NC Museum of Art Pentagram Interview 8-19-09 Q ...ncartmuseum.org/pdf/interview-pentagram.pdf · NC...

NC Museum of Art Pentagram Interview

8-19-09

Q: Interviewer(s) A: Interviewee A2: Interviewee Q: ___ yesterday, did you get a chance to look at that, I hope it wasn’t too scary.

A: Yeah, no, it’s not scary at all.

Q: Good.

A: Good questions.

Q: You’re—I know ___ and Dave [ph] have been talking, but we’re in the process

now of actually getting things to the printer and rolling along between now and

November. So have things in place here, in-house. But our November issue,

which drops in the mail about mid-November, of our membership magazine, will

be very rolled with that. So we thought just chatting with you about it, thinking

about the members of our readers would be a nice thing to do, and we’re actually

taping this for our purposes, to just help us remember what we said ___.

A: Okay, that’s fine.

Q: Would you be okay with us posting that to our website an edited version or a

transcribed version, or are you more comfortable with it staying ____?

A: No, whatever you want to do with it is fine with us.

Q: Okay, great.

A: And are you literally talking about posting an audio recording?

Q: Yes.


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Transcript prepared by Rogers Word Service 919-834-0000 1-800-582-8749 www.rogersword.com

A: Is the quality of what you hear now okay?

Q: It’s okay. We’ll see.

A: I mean, my voice isn’t even under the best conditions, and I don’t think this echo

chamber helps that much.

Q: Right. But we’re just sort of thinking, basically thinking aloud about it.

A: Okay. So, basically, do you want to go through your questions and we’ll try to

give you some stuff you can use?

Q: Sure.

Q: Yes, sure, what we were thinking about, the entire process, we were coming up

with questions, and then we thought, “What’s the most basic thing to ask? Why

does branding matter?” Maybe specifically to our members, like why does

branding matter to me particularly.

A: Okay. Well, I don’t think branding in and of itself matters. I don’t think people

wake up in the morning yearning to encounter more branding or wishing that their

favorite institutions would be more aggressively branded. But I do think that it’s

a fact of life that everyone, and specifically the busy, culturally informed, kind of

curious and active people that make up the core of your membership, have to

constantly navigate between and choose among a bunch of different claims on

their attention and options for spending their time.

And I think that the best kind of branding, as it’s expressed, say, on a

website or on a mailing that you get or on a sign, is something that really reminds

people of the actual experience that they’ve had in the institution. So the brand

itself isn’t something you kind of necessarily would take pleasure from


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experiencing, but when the fit is good between the brand and the thing that it’s

representing, it actually does—it does actually connect up with people’s memory

of the experience they’ve had. Or if they haven’t had an experience, it helps them

anticipate what that experience might be like.

And so I think by coming up with a distinctive tone of voice, visually and

editorially and in every other way, for NCMA, what we’re hoping to do is remind

people who have been there what a great place it is, anticipate, I think, for people

that haven’t been there, help them anticipate what a nice experience they might

have there. And for both those categories, signal the kinds of transformations that

will accompany the opening of the new building and the expanded offerings that

you’ll have there. So I think it’s not just change, an update just because things

need to be updated, but I think it’s signaling that the museum itself has been

transformed. And the branding, I think, is an outward manifestation of that real

transformation.

Does that make sense? You can edit it down.

Q: Yes, that’s great, fantastic.

A: Do you need to have anything to add to that? Okay, you don’t have to

[LAUGHTER]. All right. So, carry on.

Q: That sort of feeds into the next question, which is a little bit more about the

research that you did when you came here, who you talked to, what you learned

about the museum, and how that informs what your visual solution was.

