 at the Smithsonian Design Museum, and I am thrilled to see all of you here tonight. Today and every day for the next three months, we are in the middle of a massive countdown at Cooper Hewitt. We're 93 days away until the reopening of the museum. So sometimes I have to check, do I have a hard hat on, or do I not have a hard hat on? So we're very, very excited to be nearing the end of the most ambitious renovation in the museum's history. And as most of you know, during the renovation, we really made an effort to keep the flag of Cooper Hewitt flying with talks like tonight, thanks to the Adobe Foundation. We also had exhibitions traveling nationally and globally. So when we come back, we'll be that much stronger and more well known across the world. The other thing I'd like to remind you of is next month is National Design Week, the second week in October, with the National Design Awards gala celebrating this year's winners on October 9th. This is the 15th year of the gala. And if you don't know about it, check out our website. In fact, tonight voting starts for the People's Design Award and we have 20 very innovative products and you can vote and populate our site and learn a lot about all of these different products. So please help us really make that even more visible and join us for the many events during National Design Week. There's an event every day of the week for every age individual. So, the renovation is complete. We're installing our cases. We're installing some of the design objects in anticipation of the December 12th opening. December 12th happens to be the exact same day that Andrew Carnegie moved into the mansion with his wife and daughter and a few servants. So we liked the synergy there of opening, the same time, 1902 to 2014. Very little about Cooper Hewitt will be the same. We've taken the time to really completely re-envision the museum experience using cutting edge technology to make design and the design process come alive and transform all of you from viewers to participants. We took this time also to look at everything that has to do with the Cooper Hewitt experience. The moment you walk in the door at 2 East 91st Street, what the ticket looks like, what the website looks like, how you participate in our programs, and really change the way we're doing things. Our transformation is truly 360 degrees inside the mansion, outside the mansion, and throughout the museum experience. So, given that, we wanted a new brand, we wanted a new typeface to signal the new Cooper Hewitt, a revived international resource for design. So we've worked with Pentagram now for nearly two years to redesign Cooper Hewitt's identity, which we rolled out this past June, complete with a custom typeface called Cooper Hewitt that we offered to the world for free. And as of about two hours ago, the font has been downloaded over 5,500 times. So we're really looking forward to how people use the Cooper Hewitt typeface. To talk about this crucial aspect of the new Cooper Hewitt, tonight I am really, really delighted to welcome Eddie O'Para, partner at Pentagram, and type designer, Chester Jenkins of Village. Chester and Eddie will first speak to you each briefly about their work on the Cooper Hewitt project, and then I'll join them for a discussion about how they worked together, how they worked with us, and all about the ins and outs of this particular labor of love. So over to the two of you. Hello, everybody. I'm actually going to sort of work like a clock when I talk. So I'm going to actually move like this as I'm talking to you. I think it's best because sometimes if one's actually talking, you're always talking directly in front of an audience here, but it's very sort of like a nice, nice semicircle. Hi, I'm Eddie O'Para, and I'm one of the partners in the New York office in Pentagram. I wanted to start off this particular presentation with this terminology, as you know, it's Latin. And there's one thing that I was actually asking my staff about, do you know what this is? And they actually really didn't. It was quite surprising. Anyway, when I was a child, I studied Latin. I actually did fail my Latin GCSE. But the bluribus unum is out of many comes one or out of many is one. And this is a very important factor due to the fact that it's part of the great seal of the United States of America. And it really has and personifies the ideals of what America stands for. And the idea of being united, coming as one. And one of the things that the Smithsonian does is that it is a collection of museums, but also in an educational structure. And that's a very important factor that we wanted to bring across. And one of the things that we saw in the balance of the previous mark is the idea that Smithsonian was seen, but the Cooper Hewitt actually wasn't. And the naming of the National Design Museum also dictated a different type of understanding to people around the world and also in America. Locally, everybody knows it as a Cooper Hewitt. And so how can you go out and become an acolyte to for people in the Midwest, in the Northwest, you know, of America and explain what the Cooper Hewitt is, they didn't really understand that. And that's one of the principles in regards to sort of making a system that was presentable in a clearer idea. Everybody said the Smithsonian, that's absolutely fine, but they didn't know what the Cooper Hewitt was. Thus they didn't understand what design was in regards to design learning and the design museum. And so one of the things that we tried to do at Pentagon was with the Cooper Hewitt is what is the contemporary notion of the Cooper Hewitt in name and visual identity. And so when we were asked to start this whole process, one of the things that we had to do was actually define, actually enriching the name, help the Cooper Hewitt define that name structure as well as the visual identity. And there was a plethora of names out there. And I won't really go into that particular idea or aspect because we don't have that much time. But over the course of the process, it was laid out to us that, and this is a very important principle where normally, I've worked with many museums, and normally you talk to the board of trustees right at the end. This was an entirely different, it's on its head, which was amazing. And so you principally understood how and why they wanted the particular structure to be defined in a particular way. And it was great that we had this dialogue. It was very, very good. And this is just one of the sort of charrettes that we had for the designs. And these are some of the things that we looked at. Look at the names of Smithsonian Museum of Design, whether it's actually acronymed. These are the types of things that we sort of looked at. But in principle, looking back and having a lot of dialogue with the museum and also the board of trustees was that it's not about the pontification of layering of meaning, the subjective meanings that you would have in the contemporary aspects of identities today. And it's not about decorativeness. Even though the shell of the Cooper Hewitt is a wonderful decorative construct. And you have to think about what's within the bounds, the vessel of the Cooper Hewitt, the aspects of design, the bold statements and actions of design and how they function, the bold weight, the sense of tailoring, the durability, the functionality of it. And that's what we wanted to do to reflect the actual identity. And also provide a slice of fun where possible. And this is what we established. As you know, Chester will talk