 I am the director of learning and audience engagement at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome, we're thrilled to have you all joining us this evening for our communication design across generations conversation. As part of the Smithsonian, Cooper Hewitt is devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design, and this week is National Design Week. Thank you, Ellen. A week where we celebrate past, present, and future, the future of design, as well as the winners of our annual National Design Awards. Three of them who are speaking this evening, some are in our audience, which I won't say. Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards is our largest education initiative. Its roots in education is truly what distinguishes it from other awards. Programs like this allow us to share the designers with people of all ages and people with various design experiences. Actually, Rem and Seymour were at our career fair yesterday and spoke to hundreds of teens about careers in design. So we have wonderful programs throughout the week. I wanna thank my colleagues, Eugenio, Alvaro, Alexa, Sheamus, Kosa, Catherine, Anne, Hannah, and our security team for the work they've done on this program. And thank you to IBM and eBay Design for making this program possible. I would like to introduce our moderator, a celebrator designer herself, Ellen Lopton. She's a curator emerita at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and she will introduce the panel and get us going. So welcome, Ellen. Thanks, Kim. Wow, I can't tell you how totally cool it is to be here tonight. Who loves graphic design? Yes? Do we have some hardcore fans in the audience? This is not casual for us, right? This is the thing. Okay, so the National Design Awards are a big deal. And each of tonight's speakers has earned an enormous honor for their individual achievements as designers, makers, doers, and educators. But what you're gonna see on the stage tonight is more than a beautiful win for these individuals. This year's awards are a win for graphic design as a whole. Okay, this is like super serious stuff. We have arrived, we have swept it. This is the Nobel Prize of Design and they all go to us. Well, not all of them, but the best ones, okay. So back in 1951, when Seymour Quast graduated from Cooper Union, no one knew what graphic design was. He showed everyone what it is by co-founding Pushpin Studios, one of the world's most influential design firms ever. For over 70 years, Seymour has brought pop, politics, and panache to magazines, posters, paintings, food packaging, and more. He joins us tonight as the National Design Awards Design Visionary. Visionary, people, okay. Okay, so now we're gonna jump forward a generation or two to Rem De Plessis. When he graduated from college in 1993, the Apple was creating a new way to make graphic design. Messed everything up, right, total change. Now he kind of runs the place. That's how that happens. Rem's touch, taste, and typography have earned him already nearly all of the planet's highest design honors, including this year's National Design Award for Communication Design. Amazing. Also here tonight is Beatrice Lozano. She was planning to become a mechanical engineer when she got involved in immigrant rights activism. And that experience inspired her to become a graphic designer. Change path now. Any engineers in the audience, this is your chance. Right, get on our train. Her inclusive experimental approach to design and education is bringing design to new people and new places, places we are just beginning to imagine. Her work earned her the 2023 National Design Award for an emerging designer. So we've got it all here. We have a beautiful evening planned for you. We're gonna hear from each of these winners about their work. We're gonna have a conversation here on the stage. We're gonna have a conversation with you. So I wanna welcome our amazing Design Award winners to come join me here on the stage and get us started. Hello. Hi, everyone. It's wonderful to be here. I just quickly wanna thank the Cooper QA team and the National Design Awards team for having us here today, as well as just saying it's an incredible honor to be here on stage with these two design legends. Today, I wanna share a bit about my work. And so my work is very much rooted in typography as we can see here, but it also is exploring how we can incorporate new technologies such as AR, AI and generative typography, creative coding into our designs to make work that is a bit more interactive and inclusive. And so the first project that I wanna share with you all today is a project that started off as a personal project, and it's my typeface, Ancho. Sorry, having a little, there we go. And so Ancho started off as a project as a way for me to learn how to design a functioning typeface. And this evolved to then be used in many different applications, including this Get Out the Vote poster designed for AIGA, which then became a 3D animation that we can see up next. So this one single typeface has now allowed me to explore things like coding with variable typefaces, exploring how to design type for a three-dimensional world. And then it also existed as this physical object because it was so well received. I created this shirt that we then sold and all the profits went to a nonprofit that helps people register for driver's license so that they can vote as well. And since its release, Ancho has been used in many different use cases, but perhaps one of my favorites that we could see here, it was used in Mexico City by women's rights activists during the 8th and March against feminicides. A lot of my work is still very much rooted in branding and developing identity systems. It's truly what made me fall in love with design in the first place, and maybe it's because of my engineering background. I really just love how all the pieces can come together. And a recent project that really embodies this for me is the rebrand for the Tide Film Festival, which takes place in Brooklyn every fall, and it highlights the work of filmmakers of color. And so for this project, I got the joy of custom drawing the wordmark, including this concept of a tidal wave to embody the positive disruption that Tide is all about. And then as a team with the Sunday afternoon team, we built this out into a functioning system. And so I encourage you all to check them out this November. And a lot of my work has also been exploring how this new technology, such as generative typography, can impact our work. Here, this is a sketch I made in 2020 as part of a homework assignment for a Typehead Cooper P5 class taught by SpaceType. And in this class, we were exploring glitches. And this was right around the time of George Floyd's murder. And it brought to mind the saying, the system isn't broken, it was built this way. So I married the visual of the interactive glitch that fragments depending on the user's cursor position with this saying. And I shared this on social media. It was picked up by an activism group here in the city. And this design was then projected across different locations, including the Brooklyn Bridge, and then my personal favorite outside of a Brooklyn precinct during a defund the NYPD protest. And recently, I have also been exploring the role that AR can play in our designs. Here, we see a collaboration with my good friend, Lin Yun. And