A: So, I think there’re some literal answers to that question and some less literal

ones. I think the—one of the things, one of the pleasures, I think, to be had with


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the branding is that it’s—I do know it’s derived very literally from the geometry

of the new architecture. And I think, given that it’s a visual—it’s so much of

what the institution does is based on visual connoisseurship at all kinds of

different levels, whether you’re a student of art history or a school child attending

an art class; it’s all about kind of learning to see things and to be more aware of

what you’re seeing and more discerning of what you’re seeing. And I think sort

of embedding some nice surprises within the branding that relate directly and

literally to things that you’ll encounter in the new museum building is a way of,

again, kind of signifying in a way that the pleasures that are to be had in that sort

of close looking. So I think that’s one thing.

I also think, on another level—and this is more abstract in a way—is one

thing, when we were doing our research, it was we spent a lot of time talking to

the architect, as you know, and a lot of time visiting, a lot of time in their offices

looking at the building, but a lot of time also at the museum, looking at the

collection, talking to the curator, talking to the director, talking to the staff, who

jointly determine what the visitor experience is. And one of the things that struck

us was that the new building isn’t simply kind of expanding a single museum

building into a bigger pair of museum buildings, but it’s that NCMA has always

existed within a larger context of the museum park and all the activities that

happen in the park, activities that happen in the amphitheater.

And it’s like a much bigger—one thing that I remember, I remember

really distinctly on our—it might have been on our second visit, actually. It took

a while for it to sink in, but I realized that the brand, if you want to call it that, is


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much bigger than the typical museum brand. I think in many cities or areas, there

is the museum. And physically, when you go to a museum, they can have a lot of

different things there. They can have classes for kids, they can have film series,

they can have lectures, they can have exhibitions, and they can have special

events around those exhibitions. But they’re all really contained within a building

that also looks and feels like a place that’s been designed and is actually

functioning as a house for the display of art.

You have that. You’ve had that traditionally at NCMA. You’ll have that

in a radically expanded and excitedly expanded way when the new building

opens. But it has also existed within this much larger context that can be accessed

in a lot of different ways. You can actually have, in a way, part of the North

Carolina Museum of Art experience by just entering the museum park, as a

jogger, and kind of going through and encountering some outdoor sculpture and

engaging with that on as deep or as cursory a level as you want.

And so it seemed to us that the idea of it, the footprint that it occupies in

the community, is much bigger and much more porous, if I can use that word,

than the typical museum. And I think what we wanted—that’s sort of made us—

that discovery, I think, led us to come up with what we thought might be a more

distinctive and legible, in a way, brand language than we would have ordinarily.

If you were just doing a regular museum building, you count on sort of the

singularity of that monolithic experience kind of carrying the—kind of paying off

the identity in a way.


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And I think in this case, where the identity, where the actual experience

itself potentially variegated, it seemed like it needed sort of like a bigger and more

obvious and more memorable and more hooky sort of brand in order to kind of

signify something that could be everything, from a concert or a movie in the

amphitheater to an event that would happen in the farthest reaches of the park,

something that would happen in the original building, something that would

happen in the expansion building. Something could happen in all those things all

at once. So, to you guys, that seems so obvious; it’s what you live and breathe.

So I can say that it’s actually saying that it took hard research for your consultants

to discover that is a little bit embarrassing for us, but it is a discovery we made

that I think was a fundamental one to the way we thought about going forward

with everything else.

Q: Did that just naturally leads to thoughts of developing a typeface?

A: Not necessarily. It wouldn’t necessarily lead to that. I think one of the—when

any design problem has sort of the general nature of the problem, which we could

talk about, but it also has sort of the real specifics of the hand you’re dealt. And

one whole set of specifics is the actual physical character of the experience, with,

as I said before, the two buildings in the park, et cetera. But I think another one is

that you sort of have a name consisting of four words that make for a mouthful.

That when you write them all down, particularly in the local context—there’re a

lot of things that say “North Carolina”; there are other museums, there are other

institutions that have “art” in their name. The name alone is sort of—it’s not

generic by a long shot. It’s descriptive, but sort of the components are made up—


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it’s made up of a lot of things that actually show up in a lot of different places

there.

