distinct ways of doing it, and everybody else is somewhere in the middle. And they're all connected to their own personality and the way they want to explain things to clients. Like for example, my partner Natasha Jen is very analytical and very organized and she always makes like these very succinct diagrams that explain things to people very clearly where I would be uncomfortable doing that because my mind doesn't work that way. And you have to find your individual basis of doing that.

Then sometimes if you partner with somebody you may be doing it collectively. Also, I do another form of work, which is environmental graphics, which is over their projects that take a long period of time and don't require the same kind of explaining and selling because they're in an industry that is more about building. In fact, they're more about craft in many ways. They're more like the way we did record covers. You know, that if you persuade somebody to looking, it's looking at something and they think they want to make it and they, and you cost it out and they find out they can make it, it make to take four years to build, but it looks exactly like the Photoshop rendering you showed them. Whereas when you do a piece of graphic design, you might start out with something

and it comes out totally different at the end because of the client relationship. Give me an example of environmental design. Okay, you've seen the public theater. Yeah. There's that you've seen the building. There's the outside of the building and the inside of the building. There are graphics all over the place and they're built into the walls and they're the logos of the place and there are objects there and there's an awning that comes out and there's a big word public on the top of the awning and it signs. It signs and spaces. And in New York City I've done Symphony Space which has sort of complicated graphics, new 42nd Street studio. There are a lot of them in different places. And they exist in the insides of lobbies of buildings.

There's a teratsa floor that I designed that's in a hotel in Fort Waterdale, that's 8,000 feet, and it's a map of Fort Waterdale, and you walk over it and stuff like that. That's part of the genre. What is the relationship between design and architecture in general? Well, architects tend to be my clients. It really depends upon how you're brought into the project.

I met Jim Polshek, who owned a design firm. It was Polshek Partners that has changed its name to any ad later when he became old and was retiring. And they're an architecture firm that do a lot of wonderful things like museums, they did the Museum of the Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. That was probably the first big building I signed. And I met Jim and the lobby at the public theater many years ago, and this was before

we did the major renovation of the lobby, but he had to put up something quickly because George Wolfe had hired him at the same time where he was there at the same time I was doing the new graphics. And he saw them and he liked them because they were sort of constructivist. And he likes that period. And he says, I know, let's just cover the place with this stuff. And we sort of hung things on the wall and made banners. And that was the first time I was an environmental graphic designer.

So that's, you know, it happens in connection to a place because it's part of the personality of it. And it's very exciting work. It just takes really long. Tell me about the maps. long. Tell me about the maps. For a long time I did these kind of sarcastic and fractured paintings of information that were small, that I did for New York Times pieces, like I made a diagram of a blog thread, or I did a some kind of information about Bill Clinton's, I don't know, whatever was going on with him at the time,

you know, the Monica Winsky stuff, and his America and who supported him who didn't. And they were political, and I got used to do it in newspapers. And somewhere, I think around 1998, I think it was when I started working for Citibank and I was really just doing straight corporate work for like a period of about six years with some other work that was more interesting. I thought, you know, maybe that stuff that I paint, the little

things that I paint for the newspapers would be good if it was really big. So I did a painting of the world. I went up to, we have a house in Salisbury, Connecticut and their space. I unrolled some canvas and I painted the world. I put all this information and it looked, then it was, I painted the world in accurately and left things out and didn't care and wrote my version of everything. That was my painting.

Then I began to do them Meeven Bigger. And as I was doing them, I thought, well, maybe this is really a thing. Then I had a friend who had a gallery, and he told me to bring my paintings in and show it to the gallery, which I did, and they gave me a show. And it was a success.

