David Reinfurt, Author — A *New* Program for Graphic Design

ORG Founder David Reinfurt on how identity intersects design, and what art and design have in common.

For the first episode of 2020, I spoke with David Reinfurt, founder of ORG, half of Dexter Sinister, and author of a new program for graphic design. In the interview, David and I unpack the various ways identity has intersected with his work and collaborations, how art and design are linked, and the origin of the iconic MTA ticket vending machines in New York. Let's get started.

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Liam Spradlin: David, welcome to Design Notes.

David Reinfurt: Thank you.

Liam: So to start off the same way I always do, I want to know a little bit about the journey that brought you to your current work, and also how that journey has influenced the type of thing that you're doing now.

David: I've worked as an independent graphic designer in New York for 20 years. Before that, I went to graduate school and studied graphic design. Before that, I worked in graphic design, and before that, I didn't study graphic design. So it's a, I think typically circuitous route to the work that I do now. Perhaps the most important thing to know is that during the 20 years of working independently, I've worked with always collaborating with others.

Liam: The first thing that I want to talk about, because this is something that I use all the time and that I've actually studied in the past for projects that I was working on, and that's the MTA vending machines, and they have this very enduring and iconic interface for New Yorkers and anyone who's traveled to New York. So I want to hear a little bit of that story from you.

David: My second professional job was working at IDEO in San Francisco. I started working there in 1995. At the time, I had moved from New York City, where I'd worked in a small graphic design studio. I was interested in interface design, interaction design as it was called at the time at IDEO. And I made contact with the San Francisco office, which at the time was, I think, maximum 13 people. So IDEO was a very different place at that point. I was offered a job, and I moved out to California to become an interaction designer, one of only a few in the studio there. While working at IDEO, after, uh, maybe about a year, a project came in, a last-minute project came in from the MTA in New York.

David: And as I had just moved from New York and was a little bit pining for New York while living in San Francisco, I knew how important this project was. I was the youngest in the office, and my billable time was probably the last costly. Turns out the project was, um, IDEO was called in at the last moment to reconsider the interface design that was already built out by Cubic Westinghouse. That's the company, a defense contractor, and they also built all of the furniture for the subways, based in San Diego. Um, they're very good at building robust machinery, and turnstiles, et cetera.

David: They're less savvy at designing interfaces, certainly at that time. The metro card touchscreen vending machine was set to arrive already in three years from that point, so this was a very last-minute design rescue job. Masamichi Udagawa is a product designer at IDEO who had recently started around the same time that I had. He was set up to open the New York office of IDEO. He had recently worked as a product designer at Apple, designing one of the PowerBooks. Prior to that, he worked at Yamaha, and he was a much more established and, um, mature product designer.

Masamichi and I had struck up a friendship pretty quickly, and we both clamored to work on this project. Made a lot of sense, since he was going to be the New York office, based out of his apartment on 16th Street, right nearby here. And, uh, I was just simply maybe pushy enough or cheap enough to get put on the project, as well. We had a clear communication with the MTA, facilitated by Sandra Bloodworth, who was head of arts for transit, who brought in IDEO to this project. Masamichi handled all of the coordination with the client and with Sandra Bloodworth and the others at the MTA. I was the lead designer on the inter, on the interface. I was the lead interaction designer for it.

The project began with an existing spec and existing interface. We took that apart pretty quickly to understand what could be changed and what could not be changed around that. Kathleen Holman was also an interaction designer at IDEO at the time, worked on Nokia phone interfaces, and she was based in London. So I moved to London for about three months to work on this project. I was based in a small attic in Camden in IDEO in the kind of overflow space of IDEO, so again, it's worthwhile noting that the kind of liminal space of working small and kind of out of the flow of other projects allowed this to proceed relatively smoothly.

From the beginning, I was already interested in how to make this interface something that would persist, that would last. And so the graphic design of it uses coarse graphics. In fact, the type was huge on screen at the time. We would be used to seeing 12 point, 14 point type, on a screen interface to this point. This was absolutely gargantuan. And this was a practical consideration that was developed as we worked through the project, to do with the relative coarseness of the touchscreen that was going to be used and the novelty of a touchscreen interface at that point in time, as well.

The initial design work proceeded through a process which the MTA had set up, which included a number of review milestones and, uh, small user testing groups. It was quick. It was six months. Um, the principal design work both on the hardware, which Masamichi was doing with Cubic Westinghouse, as well as the interface, software design, was a very compressed process, and again, I think the combination of one primary contact at the MTA, an extremely compressed design process, and perhaps a acknowledgment of how contested this screen real estate would be in the future, all ended up in a project which wrapped up in six months and left plenty of room for it to change as it needed to.

At that point, then I decided to go back, do graduate school at the Yale School of Art and study graphic design properly. I could've kept on working at IDEO, but something told me that I needed to give myself a little bit more, uh, nutrition to continue to do graphic design for a long time. So I started back in school in 1997. All of the graphics and hardware spec had been sent off to Cubic. The project went away, essentially, for two years. By February of 1999, the first machine was installed in the 68th Street Hunter College station on the 6 Line. And I went to go see it with Masamichi, and I was stunned, stunned, that the interface was almost exactly as sent. I had already been through enough projects where the manufacturer was divorced from the design and been disappointed with the results, and so I was flabbergasted and excited that it was, it matched what was the design intent.

It changed in the details, and it continues to change, and in fact, the aspect of this project that I feel most pleased with, this has existed for 20 years now, is the ability for it to accept change over the course of its lifetime.

Liam: I'm really interested in this relationship between the work that was happening on the interface design and the hardware design because it's a device where you have to use both in order to have a successful interaction with it, and the interface is built to account for all of the people who would be using it in New York, so I'm interested in, what are some of the specific details that allowed you to accomplish that, especially, as you said, at a time when touchscreen interfaces in public were still a novelty?

