You may not be as of a design geek as the both of us are. Stick around because I want to talk about what Jesse has learned about studying standards manuals and understanding what timeless design looks like and what he thinks of in the future for brands. I'm Jesse Reed and you're listening to the future.
I hold in my hand or hands this book and as you can see before you behind me all around i'm a lover of books and tangible things as we live in the digital age i think there's this nostalgic component that i have about books and this is just one of the many that i have from you or one of the few i should say and this is all about the new york city transit authority and the objects and i believe i was able to purge to purchase this during some kind of crowdfunding thing when I was able to get in on it because that's how I first got into the rabbit hole of what you do or did I imagine that That particular book was not crowdfunded. It was a different one, right? Yeah, we did three.
NASA, right? Yeah. So NASA, the NYCTA, which is the New York City Transit Authority book, and then the EPA book, those were all crowdfunded on Kickstarter.
And we were fortunate enough, like that one that you're holding was the one that we published on our own once we became a bit of a grown-up company. I can't remember how I came upon your books and your ideas before I actually even knew who you were. I have all four, I believe, and I was looking through the house desperately like, "Where is it?" Half the books are at the office, the other half of the house.
Luckily, I have one so I can show our audience. We don't always have props I can hold up here. What I'm going to describe to our audience who are listening to this on the pod is, I think, beautiful, straightforward flat lays or documents, tickets, all kinds of objects.
and they can be works of art themselves as still lifes or ready-made, just objects that you can find and they're just... documented here because as a collector of things it would take forever for me to come to any resemblance of the collection you've been able to put together and you photograph it so when you're preserving and you're sharing and you're giving us an opportunity to look into the past and documenting so well so Jesse first of all welcome to the pod and I just wanted to ask you if people don't know who you are can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of your backstory and we'll take it from there Sure. But yeah, thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's a real pleasure to be on. So I do wear quite a few hats. I will name maybe just three as I think they're relevant to the conversation that we're going to have.
So yeah, as it relates to the book that you just held up, I'm a co-founder of Standards Manual, which is an independent publishing imprint here in Brooklyn, New York. I I'm also a co-founder and partner at Order, which is a design office also in Brooklyn. And then I am a co-founder and CEO of Standards, which is a digital brand guidelines publishing tool.
Do you teach and lecture as well? I do. I'm not teaching currently, but yeah, I have at Parsons, University of Cincinnati.
I'd lecture more sort of sporadically or doing conferences and talks of that nature. On top of the day jobs, teaching is just a bit too much for me. You know, I love it.
It's exhausting. So once I have more time to commit, I'll go back. wonderful oh well i think that's neat what you're doing so you live in a very rare space i would consider this a co-founder of three different companies doing slightly different things you're in the design service space that's where most of our audience are going to be able to relate you run a company you work with big clients work with small clients you do all kinds of different things and then there's this i would describe it as like a passion project something that you care about in the publishing and documentation of these artifacts And then there's the digital version of a standards manual.
That's the standards company, right? Yeah. So the first question I have for you is when does one sleep when doing all these three things?
How do you find time to do anything? This has been the case a lot of my life. I've now been able to reflect on where I think I do my best work or I thrive on many things happening at once.
It's not really... I mean, I guess one would call it multitasking. I just enjoy doing one task or activity for a shorter period of time and then stopping, going to another, working on that and sort of continuing that throughout whatever it may be.
And I think, you know, I really learned this previously to starting all these companies. I worked at Petrobras. pentagram here in New York for Michael Beirut.
And I mean, in that environment, you have to multitask, you have to be very good at time management, you are responsible for many, many things happening at the same time. And for some people, I think that's overwhelming, or even in some environments, some agencies, you're working on one project, maybe two projects that are very large, and you're sort of stuck there. But yeah, I enjoy the sort of multifaceted day, the the day to day of really not completely a routine.
I'm not exactly sure what's happening the next day or the day after that. And between all three companies, depending on what's going on, I have to sort of like put on a hat, take off a hat and sort of change modes. And I, it's just my personality.
I enjoy doing that. And I don't, it's not like a 24 hour machine. I get plenty of sleep.
I do extracurricular activities. As it relates to standards, which you could say is like partially an efficiency tool, I think I've learned to be efficient with the eight-hour day and just manage my time appropriately. So yeah, just because you do many things doesn't mean you don't have to sleep.
Do these three different companies feed into each other or is there a natural overlap that there's some synergistic quality? Both. They certainly feed into one another and they overlap.
And just to give some context around timeline, Standards Manual, the publishing imprint, was started first in 2014. And yeah, alongside my co-founder Hamish Smyth, we published the first book, which was on the NYCTA Graphic Standards Manual by Massimo Vignelli, Bob Norda, Unimark for the New York City MTA system. And at that point, That was a project.
That was a singular idea, a project that we thought we wanted to make happen, and then it did happen, and then we thought that would be the end of it. Essentially, a year later, we did a second book, and it turned into an imprint and sort of a company. But even at that time, we were still working at Pentagram, didn't want to leave our full-time jobs, and so continued to do it on the side, as you said, a passion project.
And then eventually, in 2017, We left Pentagram and started Order. So that's the design office and we do client facing brand and identity work. And then about four years ago, Standards was created, established and has been being built ever since.
And so I think that progression is worth sort of knowing and talking about because starting a business almost unintentionally. I mean, the publishing imprint, we didn't set out to say we are going to start a publishing imprint with many titles. We're going to do a book a year.
There was no business plan. It just started with a very passionate idea that was successful. And then we did one more and then we did another one and it went from there.
And so I think that taught us a lot about business and running a business. that side of things. And then on the other hand, we learn about archival processes and how important history is and sort of learning from history and applying it to modern day work.
So when order then began A lot of people knew us from the books, but had no idea that we were working, practicing graphic designers. They thought we were just publishers. I don't know.
But we have no background in publishing. I didn't go to school for it. We didn't know.
like the norms, I guess. We figured a lot of things out just on our own. And I think that innocence almost was to our benefit where we didn't have anything stopping us from doing it the way that we thought it should be done.
