Doctor Overanalyzes the World.

Doctor Overanalyzes the Mad Men Heinz Pitches.

I thoroughly enjoyed this past week’s Mad Men, as I do almost every week. As a designer, there’s an extra bit of thrill that comes with episodes that include creative pitches, like this one. In the earlier seasons, it was exciting to watch the tactics that Don used to sell kind-of-okay work to clients, but as we’ve moved forward through advertising’s creative revolution the work itself has become more and more something to look forward to.

Stan’s strategy for clearing the cobwebs seems to have worked, because the campaign SCDP pitched for Heinz was arguably the best work we’ve seen on the show so far. Don clearly believed in this work, presenting it with the least bravado he’s given to a pitch, aside from when he pitched Life Cereal while blackout drunk.

Don presents three beautiful closeups of food on a white background. “It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s tantalizingly incomplete,” he says. “What’s missing?”

Obviously, ketchup is. You’re already beginning to think of these foods covered in ketchup. But when Don and Stan flip over the acetate, it’s not ketchup that comes with it, but a three-word headline in black Helvetica Condensed Bold.

Ketchup, as a condiment, isn’t all that appetizing by itself. Fries, or steak, or a burger is what’s appetizing, but fries and ketchup, or steak and ketchup, or a burger and ketchup is even more so. It’s the tension in these ads that makes them successful — it’s a print ad, but it’s not motionless because you’re already imagining the viscous red sauce being slowly poured over these foods. As Don says, the audience’s imagination has no budget or time limit.

In fact, not even the word “ketchup” is in the ad. The client’s first reaction, of course, is “You mean Heinz *ketchup*.” But by assuming the audience will make the connection in their heads (which they will), the campaign creates an indelible connection. Heinz is ketchup. Fries need ketchup. Fries need Heinz. It’s a shrewd bit of branding.

The layout of the ad also supports the tension of incompleteness. Although the ad is dominated by the oversized food photography, the focal point of the ad is the tiny black headline in the vast sea of white. Your eye lands there because of the point force from the fries and the swelling force from the white field, making it the ad’s punchline.

The client, reluctant to have an ad without the actual product in it, says, “I think I still want to see our bottle.” When Stan (in a mustard-colored blazer, which I think is funny) starts to defend leaving it out, Pete cuts him off with, “We’ll test it both ways.” Some may interpret this as Pete appeasing the client, but I think this is Pete being much more shrewd, knowing that “We’ll test it both ways” really means “We’re going to leave it out anyway.” No client wants to think that you think you’re smarter than he is.

Peggy’s ad is philosophically almost the exact opposite of Don’s. It shows the product, the headline takes up the entire thing, and the art and copy don’t really inform each other. In fact, the inverse of Peggy’s headline is the reasoning that Don uses to justify the omission of the word “ketchup” — “It’s Heinz. It only means one thing.” Peggy’s is still a good ad, but it doesn’t operate on the same level of subtlety as Don and Stan’s.

Peggy’s headline is a strategy statement. That alone doesn’t make it a bad headline, but where Don’s ad succeeds is in allowing consumers to come to that conclusion themselves, rather than outright telling them. This strategy does work, however, because it tells a pre-existing truth instead of trying to implant a new idea. Heinz today has a 60 percent market share in ketchup — the next-highest is Hunt’s, with 16. I can’t find numbers for 1968, but if it’s even anywhere close to that it’s not outrageous to say that Heinz is the only ketchup.

The Warhol-esque art direction, with the type in cheeky Futura (kudos to the art department for using an optically corrected cut of Futura, too) also pushes Heinz Ketchup and its bottle as a pop cultural icon.

Of course, the client picks neither of these ads, instead opting to go with the giant agency J. Walter Thompson.

I hope we get to see more pitches as the season goes on — if these first four episodes are any indication, then it seems as though Don and Peggy’s newfound professional rivalry is going to be a dominant theme in season six.

The First Man

He says he made me, which he did.

I also made him.

Everyone else did, too.

Doctor Overanalyzes American Airlines, Redux.

There were a few ideas I wanted to expand upon in my American Airlines post the other day but which would have taken up too many column-inches, so I’m going to talk about them here.

A lot of the criticism I’ve heard of the new logo is that it depends too much on gradients and shadows, and that a logo is only truly successful if it can be used in one color. There are many advantages to be gained from being able to use a logo in one color. One is that printing a logo in one color is much cheaper than printing it in four. This is still true today, but slightly less relevant because of the increasing proliferation of digital printing (which still doesn’t look as good as offset, but it gets the job done for small runs) and on-screen applications of the identity. It used to be that a letterhead was your most important piece of corporate identity — now it’s rare that business correspondence is sent through the mail.

