Dave Crossland, Google Fonts

Exploring the impact of digital type on our lives, on software production, and on the future of design

Liam and Google Fonts Specialist Dave Crossland explore what digital type can teach us about digital production, emotional expression, and where we fit in the world as designers; and how – with a little imagination – we might unlock new possibilities.

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Liam Spradlin: Hi, Dave. Welcome to Design Notes.

Dave Crossland: Hey. How are you?

Liam: Good. To start off as usual, why don't you introduce yourself and the work that you're doing?

Dave: Well, I'm working with the Google Fonts team as the sort of operations manager. Often, I get boiled down to the team font expert, and I've been on the team for over 10 years. I sort of know everything that's going on, a lot of context, and so, I'm often explaining what we do can be very nuanced. There's a lot of depth to typography, but at the same time, it's something which a lot of people don't think about too much. A lot of my work is explaining type designers to Google and Google to type designers as we commission fonts.

Liam: Tell me a little bit about how you got there. What is the journey like to become font expert?

Dave: Well, I think I've always, since I was early teenager, been interested in graphic design and publishing, the power of information and information design. That's what I went to study at college in the UK. I'm English and I went to Ravensbourne College of Design, initially in a graphic design program, and I graduated in interaction design.

Then, a couple of years after that, I attended the University of Reading, which has an old kind of red brick Ivy League style university and has a department of typography, and within that, a master's program in typeface design. And so, I attended that for a couple of years. As I was student, the web font revolution was happening and this ability to use any font on a webpage was re-arriving. It was something that had been in there in the '90s but had gone away and then came back some 12 years ago.

And so, I was very keen on the idea of what I call libre fonts, other people may call open source fonts. That was a bit of a radical idea back then. Recently, I was chatting with a recent graduate and I said, "Well, you know, before Google Fonts, da da da." They were like, "No. No, I was 12 when it came out." Don't remember.

Liam: There was no before.

Dave: They don't remember that. Yeah.

Liam: Why was that a radical idea?

Dave: I think if you go back about 10 years, there was just very, very few fonts which were available under such sort of permissive license terms where anyone can use it for any purpose and even modify the font itself. And a big question will be, wow, it's a huge effort to design the typeface, to draw everything. And it's difficult to do that on a hobbyist kind of part-time basis.

If you try and do type design as a hobby, you just may not be able to put enough concentrated time into it to get good at it. And so people who really get into it are really investing, I mean years of that life into it. And so to design a typeface for six months as a full-time effort, that's something that's got to be paid. And so always with libre licensing of things, then people can sometimes feel a bit mystified about why would anyone be paid to do something that's given away.

There are organizations that benefit from work being freely available. It's more valuable to that organization for the work to be unrestricted. And that's really the case here with Google Fonts, that having fonts which are not tied into Google's products that are totally open and can float around with their text, the document can be exported and imported in and out of any application, that's important for people. And especially as we keep advancing into the future with new mediums, there's kind of AR, VR stuff right now, seems to be a sort of new platform, new technology that people are exploring.

And so the ability to always be able to move forwards, even if a company from a previous era ends up going out of business, going out of the way, if they've been publishing free and open libre software or font or other things, those things can have a future life. So yeah, it was a new thing back then and was seen as a bit radical because people, I think, had some anxiety back then about how it was going to work.

Liam: You also mentioned aspects of type design that are really integral to the process, but that people maybe don't think about very much. Could you talk a little bit about some of those?

Dave: To me, something that's been driving me to work on this for over a decade is there's this sort of amazing tension between the ubiquity of type and its obscurity. You can't go anywhere in the world, in any urban environment without being surrounded by text. And yet the fact that someone has drawn those letters that you are seeing and that there's this system of shapes going on, is something that's totally below the level of consciousness.

I think one of the biggest trends in these years I've been working on this has been this continued globalization and internationalization of type. Hundreds of years ago there was a lot of ads in London, Paris, New York, but that wasn't the case in a lot of other nations capitals. And today, smartphones are becoming something that everyone has and digital typography, digital advertising is becoming a real big business.

I think today you go to India and you'll see commercial billboards on the side of the highway that are in English, but it's also the world's largest democracy. So a lot of the political billboards are in the local languages, local writing systems. So yeah, I think there have been these commercial drivers in the past, but I think that with digital typography, digital advertising, we're seeing that change.

Liam: I think it's interesting to point out how much type kind of constructs the world around us or how much it's surrounding us in urban areas, and the fact that someone made that. Something that I like to explore a lot on Design Notes is how we as designers are placing ourselves in the world. And it strikes me that this is kind of a special placement as it were because we are placing ourselves in the type that is then being placed by other people into other contexts. I guess I'm interested in your thoughts on what that relationship is and how we can be conscious of it as designers.

Dave: Well, I would say that really the real value of different type is the emotional note that it adds to the text. This is in a way kind of true subliminal advertising. There's not really secret messages in a single frame in a advert on TV or whatever that all kind of 1950s ideas, the kind of weird shapes in the ice cubes kind of stuff. As far as I know, that's not real. But the way that letter forms shapes make you feel, that is real. And there's a lot of fonts for the Latin writing system that we use in English, other European languages, but there's very few for many of the world's writing systems.

You go and you see a ice cream shop, I think Baskin-Robbins in the States it's like a big international chain. And when you travel around the world, you are going to see Baskin-Robbins shops and they're going to have Baskin-Robbins written in another writing system and it's not going to match. The way the two typefaces look is not going to match, not going to carry the same feeling.

So I think, yeah, there's a huge amount of potential for the future in developing much richer palette of type options for all the world's cultures.

Liam: Speaking a little bit about the impact that type can have on our emotions, our socialization, impact that it can have on the world. I'm curious if there are specific projects at Google Fonts that you think have had a particular role in that area that you would want to talk about.

Dave: Sure. I mean going back, the old days when Google Fonts launched, we had a breakout hit in the lobster font and these days, pretty much every city you'll see lobster around. That was important in the early days because when you saw lobster on the web, you knew that wasn't a system font, that was something that you hadn't seen before. Since those early days, the Google Fonts team has grown to invest in four areas. We're working on the Google's company branding type, we work on the operating system type for Android, and [inaudible 00:10:51], and other operating systems.

And then we have lobster and all this other expressive options for products. And then we also invest in the foundational technology, so things like font quality checking tools, or even the font formats itself. And yeah, I would say that the idea of the Unicode standard itself, the idea of bringing all the world's writing systems together into one standard, and making that completely interoperable and universal is, again, part of that real foundation that Google Fonts is building on. And so codifying languages as digital fonts is something I think which is really important. And literacy, accessibility, these are foundational human needs, and the type is a really key building block of that stuff.

