True Tales from Top Creatives 7 Compelling New Book Cover Designs How to Reveal an Authentic Brand Story

Propaganda: The Art of Lying

PRINTMAG.COM 67.5 OCTOBER 2013

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09281 01776
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Cover artist Wendy MacNaughton created this useful infographic that identifies elements of every story ever told.

Storytelling Issue
a g r e at st o ry is the heart and soul of all outstanding graphic design work. An authentic narrative is what sets a brand apart from its competitors, even making it beloved. No design project should begin without a thorough exploration of a product or companys back story; the tale you spin will become your clients legacyso it better be a true one. In this issue, we look at storytelling from every angle. We even share personal stories from designers themselves. After all, every successful designer is really a great storyteller at heart. Sarah Whitman Cover design by Wendy MacNaughton (www.wendymacnaughton.com) Back cover photo courtesy of Shutterstock (www.shutterstock.com) Art direction by Ronson Slagle Wendy MacNaughton is an illustrator and graphic journalist based in San Francisco. Learn more about this issues cover at Printmag.com/October-2013.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

A great product cant be designed without knowing the brands story. Otherwise, what are you designing the product against? Stanley Hainsworth, page 12

36 GRAPHIC CONTENT Every designer has a good story to tell. So we culled 8 intriguing tales from a new book full of essays by graphic designs most celebrated creatives. E D I T E D BY B R I A N S I N G E R 44 C O V E R S TO R I E S Of course, were all judging books by their covers. But how do cover designers tell a story that makes us want to read the one inside? Learn more about the ins and outs of book cover design and get the scoop on 7 brand-new covers. BY M I C H E LLE TAU T E 54 BEHIND THE BRAND How do you find a brands genuine backstory? Kit Hinrichs and Alina Wheeler share their advice and present case studies of successful branding projects. BY M E LI S SA M A Z ZOLE N I

62 I N S I D E S TORY Playful designs pull audiences into the narrative. Read about 3 creatives who have turned interactive storytelling into a contact sport. BY K A R LI P E T ROV I C 70 T H E A RT OF LYI N G The word propaganda is nearly synonymous with lying. Here, we examine 5 works that are steeped in subversive storytelling. BY S T E V E N H E LLE R 76 R E F LE CT I O N S O N A PUDDL E A visual essay by Debbie Millman, one of the industrys most notable storytellers. BY D E B B I E M I LLM A N

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
UP FRONT 9 GRIDS+GUIDES Wine barrels become art; designers give advice; an exhibition walks you through a story; and tattoo artists with graffiti style inspire a book. Plus: an update on an Iranian culture magazine. 1 2 INTERVIEW Storytelling guru Stanley Hainsworth shares his secrets for creating brand narratives that people connect with. 1 4 EVOLUTION Todays stock photos have their roots in 16th century engravings and 19th century cuts that were popularized by printers. IN BACK 8 3 REVIEWS Debbie Millman on Chip Kidds new book aimed to teach children about graphic design; Rachel Swaby on a new interactive game that elicits both a competitive and emotional response; Claire Lui on Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilberts latest book cover; and Douglas Wolk with the story behind Eleanor Friedbergers Personal Record album. 8 8 THE LAST WORD Seymour Chwast signs off with Oscar Wilde.
OCTOBER 2013 67.5 PRINTMAG.COM

EDITOR Sarah Whitman ART DIRECTOR Ronson Slagle ASSOCIATE EDITOR Melissa Mazzoleni ASSOCIATE EDITOR Karli Petrovic CONTRIBUTORS Seymour Chwast, Stephen Coles, Paul Ford, Steven Heller, Allison Kerek, Jeremy Lehrer, Claire Lui, Wendy MacNaughton, Debbie Millman, Rick Poynor, Paul Shaw, Brian Singer, Rachel Swaby, Michelle Taute, Douglas Wolk F+W MEDIA CHAIRMAN & CEO David Nussbaum CFO & COO James Ogle PRESIDENT David Blansfield CDO Chad Phelps SVP, MANUFACTURING Phil Graham VP, ADVERTISING SALES Dave Davel VP, COMMUNICATIONS Stacie Berger F+W MEDIA DESIGN COMMUNITY GROUP PUBLISHER Gary Lynch CONTENT DIRECTOR Bridgid McCarren

Disneys epic storytelling extends into their advertising and marketing with the work of their Yellow Shoes creative agency.

SENIOR/ONLINE EDITOR Jessica Kuhn INTERACTIVE CONTENT DIRECTOR Erin Prus GROUP SHOW DIRECTOR Beth Dean EVENTS MANAGER Heather Griffin

COLUMNS
16 INTERACTION Why do users flock to monomedia websites like Pinterest? Turns out, constraints are actually a good thing. 18 BEST PRACTICES The vanguard of the environmental movement is not in renewable energy or zero waste: Its in storytelling. 22 DIALOGUE Will Gay, creative director for Disneys Yellow Shoes, shares this beloved brands approach to storytelling. 26 STEREOTYPE Type is usually seen as a service provider, taking a back seat to a texts words and images. But in these unconventional works, type plays a starring role, helping to shape and showcase the stories in a surprising fashion. 34 OBSERVER Many graphic designers dont read comic books or graphic novels. Find out why you should give this medium another look.

ONLINE PRODUCT DIRECTOR Amanda Malek CATEGORY MARKETING MANAGER Corinne Zielke COMPETITIONS MANAGER Tara Johnson ADVERTISING ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Elayne Recupero 267-247-5874 elaynerecupero@gmail.com SALES REPRESENTATIVE Amanda Wild 800-283-0963, ext. 13653 amanda.wild@fwmedia.com AD SALES COORDINATOR Mary Lutz 715-445-4612, ext. 13313 mary.lutz@fwmedia.com

PRINT (ISSN 0032-8510) is published 6 times per year in February, April, June, August, October, and December by F+W Media, 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242. Volume 67, Issue 5. Periodicals postage paid at Cincinnati, OH, and additional mailing offices

EDITORIAL OFFICES 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242 513-531-2690; info@printmag.com www.printmag.com BACK ISSUES MyDesignShop.com SUBSCRIBERS Send subscription orders and inquiries to: PRINT, P.O. Box 421751, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1751 www.printmag.com; 877-860-9145 (US & CAN) ; 386-246-3361 (International) SUBSCRIPTION RATES U.S., $57 for one year, $114 for two years; outside the U.S., $72 for one year. FOR NEWSSTAND SALES Scott T. Hill; scott.hill@procirc.com FOR INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS Outside North America: Bernard Bruil, Bruil & Van De Staaij Postbus 75, 7940 AB Meppel, Holland phone: 31 522 261 303; fax: 31 522 257 827; bruilvds@wxs.nl ATTENTION, RETAILERS To carry PRINT in your store, contact: Curtis Circulation Company 730 River Road, New Milford, NJ 07646 phone: (201) 634-7400; fax: (201) 634-7499. POSTMASTER Send address changes to: PRINT, P.O. Box 421751, Palm Coast, FL 32142 Printed in the U.S.A. PRIVACY PROMISE Occasionally we make portions of our customer list available to other companies so they may contact you about products and services that may be of interest to you. If you prefer we withhold your name, simply send a note with the magazine name to: List Manager, F+W Media, 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242. Copyright 2013 by F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Print is a registered trademark of F+W Media. TWITTER.COM/PRINTMAG FACEBOOK.COM/PRINTMAG

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PRINTMAG.COM Wine barrels become art; designers give advice; an exhibition walks you through a story; and tattoos artists with graffiti style inspire a book. Plus: An update on an Iranian culture magazine. by Melissa Mazzoleni

GRIDS+GUIDES

BARRIQUE REVIVAL

The eco-friendly, one-of-a-kind furniture and home dcor in the Barrique Third Life of Wood Project caught our attention with gorgeous designs and a socially conscious backstory. Alongside the young adults at San Patrignano, Europes largest drug rehabilitation center, more than 30 designers and architects designed these limitededition, luxurious pieces out of reclaimed 230-liter wine casks. The project gives new life to the French oak barriques and the patients who learn the artisan trade of wood working, making the designers visions a reality. The pieces in this project transform a simple piece of wood into a beautiful work of design to symbolize the rebirth and rehabilitation of our members within the community, says Marco Stefanini, head of carpentry at San Patrignano. The Barrique Third Life of Wood project toured the U.S. this summer, with a final stop at the Museum of Design Atlanta in October. Each handmade, repurposed wood project, such as Angela Missonis Miss Dondola, shows that fresh starts are a beautiful thing. www.barrique.sanpatrignano.org/en

Clockwise from top: Miss Dondola designed by Angela Missoni; Dogadoga designed by Claudio Bellini; Doga [Stave] designed by Michele De Lucchi

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GRIDS+GUIDES
IMMERSED IN ILLUSTRATION
the multidimensional exhibition titled Memory Palace at the V&A Porter Gallery in London, lets visitors physically stroll through a dystopian story. As part of the Sky Arts Ignition seriesan initiative to fund innovative art and exhibitions20 artists created their 2D and 3D interpretations of fiction writer Hari Kunzrus new work. The tale is written in short passages and fragments from the perspective of one prisoner determined to preserve memories in a futuristic London where technology and knowledge have been lost due to a collapse of the global information infrastructure and books or any forms of remembering are banned. International graphic designers, typographers and illustrators retell the narrative from various viewpoints, creating distinctive experiences and expanding upon the original story. Memory Palace is a physically immersive illustrated story that explores a new reading format at a time when concepts of publishing are rapidly changing, say co-curators Laurie Britton Newell and Ligaya Salazar. The broad selection of contributors demonstrates the exceptionally diverse and expanding worlds of contemporary graphic design and illustration. www.vam.ac.uk
T H E D E S I G N E R S AY S T H E D E S I G N E R S AY S

T H E D E S I G N E R S AY S

T H E D E S I G N E R S AY S

Im trying to find a way of working which reduces the number of layers of assholes between me and the public.
Tibor Kalman ( 1 94999 )

MOST PEOPLE HAVE SOMETHING POSITIVE TO OFFER, EVEN IF IT IS TOTAL RESISTANCE.

Andrew Blauvelt ( 19 6 4 )

If there is something in common about my books, it is the roughness; they are all unrefined. Very often there is something wrong with them.
Irma Boom ( 19 60 )

I LIKE UGLY, RAW WORK.

Barbara deWilde ( 1 96 2 )

DESIGNER CHATS
If youre in a rut, questioning your life choices or just want an engaging read, crack open The Designer Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom (Princeton Architectural Press) for the salient advice, opinions and wisdom from more than 100 contemporary and historic designers. This compendium consists of attractive spreads that pair two designers quotes side-by-side to create mini-conversations that will encourage you on one page and make you snicker at the candor on the next. Sometimes a designer from the 19th century is conversing with one working today, or two contemporaries have the chance to exchange their views on typography, managing clients, honoring mentors, nurturing talent or any number of practical and professional topics, says editor Sara Bader. The back-and-forth creates self-contained dialogues that only exist within the pages of this book. Without resorting to platitudes, The Designer Says speaks to a wide range of topics beyond graphic design. While the book definitely celebrates graphic design, there are also schooloflife messages for all of us, Bader says. She points to a quote by Paula Scher that reminds us to avoid complacency: You cant do the same thing for five years. You have to get rid of it. It doesnt matter anymore. Just let it go, even if its your signature. Even if everybody expects you to do it. Try to find another way to walk. Wise words. www.papress.com

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BODY OF WORK
Since last year, the Print team has been eagerly awaiting the next issue of B|taarof: A Magazine for Iranian Culture, Arts & Histories. The first of its kind to be printed in English, B|taarof recently released its second issue, focused on the theme of The Body. And this issue is as engaging as the first with personal essays, interviews and Haniyeh Nikoos photographs of her 90yearold grandmother in the nude. I wanted to create something that is appealing to both the Iranian and American community, says Afsoon Talai, visual arts editor. We incorporated old ads from the 70s, 80s and 90s to create a sense of nostalgia for the older Iranian generation. We intermixed modern Persian graphics and fonts within the magazine but only enough to not turn away the non-Iranian readers. Our goal was to create an interesting, vibrant magazine that complements the articles. The design elements and intimate writing made the wait well worth it. www.btaarof.com

INKED WITH STREET STYLE

the defiant art forms of graffiti and tattooing come together in Skin Graf (Prestel Publishing), the first book to document the convergence of these practices. Written by graffiti artist, musician and now tattooist Michael Kaves McLeer and producer/director Billy Burke, Skin Graf explores the unique body art created by graffiti artists who, like Kaves, have traded in spray cans for tattoo guns, bringing their street art style with them. The book is very graphic and features incredible photography by Estevan Oriol and Angela Boatwright, both of whom have always been around subcultures and know how to capture unique images in unique settings, Kaves says. [It] connects the dots between all of these pioneering graffiti artists and features their work on a different type of canvas. These peoples stories havent, to this point, been told in this manner. While both art forms have been around for centuries, Burke adds that this book serves as a physical documentation of this current cultural immersion. With 450 illustrations, Skin Graf shows that these street cultures go handininkedhand. www.randomhouse.de/prestel_eng

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GRIDS+GUIDES/INTERVIEW
TELLING TALES
Storytelling guru Stanley Hainsworth shares his secrets for creating brand narratives that people connect with. by Karli Petrovic

Some people are just naturalborn storytellers. You know, that person who steals the attention at social gatherings, even when regaling the simplest anecdote about a trip to the grocery store. As a designer and CCO of Tether, Stanley Hainsworth has made quite a name for himself by telling great stories. After all, nowadays, brands live and die by the narratives they share with customers. One wrong chapter, and a hero can quickly become the villain. Read on for Hainsworths advice on how to build the right happy ending every time. The Tether website exclaims, We Are The Stories We Tell. What does that message mean to designers today? Designers are problem-solvers. Thats what we do. We identify a problem and then come up with the most efficient and compelling way to solve that problem. But in order to get a consumer to want a product or service, they need to care. And thats where the story side of our job becomes so important. We have amazing creative tools that enable us to create and strengthen emotional connections between a brand and its audience. With these tools we can translate the soul of a brand into a story a rich platform that touches all five senses at every point of contact. How do you determine each clients story? Is there a method

Packaging is the face of a brands story. Many times it is the most direct face to the consumer as they encounter the brand on-shelf. A great product cant be designed without knowing the brands story. Otherwise, what are you designing the product against? The packaging is a physical representation of that brand. It contains all the elementsvoice, color, photography, structural and graphic shapes, etc.. I like to think of a consumers first encounter with a new brand package like a first date. You see it sitting on the shelf as one of many possibilities. But, somehow, that particular package calls out to you theres something about it that intrigues you. It first catches your eye, and you become curious. You pick it up and turn it over in your hand. You like the feel of it. You read the front and like the attitude. As you turn it over and read the back, you decide that you like it enough to consider a first date. And you place it in your cart to buy for a first try. At home, you spend some time with the product. It delivers on the potential that you first hoped when you fondled the package. Next time youre at the store you buy it again, then again. Youve now had enough dates with this brand representative that you decide to make it a part of your life, and it takes a permanent place on your shopping list.

Stanley Hainsworth makes a living uncovering and sharing the stories that cause consumers to fall in love with certain brand products.

You do a lot with packaging design. How can it tell a story?

PH OTO S AN D SC RE E N S HOTS PROV ID E D BY T E TH E R

to figuring out which of a million different stories to tell? Each company has a starting point a person or group with a reason to go into business, whether driven by a passion they had or a need they saw that wasnt being fulfilled. And as no two people are alike, neither is the reason for two companies to start up. We research the founders story and un-archive the brand beginnings as a starting point. Or, if the company is a startup, we help find and create its story.

A brand is like a person. Great brands or memorable brands can be described with characteristics and personality traits. We help these brands define their unique character, and that is the start of the brand story. Even though brands may share a characteristic, say honesty, its the combination of multiple characteristics that makes this brand unique and one-of-a-kind.

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Hainsworth and the Tether team helped Gatorade revamp its story beyond the hydration beverage category to include the G Series, a line of products that helps athletes prepare for, perform and recover from sports activities.

You are known for your ability to craft stories for well-established brands that often already have stories (Starbucks and BMW are great examples). Whats the trick to changing the narrative? How do you know when it is time to do so? As people, we move through life with values and characteristics that stay intact, but we modify many other elements based on the timeshairstyles, clothes, our vernacular, etc. Great brands remain relevant because, in the same way, they have a core story with values and characteristics that endure. But, they are able to remain relevant with the times because they adapt. They dont change who they are, but they modify their tone, their visual appearance, their approach. Gatorade is a great example. They created the hydrationbeverage category but stopped innovating; after 40-plus years, they were still creating only one product. Inevitably, competition began nipping at the heels of the category originator. By looking back at their history, we helped them get inspired about the possibilities of the present and the future. We were able to help them create the G Series in order to broaden their palette of innovation beyond

just hydration. The trick is to update/modify the story before it needs to be done. By being able to read the marketplace and think like the consumer, enduring brands stay relevant today and tomorrow. How has the digital revolution changed the stories you tell through design? The digital age has changed things considerably. Before, brands had a one-to-many relationship, where the brand had a one-way conversation with consumers. Now digital, especially social media, has changed all that. The consumer can now have two-way conversations with brands. This has forced brands to let go of some of the previous control they had. When you let consumers comment on your brand or make suggestions about your offerings, you have to acknowledge their contributions and be responsive. Hence, the stories now told through design are less like a novel that progresses from chapter one to the end (and then put on the shelf for someone to notice and buy) and more participatory. Effective brands are like serial graphic novels where there is a story line but the content is created both by the

author (the brand) and the reader (the consumer). The brand retains the role of editor so that they can help control the path that story takes and make sure it is true to the story line of the brand. In the end, the digital tools we have as designers have broadened the possibilities; now were like kids in a candy store with so many tools for creation and so many new surfaces to tell our stories. In a world where every person, company and brand are creating and sharing stories, how are you able to make your clients stories stand out? For anyone to possibly care about a brand and its story, there has to be an audience. If you write a book or make a movie and no one cares enough to read it or see it, it only exists for the author. The challenge is to create a brand story that is compelling enough to attract a followinga story with enough substance and truth to move beyond a passing fancy. Brands that create an emotional connection with their audiences convert consumers into brand fans, who not only want to develop an ongoing relationship, but also become a companys best brand ambassador.