a little bit more about the type, how the type structure actually works. But in a sense, what we were trying to do was shape it in a particular way that it created balance and was very, very stern and also flexible. And so we did certain adjustments to it, with the help of Chester. And these are a video explaining how the different weight structures would actually occur because you can't just have the idea of a one mark and how does that sort of pronounce itself across a whole branding exercise. It's very, very difficult. And we needed to establish a very versatile type face that could do that. And this is how we would define it. We also considered that the Smithsonian Design Museum, which is at the bottom, the Smithsonian Mark, would be at the foundation of the identity. And so what we would do is sandwich within that all the content to explain what's actually sort of going on. And this is the sort of system that we are actually working on and playing with as we speak. Another thing is that you have to think about all the subsets of the Cupid Hewitt. It's not just the museum itself, it's the National Design Award, it's National Design Week, it's the People Design Award, and there's others. And so what we wanted to do is make sure there was a very concise system that was generated. And then how does it apply itself to the magazine? This is something that nobody's seen just yet and we're still working on it. This is the sort of front and the back of the magazine. The interior and how it actually sort of works through that. And so we've tried to push and frame every part of the experience of the Cupid Hewitt with the defining factors of this mark and the typography. And as you can see from the actual website, many of you may have gone to so far. So I'm just going to slowly go through these things. And so one of the things about a lot of websites is that sense of logical consistency. After a while, you go to one page and then you go to another and you go down in layers and it starts to break apart. We did not want that to happen. And especially if you have the ownership, or you could say ownership of this particular font and you have it at your grasp. It's very, very sort of important. So we've tried to do that. We've also tried to establish it in regards to signage as well. So we're doing all the signage work from Michael Garrikey's team at Pendigram. And the glorious pen that many are waiting in anticipation to actually utilize. And on local projects interfaces. But it doesn't stop there. I mean, that's a map comment, isn't it? It doesn't stop there. The aspect of applying this system to the labeling structure for all the objects within the museum on exhibits is there. And it's actually more than this. There's a large structure going on. And the great thing about it is that once you have this, you create balance. You start to understand the premise of having guidelines, of having a system, of having a structure. The interior of the bag. This is the sense of fun. This is one of the bags that we're actually dealing with. And this is the interior of it. How can you actually have fun with this and playfulness with this particular mark? And so the fact of this is that at the end of this massing, we have this particular comment to say. And does anybody know what this means? I think, can you say that a little louder? Correct, sir. And that's the point. The premise was to define a system as one and then allow the public to take it and use it the way that they want. And that is what design is all about. Thank you. That was great. So yes, that was cool. Thank you, Eddie. That's illuminating and sort of gives me all kinds of things to reference when I'm talking because I obviously have not super-duper prepared. Before we begin talking about Cooper Hewitt, just gonna show some other works. Some sort of earlier work and talk a little bit about Village, because like, who exactly are we? We're not sort of some big name type people. Only seven or eight people know who we are. But we were founded in 2004, launched our website and in 2005, Liberty Equality and Brotherhood, all that good stuff. And over the years, we've been very fortunate to work with some fantastic designers, including Eddie and several of the other partners at Pentagram trying to collect the whole set. But we had a wonderful project. We worked with artist named Marielle and Carol who designed this piece called, what is it called again? Here, Indestructible Language, across five buildings in Jersey City. And it was there for a few months after this factory was sort of prepared to be turned into condos. So we've worked with this wonderful artist. These are all eight-foot neon letters. We have the test one in our studio. We've also worked for some interesting people beyond Maharam, the fabrics company, the late lamented New York City opera, those people who are in trouble at the moment. The Performing Arts Center, that fashion brand and that other fashion brand. So yes, whenever I see a young woman walking down the street and she has pink on her butt, I did that. It's very exciting to know. This was oddly enough project that more people were excited about than anything else. So I designed a tight face based on the Snickers logo. And yeah, whenever I show that, you can show them all the cool stuff, the opera, the museums was like, oh, Snickers, that's cool. Another nice project for the New York Times Magazine for their ideas, year in ideas issue, where we made a 3D tight face that is much more 3D than most 3D tight faces. And this is how they used it. So yeah, we've been doing work for a long time and Cole came in from Eddie in February of last year and he says, well, I can't talk to you on the phone about this, but can you come in? So I went up to 23rd Street and then we sort of, he talked about this. He says, we've got this. And that's your tight face. That's Galaxy Polaris condensed. So I was like, cool, excellent. And obviously tweaked to make some alignments and stuff. I was like, great. And he says, would you help us just tweak it a bit more? So I did. So I tweaked it and I tweaked it and I tweaked it and I tweaked it and I tweaked it and I tweaked it some more and a little bit more. We tried some of the things and we did this. And I was like, okay, that looks good. And that took like three weeks or 15 seconds, whichever. So he's like, that was good. Eddie was like, thank you very much. And moved on to the next thing and I didn't hear from Eddie for another few months and then in July he calls up and says, so. We've been working with your tight faces with the Galaxy Polaris regular width and condensed and the regular's too wide and the condensed is too narrow. So what have you got in the middle? And we happen to have semi-condensed that was kind of just very beta, lived on my machine and that was about it. So they sent that along and he's like, perfect, great. So let's take the regular and the condensed, smush them together, you get semi-condensed. All right, but wait a second, they don't match. What doesn't match? Those things don't match at all. There's some forced alignments that we put in the logotype. There's the horizontal stroke terminals which are not in the semi-condensed. So it's like, well, we need it to look like that. We don't need it to look like that, that looks odd. So let's have a tight face that looks like that. And that is how the process all started of working on the Cooper Hewitt tight face. So this was in October, mid-October started talking with the fine folks at the Cooper Hewitt and they