Liam: Speaking of factors that people might not consider related to type design, it strikes me, especially as you're talking, that to be a type designer also involves a significant amount of technical skill as well. That type design becomes a different mode of creative practice or of production.

Dave: Yeah. I mean I think, again, for me to be obsessively working on this for 10 years has meant there's the visual culture aspect, the linguistic aspect, the technology, the business, and all of these things are interrelated.

Liam: In a lot of recent reading I've been doing about concepts surrounding digital production and how that influences social systems that inform our lives, I've read about how free software that we talked about earlier has sought to reconfigure or re-socialize the relationship that we have to practices like this to making digital products and the processes behind production. Having mentioned that being a type designer already involves a different mode of production from a lot of other design disciplines, I guess I would ask more broadly how Google Fonts fits into that, affecting the relationship that we have perhaps to digital products?

Dave: Yeah, I think there's an old idea about value having two sides. There's the direct usefulness of a thing, use value, and then its value and exchange. What can you sell it for? And when you produce things where they're having to be directly monetized and you're producing for exchange, then that can sometimes create incentives that warp the thing, and designers can end up maybe being told by the business to go and optimize that side of the value proposition to the detriment of the usefulness. And an example of this outside of type, and maybe outside of design, would be healthy food. Healthy food could be cheap, it doesn't have to be the top tier deluxe stuff, but it's more profitable to sell food which is addictive and unhealthy, and we end up with food deserts in the urban landscape. And so with fonts, to some extent, this can also be the case. A language support can be missing for certain nations which don't present a large buy-side of the marketplace.

And with Google Fonts, what we've heard is that there's an issue where some type designers that we've commissioned have seen the incentives such that they don't put their best effort into their project because it's a fixed fee, it's being paid upfront, and there's not the same speculative retail or revenue opportunity that they have with their own projects. And they will put their best effort into a project which they're making to retail, but what they'll earn with that over say 5 or 10 years is speculative. It could be close to zero, it could be millions of dollars, over the years. Personally, I think that's unwise because the Libre fonts become the most widely used ones, and that becomes what type designers' reputations get staked on, but other people see that differently. So I think when making free software or making Libre fonts, often people are making them for themselves, and maybe they're being commissioned and their time is being paid for, but that exchange value aspect is being taken out of the equation, and the focus can be on making it as useful as possible.

Liam: Do you see that as a model that could work for other things, especially in digital production?

Dave: Well, I think those other things came first. That was definitely my idea, that when I went to do a master's degree in type design, I was very focused on this idea of bringing some of these ideas from the Libre software movement, Wikipedia, Creative Commons. These things, there was much more of a buzz around them. Creative Commons was new when I was a student. We do see people making Libre fonts typically under the open font license outside of what Google Fonts is doing, so different governments, different individual designers, different companies have decided to go with making their fonts freely available. Nothing to do with Google.

Liam: Yeah, I was going to ask, do you think that the success of Google Fonts or the ubiquity of those fonts, because they're free, has had an effect on the industry? But it seems like maybe those things are happening in multiple places independently at once.

Dave: Yeah. I mean obviously Google Fonts, in certain respects, is big, in other respects is small. So I think there's probably more open Libre fonts today with Google Fonts existing than there would be without Google Fonts existing. But that's hard to say. It's a speculative fiction there. And in my studies, in being a student of type design, the history of all this is something that's synthesized, and I think when you go into the different eras of the type industry, in the past there's always been a $0 tier. Before digital, those physical typesetting machines would come bundled with a few choices that are free, and before Google Fonts, there was plenty of freeware fonts around on [inaudible 00:17:54] and other places.

And in the '90s, if you got CorelDRAW, it came with a CD with hundreds of fonts on it that if you had to get them individually, it'd be way more than CorelDRAW. So there's always been a cheaper option. I think if Google Fonts didn't exist, there would be less people enjoying using type to express themselves and identify their brands on the web, themselves on the web, and the type industry overall would be smaller. There'd just be less people using different type and thinking about type. I know some people see it differently and they could count every use of a Libre font as a lost sale, but that's like when people say that PirateBay costs the movie industry more than the GDP of Japan or whatever. In the real world, that simplistic economic ideology just doesn't work like that. And I think what really happens is often the opposite of what simple theories predict.

So I would say that it's good for everyone in the type business that more and more people around the world are choosing and using different fonts thanks to Google Fonts making it so easy. And I'm English. We have the BBC in England, in the UK, which sets a very high bar for the quality of TV. And then there is private cable-style TV, satellite TV that's even better because it has to compete with that public option. And people don't just watch the BBC or just watch private TV, they're going to see the good TV, the good TV programming that's entertaining or whatever. The highest traffic websites using Google Fonts do not purely use Google Fonts, they're using type from a mix of sources because it's ultimately about the typefaces and the typography, and the licensing terms, the cost is a factor, but it's something of a secondary factor. So I would say Libre software, Libre culture, Libre font is this global public service provision that's setting a baseline, which means no one's excluded below that baseline and sets the stage for more broad competition in the marketplace. And the fourth area of our investment in a tooling technology, that is something that is directly improving the overall business and industry. We have excellent QA tools and know-how about how to finalize and productionize typeface designs, which is available to everyone in the world he wants to enter the business. So there's a more level playing field.

Liam: When you talk about the perception that maybe a use of a free font is a lost sale or things about movie piracy, without going too deep into it, maybe some of those thoughts are coming from a friction between modes of understanding what a product is and how it's distributed between historical analog implementations versus digital ones. And I'm curious what you think about that because as I learned about type design, it seemed like type had had this kind of friction for a long time, of how is type distributed, how has it been distributed historically, how does that line up, how have we tried to replicate that in a digital space, and where has that gone right or wrong?

Dave: In the past these previous eras of type, when type was physical, especially at the end of the pre-digital period where we had this dry transfer lettering, like Letraset was one of the inventors, the leading brand of this, you literally rubbed out the letters one by one on the dry paper and you paid by the letter, and that kind of business model where you had to buy the type, buy the letter, it's not coming back. And even before that, when metal type would wear out it'd need to be recast and rebought. So I think that was the case, as I said, in London, New York, Paris. But in most of the rest of the world there wasn't that much typography going on. And today there's this huge growth in demand for type globally. So the distribution models and so on, the idea of buying a font on a floppy disk, well that was sort of working for English, I remember. And I was a student, that was just kind of on the way out, and OpenType, where you could have more than 250 glyphs in a font file, was coming in.

But I got a glimpse into those older days where even for English digital type was kind of tricky. So yeah, I think as the technology improves, it's just a better experience for people making publications in a broader sense, and that's going to lead to more people wanting to make good quality stuff and wanting to use good quality type, new type. There's a fashion aspect to it. I mean, type has such a long history. It predates capitalism, almost. So 500 years ago a typeface cost more than a small private army. This was a royal technology and it was extremely powerful. The printing press caused revolutions. And maybe Marshall McLuhan idea, but maybe the fact of printing existing as a technology itself caused a scientific revolution. That way of thinking about atomizing and breaking things down into their pieces and making them uniform and repeatable and reproducible. The type was the first mass produced product.

