 Yng nghymru, mae'r grannu graffics yng nghymru. Mae'n ni'n i wneud o hynny, rwy'n ei ddweud fydd eich clas, oherwydd mae'n roedd eich clas arall y symest. Mae'r clas ei ddweud yng nghymru, yng Nghymru, a'r bobl yw'r gwirio gweithio mewn gwirio, a dyfodd o'u cyfrifiad graffics, ac yn mycoroc. Yn gweithio'r gwirio, yna'r gwirio yng nghymru o ran sefydliadau, a dŵr cychwynethau a'r cinnolaeth a'r effectws o gwneud hynnywn am gallu amddangos o'r amddangos a'r diogam, o'r llwydd, o'r berthynars, o'r f Westfyn, o'r ffongio y gallu cerdyn fosieis ac i'rymog o'r темos ar y gweithio cyflau, i gyd ysgrifennu i yma i ddysgu o'r holl o'r yma yng ngilytio yn y cyfliadau. Graffics project is anual series of lectures, discussions and portfolio reviews exploring the role of graphic design within the field of architecture. The goal is to examine various methods of visual communication used to convey concepts to both the specialist and the general audience. A short term, a more immediate goal is to help and inspire you to think strategically about how you put your portfolios together, as you know, is a graduation requirement here at GSAP. But a more longer term goal and arguably a more important one, I think, is to provoke ways of thinking about visual presentation as a larger overarching concept with some longevity. Something you'll have to contend with as professional architects throughout your careers. So these series of events aim to help students build successful graduation portfolio while simultaneously unpacking the topics, tours and trends of contemporary design. Over the next weeks, we'll investigate the minutia of glyphs and grids all the way up to structures and style, ranging from concrete concepts to perhaps more sort of grander, elusive ones. You can refer to the Graphics Projects page on the GSAP website. There's lots of acronyms going on. Website for the scheduled events. All events happen between 1 and 6pm. So tomorrow will be Michael Rock from 2x4 presenting at 1, Tom Griffith from Everything Studio presenting at 3. Sunday is Juliette's Parsons. Greg Gazduwitz of Commercial Type, Dan Michelson of Link Bayer. A studio that's responsible for the GSAP website that you guys are currently using and refer to every day. Next week, we offer a couple of sessions of portfolio reviews for graduating students. So sign up sheets in the back over there on the tables for you to use. If you are interested in signing up, make sure that you sign up for two sessions with group A and group B. And make sure that the times don't collide because you can't be in two places at the same time. I also want to thank Forest Jessie, who has been the former director of the series Graphics Project, for laying down Solid Foundation for the series to help me to have inherited his commitment throughout the last few years have not gone unnoticed. And of course, thank you to all the speakers and reviewers who have agreed to share a portion of their precious weekends with us. So to kick off the series, we start with lectures and discussions called Architecture Unbound. Tonight's discussion is between three New York-based designers, Yejju Choi, Neil Donnelly and Alex Lin. They're here to share a selection of their recent works. While active and prolific in diverse content areas, all three designers have experience engaging very closely with architectural content, assuming multivalent roles as designer, researcher, editor, strategist and so on. Each speaker will present and discuss projects they've completed in collaboration with storied studios and institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Cambridge Arts Council, OMA, WXY, WRKC, Moss Architects, AIGA New York and, of course, Columbia GSAP. We'll have the opportunity to learn about the individual methods of dealing with issues such as typography, materiality and production, as well as the general practice of giving form to content and building a narrative through graphic design. So I introduced the three speakers that are here today. Our first speaker, Yejju Choi, is a designer and educator based in New York City. She runs a small multidisciplinary design studio called Nowhere Office, focusing on projects in the public and cultural realm across various mediums including printed matter identities, websites, installations, as well as community-based public art projects. Previously, she's held positions as a design director at WXY and art director at Barney's New York. She received her BFA from Soul National University and MFA from Yale. She has been teaching at the graphic design department at Yale School of Arts since 2013. Our second speaker is Neil Donnelly. He works in graphic design across media with clients in architecture, publishing and public service. His studio has a particular interest in designing flexible structures and systems that grow out of conceptual thinking and encourage deep engagement with content. They aim to surprise and delight readers, users and visitors through careful consideration of materials, typography and interactions. Clients include the Guggenheim, the Met, Cooper Hewet, Wark AC, Harvard University, The New York Times and so on. Neil has lectured talk courses and led workshops at Yale School of Art, Harvard, GSD, Parsons, Micah, SVA, Rockers and other institutions. He holds a BS in engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in graphic design from Yale. Finally, our last speaker, Alex Lin, is the founder of Studio Lin based in New York City, a graphic design studio that designs books, identities, websites for local and international clients. The current studio Lin team is Jenna Myung, Sharon Gong, Yijun Zhu and Louis Kong. So I will hand over the mic to our first speaker, Yiju Choi. Oh, thank you, Yoon Jae. So I know I'm here to talk about 3D in 2D sort of, right? But my presentation may seem more about 2D in 3D, but I promise I'll make a point why that's relevant and important and maybe interesting. So I'm still talking about graphic design or books, but I would like to focus on a rather specific aspect in thinking about books. So this is, of course, about the fact that a book is a physical, tangible object to be experienced, but also because it exists in the three-dimensional world as a thing, there are all these other things around it which inevitably becomes part of the experiencing of a book. I'm talking about the audience who's having that experience, the context that the experience is happening in, the perspective through which the audience sees the thing, both in a physical sense and otherwise. Tectility would be another thing or temporality, so things like that. Well, it is by no means a new or unique way of thinking about books, rather it is inherent in the design process, at least I think so. Before I go further on that, I would like to show you some of my projects, old and new, and maybe that's helpful in understanding what I mean by thingness. So for the past 10 years or so, I have worked somewhere in between architecture, graphic design, urban design, and planning in many different capacities by that I mean sometimes actually creating something that is actually spatial, structural, such as this public art project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that integrates art into urban infrastructure. It's a little video. So employing colors and patterns and these sort of ambiguous three-dimensional structures, it encourages people to interact with their everyday, mundane environment in a more active, creative way. Or sometimes creating temporary urban interventions like this. This is in lower aside or was it's taken down. As you can see, I'm kind of interested in playing with perspective and distortion and illusion that it makes. And this project is specifically really about rethinking what fence could be other than something that divides space into two. Can it be where people actually gather? Can it be something that you interact with and touch? Or creating a temporary space where community members communicate with each other? In this case, expressing gratitude towards people who help them after Hurricane Sandy. Some of the things from that space. Or sometimes actually just collecting stories about disappearing places or a sense of place, making it into an archive or interactive audio tour, I would say, as part of a bigger place making project. This