David: We took as a given that we would make direct links between all the parts of the machine you needed to touch and what you needed to touch on the screen. We decided to use color to link the parts of the machine directly to the interface, and we went through a couple of rounds of even more direct links between what you see onscreen and what you see offscreen, but for example, when the interface asks you to put in cash, then the instruction bar is green, and that links to the area that's green on the machine.

Masamichi designed those areas of interaction with the machine with exaggerated geometric shapes, which also pulled out the colors. All of this was done in order to make it as direct as it could be, to link what you're doing onscreen with what you're doing offscreen, but particularly because you might be using a credit card, you might be using cash. You have to have a place to have a receipt. The metro card asked you to do a transaction which is unfamiliar, which is you can restore value on a card, and so you have to put in your card, get it loaded up, and then get it back out. And so all of these seemed like significant enough kind of interaction design problems with the machine itself that making the link between what's happening onscreen, the instructions, and what's happening offscreen, had to be as direct as it possibly could be.

Liam: I want to get into your work at ORG, but first, I want to ask who is Dexter Sinister?

David: Dexter Sinister is a shared name that I share with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, who's a graphic designer who know lives in London. Stuart and I have known each other for 20 years and worked together for about 13 years under that name. Dexter Sinister began as a project for an art biennial. The Manifesta 6 biennial on the island of Cyprus. It evolved into a space on the Lower East Side in a basement on Ludlow Street, which was a bookstore we ran once a week. It was a studio, and it was a space for event. The name of that space was Dexter Sinister. The bookstore ran one day a week on, on Saturdays for 5 years. Another 5 years after that, by appointment. It was small. All of this is rather small-scale. Very small-scale.

Dexter Sinister, then after setting up the bookstore, running events in the space, and collaborating on design projects, we started to be invited into art exhibition projects or things which didn't really fall into graphic design clearly. And we welcomed those invitations because the invitation was so strange to what we did. We are both rooted very firmly in graphic design as a kind of discipline or an identity or something like this. However, we've made exhibitions for about those 13 years all around the world in institutions of various sizes, from MoMA to like a small gallery or a basement somewhere. In these exhibition projects, we have tended to treat the invitations as design projects in one way or the other.

So when asked to show a piece of work in an exhibition, we've often turned around that request and said, "Well, we'll do the graphic design for the exhibition as a work in the exhibition." It's still fresh. The piece of that work that I remain very committed to is the way in which it troubled distinctions between, uh, what are the limits of a graphic design practice. How can you intersect it? What does it need to do in the world? Et cetera. That's Dexter Sinister.

Liam: There's a lot in there that I would love to dig into.

David: Okay.

Liam: First of all, I guess, how does graphic design as a practice intersect with art, practically?

David: It's adjacent, I think.

Liam: Hmm.

David: A certain segment of graphic design certainly works closely with the contemporary art as a client, so that's the way I was introduced, I think. So in 2008, Dexter Sinister was invited by the Whitney Museum to participate in the biennial. We were invited, we were given three possibilities for how we might participate. We could design the catalog. That's pretty straightforward. We could design, edit, and produce a kind of separate catalog, which would be a parallel to the existing institutional catalog. Or we could make an autonomous project in the show as an artist.

We decided to take the third option because it seemed the farthest from our comfort level. But the project that we proposed back to them was called True Mirror. For that project, we, Dexter Sinister set up a press office in the exhibition behind a hidden door in a secret room, and we went to work there every day for three weeks, and we collaborated with approximately 30 artists, writers, um, designers, curators, other creative people, to write a press release about the show. The Whitney Museum was kind enough to give us access to all of their email and fax and other press contacts.

We sent these press releases out as if they came from the Whitney, although they were coming from us, and so we would design the layout of the press releases in a certain way or consider how they were distributed. For example, one of those press releases was a piece of music performed on a Saturday afternoon at the Whitney biennial, but we called it a press release. This seems like a straightforward art project, in a way, or maybe not so straightforward. I think the distinction I would highlight is that the work itself attempts to be useful, which is usually anathema to artwork, where its uselessness is what often gives it agency. It becomes something you can think about the world through because it doesn't have to do any work in the world.

I think I'm always interested in troubling that distinction, and so I think graphic design and art are certainly separate, but I think you can approach graphic design as ambitiously as you can approach art.

Liam: I think as we talk about these distinctions and also about Dexter Sinister itself, particularly with Dexter Sinister, it seems like this is an identity that is shared, not just between people, but between physical location and programs that happen at that physical location. And it seems like there's a certain filling up of this identity that maybe explodes what's contained inside of identity itself, and I'm curious how this approach to identity impacts the work or how you think about the work or how other people think about the work?

David: That's a perceptive question–

Liam: (laughs)

David: Perceptive insight. People are always confused. What is Dexter Sinister? We never set out to make it confusing, to make it obscure. In fact, just the opposite, really. But I do think, uh, the way we've treated the name and the way we've treated the work, it jumped from one place to the other. So it's funny you had mentioned identity, as I think that's something that, coming from graphic design, we're particularly attuned to. When we set up Dexter Sinister, we also designed a badge, like a coat of arms, which became our symbol, and I feel like that worked like a typical piece of graphic design. Like the relative success of that mark also amplified what we were doing.

Turns out that the name Dexter Sinister even comes from the design of that mark. In the design of coats of arms, there is a written form, a visual mark, which comes before the mark itself and acts like a set of instructions for how to draw the mark. Our badge is defined by what's called a blazon, a, a, a literal version of it, which is "party per bend sinister," which just means take the form, divide it from the top right to bottom left with a diagonal line. So sinister means left, dexter means right. Hence, the name, Dexter Sinister.

As Dexter Sinister, one project that we made addressed identity very directly. It was an exhibition at Artists Space in New York. I don't remember the year. The name of the exhibition was Identity in quotes, so "Identity." It was a three-screen video about 25 minutes long, which provided a three case studies of art institutions and their relationships to their graphic identity. On the left screen was the Pompidou in Paris, on the middle screen was the MoMa, and on the right was the Tate.