were on furlough so you could talk to them but you couldn't really talk to them because they weren't working, they were being shut out by the government. And so in mid-November, we figured out, wait a sec, so we shouldn't just tweak Polaris semi-condensed which was kind of beta and weird anyhow. Let's make something new, let's make something that is going to be just for the Cooper Hewitt. And so I'm gonna show a little bit sort of the odd little details of this tight face that make it unique, very unique as some people would say even though you can't have something that's very unique. This is a regular old O, capital and lower case O from one of my tight faces, four points in each sort of shape with the handles which sort of dictate the curve between the points. That's how you're supposed to make good tight faces, nice and clean, no superfluous stuff, nice outlines. For the Cooper Hewitt tight face, I purposefully added these straight line segments that you can kind of see especially in the left-hand one in the counter, the inside form at the bottom, when you see it filled in you don't really see those things but I wanted to sort of break some well-long-established rules about how exactly you're supposed to make a tight face. So that's what we did with the tight face and I had to sort of redraw, you can kind of see in this I built the new tight face on top of the semi-condensed just because we liked the stroke wits, we liked the actual letter wits and so we didn't want to remake that particular wheel. So we built the actual letter forms to sort of fit in with that and when you're designing type you often work with two poles, the light and a heavy pole. As you're working you sort of generate instances between those two to see how they work. These are the two masters, the light and the heavy master from Cooper Hewitt just for the lower case A and then you sort of play out that range and when we're working on type we don't just have the nice clean outlines, we sort of have all these built up bits and pieces which we flatten at the end of the process. So this is kind of how we explore, we generate multiple instances and I'm getting louder, that's much better, so that we can pick from what we generate as what's going to be a good set, a nice working set. So once we sort of did those several weights you make the uppercase and the lower case and the numerals and currency symbols and accented uppercase because you gotta do that and accented lowercase because you gotta do that and a heap of other stuff. So diacritics, I always like to put an entero bang in my tight face so that's at the top of the middle of the top row and I also like to do a sort of Spanish beginning entero bang because why not? Doesn't have any kind of unicode point which three people here will know what that means but I do it anyway and card suits, why not? Recycled logos, arrows pointing here, there and everywhere and all sorts. So once you do the Roman then you have to go and do the Italic and I killed myself on this because by having all of those straight line segments it made the Italics just a nightmare to draw because when you're designing a tight face you have all of your points, all of the sort of the control vectors, the nodes and the handles have to be on a thousand M unit grid so you can't pull something just a tiny little hair because it'll look better that way, it has to move a clunk and so that changes the curve. So this is kind of an example of what the Italic would look like if it was just a slowed Roman and then this is a proper Italic. Oh boy. This is like watching paint dry. So yeah, and we have to do it for every glyph so all those glyphs that were in there have to do it for everything including this S set. So I sort of put this in here because the S set shows where some places we have to have that angled straight line segment on the outside, other places we have a nice up and down handle on the inside of the form, this totally inside baseball. So again, uppercase, lowercase. We don't rule this in front of you. Oh God, one of those. Oh no, oh God, okay, I'm finally. So we do this all for seven weights in Roman and Italic, 14 fonts, 561 glyphs in each font, a glyph being a unique character. So in the Cooper Hewitt at the moment, 7,854 glyphs. And that's how we got there. And so when we were starting on this process or actually a couple of months in, came in and met with Caroline and she said, and we're so excited, it's going to be open source. And I was like, it is? I'm so excited too, I guess. Most people think that typefaces should be free. Nobody makes them, right? They've been around for hundreds of years. It takes months and months to make these things and so I don't give any of my work away. Everything I have, I either sell or I've made for a client and they've paid for it and that's good. In this case, we sort of were like, well, okay. It's gonna be open source, but that makes sense because this is the typeface for the National Design Museum. It's owned by the people. By one of the people, for the people. And so yeah, and I thought that was very interesting. I'm very interested in how the Cooper Hewitt, especially in the Smithsonian, as a larger institution is documenting everything, just everything. And so everything that every piece of work that enters the Cooper Hewitt collection is studiously documented and you have access to that. The people visiting the museum in person or online can really zoom in and see what's there. There's amazing things that are gonna be in the museum. The wallpaper room is just having some fantastic things that are the Cooper Hewitt's collection and this typeface is in the Cooper Hewitt's collection. So now this becomes part of, it belongs to the people. And so giving away the typeface, while it sort of confused me at first, I got my head around it. Also free fonts, when you think of free fonts, you don't usually think, oh, that's gonna be really good. You think that's gonna be awful and the spacing's gonna be horrible, it's gonna be a dog's dinner and probably a dog's breakfast too. And so we wanted to sort of put something out there that was gonna be free. That was not gonna be heinous. And we really sort of liked that the Cooper Hewitt put their money where their mouth was with this one and so this is, they commissioned a typeface and they gave it away. And you go into a museum these days and you can't, I don't even allow it to take a picture. Here, they're giving you their font. So that was why we were excited about open source after the five minute shock wore off. And I love seeing it on the website, love seeing it in use, love that it's been downloaded 5,500 times, 16,000 times from Font Squirrel. So yeah, people hopefully will start using it and I'm curious to see when that happens. