 Thank you, Carol. I'm honored to be here. Thank you for having me and being inside on this beautiful sunny day in Minneapolis. I know that I'm the only person between you and potentially another drink, so I'll try to make this quick. But every time I timed myself last night, given this talk, it went over 25 minutes, so I'm sorry. Sorry in advance. Hi. My name is Juan Carlos Pagan. Everyone tends to call me JC. It's a lot easier. Get the whole bullfighter thing out of the way. That is my great-grandpa up top. And on the little dude on the bottom, I just really like this photo, and I like that. We're sitting exactly the same way. I am from New York, but not this New York. I'm from this New York. I grew up two hours north in a little town called La Grangeville. And this is where I made bad paintings. I listened to Radiohead, and I was an angsty teenager. That place right there, this little Google screenshot. When I got the email to speak here, I began to panic. I began to panic mostly because, turns out, I'm not an expert in anything at all. I watched the talks that were given in the past, and they were really thoughtful and educational, and they went really specifically in on one thing. And there are tons of people in this room and in this audience that can tell you about M-theory or Dwiggins or variable type much better and, well, more suited than I can. But I am an expert in my own work, I think. When I started putting this all together, I started really questioning whether I'm an expert in my own work. I started getting very worried. I'm like, well, this is concerning, because the work tends to be all over the fucking place. Am I an expert in my own work? And I started to freak out, and I called my friend Anika. I'm like, listen, we need to have dinner, because I'm about to give a talk at Type-Con, and I don't know what to talk about. She was like, well, what's your narrative? And I was like, I don't really know what that means. She was like, what are the things that have interest you over your life? What is your experience visually? Why don't you try to put them into buckets? Maybe that can help. I'm like, buckets, that's a great idea. I'm going to do a talk on love buckets, the things that I love. So this talk is called Love Buckets. And I'm going to take you through four things that I love in hopes that we can maybe unearth why I make the weird stuff that I make. So things I love. Things I love, number one, this guy was obsessed with magic eye. Who by show of hands knows what magic eye is? Most of you do awesome. For those of you who don't know what magic eye is, you would stare at this thing for an extended period of time. And one of two things would happen. An image would either emerge like dolphins or sea horses, or you would get a blinding headache. Sometimes both would happen. But a young version of me was absolutely obsessed with this. I couldn't get past the fact that my brain and my eyes were playing tricks on me, that this seemingly innocuous image could transform into something different. And every time I would go into bookstores, I'd grab the magic eye book. Every time I talk to my parents, I'm like, buy me magic eye books. For Christmas, I'm like, magic eye. Nothing else. Just get me magic eye. So I stared at this for a very, very long time. And that naturally led to an obsession with Escher. So I was one of those high school kids who had Escher posters. And I was obsessed with empty Escher. And I think it was fascinating the way he made me question reality, the way mathematics was broken and everything could be up, can be down, down, can be up. Reality was changed. And I extended that love to Escher all the way through, like way longer than it should have been, all the way through college. I did my undergraduate studies at Parsons School of Design, back when these two were together. It was a beautiful time. And then I did my postgraduate studies at the Type A Cooper program. Kara's here, and Hannah's is here. It was wonderful. And at that time, I'm like, yes, I'm a designer. I'm an illustrator. I'm a letterer. And most importantly, I'm a type person. I play with type. I manipulate typography. I love letter forms. So thing I love, number two, typography. But specifically, I fell in love with the work of Herb Le Ballon and Saul Bass, and people who were able to tell multiple narratives through the manipulation of letter forms. I couldn't get over that you can tell multiple stories just by tweaking a couple of little letters and forms. The first time I saw this, my mind fucking exploded. I was like, this is so simple and so smart, and I want to make work just like this someday. Herb Le Ballon became my hero, and I tried to make work like this. And I still try to make work like this at this day. But at the time, I was making some very amateur-esque type faces. This was my first stab at typeface design, malleable grotesque, which was a type family that really tried to capture this idea of what happens to metal when it gets heated, the softness of metal. And it was more than just creating a rounded typeface, right? It was really living in those really small moments that can capture that singular moment where something goes from hard to actual liquid, just capturing that one moment. And seeing it through a type family was something that was a really educational experience for me. I took that, and I brought it into my experience at Type at Cooper, where I designed Micah. This was my first real crack at serious typeface design. And my inspirations are pretty evident, right? Like you have a lot of Dwayne's and Gerard Unger in here, and I really wanted to make a hard-working typeface that could be legible in editorial contexts. But at that time, my buddy Mike reached out to me, and he was like, hey, I have this really cool project. He's like, this little company called Pinterest wants to do a rebranding. And at the time, they were using Bellows Script by Underwear, beautiful typeface. And they wanted something custom. So we ended up making that. So this is what they used for a really, really long time. But Pinterest at the time was a pretty small company. There were under 10,000 users. And I was like, all right, this is my opportunity to do some fun stuff typographically. I'm going to do my Herb Blue Balance thing if I can. And I'm going to add a discretionary ligature to the ST. And I'm going to do some fun things in here that I can sneak into this small company because who's going to see it? Nobody. Whatever. So I did this. And everyone sends to ask me, are