with a lot of my AR work, I often say that I view AR as a way to make sculptures without the limitations of the physical world. As we can see here, we can scale up these designs to massive sizes. We can add all of these different kinetic elements that just wouldn't be possible or even financially feasible for a lot of projects. And lately, I've also been exploring the role that audio can play. So you're all welcome to scan this QR code. Recently, with a group of friends, we've been exploring the intersection between music and technology. So here, once you scan the code, you could see the letters that spell out NYC. These letters are made of different components, and each component is reacting to different audio levels, which then impact the color it's changing into as well as the shape it's taking on. And lastly, I also want to touch a bit on my educational experiences. So I've had the joy of teaching these last couple of years. Here, we could see some work from my Parsons Interaction Design students, where I had them design a textiles in code. These could be textiles from their own cultures or just textiles from fashions they admire. And this was an assignment to learn how to code with loops in JavaScript. And this past year, I also taught an intro to AR typography class with type electives. This was only a five-week course, and the majority of the students had zero knowledge of 3D or AR before joining the class. So it was just incredible to see everything that they were able to make and how far they were able to come in just five weeks. And lastly, I'm very passionate about making design education as accessible as possible. Here, we can see a video from a workshop I held in Mexico City. Last year with the help of my friends over at Republic. This workshop was held entirely in Spanish. I believe with the new advancements in technology, it's all of our responsibility to make this technology accessible for designers and creatives all around the world, and especially designers who are outside of New York City, outside of the US, and outside of English-speaking communities. And I'll be returning to Mexico this November to hold a few more workshops, and I'm really looking forward to that. Thank you. Can you hear me? Oh, there it is. With the technology, that was great. In Mexico, that workshop, the technology that you brought, how did you go about that? How did you, did you have to provide laptops and everything else? Or was it just the software or? So it's just the software. For this workshop, we were using Spark by Meta, but at least as of last year, the majority of the resources are all in English. And as anybody who is like Mexican or Latino, you know, like everybody's aunt and cousin loves Facebook and is on Facebook. So it was just a tool that was so normal for people there in the community there, which is why I chose to use that tool for that class. Yeah, that was awesome. Thank you. Hi, everyone, I'm Rem, and it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Cooper Hewitt. Thanks for coming out. Very appreciative. So I'm just gonna jump in and make sure I go the right way. So I started my career in the editorial world, magazines. I work for Apple now, but it was a big jump because my whole career was pretty much print. And working a lot on kerning and very specific things that all of us design, nerds love and adore. So I'm just gonna go through a few projects. This is one of my favorites. I mean, the New York Times magazine, as a lot of you probably know, it's a weekly magazine. So we put out 52 issues a year. It was a constant churn of tight deadlines, but also great creative projects. If you didn't get it right one week, you had the next week to make up for it. So I always enjoyed that. But the reason why this college issue was one of my favorites is it's all done by hand. Everything that you see here was ripped torn paper and it was, we jokingly call it the collage issue because it was supposed to look like a bulletin board at the end of a semester when all the students rip off there, you know, rip everything off the flyers and all that kind of stuff, one adds. So that was the goal for this project. And it was actually really big. And then we shot it and obviously reduced it down to the magazine size, but no Photoshop was used at all. It was all done by hand. The next one, this was a, every year we would do a Hollywood issue. And this one stands out for me because we worked with the photographers in Esen Van Nude who are usually bigger celebrities than the actual celebrity on the shoot, on the set. So in this particular moment, they decided to shoot the Avatar Stars in black and white. And it didn't feel right to me because that was such a colorful movie. So I printed out the photograph and then I used sharpies, I mean not sharpies, but highlighters to color in the tattoos that you see. And I showed it to them, very fearful, I was very fearful when I showed it to them because they had a lot of opinions, but they looked at me and they said, we love it. And then it became reality. But that stands out for me because it was a pretty funny moment, but hugely talented photographers. For this issue, this was an innovation issue and it was an entire issue dedicated to who made that. So inventors, people who have made products. And I decided that the cover should be also following that rule. So we annotated everything on the cover from the typeface to the history behind the New York Times Magazine logo. We even have an annotation for the staples that you have in a magazine and talked about the history behind that. So it was a fun project where, there was a little story there where you could become educated on how things were invented. These are some sketches we did for the beginning stages of Twitter, which is now X. And there were a lot of things that happened within the invention of Twitter and the development of that company. So I worked with Paul Sayer on this and he came up with a lot of humorous illustrations that kind of met the demands of the headline, the savage dawn of Twitter. And we ended up going with this one. It's funny to look at this now because it's actually relevant again, I guess, with all of the things that have been happening there. This was the ideas issue. Every year we did an ideas issue. This particular one was shot by Horatio Salinas and it's a honey dipper and the shape of the light bulb is actually honey. And then there's an index. All the typography that you see is all the ideas within the issue and where you can find them in the magazine. This is a sketch I did for Mad Men which was hugely popular at the time. A brilliant show, a very sexist show and this was a sketch around how we should approach the final photograph where the women become objects in the photograph. And the headline was smoking, drinking, writing, womenizing but the design allows for that order to, you know, it just keeps going. There's no real order to that. All of that stuff happened on that show if you watched it. This was the first time that we ever allowed and this had to go through the lawyers but we commissioned different, this was the innovation issue and we decided that we would work with different illustrators and typographers to rethink the New York Times Magazine logo and it was hugely challenging. I had to meet with every attorney within the walls of the New York Times but they finally agreed to allow us