So that power has not gone away, but it's only got cheaper and cheaper over time, over hundreds of years. But we still have a good business, a good industry, healthy industry that lots of people around the world are making type today. So I don't know, I'm not sure if that really addresses your question, and it's something that personally I've been in a privileged position where I've been working with Google pretty much since I graduated and Google's been cutting the checks to develop almost all the type that's in Google Fonts.

Liam: Yeah, I think it does address the question, as digital type as a whole is such a surface for exploring how things move from analog to digital modes of production and distribution type continues to evolve into a place. Speaking as someone who works on a design system during the day, I'm very interested in the capacity for variable type to embody a system that can satisfy user intent without knowing about it and perhaps requires a designer intent that is more facilitating of a wider range of expression. I want to just jump into that little bit and talk about it.

Dave: Absolutely, yeah. So the way that I've been advocating for variable fonts, variable typography, a flexible typography is to say that there's three main benefits to variable fonts. To compress, to express, and to finesse. And what you touched on there was the third thing, where we can improve the user experience in a way where they're not even especially conscious of it. This is kind of automatic finessing that's individual and providing subtle accessibility improvements, which maybe on a mass scale could be measured, but that can be quite subtle. So to break down those three things, the to compressed benefit is that if you take a set of static fonts and you look at the total file size there, if you were going to use all of those styles within those families, and then you look at the file size of those families as variable fonts, then often you see a pretty big reduction in file size.

Now obviously if you're just using Lobster, it's a single style font, there's no reduction possible with variable fonts. If you're just using regular and bold, there's probably also not really a reduction. But even if you are just using regular and bold as a variable font, you now have all of the weights from regular to bold, and say maybe those semi bold medium weights can be useful for you. And as designers, we can do large type or even text type and choose type for its expressivity, for those feelings it evokes. And being able to dial in and fine tune those feelings, that expressiveness is exciting. But that automatic style selection I think is really the most powerful benefit here. So the big example of this is this idea of optical size designs, where in pre-digital, pre-phototype, every piece of metal type was being made at a physical size, so the marginal cost of customizing the typeface design to that size was very small.

And then when we had phototype, you took one design and you just scaled it up and down to the size you wanted and you lost that size specific design. So today with variable fonts, we can have a continuous range of designs from a very small design to a very large design, and then multiply that across weights and widths. So the heaviest weight, the lightest weight can be much more extreme at a large size. And then as the size comes down, the type kind of gets more resilient and the readability and legibility is reinforced or defended, and the actual proportions get less extreme, even though it's still the maximum possible at that size. So I think the designers, end users, font users have not really even begun to scratch the surface of what variable fonts can mean for typography.

And there's this old Marshall McLuhan idea that when a new technology or a new paradigm arrives, what he called a medium, as opposed to the message that it carries, when that medium arrives in society, then initially it's only used to mimic and emulate previous technology that was most similar to it. So for example, early radio hosts, they would dress up in a full on three piece suit to announce the news on the radio, as if they were doing a public speaking event in front of a large live audience, even though they were stuck in a studio. Early cinema, they would stick a camera in the middle of a theater auditorium and film a stage play, and only later did you get radio shows that were not mimicking giving a speech, and films like, say Orson Welles's Citizen Kane that pioneered new ideas about how to create cinema that was cinematographic.

So what we see with variable fonts is that they're being understood today with that kind of compressed benefit, we could say misunderstood, that it's all about the smaller file size version of static fonts. And especially for technology companies, engineering managers can really get that because that's a very measurable benefit. You had what you had before and the file size is smaller and there's no change to the design, there's no change to the typography. It's just a pure engineering benefit that can be very easily quantified.

But I think that kind of overlooks the real value and opportunity and what's going to happen is that the designers using variable fonts are going to become sort of pioneers and discover the deeper nature of the new medium of typography, of fluid or variable typography. And they're going to come up with new kinds of designs that weren't possible with static fonts. There's this sort of meeting place between the type designer and the type user, and variable fonts kind of start to break down that barrier that in the past with static fonts, the type designer issues, the final release of the project, like this is it, and then the type users work with what they have.

And with variable fonts, there's this sort of type design on rails kind of thing where you have so many options as the font user, you can fine tune so many key aspects of the typeface. You are not drawing the shapes, so you're still within predetermined ranges of what you can choose from. But you get this incredibly fine grain control and it becomes kind of like a musical instrument, obviously you have the possibility to make horrendous sounds, but also you can make something which really sings and that no one's ever heard before.

Liam: Yeah, I think it's fascinating the idea of bringing who we consider users closer to the process of design or production. But also I think this must have tremendous implications for design as a practice as well, because we're no longer focused on designing single points in a design space, but now we can do line segments, or planes, or entire three dimensional shapes as designers. What does that do to the mental model of a design practitioner for what they're creating?

Dave: Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential which is yet to be explored. And I think that this potential is in the total systems, and it can be difficult to get into it when you're dealing with kind of snapshots of static frames in a design app, where you are sort of ideating and mocking things up and how things work within the actual medium of the digital experience is where it's going to be.

Liam: I also remember being struck learning about the concept of design space in variable type, that it is in fact multi-dimensional to an extent that is hard to even visualize as humans living in the three dimensional perceptive space that we do.

Dave: Yeah, I mean, we are offering variable fonts like Roboto Flex, which have got over a dozen axes, and there is a real system behind that. It isn't a dozen completely different things. There's a dozen things that are interrelated and that work as a system and definitely visualizing more than three dimensions, even three dimensions, can get trippy.

Liam: What do you think lies in the future for that? How do you think that that process changes to become more apprehendable? Or does it?

Dave: I've always been in that sort of old chestnut, that should designers code? I've been very much coming into design from a technology culture. And so I think that in the same way there's been some work around how to better visualize programs because they also can end up as these very complex, multi-dimensional, abstract entities. And yeah, I think a lot of people, myself included, who go into design, they have such strong math skills. There's three kind of people in this world, those you can count and those you can't. And so that's definitely me. And so I think that there's some kind of more direct experience of this stuff, which can be hard to translate or visualize.

Liam: I think it's very important to call out the importance of approaching this from a technical aspect as well, because the things that we create as designers are also mediated by things that were designed themselves. So, perhaps you must create the thing that allows you to design in order to design the thing that you truly want to make.

