 Hi, my name is Yoon Jae Choi. Some of you know me from either having taken my class before or taking it this semester. This is my second time organizing the series of events called Graphics Projects. Just to introduce this event again, the Graphics Project was conceived by full-time faculty members here at GUSAP many years ago as a way to help you think about how you present your work visually. And as you know, presenting a compendium of works at the end of your time here at GUSAP is a graduation requirement. And it's just a good way to think about what you've done while you're during your time here, but also how you present yourself to your peers but also the outside world. So we have organized a series of talks, lectures by designers that work with content around design and culture in general. And then over the weekend, as you know, we have a series of portfolio reviews that you can sign up for. I have the sign-up sheets here, and I'll have them available to you again when the lecture ends and in between. So in the short term, our immediate goal is to help you think strategically about how to put together your portfolios. But in the longer, in my mind, the more important role is really to think about what is visual presentation or representation in general. And that's something that we try to contend with in my class, but through these series of lectures and the hearing from industry professionals that deal with so many different kinds of content in different contexts, with the makers that deal with publications or exhibitions, branding, products that are both tangible and digital, thinking from very high-level sort of concept and strategy to something very minute and detail-oriented like, you know, letters, space between two letters. So by, I think, hearing from people that deal with this on an everyday basis, I think my hope is that you are inspired and provoked to think about your own work and presenting your work in a much more sort of thoughtful and effective way. So today I want to introduce you, our first two speakers, Felix Spurikter and Erin Knutson. They work on Pinup Magazine, which I'm sure you are very familiar with at this point. It's been around for over a decade. 25 issues, 25 issues. It's a very impressive, big stack. So I want, there's some copies here which I will pass around so you can actually sort of touch and feel the magazines. But I think we're, you know, we're very privileged today to hear about the sort of the genesis of the magazine but also from both the editor and the designers of the magazine, how they've put together the most, two most recent issues. So we'll get a glimpse of their kind of processes. Let me introduce you to the two speakers. Felix Spurikter is a German-born New York-based creative director, curator, writer and editor, originally trained as an architect in Paris and New York. In 2016, Felix founded Pinup Magazine, a self-described biannual magazine for architectural entertainment. In addition to publishing Pinup, Spurikter curates exhibitions, consults on design and architecture projects for various design brands and contributes to numerous publications, including W Magazine and Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman. Felix has edited a number of design and art books, including Cassina, This Will Be The Place, Raphael de Cadenas, Architecture at Large and Pinup Interviews. He's curated exhibitions for global institutions such as House of Kunst in Munich, Germany and the Swiss Institute. His most recent exhibition, Blow Up, is currently on view at Friedmann Bender Gallery in New York through February 16th, so you'll have an actually chance to go see that in person. In addition to being in charge of the design at Pinup Magazine, Eric Knudsen is an independent art director and designer based here in New York City. Her studio, Eric Knudsen Design Office, focuses on brand identities as well as book and exhibition design. Recent projects include the relaunch of Performance Space in New York, Exhibition Art Direction for Björn Malgaard, The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment, Rammel Z, Racing for Thunder and Gretchen Bender, So Much Deathness, which is opening March 6th at Red Bull Arts again, so you'll be able to access that. She's a visiting lecturer and critic at Cooper Union, Parsons and Yale, and has led workshops at Typography Summer School in New York City and a school, a park in Montreal. That's the name of the workshop. Knudsen receives her BFA from Cooper Union in 2009 and her MFA from Yale in 2015. Okay, so I will pass over the mic to the two of you. Thanks so much for the introduction. Thanks for having us today. I think there was actually an important detail in the introduction that I didn't mention, but I'm an alum of GSAP, yes. So this is double the pleasure to be here today to talk to you about Pinup with Aaron. I wanted to start, for those of you who don't know the magazine, I wanted to quickly introduce it. Actually, how do we? How do we press play? Just play. I wanted to quickly introduce the magazine and as I already said, it's been 10 years, actually. Is it just arrow, key, A, B? Oh, there we go, sorry, got it. All right, okay. So what you're seeing in the background now is actually a reel of 10 years, actually 11 years of Pinup, 25 issues. Pinup started in 2006. It was a very different time. So just for context, actually 2006, George W. Bush was still president. It was pre-crash. And somehow, it was already kind of, digital was increasingly important, but it was still, I don't know, a healthy print scene out there, but I think it was a kind of limbo moment for print. So it wasn't maybe an obvious time to start a magazine, but that was never really, I never really took that into consideration because it was kind of, Pinup started less because of a demand for a magazine, but on a larger scale, but more of a personal demand for a magazine. I had studied architecture here at GSAP and I worked at the time for a large corporate office, KVF, sure some of you are familiar with. And I kind of needed a, we were working on big, this was 2006, so China was the promised land for large corporate Western architecture firms and we were working on dozens of projects and none of them particularly interesting, to be honest. And it was kind of, Pinup was a way to start a project that incorporated a lot of the things that you learn and that you deal with during architecture school and that you all of a sudden realize that you're not doing anymore once you work. So I think this was kind of a very recent nostalgia for to kind of, to show projects and ideas and discuss ideas that were important during my studies. The mission for Pinup was always to bring together a kind of like the intellectual and theoretical side of architecture and sort of take it out of the context of academia and present it in a way that was maybe also accessible to a wider audience that was outside of architecture. And so, which is also the reason why, from the very beginning there was a discussion whether we should have a commercial advertising or a grant and we decided that we were gonna have a commercial advertising and that's also the reason for the subtitle, which is architectural entertainment, which believe it or not in 2006, was seemed kind of a fervorless almost as a suggestion. I don't think it really does anymore in 2019. So how did Pinup start? Why did Pinup start? So like I said, it was kind of a lack of personal, a personal lack of excitement in being a professional architect and I think probably the biggest decision that I had made at the time was to, or rather the biggest realization at the time was that I couldn't actually design this myself. Being an architect, of course, thought I could. It was laughing. You probably all think you do, but I realized that to actually make a proper magazine, you, I'm gonna need help from a graphic designer, so a professional. And so the first issue was designed by two designers, their names are Jeffrey Han and Dylan Fakureta. They were designing it together and they had just graduated from Yale and the brief was kind of, I think I remember giving them two, essentially two references for the brief. And one was a copy of an East German photography magazine and the other one was, I think, a pamphlet from the Fully Beger in Paris. So two very kind of very dichotomous references and they kind of went into seclusion and I wanna say like maybe a month or two they came back and I think from the almost immediately, I think the first thing they presented was pretty much what we went with. It was kind of the concept for the design was entirely based on constraints and the constraints both of typographical constraints which is to only work with the most generic typefaces. It was Ariel, Times, New Roman and Courier. And the other constraint was kind of a grid type of graph. A grid. A grid. A specific grid. A very specific grid. So the first issue, I don't know if we can actually, can we go back to the beginning of the video? Is that possible? Oh, there it is. No, no I messed it up. So the first issue was what you see here in terms of content. I'm always sometimes amazed how the first issue is turned out to be really representative also content wise both in design and it was a very assured statement much more. It looks much more assured now from within hindsight than I felt at the time but it really kind of laid the groundwork for conceptually both for content and also design that things that still kind of carry through to this day. And if you look at the way pent up a structure is there's always kind of big kind of the foundation of the magazine is kind of a Q and A format with architects or people who are, this is already issue three, we're going fast and so there's always about, I would say like four big interview features with architects or artists or people who's work deals with kind of spatial issues or who deal with, well, whose work is in a larger sense architectural. And the built environment and then this portfolios, there's different sectors of panorama section, we're gonna, the second part of this series is we're actually gonna go through an entire issue so you'll learn a little bit more about the individual sections. I wanna talk a little bit more about the design or the designers who have kind of shape pin up over the years. Like I said, it was started in 2006 by Geoffrey Han and Dylan Focaretta. They did, I think five issues together until issue, until from then on, it was 2009. And then from then on it was Dylan Focaretta by himself from 2009 until 2015. And then in 2015, Aaron Knudson came. So Aaron has been working on, this is issue, how many issues have we done? This is about seven? Seven, yeah, I think we've done seven issues together now. And it's a really interesting, what's interesting about also what Aaron has to say about the project is that it's one thing to come up with an identity for a title from scratch. It's a whole nother to take an identity that's kind of already established. Cause I think in 2015 it had been like nine, almost 10 years. And to kind of make it your own while also respecting the codes and or disrespecting the kind of stuff. So it's a real kind of what you see here is a real evolution of design. And I think maybe should we move on to what we were going to do is to actually, we were going to walk you through the past two issues, the most recent issues, 24 and 25. And we're just going to go kind of do like a kind of a bantary walk through page by page and kind of describe and explain a few things that seem worth mentioning. So should we skip to? Yeah, so I don't actually know how to fast forward this, but by the way, the first issue was launched on Halloween 2006 at the center, the urban center, which is right behind St. Patrick's Cathedral, which I don't think it was an architecture bookstore, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, so I came on in 2015 and I had always like known about pinup obviously and it was like a very exciting thing to look at as a designer, but I also knew about the concept that Jeff and Dylan had been working with, which was like this extreme restraint. And even when I was at Yale, I was like looking through their thesis books and they had been talking about this idea of restraint in their thesis is at Yale. And so basically when we kind of did the redesign, we decided to keep Ariel, like Ariel is the typeface and we try to figure out and we kept the editorial structure, but then we kind of reinterpreted how restraints could work within. Well, I'm not sure, because we talked about this briefly before, I asked you, what would you describe that