A good example of this is TATCHA. First of all, Im not only their agency partner, but also a co-owner. The stakes are higher. I have skin in the game and care deeply about what happens to this brand business-wise, not just its design. This is true for all the brands I work on, but when you have a stake in the company, the role of design as solution and business driver is heightened. The founder, Vicky Tsai, brings deep beauty knowledge and business experience, which weve been able to develop into a story that resonates with consumers. We didnt just launch a product we launched a story embodied in a product. The first product we launched, blotting paper, wasnt just paper you use to remove oil from your face. It is a treasured 200-year-old secret of the Geisha, sourced from a small village outside Kyoto from craftsmen who use the paper as backing for pounding gold into thin sheets. By telling stories like these, we imbue the product with value and a story that can be retold by a happy customer, who rewards us with words like, not only the best product but the best presentation ever! I will support you anywhere!

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GRIDS+GUIDES/EVOLUTION

OUT OF STOCK
Todays stock photos have their roots in 16th century engravings and 19th century cuts that were popularized by printers. by Steven Heller

The printers cut or clich is as common in graphic design as yodelling is in the Alps. Yodelling is an oscillating, trill and often polyphonic sound or song that lls the snowcapped mountains with vocal resonance; printers clichs are visual noisessigns, symbols, vignettesthat ll mountains of empty printable space on paper with resonant images. Both tell stories in their respective ways. During the late 19th century, cuts were a popular means of illuminating and illustrating. An individual image may only be the fragment of a tale, but a series of cuts could be made into sequenced narratives. When printing consumers found the right combination of cuts, they probably yodelled with joy. The practice of using pre-made art and design may have begun as early as the 16th century with engravings or stamps used to distinguish artisans bookbindings in the early days of printing. These were one-of-a-kind but, nonetheless, models for printers marks that appeared on inside pages. Most were decorative, including swags and oriated sprays, but eventually representations of birds, dogs, deer and the like appeared. When brought to mass printing, they became clichs, derived from a printing plate cast from moveable metal type. This evolved into the stereotype, the printing term for the form from which a plate was created that made multiple impressions on press. Also known in German as Gebrauchs-Vignetten, stock cuts were common during the late 19th century through the 20th. Whether referred to as clich, vignette, stock, pick-up or clip-art, the fundamental premise is the same: They were produced in multiples on various popular concepts and themessome simple, others not, some benign, others poignantand were an essential part of a printers toolkit, made by either a type foundry or, increasingly

during the early 20th century, by commercial art studios and used by compositors and printers to ll space with an appropriate illumination or illustration. Even a young Paul Rand made them for an outt called Metro Associated Services in New York. Whether an image became a clich was determined by factors like the frequency printing consumers requestedor were anticipated to needparticular themes. Pointing ngers were the most ubiquitous; watch faces, smiling and frowning heads, horses, fruits and vegetable baskets, and funerary iconography were popular, but thousands of other images were produced. The artists routinely did not sign their work, although occasionally a supplier or distributor would emphasize particular artists. The Schriftgiesserei Brder Butter in Dresden, Germany produced a catalog of cuts that featured individual artists (at least their last names), each with a distinct style and narrative focus. Hahnemann Vignetten were marks that were general yet stark graphic logos; Reibentantz Vignetten were more lyrical and orid drawings related to theater and food; Matchy Vignetten were mostly costumed people celebrating things like marriage and Christmas; and Corty Vignetten were bold sports and hunting themes. By the 1920s, cuts came in generic and customized iterations. In addition to the garden variety of standalone symbols, there were comic cuts, symbolic cuts and conceptual cuts, cuts that were impressionistic, expressionistic and cubisticanything that looked good, gave relief to the eye and helped tell a story. Todays pictographs and icons are direct descendants of the clich. In fact, some are direct copies. Stock cuts are never just space-llers. As Rod Stewart rightly acknowledged, Remember, every picture tells a story, dont it?

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IF THE MEDIUM DOESNT EXIST, CREATE IT. With an MFA in Emergent Media from Champlain College, you dont just learn todays media landscape, you dare to imagine and create how it will impact tomorrow. Housed in our dynamic Emergent Media Center, our curriculum is designed to develop your creativity, collaboration, innovation, and passion, while simultaneously putting your skills into practice, creating bold new visions of the future of media. The future of you. Apply now. Contact Marissa George at marissa.george@champlain.edu or call (802) 383-6601. champlain.edu/mfa

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Interaction
But thats a problem: When you can do anything, where do you even begin? Making a social network focused on one type of media makes it easier for the users to get started. Constraints also help dene the very nature of the community. SoundCloud is a great site for people who are into electronic music, and its become one of the places where young electronic musicians release their work. They could post their music on YouTube, which has more users and is equipped to host audio les with an unmoving picture, but doing so wouldnt allow them to create the same kind of community. The fact that SoundCloud is all about music and audio les means something to its users. They all share a fundamental understanding of what a song is. Its tribal, almost, and SoundCloud gives the tribe a territory they can share. Another example worth considering is Tumblr, which Yahoo! recently purchased for $1.1 billion. But wait, you might think, Tumblr is all sorts of media: videos, images and text. Thats true, but when you post to Tumblr, you choose what type of post it is: text, photos, quotes, links, chats, audio or video. The way the post will look and behave depends on your choice. Choosing from these post types makes it very easy for users to understand what they are supposed to do when using Tumblr because they already know what a photo or quote is. Tumblr succeeded in taking constraints that people already understood and mixed them together into a tumblelog or microblog. They didnt invent photos or quotes or even tumblelogs. They just arranged things so that people could work within boundaries and rules that everyone already understood. The end result was something new and valuable that many millions of people now use to communicate and share their experiences. Theres much to learn from these monomedia approaches; the most important lesson is that users understand and even appreciate constraints. As Tumblr shows, people can be taught the difference between a quote, text or audio. As Pinterest shows, training people to organize their world in terms of images can yield huge results. Sometimes we focus on how many possibilities digital media presents. But if we want to build products that appeal to millions of people, it might be better to break our pages and apps down into very small components and focus on the constraints.

Limiting Possibilities
Why do users ock to monomedia websites, like Pinterest? Turns out, constraints are actually a good thing. by Paul Ford

rom its earliest days, the web has been understood as a place for rich, interactive documents. Videos can be embedded inside of paragraphs of text. Songs can play in the middle of a newspaper article. Even The New York Times puts video and audio right on its home page and embeds tweets into its blog posts. Facebook and Google+ are mixes of photos, status updates, videos and apps. But that isnt the whole story. Some successful websites and social apps grew up not around multimedia but around one single type of media. Theres YouTube, of course, which is all about video, and its fancier but less popular sibling Vimeo. Flickr and Pinterest focus on images, although each has its own take on what an image really is. SoundCloud lets people share music. These monomedia services are in many ways the opposite of what we expected new media to be. Yet their simplicity is com-

pelling to users. If you know what a video is, you understand YouTube. Once youve pinned a single picture, you get Pinterest. You can sign up for these services and instantly upload a video of your barking dog or pin a picture of the sky. Later, you might gain more followers and decide to take pains to make your uploads better or more interesting. Its a pattern that works: YouTube is the No. 3 website in the world, for example, and Pinterest is No. 16. Facebook bought Instagram, which until recently focused only on images with the same aspect ratio, for a billion dollars. These success stories teach us the importance of constraints. What is a video or a picture in an age of computing? Its just data that follows a standard set of rules and tells a computer what sort of le it is and how to play or display it. Meanwhile, a web page or a digital app can do just about anything we want it to. It can display all kinds of media.

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE ELLIS, WWW.MIKELLIS.COM

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Best Practices
panys software to design sustainably. The campaign for Global Zero uses compelling visuals and a predictive story line to show the step-by-step process by which nuclear weapons can be eliminated in the next 20 years. And the documentary The Story of Stu, created in collaboration with the activist Annie Leonard, examines the damaging impact of consumption, waste and the way that consumer goods are produced. The lm, which has garnered approximately 35 million views on YouTube and a private video server, juxtaposes Leonards onscreen narration with simple
Futerras campaign for Sky Rainforest Rescue seeks to stop deforestation by encouraging people to fall in love with the Amazon.

animations that show the environmental, social and economic impacts of manufacturing and consumption. Leonard came to Free Range having amassed 10 years worth of research, and the studio gave her work visual and narrative form. We helped her translate that into story-like language, Sachs says, meaning Free Range gave the raw facts a visual and narrative form and conveyed them on a human scale. It is a beautifully eective piece of advocacy and educationso much so that teachers began showing it to students in schools. For Sachs, stories always have a few specic elements: the myth or narrative itself, the belief system it conveys and the associated ritualsthe actions you perform because of the stories you believe. When certain cultural narratives stop making sense, individuals and cultures embrace new storylines and the rituals that go along with them. In the post-WWII era, as older cultural paradigms began to hold less sway, marketers captured the popular imagination with myths that oered us immensely accessible rituals. To wit: The Marlboro man, that archetypal cowboy, embodied the grandeur of America and the quiet heroism of the frontier. Youre giving this amazing story to people that if you smoke a cigarette, you can reconnect with this American myth, and the ritual is so easy: You just go to the store and buy a pack of cigarettes, Sachs says. When it comes to making sustainability change, the rituals are so much harder. Stories can help draw us into the world of myth and archetypes; they can give us a sense of purpose for who we are and what we do. But ultimately, storytelling may not be enough to foster change.

The Sustainability Saga

The vanguard of the environmental movement is not in renewable energy or zero waste: Its in storytelling. by Jeremy Lehrer

iscussing the cultural shift to sustainability, Jonah Sachs, co-founder of the strategic consultancy Free Range Studios and author of the book Winning the Story Wars, emphasizes the importance of stories. In the marketing that most of us are familiar with, Sachs explains, the brand is the hero of the story, and the consumer is the damsel in distress. The brandor nonprot, as the case may bepromises that by supporting it, the audience will be rewarded with a better life or the world will be improved in some way. But Sachs is pioneering an alternative. If you want to break through and create real engagement in the digital age, you need to empower audiences to be the hero of the story themselves and to take action and do something that is not the most convenient, not the most simple, he says. If you look

at all the great ad campaigns of the past, theyre not necessarily telling people this is the easiest, most expedient approach. They often tell youas Nike doesyou have to dig deeper, try harder. People respond to that message when its something that they care about. Sachs is a specialist in this arena. His book examines the way in which stories have been ever-present in human culture, whether theyre expressed in the form of sacred texts, myths, movies or advertising, and how these narratives can catalyze an era of change. At Free Range, Sachs has done just that, creating brand identity, design and strategy projects for clients like Autodesk, Global Zero and Greenpeace that rely on storytelling to engage audiences and consumers. The work for Autodesk helps industrial designers understand how to use the com-

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best practices

Annie Leonards documentary about consumerism, manufacturing and waste garnered approximately 35 million views and is used as an educational resource in schools.

Henry Hicks, a creative director at Futerra, a sustainability communications agency headquartered in London, argues that there also needs to be an evolution of social proof, a psychological term referring to those feedback loops that arm for us what behavior is appropriate. The social proofs of what society nds acceptable and peoples habits also need to be overcome, he says, observing that our habits, such as driving to work by ourselves instead of organizing a car pool, tend to have a very strong inertia. We need to design behavior change beyond just the story. The story is an important pointit will increase peoples willingness to act if you do it well, and it can be a great catalystbut there are other elements that need to be in place as well. Those other elements include the infrastructure that allows newly engaged audiences to act. You dont want to get people excited, and then theres nothing for them to do and nowhere for them to go, he says. Similar to Free Range, Futerra partners only with clients who are committed to sustainability. The agency has worked on campaigns for corporations and nonprofits including AkzoNobel, Unilever and the United Nations Environmental Programme. Hicks uses the example of a ride-sharing initiative to explain the specics of infrastructure necessary to facilitate lasting change. Ride-sharing saves drivers money, lowers carbon emissions and allows for some social time during an otherwise lonely trip. If enough people were to travel this way, trac would be reduced, as would commute

times. So if a city or company launched a ride-sharing projectand there are indeed startups like Lyft and Sidecar that have entered this spacean initial storytelling hook would need to connect potential participants with a central resource that gives them information. And they would need to trust that ride-sharing is going to work for them. If people have a fear its not going to work or its going to fail or that theyre not going to complete something successfully, then that is a big barrier, Hicks says. And he places a strong emphasis on the value of community. Ideally, they want to feel that theyre part of a community thats doing this, he explains. To create that sense of social proof, how can you introduce them to people like them who are doing this already? How can they feel part of a tribe? Trust and community are essential to any brand, and Futerra is facilitating these qualities for clients like Mondelez Coee, a division of Kraft in Europe. The agencys coee made happy campaign shows farmers who produce coee for the company, and documents what Mondelez is doing to improve the farmers lives, thus connecting consumers to growers. The agency has also relied on a strategy of focusing on the positive when creating storylines. In its rebranding work for WildTeam, a Bangladeshi nonprot that protects tigers and their habitat, Futerra shifted from a message about impending extinction and human-tiger antagonism to one focused on celebrating nature and the ways in which nature and human populations can coexist

happily. With a boldly colorful design and taglines such as We work with real people because they know the real deal and We believe people are the solution, and we see evidence of it every day, the project emphasizes that people are key to ensuring the tigers continued existence. While we cant predict what new stories will emerge in upcoming years, its certain that our narratives will change, as innovative companies, nonprots and agencies continue to rene their storytelling approaches. The understanding of sustainability itself is evolving, as terms like abundance and resilience become more in vogue as a way of describing the goal to ensure the vitality of the environment, the economy and communities where people live and work. Futerra has been working on a project for Sony in collaboration with the nonprot group Forum for the Future. The endeavor envisions what it would be like to have a singular technology device that we would have for life, instead of a series of devices that we throw away and replace. In May, Free Range had begun working on a new initiative for Greenpeace. And while Sachs couldnt discuss specics yet, he acknowledged, They are talking about how the whole concept of sustainability is a bit of red herring because how can we truly sustain this global society? Theyre shifting a lot more to be a cultural organization, recognizing that the change has to come not so much in a technical way but in the way we organize our lives and organize ourselves.

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22

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Dialogue
Finding Fantasyland: Marty Mueller, global creative director; Tim Klauda, executive creative director; Will Gay, Joey Hasty, creative directors; Brad Hall, art director; John McCall, copywriter.

families on trips around the globe with Disney guides to learn the real stories of all these great destinations, is going to be Will Gay, creative director for Disneys Yellow Shoes, shares quite dierent than something that might have characters involved, like the New Fanthis beloved brands approach to storytelling. tasyland expansion. Speaking of which, we by Steven Heller came up with a pretty fun story for that campaign to help us with all the challenges hat says storytelling more outside creative agency. The name Yellow around the launch of the largest expansion than Disney? Every part of the Shoes comes from an old Walt Disney story. in Magic Kingdom history. We said, what if brand is rooted in narrative. As Back when Walt was walking around the this thing we are calling New Fantasyland creative director of Disneys company and wasnt in a particularly great has actually always been there. And maybe Yellow Shoes, Will Gay leads a mood, people would say, Walt is wearing its just been hidden by an evil curse. So, if team of art directors, designers and writers his bear suit today. But when he was in a its always been there, then we would need to advertise and brand Disney Destina- good mood, they would say, He is wear- your help to break the curse and reveal it to tions around the world. His job is to guide, ing his yellow shoes. Following a visit to the world once again. We called the whole inspire and support great ideas, design and Disney in Burbank, CA, I asked Gay, who is thing Finding Fantasyland. storytelling for the Disney brand, including based in Orlando, FL, about the storytelling Disney Parks, Disney Cruise Line, Adven- that underpins Disneys persona in general The Disney brand is rooted in characters. tures by Disney, Disney Vacation Club and and in advertising specically. Are there limits to how these characters Aulani, a new resort and spa in Hawaii. can be used in stories? Yes, great characters Yellow Shoes began 15 years ago as the Yellow Shoes advertising is rooted in are always at the heart of a great story. You Marketing/Advertising Creative Services storytelling. What stories do you tell? We connect with these characters emotionally Department. Thats a lot to t on a busi- tell all kinds of dierent stories for all of our you care about them, you laugh and cry ness card, Gay says. So the group was destination brands and all their sub-brands, with them. You love them. So we dont want rebranded in order to act and operate less too. The way we tell the story for something to mess that up. There are denitely right like an in-house shop and more like an like Adventures by Disney, which takes and wrong ways to use the characters. Some

Making Magic

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dialogue
Left: Free the Goat:

Great characters are always at the heart of a great story. You love them. So we dont want to mess that up.
characters have a certain time period and environment that they live in, and taking them out of that world can be strange. We actually have a very good character brand department that helps when questions arise. They also protect the integrity of the characters and their stories so that they are always seen in the way they were intended from their original stories. Using them in the wrong ways can be very damaging for not only that particular character or story, but also for the Disney brand as a whole. How is storytelling used to engage the Disney customer? A lot of people grew up watching Disney animated lms and our other movies. People know these stories really well. So a lot of times, we might just use a piece of the story to engage our guests. For instance, we have used a real image of a lone glass slipper left on a staircase with the word Believe. That is all you need: You get it. You know the story already, so we dont have to hit you over the head with it. You told me that you use new and minor characters for campaigns. How do you make minor into major? Free the Goat is one of the most recent stories we concepted at Yellow Shoes. We were asked to get the word out about a three-day park ticket oer for Florida residents. So naturally, you think, use a goat. Wed had some previous success with a TV campaign we did a few years back where we decided to give some classic attraction characters, our Jungle Cruise animals, a new life as the stars of the campaign. They are minor characters that dont talk and can be seen moving animatronic style as you ride through the attraction. We had this idea that they came to life for real in between boats and talked to each otherthey just want to get out into the rest of the parks and have some fun, too. That led us to taking our most recent

Will Gay, creative director; John McCall, copywriter; Matt Stewart, art director. Below: Boat!: Marty Muller, senior vice president global creative; Will Gay, creative director; Matt Stewart, art director; John McCall, copywriter.

minor character, the mountain goat from Big Thunder Mountain, and giving him a story and a voice. We catch up with Billy in a short online video, and we hear his plea for us to help set him free because he has these dreams to go experience all the magic at Walt Disney World, too. There are many creative people working at Disney. Can each develop story lines that reect their individuality? I think they can for the right projects. Disney has all these great stories to pull from, whether we are doing advertising and design, designing products or building the parks. The stories are there, and sometimes side stories can be developedor back stories or new ones entirelydepending on your needs. Individuality comes from translating that story in a new way. The terms storytelling and narrative are frequently used today. Everything tells a story. Do you think this is true? Everything does tell some sort of story, and everything has a story to tell. Now whether that story is clear or engaging or memorable is another matter. Not everyone has the luxury of such great characters and already existing stories all throughout their brands. If you were to sum up the main story line in Disney, is there one thread or one plot? Good always triumphs over bad. I think that applies to life in general, too.