We didn't sort of come with industry baggage. So anyways, then once you're doing order and sort of the client facing work, I think having an entire company that revolves around brand guidelines and legacy systems that to this day are still in place gives us at least optically an advantage when we're working with new clients and new companies that want to be doing the same thing. We sort of have some credibility there where we've researched and analyzed all of these systems, the components, the way that they've worked for NASA, for the transit system, for EPA, and then how that same thinking can be applied to contemporary design practices.
And then naturally, next evolution, not to sort of jump ahead, but brand guidelines from a printed five ring binder to PDFs to something that lives as a website sort of happened naturally through the combination of standards manual and order. So then standards was born. Did you at that time in which you decided to fund or crowdsource or crowdfund the first book that you would be partnering up with who you did?
Creating order. No. They were so separate at that time because that was 2014.
I started at Pentagram in 2011. So just a few years in and I was... having the time of my life, I still felt very new and young and had so much to learn.
And I loved working for Michael. He was, became my mentor, whether he signed up to do it or not. But even at that point, we were still designers.
And then eventually we became associate partners at Pentagram. So, and I think that was the goal. So from starting the publishing imprint to starting a design agency, There was so much of a gap in terms of timeframe and ambition, and we were sort of just happy at Pentagram.
And Michael was very supportive of us doing this project, and then eventually it became what it was. But his support, other people at Pentagram's support, it was all encouraging. So we tried to not let it get in the way, but there wasn't sort of visibility too far into the future for even order or standards.
I think the cool thing about this is I often warn people do not Partner up with people because it's like a marriage and I think having a project to work on allowed you guys are like well This is kind of fun. Should we do another one another one and it's it's grown into three different companies now So you kind of keep the tires you test it a little bit before you jump in So for a lot of people are listening to this and for reasons of my own I'm not gonna get into really test the relationship know what people are like in the good and the bad because sometimes I the person you partner up with is a criminal or has totally different vision than you and you're fighting the entire time you're wondering why are we doing this people kick start a project they think the project's done when they get funded no the work has just begun and so so many there's like the internet's littered with them failed kickstarters where they got the money but they totally squandered the opportunity and so sometimes they they're under capitalized or they're stretched too thin delivery dates quality control all out of out of their control I'd like to ask you this question in two parts. You said lessons learned.
I want to know about the business lessons you learned and about the design lessons you learned by becoming accidental archivist or just understanding what it means to preserve history. So let's separate those two. From a business point of view, you've crowdfunded something.
You're in business now. You're learning lots of business principles. What are the key things that you picked up?
I mean, in terms of business, the first thing that comes to mind is staying focused. And this is specific, I think, to Kickstarter because Kickstarter has gone through many phases. When we did our project, it was sort of at its peak or it was like fairly new.
And so there wasn't an exhausted market and it wasn't oversaturated. I think now there's so many creative projects that people want to do. And that's a great thing.
But also not everyone can constantly crowdfund everything. But when we did the first book, it was new. And so but what you...
sort of set up was a campaign and you were trying to fund some sort of idea and then you gave people a reward for funding that project. And there were some Kickstarter campaigns and projects that there were like like 10 different tiers of awards that are things that you could get if you funded that campaign. So it could be like a poster, a t-shirt, the book, and then like a meet and greet or like an autographed copy.
Just so many combinations of awards. I think that's what they call it now. I'm like blanking on even, oh, rewards, not awards.
So yeah, the rewards that you got. So then on the opposite end, we just stuck to one thing. All you got by funding our campaign was the book.
Eventually, we sort of did bundles of two copies and like five copies, but you didn't get a poster, you didn't get a sticker, you didn't get hats. And so the point of that was just keeping things so focused on one singular item made everything run a lot smoother. And so I think that theory applies, again, to standards and any other company that you're trying to start fresh and from the beginning is to not do too many things at once and to grow very slowly.
So we picked that up, I think naturally, maybe someone gave us that advice or just seemed pretty logical. Like it would be a huge headache if we had to coordinate five different rewards for many different tiers to different people, and then shipping these things all around the world. I mean, this is specific to book publishing, but as graphic designers, what we did know how to do was to design and print a book.
We did that for our day jobs. So a client, a publisher, they would hire us, we would get content material, and then we would design it, hand over the file, and they would take care of I mean, maybe we would be involved in production, but they would be responsible for distribution. So we had to learn publishing distribution very, very quickly.
And we went through a few bumps in the road on which partner to use and what's the most efficient way to get books all around the world. That was the biggest learning hurdle was really the distribution and the logistics of running a publishing company that's shipping physical goods and not just delivering logo files over email. When you said focus, I almost kind of smirked and laughed a little bit because here's a guy who has three companies.
He was talking about focus. But another word for focus in this thing is to keep things simple, to not overcomplicate it for communication and also for delivery of said promise good, right? I think people get caught up in the gamification of funding or they feel like they have to value stack something to a ridiculous level in which then it just becomes a beast.
And I think people who do something, one thing really, really well tend to work out pretty good. It comes maybe also out of the design philosophy that I've been taught and sort of subscribed to. Just this idea of simplicity, reduction, getting to the core message of anything that you're creating.
And so, yeah, to that point, that can relate to designing a logo, but it can also relate to designing a book or starting a company. That simplicity, that reduction of the core DNA, the core focus, the core attention that you want to give any given theme or artifacts is really critical. So yeah, I think the design philosophy in that sense also applies to the business philosophy.
While we're on this, before I get into the second part to that question is you have three companies. I just want to ask you just quickly, if you don't mind, which of the three enterprises generates the most money for you? It's order.
We're doing... at sometimes very large scale brand and identity projects not all the time that's sort of a range of very small to very large but i think within that diversity it generates the most income on a consistent basis i mean some would look at you know our past crowdfunding campaigns like nasa that raised almost a million dollars within 30 days so you look at that and you say well How could you be raising a million bucks in 30 days? And that is a one-off scenario.
And it glides very nicely throughout the year. And it has its peaks and valleys. Obviously, the end of the year is better during holidays.
But on a consistent basis, the design agency generates the most. What of the three takes most of your time? Personally, it is also still order.
I run a team of five people here in the Brooklyn office. So we have four designers, a head of operations, and I'm the managing partner that oversees all of the projects. So certainly that takes up the most time.