is a really old project. Or sometimes using or subverting an existing architectural space to create a new sensory experience. Lastly, of course, making books about places, between places, place making, built environment and lives within that built environment, issues, planning. And this is another small publication documenting dialogues around public space in New York City. So here the quotes on the left side are organized by the issues and themes in planning and color coded along the gutter. Which you can kind of see here in the center fold with an infographics of timeline of the milestone projects. This is another planning document in two different formats. The one with the red spiral bound is a more comprehensive document for stakeholders and partners. And then the larger tabloid format is the condensed more accessible document for the general public in two different languages. Another planning document about process from 2014. OK, so I would like to talk about two or one or two if I have time projects in more details and kind of to circle back to the theme of this talk, the thingness. First is an identity project, which is perhaps the longest project that I have been working on with the New York based architecture and planning firm WXY. In a way it's still ongoing. Unlike many other identity or branding projects where you design the whole system and kind of roll it out simultaneously through different mediums, this project actually started in one medium for a very specific occasion. In 2010, I believe, the firm was invited to participate in this exhibition in Seoul, Korea, where we had a small booth space, which is tiny. They decided to show only one bench, which barely fit in the space, so we decided to take the modules apart and use the reflective material I believe that was mylar. To virtually extend the bench in the space. It's like a big convention hall. There are a lot of booths with signage, a lot of boards, a lot of information. I wanted to make a space that's just where people can just sit and have conversations or just take some rest and just experience the bench. But one kind of sneaky thing that I did, instead of having any signage, there was to have this newspaper format brochure, whatever you call it, available in the space, so people would naturally pick it up and open it in the space. So the size of this is crucial because I wanted it to be almost like a moving signage, right? So it has to be visible from far away. And also if you think about how people interact with a bigger scale publication versus a small book, because newspaper, you have to hold it up so that the face, the front face is visible to others. So the name of the firm, at this point, that wasn't even a logo, that was just part of the design of this publication. It's placed vertically along the spine and fold to highlight the mirroring, the symmetry, connecting to what we were doing in the space. But then the idea of having this built-in but invisible axis or the hinge became the core of the identity of WXY. These are business cards. I think I designed this maybe two or three years after the installation. I thought it represented WXY pretty well and had a lot of potential because, well, it has the inherent three-dimensional or structural potential. And it has to be activated by the user, right? You have to open it. It reveals the medium or the physicality of the medium it's on. And also it also makes you realize your own perspective because the form changes drastically based on your point of view. And of course being folded means that there's something more to be revealed inside. And I was simply also just excited about the fact that you can place your business card kind of upright during meetings or whatever, like a tiny little structure. You can have one with it. And the website, again, I made this probably two years after the business cards. In this case, of course, you cannot really fold the screen, right? But you can reveal the center line in a different way. And you use that center line to organize information. In this case, on the left side of the logo is all firm information. The right side is all projects. This is, I guess, pretty recent. A portfolio showcasing their 10 projects. Some interior shots. But still playing with the changing form here. Same idea, tote bag. I mean, a tote bag is flat when you're designing it. But then in real life, depending on what's in the bag, it changes the form. And also depending on how you're carrying it. Lastly, this is their office. And I should mention that I actually didn't do this. They put this up recently. And it kind of made me happy that after just like relentlessly pushing this idea for maybe seven or eight years, they finally got it and they were using it in the way that I wanted them to use. But again, I'm showing this simplest sort of piece of graphic design. But when placed in the real world, it takes on such flexible and multi-dimensional lives. Especially if you consider that and kind of engage that in your design process. And I thought I should talk about this because I'm here. This is published by GSAP also. How am I doing on the time? So a lot of the things that I mentioned so far were very important in designing this book. I'm sure if I have kind of explained that well, you kind of see what I'm talking about. That's why I'm showing the book in a different, in many different way from many different angles. So I should mention the idea of change or elevation was very important. Something that I really wanted to bring out to the very fore in a kind of in-your-face way. This is a very poorly made video and you'll see it. So the gradation of the two colors also changes throughout the book. As well as of course along the all four edges, the color changes. So it looks different depending on your own perspective. I kind of wanted to show the flow of the book. So this idea of thing is I mean I have shown you examples mostly how that's manifested in the very sort of outermost surface. But really what I'm trying to say is that is something that you could or should think about when even organizing your information or doing your layout. What's the most efficient way of communicating certain ideas? What's the narrative? All based on whatever specific context that you're in or where you're going to show your book in. Yeah. I don't know. Was that helpful? I think that's it. So hi. I'm Neil. Thank you very much to Yun Jae for asking me to be a part of this. And also it's a real privilege to be here with Yejoo and Alex. So I run a small, very small studio in Brooklyn. And it's me and one of the designer Ben Furman Lee who has contributed significantly to a couple of the projects that I'm going to talk about today. But mostly we work with clients in art and architecture and it tends to be people who are interested in ideas and are specifically coming to us because they're interested in the ideas that graphic design can add to their content or that can enhance it in some way. And one of those ways that we often think about our ideas is and kind of work them out is through structure. And structure is both a way of organizing material but also I think for us often has like an expressive possibility. That it can kind of do something more than just organize. That it can kind of complicate or enhance or kind of say something about the themes in the work that the material itself maybe can't say. So there are four projects of ours that I want to talk about. But before getting into those I want to go back to Joseph Muller Brockman from 1981. This is from his book Grid Systems and Graphic Design which has long been one of my favorite images just because of its, the expression of the kind of like utterly neurotic modernist. Like this entire environment can be boiled down into a really relentless grid to the degree that even like the recessed lighting in the ceiling is part of the grid. To me it just seems, well I mean if anyone who's designed an exhibition sort of knows that this is total nonsense but I think I'm kind of more interested than that way of thinking about structure. More interested in someone like Seal Fleuer who's an artist who's among other things been doing this project for a very long time called Helix. Which is just about using this Helix circle template for drawing circles of very specific diameters but