era in design? Because when I started the magazine, I actually didn't really know anything about design, at least nothing, four more. So 2006, what kind of era in design was that? I mean, also Jeff and Dylan came from Yale, so. 2006 in design was my, I don't even know if I do anything about design then. No, it was the trends were, I think it was sort of this fantastic man that had been happening. As far as editorial design, there was like a lot of looking back at like old, older, you know, the thin line. What would you call that? Like the Gentleman's Magazine? The kind of like, I don't know. And then what Jeff and Dylan were doing, which actually did seem really fresh at the time, was using this system of restraints, the aerial, the grid, but somehow reworking it every time so that it became a totally, it did have a different identity at each time, which was important that we kept when we kept doing it. So it's like, it has this sort of through line, but because of the way we set it up, we can play out these concepts differently each time and get like very unexpected, like even we don't know what the result is gonna be, as opposed to a magazine where it's like, they have the same format every single time, they do a redesign every five years or something. Yeah, I think that that's a really important aspect actually is that the structure of the design of the magazine is such that it allows for an evolution rather than repeating the exact same thing every time and then doing a redesign after a couple years, but it really allows for a kind of natural. Yeah, and I think we basically really attach, and maybe more what I do than what Dylan and Jeff did, I'm not sure, but is like kind of really lock on to whatever the theme of the issue is. Maybe you guys didn't have as many specific themes in the beginning, but now it's like there's a definite theme to each issue. And so how can you take that theme? Like for example, we'll look at it in mental. We did actually have a few, so we had themes and some, I remember one was serious fun. All right, one theme, one earlier theme was serious fun. We had flamboyant restraint. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's two. Now they have, and so now we have like comfort, mental, garden variety, Los Destinos. So we kind of come up with a theme for each one and how the design within those really specific restraints can be really playful with that theme. So how can Ariel become like a drunk travel magazine for the Destino? So how can it be, how can the grids become like a garden design for the garden issue? And we try to really like get into it and play it out in multiple places throughout the magazine so that it's sort of the sum of the parts becomes like a visual language for that specific theme. So what we're about to walk you through page by page is the, oh, I'm always hitting the wrong. Mental. Okay, is issue 24, spring summer 2018. And this is the theme for this issue was mental. It was roughly based on a Baldwin quote about the mental being just as legitimate as the physical world that surrounds you. And it really was about the architecture of the subconscious and design of the subconscious. So we had, I think we have to go a little faster. Because we have 250 pages ahead of us. We always do several different covers. This one, I think, I don't know if the magazine's on circulating, but this is a special cover we did on the occasion of the opening of the Serpentine Pavilion in London with which Frida Escobedo designed in 2018, in July. The color of the cover was this kind of alarming orange, which we also used here. Erin, do you wanna talk about the design of the? I think the mental, for mental, we really went into this sort of like surrealist fantasy, the mental landscape. We've say it with like, I mean, you'll see it, but like optical type and warp type. Like things we actually normally kind of hate, but then like how could we kind of make them interesting for us, not hate, but like what not love. And so this cover was, it's sort of an Oman Chou Collage. I mean, in the most obvious way, that's like a very mental landscape concept and a surrealist concept. And there's no architecture on that. We removed the architectural aspects. It's a photo by Philippe Jean-Jean of... Of the island of Lanzarote. Lanzarote. This is a portfolio later in the magazine by focusing on the work of... Oh my goodness. Manrique, Cesar Manrique, the artist and architect who almost exclusively built on the island, on the volcanic island of Lanzarote in the Atlantic. We chose this orange, I think, just because it is the color of like warning. It's the color of like some caution. It's like sort of, and it repeats. Of alertness. And apparently also, according to studies, it's also the color that is the, that sells the most for a magazine type. Which actually proved true. Which proved true. It was orange. I think one of the important things to say about the cover is that it is one of the... It's the most important thing. The first thing you see about the magazine, it is usually the last thing we design. Because in many ways it, both in design, well actually in design it kind of incorporates all the aspects that were, that we did in the issue, you know, both thematically design-wise. So we kind of see it as a synthesis of, sometimes we have an idea already what the image is gonna be, but usually the design doesn't happen until literally the last minute. The actual last minute. Yeah, so there's always like keys and hints of what's gonna be within from like the typography choices on the cover that are taken from within. I'm gonna click through this quickly because this is advertising. We actually, we place quotes from the issue that usually relate to the theme next to, in the beginning of the book. Then we also have the privilege of working with, or some advertisers that we work with. Also let us choose the motifs, which is great because you kind of create a more coherent, you know, kind of appearance in the magazine, a better flow. This is table of contents. Here you have the three covers lined up and what you see here is actually, this was a collaboration we did with, for the Venice Biennial with Adidas. So here you see a beautiful hand drawing of that scarf. Then, okay, let's go through. So the first editorial part of the magazine is what we call the pinup board. And I think in regular kind of media parlance, it's called the front of book. Yeah, kind of have shorter stories, maybe a little bit more news-driven. In the case of pinup, they also tend to be more on the design side. And whereas the features usually tend to be with architects. So here we are. We also do these shoots. These are two shoots and we, every issue for the pinup board, we kind of do a shoot with Avina Gallagher and Vincent Delio where a theme comes up based off of sort of like things that you've been noticing around design and stuff like that. And then come up with a theme. So this shoot is a pinup shoot, which is home jewelry where we're using design objects. Yeah, the idea is that you go around the house and actually put on all the objects in the home and use them as jewelry. So I think that's a, how do you say, colander? A colander as a hat. And obviously cutlery is a bucky fuller dome. This is, don't judge, okay, here's more home jewelry. The coffee maker around the neck. Okay, Aaron, do you want to say something about the design? This was a sort of in between pinup board. We were trying out a new idea of where we wanted it to actually look like a pinup. I think before in older issues, we had another version of it. You may have seen the show, by the way. This was a G-Sep. This was a show at G-Sep. And then, yeah, with this one, I think it was like, how can we place the objects in a specific grid and then the type wraps throughout. And then this is our first, so here's like the first issue of mental typography, where we're working with like optical typography along with the story that we do every issue. This is a collaboration with the artist, Carla Sies. And he essentially, the idea was to do a bed story and he took these beds and, oh God, I hope I'm getting this right. He then placed them, the printout on styrofoam, mapped the styrofoam and scanned it. What, mapped it, scanned it. Then, oh God, am I getting the order right? And then it was, and then. And used that like styrofoam type hogger, like type hogger. No, no, no, I'm sorry. And then rendered, sorry. Yes, no, I got it. And then he scanned it and then as a 3D model, so it was a board of hardened foam, he scanned it and mapped it, used it as a 3D model, and then did these kind of rendered effects that look kind of gooey, nightmarish. I think you see elements of sheep in there. So this was a kind of a. It's like a dream skate. These are the features. Each feature, there's usually four features in each issue. Aaron, do you wanna? I think with the features, as far as the typography, it's pretty simple for this issue, or it's kind of something we repeat with making minor tweaks to it. But I think what we really deal with in these is how to present architectural images in a way that makes sense. Because oftentimes we'd be given like developer style photography or this sort of thing. So we commission portraits of the interviewees and then also kind of come up with a system to deal with their images for each. Well, it's an interesting position to be in because architects aren't used to necessarily be photographed. They're not models or actors that are kind of trained to be in front of the camera. They also, it really should be about their work, but in the case of Pinup, we're actually particularly interested in them rather than a specific aspect of their work. So we are interested in the personality and their process, their work process. So I think it's a kind of a fine line between really kind of the focusing on the person and the work. And usually we try to achieve that by commissioning photography that is true to their personality, but also true to their work, but not being too didactic in showing the work. Because especially, I mean, we're kind of standing here from plan of print. We also have a website. But I think especially also most of the work images are usually also very readily available online. So I think it's really important for us to kind of focus more on, oh, I think this is interesting. Yeah, so here we did for Frida's work. So I think in Frida's case, we were particularly interested in showing also the ephemerality of a lot of her most important projects. They were either installations and kind of, or statements, temporary pieces, especially in museum context. So we had already featured some of the work individually a few issues before. So in this case, we decided we were going to use the collage style. Yeah, so these are all printouts that we printed out, cut up and literally pinned up in the office. And then this is just a photograph of the collage. You can literally see some of the needles. Yeah, pinning it. This is a photograph of an actual collage on a wall in the office. And then we did another one with this grouping of projects. So it's a literal pinup. This is an interview with the artist, William Scott. He's part of Creative Growth, which is an institution in a nonprofit in San Francisco, I think in Oakland, actually, that provides space for artists with mental disabilities. He makes these really beautiful paintings of his imaginary architecture, fantasy. And this is utopian landscapes and projects that he paints. I think we have to go a little faster. Oh, okay. So here's where mental really starts. So this is a portfolio and every time we do the theme, there's the features, and then there's a very specific portfolio that we really suss out the idea of the theme. So here is the opening, and then we made all of these collages for design objects. It's like artists and designers that have a sort of mental... I think it was where it kind of taps into the subconscious of what we perceive as kind of towing the line between functional and non-functional furniture. I'm gonna go a lot faster here, since I'm seeing this time slipping away and we have a whole nother issue to go through. This is the cover story. This is Lanzarote and focusing on the work of Cezanne Manrique, who does these excavated volcanic spaces. And these are, I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Pezavan Alaric's House, and this is a story that focuses specifically on their drawings. And it was written by Dan Cher. And I think here, Erin, you can... There's very subtle warp. There was very big warps, and we basically make it like pretty extreme and then Felix brings it