PRINTMAG.COM

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26

P R I N T 6 7 . 5 O C T O B E R 20 1 3

Stereotype

Casting Type
Type is usually seen as a service provider, taking a back seat to a texts words and images. But in these unconventional works, type plays a starring role, helping to shape and showcase the stories in a surprising fashion. by Paul Shaw and Stephen Coles

La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) by Eugene Ionesco, 19641965; design by Robert Massin; photography by Henry Cohen. To illustrate an argument, this spread shows the typographic voices of Plantin (Mr. Smith), Plantin Italic (Mrs. Smith), Monotype Grotesque (Mr. Martin) and Gill Sans Italic (Mrs. Martin).

he most common conclusion drawn from Beatrice Wardes The Crystal Goblet is that book typography should be invisible or transparent, that it should be looked through to the text rather than looked at for itself. Similarly, Josef Mller-Brockmann, setting forth the principles of objective typography, declared, The paramount requirement is an unadorned typographical form serving purely the needs of communication. These pleas for typographic restraint whether from a traditionalist or a modernist perspectivehave guided most text typography over the past century. But not all. There have been occasions when typo-

graphic excess and exuberance have been Alices Adventures Underground (1864), demanded by the text; moments when the ended The Mouses Tale with a punning narrative insists on some gusto. Sometimes, interpretation of its title. as Bradbury Thompson knew, type needs In the early 20th century, avant-garde to be playful. poets and artists, unburdened by preconBoth Laurence Sterne, author of The ceptions about typography, set lines vertiLife and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, cally and diagonally, mixed typefaces with Gentleman (17591766) and Lewis Carroll abandon, and experimented with rules and understood this. Sternes novel included dingbats. Among the highlights of this crosses in the text whenever Dr. Slop period are: crossed himself, squiggly lines to indicate Zang Tumb Tuuum (19121914) and the dierent life lines of Tristram Shandy, Les mots en libert futuristes (1919) by blank pages to indicate where pages had F.T. Marinetti been ostensibly torn out of the narrative, Dlia Golosa (For the Voice, 1923) and a solid black page in mourning for by Vladimir Mayakovsky (designed by the death of Yorick the Parson. Carroll, in El Lissitzky)

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stereotype
In the early 20th century, avant-garde poets and artists, unburdened by preconceptions about typography, set lines vertically and diagonally, mixed typefaces with abandon, and experimented with rules and dingbats.
Die Scheuche (Scarecrow, 1925) by Kurt Schwitters, Kte Steinitz and Theo van Doesburg S lod jez dovaz caj a kvu: Poesie (Sailing on a Ship that Imports Tea and Coee: Poetry, 1928) by Konstantin Biebl (designed by Karel Teige). The spirit of play exemplied by these pioneers of modern typography, as Herbert Spencer dubbed them, largely vanished during the 1930s and 1940s as economic malaise and war put a damper on things. Karl Gerstner sought to inject some freedom into postwar Swiss typography to leaven its emphasis on objectivity and rationalism. His concept of integral typography, in which the typographer is allowed to perform as an artist, was applied to Schi nach Europa (Ship to Europe, 1957) by Markus Kutter, a novel described by the author as a synthetic, hypothetical drama. Although Gerstner used only sans serif type (Akzidenz-Grotesk for display and Monotype Grotesque for text) and adhered to a consistent layout matrix, the design responds to the narrative through shifts in type size and weight, paragraph indents, and rotation of the text page. A contrast to Gerstners sober narrative experiment is Robert Massins anarchic designachieved in collaboration with the photographer Henry Cohenof La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano, 1964) by Eugne Ionesco for dition Gallimard. His interpretation of the absurdist play is a razzberry to typographic modernism. Never combine dierent type families, declared Josef Mller-Brockmann. Massin uses six typefaces, but with good reason. Each of the plays characters is identied by a unique typeface: Plantin for Mr. Smith, Plantin Italic for Mrs. Smith, Monotype Grotesque 215 for Mr. Martin, Gill Sans Italic for Madame Martin, Cheltenham for the Smiths maid Mary and Clarendon for the re chief. And other typefacessuch as Cochin and Goudy Handtooledpop in and out as needed. Do not use a lot of dierent type sizes, warned Mller-Brockmann. Massin ignores that advice, too, employing a wide range of sizes, including letters so big that only one ts on a page. The Bald Soprano also sports type set at an angle, distorted type,

French Fries by Warren Lehrer and Dennis Bernstein, 1984; design by Warren Lehrer.

30

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stereotype
shaped type and type thats treated as comic book speech balloons. Two decades later, Warren Lehrer swiped Massins ideas and added some of his own for his typographic interpretation of French Fries (1984), a play he co-wrote with Dennis Bernstein about the denizens of a diner. As in The Bald Soprano, each character, and their distinctive speech pattern, is marked by a dierent typeface, and there is a climactic scene where speech visibly collides. But he also gives each character a unique color and adds decorative patterns with echoes of the postmodern Memphis collective, dingbats, icons and illustrations. While Massin worked with metal type and designed The Bald Soprano in black and white, Lehrer took advantage of phototype and color to turn French Fries into typographic performance art. Richard Eckersley (19412006) was the rst book designer to take full advantage of digital types possibilities in his treatment of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) by Avital Ronell. The book, a 400-plus page semiotic ri on the history, use and meaning of the telephone that embraces Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Jacques Derrida and more, is full of typographic gymnastics: crossed-out type, mirrored type, undulating type, blurred type, overlapping type and more. Eckersleys impeccable typography, Adobe Garamond with Helvetica Bold Condensed, frequently gives way to gaping rivers, loosely tted letters, uneven baselines and wrong fontsall in the service of matching Ronells verbal legerdemain. The result is a tour de force that puts the more hyped work of that time by Emigre, David Carson and Octavo Designs to shame. In fact, the 1980s and early 90s contributions from the likes of Emigre and Carson have been so thoroughly covered elsewhere, we should jump right to the most recent 25 years, during which the mantle of expressive narrative has been carried, or at least shared, by Irma Boom. The Dutch design icon is best known for fearlessly rethinking the very essence of the book as an object, playing with various unorthodox substrates and raising the senses of smell and touch to the same level of importance as sight. Boom likely won her many awards by deploying

Above: Irma Booms design for Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor (2006) breaks the sober typographic conventions typically found in artist catalogs. The opening essay begins with huge type, paired with a coarse weaving by Hicks, that gets progressively smaller with each page, ending with a tight, refined tapestry. The book was named The Most Beautiful Book In the World. Left: The Telephone Book by Avital Ronell, 1989; design by Richard Eckersley.

these structural concepts, but we should also credit her typographic exploration, too. Her stamp book for the Dutch Postal Service has essays set in square boxes that mimic the shape and orientation of the stamps they describe. The opening essay for her book on textile artist Sheila Hicks begins with very large Plantin (one of her favorite typefaces), which gets progressively smaller as pages advance. The unusual but accessible approach invites readers of all kinds to jump right in and learn about the artist, a response to the common impenetrability of academic texts. The Hicks book proves that readable type doesnt have to be staid or familiar. In fact,

maybe it shouldnt be. Even the most blatant manipulation of type can encourage reading and enhance comprehension. Actually, going back to Beatrice Warde, invisibility isnt the main point of The Crystal Goblet, after all. The less often quoted but more interesting section of the essay asks us to imagine typography as a paned windowone that frames the subject but has a structure of its own, one that exposes evidence of a craftsperson who has made an eort to enhance the view. As German designer Hans Peter Willberg said, ist nicht nur zum lesen da. Man sieht sie auch. [Type] is not only there to be read. You also see it.

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34

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Observer

The Design of Comics

Many graphic designers dont read comic books or graphic novels. Find out why you should give this medium another look. by Rick Poynor

o you read comics and graphic novels? As a writer on graphic design, I sometimes write about what is often termed sequential art, though I make no claims to be an expert, and I have always assumed that many designers are (or at least ought to be) interested in the medium. But there are no statistics on this, and over the years, I cant say Ive encountered many graphic designers prepared to enthuse about the subject with the enduring commitment that comics champion Chip Kidd brings to it. One reason for resistance could simply be that some designers are much more focused

on type. A designer who doesnt relish illustration and drawing is unlikely to nd the prospect of several hours immersed in a graphic novel particularly appealing. And there is still the slightly nerdy stigma of comics: No matter how adult the subject matter and themes have become, the geeky childish stereotype never goes away. For designers excited by the expressive possibilities of visual narrative, the connection between graphic design and graphic novels, two pursuits linked by the same adjective, seems entirely obvious. In recognition, Print has shown a long commitment to the medium. Comic-book art has always

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PRINTMAG.COM been graphic design, begins an article by comic book artist Arlen Schumer from 1988. Comic books created their own graphic design vocabulary with symbols, styles and structures born of that form: page-turning, sequential graphic storytelling. A 2010 report from San Diego Comic-Con by Print contributing editor Michael Dooley is a mine of insight from comic book artists who discuss the fundamental links with graphic design. Comics and graphic novels are not simply inuenced by graphic design, artist and writer Justin Randall says. They are, in my opinion, one of the most technical and expressive examples of this discipline. Thats a large and arresting claim, which could bear some close attention, but it comes from the comics side of the fence, and its not a view reected in graphic design histories where comic books and graphic novels are nowhere to be found. Ten years ago, when I pressed the point by commissioning a book about Chris Ware for a new series of monographs about graphic designers, sales were not spectacularand that was Chris Ware, for heavens sake. Ware had seemed like the perfect test case. His page layouts are some of the most elaborately designed in the history of the medium; his drawing style tends toward an almost pictographic reduction of form and line. He is a master of lettering, a skilled manipulator of the typographic styles of period advertising, and he is popular with art directors as an illustrator. On top of that, Ware had just authored Jimmy Corrigan, an innovative and widely celebrated masterpiece of the graphic novel. Im not sure, though, that graphic novel doesnt serve at times to limit our sense of what a graphic narrative might be and, as a result, reduce graphic designers perception of the mediums relevance to graphic design. The term was important because it opened a space in bookstores within the ction section where this kind of volume could go. But plenty of the books now led under graphic novel are not actually novels, from Robert Crumbs rollicking The Book of Genesis Illustrated (2009)some might regard it as ctionto Seymour Chwasts delicate graphic interpretation of Homers The Odyssey (2012) to Joe Saccos Palestine (2001), a work of urgent visual reportage. These books do tell stories, but what about graphic books that serve a purely factual or argumentative purpose? The last time I perused the graphic novel section of a city bookstore, I saw a copy of the British comic book artist Woodrow Phoenixs Rumble Strip (2008) tucked in among the ction. That couldnt be more misleading, and it limits this remarkable books potential readership. Rumble Strip sets out to shake our condence that there is anything reasonable about our relationship with cars. The book certainly looks at a glance like a graphic novel, but theres no continuous story here, though there are narrative sequences, including a tense nal section in which the author recounts how, when driving at high speed on a freeway, he narrowly avoided a fatal crash. superiority over pedestrians and anyone in a lesser vehicle, and the motorized arms race initiated by the SUV. Phoenix illustrates his relentlessly paced visual essay, in which people feature only as stylized street signs with graphic images of trac lights, road markings, parking lots, crosswalks, crash barriers, overpasses and the alwaysseductive lure of the open highway. Ive never seen these arguments so eectively expressed. We could call Rumble Strip a comic book, but this description falls woefully short. Phoenixs hazard warning is a relatively new kind of hybrid, which uses visual storytelling to make a nonction subject more accessible and to intensify the message. The most comic book-like aspect is the hand-lettering, though its regularity suggests its digitized. The lettering gives the book an approachable, informal voice and knits with the imagery, but the right typeface could work just as well. I would recommend Rumble Strip to any designer who remains skeptical that this kind of publication has value for formal graphic design. If the book isnt graphic thinking of a sophisticated kindintegrating text and image in a complex spatial arrangement in order to make a compelling cultural argumentthen how else would we describe it? Its instructive to revisit Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, published in 1993 and still in print today. First, because Scott McClouds studya witty, self-reexive comic book about the practice and theory of the comic bookwas instantly recognized as a groundbreaker, it should be on the curriculum for everyone studying graphic design. Second, because McCloud oers a denition of comics so inspiringly inclusive, it would be hard to improve upon it: Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. With this ashlight in hand, he is able to illuminate the mediums precursors and parallels in sources as various as the Bayeux Tapestry (1070s) with its many scenes, William Hogarths series of engravings marking A Harlots Progress (1732) and Max Ernsts Surrealist collage novel A Week of Kindness (1934). Like any work of graphic ction or nonction, these are all exercises in communicating visually, and the potential of visual communication is graphic designs driving concern.

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Comic-book art has always been graphic design. Arlen Schumer

Phoenix opens brilliantly with a series of boldly blocked, monochrome panels showing a street where every building has a couple of grand pianos suspended above the sidewalk. In short, incisively worded captions stamped across the pictures, he asks us what we would expect of the individuals in charge of these hugely dangerous and potentially destructive objects. He points out how outrageous it would be if those guardians were casually swinging a piano with one hand while drinking coee, talking on the phone or applying makeup with the other. What if the massive object were to fall and crush someone as a result of such inattention? The person responsible would deserve to be sued for every cent. Then Phoenix cuts to images of the road surface with huge white arrow markings to suggest the violent momentum of trac. A speeding metal car can annihilate anyone in its path, yet cars are driven as though their misuse had no consequences because dierent rules apply. In Britain, Phoenix notes, custodial sentences are rarely given for driving oenses that result in loss of life. Somehow, because the instrument of death is a car, and we all need and love our vehicles, the carnage on the roads is accepted as a price our society just has to pay. The causal link between action and consequence is unhooked in a way that would be considered psychotic in any other area of our lives, Phoenix writes. From there, the book hurtles on to explore the psychology of car drivers, their sense of

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GRAPHIC GRAPH HIC C CONTENT ONTE ENT

In a forthcoming book from Print, dozens of the industrys most beloved designers share personal essays about how family, friends and work have touched their livesthe types of stories told over dinner or a drink. So pull up a stool, and catch a sneak peek of 8 true tales told by top creatives.
edited by Brian Singer

RESPECT FOR THE LITTLE GUYS

by Aaron Draplin
DRAPLIN DESIGN CO. WWW.DRAPLIN.COM The year was 1995, and I was a hungry, scrappy designer/illustrator living and snowboarding in Bend, OR, drawing as much as possible and sneaking into the local community college to poach computer time. That February, a group of buddies let me hop in their back seat and ride down to a big snowboarding trade show in Las Vegas. There we would encounter the entire snowboard universeall the companies we had looked up over the years! The trade shows are where ski shops peruse the upcoming seasons gear and place their orders. The undercurrent is a rowdy migration of wild-eyed snowboarders, partners, hopefuls, hangers-on and downright scrubs like myself, lurking, seeing stu, shaking hands, etc. In short, you could meet the owners of the companies as well as their employeeseven eyeball their professional riders.Stickers were free, and I loaded up a big bag.Cool stu for a 21-year-old rat! A favorite snowboard company of mine had a big booth, and we knew a couple of the guys working it. They gave us a tour of the gear and introduced us to their co-workers. One of the fellas was their art director, a renowned designer in the snowboard world. I was so excited. I remember trying to tell the guy my name, what I did and how much I liked his work. And he couldnt care less. Annoyed. Distracted.He was pretty caught up in everything,and I know how that goes, but I distinctly remember feeling bummed after meeting the guy. Maybe he was busy? Maybe he didnt like my meatball face? Hard to say. Its fun meeting your heroes, but this time it hurt.

ILLUSTRATION BY ALLISON KEREK, WWW.ALLISONKEREK.COM

A couple years later, that little moment taught me something very crucial: If a kid comes up to you, no matter what the deal, you have to respect the courage it took and make a little time for him. And Im here to say Ive done just that for years, navigating the lucky predicament Ive been in for a little over a decade.Ive been speaking for about four years and am proud to say that Ive completed 8590 gigs! Just incredible. So lucky. At these talks, I meet young designers in droves, and they come up to me totally freaking out, nervous, excited and I make time for each and every one of them. Im learning how to calm them down, make them comfortable and hear their stories. I was that same kid many, many times, and I still am on so many levels. House Industries let me in their shop in 1997, and frankly, they were busy as hell and didnt have to do it. They made time for me and made me that much more of a fan. For life. I got to see that they were hardworking guys, funny as hell and insanely creative. They did that for me. And now, I do the same for kids at my shop. A couple summers back, I got an e-mail from that designer I looked up to so much. He had recently stumbled onto my work and wrote in to tell me how much he dug what I was up toand to ask me to consider him if I ever had any extra work. Id rather give it to the kid who came up to me in Rapid City, shaking, and told me, Draplin, I sent out 100 rsums, and you were the ONLY one who wrote back! Wow. I felt bad for the kid hearing that. When he wrote me, I commented on his impressive work, gave him a couple pointers and oered up a couple leads in Portland. Small talk, you know? He was moved, and in turn, to see how it helped him, it moved me right back. We hugged it out, and I warned him to stay the fuck out of Portland! Ha! Make time for the little guys. Always.