you upset that they lost the interest part in the Pinterest logo? And the truth is, I'm not. Ben and Evan were pretty straightforward. That they really wanted to put most of equity into that. And that's really where we spend most of our time, really bringing the concept and the idea and essence of the brand into that P. Turning the P into the matte pin with that little gesture was really where we spent a good deal of our time. And the fact that they became such a successful company was really exciting because I got to see my work for the first time ever on everything and everywhere. And it allowed me to get jobs like this, which was another identity project for Joan. Joan is an advertising agency in New York City. They're ran by two women, Jamie and Lisa. And they named their agency Joan because of all the badass women by the name of Joan. Joan Rivers, Joan Jett, Joan of Arc. You can go down the list. But only one of them yields a sword, Joan of Arc. And I'm like, guys, we kind of have to make the J look like a sword, right? And they're like, yeah. So again, this is me trying to do my Herb Blue Ballon thing, trying to get this idea infused in letter forms. And the rest of the characters are supportive of this singular character. Really, the idea is captured within one singular letter form. It was really fun because they bought right into it, which brings me to Thing I Love, number three. It was late in the game, but I got introduced to the work of Franco Grignani. Mateo, I know you're in the audience. I'm sorry for butchering that. But his work really changed my perspective on everything. And I think his explorations with the optical exploration that he was doing really tapped into that part of my brain that loved Magic Eye and Escher. I was like, holy shit, I want to make work just like this. Just by tweaking lines, I can change people's perspectives. So I started bringing that work into my lettering. I started trying to merge these ideas together. And at first, this formal study of bringing lettering and optical exploration was just kind of a formal experiment. But then something else started arising. Another narrative started taking place where you started looking at the treatments of these letter forms and the optical experiments. And you started reading into the letter forms in a different way and the words into a different way. And at first, it was the background and the word. And then ultimately, the merger of the two, bringing the backgrounds and the type form together just to make one singular image. And you know what happens. Once you start doing enough of this work, people, clients, start asking you to do this work, which is exciting. So Variety Magazine reached out. I was able to do some work like this for them. Print Magazine asked me to do the cover for their 20 under 30 issue. And this had another element of difficulty because the numbers themselves, which were exciting to create, needed to be divisible by five. It needed to be divisible by five because they wanted to showcase all the winners at once on the cover and within the pages of the magazine. So it acted like little windows into the work. Most recently, I was asked to do the cover for the New York Times 50 Years of Pride. So 50 years ago in New York City, the Stonewall riots, for those of you that don't know, really sparked a revolution within the LGBTQ community, which permeates today, right? A lot of the organizations came out of this riot that happened at Stonewall Inn, which is a bar on Christopher Street in New York City. So I went to Christopher Street and I'm standing there and I'm looking at the floor and it's kind of incredible. They took the street signs and they put the pride colors in between the street signs. And I was like, well, this is kind of beautiful and amazing. That became the launchpad for the 50 Years of Pride cover that we ended up making. Instead of separating the colors, what we did was turn all the colors into a gradient because the movement has grown since then, right? It's more inclusive and involves a lot more communities, both of color, but also trans communities now. So the full gradient seemed to make more sense, but we still kept that idea of the street signs because the riot poured from the bar into the streets of New York City, right? And I realized if I was able to draw the letter forms on an isometric grid, that you can bring the letter forms close to the getter to reinforce this idea of coming together in community. So that's the wireframe on the left and the poster that we ended up making on the right. Abelor, how many of you are whiskey drinkers here? Seems like it, yeah, all right. So if you're not a whiskey drinker, here's one little insight. The water source is super important to making great whiskey and they happen to be one of my clients and they are from Scotland they claim their water source is the best water source on the planet and they do make a beautiful spear, Abelor is fantastic but they wanna commemorate their water source. So they asked me to do custom numbers as if they were rising out of this water source that they had in Scotland. So we ended up doing the 18, the 12 and then ultimately the 16, right? Again, it's experimenting with these optical tricks and at the time I was playing around with not only digital optical tricks but like how glass and water can just analogically like optically mess around with stuff and everyone's been there, right? If you've been to a restaurant and you had a glass of water and you put your hand behind it, it like manipulates it. So I took that idea and I sold it to my gin company this gin company that I was working with they wanted to do an out of home campaign to kind of showcase their gin and I'm like, well, we can take words with gin in it and then shoot it through the bottle and distort the letter forms and we chose words in this case like imagine words with the gin in it. Imagine, vegan, Oregon, I'm sorry, origin. But this was really done for the most part through analog manipulation just using the gin and the bottle itself to transform the typography. A lot of like Photoshop work in the end but those manipulations are happening in camera. The ADC, I have a really wonderful relationship with the ADC and after I won Young Guns they have this great tradition where a former Young Gun gets to reinterpret the award after they've wanted to ask me if I would reinterpret the Young Guns Cube and we're staring at their logo and like, well, maybe there's an opportunity here to build letter forms out of the circular