back. No, we kind of do like a kind of back and forth, but I do think like there is very subtle like warping to the grid here or to the... To the actual type. I don't know if you notice it, but even in the actual body text, you have slight warp effects. Here it's a little bit more visible. Or actually, well, Erin. Well, here it was the whole body text was waving at one point, but it's just a slight, like every line was warp. There was angle just slightly more the type was until it got this sort of waving effect, and then kept it in the titles. Again, wavey effect. Here is an essay by Nick Karoti. Oh, I think here we just inverted these two, okay. I think in the end note. The end note is usually is a Q and A at the very end of each issue, and it usually is with someone. It's also something that we commissioned very late into the organization or of the planning of the issue, because it usually sums up thematically the ideas discussed in the issue as a whole, but in a kind of more abstract way. Yep, and that leads us to home, which is the current issue. I think it's also going through right now. Home was a 25th issue, so somewhat of an anniversary issue. And so in that sense, it was also a bit of a homecoming. And I mentioned two magazines earlier, or the two references earlier that I had shown back in the day. I think it was in 2005 to Dylan and Jeff. They were those two, one was this East German photography magazine. And we kind of found more copies of that magazine around the time we were working on this issue. And at the same time, we were looking at the kind of media landscape, both digital and print, and the things that were happening. And we felt like it was, there was a kind of, well it was kind of, you kind of cluttered, there's an incredibly cluttered and there's this saturation with type and which I think we're partly guilty of as well over the years, but it kind of over saturation with type and information and graphics. And so I think the general direction we wanted to do in terms of design was to kind of go back to something a lot more simple. We wanted to like literally bring it home to, or literally, but like bring it home to our essential references that Felix also showed me photography and these magazines, these old like 80s magazines that we could then find like the beauty and the bland. 90s because there's a nest. And then I, yeah, and then sort of like what magazines inspired us initially me as a designer, you as an editor. And I think it was like nest, photography. And so we really pulled on these references and looked at them more deeply and came up with sort of this idea of like it being so bland that it was like. We actually, we set out to do it really bland and the joke was that the most audacious thing to do right now is to do something really bland. And that's how we kind of coined the term internally, but we've started talking about a public, well, very publicly here right now. It's a secret. We called it blendacity. So the whole issue is inspired by blendacity. And it kind of runs as a red thread through the issue. We're kind of stuck here on the cover because I wanted to talk about just the kind of struggles that we go through with each cover, especially this one was weirdly especially difficult for us because it's the first one that we didn't have type on the cover. But that was a long process. It also, it's barely noticeable, but there's this slight rounded corner at the bottom with the blue. We wanted this to look exactly like a postcard and originally Aaron had done a beautiful design where there was a blue trim all around the around. It was so beautiful. But then we went back and forth and because Felix didn't want the blue trim around the edge, I mean, like hundreds of copies and he's in Brussels and I was like upstate and we're like. We print in Belgium. Yeah, we were printing and then came up with this beautiful compromise of like that moment. Well, and I think you'll notice and you're probably looking at us like we're crazy, but so there's this slight rounded corner is a reference to a story that comes later in the magazine which was actually, well, it's Aaron. The corner? Yes. The slightly rounded corner is inspired by the home screen. Well, you can actually see it much better here. It's essentially the way you receive an image on your phone. So it's like an intimate moment of text messaging. Or again, I'm gonna go through this even faster than before. Here we didn't actually show the cover in the issue because it was a surprise. We saved it for an event in Miami last fall. So when you received the issue in October, November, you were hopefully in high suspense to find out what that cover was. You can already sense the blendacity coming through here in the opening of the pin-up board. Yeah, so we did a kind of redesign of the pin-up board for this issue. And the inspiration for this, I think, was going back to like really original rules that you learn when you're learning graphic design, like things not to do. And when you leave like one word at the end of a paragraph, it's called a widow, which is, or an orphan, there's like a debate that it's basically- Yeah, there's actually, there's a subtly, well, not so subtly sexist. Well, yeah, so somebody had told me once when I was learning, I was like, how do you remember the difference between the widow and the orphan? And they were like, well, an orphan has no past and a widow has no future. And so that's how you're supposed to remember, which I was like, it's like patriarchal, like you have no future if you have no husband or anything. But the, but so I think this was a little bit of an homage to the widow and the survivors of- Empowering the widow. Yeah, empowering the widow. So this became also sort of the widow issue. And we really celebrated the widow. A blendacious widow. Yeah, a very bland but very important widow because she's the only way you know the paragraph. I don't know if you've understood by now what we're talking about. So at the end of every paragraph, instead of having a line break, there's actually just one word that ends each paragraph and it goes directly into the next, which is, I think- It's very subtle and- Well, it's literally the thing you learn not to do in graphics, it's one of the first things you learn. So, we really went for it here. I think I'm gonna go through to, this is a portfolio. You know, this is the home issue and I think there's a fascination with the phenomenon of home innovation, especially in the U.S. So we thought it would be a fun idea to stage- Well, you're also always getting these. Yes, I'm sorry, I forgot the most important detail about this. We receive, usually from companies, design companies, we receive a lot of stock images, which we're then sort of politely asked to feature in the magazine along with their product. And it's always kind of a polite dance around how to tell them that we are not necessarily interested. And for this issue, we thought, well, maybe why don't we just use all of them and just use them as a backdrop for a photo shoot. So- This is like a parallel to the home jewelry in the previous issue, this is the same story, but here, so we shot these women. Yeah, this is all styled, actually just one woman. It's this model, Pia, and she was styled by Avina Gallagher. And we were very surprised to learn that a lot of people didn't even understand that she was just Photoshopped in. They were surprised what elaborate sets we were building. Again, here we have the features with Martha Rosler, an interview with Martha Rosler, the Sondler Mexican Architects, based in Mexico, Marie-Joseph Vane, Ola Sharon. So, Aaron, do you want to talk about the layout of? Bland, it's a bit, again, we had to come up with a treatment for each feature. I think we, maybe in the next one, Sondler, so we repeat this sort of structure, and then... Alternating between black and white and color. With Ola, we ended up making these sort of photo montage collage of the kind of developer, like... Yeah, so we try to, in cases where we can and where the budget allows it, we try to shoot people's work. That's especially difficult when most of the work is overseas and in very different places, so in this case, all we had access to was the official photography, which was either provided by the PR company or the developer, and while individually these photographs can be very beautiful, sometimes they are problematic in the context of the overall structure of the magazine, so we had Aaron came up with a system of collage where we made some of the, because it's a mix of renderings and photographs, where we make... Yeah, so we put a sort of slight blur filter on the images that were less interesting, sharpened the ones that were not, and made... Well, I think we tried to, it wasn't less about, it was less about the level of interestingness with the images, but more about trying to reconcile the renderings with the actual photographs. This is a, I don't know if any of you know this video of a kid dancing to Vogue. If you don't know it, Google kid dancing to Vogue on water. Martha Rosler. And I think, there's an essay by Phili Brahm. It's our homage to Nest. So there's this kind of blend, the idea of blendacity is punctuated by moments of very relatively overt references to another magazine that has been a huge inspiration for both myself and for Aaron and it's Nest. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it. It was published from the late 90s to the early 2000s by Joe Holtzman and it was a very... Yeah, it was a very eclectic, kind of almost like a... ...wundercommer of a magazine, both design-wise. The production was always incredibly elaborate and the story ideas were really crazy. So this is a... Well, if you actually know the real Nest then this is a slightly bland homage to it but it's still... Then this is a story with using Telfar models, mannequins, another sort of design homage to Nest. We worked with Jonathan Castro on this one. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's a graphic designer from Peru who works in Rotterdam and we paired him with Freddie Mamani, a self-trained architect who does these incredible cholets in Bolivia. Yeah, so here's the feature. Here's sort of the home stories and this is where we took sort of like a architectural digest type style home story layout and then just added like these slightly rounded corners, like a few little small moments to tie the home stories together so they punctuate throughout but they always get the same treatment. And in case you're wondering why we're featuring this chalet in the Swiss mountains, it's actually inside, it was completely renovated by Caruso St. John. This is a story about Doi Lis, the ultimate staple of the well-appointed home. Another home story, this is a house in Sicily by Arnaud Brandelhoeber and a... An essay by Adam Charlotte Hyman on he has a collection of doll house, like an archive of different images of doll houses so we made this collage with his archive. It's actually the archive served as the inspiration to the exhibition, which I mentioned in the introduction, which is up at Friedman Bendo right now and which was the exhibition design is based on doll house architecture. Then Vector Architects. An essay by James Taylor Foster on Virgil Abloh's prolific career. Here we worked with graphic designer to incorporate all the brands. I think it's about two dozen brands that he's collaborated with over his career and he's done collaborations with, including MCA Chicago where the show opens next year. Superimposed on the opening or the release in Venice during the Biennale of his book that he did with Harvard, which is a... Oh, this is the party page for the scarf and for towels that I was asked to design. And again, the end note, this time with Jacoby Satterwhite, who talks about creating digital homes through his art. And then as a closing, I want to say something. The inside back cover is actually a very important spot for advertising, but we sometimes choose to, especially when no one's interested, we choose to just give it, we choose to just kind of use it as a place to... Message. Yeah, to kind of make a statement about the theme of the issue and kind of a more general statement. This blue, however, is actually, and this is the same blue as you see on the cover, and we wanted the UN blue. And so we were looking up the exact pantone for the UN, and it turns out there's, I think, there's about 15 different UN blues. Every agency has a slight variation of blue, so we put them all together, and then what you see here is actually the combination of all the different blues of the UN under one roof in one