janfebpreview2009 by Commarts

Elixir Jim Krantz United Airlines International Poster Design Verve Social Causes & the Web Exhibit

January/February 2009 Eight Dollars www.commarts.com

DESIGN by Ruth Hagopian

sk Jennifer Jerde why she started her own design firm after less than a year of working for hire and she’ll tell you she fell in love with a dog. “I was art directing a photo shoot for Levi’s and there was this amazing working dog, an incredible animal. The trainer said, ‘If you like, you can have her puppy, it’s not really fit for television.’” Jerde had a great job at a San Francisco design firm, but staying close to home to care for the dog became the catalyst to start her own studio.

Jerde’s firm, Elixir Design, is now in its sixteenth year. Based in San Francisco with a staff of fourteen, Elixir’s black office building is the kind of place city travelers note as they drive down Van Ness Avenue, a busy gateway to commerce, and cross Broadway, the gateway to nightlife. Once inside, the 4,000square-foot office has a surprisingly low-key ambience with quiet furnishings and the warmth of a home—albeit one that displays intriguing posters of human organs and anatomy. Specializing in brand strategy and design, Elixir also adds identity and collateral projects to its portfolio as well as catalogs, packaging and Web design. A visit to the studio might include a scene of quiet intensity, smoky jazz floating from speakers and staff members moving their projects forward; a return visit may find that half are off at a photo shoot, a location scout or on a search for exotic materials. Elixir puts its own perspective on all these diverse activities, using their custom approach to branding that informs the work they do. Elixir’s strategy is more than the creation of a logo. Its mission is to go deeper, to explore all the levels of awareness where brands are perceived. “A brand could be the customer service phone call as much as it is the logo, the brochure, the thing,” says general manager Kyle Pierce. “It’s what’s in people’s minds.” Elixir conceived what they call their North Star approach after finding that the branding documents they received from clients were so generic that they could have easily applied to any of their competitors. In contrast, Elixir’s design team gathers data from client interviews and workshops, as well as the clients’ customers. They probe to get beyond vague terms, such as creative or innovative, to reach highly specific feelings. Part psychology, part r&d and part interactivity, the goal is to help a company that’s already doing something well, do it better. “We’re here for people who believe they have something special, some service or product, and they want people to understand,” Jerde says. “That’s where our sweet spot is.”

Nancy Park, ceo of Naturopathica, a premium botanical skincare line, uses the terms humbling, edifying, completely authentic, when she describes working with Elixir on a variety of branding projects. “They are brilliant visual and verbal translators, expert communicators, both senders and receivers,” she says. “The North Star process…consistently propelled our team to a higher bar and more distilled truths.” These truths are found by mapping out hundreds of keywords garnered from their investigations to differentiate the brand’s product or service. The team then conducts workshops with the client and makes the strategy physical by pinning ideas written on strips of paper to a board running the length of their conference room. Continuously combining and refining the groupings, word matrices are formed until a hierarchy of importance reveals a maximum of five clear ideas. “We spend a lot of energy making the ideas in marketing jargon understandable and useful,” Pierce says. “These hierarchies are a strategic part of identifying and clarifying the authentic qualities that make a company unique and suggest how they want to be recognized.” Ultimately, it’s not just about design. Elixir also provides content, creating messaging for their projects with the help of talented writers, including Rich Binell, Alyson Kuhn and Adrian Lurssen. When the process is completed, the client receives a binder with the full commentary, analysis and recommendations for their customized branding strategy. “We clear up a lot of confusion for them,” Jerde explains. “After working with us, people have the sensation of being super grounded and they can operate from a position where their ducks are in a row.” “I don’t think there’s anybody like them,” says event designer Stanlee Gatti, with a laugh. He has worked with designers Aine Coughlan, Nate Durrant and Syd Buffman on promotional projects that include the Artists Ball Six for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (ybca) and The Modern Ball for the sfmoma. Gatti’s appreciation for offbeat materials and textures encouraged the designers to use a ball of crumpled paper for the Modern Ball’s logo and encapsulated silver marble dust for the ybca. For the long-awaited opening of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, Gatti, Jerde and Coughlan brainstormed about the earliest