And then this other hat that is somewhat recent for standards, I now basically take enterprise business calls where I speak with new customers that want to sign up for a much larger enterprise plan and give them demos, talk about the benefits of using brand guidelines for the web and all of that. But I do zero design consulting. I sort of completely take off my creativity hat and I put on my business hat.
And then with standards manual, I guess it's a mix in between, but it's really active when we have a new title being produced and published. And then when we don't, again, it sort of runs on its own. I mean, we've set it up to work that way, but order is the day-to-day beast in my life.
Yeah, a good beast. If money weren't a variable in this, which gives you the most joy of the three things? I mean, not to keep repeating myself, but I honestly do find a lot of joy from working with people and learning about industries that I never would have come into contact with had I not been designing an identity for them.
So I do get a lot of joy out of that in the more social or collaborative aspect of it. I guess second tier to that would be the publishing imprints where we're, I wanna say authoring, but that's not completely true because some of the content that we are compiling is not our work, but we're able to package it and talk about it and I think make it accessible in a way that we think is the best way to do it, where we don't have a client, no one's giving us changes, no one's giving us feedback. So there's complete freedom in the publishing and print where we do it exactly the way we want to do it.
And I mean, for those watching on video, you see these books behind me and our Parks book. I was talking about this earlier with a few students and how most major publishers would never allow a cover with just one word on it to ever go to market. It has no author, it has no byline, it doesn't have an image.
You have no idea really what's inside of it. But we believe, again, in the simplicity and the reduction of an idea to intrigue a person to pick it up. So that gives me a lot of joy as well.
So that's sort of like a non-answer, but those two are in there. Yeah. No, that was a good answer.
And you helped me to figure something out, which is I think you are aligned in your life. The thing that you spend the most time that gives you the most joy also pays you or rewards you the most. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's that's what's keeping me alive. And standards is so new. So hopefully that completely shadows everything eventually one day.
But publishing is a hard market and we're fortunate that It can sustain itself. We actually don't do crowdfunding anymore. So we have the capital to produce books on our own without asking people to contribute beforehand.
But It's not making us millionaires. And I don't really care. I think that the point of the books is that we're producing something that we really care about.
And even if it just broke even, that would make it worth it. So I think with the balance between all three of those companies, I don't want to say that standards doesn't give me joy. It actually does.
And it makes me use a different part of my brain that I don't typically or hadn't typically done on a day to day basis. And I think it's growing. And again, it's a passion project that has turned into a very serious company that we hope goes very far, but it's early days.
The natural question or follow up to all of this is if one of these three things gives you all of what you need right now, why even bother with the other two? Because usually it's different. Usually it's the passion project gives me the most joy.
It's no clients, self directed. It's 100% in line with what I want. I do this other thing to make the money so I can pay for this other passionate thing that loses me money.
And the third thing is it brings in so much money, but it gives me no joy. It's just a vehicle to make money. But it's really interesting that yours is all aligned.
So the question for you is why bother pursuing these two other things if you're getting the maximum to whatever level that you can get from a design service business? Yeah, I guess there's a few thoughts there. I mean, one is like, not to think about this in a doomsday scenario, but I sort of in the back of my mind, always think, okay, if order just bombs one day, and just we lose all of our clients, everyone quits, I'm on my own.
What am I going to do? I have some backups. I hope that never happens.
That is like a voice in my brain that just thinks I have to be doing many projects and many activities at once because you never know what will happen with one or the other of anything that you're doing. So, I mean, that is one aspect of it. The other is I just find pure joy and excitement from, like I said, very early on.
sort of working on one thing, putting it down and then going to another table and working on another project. So it'd be like if you're in a wood shop and you're building a chair, a table and a bench, I don't know. And they could just be all three very different styles of craftsmanship and refinements and wood type and style and stain.
I mean, make whatever metaphor you want or like in a kitchen making three different dishes, you know, an appetizer, a main and a dessert. I think you could say, well, why don't you just make desserts? desserts forever and some people are pastry chefs and that's what they do.
But I think you could say I'm more in line with a chef that likes to create all different courses rather than just one forever and always. And I mean, the money, yeah, I have to make a living. I got to pay the bills.
I have people's lives that I'm now responsible for, but it has never been. And this is just so honest. It's never been the driving force.
And even with standards manual, I mean, people looked because it was so transparent. They looked at the crowdfunding results. They said, you made a million bucks.
Like you guys are so rich. And it's like, that's just not true. When you break it down, you take out costs and you really do the math.
And We did that out of pure passion and the result was something very successful. And that's what I tell students or young entrepreneurs that you have to be driven by interest and passion and curiosity. And I almost guarantee you that it will result in success.
some financial success. I mean, there's a big meter of what that means to you. If it's like $50,000 in a year, that might be amazing.
Or it could be a million, 2 million, 5 million, whatever you want. But I think the interest and passion driving anything you're doing should be first and foremost. So it sounds to me like you're getting everything that you want or need from order your design office, but to tickle the part of your brain that enjoys spinning another plate and doing something.
And I want to emphasize this. This is not criticism. It's just acknowledgement that some of us work better when we're doing different things so that when we're doing thing B, we get ideas for thing A.
And thing A drives concepts for thing C. And it goes on and on like that. And some of us work best like that.
I'm reminded of this one idea, though, that was shared on stage from Sharon, a businessman. And I guess he's the CEO of of acquisition.com he said something like live by the 10 10 forever rule which is have 10 friends that you make 10 times the effort that they're your friends forever and i think that's a rule of like focus like you had said focus which made me smile again it's like if standards or standards manual, the imprint or order can have 10 times the effort with 10 times the result that this is the only thing you need to do forever. That's the one thing I want our listeners to think about as you're spread thin, not you, Jesse, the listener.
You might just say like, sometimes when things don't add up as the expression goes, start subtracting. But for you, I think it is one of those rare cases where the more things that you do, the more all of it adds up and there's interplay and overlap and I can see how they all work together. So getting to the lessons learned in business, you had said, I think you had some advantages as a relatively early mover in a space that wasn't super crowded and noisy.
That's a lesson potentially is to have a focus offering that you can then deliver simply because that's where most people crash and burn and kind of self-sabotage. I want to now flip it onto the second part, which is, what kinds of design things or principles did doing the manual inform you? What did it inform in terms of how you move forward in terms of the design lens?