home. So that's the end of the home issue. Right now we're working on desert. That's the theme for a spring-summer. So if you will have us back later in the summer, we can also walk you through that one. Thank you so much. I want to take this opportunity to say thank you for the presentation, and we take just a couple of questions before our speakers have to go. I wanted to maybe start off with a question that I've been curious about, and when I was flicking through the pages of the most recent issue, and actually now knowing the backstory, it's so much richer, the background for these kind of design decisions. Many of them are extremely nerdy design decisions that super nerdy that you will pick up if you care a lot about topography and spend a lot of time with it. But to me, pin-up seems like so much of its character is about this kind of tension between something that is serious and something that is not serious, something that is very irreverent and sort of tongue-in-cheek and a little bit ironic. I mean, even the statement magazine for architectural entertainment, like in some ways those two things seem to sort of collide a little bit, and that trickles down to decisions like I'm going to leave a widow at every paragraph, which isn't a crazy thing to do in a way if you speak to somebody who is a classicist. But then each column I noticed was ragged, and those of you that don't know what ragging is, it's this crazy absurd practice in typography where you think about the irregular shape of the right edge of a text. So in this issue, I noticed that somebody went through this painstaking practice of ragging, so it looks very beautiful, and then you do a thing that is very wrong, which is leave a widow. So I want you guys to talk a little bit about this tension between something that is correct and something that is wrong, something that is serious and something that is not. I think that is actually a very fun... I think that that makes it kind of like... And the best thing about working on a magazine is that you get to do it again and you get to, for each issue, come up with like a new set of rules that's fun and interesting and makes it something unexpected happen for you. But yes, the ragging versus the widow was painful, and if there was a single correction, we had to redo the entire rag again to get that widow to just happen right there. But I think always finding those moments where we do respect design very much, but we also want to kind of look for the places that we can kind of angle in and have... I mean, fun is such a whatever word, but that's sort of where we find... I think it goes back also to the... It goes back to... It goes back to... It goes back to the idea of kind of working against the constraints or a system. I think in this case, Aaron kind of picked the one thing that you're not supposed to do, and then what is otherwise a relatively formal layout kind of introduces this disruptive... Very minimal, but kind of disruptive element. And some people pick up on that. And then actually reminded some of the issues, maybe some of them you've worked on, but some of them have been worked on by Jeff and Dylan in the past and really test the limitations of legibility. Like that has happened before, which there's actually this very old 1994 example of Reagan Magazine, which was designed by David Carson, who's this kind of design legend, American design person, where an entire interview with Brian Ferry was... In Wingding? Yeah, it was in Dingbat. Dingbat, yeah. So you couldn't read it. Yeah. The story is, the kind of urban legend is that that was done by the designer because he thought the text was so bland, like he just changed it, that nobody could read it, which is something that could be really imperiating for the artist. But I wonder, you know, in your... Who really needed another interview with Brian Ferry? Right. But do you ever come across these situations where the kind of, you know, being right at the cusp of legibility or taking stock images from a supplier and then really doing something that, you know, that they didn't intend it to, you know, be? Yeah. Does that ever cause issues or is it turned up so established as that kind of magazine now that it's just accepted? I think it's... It happened more in the past. I think we've also learned from mistakes or, you know, we've learned from some of the experiments that we've done, especially with topography, you know, at the end of the day, you know, what you just mentioned, it's actually kind of a serious thing. You know, when you're printing as opposed to web or digital, it requires a lot more effort. You know, there's, you know, there's always a proof reading, but then after that there's the ragging, there's the typesetting, there's the, you know, you really have to proof it several times because then it goes to the printer where, like, you know, then you have like proofs of a lot more effort than hitting publish. It's forever. Well, it's... Hopefully, in most cases, it's forever. But, you know, and also the cost attached to it is... So, which is ironically why, even though much less people have access to it, print still seems to have hold more value to when you're published. So, when you end up as a subject, I mean, I'm actually pointing at myself but I'm not the subject, but let's say we wrote an article about you and then we publish it and then it's kind of illegible. Maybe you as a designer would appreciate it. But then, but you know, I think there were some moments in the past where, you know, we have... where people were featured and it looked beautiful, but you actually couldn't really, you know, it was very difficult to read. And... But I think sometimes it's appropriate to make it a little illegible and make people work for it a little bit depending. But I think what we're taking now is more like, what is this theme? If that goes with the theme, we should push it. Like, if it goes in the constraints that we set up, like, I think garden was difficult to read some of those openers and things like that, but it was more important that the... That there was a coherence also. It went with the theme and that we were kind of pushing something like that. But we made it much more legible. Well, we made it this time. We made it a lot more legible. This is the most legible. Well, the mental one, I was always pulling back. Yeah, I made it pretty legible. It was very legible at some point. People should be able to read the... Although, I mean, we now have the benefit. I was just kind of dissing, not really dissing print, but I think now the beauty is also we've been talking only about the print, but we obviously... I would say 80% of the content that's in the print issue is also available online. It looks very different. The way it's presented is maybe a little bit less interesting, but the legibility is there and the accessibility is there. So I think that, in a way, also allows it to be a little bit more adventurous in the design for print because you don't entirely rely on providing news. You know? You can kind of... Maybe I shouldn't emphasize that too much. If anybody else has a question, I'd love to... No. Yes? I have a question about the magazine's change over time, whether you can't keep track of what the audience is, whether that's changed since the beginning and whether that's shaped the design of the course of the issue. The changing audience of the design? That's a really good question. This is probably not what we should say, but I don't know how much we think about the audience when we're designing. I mean, somewhat, but... Is that okay to say? I don't know. How has the audience changed? Yes. No, we do think about the audience. No, of course. I think we... We've done kind of surveying of the audience and these kind of auditing. But I'm somehow like... I mean, I should be more interested in who are the readers, but I think the nature of the magazine, the way it started, was really a very personal outlet, and so even though it's not just me anymore, there's a lot more people working on it, I think it really still is for everyone involved, very much an outlet for what they would like to do, rather than what they would have to do. And in fact, even, you know, we have a lot of people writing for Pinup who write for many other publications, or who are even on staff at other publications. And, you know, in conversations with people, I would say like, you know, give me the story that you could never publish in, you know, XYZ magazine, or give me the piece that is very personal to you. So I think in a way that the magazine reflects that and I think, you know, based on who's working on it, I think also the audience has evolved. But I would not be able to give you that. So, you know, don't really do like reader survey. No. I'm afraid not. Well, this is a marker research. You're actually being used right now. So that's why actually we would appreciate more questions. How would the advertising or having advertising in your publication affect your content or readership? Does the advertising affect the readership? Or like, they position their advertising money in your publication based on potential like readers. And does that affect the content that we're producing based off of who is advertising? Wait, sorry, that's two questions. So, is the question does the advertising affect the content or does the the decision for the advertising the people who are advertising? I guess I'm more interested in the first one you said. Does the advertising affect the content? Well, if we do, for example, yes, specifically, I mean, you saw the story that which is called home invasion. Those are images that were largely sent to us by not all of them, but a lot of them were sent to us by companies that advertise. And so, that's the access that we have to these kind of images. And it also had the benefit for them that we actually did publish these images. And because we used those images, we did write a caption that was describing the objects that were in the background, which were advertising that wasn't actually paid out, but that was a different thing. In the sense, so there are commercial credits in the magazine, which are sometimes relate to also to not always, but sometimes relate to the companies that advertise. And to be honest, I mean, maybe this is this is a what's the ethical thing, but we have a lot of people who supported PINUP from the very sometimes from issue two or three on. I mean, for example, Muharram is one of those companies, or Vitra, now I'm making advertising. But there's a lot of companies that for at the time when they started advertising, it actually had very little, I mean, the price that they were paying for the exposure that they were getting was really negligible. And it really was almost like I don't know, like active, you know, just almost like a patron. So, you know, we've also done special projects that I think were influenced by advertising, like the teddy bears and the stools. Oh, those were direct collaborations. Yeah, but I think, you know, over time that has this developed relationships with partners, you know, like the companies that I just mentioned that go way beyond just, you know, them writing a check at the end of every season. And, you know, I mean, that's the model that we chose for the publication. It's worked really well, you know, I never thought it would. But, you know, I don't know if that answers, I hope that answers your question. Hi. There's a very small design question. Oh. I'm just curious if you could say more what went into the decision to not have text on issue 25 cover and that's a one-time thing, a new direction. It's a one-time thing. I'm saying it publicly now. No, we had a lot of that, how we came up with that decision. I mean, literally I was like in a field of state and he was in like a warehouse in Bruges and we were like texting things back and forth and I had actually originally had a lot of typography on it. There was, in fact, we were originally going to include an image of just the wall. We had an entire wall full of almost what looked like identical cover. I showed them to a friend who I was with and he was like, you got to help us decide between these two images. It's really, we don't know what to do. And he looked at it, he was like, I literally do not see the difference. I flipped back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He was like, I don't see, there's no difference. So I think it's like we got to the point where we had so many different. We really make a lot of versions usually. I think the reason why we ended up with a no text cover for this one is because the image was very