So I've been doing it ever since. We make prints of the paintings, and we sell the prints as well as the paintings. And recently I was commissioned to paint a whole Porsche, a 1977 Porsche. And it's covered, it's a United States map. It's the sort of upside down going around the car because I One side of the car is you know the Canadian border and the other side of the car goes down to the bottom of Texas so it's sort of wrapping it and It's in an exhibit. I'm having I actually in Munich in a museum called Pina Cotec

initially in Munich in a museum called Pina Cotec Moderne, and it's all my typography, including the car. Incredible. Are you going? Yep. Beautiful. You talked about the size of the pieces getting bigger. Talk about the size of art and why size impacts our relationship to the pieces that we see. That's a really interesting question. I'm not quite sure how it works. I mean, the thing is that

I know what happened with my own paintings is that people seem to marvel at the scale of the of the the painting and relationship to the density of the information. And the thing is that the information is often, you know, it's mostly inaccurate. I mean, I saw somebody, there was a giant painting idea of the United States. It was a Cooper Hewitt for about six months. And there were two men, I walked in one day, and there were two men describing a road trip they took, and they were sort of navigating themselves across the country on a road that was in the wrong spot. You know, and it was sort of, you know, it wasn't deliberately in the wrong spot, I just messed up.

They're sort of right. The information is sort of right because it's generally correct. It wasn't like I was drawing a road from Taiwan in the middle of the United States. It was just that I had a wrong route number on it. There was probably the road he took, but not the route number. They're poetic, man. They're opinionated also. And yeah, that was probably the road he took, but not the route number. Their poetic maps. They're opinionated also. They're very political mostly.

And I get my frustrations out that way. I had done a map that was completely low. I had the last, the last total show I had where I was doing one thing throughout. It was really repainting the United States a million times with all kinds of demographic information. And I am very politically obsessed. I am a news junkie, and I am really interested in how Americans think, and what their value structures are, which I don't understand anymore, And I keep trying to find some commonality, but I find that just different parts of the nation

are really, really different when you do the research. And it is, how we're one nation is, I guess that's why there's Europe. And maybe that's how that happened. Maybe the United States is where Europe was when it all became different city states. I don't know. Could be.

How has your relationship to design changed over the course of your life? I started out not knowing what being a designer meant. And I learned it on the job. And I began to find my own method of communicating and building on a language that I see people respond to and use. And I love it all. I have to say, I love the things that I do that are personal, but I also love the things that I do that are really public.

I never tire of finding out somebody saw something or was influenced by something or that it was out there and that I could make that happen. And I think we're all very lucky when we can do those things. It's amazing that we get to make creative things and people like them and it ends up being our job. It's wild. It's a wild that

the world works the way it does. No, I think the notion to be able to love what you do is so fantastic. So many people don't. And I find that I appreciate it more as I get older and find myself not feeling like I'm repeating myself and not feeling anything but kind of limber in it. And that's great. Great. How important is it to break new ground and create something new? How important is newness?

I think newness is relative. You know, there are no real, I'm trying to think of like the last great originator. You're not like, I think Vincent Manco made something that nobody was making. That's new. I don't think we, I think it's very difficult to do that now because there's so much. What I do think is that you move things forward and you make discoveries usually through mistakes

that you're doing something and you've made a terrible mistake and you stop and then you realize there's a possibility and then you can then you can play with it and move it forward and sometimes you stretch a form. And that's really what I'm always trying to do is stretch the form. That's an interesting thing about mistakes and accepting mistakes. Some people's egos wouldn't allow the mistake

to be the good thing. So we have to be really open-minded to accept the mistake to be the good thing. So we have to be really open-minded to accept the mistake as better than what we were trying to do. Do you think that's hard for people really? Well, I think there are some people who, if it doesn't feel like it's coming, they have the idea. For some people it's more intellectual. They have the idea and they want to execute the idea. And anything that gets in the way of executing that idea

is not good. Well, that's actually self-defeated. I remember my... We're in the same boat. Years ago, Michael Beirut said to me, he was working on something and he said, I have this really idea, but I can't get it to work. And I sort of looked at it and I said, maybe it's not a good idea.