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P R I N T 6 7 . 5 O C T O B E R 20 1 3

THE IMPORTANCE OF TROPHIES

by Chris Hill, as told to Mike Hicks
HILL WWW.HILLONLINE.COM On a holiday weekend many years ago, I was visiting my parents in Bonham, TX. Its a small town where I grew up quite happy, playing football, running track and sneaking an occasional beer with friends. I was an Eagle Scout simply as a matter of course. It was as natural and fully expected as a third-down, o-side rush. My dad sold life insurance to just about everyone in town, while my mother tended to my sisters and me, cooked conventional meals and decorated competitively with friends from her bridge club. On this particular Saturday, I was keeping Dad company during his weekend morning ritual of drinking coee while reading The Bonham Daily Favorite and watching television news. It occurred to me, sitting there in the den, that this was the perfect

time to bring him up to speed about my career and recent accomplishments. Though very supportive, my parents had about as much of an idea about my professional career as I did about their sex life. (In that regard, less is more had always been my motto, and I was quite content to believe my siblings and I were the result of immaculate conception.) In actuality, the world I was living and working in was far removed from the sleepy little town of Bonham. After graduating from college, I ended up in Houston at a high-prole design rm. Six years later, I went into business for myself. It was fun, and my rm was prospering, with national and international clients and a growing reputation in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. In Bonham, however, there wasnt a single individual who could conceive of money being exchanged for what I didassuming they had any idea of what, in fact, I did. Therefore, it seemed only right, sitting in my dads den, that I should at least let him in on it and tell him how accomplished I was at this profession. So, during a station break and coee rell, I started talking, nervously at rst,

TRUTH
by Alex Bogusky
WWW.ALEXBOGUSKY.COM When I was in my early 20s, I spent all of my time at the beach windsurng. The bigger the wind and the waves, the better. Most days, these sorts of conditions keep people o the beach. But on this spring day, it was windy and wavy,andunusually sunny and warm. Florida is famous for its undertow, a tidal condition where water being pushed up on shore creates invisible rivers owing away from shore. Beach-goers get swept out, and in their desperation to swim back the way they came, they ght a losing battle against the rip and eventually tire and slip under the water.Tip:If youre ever caught in a riptide, the best plan is to go with it until it pulls you out past the breakers. Then swim parallel to shore and nd a better way in. The more water, in the form of waves, pushing up on the beach, the worse the rip.And on this day, the rip was bad. The warning ags were up all along the beach but, hey, it was sunny: How bad could it be? I was sitting in the sand with my wife, looking out at the surf and waiting for the wind to pick back up to go windsurfing. Suddenly we heard this shriek from down the beach. A woman was hysterical and pointing at her son sitting in an inner tube getting sucked out through the surf. A group of men ran out into the water, some still in jeans and T-shirts. After a few minutes of commotion, they reached the boy and began to pull him in. But one of the men had been caught in a particularly nasty bit of rip and surf. He was swimming hard but making no progress, and with each passing wave it seemed like he surfaced more slowly,

holding his head just barely above water. I pointed him out to my wife and said to her that I thought the man was drowning. I stood up and told her that I thought I should go out there and try to get him, but she got angry and reminded me how drowning victims often wind up drowning their rescuers, which I know is true. We watched as 60 yards away this man fought for his life. And I felt like a coward. A wave swept over. He came back up. Another wave. And he came up again. A bigger wave crashed down and he came up. But face down. He certainly wouldnt drown me now. I knew the beach and the currents, and I knew if I tried to reach him from here Id be swept right past him. So I ran 20 yards up the beach and jumped in. I put my head down and swam as fast as I knew how. The rip was taking me out fast, and I popped my head up to try to nd the man. I was in a good spot to reach him. I put my head down again to just swim. The next time I looked up he was right next to me. As I reached out to grab the back of his tank top and pull him to me, his head was down and the current pushed him deeper. You think odd things at times like this, and I thought, This guy doesnt care at all. Hes not going to be any help. Of course, he couldnt help. He had drowned. As I ipped him over, his eyes were open and lifeless.I wrapped my arms around his chest and found out he was a big dude200 pounds to my 165. This was gonna suck. As I swam with my legs, I pumped his chest and started talking to him, telling him to hang on and stay with me. The pumping and squeezing of his chest was working, and foam started to come out of his mouth. The problem was that the waves he had been in were the same waves we were both in now, and I was swimming for the two of us. Pretty soon it dawned on me that I was starting to drown, too. I knew that if I let go of him I could make it back to shore, but I wasnt sure we both could. A big part of me, maybe the rational part, wanted

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but slowly working my way to a complete and glowing review of my career. Achieving full steam, I boasted of having my work in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and in the archives of the Library of Congress, and having won not one, but two gold medals in the Art Directors Club of New York show. Its sort of like winning an Oscar, Dad, or an Emmy, I explained. With his newspaper in his lap, he sipped his coee, smiled and said, Do you remember going to the bowling alley with me when I was in the league?Yes, I replied, trying desperately to gure out what this could possibly have to do with the conversation. Remember when our team won the big tournament and I brought home that trophy? Sure, Dad, I said, now wondering if this was one of the symptoms of early dementia I should have noticed before. Well, the next day I went over to the barber shop for some coffee, he continued. (The towns barbershop was the equivalent of Starbucks and the social center of Bonham.) I told all the fellows there that Id won the tournament trophy, and everyone congratulated me Thats great, Dad, but Heres my point, son, he soldiered on. After all the congrat-

ulations, nobody said another thing about it. We talked about the weather, old Mr. Wilsons funeral, beef prices, but not another word was spoken about the tournament or my trophy. You see, they were sincerely happy for me, but they werent in the tournament. So it really didnt mean a damned thing to them. I must have looked utterly confused at that point because he couldnt quite hide the smile behind his coee cup. Your mother and I are real proud of you and your accomplishments, son, he said, suddenly serious, and its gratifying to win awards and the respect of your peers. But never forget: To everyone else, those awards and honors are just so many bowling trophies. No better. No worse. My confusion turned to chagrin as I realized he was trying to let me down gently. Then he got out of his chair, hugged me and murmured, We love you Chris. It makes us happy that youre happy. Thats all thats important to us. Needless to say, it was one of the more humbling experiences of my life, but nonetheless strangely uplifting. A few years later, I shared this story while speaking to an AIGA chapter in Minneapolis. After the talk, I went out for drinks to catch up with Eric Madsen, an old friend from Texas. He told me how much he liked the bowling trophy story and wanted to know more about my dad. Later in the evening, I quipped to Eric, Well, I still havent been featured in Communication Arts magazine, but I dont think theyre losing much sleep over it in Bonham. He agreed it was likely not in their top 10 list of county-wide disappointments. Although I joked about it often, having The Hill Group featured in CA was, in fact, my No. 1 professional goal. It always had been. I still remember the day a few years later when our receptionist told me some guy named Dick Coyne was on the phone wanting to talk to me. I tried to feign surprise, but Id been waiting on his call for 15 years. It was all I could do not to blurt out, Finally! At long last my feature article had arrived. A week or so after the magazine came out, I was still reveling in my newfound fame when I noticed a large box sitting in the reception area addressed to me. I lugged it back to my oce and discovered it was from Eric in Minneapolis. Inside, I found a magnicent bowling trophy ornately adorned with golden angels, wrapped in fake snakeskin and crowned by the inevitable 24K bowler. Its base read: Chris HillThe Hill Group Communication Arts Magazine 1st Place1994 Though Dad had passed away several years earlier, I instantly thought of him and realized he, of all people, would have smiled in understanding at such a gift. Today, the trophy remains proudly beside my desk, constantly reminding me of my family, my friends and whats truly important in life. Thanks Dad, and thanks Eric.

to let go. But it was impossible. Not impossible as in I couldnt live with myself impossible, but physically impossible. My arms would not let go. Later, I learned this phenomenon is not uncommon. Its the reason why police ocers are sometimes pulled o of rooftops by jumpers and why they tell police not to grab them. Because if you do, you probably cant let go. So all that was left to do was to kick. Keep kicking and praying. I believe we all pray at times like this no matter what you believe the rest of your days. Finally, I kicked and hit something solid. Sand. The bottom. I stood up and started to drag him in. Soon the other men who had rescued the boy reached us and took the man from me. The woman who was shrieking earlier was letting out sounds Id never heard before. The drowned man was her husband. On that day, there had been so many close calls that the paramedics had their trucks moving up and down the beach, and they were there as we pulled the man on shore. They began CPR instantly. I was sick, sad and exhausted, so I just walked o to nd a quiet place to sit. Within minutes, the ambulance and the family were shuttled o. My dad read in the paper the next day that the man had survived. Knowing he was alive and that their family was still together was an indescribable feeling.Years later, when we launched the Truth campaign (www.thetruth.com), I experienced that feeling a thousandfold knowing that hundreds of thousands of kids would decide not to smoke because of the advertising we made. Who would have thought you could save more people with an ad than by playing lifeguard?

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ORIGINS/ORV
by Nancy Skolos
SKOLOS-WEDELL WWW.SKOLOS-WEDELL.COM I heard a joke once: There was a zoo that had only one animal. It was a Shih Tzu. A shit zoo pretty much describes the town I grew up in. Our small ranch house, one of 60 sitting on what was formerly a farmers eld, was a singular cage of culturethe only place where one might nd a grand piano, a silkscreen print or a piece of modern furniture. We had relocated there in 1962, courtesy of my dad Orvs midlife crisis. After a hectic decade of working in a high-powered ad agency in a large midwestern town, Orv had retreated to a quieter lifestyle at a job with a company designing point-of-purchase Plexiglas signs. His new life also had its moments of high stress. A three-packa-day smoker, he often spent the wee hours of the night sitting on the edge of the bed chain smoking while my mom, exhausted from teaching junior high music all day, slept in a virtual coma. When we rst moved there, a steady stream of Protestant ministers bombarded us, bidding for my moms talent for directing choirs. Orvs tactic for getting rid of them was to invite them into the not yet refurbished bubble gum pink living room and proceed to pick an argument about how the Immaculate Conception was impossible. The most memorable incident from one of those conversations was when the cat overturned the planter/room divider, spilling vermiculite mixed with cat turds all over the carpet. Orv and I were pretty much physical clones of each other, me being the female version of him. He, like me, was an only child, and the two of us relished our mutual DNA. We enjoyed exactly the same food, had almost the same glasses prescription and compared unique foot rashes. He desperately wanted me to pursue art, so I dutifully took K12 art plus some summer classes. His path to commercial art was made possible by World War II. He was a third-generation Norwegian who grew up in Wisconsin and didnt speak English until rst grade. After he joined the Army, he was selected for intelligence training at the University of Cincinnati because of his northern European appearance and his knack for speaking German. Luckily, he didnt end up going abroad, and after the war ended, he was invited to stay on at the university and study whatever he liked. He chose industrial design. One of his sleepless, cigarette-smoking nights was brought about by a failure in a digital clock design that employed what was, at that time, pretty cutting-edge technology, something the sign company cultivated to stay abreast of the competition. While my friends chemist parents were busy keeping the Sohio renery running, Orv was experimenting with polyurethane foam as fake wood or silkscreened vinyl as stained glass, and working on signs that used articial fragrances to emit the smell of freshly baked cookies. The clocks had been shipped earlier that week, and a few that were

delivered caught re at exactly 10:00. After much mental troubleshooting, my dad had traced the design aw to the seal between the two halves of the clocks plastic casing. If the clocks were screwed together too tight, the light in the upper right segment of the 0 in 10:00 was in position at the edge of the box to ignite the neoprene spacer, which he hadnt realized was ammable. He smoked through the night until morning when the company successfully phoned all of the aected customers before 10 a.m. His most outrageous assignment was to make a patch kit for John Deeres green and yellow outdoor signs that were being shot to pieces by hunters using the logo for target practice. My dad who wouldnt even go shing, let alone kill a deerhad the gloomy task of driving his Corvair around the countryside to analyze the situation. I can just picture him on a ladder with a cigarette of mostly ashes dangling from his mouth, measuring the bullet holes. His deliverable was an elegant toolbox containing a set of hole saws in sizes to match the bullets and two rows of Plexiglas plugs in progressively sized circles, one set of green, and one set of yellow. As a result, store owners could easily repair the signs by sawing just the right size hole in whichever part was damaged and plugging the hole with the corresponding disk of yellow or green Plexi. Even though I liked the trappings of commercial artthe rubber cement, air brushes and pastelsmy mothers world of music was much more attractive to me. Her choirs put on elaborate shows and went to competitions all over the state. In fourth grade, I took up the clarinet, and by high school I was playing in regional bands and the youth symphony, and even went on a tour of Europe with a group of young musicians that played in Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center and the Roman Forum. Being relatively quiet and unassuming, I lived in the expressive sounds of the clarinet, and it became my voice for both melancholy and mischief. When it was time to go to college, I applied to three music schools as a clarinet performance major. Not realizing how many baby boomer clarinetists would be coming out of the woodwork, I chose some pretty competitive places. My parents were still at work one late spring day when I found two rejection letters in the mailbox. I ran inside the house and made a beeline for the stereo and listened to Mozarts Clarinet Concerto while sobbing face down into the living room carpet. My two surrogate siblings, Hilde the dachshund and Joe the cat, were stunned by this unusual display of emotion and sat side by side next to my head, lending sympathy. When the piece was over, I collected myself, found my application materials and dialed the conservatory at the University of Cincinnati, the one school that I hadnt been rejected from yet. A nice woman answered: Hello? Would you send my application for the music school over to the design school? I asked. What kind of design do you want? What kind do you have? Fashion? No. Interior? No. Industrial? Yes. That would work. Thats what Orv had done.

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FORMSACHE
by Stefan G. Bucher
WWW.DAILYMONSTER.COM A few years ago, I needed to travel back home to Germany. A week before I was set to y out, I noticed that my passport had expired, so I made my way to the German Consulate General on Wilshire Boulevard here in Los Angeles to apply for an emergency passport replacement. After all this time of living in California, its always a bit of a head trip for me to be among a lot of German speakers again, particularly at an early hour when I should still be fast asleep. It feels like a strange but orderly dream. Id been to this oce a few times over the years. It looks as if a whole German post oce has been teleported into the 11th oor corner suite of an oce building. You dont expect to see service counters or pens on chains once you climb above a certain elevationor a security gate manned by a burly guardbut there it was. After a short wait, a consular ocer called my name and handed me the appropriate form. I lled it out, handed it back to him and was told to return for my passport the next morning. No fuss, no muss. I came back the next morning, bleary-eyed as on the day before. Up the elevator, past the guard, through the security gate and into the waiting area. When my turn came, I stepped up to the coun-

ter and took my seat before the ocernot the same one, I noticed,who had seen me the previous day. I told him my name and that I was here to pick up my emergency passport. You were here yesterday to hand in your form? Yes. You lled out the form yourself ? What now? Had I lled the form out myself ?I wondered what this inquiry meant.Was this the same kind of question as, Did you pack your own suitcase? Was I in trouble somehow?Yes, I lled the form out myself. Gulp. Slight darting of the eyes to check for possible escape routes. One moment. The ocer turned around to the people working behind him. Its him, he said. Its him? Im him? Who? What? I could see the other ocers peeking out from behind their monitors to look at me with curiosity. What the hell was going on?When youre dealing with government agents, you learn not to ask questions, but this was just too odd. Excuse me, sir. What just happened here? I asked. Oh, not to worry, he replied. We just had never seen a form lled out so neatly, and the others wanted to see who you were. And there you have it. You know youve crossed into a strange, new territory of obsessive achievement when the German government compliments you on the neatness of your forms. Feel free to fear me.

SCHOOL IS OUT
by Yang Kim
PEOPLEDESIGN WWW.PEOPLEDESIGN.COM Ive had waves of employees over the years, and many of the same issues seem to come up again and again. Theres one that I think is especially interesting: Some people cant help talking badly about dicult clients. Once you label someone, they become that person for you. Hes the Sleep-on-it Guy, or shes Ms. WinWin. Or worse, you get into less inventive name-calling. Its true that weve had our share of dicult clients. Who hasnt? And its tempting to label them. When I need to summon a little willpower to resist, I think back to one particular instance. This client was really awful. He talked big but always had to check in with the boss. He never missed an opportunity to aunt

the fact that his oce was in Manhattan or that his company had oces across the country. He was in charge of the purse strings, and we were to remember that. When it came to direction, he was the type of client who liked to say, Ill know it when I see it, and hed often talk down to our designers, asking such not-very-helpful questions as, Why arent you picking the right images? You get the picture. Well, one day he mentionedapropos of nothing, other than to hold one over methat he had attended an Ivy League school. Im all for education, but at some point, it doesnt matter. If youre brilliant, then youre brilliant. Once you hit 40, theres 20 years of distance between you and your undergrad days. Have the intervening decades been so uneventful that a 20-year-old degree is your primary source of validation? What he didnt knowand I never mentioned to himwas the fact that I was actually accepted to an Ivy League school (Harvard), but I didnt go. It wasnt right for me at the time looking for a degree in design. Years later, I also participated in Harvard Business Schools Executive Education program. I suppose that does sound a little impressive. After recounting this story with a colleague, Ted, who also had experience working with this particular person, Ted imparted some wisdom that was shared with him by his long-time mentor when faced with a similar situation: Honey, the world is run by C students, so get used to it.