And the work provided a reverse chronology of how they got to their current logo, essentially, and had lots of digressions about the kind of limits of branding in relation to art institutions. This project, I think, addresses some of the same things you're getting at when you, when you say that the name Dexter Sinister bleeds from one kind of identifying capacity to another, so, I, I guess I think that even graphic identity is quite a bit more fluid than the profession wants to identify it as.

Liam: I also want to touch on ORG, which is an organization that you've described as a one-person concern masked as a large organization. It seems to me, especially given the conversation that we've just had and how you mention that graphic design can be ambitious in the same capacity or the same direction as art can, that perhaps positioning an organization this way is itself a kind of commentary.

David: It absolutely is. I incorporated ORG on the first business day of 2000, by design, or by...That happened to be approximately when I needed to do it. The project was self-conscious in its set-up. So ORG, I took the name, as it sounded like the three letter acronym seemed to be a good way to indicate size. I wasn't actually interested in masquerading as a large organization, but I was certainly interested in inhabiting that form, and so I took an office that was on 39th Street in Midtown. I thought that was a good corporate address. When I called the telephone company to get a telephone number for the studio, I asked them to give me as many zeroes as they could give me. And they did. They gave me two. Fairly generous. And a 212 number, so that was good.

I incorporated on the first business day of the new millennium, which was January 3, 2000. I saved or kind of highlighted the papers, which I needed to file in order to become an S corporation in the State of New York. And I wrote a bit of narrative and did some staging of the office in order that it looked kind of bigger than it was. I even ended up writing a piece in The New York Times Magazine about that time that was called "How to Make a One-Person Firm Appear as a Large Organization." I must have written a better title than that, but anyway, it was not the goal just to get press. The goal was to actually do this project where someone might have to hiccup or stop and think for a second about who and how they were hiring this designer.

I guess I'm always interested in questioning or considering the kind of design-client relationship, not as a power grab or anything else, but just as a kind of human reconsideration of it on each project because it's so different, and I think it's very easy to fall into lazy patterns of interaction, which short-circuit what's possible to be made.

Liam: I think it's interesting that ORG is described as another fluid identity of collaborators coming in and out. At times, it's been just you. At times, it's been multiple people. And so it strikes me that that approach can ensure the kind of collaboration that you have said is fundamental to design work, but then there's also the kind of interaction with, like you said, the people who are hiring this organization. And I'm interested in how this approach has impacted those people who hired ORG, and if that thought was sparked as maybe you had hoped.

David: I think sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't, which also I suppose is not surprising. There are clients I've worked with since then, so that's an awful long time, and so obviously they bought the structure and were influenced by it. I think in almost all the situations where I worked on projects, it was very rarely the case that the clients treated the relationship as a straightforward design-client relationship. I was very fortunate in that way.

When it devolved into a more transactional exchange, then I feel like the work got weaker. I got more frustrated. Likely the people hiring me, as well, got more frustrated. The ORG started out as just me, and then became a kind of, as you were describing, a fluid network of people who were both employed by me or simply a writer who I might be working with would stay in the studio for, you know, two weeks, or might be the case. Or sometimes, simply friends or other designers would use the studio from time to time as a kind of base to do work and have some conversation and these kinds of things.

Liam: I also want to hear about the Demise Party.

David: So I'd run ORG for six years by that point. I was getting increasingly frustrated by, not by the scale, but rather by the kind of waste that was inherent in doing projects which needed a larger scale. And so I wanted to reconsider how I was working. I was feeling frustrated by working quite so hard and having so much of it fall by the wayside, and this didn't feel very effective for the people I was working with. Didn't feel very good for me. So I decided to shut down the studio and recalibrate how I work, and work without any assistance, and to work only with Stuart, in that case, to reconsider the conditions of working, as well.

So Stuart and I had found a small basement space on Ludlow Street on Lower East Side, where the rent was really cheap. Also, by reorganizing the studio, I no longer needed all of the equipment I had in the studio, so I had computers, and I had lots of books and reference materials and tables and lights and even a fax machine, at that point. So the Demise Party I held is a public event where I gave away everything in the studio, so those who participated in kind of building up all the material, they came to this party and just took what they wanted, so computers and lights and tables and printed matter and books, and I found it to be liberating. You can imagine. It sounds like it when you clear out a place.

But also really made me feel very good, as those people I'd formed friendships with probably all of whom I still see now, many have gone on to form other studios, do other things. Anyway, the party, we gave away everything. It all happened in one night. By the end of the night, the studio was trashed, and a lot of the stuff was gone. Not all of it by any stretch. People came back and took tables and other furniture later, but that was the Demise Party.

Liam: It seems like quite a radical approach to closing a place down, to give everything away.

David: It was. I think it's typically theatrical in the way that I've organized my design practice, like-

Liam: Hmm.

David: You know, it was both a practical way to give away everything and a way to flag that up as an event.

Liam: I also want to talk about your new book, A New Program for Graphic Design. The book is based on three courses that you had developed for teaching at Princeton, and I'm really interested in what it's like to translate the foundational material of this book into a book format.

David: We did it in a strange way. Again, using some aspect of theater or performance. I started teaching at Princeton 10 years ago, and I was brought in to invent a graphic design course that had never been taught at Princeton previously. The first course I developed was called Typography, and then that developed into a second course called Gestalt, and a third course called Interface. There are now a couple other courses, as well. There have been several other people teaching with me along the way, including Danielle Aubert and Francesca Grassi, and now, Laura Coombs and Alice Chung. So it's just to say, it was not done by myself in isolation, to be clear about that.

The book began as an invitation by Inventory Press, based in Los Angeles, about three years ago. Actually, the Inventory Press is a partnership of Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey. Adam used to be part of ORG, so that's how I met him. He knew about the teaching I was doing at Princeton, as I was developing these, these courses, and he thought it might have a broader appeal outside of the classroom. So he invited me to make a book. I had very little desire to write that book, because somehow that felt like it would make the material too static for me, and it was still working material. So we came up with a different way to make the book, which was instead of writing it, to speak it.

