After the Gold Rush

This probably dates me, but when I was in college, it was people like Alexey Brodovitch, Peter Saville, Neville Brody, and David Carson that my designer friends wanted to be. They passed around copies of The Face, Beach Culture, and Wet like bootleg Grateful Dead VHS tapes.

One of my buddies was convinced he was going to be the next Jim Moore. Some days, he would bring in the latest issue of GQ and try to explain the nuance of the sliver of colors that overlapped between the G and the Q. Can’t blame the poor guy, though. The early 2000s were heady times.

Back then, New York was the place to be for a designer interested in the cutting edge of culture. Today, the Bay Area is seen as the epicenter of commerce, and, by extension, the graphic design that services it. Roughly 10% of all Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there, making it a close second to New York. Early last year, Facebook reported $13.23 billion in revenue in a single quarter, and yet stocks tanked because it wasn’t the projected $13.36 billion. Meanwhile Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and GQ, reportedly lost about $120 million in 2017.

Designers are flocking to the West Coast in droves, and it’s not hard to see why. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says one ex–Condé Nast creative director who now runs a startup in the Bay Area. “In magazines, you get access to powerful, thoughtful people, celebrities, and you rub elbows with some incredible people, but at the same time, the publishing industry has gone through such profound change, it gets tiring to deal with cutbacks every half or every quarter of every year.” A former New York print designer who now works in Silicon Valley and can’t speak publicly puts it more bluntly: “Anyone not mentioning money is full of shit.”

While some are lured by the potential for fame and fortune, simply “following the money” is not enough to explain the consolidation of talent in the Bay Area. Others are finding the opportunity to have wide-reaching influence irresistible. “Every era is defined by an industry,” says Keith Yamashita, cofounder of SyPartners, a bi-coastal design and business consultancy. “Ours is defined by technology— it’s where so much of society is being made.” To put it in perspective: Even Paul Rand did work for Steve Jobs...