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Boy, good thing I took three years of Latin, Eddie. Boy, I understand your introduction there. I actually recall the poem that I had to translate in Ovid and I totally screwed it up at the age of 16, so never mind. These things happen. Well, speaking of being teenagers, I actually grew up with my grandfather's printing press in our cellar and I was setting type at the young age of about four or five and I had little business cards that said Caroline Bowman, my brother's here, he'll remember that. But I do wanna rewind the clock with the two of you too. When did you know that you wanted to be a typeface designer? When I was nine. Nine, what happened? I just was attracted to, abnormally attracted to calligraphy. I was never horribly good at it, I'm still not a great letter drawer, but yeah, I had my first commissions writing all of my classmates' names on their report cards. So I actually had some insider information on grades for a few hours there. I could have used it, but I used my power for good. But yeah, so that was when I was nine and I was always drawing letter forms instead of guns and tanks and airplanes and things. And then what happened nine years later at 18? What was your pathway? Because we have a lot of students in the audience. Well, I'm originally from Montreal and I went to Dawson College in Montreal, which is a CGEP, a sort of a technical school. It's totally different educational system in Quebec than anywhere else in the universe. But wonderful system, I think it's great. And so I went to this technical school to study graphic design. And you study everything when you're there because you go in when you're 16. So you leave, you finish school quite young, high school and then you go into college and study graphic design and learn to use a ruling pen, learn to do drawing from life, learn to do research and documentation, warm gray versus cool gray, all this kind of stuff. So yeah, I just, I never studied art but I did study design. And you used the words anguish and nightmare when you were describing the process of coming up with the typeface for Cooper Hewitt. It seems to me that it takes a particular character or personality to take this route of becoming a typeface designer. Yes, yeah. Yes. Not you. We're all on the autism spectrum somewhere. And Eddie, how about you? Tell us about, you know, nine years old, Eddie, were you? Well, I think the first chance I had that I understood what graphic design was was I was asked by my mother to design a logo. It was a dove for her like women's association. We had a big argument about it. She wanted changes, so there were rounds of changes to do. And I said, I'd never do anything for her ever again. And I'd have never. But it really was when I was around 18, I actually wanted to be an architect. And I did find out that by the age of maybe, maybe 50, 40, 50, you could build something, you know, of substance. And I was like, yeah, I wanna do something a little faster. And my friends were, yeah, we were in painting class and he was like, you need to be a graphic designer. I was like, why? He's like, look at your apples. They're absolute circles. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, so, you know, I applied to the London College of Printing and now called the LCC in London. And, you know, that's my start, yeah. And when did the two of you meet each other and start working together? Well, there is a certain somebody, I think, here. My wife, Tracy. And partner. And Tracy was a student at Yale at the time. And I remember meeting Chester in Chicago. Yes. I think it was the first time. And I didn't know so much about his work, but I knew who he was sort of working with at the time. And over the course of time, we kept tabs on each other. And I'd worked with Tracy at two by four. And, you know, even through my other studio in the app office, and up to Pandagram. And so I know that, you know, Galata Plyrus is a labor of love that Chester had designed it initially for Tracy's thesis book. So, you know, it has passion there. So, you know, that's a good thing. Type of passion, not an nightmare. Sorry. Lots of positives, lots of positives. The whole process was incredibly collaborative between Pandagram, between Village, between all of the departments at Cooper Hewitt. We were coming up with a new branding, a new typeface. Everybody was involved. I'm curious to know about, when did you hit brick walls? Because I know there were some. I heard about some of them. And how did you get beyond them? Number one, and number two, what was the inspiration behind helping us come up with a branding that really worked for the new and transformed Cooper Hewitt? Well, I think the first, you could say it was a rubber wall. It was quite flexible. Was the naming process. And it really wasn't from what we had devised. It was really from the Board of Trustees were very torn between two significant names. And I think the way that we sort of tried to simplify the process was to look at it from the point of view of how the name would actually be utilised in different places and also how people would relay it verbally. And I think that that was a very crucial point because it would have been very difficult if you had the wrong name to define this entity, this important entity. And that was the first problem. And certain brick walls are there to be smashed down. But I believe the sense that it's a big family. This is another issue to a certain degree, but it's there because there's so much content at the Cooper Hewitt that you have to relay. You can't just use one weight to define everything. It just won't work. The clavifications, the contrast, the hierarchy, it just will not work. And so for us devising a sort of interim sort of guidelines for third party vendors whilst actually still designing everything is a very, very hard task to do. But I think from there, you start to learn what's going on in the mindset of somebody who's reading your guidelines. And things came back to us and they were like, is this right? And you're like, no, it's nowhere near right. And you say to yourself, God damn it. But you take it and you readjust it, you rewrite the guidelines and make sure that these are the don'ts, you're collecting the don'ts. It's amazing what people do. You think you've got it, you've got the system down. And then they come up with something entirely different. It's like, what about this? Is this correct? It's like, no, is this what we have to connect this to this to this? And you're like, oh, I see what you have to do now. And so it's a very sort of malleable sort of fluid approach. And we're really getting there now in regards to defining it. I think we were sent one from Jennifer today. And I think your email was like, your head's gonna explode on this one. So, but the refinement of it by the third party is getting better. It has gotten better. And these are the types of brick walls that we have. And then challenges. For example, well, Eddie shared some of the surprises like our wonderful shopping bag. And that's okay. When you walk into the Cooper Hewitt in December, you'll see that the typeface just really sings on the ticket, on the pen, on the labels. But one problem we had just this week is when the pen needs to be charged, there's a little light that appears on the pen. And we realized just a few hours ago that we actually needed to move the branding, the Cooper Hewitt name, or it would be right on the light itself. So there have been things like that where we're working hip to hip on working out how the typeface will be inserted into all of these different collateral pieces for the museum. Yes, there's also one more where the local projects is actually using a sort of software program which is, it is open source, but it doesn't have a very good typography engine. And so we're trying to get around that as well, defining it in a better way. So these are the things that crop up. It's fun. Yes, lots. So I want to get into the head of a typeface designer even more, Chester. So tell us about, I love watching that video of the iterations of the Cooper Hewitt typeface. Talk to us about, to do that in the middle of the night, do you think at two in the morning, oh, I should move the P over a little bit. Talk to us about that whole, that