We set up a series of three days in Los Angeles, where Inventory Press is based, two summers ago. Over the course of those three days, each day I gave six 45-minutes lectures with 15-minute breaks in between. These were attended by art students from Otis, from CalArts, from ArtCenter, about 60 people a day or something like that, who were patient enough to sit through all of these lectures. All of these, the proceedings were video taped, video recorded, and after the fact, transcribed, and that became the basis of the book. The event itself was carnival-esque. Between the lectures, uh, there was synthesizer music and light shows and some other things. I think that kind of activity helped give the material a bit more levity than it would have otherwise.

It was also an absurd endurance performance. By the third day, after speaking for two days straight, my voice was shot. And I imagine the audience, at least the persistent audience, was flagging by that point. Anyway, that material was transcribed and edited by Eugenia Bell, and that forms the basis of the book. I think what I am very happy with in the book is that the relative casualness of the address, of the text, of the language, makes it feel a bit more like being in a classroom. And I write in the introduction, and this means I said it when I was out there, I said something to the effect that, "This book is not intended to be a kind of graphic design historical canon. These are simply references of models of people that I know and like and share with students, and anybody else would do it totally differently."

And so I suggest to the reader and to the people who were there, I said, "This is a prompt for you to do the same thing. When you finish reading this book, rip it up and make your own." And I think that license is something I'm always trying to get across in teaching. Like, as a student, you can absorb what you hear in the classroom, but it will only be valuable when you redo it for yourself.

Liam: I think it's really interesting that you delivered the book in that format. But a book is definitely still quite a solid artifact and can't necessarily reproduce the interaction that you might get between a teacher and students or between students themselves. So I'm interested in how that played into how you approached it or how you view it now?

David: You certainly miss the back and forth. That's clear. In teaching, that's a rhetorical strategy I use without like naming it as such, but I don't want to hear my voice drone on for very long. Not because of what it's saying, but more so, I'm worried that the form of one person speaking and nobody else speaking immediately communicates a kind of imbalance that's completely ineffective in a classroom.

In the book, I try to broker the limitations of it being a monologue by making it clear when I don't know something, by offering the material in a manner that perhaps seems tentative or provisional. And that at least I hope allows some room for the reader, not to necessarily disagree, although that's fine, too. Of course they will. But to imagine that they are part of the conversation.

So the book was published by Inventory Press, together with DAP, Distributed Art Publishers in New York. It came out in September of this year and had a substantial print run. We, it's been successful enough that they are reprinting it now. So I'm just going through the page proofs of the second edition, and what I'm finding in reading my own words is a slight bit of discomfort with the casualness of the language. But I think that won't change, and I'm pretty sure it is that looseness which gives it some spark. It looks like a book. I mean, it is a book. Even looks like a straightforward kind of graphic design textbook. But I think there's a bait-and-switch going on.

I think when you pick it up, you realize, oh, this isn't gonna offer me any rules at all. This is simply kind of a recording of one particular point of view, and maybe provides a model for how to do this, or one approach, and that's it. I'm consistently drawn to making work that does that bait-and-switch, and it's not a matter of trying to be elusive or anything else. But I feel like the exterior form can set the conditions for reception, which then the details can undermine and along the way leaves a kind of complicated understanding of the object, of the thing, of the project.

So I, I am thrilled when I see artistic interventions in things that are in the public, and I don't mean public art, but what I mean are like choices which don't seem to be immediately coherent with the situation that they find themselves in.

Liam: And to close the loop from earlier, perhaps the way in which the book is delivered and the casualness of the words actually crystallizes your own identity in the work.

David: Yes.

Liam: There's certainly a much bigger, broader question underneath this, but I think as long as we're talking about one specific work, maybe that'll be helpful. I'm interested in, when you were approached about doing the book, how did you know that it was time for a book or that you should do this or what was your thought process that was like, "Yes"?

David: I think it was the same as all of the work that I make. It's always by invitation. That sounds lazy or unconsidered, but I've realized that's my orientation, and it's not passivity. But it's certainly a, I'm not motivated to make work on my own. I'm motivated by an invitation. I think that's my orientation as a designer, or my, like, identity in that way, is I'm much more interested to be given a situation to work into rather than inventing everything from scratch.

So I was invited to make a book around the teaching. I didn't even consider that it would be 10 years when it came out. I always treat teaching as absolutely continuous with my other work. I never think of it as something that I have to do or I don't, never think of it as something that is external to any of the concerns I have in doing any of my other design work.

So when the invitation came to make a book, I said sure. But let's figure out a way to make a book in a different way that is productive, that makes something new, that doesn't simply wrap up what I'm doing here and seal it away and put it to bed, unless I'm going to stop teaching, which was not my plan. So I can understand what the larger question is, and I think it's essential to my orientation as a designer. Like it's just invitations are what initiate projects, and I never buy the distinction between commissioned client projects and self-initiated projects for myself. This distinction is nonsense. I never, I never initiate projects. They're always by invitation, one way or the other. They may be better or less well-funded, but they're always sparked by somebody else inviting me.

Liam: All right, well, thank you again for joining me today.

David: Thank you very much.

Jesse Reed, Standards Manual

Identity designer Jesse Reed on the lasting power of brand standards

In this episode, Liam speaks with Jesse Reed, identity designer and co-founder of Standards Manual — a publishing imprint known for preserving and republishing historic design style guides and assemblages of designed artifacts. In the interview, Reed explores his experiences working at Pentagram, and how identity design is related to time, truth, and the organizations it ultimately serves.

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Liam Spradlin: Jesse, welcome to Design Notes.

Jesse Reed: Thank you.

Liam: I was first introduced to your work through Standards Manual, where you’ve worked on these compendiums and assemblages of branding systems and objects, from things like the EPA and NASA, and the New York City Transit Authority. But I want to hear a little bit more about the journey that led you there.

Jesse: Um, I’m from Ohio. So, I went to the University of Cincinnati. In that program, you have co-ops, which are basically internships that you do during the program. So, I did six of those, four of which were in New York City. My last one was at Pentagram in New York City. So, I was kind of familiar with the city and kind of the, the graphic design, sort of, profession and, you know, how it was thriving here.