So in that aspect, it's interesting, sort of the leapfrog over order from standards manual to standards, because they all have a relationship, but there's clearly a direct relationship from the guidelines that were developed in the 1970s, what we learned from them, and how in the 2020s, we're moving forward into a web-based interactive platform. And I think what we learned, this is a design principle. I mean, the sort of consistency and the efficiency and the process in how you work is just as important as the outcome.
And that's what standards, the guideline software is really doing. Like, it's not itself a quote unquote creative platform itself. It is its structure.
And it gives you the designer structure to do your best work and do it very quickly and efficiently and to the degree that you want to make it look exactly how it should. And so not to get into the technical weeds, but we designed it so that anyone could truly have it reflect the brand that it needed to and not be set in a template so that every single guideline built on standards looked exactly the same. So this flexibility and this nuance and this dynamism that we were missing from tools that we didn't have five years ago, that's what led us to build standards.
And I know it's sort of like a way around the question a little bit, and hopefully it doesn't come across as that way, but truly sort of setting up the foundational and fundamental principles and structures that you need to do your best work is what I think that's the biggest design lesson that we learned from those two companies and what we continue to do at standards and the feedback that we get and what people want to see in that platform and how we can make their jobs and lives easier. That's sort of our purpose within that company. I mean, sometimes I can imagine this happening as you're archiving or unarchiving the past and we're like 20, 30 years removed, maybe more.
Sometimes looking in the past, you can learn a lot. Did any of that happen to you where you discovered something about your outlook on design that you're like, "Okay, you know what? As we're designing modern identity systems for people in 2020 something, these are timeless principles that designers have forgotten about that you were able to rediscover for yourself." Basically, we're just doing the same thing.
I'm not totally dismissing technology and the advances that we've made. as a profession and with the tools that we have. But honestly, in some of these books, the NASA book, EPA, you name the guideline, it has typography, it has color palettes, it has the way to use typography and hierarchy and placement and composition and scale.
Nothing has changed. Look at any contemporary brand guidelines for the biggest corporation you could possibly think of. And then the smallest mom and pop coffee shop, all of those same principles apply to both ends of the spectrum.
So I think what we've learned is that we aren't completely changing fundamental principles. It's just the way in which they're expressed and utilized and maybe advanced in how they look and how they are created, but the way in which they need to be communicated, distributed, and the consistency that underlays everything. hasn't really changed that much.
And I don't think that's a bad thing, staying the same for so long. And it's almost like we're taking care of the boring parts of it all so that the creativity can be emphasized even more. So I think some people think about this or hear this and they're like, "That sounds not fun at all." I don't know.
You're talking about grids and modules and structures and the architecture of a brand. To me, that's really exciting. And that's why I think me and the rest of the co-founders that these companies love to do what we do.
Well, it seems like you're the right person for the right job. If you need identities built, you enjoy this, you have a deep passion and history about this. Maybe it's because both of us have a design background that there are a lot of self-taught creatives out there that haven't actually studied, do not know what the standards are, the rules, how you build modular systems and how a company can scale with the systems that you build.
Maybe that's where they run into trouble. I feel like Maybe just because my feed is biased towards a certain thing, there are people out there saying some silly things about identity systems they do not understand. The Internet's full of them because when there's a brand refresh, they go crazy.
This is weird for me to say because I'm a pretty opinionated person. The voice of reason, everybody just calm down, put your design torches down, When you look into the work and the planning that goes into this, you'll understand why all the decisions are made. Maybe you don't agree with it aesthetically.
And I forget, I think it's Marty Neumeier writes about this. It's like when we fight the battle of design purely based on aesthetics, it's like we're fighting in the ghetto of design. It's like we're not talking about it in terms of it's solving problems, communication, marketing, branding, business problems, and we get pulled down.
What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as you're saying all that, I'm sort of like, I'm also smiling.
And the one thing that comes to mind immediately is a fairly recent rebrand for Amazon and the work that Kodo did for that. It comes to mind because I'm on LinkedIn, same thing, I gabbed feet, I see what people are saying. And the outrage that some people have around the tweak to the logo, the wordmark, saying that it took 18 months to...
refine a barely noticeable change in the logo. Obviously, they did not spend 18 months doing that. And anyone who says that clearly has no idea the work that goes behind something at that scale, that stature, complexity, 18 months to me sounds short for what they had to do.
And like, kudos to them, like hats off on the work that they did. I mean, again, you could we could discuss aesthetics and typefaces and color all we want. But the sheer complexity of a system like that, and the application that it requires to be figured out.
I mean, back to this topic that we're talking about is brand guidelines. Somewhere in there, there's some sort of systematic structure that instructs the people who need to print more bags, more boxes, apply decals to trucks, social media, websites. It's mind blowing.
I mean, really, when you think about it. So yeah, for all the naysayers thinking that all we're doing is kerning letters and picking colors. I don't know.
There's a lot to be learned still for those people. There's hopefully tools out there to learn it. Yeah.
It's one of these things where I think it's the curse of the ignorant that they think they know it all, and it's the curse of the informed that they don't think they know anything at all. We should just cross over a little bit there. Whenever I see someone respond with, "Oh, it's not symmetrical.
I fixed it there. Why did they do this? Oh, I made it better." they're almost telling on themselves that they don't know what they're talking about.
For people who cannot understand why a system that for them barely changed at all would require 18 months, can you quickly tell us what's involved in designing a system that big? What are the considerations? Just very high level.
If you can enumerate just so that people start to say, "Okay, next time we see something, We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg and what there's this massive thing below. What are the kinds of things that you have to go through in order to arrive at those kinds of decisions? You know what it is?
It's working with other people. This is not done in a vacuum. A designer did not get a job, do work, and then just deliver it and say goodbye.
That is, I think, at the very top of this pyramid of nuances that we could go into around what's involved in a rebrand. At the end of the day, you're doing this work for other people to do their jobs. So if we use Amazon as an example, you could really name any major corporation.
There are so many distributed teams and departments and levels of every job position that you could imagine, many of them in one way or the other are touching the brand, using the brand, needing to be represented by the brand or to represent the brand in some sort of way. You have to take into account every single aspect and expression that every department and vertical and sub brands down to administration, finance, legal design. I can just go on and on.