Jennifer Jerde is creative director on all projects. Caption information was provided by general manager Kyle Pierce and writer Alyson Kuhn. Right: “We began working with Sundance in the late ’90s. In addition to refreshing the core book, jewelry catalog and Web site, we created several specialty catalogs, including two single-issue gift books and Almanac, a men’s catalog that launched for Holiday 2008.” Scott Hesselink/Holly Holmquist/ Jennifer Jerde, art directors; Amber Gunnell/Scott Hesselink/Holly Holmquist, designers; John Dolan/Derek Israelsen/Michael McRae, photographers.

January/February 2009

Communication Arts

21st INTERNATIONAL

warsaw

POSTERBIENNALE

by Rebecca Bedrossian

edia increasingly competes for our attention. The daily deluge of messages we receive is mind-boggling: tv, radio, print, e-mail, etc. Visual noise is an apt description. It’s more than a challenge for designers to break through and make an impact. One medium with a knack for delivering eﬀective messages with immediate strength is the poster. Its survival amidst the advent of the Web and its subsequent media dominance is truly a testament to the power of graphic design. The poster is pure design. No sound or motion, bells or whistles. Its simplicity is its strength.

Oil Kills Peace [left] epitomizes this; created by Mark Gowing of Australia, the poster speaks volumes, without words, for all to understand. It won a Gold Medal— unanimously—in the Ideological category of the 21st International Poster Biennale in Warsaw, Poland. Uwe Loesch, chairman of the jury, said, “The black dot of oil in a form of a bird is impressive... It works in any direction, upside down, horizontally or vertically, in any size. The minimalism of expression in the space of the poster is exceptional. The poster is not fancy. It is classic and instantly contemporary. And it is human.”

“”

A poster should arrest attention!

—Uwe Loesch

His ﬁnal comment resonates and symbolizes one of the great strengths of international poster exhibitions. These events comment on the state of our world—the environment, human rights, consumerism, health, the arts. Poster designers oﬀer snapshots, messages pared down to their most essential, imperative elements.

Launched in 1966, the Warsaw Biennale was the earliest exhibition of its kind. Professor Józef Mroszczak, the Biennale’s founder, wrote in the first catalog: “Great competition. Grand test to see how life is mirrored in the poster and whether the reflection of human needs is true to life. Splendid manifestation of the best in this field of the graphic arts. Indeed, a review of creative thought, artistic experiment and inventiveness. This is what the Warsaw Biennale can and should become.” Mroszczak led the way, and now the world is host to numerous poster exhibitions, from Tehran to Mexico City and Brno to Fort Collins. Last summer, the jury for the 21st International Poster Biennale in Warsaw, convened at the Wilano Poster Museum, home to the exhibition since 1994. Chairman Loesch (Germany) was joined by jurors Xavier Bemúdez (Mexico), Tomasz Boguslawski (Poland), Jianping He (Germany), Anette Lenz (France) and Marcin Wladyka (Poland) for two days of judging, poring over 3,068 entries from 57 countries, in three categories: Ideological, Culture and Advertising.

This page: Mark Gowing, Australia. Oil Kills Peace, Gold Medal, Ideological. Right: Malte Reinish, Germany. No I.D. But A Face., honorable mention.