then using it as a frame for a collection of other objects. So she gathers these things that really have no business being together other than just that they all fit exactly into these holes. And similarly I think Martino Gamper, a furniture designer who did a project called 100 Chairs in 100 Days and It's 100 Ways. In which he kind of set himself to the task of making 100 chairs in 100 days but not by designing 100 chairs from scratch but rather taking pieces of different chairs and just kind of slamming them together to get these sort of mongrel pieces of furniture. And I think it's also worth considering some words from Anthony Frostog, a British designer from the 1970s, from an essay of his called Design as an Exercise in Analogy. Now you can't make an analogy between two ideas which you have no property in common. You can't make things fit which aren't in them to fit. Indeed it's the tragedy if I can use so high-flown a word of most design that the so-called solution has no reference to the requirements of the situation. Not just that it's badly designed but that it's so to say quite beside the point irrelevant. It's often the result of a designer seeing another designer's idea and being excited by it trying to fit his meaning into an idea, a form which is quite inappropriate. So, you know, while we're concerned with structure, I think it's structure that kind of grows out of some larger ideas related to the material we're working with, at least that's usually the goal. So I'm going to talk about four projects. The first of them is a book for Work AC. We'll get there when we cross that bridge, which was their first monograph. This is a project that I was working with them on for maybe a year and a half, and they had been thinking about and working on for much, much longer than that. And it was, I think, important to Dan and Amal to create a book that expressed something about their practice beyond just showing the work itself. And they had been referring to the book for a very long time as a duograph and not a monograph, as kind of a combination of their two voices. And that plays out very literally in the text of the book. You know, it's actually a kind of bracingly honest text, especially for an architecture monograph about their practice and the ups and downs. And it's a discussion between the two of them. And so that duality kind of provides a structure for the book. But there are a couple of other structures at work here, and both of which you can actually see along the fore edge of the book. The book is divided into three eras, which are each indicated by three different fluorescent colors. And then also within those eras, there are 10 main projects that are kind of explored in depth, followed by an issues section that is kind of a larger idea that relates to the particular project that precedes it. And so the main projects are like a quarter inch shorter than the issues sections. So you get this kind of stair step on the fore edge that gives the reader a very physical sense to go back to Yejoo's thingness of the divisions in the book. And so each of these three eras or five-year plans, as Amal and Dan took to calling them, kind of explain the issues and ups and downs of each of these five years. So the first called, say yes to everything. Second, make no medium-sized plans. And third, stuff the envelope. And each of these sections are introduced with kind of more personal photographs and photos that are emblematic of the office culture and family and cakes that look like buildings. And then moving into the project sections, there's kind of a dichotomy in the structure between the projects and the issues and that the projects are kind of presented fairly traditionally and straightforwardly. Lots of big colorful images, sensible grids. And then the issues section that follows it breaks form from those sections by using different typography. And they're much kind of looser and wilder than the project sections with type kind of running around up and down between images. And so this sense of back and forth or kind of front of house and back of house was something that seemed very important to this project and finding a way to kind of squeeze them all into the same surface. And at the end of the project, I went back and looked at one of the earliest pieces of material that came out of it, which was this diagram that Dan and Amal had made when we were first working on this that kind of divided the projects up into these sections and the kind of alternating main project and issues sections. And I think this just as an artifact is a pretty, is quite fitting actually for the book that we ended up making just in that it's this very orderly thing, but then my chicken scratch handwriting kind of spilling out all over it. But also it kind of was nice to go back to this to see that a lot of the things that were important to us from the very beginning kind of ended up being integral parts of the book and that kind of survived until the end of the process. And then I thought it might also be instructive to show the book map that we were working with. In addition to the kind of material and production decisions that I was talking about, there's also two different paper stocks. So the main projects are on a coded paper and the rest of the book is on a coded paper. And when you do that, you kind of have to figure out as we kind of end up spending a lot of our time doing like how to structure things into an appropriate number of pages for signatures of each different kind of paper. And a signature being a kind of gathered collection of 16 or so pages. So yeah, I think most designers who make books kind of end up creating things like this that I think have a very kind of architectural plan view quality in order to just kind of organize their structures. Architectures All Over is another book that we did with Columbia Books on Architecture in the City, the good books up here on the fourth floor. And this is a book that was edited by Esther Choi and Marika Trotter and central to the book as they say in their introduction is the idea of architecture at the turn of the century being subject to both diminishment and ubiquity simultaneously. And that kind of like multivalent binary is something that we wanted to really kind of fundamentally address in the design of the book in certain ways. And so one of the ways that we did that was creating these typefaces that are never quite forward or backward. They kind of operate in both directions. The counters are flipped in each of the letters that has one so that there's something about it that's always backwards or forwards. We also have these title pages which on the back of the leaf the title appears backwards and on the other side of the leaf it's forwards. It's always black when it's kind of reading right and fluorescent ink on the backside when it's backwards. And then the same thing happens with the images. So the images are just black and white on one side but then on the other side appear in reverse in fluorescent ink kind of running under the text. And so it creates this kind of texture that runs through the entire book where something is kind of like a kind of ghost presence of an image is interfering with content that may or may not be related to it. So as much as this is like a very rigid structure there's something about it that's also kind of destabilizing or maybe a little bit potentially unwelcome. Although we did a lot of tests to make sure that legibility of the text over the fluorescent was good enough. There also are a few different grids we're using for a few different types of content so there's another kind of flexibility in the structure there as well. Princeton Public Library, we did signage for the second floor of this space. It was renovated last year by Andrew Berman Architect. The building itself is not that old. It was probably from the early 2000s. But already the library started to realize that the second floor wasn't quite serving 21st century patrons in the way that it should be. And so Andrew and his team really opened up the space and brought a lot more light into it and changed the kind of circulation through the space and large part by pushing the stacks and the collection kind of to the walls like making the walls out of the books essentially. So in terms of the signage we