The list is hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe, of people that need to understand and use a system. That is incredibly difficult and that is not done easily or quickly or in an isolated way. Let me fix this in a few little pixels that I'm pushing.
So that is completely besides the point. It's understanding relationships and the work that other people need to do to do their jobs efficiently and correctly. I've not worked on any identity system on a scale like that, not even close.
So let me try and see if I can explain to maybe the non-designer types what's happening here. When you see a logo, oftentimes you're only seeing one instance, one use case of that, and you're critiquing and commenting on that thing. When you get to a large enough company, there are many use cases for it, many things to consider.
And so you probably have to build a brand tree to see how many different ways this is being used and different configurations, square, rectangular, long, vertical, all these kinds of things. Then you take that and it's on a level to the power of all the different stakeholders who have an opinion about how what you're going to do is going to make their life easier or harder. And as the person who has to then interview, build a database and cross-reference all these things, you're juggling the needs of a thousand people and trying to be the benevolent designer person to bring it together while serving the needs of the brand, brand of chief brand officer, chief marketing officer, and potentially chief revenue officer and CEO.
So it's a complex juggle of many different things. So when we talk about the execution, the form itself, it's not that hard. As you astutely had pointed out, if it's just you making it, anybody can make this and you can get paid $5.
Nobody's going to complain. But when you have to do this, and the reason why small to medium sized companies typically who don't have this pedigree are never invited to do these things because they just simply don't understand. We haven't even gotten to legal yet.
There's like legal considerations and doing trademark searches and referencing competitors and positioning between things. And sometimes it's like threading a needle. So there's a lot there.
So if y'all are not that interested in communicating to the world that you don't know what you're doing, please stop, put down the design torches, take a minute and understand things. And this is not a plug for you, but I'm going to do it. Go pick up a design standards manual designed by a legend, Vignelli.
Look at it, study it. See how people who have been doing this for way longer than you, who are highly regarded, respected within the pantheon of great designers that are in the history books. See how they did things.
And then you'll start to understand just a little bit more. And we try to do this on the pod just to make you a little bit smarter. So there, end of soapbox.
You want any final thoughts on that? - Yeah, what I would add to my answer of, you know, you're designing for people, it's also decision-making. That is almost the primary topic of any meeting presentation that a designer might be in.
You are presenting to a group of people and at the end of it, you hope they make the decision that you intend for them to make. And that doesn't always work. And then you have to go back and forth, you have to compromise, you have to revise, you have to be flexible, or you're really rigid, and you push back and you stand up for what you believe in.
But at the end of the day, it's all about decision making. And to bring this totally full circle is what we're talking about with brand guidelines. They exist, so that those decisions don't have to be re asked and and re-answered, there's already an answer that's quantified and qualified and codified in some sort of document that is the central source of truth.
So at the end of the day, you come back to it and all of that work isn't lost. And that's where it sort of lives as the proof, the evidence and the longevity of a decision-making process like a rebrand or a completely new identity. In research, I pulled up some things.
I don't know if it's true or not. Did you also start a type foundry? Yeah, I left that out just for the ease of conversation.
But I always actually forget the year, but it's been a few years now when we started it. And yeah, at order, we started order type foundry, OTF for the real type nerds. They'll get it.
That's pretty funny. If you know, you know. Yeah, exactly.
The quick origin story is that during the pandemic, whatever, we're all sort of twiddling our thumbs, hoping that work doesn't completely dry up. Here in Brooklyn, there was a group of type designers that got together in a park in Greenpoint where I live. And we'll just talk every week and basically be like six feet apart, just be like outside.
having some social activity. And one of those designers, his name's Ben Tuttle, he was showing me a library of typefaces that he has designed and pretty much completed, submitted them to a type foundry, a very large one, which I won't name, and they were all rejected. And I just thought that was absolutely insane.
And so sort of a light bulb went off where I thought, you have amazing work ready to go. I know how to publish and distribute books. Certainly, I could apply the same thinking to font files.
Clearly, not the first one to do this, but it just, you know, we had an audience order had grown pretty significantly. The technology of having a website and again, sort of distributing digital files was not that difficult. So that's where the idea was born.
And then a designer on our team, Emily Klaby, full-time designer, but also aspiring and now fully fledged type designer, I sort of charged her with the project of let's start a type foundry. And so we just made another page on our website and we started with two of Ben's typefaces as the inaugural fonts that were released. And then it became a reality.
And again, it was like, we're not putting in major financial investment. We're not asking for any, we're not going to be in debt. This is again, a passion that if it goes well, can be passive income sounds like lazy but fonts just get licensed and you design them once and then people license them purchase them and use them so it was an interesting i'll be honest like an additional revenue stream that it's like huh we can release really great work from people that are being rejected by larger companies.
We can support younger emerging type designers. And to your earlier question about the overlap and the interconnectedness of all these companies, this is directly related to all of them, specifically order, where we were already doing custom typefaces for clients. Now we just act more as a distributor.
So yes, we also have a type foundry. Okay. I feel like the more we look around, we're going to find another company or two.
Who knows? There is. I'm sure there is.
I see them. I say that as if I don't know, but they're right in front of me on the screen. I want to do this because I had promises at the beginning of the pod.
Congratulations, you're all still here. I want to talk about the future of brand. Given your pedigree, your time at Pentagram, your own design firm, publishing books on systems, What can you tell us about where brands are headed?
From what I observe, I think this is a good thing. I think they're becoming much more emotional. And I think at one point in time, this would be seen as a negative or something that you maybe didn't want.
And I'm talking about like decades and decades ago when you're talking about like corporate identity design, banks, law firms, you name it. Now the emotion is what separates you from your competitors and everyone else. Like what is your emotional identity?
And people listening to this are probably like raising an eyebrow at me because I think when we talk about our design process, we actually leave a lot of emotion out of it, but we leave personal emotion. And so when we're developing identity for someone else, another company, we're trying to reflect and respond to what their emotion is, what their personality is through a visual language. And I think that's a pretty good way to describe it.
When you look at startups and all the DTC brands of olive oils and mattresses and kitchenware, cookware, it has a lot of emotional personality to it. It's no longer the Chase logo and sort of the top left-hand corner of a letterhead. And that's all it does.