process. Yeah, well, I was just gonna say about the Cooper Hewitt typeface, especially, and about a lot of the work I do is low contrast sand serifs. So it's very plain, plain sand serif typefaces, not sort of your usual text serif typeface, like Garamond, but of Helvetica and family. And so trying to find different avenues in that particular design area, because there's only so much you can do, you don't have serifs. But yeah, you can be kept awake at night, just running the software inside your head. And but yeah, if you sort of build it well to begin with, then hopefully it'll work for you. And you can sort of squeeze out of it what you need as far as the weights that we needed on this one. And in the process, I didn't really show, but we sort of built the heavy to the light as the gamut that was covered by the Super-Pillator, which is a wonderful piece of software written by Eric van Bloklamp, a Dutch type designer and programmer. And so we use all these wonderful small tools that have been written by type designers. And so we license from them and helps us build our types. So I had like the range, the gamut, the light to heavy, and then it's like, but wouldn't it be nice to have a thin? So when you make that, you have to go in and sort of do it all by hand. You have to move every point in every letter form by hand on that one. And for the longest time, that was how we had to do things. And God, for the very longest time, they were knocking it into metal in inverse and mirrored. So it's like, it's pretty, we're very lucky. Like this typeface only took me, I think, four months of work, pretty much full-time, four months. That's incredibly fast in typeface terms. A lot of things, they take years of picking it up, dropping it, picking it up again. So on that note, was there a moment when you said, okay, this is it, this is powerful? This works, I'm done. No, no, and they got it so open-source. So hopefully, I will be able to work with it. And that's the other thing I should have mentioned, of course, the source files, the UFO files, which are the sort of the guts of the font design, those are all available for download. And those are also what's counted in the download. So anybody, anybody who's ever been to a font, anybody anywhere in the world who wants to download the files and open them up in their font management or font design software and move some points, or I'm going to make the Greek version of this. I'm going to make a really, really, really heavyweight. I'm gonna make, anybody is welcome to add to it, monkey around with it and send it back and we'll probably have the same reactions to a lot of stuff. What were they thinking? Hopefully we'll have several dozen more downloads tonight. We're encouraging all of you and everyone who's downloading the typeface to let us know what you're doing with it and we're gonna share it on the Cooper Hewitt website as well. So we can really share how this is becoming a global typeface. So Chester, who do you look back to? What master typeface designer inspires you? Or whose work do you look at when you really need inspiration for a project, whether it was Cooper Hewitt or another project? Yeah, lately my sort of, my favorite designer from the past is Morris Fuller Benton, who was American typeface designer, incredibly prolific. Designed Franklin Gothic and Trade Gothic and Hobo, which is one of the best typefaces ever. Really, generally, it's amazing. The lightweights of Hobo are fantastic. And this is the thing, nobody knows about the lightweights of Hobo. So yeah, Morris Fuller Benton's work is amazing. I know he was insane, but Eric Gill, the English type designer, was incredibly interesting and I really like his work. But of living designers, I have a lot of colleagues so I really enjoy their work, enjoy talking with them and enjoy sort of batting things back and forth. And the two sort of master type designers, Matthew Carter and Herard Unger, who's one of my faves. He's kind of flies into the radar a little bit, but he's one of my favorite designers and people. I would say Matthew Carter. Yes. Definitely so. National Design Award winner. National Design Award winner. You have to add that in. And Adrian Friediger. I remember when I was an undergrad, for some reason I wanted to make a tight face that was just using your fingers. I was at that stage in my life. And I said, oh, I would love Adrian Friediger to do this. And I asked my teachers and they said, oh, he's dead. So you can't be dead. Really, you can't be dead. So I did a little research, he's not dead. He was very much alive. And I contacted him. I actually got one of my very good friends who speaks fluent German to talk to him. And he did it. And I have the photograph somewhere. Somewhere in my house. And it was always firing when I got a letter and all these photographs of him with every single, yeah, that was something. Yeah, master, master. So yeah, I would say those are the two. And then in regards to, I wouldn't say young and up and coming, but absolutely genius and young is, and I just spotted him, Mr. Fryer Jones. Exceptional. I would say. Absolutely. Another, is he from the national? Yes, yes. Yeah, another. One after the next. Yeah, yeah. One after the next. One in our midst. So getting back to our working method and how we came up with this new branding and the new typeface, the collaborative process was really quite stunning to me. How is the Cooper Hewitt collaboration different? And how is it different from some of your other projects? I would say when it comes to cultural, museum and cultural projects, as I had stated earlier, I thought it was absolutely, I will name no names in regards to other museums and they are in New York City. Close, you know, I'll say about 10 to 15 miles away. The situation is that of organization and of also making sure that you have direct contact with the people in charge. And so talking to Caroline and also Jennifer and Jocelyn is an important factor. That immediate access to Seb is absolutely a must. The whole approach of bringing in the trustees early on and understanding what the process was to accept what we're doing is so paramount. Imagine if you had worked so hard to produce very good designs for a museum or a cultural institution and then found out that somebody in that, one of those trustees hated it and this has happened, hated it and just wiped it off the face of the earth even though it was accepted by the whole museum, by the administration, by the directors. That is not fun. It sounds like it's happened to you. Oh, it has happened and you have to start all over again. That is not a good philosophy. That's not a good methodology to utilize. And turning it on its head, having a very good one-to-one relationship with the people in charge is a very paramount issue for designers today. And as you can see, there is so many more middle men, as middle people, that it gets very much muddied and it's very, very difficult to deal with in this day and age. I would say there, I mean, that's the beauty of the size of Cooper Hewitt. You can't do that in a massive institution, but with 71 staff and 35 very involved, dedicated board members, we felt it was really important to launch right out of the gate and start the discussion and really address the problem at hand, which was two-fold. We wanted a new name and we wanted a new typeface and a new mark. So there were a lot of things going on and early discussion and early adoption is the way to avoid exactly the kind of catastrophe that can happen with one or many board