nature of their logo and that's exactly what we did. We did this sort of like Lance Wyman-esque typographic treatment. So it's kind of like inception ADC we have the ADC logo and it says ADC which then wrapped this acrylic cube and we laser cut it. So this video will explain how we kind of got it done. Yeah, so it was tricky. The hard part there was lining up each side of the cube so you didn't have a break. It was a seamless piece of art that wraps this acrylic cube which brings me to thing I love number four last but not least. Like most of us, I love typography on walls on things that I can touch, right? Like whether it's a mural or carved into a wall, I'm obsessed with it. So much so that I collect doorknobs. I do, this is my, some doorknobs from my doorknob collection. So side note, if anyone has a doorknob, hook up in Minneapolis, give me a shout. And I'm obsessed with things that I can collect that have typography on it. So I got, so, which was really fortunate because I got a really great project presented to me. Kevin Cantrell and myself were able to create the trophy for Nike's Home Run King. So every year Nike gives a trophy to their Home Run King and I guess it's like a Home Run Derby that they have and they wanted something that felt fast, that felt really like beautiful and felt like stately. And I started off doing this and Nike quickly put the kibosh on that. They were like, nope, start over. So I went back and I drew this and I sent that over to Kevin and Kevin and I were like, I think this is a good place to start from. We can build off of this. And Nike felt like we could too. This italicized black letter had the speed, it had the premiumness and we can build off of it. And build off of it, we did. We ended up creating this nonsense. Yeah, it was, this was really a fun process because me and Kevin treated this whole experience kind of like improv where you just say yes and continue. So I would wake up with files, add artwork to it, send it to Kevin, he's in Utah. He would add stuff to it, send it back to me. I would add and we would just keep adding stuff and we ended up with the craziest file, which was really fun. We never said no and Nike didn't say no. So it was like, let's just keep adding shit and see what happens. So this is what we did and we left the hard work to Big Secret, which took our artwork and they manipulated it and made it work on an actual, like laser cut on an actual bat. This is a famous photo from 1958. It's called The Greatest Day in Jazz. It was taken in Harlem. I live in Harlem. Harlem has a rich music history and I have a friend who owns a music studio in Harlem and then he showed me this photo which is The Greatest Day in Hip Hop. Also taken in Harlem in 2001. I'm like, whoa, this is incredible. He's in touch with both of these incredible movements. He makes music in Harlem and he asked me to do a mural in his recording studio and I'm coming off of the Nike bat. So I'm thinking about black letters but instead of doing an italic black letter, I'm like, maybe I can do a back slanted black letter. That's kind of interesting and it kind of felt oddly appropriate. It felt like some street art that USD in my neighborhood and then by adding the Victorian flourish to it, it really brought a premiumness to this. So I created that which I then ended up painting on his wall. And last but not least, the Art Director Club was happy with the first cube so they came back. They're like, hey, you guys, do you want to do it? Do you want to reinterpret our Young Guns cube again? And I was like, yes, under one condition. We create an award that levitates and they're like, okay, sure. Because me and my studio gave a good deal of thought around the purpose of an award, right? You get it and it's wonderful and it sits on your shelf and it reminds you of the hard work that you did up until that point. But what if we can create an award that not only reminds you of the great work you did but kind of tells you that you can stretch beyond what you can do and push beyond yourself and what's conceivable. So we created the whole identity system around this idea of sort of lava lamps and camo, like emerging but also levitating. So this was the system. But really the winner, the key thing here is the award and this video will demonstrate how we got it to levitate. I get this question a lot. Who am I and what I do? I'm Gove. I work at Creolab. When Sunday afternoon approached us to make a floating award, my exact first thought was, this is gonna be awesome. We've never done a floating award before. The main challenge was technical. We had to put all the technology inside, close it up, seal it in a way that you wouldn't see any seams and that it was just a floating award in midair. Sometimes I come into the office early mornings and we have this array of floating objects that still and it gives this eerie feeling because you see something that shouldn't be happening and you see this object that is floating. That's a really awesome feeling. We make things float because we can and because it's a lot of fun to do. Each year, the Younger's Award changes. This year's theme is elevate. In fact, each entrant must elevate their own work in order to stand out. Each one of the 30 cubes were handcrafted from start to finish, which reflects the level of craft it takes to win a Younger's Award. We wanted the award itself to embody this idea of elevation. So we created an award that actually levitates. Thank you. So, you know, when I look at my body of work, the truth is it is all over the place, but it does capture in a way my narrative, these things that I'm fascinated by and have been embedded in my life for the past, like since I was a kid, right? Magic Eye or something I stumbled upon when I was maybe five or six and I still think about it to this day. And I'd imagine that's gonna continue to change as I adopt new interests, as I stumble across new things that I'm fascinated by. I'm gonna roll that into my work. And the truth is I'm really just trying to blend these things that I'm fascinated by. I'm trying to push conceptual typography and optical work. And most of the time it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. And that's really a magical moment and that's what I like to share and that's what I did share. You didn't see all the failures, which is 99% of the work that I make, right? So, type is gonna continue to be at the core of a lot of that work. I'd imagine so. And I'm just thankful that you guys listen to this. So, cheers. I made it on time.