I mean, that's sometimes you think you do, but that actually is not, it's not going to work for you because there's probably something fundamentally wrong with the thinking in it. It's creating an impossibility that's either going to be too difficult. I mean, in the end, I think all our best work actually should seem so easy because that's the hard part of making it almost as if it happened itself. Exactly. It should have designed itself.

Tell me about timely work versus timeless work. Everything is done in its own time. I mean, you can't. There are things that never change. There are things that never change. There are principles that never change. Usually, if something isn't working, it's because the scale relationships aren't right. There's a kind of a dynamism that's existed as long as people have been pushing paint on paper

or making anything in some form. Because it's the relationship. If you do something that's very extreme or something that's very withheld and quiet, they're going to work, it's the middle of the bed place. You were part of the design commission for New York for a period of time. What's that like? It's amazing that it exists, I'm happy that it exists. What were the kind of things that you guys would do? It was, actually, this was Bloomberg changed the name of it, it used to be called the Art Commission,

he changed the Design Commission, and it used to be a commission that was not run by professionals. It was sort of contributors to political campaigns that got appointed to give somebody a nice position in New York City. Theoretically, the role of the committee, and it's called a commission, I was commissioned or share for six years, so I like being working. Why not? There's another side bar. If not you. James Paul Schick invited me to be on the commission. He was the head of the commission. And it was, there was a wonderful engineer named Geen Nordsman, another wonderful fine artist named Brian Kin, Signi Nielsen, a landscape architect was on the commission.

And we were all design professionals. And our job was to look at new buildings and renovations and things that were in New York, public land and on public property, and to make sure that these things were designed well and would serve the city. I mean, it was, and Bloomberg was a design mayor. I mean, when I designed the high line, he had just become mayor, and he was the one that made that thing go, which was great, when we were working on the high line back on the day. And we actually, I was working with Robert Hammond and Joshua David, who started a thing, and I did their identity. And then there was a book about it,

and the book needed somebody in politics to sort of sign on it. And they had Martha Stewart, and they had Mike Bloomberg, but they were both sort of business people. And then 9-11 happened, and Bloomberg was elected mayor. And then all-11 happened, and Bloomberg was elected mayor. And then all of a sudden, we pulled the book off, press and put it back, and it was mayor, Mike Bloomberg, and he'd endorsed the thing, and then all of a sudden, all city government began moving to make this thing become a real thing.

So beautiful. And he did so much incredible work with parks. He appointed a great parks commissioner and her name is Betsy Smith and she's now at the Central Park Conservancy and they really were rebuilding parks all over the city. And the design commission was there to look at things like that and also things like bus shelters and at that point in time the new bus shelters were developed. And the goal was that New York was full of terrific designers and architects and they should be getting the jobs and they should be doing the work

and the work should be enhancing and pulling up New York. So that we would sit, we would go down, there would be about three hour sessions for morning once a week. And the people who were working on the projects and the city agencies that were supporting them would come and they would present to the design commission. And it was our job to approve or to recommend and then approve or to try to help these things get better and move through the city. It wasn't about necessarily saving money. It was really about the design

of these things. And it was really, really interesting. And I think I was lucky because the commission was so terrific. And we, I think we did a lot to, to make things better. Sounds beautiful. I'm happy you got to do that. It's great. It was great. It was fun. We haven't spoke since the Creative Act was released, and I just want to thank you for helping it be all that it is. And people seem to like it, and the design is working. And I just want to thank you for being so helpful and making something that people seem to resonate with. Well, you know, they were your choices, Rick.

You're really the star of that book. I was just a facilitator, but you made great choices. I mean, it's interesting. It was interesting to me working with you on it because you made choices I would not have made. And you made them from a very different place than I would probably be coming from. I mean, the book is interesting because it's very classical, but it does have a contemporary edge.

And that that's sort of the terrific thing about it. I probably would have gone much more contemporary with it, but it wouldn't have had the richness that was brought to it by the classicism in it. Cool. Well, thank you. And great seeing you as always. Fantastic, thank you, this was fun. Thank you. you