to do it and this was another innovation issue so it made sense for us to kind of rethink the magazine's logo and one of my favorite things about this is there were four covers that went out into the world randomly so if you were in New Jersey you may get the pink one if you're in California you may get the blue one and so on but the whole issue was kind of broken down in the day of the life of someone that's using all of these innovations so the idea was to use a color spectrum that indicated the time of day from dust till dawn. Of course, you know, no reader would ever get that but it was a little Easter egg of an idea that I thought we had to implement. And then I, this is actually out of order but Spin Magazine was a music publication, alternative music magazine for those of you who don't know. I was there before the New York Times Magazine and I spent two years there and it was great. I worked with Sia Michaels. She was the first female editor of a music magazine and I loved the collaboration because she was kind of new to being an editor-in-chief and for me it was a career decision where I could kind of showcase the work that I knew I was capable of doing without as many restrictions as some of the bigger brands. And it just allowed for a lot of experiments. Like here, if you look at Tom York's little spiky hair, you know, I fed off of that for the O in Radiohead. We also did a lot of experimental type treatments at the beginning of each feature well. So the heartbreak kid, that was the kind of emo moment in music. So if you trace this dot to dot, it's a broken heart. Sorry to see that on the screen but we would do fun things like that because the audience was, you know, teenagers and they would interact with the magazine in that way. They would take the time to do this kind of dot to dot fun little design treatment. So I was at the New York Times Magazine for 10 years and they made a complete career change. You would be surprised within the creative space how you can actually change careers and have an experience that's completely different. The reason why it was different for me is because I was in journalism and there was what's called church and state. I never worked with the business side. I wasn't allowed to because they didn't want my work, the writer's work to influence what the advertising was in the magazine. So I didn't really know a lot about the marketing world and selling product and that kind of thing. So it was a huge adjustment. When I got there, I'm in strategy meetings and I couldn't understand how that applied to what a creative does. You know, it took me several months to learn that and then you learn how important it is and how it informs the design process. One of the projects that I'm hands down probably the most proud of in my entire career was we did this during the pandemic. It was a shot an iPhone project and it was called hometown and we commissioned 32 black photographers from all over the country to use an iPhone as a tool to document their stories and their environments and what their neighborhoods are like and the people that live within their communities and family members and we gave them complete freedom. I didn't even send an art director on the job. We just sent them iPhones and let them kind of do their thing. The only brief was to be a documentarian of your surroundings, of your community. So we created a film out of this and also a lot of beautiful photography and I'll just run through it. This is a photographer, her name is Gabrielle Anne Gotti-Jones and she documented black female surfers within the Los Angeles area and these are just different photographs from the project. This was a photographer out of Dallas and this picture he called it adjusting his crown which I love that title and obviously these were all shot on iPhone and when we shoot on iPhones for these projects they're not retouched. There's no post work done. We're not allowed to go into Photoshop because we want to showcase what actually comes out of the iPhone without any influence in the post production stages and this is one of the billboards in New York City actually. So yeah, very proud of that project and it had a lot of really great reception and it put some of these photographers on the map too. They really received a lot of projects after that which was great. We were able to launch some careers and I think that is it. Yeah, see more. Anybody want to say anything? Why? Okay, at Bushbin, we've had always been putting out some sort of publication starting with the Bushbin Almanac and it became the Bushbin Monthly Graphic. It was a way for us to express ourselves while we're selling our talent to publishers in advertising. And each of us did his own issue. Sometimes we collaborated, we did Christmas issues we tried to make it into something that had some sort of substance. And this particular issue was one, an issue on the South. I did it during the civil rights demonstrations going on in the 60s and the time when there was so much violence. We found out that a lot of people were assassinated and that was what I thought I would use here and the hole that's on the cover was punched all the way through so it's symbolizing the bullet hole on these poor civil rights people who are victims of the violence in the South that included Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King. The one on the lower right was woman Viola Lusso who gave a ride to a black man during the demonstrations and was just wiped out. Other issues we've done were less serious than that. This was the nose, which is a thing I did with Steve Heller as the editor. And again, each issue was on a different subject. We did this for about 10 years but putting out one issue a year between other things that we were doing to make a living. This one issue was on crime, other issues that went on presidents, issue on what it is, what kind of racism was going on at the time. What the kind of terrible things we did to each other, calling them names and trying to expose these things. On the right was sheet music cover with a black image. A couple of environmental things. I did the Earth Day posters for a number of years. The last one was on the one on the right which happens to be in exhibit now at the poster house. It's hanging up. And it was a way for me to express my feeling about the environment and doing something for Earth Day. And Bad Breath was a poster I did during the Vietnam War in the 60s. It was interesting because it was a time when people were actually buying posters to hang up, posters on war, anti-war, on music. A lot of great psychedelic posters were done. I did this as a, this was a woodcut that I did, using in Bad Breath as a sort of advertising slogan here. We were bombing Hanoi in Uncle Sam's mouth. And that was my way of protesting the war. On the left was a peace march. The War of Madness was a poster done for a Japanese design organization. They asked me to do a couple of posters. And that was one of them. Nogo was a peace conference in the Hague. War's Good Business Investor's Son was a, I saw it on a button that somebody was wearing and I thought it would make a terrific slogan for a poster. So I made it and it was produced and as I said, sold in poster shops. The one on the right, the Peace Gate was again done for the Japanese Peace Organization, a monoprint that I had done. War Against War was a book, a timeline