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FOUND IN TRANSLATION
by Debbie Millman
STERLING BRANDS WWW.DEBBIEMILLMAN.COM Several years ago, I spent a week in Tokyo observing Japanese consumers articulate their feelings about mouthwash and a potential new package design. It seems absurd, really, to describe my role in this qualitative market research as an observer; it is much more precise to say that I was a listener. I stood rapt with attention as a young woman translated into English what these unusually loyal mouthwash users were saying in Japanese. Her interpretations were remarkably creative, comprising such statements as the packaging looks lonely and the design is like a uy painting. I couldnt help but wonder if her surprising pronouncements were the verbatim decoding of what was being said or the result of an imaginative reconstruction. Ill never know. Being in a country where the language and the alphabet were both foreign and unreadable reminded me forcefully of my reliance on language and reading to communicate and relate. The experience underscored how dependent I am on the ability to decipher signs in order to distinguish whether my destination is joyfully welcoming or dreadfully dangerous, and to reassure me that I know where I am going. While in Tokyo, I was humbled by my utter disconnect from all these guideposts. I have been thinking about the inadequacy of language and interpretation. What is language, really? Why is it that sounds have

come to embody meaning? How accurate are those meanings? These are basic questions of the philosophy of language. And language, like design, is a system of signs used to communicate. The act of communicating is a matter of letting other people know what we think or, in many cases, what to think. The signs that make up language get their meaning from the ideas we associate with them and our collective agreement about these associations. The great British philosopher John Locke believed that thought originates in experiencenot in language. Ideas develop as the product of experience. And through this power of association, ideas are transformed into complex mental constructs like language. But language is a highly arbitrary and highly interpretive medium. Back when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I went through a particularly dicult phase in my life, when my behavior, reecting on it now, could be best described as post-traumatic stress disorder. As a result of the disruption of my outer world, my inner world began to crumble, and I developed a bizarre speech dysfunction. Whenever anyone asked me how I was doing, or what the weather was like, or any other innocuous question, I froze. I couldnt answer. Inasmuch as I thought I knew how I was doing or what the weather was like, I felt that I couldnt be absolutely sure. What if my idea about how I was doing wasnt real? What if the weather was dierent somewhere else? As I tried to answer these benign

THE ART OF HAVING FUN

by Ji Lee
WWW.PLEASEENJOY.COM Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I studied graphic design at Parsons School of Design. While I was in my third year, the school introduced its rst computer lab. This was a very historic and exciting event. I learned the rst design programs such as QuarkXpress, Photoshop, Illustrator and a crude 3D program called Adobe Dimensions, which doesnt exist anymore. One of the tools I was playing with was called revolve, in which you could draw a 2D shape and revolve it around an axis to form a 3D object. I thought this was a really fun thing to do. In one of my experiments, I decided to revolve the letters of thealphabet. It was amazing to see how each letter, when revolved, formed a beautiful and unique 3D shape. When I rotated 26 letters of the alphabet, I realized I had just accidentally created a new 3D font. I wanted to give it a cool name, so I chose a font with a futuristic and spacey nameUniversand called it Univers Revolved. After my graduation, I worked in several design rms. Although the work was busy and I was learning a lot, I really wanted to work in advertising because I was interested in ideas and scale.So I quit my job at a corporate design rm, and I started to freelance

while I was trying to get my foot into advertising. But I didnt really know how I could do this, since I didnt know anyone in advertising. I was freelancing at a well-regarded design studio called Design/Writing/Research, founded by Abbott Miller. At the time, Abbott was publishing a book called Dimensional Typography, which featured several computer-generated 3D fonts. He saw Univers Revolved in my portfolio, liked it and included it in his book. After the book was published, The New York Times was publishing a special Sunday magazine dedicated to technology. One of the editors saw the Dimensional Typography book, liked my font and contacted me, and the font ended up being published in The New York Times Magazine. At the same time, Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the most famous advertising agencies in the world, was organizing its first Innovation in Communication Award. They invited several inuential and famous artists, scientists and authors as judges. One of the judges for the award was Laurie Anderson, a musician and poet. Laurie saw my 3D font in The New York Times Magazine and told Saatchi to contact me to enter the award. I entered, and the font became one of 10 nalists for the award.

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questions, I found that all I could muster were responses such as, Well, maybe I am feeling well, but maybe I am not, or, Maybe it is raining, but maybe it is not. Maybe or maybe not became my standard reply to any question, including what I wanted to eat for dinner. My mother and stepfather were horried and angry at my inability to articulate an answer to the simplest of questions, and I was punished for my lack of conviction and clarity. But, for the life of me, I couldnt fathom how anyone could be sure of anything. I preferred to be banished to my bedroom than to utter a phrase that contained a xed belief on anything, including what I wanted for dessert. Given that language is our primary tool for thinking, can we perceive or describe something without rst having a linguistic boundary for it? And where does nuance t in? What about ambiguity? French philosopher Jacques Derrida stated that we inhabit a world of signs without fault, without truth and without origin. One of the central tenets of his philosophy is that there is nothing outside the text. Derridas philosophy has been termed deconstruction, an apt name, since its adherents seek to deconstruct the nature and meaning of language. Several phrases expressing this point of viewintentionally or unintentionally have oated into our cultural discourse: We really cant know if something is true or not, maxim of the deconstructionists, or Bill Clintons infamous equivocation, That depends on what the meaning of is is. Critics of Derrida complain that if words have no essential meaning, then there is no meaning. Or, if there is, you cant actually communicate it. I fundamentally disagree. Design is rst and

foremost a language that is dependent upon words in order to communicate meaning. Symbols and actions have as much profundity as words. In fact, facial gestures are all but universal and far more trustworthy in reading a situation than language can be. Nevertheless, language can be helpful. Back in Tokyo, while hiring a taxi to transport me from the middle of the city back to my hotel, I found that the elderly taxi driver had no idea what I was saying or where I was asking him to go. As my attempts to communicate proved fruitless, I began to ask passersby if they could assist me. A young Japanese woman came over, and I asked her if she could help me tell the cab driver where I was going, as I was lost. It seemed that she understood the word lost, and I began to feel relieved. But before I knew it, she got into the cab alongside me and started feeling around the oor! She falteringly asked me, What lost? Before I could answer, she motioned to other passersby. Suddenly ve generous people began looking for something I hadnt lost in and around the taxi. I couldnt help but laugh and consider the various things one actually could lose: your condence, your control, your appetite, your dignity, your reputation, your keys, your dog, your faith, your shirt, your heart, your mind, your life. I had simply lost my way. It took a few minutes, but I was nally able to correct the miscommunication by showing the growing group around me a postcard of the hotel where I was staying, which I fortuitously remembered was in my handbag. The image did the trick, and then all of usthe young woman, the elderly cab driver, the burgeoning crowd of helpers and Iburst into spontaneous clapping and laughing. Not a word was uttered, not a phrase was exchanged, but suddenly, everyone was on exactly the same page, and everyone understood.

To announce and welcome the nalists, Saatchi & Saatchi organized a dinner with all of us and the judges at a fancy midtown restaurant in New York. I was so excited. As a young designer who dreamed of working in advertising, this was beyond my dream come true. At the dinner, I was seated at a round table of about 10 people. Right next to me, there was agentleman in his 70s. He had white hair, he was dressed in a power suit, he had an expensive watch on his wrist, and he had a huge presence. For some reason, I was certain he was one of the Saatchi brothers I had read about in newspapers and magazines. To be polite, I struck a conversation, and heres exactly how it went: Hi, Im Ji Lee. Nice to meet you. Hello. Nice to meet you. So, do you work at Saatchi? No. What do you do? Im an astronaut. Wow. (pause) When was the last time you were in space? 1969. It took me about three seconds to realize he was one of the rst three men to land on the moon. He was the Buzz Aldrin. I felt immediately humbled and honored, and my heart was racing. Eventually, I calmed myself down, and Buzz and I ended up having a great conversation. One of the most memorable parts of our conversation was when I asked him if he believed in UFOs.

He quickly said no, but he followed with a reply: But I have seen things I cant really explain And I was thinking: That sounds just like UFOs. In the end, I didnt win the Saatchi & Saatchi Award, but I did end up meeting Bob Isherwood, who was then Saatchis worldwide creative director. Bob liked my work and oered me a job as an art director at Saatchi. Today, I think about how a small, fun school project led me from one person to another over the years until it led me to the rst man on the moon at a dinner table and, later, to my dream job.Its funny how the universe has its way of granting your wish. And it made me realize that the personal projects that Im passionate about and have fun with always lead me to amazing people and life-changing opportunities. Experiences like this encouraged me to become an evangelist to spread the message about the transformative power of personal projects. Ah, and theres another amazing story that resulted from this extraordinary chain of events. I ended up meeting Laurie Anderson, who discovered my 3D font in The New York Times Magazine. To thank her, I invited her, her boyfriend Lou Reed and their dog Lola to my apartment for a dinner. But that is a story to be told in the next book.
Brian Singer is the principal and creative director of Altitude Associates in San Francisco. www.altitudesf.com. You can buy Graphic Content, from which these essays are excerpted, at MyDesignShop.com.

COVER STORIES
Of course, were all judging books by their covers. But how do cover designers tell a story that makes us want to read the one inside?
by Michelle Taute

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Clockwise from bottom left: Dollars and Sex, Chronicle Books, Alison Weiner; Black Snow, Melville House, Christopher King; The Blood Telegram, Alfred A. Knopf, Chip Kidd; The Art of Clean Up, Chronicle Books, Kristen Hewitt; Chickens Threaten to Divide Community, Harper Design, Chip Kidd; Well-Read Women, Chronicle Books, Kristen Hewitt; Where Tigers Are at Home, Other Press, Chip Kidd, Virgil Burnett (illustrator); The Antagonist, Alfred A. Knopf, Chip Kidd; Cooked, Penguin Books, Coralie BickfordSmith, Jim Stoddart (illustrator).

ven for those of us who fall asleep most nights clutching a Kindle,

theres still an irresistible pull to carve out time for visiting real-life bookstores. A mandate to ignore our Amazon wish lists, our to read Pinterest boards and all those smartphone memos about notable books. Stepping inside the local bookshop allows us to set down all this digital baggage so we can stop feeling guilty about all the books we should be reading. Instead, we walk down the rows and around the display tables as we indulge in the romanticism of books. We wander aimlessly until a cover seduces us, makes us pick it up o the shelf, run our nger down the spine and ip it over to read the back copy. Its a moment of discovery and anticipation. Every book lover secretly longs to discover a new favorite book, a hidden gem to share with friends. But this exploration hinges on something important: great cover design. The visuals on all those rectangular spaces pull us around the bookstore (and sometimes, the internet). We might glance right past what seems like the hundredth cover with a high-heeled shoe or yet another ri on Fifty Shades of Grey. But our eyes might linger on that foil embossing, or a stunning original illustration might stop us in our tracks. When everything goes right, well-designed book covers help us nd the best stories or, at least, the best stories for us. And since this is the storytelling issue, it seems appropriate to ponder: What role does storytelling actually play in cover design? Its an interesting question because you dont want to tell the whole story, says legendary book designer Chip Kidd, associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf. You want to hint at the story. Hint at the mood or feeling of the book.

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Clockwise from above: The Middlesteins, Grand Central Publishing, Catherine Casalino; Francesco Vezzoli, Rizzoli, Patrick Li; How Literature Saved My Life, Alfred A. Knopf, Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear (photoillustration); The Org, 12 Books, Herman Estevez; The Story of My Assassins, Melville House, Christopher King; City of the Snakes, Grand Central Publishing, Catherine Casalino; Its Modern, Rizzoli, Charles Churchward, Emily Wardwell; Americas Obsessives, Grand Central Publishing, Office of Paul Sahre.

Its a sentiment echoed by Andrew Losowsky, senior books editor of The Hungton Post. He believes the purpose of an adult ction cover is to put you in a mood and give you a sense of what youre going to experience. Storytelling is what books are all about, he says. Whether theyre ction or nonction, a great cover is the start of the story. Still, its important not to give away too many details too soon. Kidd, for instance, takes particular issue with covers that show the full face of a character, a design choice that robs readers of the chance to cast that role in their imaginations. These kinds of cover design missteps, however, seem dwarfed by the larger shadow hanging over the book worldthe rise of digital media. How will print books compete with all the free information online? And with e-readers that hold hundreds of titles? Dont underestimate the power of ink on paper just yet. Im a believer that were entering a golden age of print, Losowsky says. When something loses its monopoly, it allows it to express what makes it special. Now that we can all tell the time on our cell phones, he points out, the most successful watch brands are the ones that focus on quality and design. And instead of putting radio out of business, TV just made those radio stations focus on what sets the audio format apart. So what can print do better? Well, unlike an e-book le, a traditional book actually puts in your hand a tangible object that can enhance each specic reading experience. In some corners of the book world, theres denitely a focus on the book as a desirable physical object. The Penguin Clothbound Classics series, for instance, feels lush, and its easy to imagine how attractiveand astutethe titles will look on your bookshelf. Jessica Hisches covers for the Penguin Drop Caps series feel like

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standalone pieces of art in their own right. But even less exquisite covers can add to the story. Having read the book, I want a souvenir of that moment, Losowsky says. I can easily take it o the shelf and have a sensory memory of reading that book. Kidd isnt worried about the digital revolutions impact on cover design, either. There is no algorithm that can make a thoughtful, intentional cover for a book, he says. You need a human brain for that. I dont see that changing anytime soon. He believes books in any format need a strong visual representation, so instead of worrying about the future of publishing, he focuses on making each cover he creates original. How exactly is that tall order possible? He reads as much of the book as is available and has as much contact with the author as the author wants, but beyond that, theres no dened process. He starts from scratch every time and tries to work without any preconceived ideas. If somebody can predict what Im going to do before I do it, Ive failed, he says. I think its very important to do something fresh. It gets harder and harder, actually. Hes not alone in this quest for originality. I really try not to look at book cover design, says Jason Booher, senior designer at Alfred A. Knopf. I think its a basic lesson I learned early on. I dont think you should look at the design in your own eld. Its a really easy way not to have your covers look like other covers. Still, Booher admits that its impossible not to see other covers, especially when you work at a major publisher. But its this kind of commitment and eort that makes wandering through a bookstore such a magical experience. Book cover designers are book lovers, too. And they know the right cover design just might lead you to a life-changing story. On the following pages, we share some of latest and most compelling covers.

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Phases of the Moon

Coralie Bickford-Smiths designs
for Penguins Clothbound Classics series made a big splash a few years ago, but this recent addition to the series represents a big personal moment. While earning her undergraduate degree at Reading University, Bickford-Smith spent hours in the library studying more than 100 editions of Robinson Crusoe. She was tracking illustration styles and printing methods, but she also remembers seeing the same imagery over and over: Footprints in the sand or a guy with no shoes on a deserted island. This visual language has become a shorthand for Robinson Crusoe, says the senior book cover designer for Penguin U.K. I tried to do something totally dierent. The clothbound series always features one illustrated object on a grid, and Bickford-Smith decided on the moon. It communicates the solitude of looking up at the night sky, and the moons phases mark the passage of time. Her woodcutstyle illustrations are embossed in white matte foil on dark blue cloth. How do you tell a story with just one thing? It is hard, she admits. You have to distill the whole essence of that book down to one object and get the feel of the story across so people want to pick it up and read. Publisher: Penguin Books Art director: Jim Stoddart Designer and illustrator: Coralie Bickford-Smith

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For Laughs
With Chelsea Handlers latest book,
the team at Grand Central Publishing needed to start working on the cover before the text was even written. They knew it was a book of travel essays and that some of them were about Africa. Handlers agent, Michael Broussard, thought it might be funny to show the comedian with elephants, so the design team began poring through photographer portfolios. An image from James Quantz Jr. immediately stood out. It showed elephants walking through a car wash, and Handler loved it so much that she wanted to be placed right into the scene. Anne Twomey, vice president creative director at Grand Central Publishing, thought they could create an image a bit more specic to the title. I always say bold, beautiful, smart and uniquely appropriate to the book, she says. So the photographer shot an airport luggage carousel and scheduled a separate photo shoot with Handler and her dog. The elephants and other wildlife came into play with a little digital magic. The end result? A humorous cover that tells a story with the same sensibility as a Chelsea Handler joke. One thing I know about comedians, Twomey says, it really has to be their brand of humor. Publisher: Grand Central Publishing Creative director: Anne Twomey Art director: Elizabeth Connor Photographer: James Quantz Jr. Hand lettering: Joel Holland

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A (Once) Banned Book

In the 1920s, the Russian government
banned Mikhail Bulgakovs The Heart of a Dog. The books central storyabout a franken-dog that takes on human characteristics and becomes a government bureaucratwas seen as an allegory for the Russian Revolution. For decades, this meant that the novel was printed and passed hand-to-hand, an illegal and dangerous method of distributing books known as samizdat. I thought that the idea of samizdat was really essential to understanding the importance of the text, says Christopher King, art director for Melville House. Unfortunately, those clandestine manuscripts didnt oer much in the way of visuals, so King was stumped until he found himself at a show about Bowery art at the New Museum. The punk rock posters seemed like an interesting way to explore samizdat and the general idea of distributing ideas in revolutionary ways. For the book cover, King mimicked the photocopied collage look so common to punk rock posters. The type is all found from public domain sources like Works Progress Administration postersand he even discovered the dog on a cover of Puck magazine, a humor publication founded in the late 1800s. Kings approach creates a powerful raw eect thats appropriate to the storyeven if you dont know the books history. Publisher: Melville House Art director: Christopher King

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Beauty and Loss

You might not guess it from the
beautiful cover, but this poetry collection focuses on sudden loss. Its about trying to nd order in the midst of tragedies like divorce, death, war and exile. But yet, the books tone isnt depressing. Its about beauty on many levels, says Jason Booher, senior designer at Alfred A. Knopf. Shes not the kind of poet whos trying to make you uncomfortable. Shes giving you the beauty around you. Theres tension between tone and subject matter, as well as the desire for order in the midst of change. To capture this conict, Booher took apart an illustration of a plant to disrupt its natural state. Things happen without us planning them or making them, Booher says. What I tried to create on the jacket was not the idea of chaos but a churn or disruption. The bird in the middle seems like its trying to make sense of it all. Boohers main goal? Capture the theme of the book using the same music and form of the authors language. With any book, but especially with poetry, youre nding an element, a visual note, something that feels right, he says. Something that talks to the essence of the writing. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Art director: Carol Devine Carson Designer: Jason Booher Collage: Made from original illustrations by John James Audubon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

WEB EXTRA
Read the stories behind three more new book releases, plus an article about books that double as works of fine art, online at Printmag.com/October-2013.