At the same time, there’s the reality that faced with a multi-syllabic, four-

word name, a lot of people revert to the acronym pretty quickly, as I have earlier

in this conversation—NCMA. And I think those two things conspire between

them to lead you to want to do some—to come up with some distinctive way of

writing the words that could give you a—graph the corollary in the way that you

write the acronym. And so, hence that led us to—since then, just as when we

were just kind of doing a very pre-exploration, we started working with trying to

figure out ways we could relate what we were doing to the specifics of the

architecture that we knew that we suspected would become iconic elements of the

experience for visitors. We saw some opportunities to create that custom

alphabet, which is composed out of the same geometry as the ova or ovule, as a

crossword puzzle solver [LAUGHTER] ovule, oculi [ph] that are like the new

building and will be pretty memorable for people to see it.

So I don’t think it necessarily would mean that you have to do a custom-

typeface, but one thing we want to do is sort of preserve the ability to write the

whole name and to write out just the acronym and have it feel like it was that they

were both related, very, very closely related in a family sort of way. And simply

having it be in the same off-the-rack type base didn’t seem to signal a sufficiently

tight relationship. So, coming up with something that bespoke (?) actually

seemed to be the thing that would do the trick.


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A2: It also gives you the opportunity to write other words, like “music” or “sound” or

“kid” or “art” ___ space, and so it relates back to the larger idea of North Carolina

Museum of Art while still showing all the different facets of that.

A: Yes, exactly. And I think, and a lot—again, every museum—there’s not a

museum out there that wouldn’t claim to have the ambitions, if not the reality, of

multifaceted programming for their visitors. But I think you guys really do

deliver an unusually broad range of program experiences, physical experiences.

And it’ll be magnified. It will be amplified substantially with the opening of the

new building.

And so being able to—that’s what I was talking about before, about the

idea of signaling the bigness of the idea. I think one thing that seemed refreshing

when we started playing around with it was, once you sort of establish that this

lettering is—whenever you see this lettering, you should think of the North

Carolina Museum of Art. That meant that anything you wrote—you could own

anything you wrote with those letters, whether it’s art, whether it’s music,

whether it’s dance, film, park, explore, play. It all starts to kind of get enveloped

in this one big idea, which made the identity feel as big as the place itself is.

Q: And for us as in-house designers—we’re so excited about the flexibility that it

gives us to address all of those different needs. As you know, we’re really

enjoying that.

A: Yes, it’s good.

Q: [INAUDIBLE]


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A: I mean, also, by the way, one thing that is true with that as a tactic, not every—it’s

one nice byproduct of that that you’ll come to—that I think realizing already, but

I think is important for a nonprofit, in your case public institution, that has a

responsibility to watch every penny is that once you sort of own that sort of look,

it actually starts to acquire value without—and the only investment you have to

make is just by being consistent and even relentless in how you apply it. So,

down the road you may have some instance where you have to do a really

inexpensive flier that’s like barely—that’s just Xeroxed almost, where you can’t

afford commissioning an illustration or acquiring a photograph. It might be like a

party invitation. And I would maintain that you could write the word “party” in

that font and in one fell swoop you get a customized thing that could only be for

you that in time will be recognized as such by your audience and isn’t costing you

a penny beyond the original amount of investment you made in the font.

And if you think about it, there are a lot of other institutions, and you can

think of them and we can think of them. And your readers will find instances of

their output in their mail boxes, along with your stuff, where a lot of time and

trouble is put into demonstrating ingenuity over and over again, reinventing the

wheel at every turn, every time something gets sent out. And I think that’s one

way to do it, but it requires—it’s an expensive game to play, and it sort of means

that you sort of have to be willing to sustain that over time. And most places

can’t, and they end up sort of just kind of getting differences without any

particular meaningful distinction.


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I think in your case what we’ve got is the option of building something

fairly enduring that, as you know, sort of starts—you know from working with the

system—it starts to resonate with things that it wasn’t even intended to resonate

with at the outset, whether it’s a Josef Albers work from the collection or

anything else, where I think the meaning starts to acquire more and more meaning

the more you use it. And despite the fact that upon introduction it may seem

unfamiliar to people, it’s the kind of stencil that will end up holding all that

meaning once you start pouring it in.