And it's sort of a metal sign outside and you don't touch it. It doesn't flex. It doesn't bend.
It doesn't change colors. I mean, obviously this is not a sort of universal truth for everything. But I think brands are becoming much more emotional.
And so I think if we can still move through the process objectively and to not bring our own personal biases. I mean, everyone has taste. Everyone has experiences that they bring to anything that they do in life.
But I think if we can sort of objectively look at the partners and the people that we're working with to develop something that is inherently unique to them, it can still be functional and emotional at the same time. Can you cite any examples where you feel like they've done a good job of creating an emotional brand that we might be aware of as we're speaking in the abstract there? Anything that comes to mind?
It's brands like MailChimp. They have something that I think really has an emotive quality to it. I mean, there's a literal...
monkey, a chimp has a mascot that has expressions and it moves and it changes. It isn't sort of a static environment. So that would be one Casper mattresses, like when that first came out, I think like that actually had a lot of emotional qualities to it that was really changing the way that we look at disrupting products in a space.
I mean, they were sort of very, very early on. And the same with, you know, like Oscar, we sort of went through this period of sort of, and I think now it's become a faux pas and tropes of sort of like illustrations of neutral looking people representing every gender and race sort of becoming not really the way to go. I think we're getting back to the more exposing the humanity behind brands.
And so I think this is a good thing. That sort of we've moved some from sort of the abstract illustrative to the photographic realness of a brand. Even, you know, brands like Chobani, like it's such an emotional brand for a yogurt company.
And that makes sense. You should be enjoying yogurt as you're eating it. It's delicious.
It shouldn't look like a bank or a law firm or a gas station. And, you know, again, like people are going to be like, who are you? Because I sort of come from the school of thought of Mueller Brockman and Paul Rand and Vignelli of let's just simplify, let's make everything unified and actually reduce everything down.
But you can still do both where you, reduce some of the personal baggage and allow the company to grow into its own. I would say that's pretty true. Maybe not the last part, whatever.
But yeah, the emotional growth of companies is really coming through. I want you to put your professor or lecturer hat on for a second. You're visiting a school and it's a senior class, grad class, and they're presenting a bunch of different identities.
and you were to provide some critique, I'll throw out some brands, you give us the critique, is that okay? - Okay. - This is dangerous, but I'm gonna throw it out there.
- It is, yeah. - And I want to just clarify for audience, when we say brand, I'm mostly talking about the visual aspects right now, 'cause there's a whole team of writers, strategists who build the brand, the customer service people, all the touch points. We're mostly focused on the visual aspects right now for the sake of this conversation.
Under Armour. This one's interesting. It is successful, I think, because the brand and we'll say the logo, things like color, things like typography, in this case, are not the driving elements of the brand.
And it's the athletes, it's the people who wear any products created by Under Armour. And it's the athleticism that truly is the brand element that shines through the most. And so there are brands that do this where they have certain components that are quiet and certain components that are very loud and the expressive part.
And so in this case, they're using photography and video to show real people using real products doing real athletic activities. You're speaking to a non-athletic person here. So I'll try not to make any metaphors that I'll totally botch.
But clearly the people who wear and who sort of own Under Armour, that is as much as the brand as any visual elements. Like you can never make a logo that replaces that. So I think they're doing it right where the logo is sort of like the identifier and sort of like the signature, but everything else is sort of the quality of the products that they make.
And that's true of the brand. Does the icon, the symbol of the UAX thing, does it pass your tests of an emotive Mark? I don't think the mark is emotional.
That piece of it is not. And that's also not in, even though I gave the MailChimp example, that is an example of a symbol, an icon that is literally emoting. And that I think sort of extends into more of an emotional visual language of graphic devices and illustrations and other supporting elements where in Under Armour's case, I don't think the logo should be emotional.
That's not the emotional part. The emotional part are people accomplishing amazing feats of athleticism. That's emotional.
And the Under Armour symbol is simply there to say, we're supporting you. We're the reason why they can do their best. And I don't know, I guess you could argue that that becomes emotional in and of itself.
But as a piece of isolated graphic design. I think it's strong, it's stable. And then you could say that's the perfect way to represent a company like Under Armour.
Wonderful. I appreciate that. I want to just take a moment here to do point counterpoint with you.
One of my general observations is if an icon symbol mascot isn't something I'd like to wear, especially as an apparel company, as an accessory company, I have problems with it. If it doesn't translate into patterns that become signature things that they can own, that becomes problematic. So when we look into the world of fashion, brands like Louis Vuitton have created a pretty rich symbol of icons and things like that.
Burberry, the same thing. But when you see a fragment of it, you're like, that's something I want and I recognize the company right away. So the design is doing something about creating ownership over shapes and lines and things of that nature.
I'm a geek and probably a little bit more traditional than many of my contemporaries where I like the classic stuff where it's all gridded out as like geometry and it's all considered and it seems to be like that chef's kiss where it's just Every angle is the right angle and I love that I didn't know this but I'm glad you said all these things because I don't spend a lot of time on the Under Armour brand but the real people photography real things using non professional looking athletes or models is I think the antithesis to what Nike does which is superstar world-class multi-million dollar campaigns the most exciting shots photography just immaculately presented in order to create space, you kind of have to say like, well, we can't compete in that space. We'll compete in this other space. So I can see a bunch of high school, college students and athletes saying that this represents me.
I'm not that polished thing. And I can see like, this can be very successful. So I didn't know that before.
And I appreciate you for pointing that out. Okay. We're going to go in one more and we'll probably wrap up this part of it, which is let's look at another X, X.
Formerly aka known as Twitter. It has a style to it. The formal design of that X out of any representation out of an exit, it could be this particular execution.
I don't know why it is what it is. And that's usually something that you don't want. I sort of scratch my head with why.
Let's just put aside the name change. And maybe after all of this, it's like, okay, it's a single letter. I sort of get it.
But if I were doing it, sort of thinking about the most neutral, common, universal-looking symbol of an X, I think would have been a more appropriate way to go. And instead, it's stylized. It might reference something that has never been exposed to me.
But without a reference for having such a specific style, I think it could have been much, much stronger in its universality and its simplicity. It is not a simple letter form in the way that it currently exists. So I guess in that alone, not a fan.