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The Magic of Iceland

Rodrigo Corral wanted to visually
match the uniqueness of Sjns writing style on the cover of The Blue Fox. After reading the book and researching the author, Corral found himself inspired by the fact that the writer is Icelandic. This comes out in the language, myth, philosophy and abstraction in the text. Theres a fantastical nature to the world inside the book that Corral wanted to capture on the cover. His writing is beautiful and has a poetic quality to it, says the creative director for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You can read two pages and really get lost in the concepts and layers and metaphors. Sometimes it reminded me of James Joyce because there are so many puzzles to solve. When you read this book, you really need to be invested in the exploration of his words. When it came time to concept, I wanted to focus more on the mood and the tone because this book is such a layered experience. The cool, stark night sky that makes up the covers background hints at a beauty and magic youre only going to discover in Iceland. For the fox image, Corral turned to an illustrator who could evoke the feeling you experience when you look at the celestial patterns in the night sky. It re-creates the wonder of being out of the city and gazing up at a truly dark sky where the stars seem brighter than you thought possible. For the authors name, Corral decided to take advantage of only having four letters to place on the cover. This gives you a lot of exibility, so I just started to explore and have fun with the possibilities, he says. Digital type started to feel too restrictive, so he began ripping up paper to create the most basic letterforms, then rened from there. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Designer: Rodrigo Corral Line drawings: Erik Jones

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Age Appropriate

Just like any design project, theres often a target audience

Under the Sheets

Sometimes a title sets the direction for the entire
cover. Such was the case with The Art of Sleeping Alone. Its such a good title, says Ben Wiseman, freelance illustrator and book cover designer. It already sums up so much. So he decided to create a simple visual that works in concert with the titles perfectly distilled message. This memoir follows a French Elle editor who decides to forgo sex, so its not a stretch to take book browsers straight into her bedroom. An aerial view adds a documentary quality and allows the blanket to become the perfect backdrop for the text. The understated illustration gives the cover a fresh feel and allows the readers imagination to dene the narrator. I like to be simple and unfussy, Wiseman says. If I can show a gure with hair and lips and its clear, then thats a success. To reinforce the personal nature of the story and give the cover a special feel, he turned to hand-drawn touches. Wiseman drew the hair, lips and type to create a pretty feel appropriate for a fashion magazine. Using navyinstead of blackfor the type adds softness and color. The bright background helps capture eyes in a bookstore. How does Wiseman know when a book cover is successful? He sets the bar high, noting that a cover image is a win if it can be captivating in a row of 100 cover images with people who arent even looking to buy a book. Publisher: Scribner Art director: Tal Goretsky Designer and illustrator: Ben Wiseman

for a book. And in the case of Constable & Toop, it was young adult readers. When I do regular trade ction, its a little more subtle, says Jim Tierney, freelance book cover designer. You want to stay away from telling too much of the story. Young Adult is a lot more straightforward. Usually, the book covers are more about storytelling. For Constable and Toop, he needed to capture the fun of a fantasy ghost story. Its a novel about the world of ghosts set in Victorian London, and theres a disease spreading that traps ghosts inside haunted houses. Theres a cast of human characters, too, including a young boy who lives above a funeral home and can see ghosts. This tale plays out in both literal and subtle ways on the cover. The type and architecture help establish the time period and set a mood while the ghosts oating around add action to the mix. Tierney didnt want to make the spirits too scary, so instead theyre friendly and interactive. One is tipping his hat and another is walking a small, cute dog. But if you look through the ghosts, theres a hint at the central plot. The house viewed through these spirits appears to be rotting, a nod to the disease thats spreading in the book. This subtle touch introduces layered storytelling and the idea of seeing things through dierent perspectives. The cover means more after you read the book, Tierney says. But it can be tricky. You dont want to give something away. Publisher: Abrams Imprint: Amulet Books Art director: Maria T. Middleton Designer: Jim Tierney
Cincinnati-based Michelle Taute is a writer and content strategist with more than a decade of experience. Shes a frequent contributor to design publications,including Print and HOW. www.michelletaute.com

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The IBM 100 Icons of Progress celebrated IBMs 100th anniversary with a traveling exhibit.

BEHIND THE

BRAND

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recently found a series of horribly embarrassing photos of myself in what I will call a quasi-fashionable choice. While my family members lovingly mocked my rather grubby appearance and unruly hair, I stole a private moment to look in a mirror. Despite my crazy curls, I was relieved at how many changes Id undergone since the time of those incriminating snapshots. The apparel I thought best represented me then wasnt accurately reecting my personal values. I dont even
listen to the band on that old T-shirt anymore. Over the years, Ive made conscious aesthetic choices to best represent who I am at my core. While I still sport several band T-shirts, my current outward appearance tells a truer story about me than those photos do. In a way, I realigned my personal brand. And, on very small scale, this is similar to the experience of many businesses. When my branding didnt match with a genuine description of myself, Ive had to evaluate, reect and update to keep the truth on the surface. Similarly, many companies realize that their look or the catalyst for their brandingthe story about who they areisnt in sync. They need to rediscover the authentic image that relays their core values and beliefs. Then, they have to tame their hair and update their wardrobe to tell the public who they really are. Yet, pinning down core beliefs and sharing their ideals in one cohesive and bona de story isnt as easy for a company as it is for one person. Unlike a personal transformation, its a much larger and more complex undertaking. Since brands are a cornerstone of the design world, and the stories they tell are so pervasive, I reached out to two branding experts: Kit Hinrichs, award-winning designer and founder of Studio Hinrichs in San Francisco, and Alina Wheeler, brand consultant, designer and author of Designing Brand Identity. They explain the importance of storytelling, dive into their process of unearthing a genuine brand story and recount a few of their favorite company tales.

How do you find a brands genuine backstory? Kit Hinrichs and Alina Wheeler share their advice and present case studies of successful branding projects.
by Melissa Mazzoleni

STORYTELLING IS ESSENTIAL
Even if youre tiring of the term storytelling, the narrative format is a powerful tool for designers. For one, designers have long used it to not only convey who they are as visual artists, but also the essence of a business since stories are a primary, familiar way in which we come to understand the world. As a ubiquitous form of communicating, a genuine rendition of a brands history, like a volcano erupting, spurs the designers

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The best stories are easy to share, memorable, have meaning and are authentic. Meaning is a campfire for everyone to rally around.
ALINA WHEELER

ideas forward to create all of the brand elements. The narrative format is not just for the consuming audience, but is inherently vital for the designer in creating a visual language that will function on all levels of brand communication, Hinrichs says. The design springs forth out of the retelling of a brands values or it pulls upon the ideas and principles represented in the story to reect color, style and other elements. Finding the authentic backstory is essential not only for the company, but also for the designer. Further, according to Hinrichs and Wheeler, the narrative format is the best way to make sure an audience retains information. Were hardwired to understand information told within a narrative construct, Hinrichs says. We learn better and remember longer when information is integrated into a story. Were so in tune with this form that an honest, well-told and eectively designed story is crucial to a brands success and longevity. In fact, as Hinrichs explains, a brand without a narrative will have one told for it by the public, and its critical that a company shapes and controls it own story. Putting control back into the clients hands while maintaining the integrity of the story is one of the primary objectives for a brand consultant.

ing a brand story. Thats inauthentic. For me, its about unearthing the best and most relevant stories. The consultant has to peel away the layers of time and internal or public misconceptions to get to the quintessence of a company. And the brand story, as an external reection of the company, has to emerge from the business core values, qualities and customer service. The most important element in creating a narrative is the authenticity of the story. It does no good to superimpose a story on a product or company that sounds great but does not mesh with who they really are, Hinrichs says. Designers are not in the business of making up a story about a business or institution. We examine, analyze and present the most eective way to explain the brand story to its customers. The candor that both experts seek in their work is what makes the brands story believable, relatable, enjoyableits what turns a casual browser into a customer and what makes the designers work, as a conduit to the heart of the company, sincere. And were so drawn to real narratives because they not only speak to that part of us thats smitten with stories, but they also reect a part of ourselves. We engage with stories about the burrito joint we frequent because we feel that the company shares our values. Or we choose to purchase shoes from a particular retailer because they support a worldview similar to our own. These stories create loyalty, too, because were not only engaging with a brand, but saying something sincere about ourselves.

AUTHENTIC REPOSITIONING

While a company needs to retain control over its story, this doesnt mean that its manufactured. Working with a business to uncover its brand narrative isnt about slapping on a shiny new topcoat; rather, its about digging into the past, discussing the present and nding a truthful representation that reects the clients current UNCOVERING THE TRUTH position and core beliefs. After all, customers arent foolish and Typically, company leaders welcome the expertise of consultants can spot a fake from miles away. Besides, a dishonest approach and designers because theyre already aware that something is can lead to the very thing that made a company rethink their pub- amiss. Usually, there are changes happening in their business lic image to begin witha brand story that doesnt match with that question the credibility of a brand story, Hinrichs says. the companys core. Occasionally, our research exposes a gap in what the company Despite the need to address a disconnect through more appro- thinks it represents and what the public thinks it represents. Its priate branding, both experts stress that repositioning a companys that disconnect that causes most companies to re-look at the way story must begin with uncovering their fundamental character- they are explaining their brand. They recognize that the band istics and beliefs. We know who we are is the strongest and only T-shirt no longer represents their sophisticated approach or that, starting point and foundation for any responsible brand identity over time, their story wandered, and they need to steer it back to work, whether designing a new symbol, a new look and feel, or their core values. Hinrichs outlines several major reasons why a an integrated cross-platform brand experience, Wheeler says. business would want to re-evaluate their brand story: The best stories are easy to share, memorable, have meaning and 1. The story that its audience believes is no longer accurate. are authentic. Meaning is a campre for everyone to rally around. 2. The current impression of a company is xed on an old model Authenticity is quite simply being genuine. Its never about changthat needs to be updated.

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BEFORE

AFTER

CASE STUDY

COLUMBUS SALAME: REMEMBERING ROOTS

by Kit Hinrichs
This family-owned, San Francisco-based company had a 75
year history in the California food business but was being squeezed out of many deli and retail stores by larger, more sophisticated national brands. The packaging graphics looked dated, and the generically drawn imagery reinforced the public perception of down-market product quality. Columbus Salames imagery was middle-of-the-road graphically and needed to be more authentic to its roots as a traditional Italian family-run company. To both upgrade their graphics and better express their origins, we took the Betty Crocker-ized image of Christopher Columbus and aged the artwork to look like a 15th century wood engraving. The company began to consistently use the image of Columbus to convey a high-quality presence in the deli department and on their trucks all around northern California. In keeping with the Italian brand story, we created a premium line, which we named Renaissance, and incorporated Renaissance paintings, surrounded with black and gold, which attracted an increased share of the market and an invitation from Williams Sonoma to create an exclusive Renaissance Salami Christmas package. This was all based on a strong backstory and an understanding of how to capitalize on a story that was already there. www.columbussalame.com

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CASE STUDY

ARCHIE DAVIS AND THE RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK: CAPTURING THE SPIRIT OF THE BRAND
by Alina Wheeler
In 1959, Archie Davis, a bank president, drove around the state of North Carolina for one month in a little white car to raise awareness and millions of dollars for Research Triangle Park (RTP). The vision of this public/private stimulus initiative
was to transform North Carolinas economy from tobacco and textiles to the businesses of the future. Stopping at a gas station in a small town, Davis struck up a conversation with a truck driver, who ended up giving him a $25 donation. Although the truck driver knew that neither he nor his son would (most likely) work in RTP, he made the contribution to ensure that his grandson would have the opportunity to be educated and work in North Carolina. RTP has since become the largest research park in the world. Although the majority of the $4.5 million raised in 1959 came from local business leaders, the story about Davis and the one donation from a truck driver has become a symbol of the spirit of service in the 21st century for the RTP as they embark on a journey to attract a new community of innovators, educators and entrepreneurs. This story had been buried in the organizations archives. In 2012, Bob Geolas, the CEO of the Research Triangle Foundation, shared the anecdote with New Kind, a rm that develops strategies for engaging passionate communities and building relevant brands (www.newkind.com). New Kind was charged with working with RTP to reconnect with communities around the state and to reimagine economic redevelopment. As RTP has moved forward with its redevelopment, Archie Davis has become the personication of the traits that RTP wants to espouse: optimism, practicality, transparency, authenticity, responsibility to place. These traits give us a strong sense of an identity that resonates with the people of North Carolina, says Chris Grams, president and partner of New Kind. New Kind collected new stories in the RTP Pathways to Opportunities tour around North Carolina and populated the ReimagineNC website (www.reimaginenc.com) with these tales. New Kinds additional research into Daviss personality and experiences resulted in an authentic mythology that is becoming a relatable, emotive identity for the new RTP. Along the way, we continue to be inspired by Archie, the Renaissance man in a bankers suit, whose tireless commitment helped make the Park a reality back in 1959, says Matthew Muoz, New Kinds chief design ocer and partner. Now the RTP team lovingly refers to Archie as a heartbeat, a lightening rod, and an anchor for the new RTP. www.rtp.org

Clockwise from top: Archie Davis in 1938, 1962 and 1965. The ReimagineNC website encourages North Carolina residents to share their stories.

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3. A company has become more vibrant, but its brand story hasnt. achieve mythic status because they have become so embedded 4. Public perception of a companys industry has changed, and within a culture and the stories that people share, Wheeler says. the current name and story need retelling. Sometimes there is such a vast dierence in the storieslets say 5. New management may have refocused the company and want about why the company was founded or how a company lives its to tell the story in their own voice. valuesthat it could be a signal that the culture is weak. On a more Yet, addressing these discrepancies and nding authenticity positive note, its a huge opportunity to rekindle the true story and means growing pains for the companythink back to some of revitalize the brand experience. In other words, this is a chance those fashion trends youve abandoned over the years. The great- for the brand expert to turn the company toward the best, most est obstacle to telling a compelling story about a company is the authentic representation of itself. status quo, be it corporate policies or the corporate leadership, After obtaining these telling tales, the second step in Wheelers Hinrichs says. Often its only external motives that change that process is clarifying the strategy for the brand, which leads to dynamicdiminishing sales, loss of prestige and new manage- phases three and four: designing identity and creating touchment focus are the three big moversand allow the company to points. Her process ends with helping the brand implement the move forward. Because the process of retelling a brand story is change by managing assets. Throughout all ve phases, Wheeler a real cultural change for a companys employees and custom- tries to adhere to three imperatives: Make it easy for the cusers, Hinrichs explains, it can make the people involved tomer to buywhether they are on their mobile at a sports game uncomfortable, even if they recognize the need to change. And, or in person at the point of sale. Make it easy for the sales force he reminds us that the business leaders involved in the original whether its a business development person or your website. And branding process are typically involved in the rebranding, so its important to remain sensitive to their history with the brand. Before he dives into brand research, Hinrichs explains the benets of change to the company leaders because the refocused, accurate telling of the brand story will revitalize the company, both externally and internally, raise awareness of the value of the company on Wall Street and basically help the companys bottom line. He adds that company leaders are often excited to be a part of the business history by updating the brand Despite any potential roadblocks, Hinrichs and Wheeler take a similar approach: They rst conduct research, such as interviews and brand audits, to understand a companys vision, culture and competitive advantage. You become a shrink, a sleuth and a scientist. Understanding evolves from various sources, like competitive audits, usability studies, mystery shopping and examining existing touchpoints, but interviewing is the most fertile place for insights, Wheeler says. Unearthing stories that bind the culture or reawaken institutional memory provide the most meaningful clues into what a brand is and what it stands for. These stories are the hidden gems of the brand because they allow the leaders to rediscover their original position or become aware of how their culture has evolved over time. The stories make meaning for the companys leaders so, in turn, the brand consultant can vividly express the narrative to their audience. To further unearth the narrative or to, as Wheeler describes it, nd the story that resonates with the brand and that has become a part of its fabric, she employs a ve-step process, detailed in the fourth edition of her book, Designing Brand Identity. Through open conversations, both experts seek to nd the truth so they can best present that truth to the customer. These stories, according to Wheeler, inspire all aspects of brand development from design to content development, integrated systems and brand standards. The best brand guidelines refer to the stories that helped shape the culture and the brand. And patterns begin to emerge from these conversations and audits, in the same way any person describing life-dening events might begin to reveal overarching themes and ideals. I always look for patterns. It becomes immediately evident when stories make it easy for senior management to sleep at night because theyre doing everything to build brand equity. After all, the entire motivation for this process is to better align a business with its target customers. Wheeler reiterates that sincerity is vital: An authentic story delivered in an authentic wayi.e., word of mouthwill build trust, make a referral easy or open up a new marketing opportunity.

The most important element in creating a narrative is the authenticity of the story.
- Kit Hinrichs
Essentially, authenticity is the thread that ties the entire process, the brand and its story, and the audience together. Hinrichs and Wheeler, along with other brand consultants and designers, are like archeologists who uncover layers of dust or time to reveal the truth that lies underneath. Then, they make the narrative compelling through its genuineness and with their design work. Stories stir up emotions or memories and engage us. They tell us something about things we enjoy. Most important, stories make meaning for usthey rearm or reveal our own values and beliefs. And, usually after a few years, we have to return to the source of these stories to realign them, conrm their accuracy, dispel any rumors and update the aesthetics. Visual artists have a powerful role in storytelling in the modern world. They nd the truthful brand story, put control back into the companys hands, eloquently and beautifully relay the narratives to the public, and, as Wheeler describes it, visual artists ignite the fundamental being of a company.
Melissa Mazzoleni is associate editor for Print and HOW magazines. You can also read her weekly articles on the HOW blog at HOWDesign.com.

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CASE STUDY

THE WILD CENTER AND THE GREENLEAF POND: INSPIRING BRAND VISION
by Alina Wheeler
Fish Partners, a strategic design firm, was a member of a collaborative team to dene the vision, brand and voice of a new museum in the Adirondacks, now known as The Wild Center. Fish interviewed an extensive range of stakeholders, including the museum sta, board, scientists, naturalists and tourism leaders, as part of their work to help write the master plan and create the brand identity, naming and logo. The process surfaced many stories about the Adirondacks that then informed the thinking about the new museum experience. There was an opportunity to invent a dierent kind of natural history museum because it would be built in the middle of the biggest intact forest of its kind left on earth. Howard Fish from Fish Partners (www.shpartners.co) knew a naturalist named Greenleaf Greenie Chase who lived a few miles from where the museum would be built. Greenie had collected just about every plant that lived in the Adirondacks and transplanted them to his garden. He knew that by having the plants, he would also get the animals that liked to eat, sip, hide or nest on those plants, so his garden was this humming little kaleidoscope of life, Fish says. You could watch it all through this huge window he had set up with viewing chairs. He even had a trout pool, and when his trout broke the surface of the pool, Greenie would grab his rod and clamber down to the lake at the bottom of the hill because whatever cued his trout to feed cued the sh there too, and that cued Greenie to catch dinner. As Fish told the story of Greenies garden, infused with all the wild things in the Adirondacks, Greenie was there too, casually pointing out where the sleeping ying squirrels were or explaining how to determine a bears height by its claw marks on the beech bark. It was through stories like this that a new vision for the museum was created. It became a place to be surrounded by life with a somewhat humorous and knowledgeable guide who didnt lecture you but was happy to whisper a few little secrets to get you going. This took hold and guided a lot of the thinking about the brand. The museum built its own version of Greenies gardens, and sta is more interested in watching visitors discover things than in lecturing. A few years after The Wild Center opened, a founder changed the name of the pond to Greenleaf Pond to keep the story of Greenie a part of the museum. Filled with trout, the pond literally laps against the side of The Wild Center, visible from within the museum and from outside. www.wildcenter.org

CASE STUDY

365 TYPOGRAPHIC CALENDAR: TYING TYPOGRAPHY TO NARRATIVE

by Kit Hinrichs
This is an entrepreneurial venture that I started more
than a decade ago. It grew out of my feeling that typography should be appreciated for its own innate qualities. I wanted viewers to focus on the intriguing character of the typefaces and give recognition to the designers who created them. All calendars communicate the days, weeks and months of the year. And all use typography to dene the content. But by adding a narrative to the 365 Calendar, it functions at a dierent level. In this case, we included information about the typeface and its designer, when the face was designed and, in some cases, the inuence the typeface had on the designer and his peers. Adding the information to the calendar makes the total experience both educational and aesthetic. Including the type designers birthday on the calendar was just an added nod to the creatives who bring style, spirit and function to our lives every day. In recent years, weve asked colleagues around the world to choose their favorite faces, or faces theyve designed, to include in the calendar. www.studio-hinrichs.com

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In 2011, the traveling THINK exhibit displayed the IBM 100 Icons of Progress. Each design centered on a different IBM innovation and used the number 100 to emphasize the companys centennial.