wanted to both kind of use the architecture as a substrate to not have lots of extraneous plaques floating around but also to kind of take advantage of this idea of information and knowledge as physical structure. And we made a distinction within the structure of the signage itself between collection related signage and room naming and directional signage. So anything related to the collection runs vertically in the same orientation that the type does on the spine of a book and uses a monospace typeface that's kind of from the world of the labels that you see on the spines of library books and check out cards. And then a complimentary sans serif typeface horizontally for all room naming and directional signs. There also are these little fins that are on the shelves that divide larger categories into smaller categories that the librarians took to calling shelf talkers. And so those kind of also follow the convention of running in the same direction as the collection information. There also are a number of kind of moments of larger signage like print and copy which needed to be seen from like down the hall so we made it enormous. And then some more subtle enormous type on the glass. And then lastly in the study rooms which are these little rooms that can be reserved by patrons. These rooms are all glass and so the librarians needed a way to both provide privacy for patrons but not too much privacy so that unsavory things could end up happening in there. So what we ended up doing here was kind of creating this custom film made up of a texture of letters and the letters are actually just the sequence of letters on a computer keyboard. And so there's a kind of translucency to the film that kind of provides privacy for those inside but also allows a view into the room from the outside. And then we use the opposite strategy on the surfaces that needed to have more transparency as distraction graphics. And the last project I want to talk about is a website for Keller Easterling. And in Keller's work you know both her writing and her teaching and her design language is very important. She has a very particular vocabulary that always manifests itself in her work and it seems really crucial to latch onto that and to kind of use that as the basis somehow of the structure of the site. And so the homepage when you first visit the site is kind of mostly blank other than a list of categories that seem fairly typical for a portfolio website. But then as you click those categories and start to reveal some content you notice that additional terms start to get added to the navigation. So tags that are associated in kind of Keller's particular lexicon with these entries then as you view them get added to this list. So the more content you reveal the more terms get added to the navigation. And there's also a search function so you can perhaps search for pandas and actually get a few results. And then your search term also gets added to that list so it can become completely a list that's both customizable but also the structure of the list kind of reveals the traces of your path as you move through the website. There are also some things that happen only as a result of inactivity. So if you're not using the site for a while some things start to pop up like magazine covers and certification seals and webcams from all over the world. But then as soon as you interact with the site again they all just disappear. And then the last feature is that the only way that you can see all of the tags on the site is to go to the error page. So it's kind of like a trap door in the site and in the way that you kind of have to go somewhere that doesn't exist in order to see everything. That's it. Thank you. Thanks to you Jay for inviting me to come and talk about Studio Lin's work. Studio Lin is me and two or three other designers and we do a lot of work with architects and artists and industrial designers and architects and a lot of other creative people. So one project that I want to talk about is some in house print on demand material for OMA in New York. And so we started working with them early last year. And basically it's really hard to talk to show because he's so busy. He's always like you know in some other country. And so I felt like I really needed to understand his way of thinking and the way the office thinks. So basically I watched every one of his YouTube videos and I learned a lot. And I think I learned more than if I had spent an hour with them in a meeting. So after kind of understanding OMA in New York and trying to decipher his way of thinking, we wanted to come up with some qualities for these publications. So basically the office has a list of 100 plus projects and they need a way to document these projects in small booklets. And so these small booklets can be used internally because if they want to educate like a new architect on a project, they can just hand them this booklet or if they have clients that need to understand certain projects, they can give them these booklets. So the kind of two main qualities that we came up with that the booklets needed to kind of portray were this idea of this brutal plus beautiful. So that was like one important quality that the graphics needed to convey as well as this idea of rigor, something being rigorous. So this is this list that they showed us at every meeting and it was really scary. There's a lot of content, there's a lot of different categories, there's a lot of different dates. So the kind of system that we came up with for these publications had to incorporate like all this kind of information. So we started really simply, they showed us Excel sheets so much that we started thinking in the same way. So this is a kind of, just kind of cleaning up the information but also keeping their categories, not trying to incorporate, not trying to introduce another way of thinking. So this is very familiar to this kind of Excel breakdown. So we started designing and basically we took this kind of extremely no frills approach. So typography is always just kind of really straightforward. OMEI has a history of using aerials so we said, you know, let's just keep on using aerials. So then we started adding some stuff. So this is this idea that every building or project can be represented by this kind of icon and so that icon can be like a floor plan, it can be like a diagram, whichever kind of image represents that project the best, that's what we use on the cover. And then we introduced like this really simple color system. Projects that are unbuilt are printed in white ink on top of the text. Projects in progress are printed in gray and completed projects are printed in black. And then this starts to go into the content for each of the booklets. So typically like if an architecture office is talking about a project, someone writes the text and then there's a couple images but after watching all these kind of YouTube videos, I thought that actually like the most compelling way to get this information is through this kind of storytelling method. So basically Sho gives these lectures so much that every one of the important New York projects has like the perfect slide with the perfect text and so he like does these lectures all the time and so he's like refined the presentation of each of these projects. So we took that, we just took his slides and we took his transcribed text and that's the kind of content for the booklet. So these are just some sample spreads. We numbered each one of the, we started calling these slides. So these are saddle stage books so like in the middle of every book you get this kind of continuous image so we decided the center of each project booklet is just like a full bleed image. We also incorporated stuff found on Instagram, some images for each booklet. And then the back cover of each booklet has all the images used in the booklet and they're also kind of numbered. This kind of came from the way that Sho kind of reviews content and like it's always in this kind of extremely dense thumbnail view because it's just like more efficient for him to kind of review content that way so that's kind of what we picked up here. So again every project booklet has a kind of overview of every image along with a number. So to counter that kind of density we wanted to also introduce this idea of like zines and so each of