We know that Elon Musk, if anything, is a rule breaker. He does things that we first scratch our heads and then eventually like, oh, there's a game that's being played on dimensions I do not comprehend. So I always want to reserve judgment and just for anybody, but especially for Elon, because I think he's playing fourth dimension chess and we're just playing checkers at this point.
But I have to ask you to put on your conjecturer's hat, just a random opinion. There's no research here. Do you think he went through an 18-month process reviewing, interviewing, and deciding, or he's just like, you know what, we're going to do like this, and it just gets done?
So I have no idea, but if I had to guess, in my mind, he had someone do like a hundred interviews. 200, so many possible ways in which you could develop an X, put it up on a huge wall and chose one really quickly. That's what I think happened with no evidence whatsoever.
We're a-ha-pie in my face. I think that's the most generous version of what might have happened in reality. He's like, "Keep it real simple." Somebody types something, that's it, let's go.
If you think about how he designs a rocket ship, it never occurred to anybody we should have them land. It's that kind of thinking. It's like, "What?
It seems so obvious now." I guess that theory comes out of my own experience. I've never dealt with someone exactly like Elon Musk, but pretty high powered CEOs, people at the top of the company that do like to make their own decisions, even if they've not been a part of the process the entire way, they sort of come in at the very end, and then sort of, you know, disrupt the whole thing. And usually, it's, I haven't seen enough, or I need to see more, how do I know if that's like the right thing, you just do like, 20 more versions and it's like well we've exhausted I think all the good like truly the good options that the experts in graphic design have done the same as if you're hiring a plumber to fix your pipe why would you ask them to see 20 different options of a pipe if they know that that one is going to fix your sink so that's usually my experience is that they are not satisfied with one option They want to see many, many, many, many more.
And then sometimes they'll come back to the very beginning and at the very end. And you were right in the first place. But that's where my theory comes from.
Yes. And so I'll get canceled. I'll say this.
I think there's a lot of equity in the name, the old name. It was a beautiful mark. It can be used as a verb.
It became synonymous with an idea. And that was all jettisoned for probably some kind of internet meme joke that is an insider thing that billionaires have with each other. But I will say this on behalf of Mr.
Musk is Elon did something that it seemed like no tech giant thought to do or did it as well, which is he said, You know what? Would you like a verified blue check? I'm just going to charge you money for it.
We'll get you going on this. And then soon afterwards, everybody followed the exact same idea. It's like it took him to say, you know what?
I don't care what's happened before. Let's just do it this way. And if he's a betting person, it seems like more of his bets win than lose.
Maybe this one that went down as an L, but you notice on Instagram, all of a sudden it's like, oh, we'll help you get the badge right now. Just pay for it. I wonder where they got that from.
So there's innovation and there's moving fast and breaking things. There's Mr. Musk.
So I'll just throw that out there. So there's genius in some of the decisions, maybe not all. Okay.
You're a working designer. You kickstart a project that raises a million dollars and now people are saying not so nice things. I'm imagining they're saying you're a sellout.
Why do you need all this? You're greedy. What?
Now you're rich. The criticism that eventually comes with success, there is something inherently, I think, fundamentally rotten about how creatives look at other creatives when they become successful. They achieve acclaim or fame or any one of those three.
I just want you to, because you work with way more designers than I do, what is behind that mindset if you can get into that brain and then how do you respond to that emotionally, personally? - Yeah. You mean sort of the negativity around selling out or making money for your passion or...
- Being successful. We just call it that, you know? - I mean, we did get a lot of criticism.
Not a lot. There were haters, there was criticism when these books were first being published. And actually, it wasn't so much...
I mean, maybe it had to do with, like, the dollar signs that people were seeing, but If anything, people were looking at it like we were making money off other people's work. I'm a pretty democratic person. I like to see both sides of the story.
I see what you are maybe saying, all these people, but at the same time, were not taking credit for any of the work that has been done. And I think they were missing the point of sort of the accessibility of information. And that's purely what we were trying to do.
And I think if you see someone gain success almost through something that's anyone could have done. It's like, well, that was so easy. Like, you know, or like Warhol, I could paint soup cans or I could silkscreen my face on anything.
That's so easy. And why, you know, but you didn't, you didn't do it. You didn't think about it.
And I think, I mean, I don't think we did something totally innovative. It was maybe something that people were overlooking in terms of putting a focus on brand guidelines. So we just wanted to expose actually the work that we were doing as working graphic designers.
And to do that, we thought celebrating other designers that didn't get the praise. I mean, Ben Yelly maybe being the one that got the most, but talking about like the NASA guidelines, Richard Daney and Bruce Blackburn, I would bet if you ask most designers who those individuals are, they wouldn't be able to tell you. Even sadly, I mean, we did a book for Tremayef and Geismar and Habib, and I will ask students and designers, like, "Do you know who Tremayef and Geismar is?" And they're like, "No." And I'll show them all the work that they've done.
Like, "Oh yeah, of course." That's the reason why we publish these books. And then furthermore, if you think about any book that is published by a publisher, the publisher is not the author and they are publishing other people's work and they are the distribution of it out into the world. So my point being is I didn't let it affect me.
I've gone through enough pretty harsh design critiques or people criticize, I mean, designers sadly, or maybe it's not sad, but like we get used to criticism. It's sort of like part of the job. You have to hopefully have a conversation that is not heated and not filled with anger and aggressiveness.
I think you're sort of doing it in a way that's constructive. So there's constructive criticism, but also you never know the people that you're working with to just like throw a ball of fire at you. So the criticism didn't bother me.
And I sort of put on blinders. I do this for every company. I don't expect everyone to like what we do.
And if you talk about music, talk about food, not everyone likes the same restaurant. Not everyone likes the same musical artist. And that's okay.
We're not living in, you know, one note society, clearly. It just doesn't bother me. I think that's fine.
I'd rather you really dislike it I would prefer you to actually like, be I don't know, so up in arms about something I've done, rather than being like, Okay, like, whatever. That's the worst, is to get the whatever, like, "Okay, what's the big deal? Why should I care?" I'd rather it make an impact on you either, I mean, hopefully not negatively, but like, I don't know, you disagree with it and that's okay.