CASE STUDY

IBM 100 ICONS OF PROGRESS: REKINDLING INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY

by Alina Wheeler

In 2009, IBM reached out to its partner agencies and asked them to explore and conceptualize an identity for IBMs 2011 centennial celebration. The entire campaign was inspired by a rough sketch by a principal at VSA Partners (www.vsapartners.com), Curt Schreiber, in which he combined Paul Rands landmark 1972 8-bar logo with a 1961 Selectric typewriter. This collage sparked an epiphany. Why only one? Why not 100 marks to celebrate 100 innovations and achievements? asked Jon Iwata, IBM senior vice president of marketing and communications. The global initiative was named IBM 100 Icons of Progress; the central goal was to pay homage to the people, ideas and innovations that have shaped IBMs history. The process began with a global call for submissions of storiespast and presentthat had led to a transformative change in making the world a better place. No one could have imagined the outpouring of stories that ensued. The stories ignited conversations in 186 countries about the many ways that IBM has transformed business, science and society, from helping to put the rst man on the moon to developing the barcode and the personal computer. Through an exhaustive internal and external review process, the team members edited 860 stories to 100 iconic moments. The writers, editors and content managers conducted additional research and crafted the voice and tone of each story. While hundreds of submissions were being reviewed, VSA Partners led an exploration process to develop a cohesive and exible design and content system. All icons were designed based on the number 100. Each icon needed to be a unique vessel for meaning and storytelling and to function as a visually arresting prompt for a powerful idea. The IBM 100 Icons of Progress was launched in early 2011 on www.IBM100.com and multiple other channels throughout the year, including a traveling exhibit. IBM never imagined how powerful and engaging the stories would be to its clients, its workforce and to other forward thinkers around the globe. The icons tell IBMs story in an unprecedented and highly visual way, underscoring the companys prolic impact on the world, Schrieber says. The stories did more than rekindle institutional memorythey inspired recognizing fundamental patterns of progress as a means to look forward and seed the future. www.ibm.com

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Y R O T S E D I S IN
Playful designs pull audiences into the narrative. Read about 3 creatives who have turned interactive storytelling into a contact sport.
by Karli Petrovic
torytelling has long been an essential component of design work. This oft-used tool is just as likely to incite a warm and fuzzy feeling in consumers who pick up your packaging design as it is to turn a simple illustration into a clever conversation piece. In fact, many great designs begin as stories just waiting to be told. But it is one thing for a designer to construct a narrative for the audience; it is quite another to create something that enables (and encourages) the audience to add to the narrative. From a web project that aggregates data to report on human emotions to a larger-than-life digital exhibition of an interactive ecosystem, Jonathan Harris and Design I/Os Theodore Watson and Emily Gobeille are producing some mindblowing sagas. Heres the tale of how these three creatives structure stories, overcome obstacles and foresee the future of interactive design.

JONATHAN HARRIS: TELL ME YOUR LIFE STORY

Jonathan Harris is the man behind powerful works such as Cowbird (www.cowbird.com), a small community of storytellers interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than youre likely to nd anywhere else on the web, and We Feel Fine (www.wefeelfine.org), the aforementioned

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digital feelings calculator that was a col- mented with oil painting and composing travel journals before laborative eort with Sep Kamvar. Harris dabbling with digital media. It seemed like the most interesting Work shows the has a knack for creating connections frontier, he says. realities of those who between users around the world. Princeton And Harris uses the interactive frontier to share stories among make fantasies in a educated in the disciplines of computer strangers as well as to share his own personal stories with audicollection of 10-secscience and photography, Harris odd med- ences across the globe. For example, at the outset of his 30th ond teaser videos shot ley of specialties helps him engage birthday, the designer embarked on a personal project called in New York City. audiences through visual and interactive Today. A series of daily photographs and accompanying short art and shared experiences. stories posted online, Today continued for 440 consecutive Right page: Although Computer science taught me how to days and gave viewers a glimpse of Harris life story, from witit isnt a magnet for break down problems systematically into nessing a strange encounter on the subway one Halloween to a viral content sharing, smaller, more manageable chunks, he says. car trip to deliver a book of poems to an octogenarian sheep Cowbird allows Photography taught me how to look at farmer with the soul of a poet. people to upload a things and how to notice things most peoMy favorite project is probably Today because its the most photo and write a ple dont see. My photography teacher at personal thing Ive made, he says. A lot of people do 365 story about what hapPrinceton was Emmet Gowin, and he projectsthe idea is not newbut its one of those ideas thats all pened in the image or taught me to see the beauty in everyday life, about execution, and I put a lot of myself into each days entry. led people to it. right at home, without the need for exotic Some nights I would spend four-plus hours writing the story, and travel or melodrama. Harris, who got into I tried to make sure that each entry would give something art through comic books, later experi- to people.
Opening spread and above: I Love Your

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Harris also cites a David Foster Wallace a pay-to-watch model. This was his rst experiment creating essay that dierentiates art from advertis- nancially sustainable digital art. In this case, the economic ing as an inuence in how he saw the model served as a means of funding his passion projects while project. While ads require something from still donating 10% to the Sex Workers Project, a charity that the audience, art is simply a gift. My oers social and legal services to those who engage in sex work. Today project was denitely a gift, and it If successful, Harris sees this model as a way of funding future was a tremendous instrument of personal projects from all creatives who use the digital medium to progrowth, Harris says. In the end, it started duce and share art. to take over my lifeI started to feel like a I Love Your Work turns the camera on nine women (Jincey spectator to my own lifeso I stopped it Lumpkin, Dylan Ryan, Ela Darling, Ryan Keely, Jett Bleu, abruptly. When I look back on the 440 pho- Dolores Haze, Luna Londyn, Nic Switch and Joy Sauvage) who tographs now, they seem really beautiful labor in the lesbian porn industry. Through 2,202 10-second to me. movie clips, encompassing approximately six hours of lm, the Similar in form, Harris Cowbird proj- womens lives become a narrative exploring the realities of ect looks to audiences to contribute their own photos and stories. those who produce fantasies. In this case, the fantasy was Some stories are extensive and some are no more than a sentence Therapy, a 10-part series from Juicy Pink Box Productions or two long, but each has a photo and a label, such as diplomacy about a woman who explores her sexual fantasies and experior need, a date and a short clarication like a drive with a ences by having a conversation with seven dierent women, who diplomat or what do you need? The photos range from the all play parts of the main character. Therapy predominantly professional to the Instagram-ltered, the camera-phone sele showcases self-pleasure scenes. to the worn, black-and-white shot from more than a few years Featured in The New York Times, The Hungton Post ago. Stories of heartache, suering, joy and perseverance ll the and more, I Love Your Work has gained some remarkable site in an addictive format that begs you to read them all, even praise. Greg Stefano, video editorial director of online publicathough some leave you guessing at the conclusion. I wanted to tion Cool Hunting, touts the projects storytelling aspects, create a space for a slower, deeper, contemplative kind of self- saying, The resulting patchwork videos create nine dierent expression, Harris says. I wanted to create a space for the kind stories that are, at times, very mundane but also completely and of content that would still resonate 50 years from now. Its designed utterly addictive. Slates Amanda Hess commented on the with a lot of sensitivity and care. At the same time, it violates just overall experience: The interactivity of the project reects how about every principle of viral content strategy, which means that we consume porn on the internetjumping from clip to clip, its growth has been slow. By web standards, Cowbird has a small catching glimpses of video in between mundane e-mail replies community of 30,000 authors who use it and love it, but it hasnt and, sometimes, visits to performers own blogs. blown up into something truly mainstream like Tumblr or Twitter. And aside from the content and digital platform, there are In his most recent undertaking, I Love Your Work, however, other interesting concepts at work. For example, Harris shot the Harris sought to engage audiences in a new wayby setting up 10-second clips during 10 consecutive days (Lumpkin was lmed

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When a new technology arrives, we immediately find ways to use it to connect to each other. Thats what humans do. Were empathetic animals.
Jonathan Harris

Semantics aside, Harris preferred online medium can be a twice) at ve-minute intervals for 24 hours, taking in whatever was happening at the tough one through which to share experiences. As with many time. Each $10 ticket aords a viewer access forms of design work, there will always be challenges when it to the interactive documentary for 24 hours, comes to execution, but Harris has encountered a dierent hicbut there is a catch: Only 10 viewers are cup when attempting to construct an interactive narrative: permitted to sign up and reserve a time on Mainly holding peoples attention [presents a problem], although a particular day. Assuming the tickets sell thats a challenge in any medium, he says. Human attention quickly, the project delays the ticketholders might be the only truly nite resource, but people dont realize instant gratication, something that porn how valuable it is. People are always killing time and allowing is poised to provide readily. The 10-second their time to be consumed by products and companies that are stories are also modeled after the 10-second designed to monopolize and monetize it. visual teasers the industry uses to entice There are other challenges as well. Despite advancements in people to buy the entire pornographic lm. the digital age, some critics tend to be leery of interactive designs An I Love Your Work guest page contin- where meaning can get lost in translation. Others dismiss online ues the interactivity of the stories beyond forums, arguing that the internet and social media could potenthe videos by listing the names of those who tially lead to the demise of true, personal connections. In a watched the documentary, building a com- controversial Flash on the Beach lecture in 2008, Harris himself munity of people who have participated in argued that interactive design often goes too far and that there a singular experience. have been no masterpieces in the digital realm. Today, Harris dismisses these objections. Of course it is NO MEDIUM HAS A MONOPOLY possible to tell stories online. No medium has a monopoly on stories, he says. People find all sorts of ways to transmit ON STORIES While quite dierent, these three projects meaning. The ways in which humans connect are always evolvshare an underlying theme: They tell sto- ing. When a new technology arrives, we immediately nd ways to ries. But thats not necessarily how Harris use it to connect to each other. Thats what humans do. Were sees it. What are stories? Everything is a empathetic animals. story. Nothing is a story. It depends on your Of his own comments, Harris has taken on a dierent perspecperspective, he says. Storytelling has tive. While he still isnt sure that a digital masterpiece has been become such a clich in the past few years produced (his own work included), his priorities have denitely as to be nearly meaninglesslike sustain- changed. That was something I said when I was young and brash ability or innovation. Every ad campaign and critical, Harris says. I try to be less critical now. Theres is now a storytelling endeavor, and every something good in everything, even if its simply the process of kind of communication seems to be called doing it. I dont want to be a critic. I prefer to be a creator. Ill let storytelling. I actually nd that word pretty the critics decide the masterpiece question. Im just focused on boring now. I just make stu that feels inter- making my work and living a good, simple, creative life. And being esting to me. Call it whatever you want. kind. Thats more important to me now.

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DESIGN I/O: TELLING THE TALE

When it comes to constructing stories that encourage audiences to play, Emily Gobeille and Theodore Watson, principals of Design I/O, a Cambridge, MA-based creative studio specializing in digital design, are at the top of their game. Gobeille and Watson have an enthusiasm for storytelling, from Terrarium, an interactive ecosystem that uses participants voices to fuel and sustain the environment and living things within it, to Puppet Parade, an installation that allowed children to perform alongside largescale puppets by enabling them to step into the environment and interact with the puppets directly, petting them or creating food for them to eat. We tell stories through a combination of Two projects that ourished in the interdesign and interaction, Gobeille says. We are passionate about active format were Funky Forest and creating dynamic stories, where people are not just observers, but Rise and Fall, which also happen to be the can become part of the story. Stories are also the foundation on designers favorites. Like Terrarium, which many of our projects are created. We start with a story and Funky Forest is based around an interacthen gure out the best way to tell it. tive ecosystem. Instead of using And while technology can aid in this process, sometimes an sound-activated elements, however, chilinteractive format is not ideal. According to Gobeille and Watson, dren at the Cinekid festival in Amsterdam, the trick is knowing which medium to use in each unique circum- and later at the Singapore Art Museum, stance. Some stories are well-suited to being told digitally; however, were able to grow trees using their bodies. it is important not to try and force a story into a technological Once the trees were created, participants approach that it isnt suited for, Gobeille says. In our view, it is could then redirect water from the digital always better to design the medium and interaction around the waterfall to allow the trees to thrive in the content of the story, so that a digital, technological approach con- environment. Rise and Fall was a project tributes something meaningful to the experience. for the March 2010 issue of Boards

Rise and Fall allows audiences to navigate an interactive world by rotating the covers of Boards Magazine. Right side up, the journey is light and skyward; upside down, the world falls into darkness.

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Left: Kids flocked to the Funky Forest exhibit, which empowered them to create trees using their bodies. Right: Much like Funky Forest, Puppet Parade encourages kids to interact with life-size puppets using their hands and arms.

Magazine in which Gobeille and Watson play a part in the storytelling and the outcome of the experience. developed an interactive story for the front Technology also allows us to develop tools for people to tell their and back covers. The tale of Rise and Fall own stories. Gobeille agrees that putting the storytelling comis revealed to viewers through story nodes ponents in the hands of the audience is a great method for created by holding the cover right side up increasing overall engagement. When we worked together on (rise) or upside down (fall) in front of a web Funky Forest, we came up with an immersive, interactive envicamera. Turning the magazine slightly ronment that encouraged people to tell their own stories though changes the perspective in which the viewer experimentation and open play. Technology allows people to jump sees the story world. into the story, become immersed in it and play a part in the story These are two projects that were that unfolds around them, she says, noting that each project is immensely satisfying to bring to life, and designed to help facilitate this sort of connection. We design our they are also two projects that we dont feel projects to engage people with varying levels of interaction. There like we are nished with and are looking are those that provide direct and immediate feedback, and then forward to revisiting and taking even fur- we layer more subtle interactions that reward exploration and ther, Gobeille says. Both projects involved longer feedback loops where people can discover deeper conneca balanced combination of designed and tions between things. The immediate reaction pulls people in, programmatic elements, and there was a and the more subtle interaction sustains interest and allows the real back and forth between the two of us audience to make a deeper connection with the experience. during the development process. Watsons experiences with each project were also posi- AVOIDING THE SAME OLD STORY tive. Rise and Fall was interesting as we Although the Design I/O principals consistently have too many were trying to gure out how to tell a story ideas and not enough time to make them, their biggest challenge from two perspectivespositive or nega- is nding the best way to bring a particular project to life. We tiveand Funky Forest was just such an often struggle to nd the most appropriate and intuitive way to audacious idea that at the time felt like a tell a story and ask ourselves the question, Why are we doing it complete impossibility, he says. Seeing this way? Watson says. We want to make sure our approach children playing with it the rst day it was doesnt hinder the experience and that it matches the type of installed at the Cinekid festival was one of story we are trying to tell. the most rewarding experiences we have This challenge can often extend into nding the best way to ever had. engage the audience at their level. While starring in a digital pupPlay is an important aspect in getting pet show is sure to wow children, adults may be less impressed. the audience interested in the project, and Likewise, Faces, an outdoor installation for San Francisco Art Gobeille and Watson work hard to ensure Commissions Lights on Market St. initiative that captured and people enjoy the interactive adventure. In sketched peoples portraits before projecting them larger-thana sense, a key part of an interactive experi- life onto the side of a building, is much more fascinating for adults. ence is to hand over control to the audience, We nd that dierent ages respond dierently, and we target Watson says. So it makes sense that they interaction that is appropriate for the age group, Watson says.

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Often, the environment, scale and space has a big impact on engagement, and we spend a good amount of time adjusting parameters until the experience has the right feel. Sometimes changing the timing of something by one-tenth of a second can make a huge dierence in how people engage with the work. Occasionally, however, there are technological diculties to consider. In one of their most recent projects, Skataviz, which allows skateboarders to record their movements by attaching an iPhone or iPod Touch to the board and see their runs and tricks visually displayed on screen, Gobeille and Watson were limited by the capabilities of the equipment. The Skataviz project came about in a funny moment of inspiration. We saw a friends project online that we thought was Skataviz but after watching the video discovered it was something completely dierent, Watson says of the projects inception. This triggered the idea for the project, and we decided to see if we could make what we thought it was. The biggest challenge with the project has been dealing with the pitfalls of iPod sensors. Some sensors are really accurate and others require us to add some intelligent guessing to the data that is being output. Despite the hurdles that accompany many digital projects, the Design I/O team continues to push the boundaries of the medium, striving to develop pieces people have never seen before. [Our projects] seem to be a mix of big ideas that we cant get out of our heads and have been thinking about for ages and quick projects that come from seeing something while we are outside or at a bar and then go straight to the studio to make a prototype, Gobeille says. Watson also explains that a major source of inspiration comes from collaboration. We are constantly pushing each other out of

our comfort zones, which results in something that is far beyond what either of us could have imagined, he says. Often the ideas that pop into our heads feel impossible. These are the ideas that we have the most fun trying to turn into a reality. And both designers continue to be excited by the future of interactive design and the role storytelling will play. When we rst started, interactive design mediums were intriguing to people almost regardless of content, Watson says. Now as it becomes more mainstream, with interactive walls and oors commonplace, what will dierentiate them is the quality of the stories being told and the marriage of interaction and storytelling. Gobeille also nds that narrative-oriented designs have a distinct form of longevity. Storytelling is what grounds an interactive experience, she says. It sets the context for the experience the audience is about to engage in; it encourages curiosity and discovery and also allows the experience to live on, creating a never-ending story.
Karli Petrovic is associate editor for Print and HOW magazines. You can also find her weekly articles on the HOW blog at HOWDesign.com.