Q: That kind of answers my question. Basically, that thought about how would you

respond, the people respond to the logo, the mark, or the alphabet, as a

challenging read. And you sort of just touched on that. Do you have any other

thoughts about that? Do you run across that with clients who would be like, “Oh,

that might be a challenge for a constituent”? How would you answer that?

A: I mean, I think any time people communicate, there is sort of is a—there is a

spectrum at one end, a spectrum that you’re sort of locating yourself on. At one

end is sort of like the generic common denominator that is universally understood.

I don’t know if you have a lot of post-structuralists reading your publications, but

some people would dispute that that is even a plausible goal. But let’s assume

that it is—that there is some sort of stable neutral kind of signifier for meaning

that is just on one end, which along with all its other characteristics is generic

looking, doesn’t really attempt to have that much personality. But its virtues are

that it’s readable and it kind of goes down smoothly without any sharp edges.


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At the other end are things that are so impossibly idiosyncratic that they’re

virtually encoded for a very tiny audience. And you know, well, you know there

are subcultures in everywhere you look where they’re just attuned to pick up these

really kind of subtle things, and they’re not meant to communicate with a broad

range of people. In between those two poles is where most of us kind of try to

locate where we are. So I think what we try to do when we do this kind of work

is satisfy the functional requirements, on one hand, so that you’re actually

communicating what you have to communicate in a way that is effective and has a

little bit of wit and grace to it, hopefully. But then also do it in a way that in time

will come to be associated not just with anyone but with you guys specifically.

And if what you want is that ladder, you really have to build in a couple of things

that are extra things that end up being distinctive enough they could be

proprietary to you.

So your question is actually much simpler, if I can actually boil it down.

It’s like what people—there are people who are going to say, “What the heck? I

can’t read that thing.” And I think there are two responses to that. One is that

there is just like there’s a simpler way to write the words “Coca-Cola” than the

calligraphic form that we’re really well familiar with. But because Coca-Cola

made a commitment to that cursive logo a long time ago and it devoted bajillions

of dollars to getting it out there in the world, you could see—we’ve all seen that

written in Cyrillic or in Hebrew or something, and you can still tell that it says

Coca-Cola, this white cursive lettering in that style on a red background. It’s


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because that they own sort of not just the words but a kind of particular visual

house style of presenting it that way.

Now, you guys don’t have the bajillions of dollars to devote to this that

Coca-Cola has had over the last 100 years or so; however, what you do have

instead is the license that I think you’re granted by the fact that you’re a museum

of art. And your bailiwick is that kind of visual acuity, and the sort of pleasure

you’re affording your visitors and your audiences is engaging with things on that

visual level. So I think, in a way, we’re not trying to make—we’re not arguing

that it’s harder but ever so much more worth it, but we do think that your

audience is a kind of a audience that is capable of going along with you on some

things that actually have a little bit of intricacy to it, with the promise of greater

meaning at the end of the road.

Q: One thing about the development and the solution in this type of case, was there

sort of like an “ah-ha” moment when you got back to the—what was the

inspiration once you heard about where and who we are and who are audience is

and what we’re offering to the visitors?

A: I think we sort of—Eve [ph] might chime in on this. But as I recall, we came

back with a definition of a problem that had, as one element, just the given of

North Carolina Museum of Art, how many letters and so forth that is, and NCMA,

and the hope that we might be able to bridge those two things in some way. We

also had—were quite struck with what we think will be the striking visual

iconography of the new museum building. And sort of we’re trying to figure out

if there is something in that building that kind of was—could be integrated


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somehow into the visual presentation of the museum’s name and as marketing

material.