of all the wars, or as many as we could find, since 3500 BC. There were a lot of wars. And they keep on going. But so I thought it was still worthwhile, even though it's nothing that I would do is gonna stop the violence that people pose on everybody. But I thought it would be worthwhile. And inside were illustrations from, it was along with the timeline illustrations from some of the wars. Design and style was a series of publications for Mohawk paper. Each one was on a different style. The shield was one. I did not hear surrealism and Art Deco all the way up to Streamline. And Mohawk used it to promote the paper. Inside were all sorts of things, pop-ups and die cuts in any kind of trick that we could do with paper. And that was a lot of fun. He had some posters for doctors to put up in their offices here describing what terrible things happen to our bodies, hoping that they could cure those problems. Graphic style was a series I did with Steve Heller. There were four editions of it, starting from Victorian times. And with the emphasis on the style itself, the way it looked. And the last one is the fourth edition was showing work up to about 10 years ago. What do we have here? Oh, it's was in one of the posters in the graphic style book from the 30s. Heller is a book that's been out for a year and there are a few editions being done. This one was did originally in Italy and now it's being published chronically as publishing it and it's gonna be a Mexican edition. It's a book exposing 50 kinds of hell around the world. And what's interesting about it over centuries here, and what's fascinating about it is that there are so many things about hell that are similar in all of them. It's all what's in the underworld, what goes on there after you die. And there's some fascinating differences but also things that are so similar and you wonder what in the human mind sort of gets us to think of those things that happened to us when we're no longer on the earth. So the book is, I think I have some samples of them. Yeah, I mean, there's one from hell from Iroquois Indians here, a lot from Japan, some really fascinating ones from Japan. Italy, great stuff. The Middle East, hell, you can tell that they're all enjoying it, having a great time. And I had a great time doing these things, trying to figure out what the next book is. Heaven is Boring. I already did a book on Dante's Inferno here. And the Inferno part was interesting, paradise, forget about it. Maybe something will come along that might be as interesting as hell. And I think that's it. Heavy, y'all still can go on. We've been some dark places, Seymour. Thanks for taking us there. Disease, maybe, a topic in the future. Oh, you did that too, okay. So I have some questions that I'm gonna ask to our amazing panelists. And I'm gonna start with a question that I want each of you to address. And we'll go Beatrice and then come full circle. And the question is, what is the single biggest change in the graphic design field that you've witnessed in your lifetime? Now, we've got some really long lifetimes here and some brand new lifetimes. So you're gonna have to kind of bring your sense of scale and perspective there, but change, it's a foot, right? So, Beatrice, what have you seen changed and what do you hope will happen next? Yeah, I was gonna say, I think I'm probably the least equipped person up here to answer that question. But I would say even in the last few years, I think the pandemic has completely changed the way we interact with technology. Previously, I was working at a studio all throughout, prior to the pandemic and after the pandemic. And prior to, we were still meeting very much in person with clients. Our clients were much closer to us in radius. And during the pandemic and after we began to take on global clients, we began to hire designers who were even working and collaborating with us from all across the world. I think this completely equally impacted education. We saw a huge rise in online educational schools such as type electives or brand new school, different educational initiatives. And so I hope this will only continue in the fact that all of us can embrace technology for good and help us form new communities and new connections with people, even if we're a world away. Thank you, beautiful. Seymour, what have you seen change? Anything or is it all just pretty even? No, I'm really fascinated by what happens to magazines. I did New York Times Magazine in the early days of maybe 1900, was pretty stilted. It's very ordinary. I mean, they were limited by technology at the time. But they just, everybody follows the rules. Since then, so much more has happened, especially in that magazine. And it's helped all of us. To think, well, there are all sorts of crazy things we can do. It's one thing, you know, I've been thinking about animation. You know, what is a bad part of it. And I love Snow White and Pinocchio. And now when I look at animation, it's anybody can do anything, you know? I mean, there's no limitation to that. And some of the magic is gone from that, because you know, of course Superman can fly. You don't think about what goes into it, because anything can do anybody, anybody can do anything. A little less magic, huh? Magic is gone. The magic is gone. But we still have 3,500 years of war and destruction, okay? Ram, what are you seeing? What's changed in your career? So for me, I remember starting, when I started college, the first semester, we were still doing pay stubs. And I hated that so much. And then my department, which was a very small design department, we had this shiny box and it was an Apple computer. And I was extremely fascinated by it, because I didn't wanna do pay stubs anymore, but I really wanted to learn what this new device could do, what the computer could do. And it was pretty obvious that this was gonna be the direction that design was going in. I mean, there was no question about it. And so I just spent a lot of time figuring out how to use it in all the programs, all the software that we had installed on it. And I just fell in love with it. So I had one semester of pay stubs and then everything else became working on the computer. But I had those traditional values where I always started on paper with sketches and ideas. But I guess the biggest change I've seen is what happened there when I was in school up until now. I mean, I went through a magazine, an editorial career where it was very much print. And then we saw websites become a lot more advanced. And then all of the things that you could do through that interactive experience up until apps became really popular. And then the world started trying to figure out what to do with print and how to monetize the digital side of things. And there was a lot that was happening at the New York Times during that period. And it was pretty scary because you didn't know if you were gonna lose your job or be replaced by someone that had a lot of experience on the digital side. But everyone was kind of in the same boat. I mean, you may be four or five years ahead on the digital side, but all of these things were being invented as we worked in terms of what to do with it app when you're in journalism and that kind of thing. And when that shift started happening, when you're a designer, it's all about taste, it's all about design, tools or tools, platforms and platforms, you're gonna