iconic to there's an uncanniness about it where you don't actually know whether it's full size or it looks almost like a miniature chalet on a dollhouse or one of those trains, like miniature trains or something. Also, it felt like kind of the quintessential idea of a home, almost like a kitsch idea of what a home is. And I think it was also just that we wanted this to be the 20th issue. Yeah, exactly. At that point, we wanted to just celebrate like pin up and where it came from and who it was. And so that was mostly the decision. It was the first cover with no type. It was basically to just 25. And that's the most iconic thing we could do. Maybe just one last one because What's the most important things you think in making a portfolio? Because sometimes you only get limited number of pages. So I wonder if we should include more information on one page or we should make it more catchy like making a full page in maybe? I think that it doesn't matter if there's more information or a full page. I think that you should just think about every single aspect that's going on that page and make sure that it reiterates what your overall concept is. That makes sense. If it's like you have if your thing is that information overload then make a crazy informational image or something. I don't know how to say that but I don't know if there's a strategic way to do it where it's like a formula for a full lead versus non-full lead. I think there's a tendency me having studied architecture personally and having worked in my own portfolio and having looked back at my own portfolios and now looking at other people's portfolios and probably the best advice is to always take a step back and imagine what you don't need to do is try to explain every single step of a project even though they were all very important at the time those decisions were made the person who looks at the final project does not need to know all of them or they can find out but eventually through making them or through maybe just one image that can encapsulate a lot of different thought processes. So I think the tendency is to overload and to want to tell the entire story when sometimes taking a step back that can actually be confusing so sometimes well not just sometimes like it's more is less more is less also. Thank you so much for coming Thanks so much. Graphics Graphics project is a series of lectures and a series of portfolio reviews so today we have two lectures the first one was by the designer and editor of Pinup Magazine second one is by Mimi O'Chan and then next week we have at the same time designers coming from the MET the design director at the MET who oversees exhibition design and branding design and exhibition graphics on all of that and then we have two designers architectural designer and graphic designer from 2x4 coming to talk about their collaboration there on various projects the reviews I know that there's been a little bit of confusion but you sign up for two slots for group A and B the reason for that is because they are GSAP alum so they're architects that are working in the field right now and then group B are graphic designer so you get two different perspectives so that was the idea so if that was confusing you can rectify that maybe afterwards let me introduce you to my next speaker Mimi O'Chan Mimi O'Chan is a designer who leverages over 20 years of experience bringing opportunities and ideas to life from the initial expression of a strategic vision to brand creation to products and services that live in the world as a founder, advisor, investor and consultant Mimi has crafted numerous online and offline experiences for companies including General Assembly Airbnb and Enough she has held leadership positions at a variety of innovation consultancies including IDEO and IA Collaborative a long time advocate for young designers Mimi participates regularly as a design critic and lecturer at a number of design programs including Parsons, SVA Yale School of Art and California College of Arts In addition to her design activities Mimi maintains a fine art practice and serves on the board of Future Now USA a non-profit whose mission is to achieve a set of progressive goals for the common good by 2030 Mimi receives her BFA in graphic design from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Yale University thank you so much for coming Mimi Thanks for having me and I guess I should start by saying that when Yun Jae first asked me to speak I said yes because I generally do whatever Yun Jae tells me to do but also we had an email exchange where I was like oh I feel like someone may revoke my license as a graphic designer at some point soon because I don't necessarily practice in a traditional way so that's kind of what the talk is going to be about today a little bit of an intro you did a good job covering it my BFA is from Carnegie Mellon, my MFA from Yale I've spent about half of my career in brand and about half of it in product service innovation I've sort of run the gamut in terms of working at boutique brand agencies smaller design studios so working for IDEO which is an innovation consulting working for the good clients and then I guess in 2010 I moved over to General Assembly where I developed an interest in startups so since then I've done a lot of consulting, advising and a little bit of investing in startups oops, sorry I also I'm a board member of Future Now a political organization and maintain a fine art practice I just wanted to show you one of my sculptures this is Common Lobster it's from a series I did called Creatures of Commerce which are basically surrealist mashups of capitalism and and I guess things sort of ripped from the headlines but this is a common project sneaker and a lobster and so one quick note actually two notes the first one is that in putting together this talk I realized that some of the work that I wanted to show is actually quite old so you'll see you'll see some dates that feel like whoa that was 10 years ago but I think the sort of the idea or the intent is certainly sort of still relevant today and then the other part of it is that some of this work comes from my time at IDEA where a lot of our the large majority of our projects were confidential so in some instances I've had to scrub out hence the black bar I've had to scrub out the names or the faces of some of our research participants so I think when we think about graphic design today I think we think of it in sort of two traditionally we think of it in two ways one is the first one is a way to a method for communicating the idea so a great example of that is like a resume a resume a deck a user manual and while there's graphic design decisions in every single thing we we touch or design I think in many instances it's a little bit invisible when I was at IDEA I joined IDEA in 2007 to help open the New York office of IDEA and one of the reasons why I was interested in coming to a innovation consultancy like IDEA was because communication design which was the discipline that included writers and graphic designers was really quite nascent at that time IDEA had a long legacy of designing things that made a noise when they dropped like physical products whether it was the Apple mouse or even service design whether it was Bank of America keep the change program and so graphic design really internally like part of my job was to educate our internal all my colleagues across numerous locations with others in my discipline about graphic design and how it could be not just be a way of communicating idea but actually being an idea and shaping an offering around it so that's the second way in which we usually think about graphic design which is graphic design as a product so graphic designers might get hired by clients to create brand expressions they might have to design a website but I actually um it's like I actually want to talk about a third way that's often sort of not about frequently which is this idea of using graphic design as a tool to better understanding an idea so what does that mean so for today I'm going to focus on six different ways that you can use graphic design to document an idea define the idea explore the idea position the idea test the idea or inspire the idea I'm actually going to skip I think I'm going to skip defining for now and if we have more time I'll come back to it later so the first one is using design to document the idea so this first project is a personal project of mine where so I'm a media junkie I have in addition to all the digital instantiations of media whether it's my eight different streaming service subscriptions my podcasts all the internet all the reading I do online I'm also a book fiend Marie Kondo would hate me because I have books and catalogs and magazines but I always and of that sort of large group of physical books I always think about how some of them I read and I re-read while others I have never I've brought home or ordered on Amazon and I've never opened them right now I think on my nightstand near my bed I have like a stack of seven or eight books only like the top two of which I've actually gone through so I wanted to do I wanted to do I was curious about using design as a way to document that which I actually read and to look at and to see what I could learn in terms of my own bias towards content so what I did was I started I wanted the original vision was to reproduce my entire library but only that which I've read so replicated all in terms of size and paper and fonts but only sort of only reproduce the content that I'd actually read that was a little ambitious but I'll show you this one project this project is called Miss Readings so what I did was I started out this is one issue of New York magazine where I stripped out all the imagery I stripped out color and I just documented the bits that I started to actually read and as you can see a lot of the small print disappears the legalese disappears it's usually hierarchically the things that are larger where there's headlines or drop caps and I like these sort of white space moments like in this on the right page there was obviously a silhouette of a person I think it was LL Cool J looks like that's been deleted and in this you can essentially see what I'm prone to reading what I'm not prone to reading it's a good article in Tony Blair and the funny thing was that at this point in time I think I was like a pescatarian or vegetarian I wasn't eating meat so and this was an issue and I remember like there's a section where I skip the there it is on the right at the bottom it says good old steaks and chops I just skip the recommendations on the carnivorous restaurants so the second second thing I think I'm going to skip this one sorry so the second one that I'll cover today is this idea of using graphic design to actually explore the idea so this is a more maybe a more traditional graphic design project where this is an idea project where we had a large financial services client they wanted to better understand as people were beginning to use you know as people were relying on the web or mobile apps to manage their personal finance they were left wondering is there actually an opportunity for us to use the print statement is there a way that we can more deeply engage our card holders through print and they were about to launch a they were about to launch a new product that was geared towards a very debt savvy travel focused demographic so this was a very sort of quick condensed project maybe three or four weeks I searched myself in another designer we looked at different we tried to leverage what was unique about print so if you think about what can you do with paper that you can't do online it is persistent so I can sit on your desk you can have a physical record of something you can set up you can use the narrative structure of a booklet these were the types of things that we were exploring with print so in this case this direction was called macro to micro which was from some of our research we realized there were there are people who are passively engaged with their finances they just want to know what their balance is they want to know that there is no fraudulent activity and then they move on whereas there is other people who are a little bit more you know they're the checkbook balancers who want to look at inspect things line item by line item so this booklet macro to micro offers a way for you to engage regardless of a kind of targeted typography to allow for quick skimmable reads for the passively engaged but then it would list detailed transactions and that's how the actual structure of the book was organized so big picture down to minutia