And we looked at a number of different alternatives. We looked at things

that were based sort of on some of the vertical and 90-degree rectilinearity of the

models of the spaces of the ways the façade—in different, in separate changing

incarnations, was being presented at one time or another. But then finally sort of

like looked at those—I’m not sure you’re going to call them oculi, those beholden

groups that are going to admit the light, which some museum professionals would

say is key, too; any museum experience is entirely about the quality of the light

that’s entering the rooms. And so those aren’t simply architectural features, but

you could argue that they’re fundamental to the experience someone is going to

have in any of those spaces. I’m sure the architect would even go further with

that, but I’ll let it stay at that.

But then I think it was Eve just was working with all these things together.

And when we do that kind of exploration, it’s there’s a moment where you’re not

actually just relentlessly trying to solve it like an algebra problem, but you’re just

moving things around and experimenting. So can you remember, Eve?

A2: Yes, I mean, I think that we started realizing that from the shape of the ova [ph]

provided into quadrants that you could use that as a part to make the letters say

“North Carolina Museum of Art.” So, if you could extend it to a type base that

you could extend it to pattern, that could be used. And it sort of just feels fun, it

creates a type of space, then we have to set it so that it would be fun to use it, to

see it at first, the—any in the vocabulary of the museum.


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Q: Do you actually ___ around with a pencil and a notebook or ___. Eve, I guess that

question is for you. I think I know the answer with Michael [ph], having seen all

his notebooks.

A2: Exactly. I think Michael is an inspiration, and I try to do it more. It’s very

tempting, sitting at the desk, the way we’re organized, to go right on to the

computer. But there were definitely moments of designing a typeface, certainly,

where it makes more sense to get that idea on paper.

A: It’s actually doing—typefaces are interesting things because, in a way, what I’ve

discovered is that there’re people who don’t really think about graphic design

otherwise sort of really—they’re intrigued by typefaces only because these days

you get in the era of personal computers and desktop publishing. People are able

to select typefaces for anything that they’re printing, whether it’s a launch test

[ph] poster or a PowerPoint presentation or an e-mail to their friend. And so

people have come to understand that you can put it in Arial and it sort of looks

one way, put it in Times Roman and it looks another way. And that used to be

sort of like about as esoteric a subspecialty in American life or global world of

professions that you could have. And now it’s actually a part of, a widespread

part of what it is to be visually literate today.

And so that—so I think we were conscious when we kind of like

developed the thinking that what we might do is develop a typeface. They’re

actually doing something that people would look and sort of like potentially take

some pleasure in the way you’ve done a “Y” or a lower case “b” or the difference

between the “C” and the “E” and the “O” and the “G” and these things. I think


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it’s a game that once was reserved for professionals and now more people are

attuned to.

And, again, with any of these things, no one person’s—everyone’s

handwriting is different if you actually look at it letter by letter. You sort of can

generally read people’s handwriting, even if they’re radically different. And I

think it’s partly because each person somehow is kind of projecting a consistent

personality to the way they write. And I think that’s what—if you go back to that

first question that Dave asked about branding, in a way that is sort of is what the

best brand—what the brands that we like the best out there tend to do, the things

that we sort of relate to the most as part of our lives, whether they’re commercial

consumer brands or cultural things that we relate to on one level or another. We

get a sense that there is a consistent signature to what they’re offering. And I

think it’s a handy, literal analogue for that to say your hand—the NCMA’s

handwriting is consistent the same way that a person’s is. By having this font,

you’re able to make that claim. And if you’re embarrassed of something they

claim, you can say that I made that claim on your behalf [LAUGHTER]

[INDISCERNIBLE].

Q: Speaking of that, that segues kind of nicely into the idea of how you see our team

here and how sort of the vision works with us. Because like you said, in one of

the other questions, there is a certain amount of flexibility and choices to make as

we move forward. Can you talk about that a little bit?

A: I’ve learned through the years, as an external consultant, that it can really be fun

to come in and present the vision of a problem solved in one big presentation.