figure that out. I firmly believe that. But for me, it was where I decided to change my career was really about, hey, if I'm gonna be in the editorial world and I'm gonna become a design director that's working mostly on the digital side, maybe it's time to make a shift and really rethink my career and figure out what else is out there. So that's why I made the move because innovation was happening at such a fast pace. I felt like I wanted to be really a part of that. And when I had the opportunity to go to Apple, it was just, it made perfect sense. I would have loved for that job to be in New York, but I moved across the country. And so I think to answer your question, the biggest thing for me is just there's been such a huge evolution in design, but I also think there's a lot more opportunity than ever before because there's so many, there's so many platforms now for designers, way more than when I was coming up in my career. It was all the traditional print stuff, but now you can kind of do anything. It's pretty broad, but I think the same value still hold true. I still think that education is important and paying attention to typography and all the traditional things that we've been learning for years, I think that that's still important and it should not be ignored, it shouldn't go away. Graphic design is still important. Thank you, so glad. Form, color, type, balance, beautiful. So I have a couple of specific questions that I'm gonna ask Beatrice a question. You showed us some work using AR, which for old people like myself, I'm gonna translate that's augmented reality and I still have no idea what that means. So can you just explain what AR is and why? Why do we need this? And what's the potential for it? Yeah, definitely. I put a tool for people. So augmented reality is part of the extended reality family, which also includes virtual reality where you have to put on like a full headset. But what I love about AR is that it is reacting to the world around us. So we can have designs that react to printed materials, we can now have the technology that reacted different parts of the human body or to different physical structures in the world. And what I find personally just very exciting about this new technology is that it invites the viewer to be part of the design process. It becomes a conversation. It's no longer a static piece where we have to look at it and accept it the way it is. As I shared some of my work, maybe the color changes depending on your voice or maybe the text can change from one language, from one script to another, depending on where in the world we are. I think there's also just an immense untapped potential for accessibility, functionality, for people who are disabled, for people who might not be able to see, but then we can now include different forms of audio or for people who can't hear, we then can translate that into visuals. Can you explain how that would work? Cause like, basically I'm doing this with my phone, right? Then your images, you don't see the phone. So a person with a disability could point their phone at things and get information. It depends on the disability. I mean, Apple is going to be releasing their new headset come June, I think which is a huge advancement in the field and it's still very new. Like it's really cumbersome still, even with the phone and everything that we're doing. But so was all the technology we use today. And so yes, it's still large and cumbersome but I think in the next five or 10 years, it's going to become part of our everyday life and the way that we experience design in a way that's a lot more seamless and easier to understand. And you're sort of the pioneer. You're the elizizki. No, no, I wouldn't say that. I've had many great mentors and people like Zach Lieberman, Diaz Studio. So there's definitely many more people other than myself working in this field. But you're there at the beginning, figuring it out and creating a language for it. Yeah, it's amazing. And so Seymour, I'm stunned seeing your work of course always, but seeing it all together like that, just how fluidly you move between illustration and graphic design. And where I teach and in a lot of schools, these are two separate fields. There's graphic design, there's illustration. In fact, when I was a student at Cooper Union, my teacher said, we don't do illustration at Cooper Union, Parsons does that. And this was really like a mark of pride that we were constructivists, Swiss, modern heirs of the grid. And we would leave illustration to the kids over on 14th Street. In your work and in your view of the field, how do graphic design and illustration connect? And do they need each other? Are these separate industries or are they connected? It's certainly in your work, you can't pull them apart. Well, illustration can illustrate, but you also have to position it somewhere. You have to relate it to something that's going to be graphic on the material that it's going on, how it's used. That always has to be considered. They're just really related. It's a tight relationship between design and illustration. But for me, I love to draw. The thing is, I don't like to draw realistically. I want to go out and use my work somehow as part of the design and some sort of concept that I could develop. So in a poster, which is in our collection, by the way, with the bird who's marching, and it's a piece poster, you know the one that's in your slide deck. Can you just tell us how a poster like that is put together with the type and the image? It just seems so integrated. If not, you just put some type on top of a picture. It seems very holistic. No, you have to. You can think of the elements separately here, but then you have to have an idea in your head. What's the important thing? How much do you have to put in to get the idea? The message is always important. You can overdo it by saying too much. You can mess it up with all sorts of extraneous things. But then there's style in a while. So you have to sort of fit your idea, the message in the kind of style that you're doing. So if there are things going on in your heads at the same time here, when you're putting something together, I don't know how to do that. Most people don't. It's like, I feel like the challenge with illustration is you can't just put Helvetica on top of it. The text somehow has to be illustrated too, like in your hell book that you showed how the image and the text are completely suffering together for all eternity in the most beautiful way. That's really amazing, so thank you. Thank you for that work. So Ram, I have a question for you. Creative director, I get what a director is. What makes it creative? What exactly is a creative director? All my students want to do that because they think they won't have to do all the typography anymore and enter corrections and to documents and scan things. So what do you do? What is it? Magical job. Well, I think how it's defined is dependent on the platform, but how I define it is something that's earned through a lot of time and practice. It is thrown around a lot in terms of people using that. I'm a creative director, but for me it's in what I do, it's running a really big organization, a team of people and being able to balance between multiple projects and selling ideas, creating ideas that'll work for whatever the brief is, and being able to articulate ideas and projects and needs to