this next one was called kid-a-parts and this was really about creating even though People can opt in for paperless statements. We noticed in our research that some people still insisted on printing them out or getting them in the mail and they would stuff them in a folder. So this was a way to design for those people. So this was about sending them a binder that would get pre-loaded with contact information, regulatory information and your first statement for new cardholders. And then, and on the sort of, on this version, you could kind of see your account summary, you could see your 13 month spending comparison, but then if you opened it up, you could actually see a sort of a counter view and have all of your transactions visualize. And it was a way to maybe help some people develop an awareness around their spending categories. So if you saw, if you looked at this and it was all shoes, you maybe would think a little bit more about what your spending habits were. The third direction was a magazine format. So again, since this particular demographic was very, were travel enthusiasts, our thinking was, oh, I wonder if there's an opportunity for to combine a sort of travel and leisure with your bank statement. Since you are, your use of your, the use of your card is ultimately accruing you points that you can put towards something that we knew these cardholders loved, which was travel. So your account statement would get tucked in, but then all of the features and everything actually, all of the content inside of the magazine was essentially translated into an equivalent amount of reward points. And then this last direction was called memento, which was as things, as we use our mobile devices we're becoming more and more sort of micro about things, is there a way to actually create, to use, to create a sort of poster sized version of the statement, and one that would sort of commemorate or memorialize all of the places that you've been, whether it's restaurants, whether it's stores, whether it's sightseeing, anywhere that you've used your card. So you would get a summary as well as detailed transactions but then if you opened it up, you could basically have a record categorized of all of the places you had been to when you travel. The next project I'm gonna talk about is using graphic design to understand positioning for an idea. So in this particular case, this is another IDEO project, a large consumer package goods conglomerate company had come to us and they had this, they had this technology, which was basically a, it was like a light therapy wrinkle remover technology in the form of a wand. And so they came to us and said, can you help us envision a brand experience around, like a beauty brand built around this device as well as any additional products that might sort of enter that ecosystem. This was again, like with a lot of projects at IDEO, it's a multidisciplinary team. So we did a bunch of intense research sessions called Girls Nights In, Girls Night In where we assembled groups of smaller groups of women who had very, and sort of facilitated these very frank conversations around their approach to beauty and wellness, their beauty rituals. And one thing that became apparent was that there were two distinct archetypes. One we referred to as like the label reading conscious consumer. The other one was someone who was very like focused on efficacy focused on proof and otherwise a little skeptical. So what we did was we created two books that are apples to apples. Each one designed for a specific archetype and these were then used later to test with a larger sample size of consumers to understand what was resonating and what wasn't. So this first one was, we called her Juno. We called the archetype Juno, which the shorthand is that this is a Brooklyn mom. She reads every label. She avoids invasive procedures and she believes in skincare from the inside out. So long-term nourishment is shown in her skin. And so one of the things that we did at IDEO was we also did some narrative prototyping. So understanding what the tone of voice would be, understanding what the stories would be. I always think of it as sort of high resolution writing. I think as graphic designers, sometimes we will fill something in with Greek because we just want to figure out how to set the type. But there's actually a lot of clarity and a lot of resolution that occurs when you are forced to actually write out the content, figure out the tone of voice. We looked at what were the, we represented this woman, not through, we weren't going to photograph this woman or cast her in any way, but we wanted to tell her story of the possessions that she owned, the activities that she participated in. We named the brand. And for those of you who can't read that, the tagline is there's nothing service about skin. We looked at how we might advertise to her. On the right, that's the light therapy device. We looked at where we might advertise to her. So both, so PR, communication strategy, advice. We looked at the online experience. We looked at where we might retail to reach her. And then we also did some industrial design and renderings around packaging, form for these devices and products. In Juno's case, it was much more tactile and tactile materials. Looked at forms that may appeal or resonate with her. And then Noia was the skeptic. And the shorthand for Noia was that if Juno was Brooklyn mom, Noia was highly skeptical, demands proof, and would use placenta on her face if she knew it worked. So from an apples to apples comparison, we spoke in her, we tried to emulate the way that we might speak with her. We looked at the possessions she owned, the activities she participated in, logo and tagline for her, where you might advertise to her, where we might retail. And then the design language for the products was a little bit more slick and glossy. So it's funny because one of the things about ADO is that you often do these things and then you don't under, and when we handed these books over for them to take out into the field and they were meant to test out in the field and understand which positioning was more appropriate or more right for the product and for the brand. But I actually don't know, like I actually don't know what happened to this one. I don't know where it is, if it's been where, if they ended up going more Juno, more new or something else. So another way in which we can use graphic design is to test an idea. So this was for a travel company, you can probably figure out who it is. This was, so there was a hypothesis that travelers were looking for locals, particularly international travelers, were looking for, would be open or receptive to a local concierge service. And we wanted to better under, we wanted to prove this out. We wanted to test this hypothesis. And then we also wanted to understand the types of requests that someone might ask of a local concierge. And then also understand their willingness to spend and what they might pay for. So this team, this was a small Skunkworks team, primarily design and development. So the process for this was, we recruited six research participants who were all gonna be in New York over a period of a week. We designed and built a prototype mobile website that functioned as our prototype. And then we did a very sort of, we sort of Jerry rigged it in a Wizard of Oz type of prototype using Google Voice and third party service providers. And I'll show you what I mean by that. And then we ran the experiment and gathered feedback. So the hypothesis, guests want access to on-demand recommendations and services while they travel. They also want to discover novel experiences they didn't even know existed. So our recruit was all in New York for a week, mainly in their 20s and 30s. So the core features of this product were daily recommendations that we would push to these travelers. The ability for them to ask for recommendations, the ability for them to request services and the ability for them to request transportation. So we worked very much. So I think, funny thing was I remember this day when we were sketching this out, this all happened. I think the design for the prototype happened right after we'd all, we'd gone to Doe in Clinton Hill or Bed-Stuy at Clinton Hill and gotten doughnuts, came back, ate them and then just sketched. And I think we were ready in like an hour to essentially build this thing out. So it was really about rapidly, rapidly prototyping and not investing so much time on the design end of things or not spending so much time worrying about the pixels since we were using design more, more so to learn as a method of learning. So speaking of doughnuts, I'm sure some of you have heard the expression of minimum viable product. We had a saying on our team which was minimum awesome product, which is what is the features, what's the minimum features that you can have that still yields really fruitful feedback? So there was another part. So I mentioned that some of the content for local recommendations, the Hidden Gems was gonna be pushed to our, pushed to our travelers. So the funny thing, it was a team of like five or six of us and I was the only one who was actually, had lived in New York. So I was like pulling from my memory of all the places that I wish somebody had told me where to go, whether it was in art and restaurants and shopping, nightlife, I don't know how that happened because I haven't been out in a very long time. Since our travelers were all international and traveling without a SIM card, we gave them each phones. We added an icon down to the home screen that would call up the mobile website and we told them that they had been paired with a Chloe who was a native who knew the city well. We told this to each of the five travelers. And Chloe, the name Chloe, funnily enough, was inspired by Alain de Baton's On Love, his novel On Love. It just felt like a name where it was, everyone wants to either be Chloe or be friends with Chloe. So then, so this is the sort of Wizard of Oz prototyping Jerry Reagan that happened in the back. So the way that it worked was, we connected the pipes through Google Voice. So all of our travelers would send an SMS, they would click on the mobile website on their phone that would trigger an SMS to Chloe. Chloe was actually our team. That was all, you know, we were basically in a loft in Clinton Hill. It would actually go to the Google Voice, I think Google Voice inbox, and then it would distribute it to each of our mobile phones. Then whoever was on call would have to respond. Usually it was at least one or two people. But again, as I said, nobody here was actually, nobody on our team was actually from New York except for me. So I ended up basically staying up for like five days straight doing this. Because you had to be responsive. And then we would text back an answer if it was a recommendation they were looking for, or if they were looking for food, or if they were looking for a delivery, then we would queue up, seamless or post maintenance on our side and send it off to them. So this is just some of the, this is the very, you know, low, low resolution, the low minimum viable product version of our product. So as you can see, there's a card up at the top, a carousel of cards at the top. So each day we had asked, when we had initially recruited our participants, we asked them to indicate categorical interests. So if the travelers from Germany were interested in restaurant recommendations, we would serve up a new set of recommendations every morning. And so it was customized to each of them, not necessarily, I mean, we did a little bit, to be honest, we did a little bit of checking out their social media to see if we could figure out what they would be into. There's a little bit of that man behind the curtain happening. But mainly we were trying to point them to sort of local, hyper-local hidden gems in New York. And then in terms of the questions, the core features, again, you could request local knowledge, you could request a service, whether it was a pizza delivery, dinner reservations, or you could request transportation. So you would ask a question, you'd receive confirmation, that would then trigger an SMS to our team. At the 11th hour at the bottom, we added a magic button. And the reason why we did that was, and we told each traveler that they could use it once during their stay in New York. We wanted to make sure that everyone actually used our product. And also it was an opportunity to, I don't know, experiment with some like extremely high-delight moments, brand sort of moments for them. Moments of surprise and delight. So here are some