So, after I graduated from Cincinnati, I, I moved straight to New York, um, in 2010, without a job. I actually went into Pentagram, just to kind of say, hey again, and that I’m in town. Interviewed with a few people there. Nothing kind of came of that, but a position at the Museum of Modern Art was available. And people at Pentagram were emailed about that, and then I kind of said I was in town. So, the timing worked out perfectly. And I got in touch with Julia Hoffmann and MoMA for a junior designer position there.

So, that was my first job in New York City. So, I started off, basically, like a month and a half after I moved here, at MoMA as a junior designer. Was there for a year and a half. And then, at that point I kind of reconnected with Michael Bierut at Pentagram, and there was a position open on his team. And he, we wondered if I, you know, was interested in applying for it. And I kind of was, not reluctant, but I just felt like my first job, I needed to be there for at least two years. So, I was kind of like, well, I don’t know. I’m not really to move. But of course, like, me and my dream job, so I’ll go interview.

So I did and, you know, ended up getting it and went to Pentagram, I think 2011, right from MoMA. So, and that was like, a very fast history. But basically getting us to Pentagram. I was on Michael Bierut’s team, you know, started just as a normal level designer. There’s not really hierarchies there. But just a designer. And in 2012 is when we found an original copy of the New York City Transit Authority Standards Manual, by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda of Unimark, and we found it in the basement of Pentagram randomly. I think a bunch of us were looking for a tarp to cover something on the roof. So, we were just, like, digging through drawers, and we found the red binder.

And I knew what it was. A few other people knew what it was. And so, we were just like, is that what we think it is? We all just gathered around one of our desks and just flipped slowly, page by page, through that binder. And just like, couldn’t believe what we were looking at. Hamish Smyth, who is now my business partner in everything that I’m doing, both of us naturally, I don’t know, said, hey, we should do something with this and show other people. Let’s, like, photograph every page. And maybe we can make a quick website.

So, and we did that the next day. And put up this really quick, no frills website. It got a bunch of hits. And then, about a year later, the MTA became our clients. We floated the idea of doing a reissue of this book, so that other graphic designers could have it. And we kind of thought we’d maybe sell like, 500 copies. Someone introduced the idea of Kickstarter to us, and we kind of explained that to the MTA. They agreed to let us kind of use that content to, uh, make the book. And we did the Kickstarter in 2014. And that’s kind of when all of this began.

Liam: I want to rewind a little bit to your-

Jesse: I know. Sorry.

Liam: -to your experience at Pentagram, before-

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: -you kind of unearthed this amazing artifact, which it sounds like quite a scene.

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: But I want to hear a little bit about your experience there, and just like, some of the projects that you were able to work on.

Jesse: I’ve said this so many times. If anyone’s ever heard myself or Hamish speak, we credit a lot of our abilities, our quote-unquote success or the way that we are as designers to Michael Bierut. I feel very fortunate to have been on his team and to, you know, really have him as a mentor. And I would say, if anyone has the position to be in sort of a, a one-on-one, kind of mentor, mentoree scenario, to kind of jump at that opportunity, if you can. Because you know, sometimes when you work at really large companies, you can kind of get just, like, lost in teams, where I was fortunate enough to work for one individual sort of partner, who was very hands-on and very, I guess, just interested in the growth of his designers and the people that he was working with.

If you know Michael’s work, that’s what we, we did. It’s a lot of identity branding. So we, you know, developed everything from the logos to typefaces, and to, you know, design systems. Everything that kind of goes along with it. But the nice thing about his work is that he doesn’t really have one particular type of client. He will work for restaurants or non-profits, or higher education, or really large corporations, or like, individuals who are just starting a little company, whether it be, you know, they’re an architect starting their own firm or they’re a consultant doing whatever.

My daily sort of work routine was completely different from week to week, month to month. Because, yeah, like I said, sometimes we’ll be doing, you know, a huge sort of branding exercise for Syracuse University or doing a restaurant like On Rye or [inaudible 00:06:24]. Or, um, whatever it may be. So, I started as, you know, mid-level designer. And you kind of get into the, the flow of how Pentagram works. And I should say that, you know, every partner at Pentagram works very differently from one another. So, the partnership is essentially autonomous studios, working under the same roof.

So, Michael’s working style was, I guess, unique to anyone else’s. And I really like that. So, he would get a new client in, and think either Jesse is available. Or, you know, he really likes doing this type of corporate identity. He’d be good for this. So, he kind of assigns me or any designer the clients. And eventually, you get about a group of, you know, it could be anywhere from five to 12 active clients that you’re working on at any given time. And because the team is actually very small, there’s only about 11 or 12 of us on the team, you’re responsible for a lot. There are no production managers. There are kind of two project managers for the entire team, and they kind of oversee, like, really big stuff if you need help. But you’re kind of left to your own devices, to schedule meetings, do production, do the design work, work on the presentations. And you, you collaborate very closely with Michael on the eventual solution.

But it was a lot of pressure, I think, at first. I wasn’t sure how to handle so much responsibility on my own, ’cause coming from MoMA, you kind of have an art director that you work with. And then there’s a creative director who’s overseeing everything. And then you have two production managers who help, you know, bid print work and find whatever it may.

Liam: Now it’s all you.

Jesse: Yeah. And then you’re like, now, it’s left to figure all that out on your own. So, it was about a six month learning curve before I felt really comfortable doing it.

Liam: You mentioned, kind of, digging back into history, or perhaps like being influenced by a specific moment in time. I’m interested in this moment in time, and like, certainly when we approach a project as humans, we bring to it our perspectives about things that we understand right now. Is it a goal in your identity work to separate the identity from the moment in time? And if it is, how do you do that?

Jesse: Yeah. It’s not an easy thing. I mean, this is like … That’s kind of the constant challenge. So, when you are thinking … And again, this is with, everything I’m talking about, uh, I won’t repeat myself about kind of, um, us really looking very closely at each individual, uh, scenario. So, if you are developing an identity that, in the client’s mind, needs to be around in five, 10 years’ time, you have to put sort of current culture aside. And really focus on them.