Dave: Right. Yeah. And in my teaching practice, one of my primary principles of teaching is to walk students through an experience first of making and then give them some theory to deconstruct their experience and well, it sounds silly, but to structure it then. That when you have the direct kind of raw experience and you don't really know the theories behind what you're doing, then your senses are more open to the total thing. And in stage magic, the way that illusions work is the misdirection, right? That humans are very good at deleting out stuff that they perceive from their awareness.

And so having people go first in experiencing something means that they're not filtering their experience based on a kind of ideological prejudice. And so, I would say that that's pretty deep to design practice and that it's important to try and experience the medium directly and work with the medium through its own logic rather than trying to treat it like a version of the old medium, the old way of doing things. Like I said, I really credit Marshall McLuhan with a lot of this stuff. I know that's a kind of design school classic, but it definitely shaped my thinking about all this stuff.

Liam: That's great. I think that's a great note to reflect on as we close. Thank you again for joining me today, Dave.

Dave: All right. I think I've got to change someone's diaper.

Sang Mun, YAW Studio

Interdisciplinary designer Sang Mun on how privacy-focused design can empower users

In this episode, Liam speaks with interdisciplinary designer Sang Mun of YAW Studio. In the interview, recorded in Seoul, South Korea, Liam and Sang explore how the ZXX typeface — which was born from Sang’s experience in special intelligence — helps us consider privacy and the nature of the information that shapes our lives, how accessible tools can empower users, and how to think about the practical constraints we all face as designers.

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Liam Spradlin: Sang welcome.

Sang Mun: Thank you for having me.

Liam: So, just to get started um I always ask about the journey so what do you do now and what has the journey been like to get there?

Sang: So, right now I’m running a design studio called YAW with two other good friends of mine and their furniture space and product designers. So, we work on 360-degree brand designs from spaces to brandings to other collaterals and apart from that we also just started a new brand that’s called band of colors and it’s men’s underwear and swim shorts brand so that’s what I’ve been working on in the recent years and prior to that I was a graphic design fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. After that I came back to Korea and worked as a graphic designer for this two big corporations in Korea so, once called Hanwha and the other ones on Hyundai Motor Company.

Liam: So, how did you get your start?

Sang: Actually, I studied on film and video first back from high school I guess, I guess I went into design because I used to skate online and listening to all this punk rock music, being able to adopt the album covers, two music videos, to other visual noises that I kind of got into. So, I guess uh-hmm I was always interested in the graphics and the visuals that connected with me so it was kind of natural for me to move on from film and video to graphic design.

Liam: I’m really excited to have you on today because you know the philosophy of design notes is really about finding the common threads that run through different types of design work and the ways that we approach them from each discipline and it seems like the breadth of your work is a perfect reflection of that pursuit, you’ve been involved in designing a lot of different types of things so, I’d like to hear about some of the projects from different disciplines that you’ve been involved with and the common patterns that you picked up through those experiences?

Sang: I really try to focus on telling the story and just going into the chorus and stuff what this product has to tell or what this brand has to tell or what does photography for instance, where space has to tell to the story and I just forming a bond of sympathy with the end users it’s what I try to focus on the best and I think that has changed a lot comparing to the works that I’ve done in the past because before I think we all designers have this ego because we just feel like we’re still students at school so, after leaving school I think it was a hard transition in a way but I think it worked well in the end and I’m still trying to work more on that aspect in trying to think as a non designer, like how they would approach this outcome that I mean and how they associate it with their context.I think that’s the common approach that I have in all the projects.

Liam: I’m interested in dissecting how you go about finding the story of a product and how that’s formed?

Sang: So, for instance I guess I guess one of the most successful projects that I’ve done was the ZXX typeface, I think it told a very humane and kind of silly idea and I think it resonated with a lot of people in the way that I was telling a true story of mine in a graphic way and also you know casual but scary way and I try to input my life into those projects in the way that I tell a story for instance, on the ZXX was a story of mine where I was on special intelligence personnel for the Korean military associated with the NSA and I had an opportunity to tell that project in a story that was based with my own experience of how to extract information or special signal information.

Liam: Yeah and I can definitely see through reading about ZXX that there is that like personal story component but you also relate it to the people who are viewing it and saying like this is you know we need to make use of the difference between technological and human perception.

Sang: Right.

Liam: To keep ourselves camouflaged as much as we can.

Sang: Right.

Liam: I do want to dig into that a little more specifically as we move further into an age of machine learning and AI. It seems likely to me that technology might catch up with something like ZXX and learn how to read it. So, I’m interested to know; a, like how your thoughts about that have changed over time since the ZXX first launched?

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Liam: And then I’m also interested in discussing whether that too could be subverted, whether technology could be used to design things that full technology.

Sang: Right. So, there’s been a lot of political changes in the Korean society where our democracy has been really a challenge with the corruptions of all like for instance, the National Intelligence Service getting into political and private life and kind of all turning the mindsets of the citizens. I guess I haven’t really been working more on these kind of projects but I think it’s always stayed in my mind to tackle this project or tackle this events in a different way and after the ZXX.

Sang: I think people are kind of pent up with the status quo and the way that they don’t think they could really do anything to keep their privacy private in a way and I think there has to be more of a like fun approach to be able to make them use these tools because what I’ve seen so far is that ZXX has been used only through the creative fields or the people who find what’s funny about it or what’s really working about it but for the just regular people who are outside of the design field it’s hard for them to relate to it so trying to push and pull between that creativity and finding easier way for them to use the tools might be a good way.

Liam: And is that something that design could accomplish? I think we know about the direct impact that design can have on someone’s experiences or ideas but using design to empower people in a more indirect way.

Sang: For sure because for instance like with the tools that Google’s giving out like all this free apps that you guys have just for instance like, the translators or other free resources that are out there. When is easy for a regular user to be able to approach it and use it in their daily life, I think it is the power design and it’s the power of the technology that could reinforce them to be more private in a way so, I think that’s the tool that design can really change.

Liam: I’d also like to dig into one of the things, when I was reading about ZXX that you said was about articulating our own freedom. I’m interested if this idea has manifested more in your work since then.

Sang: Not to the extent that I really wanted to because I was working on version 2 of ZXX, which was growing more in depth where right now the camouflages and the other 14 leaders were it was a one dimension typeface but I was working on making two and three dimension typeface that could really create an endless permutations but that kind of failed so but but I do keep thinking about this articulating our unfreedom and I think I got inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 and the Newspeak dictionary. How when you start shrinking the diction’s that we can use with then I think it really alters with the mindsets so, I think we are unfree in a way in this society because we’re always in the realm of my overloaded information that are given out from corporations to the governments and I think it really impacts our freedom of thinking.

Liam: I’m interested in the concepts behind ZXX 2.0. You mentioned two-dimensional and three-dimensional…

Sang: Right.

Liam: Typography. What would that look like?