Or you agree with it and you want to jump on the train and come with us. But the middle of the lane, whatever, is the one that hurts the most. Yeah.
There is a pseudoscientific study about this, about the cooked rice in the three jars. Are you aware of this? I don't think so.
Please enlighten me. Oh, okay. Well, it is pseudoscience.
There's some questions about the validity of this experiment, but they placed some cooked rice in three identical jars, and then they did three different things to them. One, they praised it, they talked about it positively, and then another place deadened from the sound so the vibrations can go through. They insulted it.
They called it funny names and all that kind of stuff. The third one, they just ignored and left it alone. What they discovered was after a period of time, the one that was praised because sound is energy, it transformed molecules so it fermented beautifully and it had great aroma.
the one where they yelled negative things to it, it rot and turned black and had mold on it. The surprising thing is the one that they didn't do anything as part of the control to see what happened to it. It had twice the amount of mold and rot.
In life, it's best to be loved, but being hated is also better than being ignored. when people are indifferent about your work it's probably the worst feeling that you can have because basically it's saying you don't matter your work doesn't matter you didn't move me x or y it's just it's something easy to ignore i think creative people have an unhealthy relationship with success and struggle they're not comfortable when the people they like or love become really successful until a narrative is created because they think creatives should be in a perpetual state of struggling because they're struggling themselves. It's just a rotten idea because it's like you love this indie band until they start making money and then you say all kinds of horrible things.
Yeah. At risk of just outing me, I think it's no secret that I participate in capitalism. I enjoy businesses that make money.
I love what I do, and I also love when financially it's rewarded. And then I can also pass that reward on to employees and partners and my friends that do other creative work. And I can hire photographers and industrial designers.
So you can be greedy about it or you can be collaborative and sort of be a little bit more community driven about the resources that you eventually gain by the work that you're doing. But I really reject the whole struggling creative or that you can't make money from being a designer or an artist. I will never forget when I was in college, there was a poster from AIGA hanging in the library saying like, you don't do this for the money.
implying that you're not going to make any money by doing graphic design. And at that time, I don't know, I didn't have an opinion one way or the other. But once I really saw like, wait a second, this is like an extremely profitable business that I'm in and I'm helping like that's the word business.
I am helping businesses like we are part of the business machine. You can be an artist and not be a part of that, and that's also fine. It's like a different thing.
But I think it's okay to be financially compensated for the work that you're doing, that at the end of the day, the people that you're doing the work for are doing the same exact thing. And last thing I'll say about that is that as a way to sort of balance out our high paying clients with ones that maybe can't afford some of the typical prices. We have an initiative at Order called Change Order, where we do heavily reduced, if not pro bono work for NGOs, nonprofits, and small organizations that really do need it.
And we do that Not to keep on adding on here, by not applying or paying for awards or competitions. We have never paid or applied for a design award. Instead, we take that money and we invest it in clients that need work done for much cheaper than others can afford.
So anyways, I think money can be spread out and it doesn't have to be so one-sided. Yeah. There's always this thing and people don't realize it.
Their idea of utopia is a very Marxist labor theory of value thing that capitalism is evil, that the rewards of doing a good job should be shared amongst the people who do it equally. And what they don't understand is somebody has to take that risk. And this is a Peter Drucker thing, which is all profit comes from risk in business.
It comes from risk. You took it upon yourself to embark on an endeavor with your partner, Hamish, and say, look, we might spend a gazillion hours doing something. It might not work.
We might not get funded. We might lose our shirt off this, but you did it. And I want to say this on behalf of anybody who identifies like me, which is I'm a collector, borderline hoarder.
My house would be cluttered if I had physical representations of everything I like. So I greatly appreciate somebody like you and Hamish went to the extent in which you did to talk to the people that you did to archive and preserve these things so that I can have one volume to look into the past to do my best to learn and to grow from it and so if you made three million dollars or more it doesn't matter to me because i wasn't going to do that work and appreciate that you for the rest of humanity have preserved something that i think is worth saving and so for that i tip your hat and to all the people who have a problem with this you do you but can't other people do what they do why do we have to force our opinions and values onto other people And that negative dynamic that I think our industry tends to have sometimes, I'm so proud that standards can sort of be a bridge. I mean, I like to speak with other studio owners and like our quote unquote competitors.
We can't work together necessarily or like at order. we're not going to work with Codo or Collins or you name it, because just clearly that's just not how it works. However, standards is this bridge where every single day I speak with other agencies, my direct competitors, on how they can utilize a tool that we've built for them to make more money and do more business, do it better and support their clients.
And I think this industry needs much more of that in whatever form that takes rather than us going. I mean, it's been going on for years, decades, whatever, just sort of the constant criticism of I could have done it better. And let me do it really quickly to your earlier point, we were talking about people's, you know, five minutes suggestions.
But yeah, I'm just so happy that we have this sort of bridge of standards where we can give back to the community and also have it be a profitable company that allows us to do even more. They can then it's sort of like then funnels down to them doing the same thing. So I think I love the sort of collaboration, the partnership, the conversation that I get to have with peers of mine through this new entity.
So inherently, the design service space, the natural order of things, if you will, is that there's competition and we don't share our resources because That's just the way it's done. Maybe it'll change in the future where it's collaboration between two design firms who are natural competitors. But this other company you've created can be this bridge that allows competitors to play in the same space, maybe learn from each other.
But to say that the pie is infinite, it's not this zero sum game where if someone wins, you must lose. Because we just see like, seems like wealth just gets created more and more, more opportunities. Like we're living better.
We have better systems than we've ever had. All these kinds of things is because it's an infinite game. It's not a finite game.
Jesse, I want to thank you for being a guest today on the pod. It's fun to talk to you, to geek out a little bit. And I hope for some people who maybe were undecided about this, that some of this was like chicken soup for your design soul.
I hope that that was the case. Thanks for being here, Jesse. And thank you listeners for tuning in.
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. And yeah, likewise, thanks for everyone who listens.
For people who want to find out more about you, Jesse, or the new projects that you're working on, where do we send them? I'll stick to the primary three once again. Order.design is the design office.
Standards.site is the guideline software. And standardsmanual.com is where you can find the books. Wonderful.
Thank you. Thank you.