Because you’re right, being a designer, that kind of the … The answer to these questions is almost like, fighting the temptations of, of culture and current societal influence, or whatever it may be, and like, pop culture. You have to not look at that. And so, the biggest sort of flaw that I see designers, mainly younger designers making is they will make these collections of, you know, mood boards of things that are happening, like, right now and that are very in vogue. And those things will not be the same in five years.

So, if you’re creating an identity for a company that shouldn’t spend time, money, or resources on doing this every two years, you have to think about what will work for them in a long term sort of scenario. So, it’s just a constant exercise of restraint on not letting those things influence your work.
So that’s identities. But if you’re doing a campaign, and something that is sort of of the moments, then I think you can take more cues from, you know, what is happening right now in, you know, film or technology. You know, like, cryptocurrency is kind of a big thing that is talked about these days. And we’re getting a few clients who are dealing in that realm of, of that industry. And so, there’s history of currencies, and the way that people use tender and exchange money. But it’s a new way of thinking about it.

You kind of have to think in the moment and apply current influences and applications to what you’re doing. So, I think campaigns and sort of things that are only meant to last for a year, sure, look around you and take those influences. But if you really want to help your client and avoid them having to repeat themselves over and over again, then just think strongly about what their mission is, what they actually do. Like, what are they making? Where did they come from? Where did their ideas come from? Who is behind the organization?

And then, if you do that, I think you’re kind of set up for success. It’s … Even if the quote-unquote design or the style isn’t agreed upon by everyone in the world, if there’s still substantive thinking, it’s sometimes hard to argue with. So, I think when we approach design, we kind of do it so that if there is argument, we have some way of backing it up. Rather than just, we think it looks great.

Liam: Speaking of the idea that not everyone in the world will agree on, maybe, the visual style or some component of the design. I’m interested in how you think about designing a new identity for an established client. Like, a company that’s been around for a while, and perhaps needs a new identity.

Jesse: Yeah. I have mixed feelings about it sometimes. Only because when that happens, sometimes it’s because of someone new in power, someone new in charge. And from their perspective, if they are, you know, the president of a company that has been around for 30 years, and they’ve been doing things the same way for the past 10 or 15, one way to signal change in leadership is to do that visually. I mean, that’s the thing that everyone sort of sees and it makes an impact.

So, you know, sometimes a, a new president or a director will come in. And they’d simply, yeah, just want to signal change in the environment, change in the culture. And you know, they’ll do that by changing the logo, because so then, it’s kind of a really easy thing to do. And you know, they’re not completely wrong. It is easier to do that than maybe change the entire structure of a company.

Then, that sometimes disrupts the strength of a brand and a name, I think, when you sort of let things build up over time. It constantly is like, solidifying and strengthening over time. And when you change that, it just looks sort of like a, a disruption. And so, yeah. My mixed feelings about that is, I don’t know if that’s always kind of the right reason, just because someone’s in power.

But I think if you are making a significant shift in the way that a company is run or the way that they’re going to do things next, then I think sort of a visual stimuli or a visual kind of connection to that is, is healthy. So, I’m more in favor of if you’re improving the business, then you know, you can signal that through some sort of visual communication.

Liam: So, going back to what you said earlier, the brand and identity should always speak to the truth of the organization.

Jesse: Definitely. One classic example is Coca-Cola, how they really have never changed their core identity since the very first time it was drawn. And then, you know, their main competitor Pepsi has gone through it many, many times, and now you see them going back to … Everyone does, like, throwback cans or jerseys or things like that.

And so, you know, it kind of begs the question on what was really the point in that change? And you know, maybe to them it was like, we, we’re signaling sort of a, a change in the way that we make our products or we’re doing things differently. But again, I mean, just the strength of Coca-Cola, everyone … It’s just fascinating how everyone wants to change things and make things new, but then everyone is constantly obsessed with the past and with things that are sort of quote-unquote vintage, or these legacy things. Uh, and they’re always like, bringing them back.

And so, maybe that says something about, we should just kind of have faith that something is going to work over time. And time and substance are two really important variables when you’re talking about any new thing that you’re putting out into the world. I mean, even like, a, a name on a brand is not the same when it is first born, to, you know, comparing it to something very similar that’s been around for five years.

Um, like, its place in our culture, time is something that you need to just give before judging whether it’s working or not, or good or bad.

Liam: That’s, that’s a good lesson for everyone, probably.

Jesse: Yeah. I think so.

Liam: I’m always interested in the constraints that designers face in, in different disciplines. And I know that identity design must be one with plenty of its own constraints. So I’m interested to hear generally about some of the constraints that you’ve run into in that kind of work.

Jesse: I think most designers, or at least some designers in, you know, one school of thought, or one camp of design, thrive on restraints. And I think I am one of those people. I think Michael is one, as well, kind of all the designers on his team. When you have a completely wide open-ended territory to do whatever you want, without any restraints or sort of goals in mind, it’s harder to make decisions. So, I think the restraints allow you to really look at things systematically and sort of pragmatically about how this brand or identity will really work.

So, right, if you’re designing a restaurant’s, or, you know, thinking about an application like, the side of truck graphics or, like, if you’re designing, I don’t know why I’m thinking of these weird applications. But like, if a client came and said, “We are a new fishing rod company,” it’s pretty obvious, sort of what applications you’re going to be designing for. But then, you know, sometimes you can imagine new applications that the client doesn’t think of. Like, you know, if you’re making new fishing rods, maybe it’s kind of like, you know, old school sort of sports. And maybe they’re not thinking so much about their web presence or the way that, like, social media can help their business.