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Look, this is how all your stuff is fixed, voila. But dynamic institutions

communicate something new every day. These days, if you’re talking about

Facebook and Twitter updates and all this other stuff, you’re talking about

communicating something potentially minute by minute. So I think we live in a

communications environment that’s going to get more rather than less kind of

continuous and detailed and working on all sorts of different levels and all sorts of

different channels. And that means that the people that are in your position,

where you’re the stewards of those sort of communication programs, you need

something to work with, tools to work with that afford you two things, two

somewhat contradictory things at the same time.

On one hand you need something that can give you and your audiences the

promise of consistency, so that you’re not daring them to get two MIs [ph] this

time. But they—from the minute they open their e-mails, from the minute they

open their mailbox, from the minute they drive by and they glimpse a banner, they

sort of say, “Oh, NCMA.” They sort of can recognize it almost before they read

it. They sort of know what to do. And, again, you’re doing them a favor by doing

that. You’re kind of making their life a little bit easier, I would maintain, by not

having them sort of have to devote more time to figure out who is talking and

what do they want from me.

On the other hand, playing against that consistency is the flexibility that it

takes to signal that first that at any one time you’re doing all sorts of different

things, from mounting exhibits, exhibits that would be what we’d expect from any

art museum, paintings and things on walls, to doing special events or lectures or


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film series or all of these other things that increasingly cultural institutions, like

museums and others, do in their programming. And those are not only all

happening at once and they’re all sort of different but over time they change. So

you’re doing something in September that will be different from what you will do

in October that will be different from what you do in November. Never mind

what you’re doing on Monday being different from what you’re going to do on

Wednesday.

And so I think you need both the consistency so people feel that you’ve

got the same person—it’s the same personality in a way—but the flexibility that

lets you adjust to different situations. And again, not to get all anthropomorphic

about it, but it’s not that different from the way someone, any friend you know

who has what you consider integrity, is consistent in the way that they behave.

There is an overall consistency in the way they behave. They don’t act one way

to one group of friends and another way to another group of friends. They sort of

seem to always be true and steady. However, they might act one way at a picnic

and another way at a funeral and another way at a graduation ceremony, another

way at wedding shower, another way. So, like, you wouldn’t expect them to kind

of like wear—pick out one outfit and wear it to all of those things and behave in

exactly the same deadpan manner in all those things. So what you want are

people who sort of feel that they’ve got some kind of basically true integrated

personality to let them vary depending on what the situation is.

So, with those ingredients, every time we’ve done one of these programs,

we’ve learned that what makes it really successful isn’t how ingenious we are in


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the kit of parts but how inspired the people that actually are going to be using the

kit of parts are in coming up with new and exciting ways to manipulate it and

tailor it to all of the different circumstances that they’re going to be faced with

going forward, ones that we can envision right now, ones that we can’t envision

right now. So, the task or the fun part that falls upon you guys is how you can use

this language not just to celebrate the excitement of launching a brand-new

important part of the museum in the form of a new building but also, six months

after that, 12 months after that, 24 months after that—three, four five years after

that—how you kind of keep evolving that tone of voice as it goes along.

And it certainly seems like, golly, that’s taking an impressively long view

of things. But if you look at—there are certain institutions, like if you look at

MOMA, let’s say, they’ve been using, basically, at the core of their identity it’s

the same off-the-rack typeface that I think they established in the late ‘50s, early

‘60s, that they continue to use now more than ever to this day. And they’ve built

their identity around it to the point where if you’re in New York and you’re on a

subway and you glimpse—it can be the name of an artist and an illustration. If

it’s in that typeface, I think a lot of people would say, “Oh, that’s MOMA.” And

I think that takes—they’ve spent 40-plus years investing in that, and you can’t get

there over night. But I think you can’t get there unless you have the right tools to

make that investment and the right people to wield those tools along the way.

Luckily, in this case, we think we have both.

Q: That seems to be maybe the less fun part of being an in-house designer. Can you

also talk about a little bit on—maybe I’m sort of asking you to say this for us


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because it’s one thing that we’ll be saying a lot in the future. It’s that sense of

holding the line, being consistent, keeping the voice disciplined but creative. Do

you find that the in-house designers that you [are] working with in this way are

challenged by that?