January/February 2009

Communication Arts

verve

Launching Artists and Albums with by Ellen Shapiro

y new album, The Orchard, started with a trip home to see my grandparents,” says jazz vocalist Lizz Wright. “I took pictures of the area where I grew up, made a slideshow and set it to the Tom Waits song, ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You.’ I took it to Verve and said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ When I showed the pictures and played the song, everyone responded in their own way, and everyone brought their own insights and sensibilities to the concept.” Wright is describing the process that’s set into motion when Verve produces a new album. Her concept was the musical journey she took from rural Georgia, where she was one of three children of a minister father and a mother who sang in the church choir, to New York, where she’s a rising star who, according to Times critic Stephen Holden, “stirs jazz, gospel and rhythm and blues into a reflective, flowing style that elongates songs into prayerful meditations.” A dozen people sit at the conference table at that first, big meeting with the artist: Verve’s senior vice president and general manager Nate Herr; executives from the label’s publicity, marketing, retail, radio promotion and creative departments; and the a/r or artist in repertoire who will be coordinating the talent—the producer, the composers and the other musicians who’ll perform on the album. For the past ten years, Hollis King—creative director, art director, graphic designer—has sat at that table. His group is responsible for producing the cd jacket, the publicity and ad photography, the posters—everything related to the artists’ visual images. “We really listen to the artists,” King says. “We talk about the audiences we want to reach, and how they want to present themselves and their music. We listen to the raw music. What are its bones? What is its smell? How does it make you feel? Then we create a product designed to transform an hour of music into a hit—and a work of art that can lift people’s spirits or make their day.” It usually starts with a photo shoot. “We define the look, coordinate the costumes, find locations. For The Orchard, it was down-home country, and that meant a trip to Georgia, scouting locations. We drove for days,” he says, “with Lizz and the photographer and assistant, the stylist, hair, makeup. When we travel on the artists’ home turf, we get access, everything opens up so the setting can be authentic.”

In this case, they found not an orchard, but the cotton field in which Wright is photographed for the album cover. She also posed against a huge vine-covered tree in a primevallooking bayou for the cd liner, which is even more dramatic when blown up to 26 by 13 inches on the double-truck inside the lp jacket. Verve releases 120 cds a year, and a dozen lps. “It’s as good a square as any square,” says King of the five-inch cd format, but for him and the designers, the opportunity to work on an lp is a luxury. “Collectors still want lps, and so do djs who like to spin them lounge-style,” he explains. “They’re produced in editions of up to 5,000 and sold at record stores, sent out to big clubs and used for publicity.” Founded in 1956, Verve is synonymous with jazz. The walls on the Verve floor of the Universal Music building on Broadway and 57th Street are covered with memory-invoking posters like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and with the gold and platinum records of its Grammy Award-winning stars including Herbie Hancock and Diana Krall. Its Impulse label brings out reissues of its catalog, the music of such legends as Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. Verve’s parent, Universal Music Group, itself a subsidiary of French media giant Vivendi, is the world’s largest group of recording labels. Black Escalades parked downstairs provide a clue about the clientele: Universal’s other divisions are Island Def Jam, Interscope-Geffen-a&m, Decca and Universal-Motown. The walls in King’s office are covered with iconic, signed, black-and-white photographs of jazz greats—and lots of design awards. Dominating the space is a huge poster for the new Labelle: Back to Now album: Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash in black satin with jewels and feathers under a big, hot-pink, ’70s-retro logo. “Labelle’s new act is cuttingedge pop, not traditional r&b,” King explains. “Our challenge was to make it modern but keep it true to who they are, wild and outrageous. We looked at what’s going on in fashion, designer John Varvatos, glitter and feathers.” King manages every two- or three-day shoot to produce all the visuals needed to market the record. “That translates into thousands of photos and dozens of costume and hair changes, hotels, limos, security, every detail worked out,” he says. “After the shoot, there’s an intense, ten-day selection process with back-and-forth between me, the company executives and the artist. After key images are chosen, we get the copy and start designing the package.”

Hollis King is art director on all projects and provided the caption information. Right: Herbie Hancock. “All digital shoot, Grammy Winner of 2008 Album of The Year.” Phillip Manning, designer; Kwaku Alston, photographer.

January/February 2009

Communication Arts

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