these zines are just like one kind of like dumb idea. So this is like all blue foam towers and just this booklet of blue foam towers. These are all square plan projects and it's on a square book and so on. So we kind of devised a system for single project booklets and then we thought like okay, like now they can be compiled to make these selected work booklets. So like if a client comes to them and they're like oh we want to make like a new art project somewhere like they can compile all the kind of art projects together and give them that booklet. So basically one kind of real pet peeve of mine is not knowing the date that something was made so it's obviously you can see when things are compiled. Also because each booklet is like a kind of saddle stitch thing when you wire it creates these kind of separations naturally. So you usually don't wire like a saddle stitch book but why not? On the back of each one of these booklets is kind of like Excel sheet type information as well as the kind of icon of the building. So that's for OMA. The next project is a website for CCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture and so this project started in maybe 2014 or 2015 and the institution itself is very different. They have some goals that are different than typical institutions or museums. So I'm just going to show like some really basic things and some visual things that kind of led to the website design. So the website itself is the basic structure is half of it is or one part of it is themes and articles. So CCA publishes and makes articles and writing and collections and exhibitions all around certain themes around architecture. So they have many, many themes and so we wanted to give each theme a kind of color. So this original idea is this color scheme is based on Le Corbusier's palette for Celebra. I think it's like a paint company or something. So this is our original idea for these like how to kind of color each theme. The other part of the website is purely institutional content. So like museum hours about history exhibitions. So we decided everything should be blue for institutional. So the Le Corbusier palette didn't really fly. It was kind of too arbitrary. So we tried to come up with a system that could not be disputed. Like it's basically like scientific or something. So here we took this kind of you can't really say this is like a rainbow basically. And then we're taking all the blue and we're going to reserve that for CCA institutional section. So then we're left with this and then we're taking like basically every other every fourth or fifth color and that's the palette. So just to show like if you approach things in a way that's like kind of purely logical then it's harder to refute. It's harder to argue against. And then where it's like okay each of these colors has to work for a theme then type has to you have to be able to read the type. And then this became the color palette for the themes. So then these are just some two slides from the still website design. So basically the homepage has these cards representing articles within themes. When you go into that theme the kind of color palette comes from that theme. And then all the institutional section is basically blue. And this is kind of how it works. So now when you go into the institutional section it kind of looks different than the themes. It's very monotone. And then there is also the search. So after making the website we were kind of it kind of continued on into a lot of different print materials and on-screen materials. And so even though we didn't really make this new identity for CCA this kind of identity grew from just making the website. So basically everything's universe. Things that are related to the institution we try and use blue things that are related to themes or outside content we can use other colors. So the last project I'll talk about is our kind of ongoing collaboration with MOS. And so MOS is Michael and Hillary and they have maybe four or five architects that work for them. So basically we did their identity first and then we did a website and now we're kind of working on publications. So one thing this was like when Michael kind of talks about the studio and their practice sometimes they have these like rule things. And so like when I saw like you know they're interested in the banal or the boring that I was like so excited. Or like repeating things or like this collective saying this instead of individual expressive difference. So I think as a studio we're not so interested in like making new forms. Like we use like four tie phases for everything and we're kind of more interested in maybe like the process or the kind of or maybe like materials or I don't know just not so interested in like forms so much. So this is the typical work process with MOS. It's basically the series of text messages and because the design is so easy we basically use Accidents Grotesque tracked out 30 for everything. You don't have to spend time on like oh he might not like the seraph because he knows it's going to be Accidents Grotesque and it's going to all look the same typographically. So this is what happens. I get text and I respond and it's like do you like this? Sometimes he likes this, sometimes he's not sure. But I think there's a lot of trust because we're kind of on the same page aesthetically and he knows it's not really going to change. So this is how it all started. This kind of basic identity was Accidents and we use like print on demand because the first cheap is printing. And then so as every architecture office needs are these kind of booklets that kind of spread their work and writing. So we started by making the series of booklets with Lulu print on demand which you guys probably know. And there's a lot that can go wrong with Lulu. So you basically send your files and the cover files separate and you just kind of pray that it looks okay. So what we tried to do is kind of make something that wasn't bad. So Lulu has problems with printing type on the spine so that's not go there. There's no type on the spine. Lulu is kind of pretty bad at chopping images or full color images but they're actually okay at printing just one solid color. So okay, the cover is color and there's only type and there's no type on the spine and so it kind of got rid of a lot of things that could go wrong. This is like an interior of a textbook. So Lulu has a lot of different options. You can get a hard cover, a soft cover you can get it like 6x9 or big or small. You can kind of like map out their content like okay, like if it's only text let's use like the smallest cheapest book and then if it has some images and you need to impress a client let's make it like hard cover and full color on the inside. So we just made a series of kind of logical choices based on the content and the budget. So sometimes we also do like for these various Biennale lists, Biennale that we make books that are kind of more of a presence because when you're at these fairs like a little dinky books not really going to have much presence. So this book was for I think it was like an Istanbul Biennale and basically I called the printer these are all print on demand like there's no publishers involved so the quantity is always like 10 or 20. So I called this printer this printer that does pretty good work and I was like what is the thickest book you can make and he was like oh like 1600 pages or something so that determined the size like now we can make a 1600 page book it can be maximum like 9x12 and so that's what determined the size of this. The content is is thousands of scale figures without architecture so I actually don't know when they have the time to be doing this but they apparently have like thousands of scale figures without architecture it's like photoshopped out so this goes through a lot of those. For Venice Biennale we kind of did the same thing we called the printer like okay what is the biggest book you can make this was like 20 inches by something it's pretty big, it's really big so based on that we made this really big book and then we also do like fun stuff so all this is like print on demand like there's no offset printers involved there's no large quantities it's just kind of like online stuff and so mouse pads and like mugs this one they had this kind of exhibition of videos