And so, you know, we try to always think of a really good idea. Like, have you thought about doing this, um, just to give you more exposure? Or to just help the, the company. And sometimes, that can be, you know, internally. Think about the employees working there. Maybe the employees wants, you know, really great uniforms. Or maybe they want, like, a cool notebook. And so, we’ll make stuff like that. Like, you make fishing rods, but let’s make you a really cool, you know, notebook to give to all your employees, or, like, a bag. And that’s just sort of, like, a badge of honor that your employees can use.

So, I guess the, the answer is, restraints are really good. And it just helps frame perspective and set goals. But at the same time, um, I think we’re not afraid to always kind of think outside the restraints. And there’s no harm in always giving your opinion and voicing new ideas, and then, clients really appreciate that.

Liam: In a related vein, I want to draw comparison to interface design, which is what I’m most familiar with. And when doing that, I think we try to think about both the medium or the application in which the user is experiencing something, which for me, is going to be screens all the time. But also, their broader context in life when they’re using that thing. So, I’m interested in how that’s accounted for in identity work.

Jesse: Yeah. We always consider that. It’s things like, you don’t want to make anything that someone can’t afford. Or if they have, you know, vision problems, that it’s going to make it harder for them to sort of literally see or understand the work that you’re making. So, you know, a restaurant is another good example for menus. I think designers like really, really small type. And I do, but, um, at a certain point you have to think about the context in which that menu is going to be read. And it’s going to be, if you’re in New York City, you know, the, basically looks like the lights aren’t even on, and you have a little candle on your table to read the menu. Um, that’s not good sort of user experience.

And so, I don’t know, maybe menus should have, like, all 50 point type on them, or something. I know my, uh, my stepfather would appreciate that, instead of, you know, everyone kind of getting out their phone lights. So yeah, thinking about context, like, one, about just legibility. And then, again, you know, budget. I think that is one thing to talk about, if there’s a company and they’re non-profit. And they can only afford to make so many things, don’t show them, like, what their logo looks on the side of, like, a jet that some, you know, millionaire would have, if they had like, a private jet.

So, you think about, you know, those sort of restraints. And yeah, again, like, the end user on, like, really what is the most practical for them. But then think creatively. Like, again, like, we do a lot of print work. So, that’s in my background and what I kind of know best. And so, if, for example, you know, you might have to make printed flyers or brochures, and black and white paper looks cheap, and it looks like it’s done at Kinko’s, buy colored paper. And that’s, like, a really easy way that, you know, a non-profit can have a little bit more of an exciting sort of visual presence or, you know, communication materials without having to go and print things offset and spend thousands of dollars on really expensive printing.

That’s, for me, like, where the creative thinking comes in. And when I think creatively, I think about how can we solve these problems better for people? And then, again, that’s, like, us rationalizing what we’re doing, other than me just saying, you know what? I think you should really spend all this money, because I, you know, I did it, and it looks really great. And it’s just gonna look fabulous. That does not matter, if it doesn’t work and they can’t afford it. And they can’t actually use it.

My creative thinking is, like, how can we work around the obstacles that most normal people, uh, face every day? And people that, you know, spend their life savings or their time away from their kids into this new company that they’re creating. Like, I’m trying to help them.

Liam: Yeah. And not convince them to buy the jet.

Jesse: Exactly. You don’t need the jet.

Liam: Maybe this happens concurrently with the creation process, maybe it happens after. Maybe it happens the whole time. But codifying an identity, kind of laying down the guidelines and a style guide for this thing that has been created. First of all, I’m interested in how you approach setting down a set of guidelines that encompasses all of the things that you’ve created and that you know this will be applied to, but which also leaves room for future applications that maybe you can’t predict.

Jesse: First, we always design stuff. We design stuff first. We don’t start with, sort of, a rigorous system. If it’s, you know, a new identity that has pretty broad application, group or, you know, a scenario where a lot of very different things need to be kind of accounted for, we’ll just kind of go crazy and not have any rules. I mean, we’ll think of a very strong, uh, starting point and a concept that makes sense. Um, and so we then, uh, you know, in the very beginning, you’re sort of building up this kit of parts that is logical to us. So, you know, you’ve created a mark, and that mark represents, you know, X, and you have a typeface because there’s some sort of relationship to this.

If you’re doing things that require a lot of really tricky design moves that only a graphic designer could really understand, I guess, one, you have to consider the, the capabilities of that organization. Like, do they have an in-house design team to really pull off all these really great looking designer-y moves? Uh, and if they don’t, then I think you have to think a little bit more, you know, in a more restricted way. And again, that’s like I was saying, like, really think about who the client is and what their resources are. If they’re just left to their own devices, and you kind of create this very complex system, are they going to be able to execute it?

So, we think about those two kind of scenarios. Like, who will take this after we’re no longer in the picture? Um, and one thing that we always mention to our clients and try to guide them towards, is really investing in a designer. I think, you know, where … We live in a, a very highly designed culture now. Um, companies that didn’t consider design as part of their DNA are now very much considering it. And I think, um, everyone’s sort of aware of its impact on business.

And so, we really are advocates for at least hiring one designer or looking at if you need a whole design team to really, on a daily basis, start executing all the stuff that we’re going to give them. So, we always keep that in mind. But it’s really, I think, first, do a ton a work. Test things out. See what doesn’t work. And then, you can deliberate from there and sort of consolidate what the main outcomes were of that kind of design exercise. And then writing them all down in a very easily understood way. That’s kind of how we go about it.

Liam: I also want to speak specifically to your work on the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. On your site, the guidelines that you provided for the identity were simple. That they allowed for a lot of flexibility later on. It could be adapted, and you gave a lot of examples of how it could be adapted to various contexts, different aesthetics, different imagery. So I’m interested in how you strike the balance between providing that flexibility and also maintaining a very strong core?

Jesse: Yeah. That identity is, you know, very fascinating for many reasons. Michael and I, and Julia Lemle, we were kind of the three people involved from the very, very beginning on that whole project. And when we started, the outcomes were sort of unknown. And like, who was going to be using any sort of design system still wasn’t completely clear. So, when we started, I guess the audience that we were designing for were everyday people. It was for everybody, and truly we were kind of tasked with this mission on creating something that anyone could sort of make their own version of. That really was kind of the impetus for the entire project.