Sang: So, the idea was to when you type in a letter A, the letter A would pop up and then with the algorithm like a random layer would go on top of it and if you want to go more than another layer or go on of it. So, it’s kind of challenging the way that humans could still recognize it as a letter A but as you said the machine would not be able to keep learning what this letter is because you’re giving it different random layers on top of it and I found out that this was possible to do with talking to other engineers but it’s a lot of work (laughing).

Liam: Yeah (laughing) but that does kind of get it the idea of using technology to kind of subvert technology in new ways.

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I’m also interested in again in the idea of the power of human perception versus machine perception and I think that that’s something that’s still continuing to rapidly evolve but have you developed any further this idea in a more broad sense of encoding thoughts and ideas into design that is only perceptible by humans?

Sang: That’d be really interesting. I’m always interested in challenging the visuals that the humans could encode and decode and one of the other projects that I was working on was like decoding a JPEG so working with codes that are encoded in it and then just changing the different layers of the information to make it extract another JPEG, which keeps evolving and just telling you the way that we perceive an image. I didn’t really had the chance to further that study yet but I did think about recently. I saw a vocal app which was presented in the Adobe Conference and it’s really scary because it encodes a human voice and then you could really alter the way that the voice could make any sounds that you want and I think right now we’re moving from an image based or editing an image to moving images to voice now with all the AIs and voice recognition software that are really getting crazy right now. So, my interest has kind of evolved from image torching software’s to voices these days.

Liam: Yeah. I guess that’s a good point because as this technology continues to develop removing not only to a place where it’s important to distinguish between the visual capabilities of humans and machines to perceive things but also whether the things we perceive are actually authentic. So, switching topics a little bit, I’d also like to know about band of colors.

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: How did that come about or what’s the, what’s the story behind that?

Sang: So, band of colors was kind of a random project coming out from three designers whose background is graphic designer, product designer and furniture designer and we were always interested in doing a business together and we just thought about expanding our studio culture and trying to challenge ourself into creating a commodity that hasn’t been challenged or that could be disrupted at this point especially in Korea and we found out that all the designers were only focusing on commodities that could be war or used in these outer layers.

Sang: So, like first dimension visuals but we want to create something that could be fun in a way, that not many designers are tackle so random and that’s how it came about and while researching about the market we found out that it was a huge huge market that hasn’t been challenged for my decades where this old corporation still owned 60% of the market share. So, that’s how it came about and I think also we wanted to create something that could enhance the daily life of every man and not just make a crazy-looking graphic design or design commodity but then something that could kind of be timeless and just could be kept in their wardrobe.

Liam: Something I was going to ask about too is kind of where the patterns and prints come from…

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: For band of colors. So, it sounds like the material creates some of those constraints as to like what can be done in terms of design?

Sang: Right and the design is so I think we have more than like 400 designs and we sketched and yep just just like you mentioned because of the restrictions that we were facing with the manufacturing process, we had to deselect the best designs that we wanted to make and then kind of compromise within the fields.

Liam: Just because this endeavor seems fairly different from most of your other work, I want to know how you would compare this work to kind of your other creative pursuits?

Sang: It’s, I think it’s really crazy that (laughing) I mean seeing the outcomes right now and knowing the journey that we were taking I think the main difference is that as a design studio we always had clients and we always had the design brief that came from outsource but for band of colors we were our own clients so we had to work on the finance, work on the marketing budget, work on all these other parts that were outside of design and also with having three designers from different disciplines we had to really come to a consensus of what this product had to look like and I think that was a real challenge that we were all facing because we just had different mindsets.

Liam: So, just kind of speaking to the difference in both visual style and process in band of colors compared to your earlier work. I’m interested in looking at the complete timeline just to wrap up. How your creative process has changed over time across all of your projects and also where you see it going in the future?

Sang: Mm-hmm. So, before I was working for different clients and when I was a student you had a lot of time to really tackle and research and try to study the contents to the fullest amount that you can but I think the process had to change when I was working for real clients because there was always limited budget to limited time so yet really dissect the amount of research to sketching, to designing and to production. So, I guess they really changed the mindset of how I approached design now and also it changes from designing a logo, to typeface, to space, to photography, to websites. I’m always thinking about the budget and the timeline and the audience that it has to meet. That kind of changed in the way that I design things right now.

Liam: And so how about in the future and you see that kind of evolving past now?

Sang: So, in the future I think I’m still gonna be challenged with the budget issue especially talking about the Korean clients because they always come in with the really limited budget that is always challenging and being able to challenge them back to make them use more passion in creating the best contents for them to be able to be different from the other competitors. It’s always a challenge for our studio and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we always have to face for other you know young designers that are going to emerge into the real design fields because if we don’t challenge the clients of today right now then the younger generations are going to suffer it again. So, I think we keep pushing the clients to meet like 50–50 consensus instead of them really over ruling our creativity.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a good point and I think as designers a lot of times we think about our challenges with clients, being around things like having a consensus on being creative vision but actually something very practical and utilitarian like budget…

Sang: Right.

Liam: Kind of has this ripple effect across all of the functions…

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: That you do as a designer…

Sang: Right.

Liam: So, that’s really interesting point but yeah. Thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Sang: All right. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Paone, Principle at Dia Studio

DIA Principle and Creative Director Mitch Paone on the parallels between jazz and design practice

In the fifth episode, Liam speaks with Mitch Paone, Principle and Creative Director at DIA Studio, about creating a jazz solo out of the creative process, using a beginner’s mindset to unlock new possibilities in design, and the difference between intuitive and analytical creativity.

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Liam Spradlin: Mitch, thank you for joining me.

Mitch Paone: Thank you very much.

Liam: To get started, like always, I want to ask about your journey. So both what you’re doing now and also what your journey was like to get there?

Mitch: The journey’s been a very, I think, multi-faceted one, and a lot of different interests, and I think people know me quite well — a ton of energy and the kind of directions that I want to pursue things in. But obviously my creative path and creative mission came out of some influences when I younger, and particularly my interest in music, and in jazz, and then also in visual arts.

At quite a young age, you know, I was… started playing piano at four years old and was taking lessons all the way up until high school. And then at that point I discovered some jazz records of Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane and you know, some of these masters. And at that point I realized, you know, this is what I want to pursue musically.

And then simultaneously once I decided I wanted to really, really take that seriously, I was, you know — visual arts and design were actually very interesting as well. Like Fillmore posters and, you know, skateboard magazines, and graffiti, and all this stuff when I was younger, was very engaging visually. So I was taking art classes in school as well. So I had this kind of dual path, so to speak, happening.

And I think in a way is kind of a luxury for me, to know right away that those felt good at such a young age. So as time went on, I ended up going to school in Loyola University of New Orleans. Out of some circumstance, there was really no school that would allow me to study jazz performance and graphic design at the same time, because they’re… they’re usually in separate schools within the university.