at Princeton and we watched there were three videos we watched the videos they were really long, kind of really boring this one's like nine minutes of like monotone voice and like slow panning and so we were trying to think of a way like typically you just make a poster or something but we used that budget to make these tote bags when you go watch the videos there's a gallery guard and if you finished a whole video they can tell the gallery guard and they'll give you a bag so it's kind of like bribing people to watch the whole video so yeah I mean basically everything's really easy to design same typeface but I think it works because MOS's writing is amazing like the stuff that they write is like so full of ideas the text is just so great that I think we can get away with this kind of like really straightforward design Thank you for sharing your work I'm familiar with many of these projects and some of them are new to me but it's always nice to hear the kind of the inside scoop and your way of thinking so I wanted to just start with what I think is a softball question but it might be a hardball question which is the truth of that question how is it working with architects? Yeah Chuti, you want to start? Well at this point I kind of got used to it you know the usual like the you know the deadlines impossible schedules but because I think I enjoy it despite that because I really enjoy the content as you can see I you know make strong things as well so just learning more and more about architecture and urban design and planning that's interesting to me I mean I I think it's there is some natural affinity I think I have with architects and I don't know if I can totally explain it I think it might have something to do with having been an engineer before being a designer so yeah this kind of like structural systematic way of thinking seems like you know something that architects spend a lot of time doing too whether it's in design or kind of the more mundane aspects of their practice but yeah I think more that it's not just a matter of like any architect though I mean I think for all three of us like you could see from the work that we showed that for the most part I think we tend to work with architects I mean I said this earlier but who are interested in engaging with ideas and who are interested in someone else from the outside being able to to kind of I don't know reflect those ideas back to them in a way that they can't necessarily conceive of and so I think the people that the really great collaborations are with the people who kind of recognize that and come to us for that reason and recognize that we can add something to what they do that I don't know enhances it in a really significant way you know there are also the other collaborations that are more I don't know less fun to talk about but I mean I did I don't know whether I mentioned this earlier or not but I do actually feel profoundly lucky that most of the people that we get to work with are people like the former people who kind of see us as partners and collaborators and that we can really engage with the same things that they're thinking about but just in kind of a different mode Alex do you find it different working with architects and other because I know that none of your studios are exclusively working with architectural content or architects you work with lots of different kinds of content but do you find it different working with architectural content versus other kinds of content there is? Yeah I mean it's definitely different but we apply the same kind of way of thinking like doesn't matter if it's architecture or photography or so I think to us there's no difference but the difference is like if you're excited about their work like are you excited about like what you're trying to design and also I mean like MOS and OME they're like completely different they're like so different that I mean in the end I just like architects have it hard they they yeah I mean in the end I always feel like graphic design is like a walk in the park compared to architecture I really I really do it's just like so I feel fortunate I mean I thought it was interesting to compare the OME example with the MOS example just in that you know for one project you showed screen captures of these kind of very intimate conversations between you and your client which is emblematic of what kind of relationship you had there whereas with the OME you couldn't even be in the same room together for a long enough period of time to have a conversation so you had to go to YouTube to watch these videos so how does that influence how you that in one aspect or in one case you have this intimate access to your client and the decision maker and the person that you want to listen to and then in the other case you don't how do you deal with that well it's I think it's a lot more pressure the kind of OME kind of scenario where you're trying to like read his mind you're trying to like figure out what he would like whereas like MOS I'll just like text them like do you like this and he'll be like no or you know so I think it's just like stress level yeah and you worked on the monograph with Amal and Dan for Work AC and you had said that you worked on it for a year and a half something like that that's not a short amount of time and because of the nature of the book which is a monograph and it's their first monograph I imagine that relationship was very close and sort of intertwined and also there's two of them and you really need to get to know their practice so do you want to tell us a little bit about your experience there yeah no and it's this idea of the duograph I think came out of the way that they worked together just in that like they I mean I think Dan especially likes to kind of play this up but the kind of like almost cartoonish difference in their roles and that to some degree kind of played out in the course of working on the book like there were a couple of maybe one moment in particular I remember being in a meeting with them and it was like I very much felt like like saying anything at all would be getting involved in an argument that was not about architecture I think that's how I want to put that so it became this like exercise and kind of navigating those scenarios occasionally but I think for the most part like the working process was very fun and lively and I think that really comes through in the design of the book too and I think when Amal was talking about this in Chicago at the biennial on a panel but just about how also our process of working together I think like we each got something out of it in the end that we probably wouldn't have made without the other that their impulses and my impulses were not sometimes always entirely aligned but that we kind of pushed and pulled in our own directions and kind of it came out in a really the final form I think is quite synthetic and I don't think that that's I hope it's not too apparent in the final form but yeah it was also I think part of working with architects is like understanding that you're working with other designers in some ways it's not the same as working with writers or artists or someone that has no relationship to form and that they are dealing with clients all the time too in a way that other other people that we work with maybe don't and so yeah in a way it kind of broke down in that Amal was mostly responsible for the images and Dan was mostly responsible for text and again this like split between between the two and with both kind of like crossing over that border now and then but and Amal you know given that I think kind of like show like Amal is always just giving these presentations all over the place and so her kind of natural habitat is PowerPoint right so she would like set up these PowerPoint files of images and combinations and sequences and just kind of send them over and and then it would become a matter of like making the layout kind of do what the PowerPoint is doing and that would always be the starting point and then we would go in together and start saying like well this this set of images doesn't really work here maybe it should move over to here or you know but you know it was collaborative but it always started with like here's the PowerPoint and then you know I would copy the PowerPoint file and change the extension to