different audiences. I don't just work with creatives all day. Audiences within the company? Within the company, yeah. So you have a lot of different people that you present to and work with and you kind of have to know, if you will, those languages between the kind of brief or conversation I have with creatives versus people on the business side or strategy or producers. All of that applies to what I do. So in a nutshell, a creative director is someone who leads the creative but also keeps all of the trains on the track and makes sure that what we put out in the world, it has a cohesive vibe to it, but also it looks great and it communicates well. And I just think a creative director is something that you kind of evolve to if you're interested in managing people and looking at things from a holistic perspective. I think it can be a great experience for people, but it's not for everyone, you know? It's the top, right? You're at the top of the field. Yeah, well. You're the boss of everybody. No, not of everyone, but yeah. There's a lot of management involved in being a creative director. If someone says they're a creative director and they don't have a team under them, then. Faking it. Yeah, they're faking it, yeah. They're not legit. So the next time someone says that to me in a cocktail bar, they'll still exist, well. Yeah. I'll just say, well, how many people work for you? Yeah, exactly. You'll know right away. How many reports do you have? Isn't that the new lingo? And then how many reports do your reports have? It's a pretty big work. There's a lot of layers, for sure. Yeah. Well, impressive, exciting. So let me bring it down to a more intimate place, which is education. And Beatrice, I'm just amazed by what you're doing, teaching people how to do AR, which now I understand what that is. And I'd love to hear more about your experience in Mexico City and sharing this technology, bringing it to life. And why is that so important to you? You have an amazing career yourself. Why teach other people? Yeah, definitely. Well, to me, I think I just always feel so grateful to have gotten this far in my career. I'm very open about being a first-generation college student coming from a working-class background. And so coming from a home where my parents didn't even get to go to middle school, it's always very obvious to me that even though if I have won an award or I get something, that there is hundreds, or maybe even thousands of people out there who are just as talented, who are just as hardworking, but just don't have those same opportunities. So that's what I wanna strive for, to sort of close that gap and give more people those opportunities, even if it means that we will get less awards. And I think that's completely fine with me. And so, especially with Mexico, I think the more that I've made connections in Mexico and just new friends, it became really obvious to me that there's this huge disparity, even more so for myself growing up in the Midwest, seeing all of the resources people have here in New York, and then comparing that to people in Mexico, it just becomes an exponential difference. So I'm really interested in working together to sort of close that gap as well. And I think also I just feel very privileged to be, I would say somewhat bilingual thanks to the efforts of my parents. And so finding ways to put that to use and give back to my own culture and community that I love very much. Beautiful, thank you for doing that work. I have an education question for you, Seymour. So many, many years ago, you were a student at Cooper Union. In the 1950s. And this museum, this very museum was located in your school on the fourth floor of the foundation building, which is now a wood shop, if there's any other alums here who have been in the wood shop. Do you remember the museum being at Cooper Union and did it have any impact on you? Very little. Are we doing better now, I hope? I remember a lot of glass cases. What was in those cases? Bracelets of jewelry and stuff, old stuff. And the place was pretty stuffy. So he stayed away. Well, sometimes I stop. Did you ever walk through those cases glittering in the dusty sunlight and think, someday I will be a design visionary honored by this very museum? It makes me feel terrible. What an awful person I am. No respect. We still have a lot of jewelry and silverware and ceramics that are beautiful and important. We also have amazing posters by Seymour Croft and other great designers and so much to offer. But our history goes back to Cooper Union and I think that's kind of cool that you were there. And so is the museum. Doing its thing, changing and growing. So I have one more specific question for Ram and then I wanna see what questions y'all have in the audience. And so my question for you, Ram, is that some time ago you redesigned GQ Magazine and you commissioned two graphic, two typeface designers, Jonathan Heffler and Tobias Farrah-Jones to create a sans-serif typeface for GQ. That was called GQ Gotham. What happened next? And why does a magazine need a custom typeface? Like is that really worth it? I didn't pay for it so it didn't come out of my pocket. But yeah, so what you have in the world now is Gotham but at the time it was, when we commissioned it it was GQ Gotham and we licensed it for GQ specifically for two years, no three years I think, before it became Gotham and then anyone could pick it up as you do with typefaces. And the importance of it at the time was we were looking for a really versatile sans-serif typeface that could be a workhorse, it could be elegant, it could be bold and it needed to have a lot of function it needed to have a lot of function to it. So there were a lot of different weights and we used it for big splashy headlines but also for things as small as captions. And the importance of having a design typeface like that, that GQ only could use was for branding purposes. It gave the magazine an identity so that when we always said that if a page ripped out of the magazine and you found it on the street you would know that it came from GQ Magazine and part of that is branding and typefaces that you use and obviously the style of design as well but the purpose of it was to give the magazine a unique language and look. Cool. Yeah, and it was a fun project. It became a pretty famous typeface. It became pretty famous, it did, it grew legs. Yeah, I wish I had a piece of that action. There were some fights over that but we won't get into it. So I'd love to have some questions from the audience for our amazing panel and we have a microphone that's gonna go around the room so we can capture your voice for our online public and for everyone in the room to be able to hear you. Thanks so much. Hi, really great to hear everybody talk. I was wondering, since this is about generational kind of communication design and that sort of thing, what does everybody think about the diminishing of the guild? And when I say guild I think you kind of touched on it before as technology advances it removes kind of like the idea of a gatekeeper, right? And so anybody can say I'm a photographer, I'm a creative director, I'm a this and that versus at one point you needed a guild to say you are a creative director, you are a photographer and what do you guys feel about this kind of as time progresses and as technology advances just kind of like that removing of the gatekeeper or