The inspiration for Skataviz came from a friend who had completed a project that Design I/O first thought was this prototype, but turned out to be something else.

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G N I LY
The word propaganda is nearly synonymous with lying. Here, we examine 5 images steeped in subversive storytelling.
by Steven Heller

THE F O ART

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he noun propaganda makes people think about the verb to lie because in the 20th century, the big lie was defined by the Nazis Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In his prison memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler wrote: [I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. He added, It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made that theory Nazi policy with these words: Make the lie

big, make it simple, keep saying it and, faith in products or ideas by engageventually, they will believe it. ing them in a story that is either real The origin of propaganda was a or imagined. In his 1928 book little less onerous. The Congregatio Propaganda, he asserted: If we de Propaganda Fide (Congregation understand the mechanism and for Propagating the Faith) was a reli- motives of the group mind, it is now gious order established by Pope possible to control and regiment the Gregory XV in 1622 (it was later masses according to our will without renamed the Congregation for the them knowing it. Evangelization of Peoples) to propaBernays ideas about propaganda gate Catholicism by missionaries the not only inadvertently inuenced the world over. Nazi ministry, but his storytelling Centuries later, Edward Bernays, fundamentals are also present in the father of American public rela- what is called the branding narrations (and nephew of Sigmund tive. Whether commercially or Freud), wrote: The conscious and politically motivated, propaganda is intelligent manipulation of the orga- not easily removed in the public nized habits and opinions of the mind from the idea of the big lie, masses is an important element in and yet the public is propagandized democratic society. Those who daily in ways that are so nuanced that manipulate this unseen mechanism lies become truth. Tell a story conof society constitute an invisible gov- vincingly enough and the malleable ernment which is the true ruling masses will be a faithful herd. power of our country. In the following examples, the Bernays was a skilled master of propaganda narrative intentionally manipulation. Advertising and pro- enters the conscious and subconpaganda went hand in glovethe scious with predictable, albeit practice of propagating the publics surprising, consequences.

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Homeland Security and Anti-Propaganda

After the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans were vulnerable and susceptible to ocial decrees that promised to ensure their safety. The Patriot Act was signed into law that year, which gave the government extra powers to respond to terrorism. In 2002, Congress established the Department of Homeland Security. In 2003, the same department announced that Americans should prepare for a biological, chemical or radiological terrorist attack and assemble disaster supply kits, including duct tape and plastic sheets to seal doors and windows against nuclear, chemical and biological agents. Not surprisingly, it caused a surge in demand for duct tape. Given the evidence of anthrax and other bacterial materials sent through the U.S. Mail, the threat appeared real. However, it also fostered a healthy distrust of governments exaggerated proscriptions and politically dubious decrees. This anonymous guerilla poster turned the government narrative on its end by using the most recognizable images of the momentthe duct tape over President Bushs mouth, eyes and ears, painting a portrait of the president and Homeland Security authorities as being clueless in the face of threats and compensating by issuing reports designed to scare the public.

Psy-Ops:Little Black Lies

Paper bombs (leaets and yers) are the least sophisticated propaganda medium in the arsenal, but they can be incisive. Leaeting is the art of artlessness, designed to convey a straightforward message without artice or conceit. There are the cautionary leaets that oer an enemy combatant safe haven and are targeted at the survival instinct. Then there are the ones designed specically to undermine a battle-weary soldiers morale using lies and subterfuge to enter the conscious and subconscious. This is especially virulent when aimed at exhausted troops who are more susceptible to doubt, despair and free thought. Given the indescribable stress of battleeld encounters, after the initial adrenalin rush wears o, even the toughest veteran can be mentally vulnerable to any lies the psy-ops experts can dish out. During the Cold War, when U.S. troops were on constant alert, the simulated enemy leaets that the Psychological Warfare Division produced were dropped during maneuvers in an eort to teach troops that the morale-killing stories in the enemys leaets were ction. This one was dropped by 505th Airborne Division in 1955.

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Camel Cigarettes: Smoke Signals

During the late 1980s into the early 2000s, the RJR Nabisco Co. saturated American media with its Camel cigarettes Smooth Character campaign. The original Camel trademarka gritty pen-and-ink rendering done in 1913 of Old Joe, a dromedary owned by the Barnum and Bailey circushad considerably more charm than the updated anthropomorphic play-beast seen here. The trade character who peers o massive billboards and thousands of deli counters is what one advertising critic refers to as moron fodder that is so much a part of life that if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it. This story is best illustrated by a 1990 open letter to Louis V. Gerstner, RJR Nabiscos chief executive ocer, from Mark Green, who then was the New York City consumer aairs commissioner: As the father of two young children, I am appalled at your campaign, which risks addicting children to cigarettes. Joe Camel does things most adolescent boys dream aboutgets the girls, drives neat sports cars and ies ghter bombers. The characters are rendered in an ambient airbrushed cartoon style and have metaphoric attributes similar to those of the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The human characteristics, while seemingly unthreatening, seductively hypnotize the younger viewer into believing hes a pal. The Marlboro man speaks to a post-adolescent need for machismo; its not aimed at kids in the same way. But this cocksure camel would be neutered if not for a brilliant, if sinister, marketing strategy that made it ubiquitous. When it launched the Smooth Character campaign in the U.S., RJR Nabisco sought to recapture its faltering market share, but even the most clever advertising ploy must ultimately fail when the product kills the conscripted, as this piece of propaganda aptly illustrates.

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Racial Hatred: Blood Story

Otherness is a euphemism for not like us, alien scum, dirty stinkin or, as the Nazi motto goes in the weekly Nazi newspaper Der Strmer, The Jews Are Our Misery. Whatever the reasons for hate, racist propaganda that selects (or in todays parlance, proles) some group or individual for persecution follows similar narratives and plot lines. The oending racial, ethnic or religious group is portrayed as sub-human, parasitical or beastial, all of which is substantiated by drawn or photographed stereotypes and caricatures that emphasize the ugliest physical characteristics and evil behaviors imaginable. In Germany, the story about the Jews situated them as either an elite class that proted o the misery of the post-war German populationtraitors who sold the nation into ignominy for personal nancial gainor as poor Eastern Europeans equated with vermin that multiplied and spread disease. In Nazi terms, they were a cancer that had to be eradicated. In the U.S., the propaganda was no less venomous, just aimed at a dierent target. With America at war with Japan, it was incumbent upon propagandists to draw portraits of monstrous creatures void of human emotion but full of a lust for Americans blood. The Office of War Information in Washington, DC, created many of the grossly distorted depictions that were transmitted through media to civilians at home and soldiers overseas. The public had to be constantly reminded of the ruthlessness of the enemy, while soldiers had to be encouraged to kill them without remorse. This was only accomplished through relentless dehumanization. The ends justied abominable graphic means.

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Weapons of Mass Destruction

Propaganda is the art of making a small truth into a big lie. In 2002, before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, propagandists were promoting the idea that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling lethal weaponry, notably biological and chemical agents. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had helped Hussein build up his arsenal of deadly weapons a few years earlier. But as early as 1988, the Iraqi strongman clearly used chemicals against Kurdish people in the north of his country. The propaganda war was launched against Hussein almost immediately after the dictator announced plans in 1990 to invade Kuwait, which he said had stolen petroleum from Iraqi elds. The Gulf War was fought to free Kuwait from a brutal occupation, and the propaganda justifying an invasion was pervasive. Fought almost entirely with smart bombs, Hussein quickly lost the ground war. While his retreat allowed him to retain his elite Republican Guard and much of his equipment, he was sanctioned by the United Nations and forced into destroying his chemical and biological weapons. Although UN monitors were repeatedly kept from reporting on the destruction of these weapons, apparently Hussein had markedly reduced his stockpile to insignicant numbers. Yet by 2003, saber rattling in Washington focused on Iraqs buried weapons of mass destruction. This pre-war front page of the New York Daily News might well have been government propaganda. The double entendre of the headline humorously masks the subtitle of the real story: Inspectors Find Mustard Gas Shells. No one denied Hussein used chemicals in the past, but after the allied victory, no one could nd any actual weaponry either.
Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Design : Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program, is the 2011 recipient of the Smithsonian National Design Award for Design Mind. www.hellerbooks.com

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a visual essay by debbie millman

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14 4 TH T A NN N UA UAL L DE E SI S GN GNTH T IN TH N KE KERS R C ON RS ONFERE RENC NCE E , I N TO TORO RONT NT T O, O C AN A N AD ADA. C RI CH RIS S CH H AP APMA MA A N D ISNE IS S NEY Y S GL GLOB OBAL AL LC CRE REAT ATIV IV V IT ITY Y & IIN NNO N VA ATION TIION O D DIR IR IREC R EC C TO T OR DA A RH RHIL IL L C RO ROOK OKS OK S CR CREA EA ATI TIVE VE V E D IR R EC ECTO O R OF TH THE AT ATLA LANT NTIC IC C R OB OBER E T FA ER FA B BRIC BR RI ICA IC A N T V P, ANT P C RE R EAT ATIV IVE E AT T F RO O G DE DESI SIGN GN NI NICH C OL OLAS S F EL ELTO TO O N I NF N F OR R MA M TI T I ON ON DE E SI S IGN GNER R CH H LO O E GO G TT TTLI L IEB S SEN E NIO ENIO I R VP VP,, R/ / GA KA K RI IN FO FONG NG C COO-FO FOUN UNDE DE E R & CR R EA E TI TIVE VE D DIR IR R EC C TO OR AT IMA MAGI GINA NARY RY FOR F OR CE CES SC CY Y RU RUS S HI HI GH HIG G HSM H SM SMI I T H T YP IT Y PE DE E SI SIGN GN GNER NER E JO OH HN N K IE E SE S LH LHO O R ST C HI ORST OR HIEF F DE ES S IG I N OF O FFI F CE FI C R AT M AD ADE E MO MOVE VEME MENT NT SA SAKI KI M AF F UN N DI DIKW KWA A Z IM IMBA BA A BW B EA E N DE D SIGN SII GN NE ER R PE E TER T E R ME TE EN ND D EL E SU S ND ND BO O OK O D ES S IG G NER NE ER M MO OR RA A G MY MYER ER RS SC C OUGH O U GH OU G U UK K DE E SI SIGN G NER ER R B RU RUCE CE N NUS U SB SBAU AUM M AU AUTH THOR TH OR RO OF F CR CREA EA ATI TIVE VE I NTEL NT TE EL L LI L GE GEN N C E SH NC S AWN AW N PE AW PETE T E RSEN TERS TE RSE RS EN N C RE REAT ATIV AT IVE V DIRE DI RE R E CT T OR OR A AT T IN NS ST T RU RUM MENT ME T DM MI I TR T R I SI SIEG GEL L V P, P, GLO OBA B L EE CO COMM MM MER ERCE CE EA AT T PA P TA AGO GONI N A JE J NN NN & K EN V IS I OC OCKY K OG KY GRA A DY Y AUT UTHO HORS HO S OF DE DES SIGN CUR SI SIGN UR RE ENCY NC CY MET TRO O TO ORONT RO ONTO NT TO C CO ON NV VEN ENTI TIION T N CE CEN NT TRE R NOVE N EMB MBER ER R 6 & 7, 20 0 13 RE EGI GIST STER ER N NOW OW > DE E SI S GN NTH THIN IN NKE KER R S.C RS .COM COM M @R RG GD #RG RGD DDT D

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Reviews

YOUNG AT ART

I am hoping this book will introduce young readers to the tenets of conceptual problem-solving, Chip Kidd says.

BO O K GO: A KIDDS GUIDE TO GRAPHIC DESIGN WO RK MA N PUB LISH ING C OMPANY

Review by DEB B I E M I L L M A N CONGRATULATIONS, you have decided to open this book, even though you have no idea what its about, and the cover is weird and seemingly at cross-purposes and possibly even pretentious. But you opened it anyway. And you know what? That was a design decision. Yes indeed, whether you realized it or not, most of the decisions you make, every day, are by design. Take my word for it, you are a designer. Celebrated writer and designer Chip Kidd opens his illuminating new childrens book, Go: A Kidds Guide To Graphic

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reviews

Sifteo allows gamers to interact with characters by tipping and stacking the cubes.

GA M E TOW E R NO TUMB LE

His latest book is for children, but Kidd has also published numerous books about comics.

SIFTE O SIFTEO IS A NOVEL KIND OF GAMING SYSTEM that uses a series of thick, sticky note-sized cubes with touch screens to inspire hands-on play with a digital twist. The cubes are smart, sensing each others presence and responding when players flip, shake, tilt or touch them. They offer a brand new way to play, but when the company released a new line of games for the cubes last September, Scott Kim, Sifteos creative director, recalls we immediately got self-critical. What Kim and his team realized was that they were relying too heavily on established video game styles of old, such as text-based story advancement. Not only that, but as Kim notes, If you look at someone playing with Sifteo from across the room, it should be obvious that they theyre re not playing with an iPad app. pp. So Sifteo paired up with Douglas Wilson of the Copenhagen-based game collective Die Gute Fabrik. The resulting Tower No Tumble is a game where cubes are tipped into a standing position and then stacked. Players try to topple the tower by flicking another cube in its direction. But this isnt just Jenga-meets-Tiddlywinks. Because each cube features its own little character that responds to the in-game action (like trembling as a player winds up for a shot), the game actually incites an emotional response. Using physical gestures to interact directly with characters creates more empathy and a sense of involvement, Kim explains. Its a new twist for video games but an ancient tradition for storytelling. storytelling. Rachel Swaby

Design with the promise that everyone is a designer, and he uses every page to prove its true. Cheerfully written and beautifully designed by Kidd, this oversized compendium joyfully investigates what graphic design is, shows why it is a part of everything we see and explains how we use design to make sense of the world. I am hoping this book will introduce young readers to the tenets of conceptual problem-solving, Kidd says. I didnt consider these types of ideas until I was well into college, but that was a generation ago! I think todays kids are ready for this. In Go, Kidd educates the reader on all elements of design, including form, line, color, scale and typography. He also teaches readers how to use these elements in clever and creative ways. Each spread explains and demonstrates a crucial introductory graphic design concept, and the book concludes with 10 interactive projects to help bring the content to life. I really thought writing this book would be a breeze, but it turned out to be the greatest challenge of my career thus far, Kidd says. It was like going back in a time machine and having a conversation with my 10-year old self. As you might expect, Go: A Kidds Guide To Graphic Design is all about shaking things up. Kids (and adults) will love its playful spirit and Kidds steadfast belief that the world looks better when you look at it dierently.

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When Elizabeth Gilbert asked her Facebook fans which of three cover options they liked best, she was delighted to find they agreed with her top pick.

ALB UM C OVER ELEANOR FRIEDB URGER PERSONA L RE C ORD DESIGNED BY MAGGIE FROST MERGE REC ORDS THE WOMAN IN THE SWIMMING POOL on the cover of Eleanor Friedbergers Personal Record is Friedberger herself, although thats hard to tell from looking at it. Moses Berkson photographed the Fiery Furnaces singer at a private home in Los Angeles. The tan strip at the bottom of the image looks like an after-the-fact design element,

BY POPULAR DEMAND
WRITERS AND BO O K READERS generTHE SIG N ATU RE ally dont get much O F A L L THIN G S input on book covV IK IN G ers; rather, theyre Review by the bailiwicks of the CL A I R E LUI art and marketing department. But Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, had a little more clout than the average author. When shown the possible covers for her new novel, The Signature of All Things (Viking Adult), Gilbert had denite opinionsand they diered from the publishers. I was going to be a diva and throw my weight around, Gilbert told USA Today, but realized there was an easy solution: Let the people speak (or vote, as it were). Gilbert posted three cover nalists on her Facebook page, and more than 8,500 fans weighed in. The Signature of All Things is the story of the ctional 19th-century botanist Alma Wittaker and her study of moss in Tahiti, as well as her relationship with a painter. The design has some subtle details that

dovetail with the plot: Gilbert felt that each of the books ve parts have a sort of botanical patron saint, and each section opens with 19th-century plant identication drawings, found with the help of the library at the New York Botanical Garden. The end-papers also feature 19th-century orchid illustrations, making the book seem, according to editor Paul Slovak, as if Alma herself might have seen them in a book that was in her own library. All three of the nal covers were art directed by Paul Buckley and designed by Alison Forner. The rst cover was purple with a border of ora and fauna from Tahiti; the second was a photo-illustration of the main character walking through a landscape. The third (and eventual champion) has a beige background and features a chromolithograph of various types of moss from an antique encyclopedia. Gilbert was quietly pulling for the cover that ended up winning and was pleasantly surprised to nd that her fans agreed. The nal cover features a serene, almost-academic image and has less of a chick-lit feel than the other two choices, indicating that readers may be less interested in the perceived notion of womens books and more open to covers that use a gender-neutral approach.

but in reality, its the edge of the pool from which Friedberger had just dived. Theres a hint of narrative in Friedbergers movement from that starting line toward the word record about to be split by her hand. Eleanor had the concept of a photo of her swimming from the outset of the projectpart of the double entendre of the title, in case thats not obvious, says Maggie Fost, Merge Records in-house designer. The sound of Personal Record was inspired by 1970s singer-songwriters. The vibe of the record is very much sun-drenched West Coast, Fost says. And the type she selected, a slightly modified outline of Avant Garde Gothic, echoes the typography of albums like Gal Costas Caras & Bocas and Big Stars Radio City (similar type appears, to very different effect, on Adeles 21). On the LP, the fill of the letters is embossed for an equally 70s-style tactile element. Douglas Wolk

OOPS!
In Claire Luis August review of Whiskey Priest, the publisher of Bits of Autobiography was listed as Tennessee University Press. While this is the books publisher, the updated cover design to which the review referred was produced by Whiskey Priest.

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