dot zip and then extract all of the images from the folder so that's a great tip by the way if anybody has to do this but yeah actually and we are now working on another project where we are receiving sometimes content only in PowerPoint like we're really waiting for the real images to show up and poor Ben is sitting there like you know doing screenshots from a PowerPoint file and placing them into an InDesign file and so it's like and that's not even an architect actually that's actually really fascinating that you've received all the content in the PowerPoint because I think of you know a lot of designers I certainly feel this way I feel really scared of PowerPoint you know just files because I didn't know what to do with them but just the fact that you had to extract these content from this very particular and finicky format maybe you know it allowed you to design a certain way that you wouldn't and when I first looked at the book the unbound copy of that book I thought wow Neil has gone really wild and I think sometimes you know the best collaborations sort of result in something that you is really unexpected from either party but because those two parties met and pushed each other to do something you know you create you know something that's really surprising and shocking even Yeju you had shown your the piece that you had made as a collaborative piece for the Cambridge Arts Council which is you know it's not a piece of design that deals with content per se but it's more about the context could you tell us a little bit more about that and the role that you had to play because you know when I was introducing you guys and I think this has become apparent through your presentations as well which is that a designer often becomes more than just a designer more than somebody that gives content form you have to become the negotiator you know in the room or the editor or the researcher or strategist you know you have to assume all of these roles so with that project it seems like you had to assume many other roles besides just making something that looks visually pleasing yeah I mean I can talk about that project all night that project actually started in 2013 and we completed the construction last year last fall but it's actually not done yet we thought it was done but there are some issues with skateboarding and a couple of residents not being so happy with it what was the brief for the project to start with? Well basically my collaborator who's also a good friend of mine Chad Treveso and I just responded to this RFP that Cambridge Arts Council put out but it was never really about designing a street designing a path it was just a public art project on this particular block but then it was our idea to suggest that maybe it should be just integrated into the infrastructure and that is partly why it took so long because it had to meet all the city regulations because it's also permanent all the regulations and we went through many community meetings we also, I mean Chad and I are both educators and we are interested in kind of using that opportunity the design process as an education opportunity so there's a school right by the site and as you saw in the video it's mostly kids who use that street to go back and forth the school and the park so we did a series of workshops with the kids in the school to actually design the thing together I mean the original design was totally different from what you just saw which I personally thought that we ended up with more boring sort of really simple design because originally it was about different materials but anyway so again going back to your question coming up with the concept of course designing the form community engagement also designing the process in this case workshops with the school kids and actually doing it and then we worked with engineers that the city hired and the GC but we were involved in the construction as well we were there we brought in subcontractors to do the form work we actually hired skatepark builders to do the mounds as well as the concrete company so like doing all that research while designing it constantly presenting the revision to various city departments going back to revise it again and still now dealing with the issues a couple months ago we went back to interview a bunch of residents to hear about their experience actually like kind of camp out there to see what's actually going on all these things I mean it's just really everything I think you might actually just be doing architecture I mean it's very collaborative also and luckily my collaborator chat was trained as an architect he works more as an artist but in a way even designing three-dimensional mounds I just kind of did it actually literally with clay just making little things kind of playing with it while chats using you know whatever software but that kind of going back and forth really works for us and also our process is I mean almost unimaginably collaborative even just replying to a client to the commissioners email we discuss it or even just sending one text message back to the client we discuss it all right I thought the few projects or slides that you showed at the end Alex the stuff that you did for Moss the book series that you emphasised were made through Lulu and there were only a few copies print on demand which as designers that make books we know how restrictive that service can be because it's print on demand we don't have to do a thousand run but I thought it was really inspiring to think about how you make those constraints sort of the design principle or the starting point of these things like how many pages can you print what is the size oh it can't print on the spine therefore we won't do anything on the spine but I find that really sort of a fun way to think about design and I think as students maybe you guys can identify with that a little bit because as students especially you don't have access to commercial printing or these kind of fancy production methods so you always feel bound by these constraints so I think as designers we have to contend with constraints all the time whether that's about production or other time constraints or budget constraints or whatever it is so can you guys talk a little bit about how that influences your practice on a day-to-day basis maybe constraints yeah I mean you also said that you use like four typefaces which is kind of a self-imposed constraint of the studio yeah I mean I think I think we love constraints I mean I love constraints just looking around the room Sharon and Jenna are over there I work with them at the studio so I mean I think like when it comes and they're like I love chalkboard typeface or some like horrible thing or whatever that's great like that's one less decision that we have to make and that allows us like like I want to push things past like the kind of visual you know I think we're interested in like maybe even the story behind it maybe it turns out like really whatever but it's like the story that led to that like boring looking thing on the table so constraints like I love constraints whether that's self-imposed or it's kind of forced upon you by the clients and I think the more extreme the better so it's like like you have to make a book and we only have 50 cents you know what does that give us or yeah I think constraints are the best yeah I mean I I guess I have to imagine that anybody who decides to be a designer kind of has to identify that with that to some degree and yeah I guess for me it's kind of like how do you how do you decide like how do you make a decision because all design is is like a series of small decisions like you keep making decisions and then something is done and then you decide when it's done actually or if someone else does and that's a constraint but I think a lot actually about a classmate from grad school and a friend Mary where he's me in always used to say in school why does anything look like anything and that's like something that I actually hear her voice in my head saying that pretty often because it's like unless like you're a total formalist just like like playing with form for its own sake which I I know Alex isn't and I don't either really then you have to have reasons for making decisions and sometimes those reasons are yeah totally arbitrary it's like we need to use the chalkboard