that idea of the guild? Yeah, that's the interesting answer. I think there are some positives to that in terms of opening the doors and making our field more accessible. At the end of the day I think the work still needs to speak for itself. Like you could call yourself whatever you wanna call yourself but if the work doesn't match then you're probably the only one that's calling yourself that. I think it's great actually, especially for photographers. You know, coming up in the magazine world I didn't see a lot of black photographers for instance or female photographers. You know, the gatekeepers were usually white men that ran photo agencies and the portfolios that they put out into the world that they would send to me back when websites weren't as popular. They were all white men. So that's what I had exposure to. What I love now about social media is you could have a photographer that's, and this has happened. I mean, we've commissioned photographers that are 20 years old that are still at students at NYU or whatever the case. Maybe we find them on Instagram. You know, they're putting their work out there now. They don't need to your point some gatekeeper telling them they're not good enough or their work isn't good enough or no one would wanna use it in a professional manner. Now corporations, creative directors, designers, we can all see their work, hear their voice and then commission them directly without the middle person. So I love that. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you can call yourself whatever you want but it doesn't mean that you're gonna have success in it. But I like the exposure that it gives because now I can find great people without it being curated in advance. Yeah. Great, beautiful question. Thank you. I have a question for Beatrice. I wanted to hear more about how you started thinking about accessibility and in terms of education, how you went about building that bridge for educational resources with your people. Yeah, for me, I think it was always just a very, it just felt like it was so entwined with all of my educational efforts. And I think partially, one, English isn't my first language even though it is my dominant language. So I still very much have memories of not being able to speak English in school. And then once I moved out to New York, I began having coworkers who were immigrants from other countries and then seeing the way that they were treated for maybe speaking with an accent or not being able to interact with others on a team. And it just really made me open my eyes to the importance of accessibility for people from different cultures who speak different languages. And it's something that I hope to continue working on for the rest of my career. I mean, I'm only bilingual. I can only speak English and Spanish, but I hope to find collaborators in the future who are also bilingual or speak other languages who can then reach back to their own communities as well. Probably a cliche question, but I feel like this always comes up around this time. What do you guys think will be the impact of AI on the design industries going forward? Do you want to try that one? Sure, I have no idea. No, I think that... As a creative director, do you consider that as a talent pool to... Use in your campaigns to sell stuff? I think it's more around, you know, and I think it is a little unpredictable right now, but what I'm seeing is that it's a tool that designers can use to... Because all of us know that there is a process in graphic design. And there's the big, beautiful, shiny stuff, but then there's all the technical stuff that goes into it in advance, and a lot of it is production-related. So I think AI will have a huge impact on that, where it'll make us, as designers, way more efficient and maybe eliminate a lot of the work that is hugely technical and not always fun. When you're up all night doing those kinds of systems, it can be grueling. So hopefully AI will have impact on that so that we can continue working on the big idea and just creating more awesome stuff and not having to spend a lot of time or as much time on the production side of it. That was not apocalyptic. Yeah. Do you have any other responses to AI concerns? I mean, I feel like I still can't fully wrap my mind around what it will become or how it will impact our work, but I still have a lot of faith in humanity. I think the closest thing we can compare it to is the internet. So obviously there's some negative things that have come along with the internet, but I think the positive outweighs it. I think even with AI in the augmented reality course I taught online, I taught my students how to use chat GPT AI to help create their design. So they were using AI to create AR. And the reason I did that is that it was only a five-week class and the majority of the students there didn't know how to code. And so in order to code, you need to invest hundreds of hours. And by now using this one tool, you can eliminate that barrier. And now anybody who might have not had that luxury of time before can now create designs that are much more interactive and much more refined. So I hope to see more, I think use cases like that. I mean, I think unfortunately there will be some negatives, but I think it doesn't really help for us to focus on that for too long. Not apocalyptic either. Thank you. I'm feeling great. Good. Other questions? Hey, good evening everybody. Thanks for being here today. Given the fact that we're talking about communication design over the course of many generations, one question that comes to mind for me that I would love to hear everyone's insight about is their career pivot. Oftentimes we're really highlighting and honoring the work, the grueling hours that we've put into said work. But it's all the back end work of, you know, around you touched on going from editorial design to creative director work, Beatrice, you were an engineer, then went into design. It's those pivots that I'm, not only can I relate to, but I'm enthralled with. I'm seeing where I'd love to hear if you had a career pivot or a pivotal moment in your design career. So the question overall is can each of you sort of share as concise as you could that pivotal moment that helped you make strides in your design career? Who wants to start? Grab that. A pivot. A switch. A sudden move. It all melts together. It's all one, sort of all flows whether it's from poster design to illustration, right? To graphic design to doing logos. One flows into the other. And this, we work on this thing while we see what other people are doing and try to use some of that, but still make it your own. Well, Seymour, you know, one of the things, you're very unique in the way that a lot of designers can't illustrate in the way that you do and combine their work together. Was there ever a moment in your career where you felt like you needed to decide? For instance, did you start doing more illustration than design work and then pivoted to doing both? Or did you always have both in your? Yeah, well, I thought I was just going to be a cartoonist until I had a teacher in high school who told me about design, his name was Leon Friend. And I learned about poster design there and I got a little excited about it. And I wanted to learn more. It became graphic design. Yeah, he's one of the people that invented that. That's a thing. No, I'm serious, the guy has a book I