The bigger argument for a one-color logo, to me, is that it reduces the logo to the base point at which it is still recognizable as that company’s logo, and thus gives the logo more versatility — it can be “corrupted” into 3D, multicolor, warped, patterned executions and still be recognizable as that company’s logo. That doesn’t mean, though, that a one-color execution is always better than a four-color one. What’s important is having the best execution for the concept. This is especially clear when we look at something like Coopervision, which uses multicolored paint daubs to suggest the clarity and depth of vision that their contact lenses give you:

(http://logok.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/cooper_vision4color.png)

That doesn’t mean that American Airlines’ logo doesn’t work better in a one-color solution, though. Here’s my quick take on what a one-color version and a flat version look like:

I actually do think that this is a stronger logo than the final result. But as Michael Bierut reminded us just a week-and-a-half ago in his essay “Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport,” those of us saying “I could have done better” didn’t have to sell anything to the client.

I think one reason that big companies so often wind up with 3-D gradient shadow beveled embossed lensflared logos is because of that fear of hearing “I could have done better.” When a client spends half a million dollars on a logo, they want it to look like it cost half a million dollars, and while the graphic designers who say “I could have done better” know what goes into creating a half-million-dollar logo, the general public doesn’t. Our profession has been demystified in the past few decades, and big companies don’t want to spend half a million dollars on something that “I could have made in PowerPoint.” Most people know how to draw a few flat shapes; most people don’t know how to draw something with complex gradient mapping.

Another argument I’ve heard against this new identity is that the old one was better. I agree. However, whether this identity is aesthetically better than the old one is entirely irrelevant, because American Airlines, the company, decided that it would be a good strategy for their business to update their identity. And I’m inclined to agree with them. Paul Rand, arguably the greatest logo designer of all-time, once wrote: “A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around. A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it represents is more important than what it looks like.”

Unfortunately, Massimo Vignelli’s American Airlines identity had come to signify delayed flights, bad customer service, and cramped seats. Perhaps American could have turned themselves around without changing their identity and restored their image. But ti’s difficult to fight perception, and although an identity update is just a symbolic gesture, it can be enough to convince customers that maybe, just maybe, the change in identity signifies bigger, more real changes.

An identity refresh is an especially tricky thing. The challenge is to shed the negative perceptions associated with the old identity, while not losing any of the equity associated with it. This is wholly impossible with a new logo, because the primary purpose of a logo is to create something ownable and recognizable for a company — a flag, to use Paul Rand’s words once again — and it takes time to build recognition. One thing I think could have been done with the new identity — and I’m actually very surprised wasn’t — was to keep “AmericanAirlines” smashed together in red and blue. Much more than the eagle mark, the “AmericanAirlines” wordmark was the most recognizable thing about their identity. Keeping the color dichotomy and changing the typeface to Frutiger — which, as I explained in the previous post, is wholly appropriate — would have retained much more equity while still giving the identity a refresh.

I could have done it better.

Doctor Overanalyzes American Airlines.

On my more idealistic days, I tend to think that the ultimate goal of identity design is to make something that never has to be changed. Unfortunately, the very nature of identity design means even the greatest pieces of corporate branding are tied to the fates of the companies they identify. Saul Bass’ United Airlines tulip, for example, was dumped in the name of equitable co-branding during the merger with Continental. As a designer it’s tempting to think that Apple and Nike are successful companies at least in part because they have good logos, but in reality it’s probably more that the logos are good because their companies are successful.

American Airline’s identity, designed in 1968 by Massimo Vignelli, felt like one of those that would never have to change. The exposed aluminum body of the planes, adorned in red and blue Helvetica, was straightforward and indestructible. It was a product of the time in which it was created, but it transcended periods, always looking as contemporary as any other airline.

Unfortunately, American Airlines hasn’t been doing so well lately, and they decided that it would be a good business strategy to update their public image, and they enlisted FutureBrand to redesign their corporate identity.

(http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/my_kind_of_american_exceptionalism.php)

First, to get something out of the way: that’s a damn good logo for an airline. It looks like a wing, and like a tailfin, and like an eagle, and like a star, and like the letter A, and none of it looks forced. It appears, looking at some of the other materials, that they have a flat execution of it that works just as well. This is important, because even in an age when spot-color printing is increasingly rare, simplicity is still a virtue in logo design. The Nike swoosh still looks like the Nike swoosh when a seven-year-old basketball fan draws it crooked and backwards. Several years from now, when gradients and peelbacks aren’t in style anymore, I imagine American will switch to the flat logo, and it will become an even stronger identity.