typeface it's like great okay and I think I think I've gotten as I've gone on like a lot less resistant to that sort of thing like I think I you know five years ago or 10 years ago I would have like had a wrestling match over the chalkboard typeface but now it's a little bit like sure like what can we do with that it's like that you know it's very cliche to talk about constraints as opportunities but I think that we and maybe it's just kind of like a general attitude of positivity that I think we tend to to have in the studio but it's more like okay well like what can we do with this like where does it go this like if this has to be then how do we make it the best thing it can be given that circumstance is there any questions what is it the oh I guess I mean like so you said it's not done now because that's like still a problem but they must have known that you hired this construction company that was that's what they that's what they construct like it was specifically like you know concrete forms for skating I mean we all knew even the city staff we worked with they knew that skaters would love this and we also know that it's not necessarily ideal for skating but what we didn't know are two things one how much the skaters would love this so like how many of them would come to skate there and another thing that really surprised me and I'm still torn by this is the how the residents in that neighborhood we have worked with who agreed on a lot of the values that we you know kind of presented this like inclusiveness and you know all these things and play would hate skaters so we didn't know that and now that it's happening we I mean we've heard about it only through well after one of the residents kind of started sending letters directly to the city manager many times so the city manager basically made an order for us to make a physical modification somehow to deter skating and well we after working on it for four years we didn't we didn't want to just agree with it of course and also it's a piece of you know public art also like we you know we cannot just change it because someone doesn't like it so we that's why we propose this process of like outreach again which includes of course residents but also the users the kids and also we ended up which became the sort of core part of our research in our most recent trip was to meet with all the skaters like we went to local skate shops and kind of gauge how what they think about it so our sort of strategy right now is that we do need to make some kind of modification because otherwise the city can just tear it apart they can just remove it we're going to make some modifications but how do we then find a way to still keep some of the skating activities but then maybe discourage like really dangerous jumping in the air things we also found a bunch of videos on instagram on our site on our street which looked really great and we were very happy but so kind of almost studying how people skate also like using our thing so we are planning on actually working with you know people who are experts in skating but also know a lot about design to work together to find a way somehow I don't know yet you should talk to Alex I didn't even talk to Nick I think at one point we talked about like if we were architects we'd build things for skaters oh man yeah for sure we'd pretend you know oh I'm nervous skated those forms fine I mean one thing I also learned is that there are many people who got into architecture or even planning through skating because they experienced their built environment very differently and kind of take interest in that this actually seems like an example of constraints are great but only when they come at the right time when the constraint comes after the project is done then maybe it's not so great yeah I mean I am hoping that this constraint would I don't know lead us to somewhere that's interesting or new we're rooting for you thank you any other questions then I'll end with one last question which is so as I mentioned earlier on all the graduating students at G-SAP are required to put together their portfolios which means that they have to look at their body of work figure out which projects that they you know think represent themselves come up with some kind of sequence some kind of look and feel some kind of tone make material choices and ultimately present this into a volume and I think you know there's many things that are hard about that obviously but I think dealing with your own work your own creative output and then putting something together and having enough of an objective eye I think it's very difficult not only for students but I think for everyone I know that at least 50% of us at this table have real trouble updating their website I'm included in the 50% you know it's a struggle I think for anyone and so can you tell us a little bit about can you talk to us a little bit about how do you objectively look at your own work do you have any advice for students when they go through this process your faces indicate that you're very puzzled that we have no advice actually I mean the whole thing I was talking about in my talk is I don't know one way of going about it you kind of set your imaginary audience or a situation and how that communication would go I mean I do that a lot too like even in writing letter writing is much easier for me but I know who's on the other side yeah that's I don't know imagine an audience very specifically I mean it doesn't have to be a specific thing I don't know but you'll probably use the portfolio to like go to an interview so you know this person might just like flip through the book I don't know like do you want to hold a book and you know in that case the dimension of the book really determines how this person is going to interact with the book also even like the thickness of the paper you know all these things if you imagine the situation where this thing you're designing is experience I think some of the decisions can be made pretty easily I think in terms of I mean the process that you described is one of assessing a body of work and then trying to figure out how to present it in a way that seems sympathetic to that work and I think in terms of the work that we do I feel like I don't really have a chance to do that all that often these days but things like this actually are a great opportunity for it where you kind of have a chance to think like well what is it that I want to say with all of these things that I'm showing and how do I draw a line around them or through them and I guess maybe that would be my advice is try to draw the biggest line around your work that you can't see if you can find a way to encompass a lot of it because I think it's only at least thinking back to when I was a student it was only when I kind of like zoomed way out that I started to make some sense of the things that I was making when I was thinking too specifically about using that line or that circle as a way to actually make things I only made things that were terrible it was just too forced so it was only when I kind of step back and thought about like well what holds all of this stuff together and that can get you into really kind of general vague territory but then you can kind of get more specific and think about what doesn't fit into that narrative I think architecture is hard enough you should work with a graphic designer or something I mean it's it's like I'm not going to I'm not going to try and like build a house that's any good without some expertise I'm not being in the position to do that but it's important I think like with MOS they have a clear understanding of what graphic design can do and different expertise where they'll reach out and they'll be like is this type phase 1.2 big or like little kind of ridiculous things but I mean I don't know how just thinking back when I was a student like it's tough like but give yourself one goal like I'm just going to make it really easy to understand or I'm just going to make it if you're too ambitious with things it just gets out of control so if you give yourself some limitations I think that might help to have a clear goal to think about I think that's good advice I want to thank you guys again for making time on this Friday evening and we have more lectures tomorrow and Sunday so stay tuned thank you again