A: Yes. I think that the principle of entropy is fundamental to the way the universe

operates, where things are just destined to fall apart. And it actually, they don’t

stick together—when you see something that is holding together beautifully, it’s

not happening by accident, it’s happening very intentionally, and because

someone is being disciplined and purposeful about it. And so anything that is

consistent out there is not—in a sense, it’s not just because you’re sort of like

doing the same things over, merely doing the same things over and over again,

which sounds boring, or kind of depriving yourself of doing things that wouldn’t

quite seem right, which sounds depressing, but it’s also because you’re figuring

out ingenious ways to be creative, where the creativity can really and truly be felt.

One of the things I like about—one of the things that took me a long to

understand as a graphic designer—and I think Eve has been in the same position

because she’s also—she’s been an in-house graphic designer in a number of

different institutions and worked as an outside consultant as well—is that the

kinds of things that you’re tempted to do that I used to do when I was an

immature, young designer, which is kind of entertaining myself by doing a lot

of—by getting bored. I’d get bored too quickly with something, and I’d start to—

I just would do variations just to amuse myself. And you are kind of—there is

this kind of—I came to feel that was actually sort of self-indulgent. If you look at


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it from the point of view of the audience who aren’t—like I said, who aren’t kind

of like going to just hope and pray that you come up with a new typeface to write

them in every day, but instead just are trying to get through the day, trying to

unpack their mailbox. Whether it’s online or on a poll in front of their house,

they’re just trying to sort out the choices that they have during the day.

Which is why, if you think about it—I mean, Apple Computer, one

typeface, white background, what could be more boring, right? I mean, why are

they considered a creative company? If they’re so damned creative, why don’t

they use like a different typeface every five seconds? Don’t they have access to

all these other typefaces? They sort of invented desktop publishing, right?

Instead, what they’ve done is they’ve realized what people really care about is the

ingenuity and grace with which the messages are presented and they want to look

past the typeface, look past the color choices, and sort of see what it is that Apple

is actually trying to communicate to them today.

And that’s for a commercial purpose, but I know one time early—in fact, I

had an epiphany that was paid for by a client who was not in North Carolina, but a

local one up here, where I’ve done a program for the fall launch of a cultural

institution up here. And it was such a success, I thought it came out well, I was

excited about it. And then I—it came time to do the spring program for them, and

I came up with this entirely new thing that I thought was just as cool that would

work in the spring. And a guy who was on their—well, this might work with you

guys down in tobacco country. This is one of those cultural clients who had

Philip Morris as a big sponsor and, in fact, a marketing guy from Philip Morris, a


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real guru from Philip Morris or maybe Altria—other way around, actually—was

on their board of trustees and was a board member who sort of had marketing as

his main portfolio on the board. And he summoned me up to his office and gave

me a sort of stern talking to. And he said, “Look, the Marlboro Man. It’s been

this typeface. ‘Come to where the flavor is,’ cowboy with a hat—background.

It’s been this way for like 55 years. Do you know how many people have gotten

bored with this and tried to change it?” And like everyone—it’s the only thing

that’s been constant, this kind of like language for communicating what this brand

is and the fact that every five seconds some genius comes along and they think,

“I’ve got an idea, let’s change it.” But it’s just gotten, all its strength has to do

with the fact that we’ve actually been consistent. It’s like they even say it’s like

being faithful in a marriage. It is like being faithful in a marriage, in a way, you

know? You can either be faithful or you can be unfaithful, and some people can’t

help but be the opposite. But if you respect the institution, you sort of know what

you’re supposed to do, right?