bought in on eBay. It's a title graphic design. Yeah, it was published in the 30s. Yeah. So he was already like really an authority on this thing that nobody knew what it was, but he did and he told you and a bunch of other people. Yeah, graphic design. And his book is awesome, right? Your high school teacher wrote a book about graphic design. Before anybody knew what that word was. Right? Yeah. So talk to me, I'll sell you my copy. Yeah. A pivot, the interest. Well, I think life is too short to do something that you are fully happy doing. And I think when they started engineering, it wasn't that I was necessarily unhappy. I think there's still so much about that field that I still love and still incorporate in all of my work. But as Ellen mentioned, when I became involved with activism, I just started off by volunteering to make posters or teaching myself how to make a website because we needed a petition signed. And maybe just because I'm a very impatient person, seeing the instant reaction from designing one poster, how they can get 100 people out to March or designing a website and get hundreds to sign a petition just overnight was just incredibly rewarding and just seeing people interact with design in a way that engineering was never able to give to me because you're working on a really small part for a really long time that might never be released. And I'm very grateful for all the engineers out there. Just wasn't for me. We're glad you pivoted. Yeah, I think it's important to, a pivot doesn't mean that you're on the path to becoming a creative director. I think, because not everyone wants to do that, but I think being open to this large creative world that we're in and really being curious, I think that's the most important thing, and not being afraid to try something new. Like if you love animation or if you love, if you're interested in being a film director, whatever the case may be, all of those things are part of the creative space. And I think that it's important for us to have the courage to make the pivot as you stated and learn something new and not be afraid of that because it can be hugely rewarding. And I don't think anyone should be doing the same thing their entire career. You have to expand and evolve. That's hugely important. So I think that fear is okay, but once it starts to be something that absorbs you and keeps you from moving forward, then that's the issue. I'm gonna take one more question for the audience and I'm gonna pivot to my final question for my panelists. Thank you. Okay, it's gone. I think my question is for RM. As a creative director, I think you need to know a lot of hats, like wrap it up. I think that's a misconception that you have to be a jack of all trades and know everything there is to know about interactive design or everything you need to know about user interface design. Whatever the case may be, I think it really all comes down to just design and how we communicate and how we put out messaging. So if you're lucky enough to work at a company that has resources, usually you have people that are experts at those different things and then you just have to trust them. As a creative director, it's really about just guiding that work to get it to a place where it's ready to be introduced to the world. But I never pretend to go in, when I go into a room, I never pretend like I know more than an interactive team. There's some of the best in the world, I trust them. And I usually just kind of articulate my vision around what it is I'm looking for or we have that discussion together and we meet in the commonality of whatever the brief is. But just like a music producer, a music producer may not know how to play a guitar and drums and all of that, but they have an eye and an ear for things and they know how to put it all together. It's kind of the same thing. Wow, I think now I understand what it is. That did it. I get it. That's amazing, thank you. Thanks for that question. I want to ask each of our panelists just to offer some advice to designers entering the field or exiting the field. You know, what should we be doing? I think, at least for me, I think it's important to challenge yourself, to try and learn something new with every project, as well as create work that excites you. The work that you put out is the kind of work you're going to continue to attract. So if you're miserable at your job or you're not really getting the kind of work that you want, that's why personal projects are so important. They're just like really putting out the work that you would love to be hired for. And I think also just like letting go of that fear of striving for perfectionism and just putting your work out. I think especially on social media, I often tell my students, you know, it's very rare. If not, it's probably impossible that somebody will ever stumble upon your website. That's your first name, lastname.com, but they can find you on social media. And I think even sharing sketches, you know, you'll find like-minded people as opposed to trying to strive for perfection and isolation. Wow, that is really hardcore advice. Thank you. Seymour, what can you give us here? Well, in the beginning, you want to do everything and then you zero in what you want. And you find that there's people out there who like your work and could use it. And make sure that it's the kind of stuff that you want to do, right? You want to make yourself happy while you're making your clients happy. That's all. It's a happy business. That's great. Thank you. I want to be happy. I am, actually. Rem, you get the last word here. Yeah. I think it's important to understand that what we do is a passion. You know, I have a lot of friends that maybe, you know, they work in finance or they may be an attorney and they always say to me, you know, you're very lucky to be able to do something that's probably not every day or something that you consider a job. You know, it's not a nine to five. You know, we're not going to become rich doing this, you know, as a graphic designer, but I don't think that's any of our goals. It's really about, you know, being passionate about something. And the beautiful thing about design is there are so many ways that you can use it, not only in your profession, but activism and really get messaging out in the world that'll hopefully create some change. And I just feel, I feel personally that I'm very lucky and blessed to be doing something that I love so much and sometimes it even feels like a hobby. You know, it's this kind of beautiful fusion between what I do to make a living and what I think about a lot and what makes me happy. So, you know, if you're finding yourself in a place that you're not happy, most likely it's your job and where you're working. So, I think it's important to really find your voice and create work that you believe in to your point whether it's a personal project or it's a company that'll allow you to do that and I think that's where you'll find your joy. But you shouldn't be miserable as a graphic designer. You know, save that for the engineers, right? Yes, totally. Jokey, kidding, kidding. And if you're miserable, you are never, ever gonna win a National Design Award. Okay, you gotta love it to get this prize and stay at it. It might take a long time to get the prize or here you are. So, that's amazing. Thank you so much. I will never forget tonight. This is history here.