On one hand, it did need to stand alone and sort of identify Hillary Clinton. Um, but at the same time, the campaign really wanted anyone to make their own version of it. And so, we needed to make it simple enough where, like, literally a five-year-old could draw it and make, you know, his or her version of it. And so, at the very beginning, there was a lot of research kind of done. And I think you would probably guess this, but if you say the word Hillary, uh, most people kind of know who you’re referencing, especially in context. And so, we just had this idea of the H, just like, the block H by itself. And it kind of created this window, and sort of this palette that you can put anything on or in. And then kind of make it your own.

And so that worked for sort of the crowd interaction part, and kind of the inclusivity of what we wanted the mark to do. But then, if you just took that H and made it like, one solid color, and it was supposed to represent just her and not anything else, it didn’t have enough uniqueness to it. And so, you know, the arrow came in as this idea of kind of moving things forward. And then also, this device that simply meant Hillary for, and then you could put anything afterward. You could just use that symbol.

So, that was kind of our, uh, involvement. We were at the very beginning, and we really just came up with this symbol, this mark, how it was used, how it was paired with typography. We worked with Lucas Sharp to sort of customize, you know, a typeface that he had previously drawn that we were going to use specifically for the campaign. So, and you know, developed a color palette, um, and then just some basic guidelines around how to use that mark, uh, and that symbol, um, to its fullest advantage.

So, yeah, the guidelines were pretty simple and straightforward. We did some basic applications, and then, you know, it became pretty clear that, you know, this campaign, obviously, was going to be a pretty serious one. And she was building her campaign staff, um, and Jennifer Kinon, uh, was appointed the lead creative director on the whole campaign’s creative side. And so, she really took those guidelines, and her and her team expanded them to worlds that we couldn’t have even imagined.

And again, that was like, a part of it. It was always, when we were sort of pitching the idea, we were always saying, like, we don’t even know what people are going to do with this. Like, you can’t know. You can never know that Shepard Fairey was going to make this poster of Obama and, you know, put hope on it, and that was going to be almost the official, unofficial symbol of the campaign.

So, it was almost like that Shepard Fairey moment that we were always, kind of, hoping would happen. And I think, I don’t know if any sort of celebrity did anything to that level. But I will say, equally if not more so, you know, Jennifer and her team took it to a whole ‘nother level of execution and thinking, and applying that in such a beautiful way that, again, like, time and substance really, the, that was the result of those two things.

Liam: I want to close on, uh, perhaps some more practical advice from you. Throughout the conversation, you’ve brought up a number of different media that you have accounted for in your work, everything from, like, menus to truck wraps, to uniforms to notebooks. Fishing rods.

Jesse: I’ve never designed a fishing rod, by the way.

Liam: Right.

Jesse: I kind of wish I had. I don’t know where that reference came from. I don’t know, it just, my past fishing [crosstalk 00:28:01] or something.

Liam: But theoretically, and even a symbol that could be applied to literally anything with a marker, crayons, pens, whatever. I’m interested in how, as a designer, you manage to learn about all of these different media, if it’s something that you’ve learned as you went, or if you have any advice for learning about all that, to be prepared for what you need to know to design an identity and keeping that knowledge current.

Jesse: My biggest source of advice would be, when you graduate college and you have this degree, you’ve learned all about graphic design or whatever, you know, interaction design, digital design. Whatever this kind of visual profession that you’re going into. When you’re out of school, you still have a solid five years of learning. I think you should act like you still know absolutely nothing about what it is you are making. The, you should have some level of confidence, and you have now the, the foundation and the tools to prepare yourself to put them to work. But you’ve just been, at that point, given the complete toolkit.

So, you know, you have your box of stuff that you’ve learned. But you have not applied them yet. And you’re not even sure how they will be applied or to what. So, I think when I finished school and started my first job, I absorbed as much as I possibly could. Kept pretty quiet, pretty like, low to the ground. I think people do want to hear your opinions and your thoughts, so you should not be silent. And you should have ideas, and you should contribute. But in the back of your head, always think, I’m still absolutely learning. And this task that I’m doing, it seems so menial. Or it seems like this amounts to nothing. How is this going to apply? Or how is this going to … How can I use this in my portfolio?

Do not think about how this is going to be worked in your portfolio. Everything, absolutely everything is a lesson. And that could be, you know, dealing with a really horrible client. Um, I dealt with a lot of those. Not, like, horrible. But just ones that wore, that were on another level of intensity that I was not ever exposed to. And I just thought to myself, I don’t know if I can … I literally thought, I wasn’t sure if I could do this. If I, if I was right to be a designer, working with these types of people and all these, like, different industries. And I left my bubble of sort of, MoMA, where everyone’s on the same team. And you kind of have, uh, support everywhere, you know, that you look. And everyone’s kind of working towards the same sort of goals.

But, um, you know, looking back on it, I really learned so much about, uh, personalities and all those sort of things. But I think if you’re a designer and you’re practicing design, learn everything else. You know, if you’re speaking to a new client, don’t ask them about fonts or colors, or, or logos. Ask them about the business that they’re making. Ask them about the way that they make money. Or the way that they don’t make money. Or who their audience is. I mean, ask all the questions that are not about design, and that will influence your design.

And you do that for years and years. I’ve, uh, only been professionally working for eight years, and still daily, I feel some sort of fraudulent activity, or I don’t know fully what I’m doing. And you have to really just trust the process. And I think that’s what you do, you learn over time, that they, you can’t really learn in school, is that there is a process that you go through. And if you go through it, it seems to have worked out every time so far. And that’s what I think younger designers and new designers should think about.

Liam: I think that’s great advice. And it’s in a class of advice that, at least for me, might not make sense until you actually do it.

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: Um-

Jesse: So, pretend you know nothing, and eventually you might know a little something.

Liam: Yeah. That’s all we can hope for.

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: All right, well, thank you again, Jesse.

Jesse: Yeah, thanks for having me