members or staff that don't like something. Exactly, and the factor is it does happen with a company such as Apple. It has and it will carry on because they believe in the aspects and the power of design. And if that's there, then you know that you're on to in the right direction. So another question, I see a lot of students, so I keep rewinding the clock, but I'm curious about, you know, you both graduated thinking, okay, I'm gonna be a designer, I'm gonna be a typeface designer. How was reality different once you were in the workplace for a couple of years and had real experience? Oh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, so that's a really good question. And I think, you know, I graduated undergrad and I went immediately to graduate school because I was so scared of going into the professional world. I really was, I was like, oh, I'm so not ready for this. And so I did my graduate education at Yale and then I left, the same thing happened. I, you know, you finish your thesis, you think that this is the ultimate document that will deliver your future and it is not. And you know, it's sort of, you think it's a prescription to the way that you're going to work and it's so not. And because you start to understand the sort of outside forces of the work environment of dealing with so many different people in so many different professions and they don't understand the word you're talking about. And so for me, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I went into the world of, now it's called the startup, but a small band of guys called Art Technology Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts that is now owned by Oracle. And I started developing applications and introducing them really more so to graphic design. And I loved it. And then I did that for four years and I wanted something, another challenge that I moved to New York City. And again, you think that you have it in your hand and you're like, I'm going to go to New York City, I'm going to show them what I've got. And it just, it's like Mike Tyson, like hitting you with a left uppercut. And biting off your ear. Yeah, and biting off your ear, right? And that's what occurred, you know. But you start to, if you were not a sponge, New York will just not work for you at all. And that's, you just have to absorb everything that it's got, that it's given you. And the work ethic that you must have is astounding, more than any other city I know of. And so that's sort of my feeling. And now I'm sort of like a partner in Pentagram. I've sort of ventured from a sort of small company that actually got really big to a medium-sized company, to a really small, to a small boutique company, a two by four, to an even small company called Map Office. And then what I always wanted was family. And as I wanted to be part of a family of designers and, you know, whether being dysfunctional at certain points, but incredibly loving, that's an insanely skillful, and that's Pentagram. And, you know, it's a love affair. And behind the scenes at Pentagram did the brothers and sisters tear apart different iterations of the Cooper Hewitt typeface ideas or branding ideas? Paula saw it. She sits next to me. She's like, what's that? With the current one? What do you mean, what's that, what's that? And I explained it to her, and then she just, she was like, and then walked off. She did this and then walked off. Later on, actually, it's about, I would say four months later, she came back and she says, I get it. She actually did, and she said, I totally get it. And that was great. That was great to know. So that was the only time. So, Chester, how about you? Yeah, well, I was gonna say the one thing about, you know, this process that was different from other processes is that I was completely hands off. I just, you know, was left to do and make and I delivered it. So, you know, because it was understood, but I was doing anyway. So, and I was not gonna be an infant and do something crazy. I was just gonna make a nice, useful typeface. But yeah, so my, you know, I had always drawn letters and things, but I, you know, studied graphic design and graduated when I was 21. And, you know, this was when being a type designer was actually, the software was a little bit harder to come by. And it was something called Fontographer, which was, which, you know, still exists, but it was, you know, it was very rough and ready back then. And so you could sort of build stuff in Fontographer. And I learned to do that at my first job. I had two jobs when I graduated from school. I worked from nine until three at the design studio of one of my professors. And then I walked to my other job and worked from four until midnight at a type setting house, back when there were still type setting houses, when not every design studio necessarily had Mac. So they, you know, they had, they were doing photo type setting, as well as, you know, Mac type setting and stuff. So a lot of car ads, a lot of car ads came through and it's like, you have to make it work for this newspaper and then that newspaper and then this newspaper and, you know, the same content. And then, you know, the text would change minute by minute throughout the evening. And so, you know, I sort of, I did that and that was actually not that stressful at all. It was pretty fun. Long working hours. Yeah, long working hours. So I did that for around six months where I did both jobs. And one of my colleagues at the type setting house was a real type history nut. He was like, you know, unilingual French, but he had all these wonderful, like, English books, this great, this great, this book called The History of Printing Types and Their Uses by Daniel Berkeley Updike, which is like the history book. It was published in 1912, I think. The original, the first published. 1912, something like that? Tobias, no. 20 something, yeah. So 19, 20 something. And he had a first edition signed by Daniel Berkeley Updike and he let me borrow it. So that was cool. And that's where I got to work with Fontographer because it costs $400 or something. So I did that. And then I had the same kind of feeling that Eddie did when I graduated from college. I really, I actually wanted to go to LCP, which was the hot shit. So yeah, and all the cool designers were coming from LCP in the early 90s. So I wanted to move across to London. I remember my parents' Brits, I have British passports, so they're like, cool, I just moved to London. So I thought I was gonna do that while I was working at these jobs. And I ended up moving to London, but not to go to LCP. I ended up moving there to work at a design studio called New Orleans Sorrel. And I was there for two years, you know, one in London, one in the Netherlands. And all the time I was like working on doing typefaces. And I did some types for clients there, as well as doing just ones of my own which were used for projects at the studio. And one was published by Font Shop International. And that sort of, you know, the type thing led me to my next job in Chicago. So I sort of, you know, went from Montreal to Chicago a very long way. And that's where I worked with a designer who was, you know, had an interest in type design as well, but that wasn't his real, his real forte, you know, graphic design was his real forte. And so I sort of ended up being the type guy there. And then so, you know, we started a foundry there and really built it up. And then, you know, when Tracy was graduating from Yale, we're like, well, let's move to New York. So yeah, and being a sponge, being a sponge in New York, I think London's spongy too. It's spongy, it's more strawberry sponge. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, the same thing where you're on the tube and you hear a lot of languages spoken. And so like that, I love that about it. It's a little sweeter. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, New York and London are sort of good places to be a sponge. So I have one more question and then we'll open it up to all of you for your own questions for Chester and Eddie. And that is in transforming the Cooper Hewitt over these last three years, we are really striving to become the contemporary design museum. So just some examples include we're slipping LED lights into the stone pillars on 90th and 91st Street. So people that are jogging in Central Park or exiting the Guggenheim will say, what are those lights? And then they'll approach and say, oh, of course, it's the design museum. We're also opening the garden for free. You don't have to be a donor or a member. We're really welcoming everybody and embracing everybody so that it becomes a true destination and we're gonna have an incredible cafe in there. I can't tell you who it is yet because we're still inking the contract. But the point is to really make it a destination and a place to see and experience contemporary design. And on that point, we were all really, really pleased at Cooper Hewitt with the new branding and mark and just how contemporary it felt. And I wonder if you two could just talk a little bit about your feelings about the Cooper Hewitt type base, how it does make us that much more contemporary and more of an energetic, alive brand. I'll start with Minion. I don't know if, I think it was my fourth or fifth slide, the, actually, fourth slide. It had the sunburst, the Smithsonian and then the Cooper Hewitt in italics. And that's Minion and there's a lot to be said about that. It is not contemporary. It was part of a family, but the family didn't want to use it. They still don't want to use it as much as people think. And it didn't really, it really showed the sort of the outside of what the Cooper Hewitt is very decorative, very stylish, the Carnegie mansion. But it doesn't really show you the interior of it. And when I say contemporary, I mean, you could say it of this time, but then you can take it and look at all the objects and look at it from their time and they were all contemporary. And that's how we sort of try to mold this particular design where you have these objects that some are more functional than others, but they are contemporary of their time. They are well refined and they're incredibly tailored, craftsmanship. And that's what we wanted to sort of allow to breathe and the thing about me being a graphic designer is that there's a sense of craft, but this is the craftsman. And so that's what needed to actually occur. Craftsmanship is not dead. The factor of it being transposed into an electronic realm doesn't mean that you don't have an amazing skill set to produce amazing work. And that's an important thing to state. Thank you. And that's my goal, is to be a craftsperson and not just, I'm not a designer, I make bricks. I always tell people I'm not the architect, I just make the bricks. And the Cooper Hewitt typeface is meant to be just of this time some of the details I was talking about, the straight line segments that are in there and just how I built it is, could really, you couldn't have done that 50 years ago, certainly, but yeah. And so the thing is, and I know we were sort of like on a bumpy road to getting it to work correctly, as we can probably see today, it's kind of cut off at the top of that. But the factor is that this rubs off on people. It rubs off on the administration. It rubs off on the members of the institution and also of anybody who wants to go and have an amazing experience from all corners of the world. That is an important factor. For our press preview a couple of weeks ago, we set up a putting green on the third floor of the Cooper Hewitt because Andrew Carnegie used to practice his putting on the third floor. And as a gift for the top editors who were there, everyone went home with a Cooper Hewitt cap with our new branding. And one editor called me yesterday and said, I just want a tennis match wearing the Cooper Hewitt cap. That's because it's so dynamic. It's very, very, very, very, very, very. So on that note, I'd love to invite the audience up for questions. We do ask that you use the mics because this is being recorded so that our listeners can hear your questions. All right, let's go. No, here's one. Hey, Shannon, I'm an undergraduate student at the Fashion Institute of Technology over there. I just have a quick question. Before you approached the museum, you were commissioned for the project, right? How many times were you able to go to the actual institution and kind of feel around the environment knowing that this would suit it well? That's a very good point. I've been to the Cooper Hewitt many, many times and shows and parties. And the factor is it's quite striking, even though you've got the Guggenheim down the road, it's quite a striking building when you see it across the road from Central Park. And so there's a variety of times that I've been there. But the factor is, in a sense, it's not the architecture that this was actually built for. It's the objects inside. And so the objects can be found online. They can be found in the everyday and also in the museum as well. And so that was a major factor to proceed with as well. The other thing I'd add to that is Eddie and the team at Pentegram are part of the Cooper Hewitt family and know everybody. So when they're talking about designing the bag for the shop, they're talking to the shop staff. And that happens with every single piece of collateral. So that's why we keep stressing this collaborative effort. It really has been incredible. This is actually for Chester and it's very esoteric and it's just been sticking in my head for the entire talk. But so if you have to move for your italics, if you've got to shift everything over and you have to deal with BCPs, like not lining up correctly, why not draw it in true type where you have higher resolution? Is that a stupid question? No, it's a good question. It's a good question because I'm a bit dumb. No, I just, I'm used to working in my 1000, I'm used to it in 2048. And 2048 just hurts my head to think about. No, I built it as open type with postscript outlines and which is what Eddie and team are using. Open types better. Yeah, I just worked in open type. So yes, I worked in that language instead of, but it's a good point. It's a good point. Plus the hinting would be better. Hi, I'm Dean Grossman. Thank you to all three of you for your time and speaking tonight. I have a question more aimed at Caroline, but of course if you guys wanna share some insights, that's great too. I'm curious what the selection process was like for the design firm, Pentagram, what were sort of the things that you guys were, excuse me, looking for in a firm? And without naming names, what are some of the things that other firms maybe were missing that led you to kind of cut them out of the mix and then go with Pentagram and into our village? That's a really great question. There were five firms that we were looking at that had experience in the museum realm or the nonprofit realm. And we interviewed each of them at length. And we were really looking for a design team that could work with our new direction with technology. That