of the requests that we were getting. So this is what we're seeing on our end. This person, can you guys read this? Yeah, okay. So this person's asking for a recommendation. This person's asking Chloe for a recommendation for a steak. They're asking about the Gary building. We even got some unsolicited selfies. And then in this particular case, this was our traveler from Germany who was actually an air traffic controller. We figured this out from LinkedIn or something. And so when he pushed the magic button, we decided that he should get a sort of hair-raising helicopter ride through over Manhattan. And he actually ended up texting Chloe photos the entire time of some aerial shots. And then we had this crazy moment where our Swedish guest who was in his 20s who was traveling with his girlfriend told us that he was going to propose and he wanted help. So this was a big moment for us. So we created Thor's Day, his name's Thor. So we created Thor's Day, which basically meant, this was in November, we set up this whole day for him where they, we coordinated with him. He was going for a run, he was taking her out for a run around Central Park. At two o'clock he was gonna meet a photographer that we had hired to do a shoot. And then he was going to keep an eye out for the mustache balloon, which would be the horse-drawn carriage ride that we had set up for him. They would be whisked down to massages in Midtown where a car would then collect them, take them back to their accommodations in the East Village where they would get ready for dinner and they'd meet the photographer there. Then they were taken out to dinner, dancing, drinks and dancing out in Williamsburg. And then the car service brought them home at three a.m. The next morning Thor texted us asking us for the best pancakes. And at noon we delivered a photo album that we had worked on all night based on the photography that we had gotten from the hired photographer. And then at the end, even though we were all exhausted, we all agreed it was definitely worth, definitely worth the effort. And one of the things that was interesting is that we got Chloe became a friend. People really took to Chloe. She got invited to Portugal. She got asked out for drinks. And she was actually even invited to Thor and Tove's wedding in Sweden the following summer. But again, we used design to really understand the types of requests, whether it was recommendations, whether it was booking, the types of recommendations that people were looking for and also a basic idea of spend. And then we had sort of general learnings that occurred on the operational side around tone. There were a few of us, since we were all, since there were five or six of us all being Chloe, and there were some members on our team who, some men, some women who had varying tones. So just sort of gauging people's reactions to tones. I remember there was one, I tended to be, when I was Chloe, I tended to be a little bit more enthusiastic, maybe one too many in exclamation points where someone else was like, he's actually German. He was very straight, never a single exclamation point. So yeah, it was just interesting sort of understanding all of the nuances that are involved in operationalizing a product like this. And then the last project I want to talk about was about inspiring the idea. So this is about sort of laying the groundwork for a team of designers to evolve an existing brand. So I joined the founding team of General Assembly as a partner in, this was 2010 and we launched in 2011. This was actually my first in-house job. And we were very, there were only five of us at the beginning. So a lot of this was like, how can we set something up where as we scale, we'll know that enough of the groundwork is laid so that whoever joins the design team can definitely kind of absorb the design principles and be able to execute on it and evolve it moving forward. So there were things, there were activities like taking the founders through workshops to identify our core values, our experience principles, establish the language, the visual language, verbal and spatial language. And then we created obviously for, in the early days, we had to create the first version of the website, the first version, our first space and then evolve it and add to it as the business scaled. So the first thing that we did was we identified what our core values were and this was a process of core values were really articulated with the intention of guiding not just what we create, but why we create them, why we create them. So the first one, people before the machine, this idea of community first, learning by doing, which was this idea of iteration as a path to self actualization. Sorry, I should probably say, for those of you who aren't familiar with General Assembly, General Assembly is a, it started, it actually is a business that has evolved but in the beginning, right now it is education for 21st century skills in coding and product management and digital marketing. When we started, there's a co-working aspect of our business which involved early startups, startups in various stages actually in our space as well as education in the form of classes, workshops and immersive programs. So a lot of this early work was maybe a little bit more relevant to when we had a community, we had it when we housed an in-house community and a lot of it relates specifically to the path of an entrepreneur. So journey over destination, the idea that a lot of entrepreneurs are taking risks and they're leaving sort of safety to take on certain risks so it had to be much more about and many of them statistically will fail if only 10% of startups are successful, it had to be about a greater lesson or a greater learning. And then we created experience principles which are really about the ways that we express those values. So if values are the why, the experience principles are the how and they are how we design our communications, how we design our spaces, how we design our products. They're intended to be guidelines and guardrails. So the first one is this idea of speaking plainly because there's so much jargon within the entrepreneurial world. The second idea, the second principle was considered details which is around the notion that execution is what matters and small moments writ large. Inviting participation within our community, iterating and refining the idea that the work is never done and celebrating craft, entrepreneurship as a discipline is often quite invisible so finding a way to concretize that and don't forget to wink again because people are taking on high pressure, high stakes sort of work. So these are essentially, this is the visual identity, all of the different elements in it, including the logo. The name actually came out of three things. When I had originally met one of the founders, at the time the working title was Superconductor and I had said to him, I would love to help you on grand but you have to let me rename it because the only way we can, the only place we can take something like Superconductor is kind of geek chic and kind of work with it that way but otherwise I don't know and Superconductor sounds like it's more about you, not about your community. And so we ended up ultimately corraling around General Assembly, which is inspired by three things. The idea factories where things are made, the idea of schools, like General Assemblies or Public Assemblies in schools where knowledge sharing happens and the idea of a self-governing body where one can find pure support. In general, I like bigger names for boutique brands. You just need to big yourself up a little bit. In terms of the typographic palette, we chose PFDIN, which was originally designed for the German transportation system for it's used on a lot of road signage because of highly legible. And then we added new 706 as a sort of, as a counter to it. The color palette, the color palette for General Assembly there's a lot of color here, but color is actually intended to be used a little sparingly and it was much more about material integrity for the space, not so much about covering surfaces with paint by any means. I had this one conversation with our, we had a woman who worked sort of frontline of the space and she kept buying black and red kitchen accessories, plastic kitchen accessories and I had to have a conversation with her about it. It wasn't actually about, even though black and red were part of our brand palette, it wasn't actually about black and red and it certainly wasn't about plastic. So yeah, these things are tough and not always successful and they take a lot of time to explain and get, I guess. This is just a business card showing that when possible, we'd use often inexpensive but unusual materials and then the brand imagery. So while we were developing the identity for General Assembly, we were also doing its build out. So nothing existed. We were like, everything was parallel pathing. So we had nothing to photograph. We had nothing to, and when you're talking about entrepreneurship and you're talking about business and you're talking about these things that are abstract, we needed to find a way to make it concrete. I also felt like we're doing something new here. I don't know exactly how we're gonna be received within the community, within the startup community or within New York in general. So what can we do? Can we anthropomorphize things because people love cute things? So that was a little bit of it. We'd specced our furniture. So we knew we were gonna have Prove chairs and we knew we were gonna have Prove tables. We knew we were gonna have Borlech seating and join table, task table. So I started making miniature versions of things, mini laptops, mini books, and staging them. And this became the brand imagery that we launched with and I think they still continue to use this today. Tote bags, filing cabinets, some post-it noting, designing, happening, a little spilled coffee on the floor. At the same time that we, so once we were launched, we pretty quickly scaled to four or five different locations. All of our corporate HQ was in New York, but we had local teams in various cities, some international, that were producing materials. So we quickly realized that we needed to come up with copy guidelines so that people had at least something to keep in mind while they were writing copy. So a lot of these are very similar. There's some overlap with our experience principles, but they're actually much more specific to how we write to our voice. We also, while we were scaling our business, we were growing our social media following. We came up with, again, different locations would have different people managing our social media. So we came up with a basic pie chart. And this was, I always love a good pie chart as a form of strategy in terms of this is what it should look like. And so this was, what are the main content areas that we can tweet about? So the largest is product marketing, but then there's things like community, which is also really important and really integral to the GA brand startup tech. And then there's also room for random. I think during the early days, Adam, one of our founders was tweeting Panda videos. And people loved it because it was authentic and it was random and it was weird. And while we were scaling, before you get to a certain scale, you have a lot of permission to do really random things. And so this was just a way to get people to think about all of these different areas as they're prepping tweets, like, oh, I haven't tweeted about anything in design lately. Let me look and see what's happening. Or yeah, doesn't the world need a random Panda today? One of my favorite meetings was actually our vernacular task force, SuperNardy. It was our brand editor myself and our head of marketing where every Friday at 2pm, we would talk about naming. We would talk about naming. We would talk about our value proposition and we would talk about our messaging. So an example for, you know, we were very plain-speaky about what we referred to as our education formats, but then there were instances where we needed a branded name for a product. So we would just nerd out on it. One thing, one exercise that happened, oops. Okay, thanks. One thing that happened every six months is we would, as our business changed, six months or every year, we would have to constantly iterate on our value prop and hopefully it got shorter and shorter each time. That was always also a goal. And then when it came to our spatial identity, I mentioned like it was about integrity of materials. So this, our architecture was done by Andrea Steele in concert with Mike