So I think it’s the variety and the surprise should really come through not

manipulating the frame, which is really what the typeface and the visual kind of

conventions are, but the subject within the frame, which is what makes the words,

the images, the things that make each one of these things particular. And I think

you, like I said, that not everyone, not every institution could hear, I think,

something with this level of complexity or command [ph] their audience to follow

along with this, but I think you guys are blessed in both regards that you have a

challenge in-house on one hand and an audience on the outside who will, I think,


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enthusiastically start following along with you. You can hold—we may be able to

hold entropy at bay long enough that it seems like it’s—this program is a little bit

more like a force of gravity than just a bunch of people making some arbitrary

decisions that they hope everyone will go along with.

Q: That’s my new screensaver, “hold entropy at bay.” [LAUGHTER] I like that.

A: Now, it’s funny. That was—when I worked for Mossimo, he was always talking

about that. He introduced an idea to me. He said that to me. And it’s really

funny because he actually had—he would rage against it, but he sort of—he

almost like didn’t sort of like think it was a human being’s fault. He just sort of

thought it was like poverty or injustice or hurricanes or tornadoes or something.

It just was this kind of like constant in the world that you live in and something

that all right-minded people have to kind of join arms and battle.

So, everybody is up for joining that battle, but I think it is actually the

only—it takes real kind of confidence and a steady hand and a clear eye to build a

brand, back to that first word. And you can screw it up in a second if you want.

And so that is sort of as you’re getting challenged going forward, that’s the thing

to kind of keep in mind and try to convey as you go around.

Q: [INAUDIBLE]

A: Then one of the things to control yourself with is that, when something is brand-

new, it does sort of seem like it’s just sort of an arbitrary set of recommendations

made by someone or other based on whatever reason. And why does that

recommendation have any more value than any urge that I might have which

might countermand it. And I think what you’ll discover, and we’ve seen this


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happen in identity programs as well, is that one secret weapon you have is that the

more you do it the more legitimacy it seems to require. And even if there are

people that might resist at first, but eventually they’ll want—assuming that the

North Carolina Museum of Art continues to be a successful institution that brings

value to its audiences and to the community and is enthusiastically embraced by

the people there, people will—eventually, that’s an imprimatur that will become

desirable, and people will want to look like the real NCMA. And so the brand

language that you guys are the stewards of is sort of the mark of authenticity that

this really is the North Carolina Museum of Art. And I think that sort of is the—

that’s why people go to court to defend their house, in a way, because they

recognize the value of it. But I think the reactions people have to it on day one,

when it’s a newborn baby and has no personality at all, versus the devotion they

can have to it when it’s an adorable child or an incredible strong-willed adult is

different, I think. So a little bit of patience and consistency kind of carries the day

sometimes, too.

Q: I think we have gotten to the end of our questions. Thank you so much for your

time. Is there anything else that—you’ve met some of our local design

community over at the College of Design. But is there any other message or

thoughts hat you want to share?

A: Well, no. I know these days, with design criticism being a spectator sport,

everyone sort of looks at a solution like this and thinks how I would have done it,

and a lot of times how I would have done it would have been better than the way

it actually got done. And so I just feel triply grateful that we were the ones that


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got to do it, and would beg the indulgence of all those talented designers down

there to first kind of give it time to grow and develop.

And secondly, I think your—Barbara and Dave [ph], you guys are in a

position to collaborate with people down there. And I think eventually it may

be—I think it actually has the bones and the kind of structure behind it that would

invite a lot of different kinds of designs and different sorts of points of view to

collaborate and put their own mark on it while staying true to the basics of it. So I

think that’s an invitation that, with your permission, I would kind of put out there

to the greater design community.

Q: Absolutely. I see that in our future, and I think we’ll obviously keep you posted.

A: Okay, that’s very good.

Q: Good.

Q: Thanks so much. That was fantastic.

A: Okay, good. I’m glad it worked. So thanks. And this sounds like it’s potentially

the most harrowing online audio file of all time [LAUGHTER].

Q: Or delightful, depending on how you look at it.

A: Boil it down to as little as—okay?

Q: Deal.

A: Thanks.

Q: Okay. Take care.

Q: Thanks. Bye.

A2: Bye.

[END RECORDING]

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