And that was only one that allowed that. And their programs in both of these studies were really incredible. The city has a tremendous culture and you feel this depth of humanity, and the people there are so powerful and interesting. And there’s some like unguarded nature about that city that really is touching, like deep down. And that really I think, was quite inspiring.

And then I was like, “Well, naturally I should go into motion graphics.” So really the first half of my career was spent working at, you know, amazing motion graphic firms like, you know, Brand New School, Psyop, LOGAN, I can just run out a big list of these things.

A lot of the people and creative directors that I, you know, worked with there had a profound effect on how I thought about design and… and really expressed that. So that was kind of the journey that got me into this 1.0 of my particular design career. I had the luxury of freelancing a lot through like the late 2000’s, and cherry picked all of the things I liked at different studios and thought about them, and… and I think really the big thing that I pulled out of that, besides the craftsmanship and the work, was how to deal and work with people.

If I were to run a studio, how do I create an environment that I can foster the best possible work that I can do, and then make people feel really good about that? And then I think DIA as it is today, is really a product of that kind of thinking, and merging all these experiences together.

I had a really serious interest in typography, you know, editorial design throughout that whole period with my career, but working in film and motion graphics, you don’t deal with that kind of side, it’s really illustrative and using a lot visual effects and film techniques. So the type kind of plays a back seat in the creativity in that area.

So a good friend of mine, his name’s Ludovic Balland, and actually recently this young woman designer named Giliane Cachin, both from Switzerland, had a huge effect in teaching myself typography. And then just generally interested in that culture and, you know, Müller-Brockmann and the studios like NORM and [Gilles Gavillet] and all these different designers. Like that work was so compelling from a typographic standpoint, but it didn’t deal with this motion or kinetic nature. It was very much like rigid, you know, type, print, editorial books.

Here in America, we’re dealing with like marketing, and we’re dealing with screens and commercials, like it’s pretty standard for us. Where in Switzerland and Germany and a lot of the European countries, it’s not really part of the output. This was a problem that I was like, “This is what I want to solve. This kind of brings it together. I can be in the moment with my music background, but I can bring my typographic interests into it.”

And I think that kind of leads us into where we are now.

Liam: As I was looking through some of DIA’s work, I came across a phrase that I was not familiar with. Kinetic brand experience, that’s something that DIA kind of like specializes in, and you produce these really amazing kind of pieces that are at that intersection of typography and motion.

So I want to explore, first of all, just what is a kinetic brand experience?

Mitch: So, it’s kind of interesting in… you know, it feels like a new idea, but it really isn’t. And… and there’s this idea of futurism in the work, and it’s funny because we’ve done interviews and lectures in the past, and they’ve labeled us as a futurist, which I didn’t really think about at the time. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the artistic movement, like let’s get rid of all the politics because we’re not violent, and we’re not gonna get rid of nostalgic and tradition stuff, but the idea of using new technology and new tools to create dynamic work that’s moving and capturing time, that is very interesting.

Like, talking about a little bit what I said about the idea of taking this Swiss typographic, or the Dutch typographic design cultures and bringing that into an area where we’re going to be interacting with it. So it was like, this has to happen. This wasn’t even a matter of interest. It was like, “We work on screens, let’s take advantage of the experience. We’re going through our Instagram, there’s however many followers. How do we create that experience super engaging with that short attention span, if anybody is going through it?”

And then if you think about the parameters of a design system, like the possibilities of creating something that feels constantly changing and different, but have a consistent voice is like, to me, a powerful thought as far as how we deal with design systems. Not to be hard on modernism, it’s not, “this is the logo, this is the grid system that’s very strict.” Once you hand that over to a brand team, it almost becomes oppressive. It’s like, you have to abide by this brand guidelines exactly.

Where if… if you’re dealing with an idea of evolution and kinesis and dynamism, like it’s exciting because you can… you can kind of create tools that allow continued exploration and evolution in the work that is more supportive in… in a way, than it is kind of just, “Okay, here’s the guidelines you execute.”

Liam: Yeah. I’m interested in the execution of that. So, I’ve seen in some of your work, you have generative identity, or things that supersede parametry, and become these really unique things depending on the application. So I’m wondering like, what are the components of that, and what are the rules?

Mitch: So to be able to work in this capacity, it goes back to learning new things. So we need to be working in the software, or the programs, or thinking about stuff in a way that isn’t traditional. So we start with those tools, whether it’s After Effects, Cinema 4D processing, like I could just rattle off. But if I’m working in a time-based format to create the work out the gate, then you’re basically setting it up that, you know, if I push play in frame five, frame six, frame seven, frame eight, like, they’re gonna be different, they’re gonna be unique.

We think about time and animation in a way that it actually is no different than scale, form, repetition, you know, any kind of design concept. So we’re just layering in basically film principles in a way, and pulling that into the design process. And you know, you can set rules. So this is the keyframe expression, this is the frame rate we’re going to use, these are the typefaces, this is the layout. And then you kind of create, you know, a generative system to apply that, and then the work executes consistently, but it feels like it’s moving or evolving.

It’s a bit of like flipping the design process on its head. So like, new designers get onboarded to our team, there’s always a tendency like, “Oh, we all work in InDesign, you know, we’re setting type.” It’s like the first thing that we do, it’s like, “Get out of InDesign. That is the last place we’re going. That’s when we get into presentation mode, and we’re gonna polish work.” Like we do care about typographic detail, like it’s absolutely insane about all that little stuff, but for us to get through these concepts and exploration ideas, we have to be using stuff that makes us uncomfortable to use, that we don’t know that well.

And that’s kind of where the surprises happen. We don’t have control over it as much, so it’s just like you know, “Wow, that’s interesting. Let’s see what happens there. Oh, let’s try this, let’s try that.” It’s not like controlled, specific direction. It’s really freeing to allow the software or process, kind of take a life of its own.

Liam: I want to go back to that intersection of type and motion, and ask how both of those elements interplay with one another to create an identity?

Mitch: Typeface is an identity, like period. Like that… If you look at, you know Google’s identity or any identity really, the one thing that you’re going to interact with the most content wise, is the text. So illustrations are cool, graphic elements are cool, that’s just layers of other things to add to it. But if we can solve the problem within the type itself, that’s really difficult to do, to create strong expression there. So we know that nuance and subtle detail there.

And what’s crazy about that is that trains your eye to be so dialed in to these details, and then you can do things and play with things, and make intentional mistakes that create personality with that. So then you layer in this idea of bringing this generative work, or animated work within that, then it gets more wild. This is when the jazz comes in. It’s like, “Okay, we have this typeface that works out, let’s see what happens when we do this, this, and this, and just hit play, or execute, or debug, or whatever you want to call it in the application.” And then sometimes it comes out totally disaster, but then you get surprises.