Cook, who was our construction manager in-house. And Andrea worked with us to design all of the campuses. And then I liaised with Andrea around sort of brand approach, but we chose material palette that was for the most part pretty authentic, pretty honest. When it came to designing our first space, there was this idea of the campus green, so a communal space where serendipitous encounters might occur. There's a bar you can see on the left that was at standing height. So people love working at standing height, but it was also a place for gathering in the evenings. When possible, we tried to work with smaller independent designers similar to the same way that we housed small independent businesses. So we worked with Carl Zahn, the industrial designer. He actually designed our lighting, which where he took essentially industrial pipe and outfitted it with LEDs. And you can kind of see it in here barely, painted in white, but that was one of my favorite features. We tried to create quiet spaces. So this is our library. And one aspect that occurred in every one of our campuses was this idea of a long communal table. And it became almost an architectural element, but it was a way to bring a little bit. Each table was different in each location, but it was a way to bring in something local as well as become this sort of symbolic tome in the middle of the space as a place where people would meet. When it came to our signage program, this was a piece of signage that I designed that sat outside of the, soon as you walked off the elevators in the vestibule before you actually would orient you to, yes, I'm on the fourth floor, I'm standing in front of GA, but the key was actually, it was less about the sort of main areas and more about the activities happening. So each one of those locations, like library or classroom or seminar rooms, is keyed with the activities that happened in those spaces. We actually, prior to launch, we had a long, I had a long debate with one of the founders over L, which is pillow fighting. He was like really resistant to it because he was afraid we would be seen as GA would be this place for dilatants, but I was like very firm about it. This was like the wink that I wanted and fortunately we kept it. I mentioned that the early instantiation of GA had was co-working. We were lucky because one of our founders, his father actually owned a signage manufacturing company, so we painted, there was chalkboard paint, magnetic chalkboard paint on planes throughout the space and one of the things we did was we created magnetic letters that we could use to list the startups that were, because we were month to month, so our roster of startups was constantly changing, but we could use the letters to indicate who was there in that wall that's right behind the reception desk and also put up notes if we had visitors. All of the seminar rooms and the breakout rooms were very largely signed. They each had a light above it to indicate whether it was occupied or not. The lockers were clearly labeled and then by the time we had our second space, open or second space in New York, we had learned a lot. So our first space, if you look at it, the footprint reserved for education was actually one classroom in a space that was like, I forget how many square feet it was. I think it was 16,000 square feet and there was probably 1,000 feet set aside for education. Nowadays, if you look at the square footage of any subsequent GA campus, it's probably like at least 60% education, classroom space I assume, in addition to communal areas. So we iterated, unfortunately with space, you can't really iterate that quickly or affordably but we did with our second one, second location. We added bleacher seating. These are some of our classrooms. One of my favorite little details was the social experiment where we would put a red, we put one red chair in each room to kind of see who it was that would walk in there and claim that as their seat. And we added a video studio for, since we were starting to record a lot of our classes for online distribution. This is the team area, the employee area. And then we had a couple other locations including LA, LA was one of my favorites. We worked with a smaller design team, Mimi Chang and Brian Hurwitz, who used to have a studio called Brook and Lynn, later became early work and they did our, they did some of our seating, some of our soft goods and as well as some of our furniture. This is in Santa Monica. This table was actually made from reclaimed gymnasium flooring that was local. And then there was, at this point there was a team, I think we had a team of one spatial designer, one graphic, two graphic designers, two or three graphic designers actually, couple product designers, writers. So they were constantly sort of smaller projects happening. Whether it was a career fair, an email blast with the year in review, whether it was developing ways to identify the different types of educational formats, whether it's a workshop event, an immersive program, our online product, oh, and that's it. And then I just have one, I'm okay on time, right? Oh, sorry, one last thing that I've been thinking about a little bit is, you know, a lot of this is, in the startup world, people talk about this idea of vaporware, right? Like things that are fake and a lot of what I've shown today are essentially faking it till you make it essentially in a way to gather feedback or understand the potential of it. But obviously it's something that's, comes with its own perils. I don't know if you guys saw the, have seen the, what was it, the Jennifer Lawrence, Steve Buscemi, deep fake video that's out there. If you haven't, you should watch it, it's crazy. So the plea is to use your force for good. And this is a French photographer who does these amazing photos where he photoshopped out the volumes of buildings to create these sort of Potemkin village, like photos of Potemkin villages to use it for good and not for evil. That's it. Thank you. Thank you so much Mimi. I thought, I mean, those of you that had been here for the first lecture and this lecture, I think it's so interesting how the first lecture was so much about one thing and going really deep for a really long time on one thing, which was Pinup Magazine, 25 Issues, really the editor who sort of conceptualized it, you know, finds a way to fund it, finds designers to work with, finds commissions, writing, everything about that thing. It comes from Felix's brain and he's been doing it for over a decade. And what's so interesting about Mimi's practice is that she's a graphic designer by trade and by education, by training, but on all of these projects, she actually is constantly sort of shifting her role and becoming the designer, but also the strategist, the writer, the editor, the researcher. And I think that's such an interesting way to work. And I think architects that train at GSAP also have this kind of tendency to shape shift and assume different roles. I want to open it up to, you know, I wanna get a couple of questions before we have to let Mimi go, but I just wanted to ask a couple of questions to Mimi as well, which is, you know, you have worked a lot with startups and more established companies on these kind of, you know, innovative ideas or new ideas or new concepts. So if it's an established company, it might be something that they've not done before or they want to establish a new market, you know, establish it themselves in a new market or speak to a different audience. If it's a startup, it's brand new, you build it from the beginning. And oftentimes it involves, unlike, you know, Felix's thing, it involves either funding or support or, you know, content generation, some kind of involvement from outside that entity. And in order for that to happen, you need to talk about who you are, like you need to express the visions and the goal and, you know, the merits of that startup or that company or that project. And, you know, I think a big part of starting something new is that is to convince other people that what you're doing is worthwhile. So, you know, having been involved at various capacities on these sorts of projects, is there a way to do that in a really succinct and powerful way? Because I think as architects, you have to do that all the time or you will have to do that all the time. So, you know, I wonder if there are certain principles that you've learned over the years. That's interesting because I think that is, in essence, what happened with FireFestival. FireFestival was a pitch, right? That went too far, that suddenly became, like it never became anything, but it stayed a pitch when it was supposed to turn into a product. But I think that's, I mean, I think that there is, there was this recent, I might have told you about this, but there's a study that was done around fundraising and why people, like the likelihood, there was some study around who raises money and it's basically people who have a certain cadence in terms of storytelling, in terms of the way that they talk about their work, which is really kind of both awesome and horrible. It's awesome if you're that person who happens to be an incredibly convincing storyteller and a lot of entrepreneurs are because they have to convince someone that they're doing this statistically unfavorable thing, but that they've got the answer or they've got a vision. But it's also horrible for if that's just not necessarily your orientation. I think there are things that you can do. I think there are things that you can do. I mean, I don't know. It's kind of like when we, I'm sure as graphic designers when we look at, we're lucky in that we can look at a graphic designer's resume and know instantly whether or not we're gonna hire them or not hire them or even meet with them or not meet with them because there's so much in the tiniest of decisions. And similarly, I would assume for anyone who's trying to solicit work or trying to get someone involved, like how succinctly, how elegantly, how convincingly you can talk about what it is that you're trying to do will kind of win. I mean, instead of graphic design, it's basically language and storytelling. I mean, which is essentially what a portfolio is. The resume format is a much quicker look, but the portfolio is, in a way it's, I think of it as a, for somebody that is making creative work, it's a truer form of how you, but that true is also sort of an elusive thing. I think it's also, I mean, I always find portfolio reviews interesting because there are people who gauge you on your best work. There are people who judge you on your best work and there are people who judge you on your worst work. So where they're going to level, like if they don't like your worst work, then they're not going to, it's not gonna demand a second look whereas like if they see the highs, I think I'm one of the highs. Like if I see something really insightful happening, then I wanna, like, then I probably will wanna talk to that person and I'm willing to kind of, at least for that first meeting, I wanna understand if that was a fluke, I wanna understand if that was actually more representative what this person's potential is versus the stuff, because I think there's many reasons why we, I think we become editors, better editors the more experience we have, right? The more stuff you have to choose from, the more stuff you can throw out, the more like, the more discerning we become as editors. So I would guess like, you know, if there's somebody who's had a long career and they have horrible work, then maybe they haven't necessarily developed that discerning eye whereas someone who is early in their career maybe has a mix, I think you have to be a little bit more forgiving about it. I mean, I think that's something that we talk about. Also in my class, which is that as a designer, you have to be an editor and especially when you're presenting your own work and your, you know, your practice, like you really have to, it's sometimes very difficult, but I think Felix actually had a similar thing, which is the comment, which is that don't try to say everything, like every single process or every single step, every single decision might be interesting at the time, but you need to cut through that and be able to sort of self-edit. It's easier said than done. Can we have, does anybody have questions for Mimi before we let her go? Okay, then we will let her go. Thank you so much for coming, Mimi. Of course. Thank you. And just a reminder that I have a sign-up sheet here. If you need to still sign up, do that now. And tomorrow we start at one at Wehr Lounge. So we'll see you, some of you there.