was a major part of this. And given Eddie's expertise in that realm, it really was a perfect fit because we needed the brand, the new brand and the new typeface to work across all different platforms, which it is proving to now with a little bit, a lot of elbow grease. But that was really the main thing that we were looking for, that flexibility. There's a lot of technology that, you know, there's website, but there's other technologies that are going to be upon us very, very soon. And as I hinted to Jake Barton and his team, his wonderful team at Local Projects, the factors of making sure that the typography is correct and how that UI is actually going to work correctly with it is incredibly important. And then how that the aspects of the labels with the pen is going to work as well. And so that sort of versatility is there. Yeah, yeah. There are 15 digital tables peppered throughout the new group. So, you know, the new branding needed to work on those digital tables for that digital experience, but it also needed to work when you received your ticket at the admissions desk on paper. And Pentagram was the perfect team and Eddy's team was the perfect team to do it. Great, thank you. You're welcome. And they got me because that you just happened to use my typeface, right, Eddy? That's really what I kind of thought. Pretty much, pretty much. Could have been anybody else. Hi, I'm Dottie Jeffries and I have a background in museum publications and product development, but I'm interested in large about your thinking on all caps in logo identity these days. And if there ever was a point with the Cooper Hewitt logo since the previous logo was in uppercase and lowercase. But anyway, I'm just curious in general what your feeling is. That's a good question. I think we were just having this conversation today. We wanted to be bold. You wanted to be bold and the factoring is that if you really write, you know, you sort of created in sort of upper lowercase, you've got a lot of, you've got descenders dealing with P's. Now if you use hobo. No, he goes, yes. I'm not gonna go into hobo, actually. Later on, I will. There's a lot of character in upper lowercase. And you want something which is emboldened, which is could be quite iconic, but also, you know, typographically set very, very well. And also seen from distance and so it's, and also scale. So, you know, that was important. And also to the fact of that, we wanted it to be really quite striking. Make a statement. And figured out also that it was just like a couple of hairs away from being a perfect two to one ratio. So you just make that happen. So now it just locks up in all kinds of cool ways. And I, you know, as Chester had actually sort of explained in regards to, especially with the W, you know, when you, if you just type it out, it's just like, it's all shifted. Everything's shifted. And so how do you get that, those characters, those glyphs to actually fit correctly and align like soldiers. And that's, that was very, very important. And yes, you force them. And that's what the logo type is, whereas the tape has a different logic. Tape has a typographic logic, logo has a logo logic. It does. And I think also where we were using in the sort of subsets, we want to repeat that. So sometimes the Cooper Hewitt mark may not be there on the page. It might be below or behind on the book. But you want to make a statement and say, hey, that's Cooper Hewitt. And so there's a sense of identity all the way through the structure. And I must admit that I, you know, made the work and handed it over and really didn't see it happening, you know, what you guys were doing with it. Sorry. I went to them, I think. Don't expect you. You know, I went to the press launch and saw the labels on objects. And it's like, OK. It works. It's neutral. It's just sitting there in uppercase, lowercase. And it's not meant to be something you see. It's just meant to be something you read, at least in a tight face. Exactly, exactly. Hey. I just have to say, I love the granular nerdiness that we're getting to here. It's pretty amazing. So I'll, preff is a very simple question, maybe in a little bit of a complicated way, because in museum exhibitions, I think especially in design exhibitions and working with curators, there's often a sense that each exhibition has a particular identity and that often plays itself out visually. So I guess my question is, will you ever use another font? And if so, how and why? Ah. Hobo? Hobo. Hobo. Hobo. That's an excellent question. Certainly not for the first year or so. Part of our philosophy is to really promote and advertise the 10 opening exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt as one, to really encourage people to come to the museum and then explore those 10 exhibitions. If we were to do, though, an exhibition on a typeface designer, for example, we would obviously explore, Eddie, don't hit me. We would explore the usage of something other than Cooper Hewitt, but it will be, you know, primarily what you see. This is why you wanted me to sit between you. Right, there you go. There is, and we're still working on this, that in the magazine, we're looking at the factor of a serif, but we're not quite sure. But to Liz Quinn's question, to answer it, Caroline is absolutely right that we are not going to. We haven't seen the magazine design yet. I think we're seeing that on Tuesday, right? So, I don't know when Liz... Oh, so... You're causing uproar over here. You guys want to throw a rock into a puddle? Hi. Hi. Armstead Booker, director of design for the Natural History Museum of the street. Off of that very excellent question, curious if you could provide any insight into discussions that you've had about what it looks like to future-proof a font like this. What is it going to look like if we had this conversation five or 15 or 25 years from now? And does that even matter? 25 years from now, I'm going to be tired. So, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter. I think that's a very good point. I believe that the way that design works is that if it functions, you know, if it works, don't fix it. The factor also is that if it has acolytes, personalities and characters that basically love to utilize it, it needs to be loved to be useful as well, that it will carry on and on and on and on and on. So, there's no need to find anything else. Now, whether it's going to work in the same constructs as another thing, 15, 20 years, 25 years down the road, I think we're going to be on the iPhone 25. And I don't know what's going to happen. But in any case, I don't think this is not the helvetica of the ages. Let's put it that way, where you've got some really staunch supporters, you should have some acolytes that will take it on and look at the attributes that it's got. And it will make the work so much easier. The possibility of expanding as well is also... That's why it's out there too. And the possibilities of creating a serif come about as well. From the museum standpoint, I mean, we certainly hope that it will be durable for decades. I have a lot of confidence that it will be. I think when you look back at the marks in the past, the Cooper Hewitt, the logo looks very, very dated. And who knows? Maybe people will say that in 15 years, we really doubt it about our new typist. I agree. No, I do agree. Eddie and Chester, thank you so much for helping vivify the Cooper Hewitt brand and for tonight's talk. Thank you so much and thank you to all of you. We look forward to welcoming you back in 93 days. Thank you.