And then you allow this kind of iterative process to produce so much work and you can kind of see it. And all it is, is just affecting type in a certain way, and applying like specific parameters to it, and that generates a specific aesthetic out of it. So with that, while they’re very specific and not very many elements at all, you create a very powerful, expressive identity with very little material.

Like, “Hey, let’s just slant things at 45 degrees and execute and see what happens.” Boom, you have this thing that you could print, repeat in different formats. And anything you want to do to make it interactive, make it animate, you can put it to print and it feels like it has this movement to it.

Liam: So I’m interested in the relative contributions that the motion and the type make to the finished composition. So would you say that applying the motion to this very finessed, and structured, and produced typeface amplifies its aesthetic and identity, or would you say that there’s like a unique contribution coming from the motion that creates something new?

Mitch: You know, this is like a really hot topic I think for what we talk about in the studio, because it can destroy it and make it bad, or it can be really a tremendous asset. The key is that motion, animation, film, all these like multi silos that you’re bringing together in the work, can’t be an afterthought.

I think there is a kind of an… an urge to just, “Hey, let’s animate this logo,” or like, “Let’s make this move,” but like you’ve already figured out design system. That’s when it’s detrimental to the work because it becomes an afterthought, but if you fuse design, and interactivity, and generative work right out the gate, and treat them on the same playing field as type and graphic design, then you have set it up in a way that it’s going to be more powerful. Because you can… you can explain conceptually why we use this kind of animation and then you got formal things that come out of that process that, you know, in way we’re actually animating and doing generative work and bringing it into print, so it’s opposite.

It’s tricky because I think the issue with that, it requires designers. And I think on our team specifically, we have to learn this stuff really well to be able to apply it on the same level as our design craft. And then the people that are interested in exploring this work, there’s a learning curve. Like, and it can be a very intimidating learning curve. Like, if someone’s opened up After Effects for the first time, they’re going to be like, “Whoa, this is a really difficult program.”

Developing a creative process that allows you to take the intimidation out of learning new tools is, you know, because that’s where the learning and the growth is fostered to get there. So eventually you have this toolkit where you can design, animate, generate, all at the same time and it’s all the same thing. And that’s… that’s like the utopia really, but that’s, you know, where we would want to be, um, with our team. And anybody on our team really can just move seamlessly into different mediums and places. Hop behind a camera, hop behind Cinema 4D, it doesn’t matter. We’re all just doing work to try define an idea or a concept.

Liam: Do you worry about becoming comfortable with the tools?

Mitch: I think as soon as you’re comfortable with the tools, get out and try something else. Uncomfortable is good. The beauty of being uncomfortable, and we’ve had problems with this with designers. They’ll come in and I’m like, “Listen, you’re not going to even open up InDesign for like a week.” And then for someone who’s maybe has some insecurity possibly in the work, that’s really difficult to deal with.

I mean I’m not doing this to be like difficult, you need to try this, but this is actually a personal lesson of, once you dive into something new and you realize you’re terrible at it, and like I do this daily, that’s humbling. It’s like, “Oh my God, I really suck at this.” And then you’re like, “Wow, I’m not like this great designer anymore, I’m just a disaster.”

So what’s special about this is, it brings you back to earth. It’s like this process of like, “Oh, I think we’re feeling good about work,” and then, “Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then I’m like… I’m grounded immediately. And I think above doing great work, that’s as important.

Liam: Right.

Mitch: Just to be a constant student.

Liam: So in some ways it’s about resetting and bringing yourself back to that first level-

Mitch: Yeah.

Liam: … on a new project.

Mitch: This might be cheesy, like you want to become like a baby again, like every other day, like and just be in this goofy world land where you don’t understand anything, and it’s beautiful. That’s what’s really cool about it. It’s like, “Wow, the possibilities are amazing.” And then you’re like, you learn something and you think it’s great and then you realize, “Oh, I need to actually really, day-by-day set a routine to practice and refine.”

And I… To pull the music discussion back in on this, to study piano and play jazz piano and improvise, there’s no shortcuts here. Any musician will tell you this takes rigorous, ritual practice to be able to do this. Like boring scales, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, over and over and over again.

But 5, 6, 7, 10, 20 years of that daily routine, and then you’re able to execute work… or execute in your performance in a way where that just… that’s your vocabulary. It’s just like speaking, we can use words to express certain emotions and things. So why don’t we apply the same kind of rigorous learning process to design tools? You know, After Effects is a piano, um, Cinema 4D is the drums. You know like, okay let’s think about it like that.

So we’ll sit there and just hammer out like the basics and just work it and refine, and then all of a sudden that becomes just a language and how we discuss things.

Liam: I think in some ways there might even be an advantage of continual discomfort with software, in that, like the way that piano keys are organized has not changed in quite a while, but something like the Adobe Suite or Cinema 4D, like you get an update-

Mitch: Yeah.

Liam: …when there are new features.

Mitch: I think the beauty of the piano keys and the rigid nature of that, the artistic detail in that specific… and music really, comes through the really nuanced, subtle expressions. You know, yeah we have scales and chords, a very classical way of thinking things that are structured like this. But in jazz, like I can play light, I can play soft, I can play in between, I can play staccato, I can play legato. Like, all of this expressive theory comes into the work.

You can never master it, there’s always something new and something different you can apply melodically, or harmonically, or within the expression of that that allows a musician to really be a constant student as well. And I think if we take that back into the design process, that’s where you get really interesting results. Like, you look at ways of being unorthodox about using things.

Liam: Yeah those, uh, subtle nuances of the way that you interact with one given tool. Do you think that those… like the way that you interact with these tools, does that reflect back into your work as well?

Mitch: I think there’s definitely this nature of being very improvisational. You know like, allowing unexpected things to happen is… what’s produced, I think, some of the favorite work that we’ve done lately. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff we haven’t even released on the site or anything. But that I think, for any designer, is exciting.

Like, in… I had a really good experience just last week and I was telling you earlier that I did a creative workshop in Moscow with this… a group called the United Notions. And it was in tandem with Hey Studio out of Barcelona and Mime Design out of London. So we all kind of worked together to create this program for these students, and it was the first time that I’ve done a workshop dealing with this subject matter. And it was probably one of like, the most like heart touching experiences I’ve had. To see, when you take a student out of their comfort zone and put them in a tool or like an instrument that they have to create that’s totally different, but then you… All of a sudden, it was just like the brain was like, “Aha, oh my God, I can try this, I can do that. Oh my Gosh.” And once you get into this flow of creativity, you know, you basically allowed yourself to just create anything. And you’ve kind of removed your critical self out of the creative process in a way, and then it becomes like just generate ideas, and get excited about it, and just get it out, get it out, get it out.

Like a project that we’re on creative development on, we could have four or five hundred different things to look at in one day, because we’re not worried about like, “Oh, this has to look good, this has to be like this.” It’s like, “No, let’s surprise ourselves. Let’s come back the next day and then …” And then you’re like, “Whoa, that’s interesting, let’s go there.”

So you’ve totally removed yourself and it becomes this collaborative generation of improv, that guides the work in a way. And then we back it in when it’s time to like, present. We’re like, “Okay, we need to get focused here, and bring things home.”

Liam: I want to touch on that too. The, um, notion of learning to improvise, or learning to create something that feels very dynamic and on the fly, but actually takes a lot expertise. And so something that I’ve seen you talk about is this idea of analytical versus intuitive creation.

So first, what are those conceptually?

Mitch: Designers, I think we know how to make things look good at the very base level. Forget ideas, forget concepts, forget the content and meat, we can execute something that looks pretty. And I’m kind of saying this in a cynical way. So that to me is our brains getting in the way of being analytical. It’s like, “Oh yeah, let’s just you know, kern the type and set the leading just right, and create this kind of sterile thing that looks good and it’s pretty and people will accept.”

But I think what the problem with that is, is that it’s familiar to people. Like when you present work like this, and it seems to carry this, “Oh, I’ve seen that, that’s fine. It’s good, you know. It’s easy to digest,” because it doesn’t challenge yourself creatively, you haven’t put yourself out of the comfort zone. And you’re definitely not putting your viewer or their audience out of the comfort zone.

And I’m not saying we have to do this in a provocative way, but intuition… It’s really easy to talk about this in the jazz context, because when you’re performing and playing a solo, you’re deciding those notes right there, in time, and you’re going to make mistakes and do whatever you want. But I think the beauty of understanding jazz improvisation, is that no one knows you’re making a mistake if you play things with like a level of conviction. Like, “I’m gonna go for this, and I’m just gonna try to own it. And I’m gonna screw it up, but I’m just gonna roll with it and just keep playing through it. And no one in the audience is gonna know that.” You know that you totally missed the chord.

So let’s do the same thing, like in design. We’ll establish a very structured process that gets you to the point where you can just create this flow. And this gets into, I think a deeper personal level of understanding yourself, what you like, and your tastes, and who you are, and what makes you tick. And I think… There is a bit of self discovery to get to a point where you can say, “I’m gonna remove my critical self out of the process and just make stuff and be free.” That really is the process that we’re going for, that’s the aim.

And then on top of that, it’s like, “Hey, let’s trade art boards. I’m gonna take your ideas and do the same thing again. And then let’s switch it back.” It’s about as democratic as it gets. We share, we make. You know you’re gonna run into a limit of, “Okay, I can’t do anymore,” and then it’s like, “I’ll take that and see what happens.”

So basically what I’m saying, is that I’m creating like a jazz solo out of the creative process. So, say you record your jazz song that you played live at the bar, or you’re recording your whole process of the design that you created, the next day put it on the wall, throw it on the floor, put it on the screen, it doesn’t matter. Then you can look, and refine, and see things that are interesting, or find mistakes, or something that we can kind of improve on.

But I think what’s really special is, everybody on the team’s like, “Oh, that one. Whoa, that one.” And it’s not like, “Oh, I created that one. That’s my idea. This is the one we should go through.” We don’t care about that anymore. It’s like, that feels super good. It kind of goes, mmm. And then you grab those kind of soulful pieces of design that have a special nature to them, and then that… Then we do the same again, let’s work on that, refine that, let’s kind of produce more in that.

So I think the goal with this sort of process, is that if we’re getting these reactions collectively, the clients gonna have the same thing. Their audience is gonna have the same thing. We’re gonna present work and it’s gonna be like, “Oh, it made me feel something. It feels weird. I have a little bit of gap before I know why I feel weird about it.” And I think that’s really, really interesting, and I think to really connect with people in a way, that’s where we try to push things.

And I mean this is difficult to present work like this, because the clients like, “I don’t know what that is. I don’t understand this.” And I like to create the analogy, if you like listen to a song, it’s one of your favorites and you know it really well, you can sing the lyrics to it, and then you have a new song that just came on the radio by the same band, or same musician, and you’re like, “Man, I don’t… I don’t know if like this, but there’s something about it that brings me back over and over again.” You know this unfamiliarity. It’s different, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know.” But then like five months of listening to that, that becomes your favorite song. The one that you liked is kind of boring.

Why not approach that for branding projects, or an identity? Like why don’t we do this for our clients and their audience? Why don’t we just go for this?

Liam: I think the analogy to old and new songs is really good as well, because that suggests that like a dynamic and generative approach to things like identity and design projects, actually works against that. It means that the song is always new, it’s always unfamiliar.

Mitch: So part of my ritual, every day I play 30 minutes to an hour of music scales, then I perform a song, then I want to practice. Every time I played, that song has been different. It’s been faster, it’s been slower, it’s been with like a groove, it’s been with a swing beat. So then you… you can switch it and change, but what’s beautiful about this, if you know the song, regardless of how I play it, the melody is there, the structure is there, and that is a parameter that defines an identity to music, that also defines parameters in design. And what I really like about that, is that it is not restrictive. It’s… you can create a huge identity that has this inner kind of connective web of rhythmic changes and colors and stuff, but people all know it’s part of the same thing.

Liam: So your studio works on these like super contemporary techniques to create these things, and your studio’s been described as futurist. So I want to wrap up by asking like, where do you see your creative process going in the actual future?

Mitch: (laughs) I think it’s funny the fact you wake up and think of yourself of a baby seeing the day as a new way, or new ideas are coming. Like if we keep this kind of lively humanity within the studio, we’ll be able to kind of receive new technology and new thinking as we move forward. So that’ll continue to progress.

And I think we’re gonna constantly think about new tools and new directions. And I think, how do we evolve these ideas into different ways? If we start working in different mediums, if… Say we start working in film more again, or like different creative ways to bring this stuff together in the work, I think that’ll be continuous.

But the thing that I’ve felt as a creative person, is… more important than doing great client work, is the connections we make with the people, the team members. I think creating a studio environment where you have dedicated a day, or a few hours a day, where you’re experimenting and learning and trying new things, and working together, that’s gonna keep us fresh and new. We’re gonna look back at our work two or three years ago, and think it’s ridiculously terrible. It’s not going to flat line.

So personally you get the… the evolution, but I want to share this with people. I want to go to the universities and schools, and luckily have some opportunities coming up that I get to do that, so. That I want to like make sure is a very big part of our studio’s kind of process.

Liam: Thank you again for joining me.

Mitch: Cool. Thank you.