(http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/my_kind_of_american_exceptionalism.php)

I’m fairly certain the type they use for the logo is Frutiger, which almost makes too much sense. Frutiger was originally designed for the signage at Charles DeGaulle airport and has become the defacto “airport signage” typeface. The Helvetica in the previous logo had a straightforward, authoritative voice, and American is contemporizing that authority by putting their in the same typeface as the rest of the airport. It makes it feel as though American Airlines is just as much a part of the airport as the restrooms. Frutiger is essentially Airport Helvetica.

(http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/my_kind_of_american_exceptionalism.php)

I don’t like the livery very much — the american flag imagery is a bit too slick, and the logo feels like it was made to go on the tail — but it might grow on me.

While I’m sad to see another iconic piece of graphic design die, overall this is a very strong redesign. None of that matters, though, if American doesn’t match the redesign with actual changes in service.

Mr. Vignelli’s design carried a lot of baggage with it. It was indicative of a bygone age of air travel, when American was the standard-bearer, but it also made American feel like a dinosaur unable to restore itself to its former glory. I maybe would have liked to see a redesign more similar to what Lippincott did for Delta — keeping the same basic elements while altering their application — but it’s also possible to keep the core ideas of your company intact while changing their visual representation, as this redesign did.

Whether this is a good redesign will be determined by what American does in the next few years. If they manage to turn themselves around and improve their customer experience, then this redesign will be the foundation of American’s identity for the next four decades. If they continue on the same path, however, then it will become another icon of design as a substitute for actual sound business strategy.

The best that identity designers can do is make something that says, “trust us,” and then hope that the companies they design for don’t abuse that trust.

Doctor Overanalyzes Disney Imagineering.

This is from week 7 of the public speaking class I took during my last quarter at the Circus. The topic was “a company you would like to work for.”

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There’s only one reason I would ever live in Anaheim, California, and that’s to work for Disney Imagineering.

I’ve wanted to work at Disney Imagineering in some capacity since I was thirteen or fourteen. If you’ve ever been to a Disney Park, then you probably understand why. There are lots of theme parks with better rides than Disney, but there’s still something about Disney World that sets it apart, and that’s the attention to the little things. They’re focused not on giving you the best individual experiences while you’re at their theme park, but on giving you the best overall theme park experience.

One time my family was at Universal Studios, waiting in line for a Shrek 4-D movie. After an hour of waiting in line, my entire family had memorized the five-minute pre-show video that had been constantly looping. That doesn’t happen at Disney. Pre-show entertainment is created to play exactly one full time during the time that you’re in line. In fact, the entire queueing area for the ride is just as delicately crafted as the ride itself, giving you something new to look at each time the line moves forward. The Imagineers understand that the majority of your time in the park is going to be spent in line, so that time should be used to build anticipation for the ride that’s to come.

Which is not to mention the rides themselves. Where Six Flags just keeps building taller, better, faster — and there is virtue in that — Disney is more concerned with how the ride’s concept enhances the ride itself. The first time I remember fully appreciating this was when I was seven years old and at Disney World for the fist time, and I rode Splash Mountain. Splash Mountain is a log flume ride just like any other, but the fact that the ride was twelve minutes long stuck with me. Splash Mountain is better than any other log flume ride because it tells you a story on the way up and lets you forget that you’re about to be dropped down a steep hill, while simultaneously not letting you forget at all. It makes the drop both much less important to the ride, and much more important than in any other log flume ride.

Tower of Terror is not the tallest or fastest freefall ride in the world, not even close, but it’s one of the most exciting because the Twilight Zone storyline that’s built so neatly around it enhances the experience. You’re not just falling nine stories, you’re doing it in an immersive environment that lets you suspend disbelief as much as possible.

And that’s really what Disney World is — the most immersive branded experience in existence. So as a designer, it’s a playland. The Magic Kingdom might be the most designed place ever made. Every surface has been considered, every traffic pattern, every placement of every restroom. Even the music is designed — as you walk from one ‘land’ to another, the music gradually transitions from one theme music to another, without any overlap.

I want to work for a company that turns out a quality product, and it’s pretty indisputable that Disney Imagineering turns out a quality product. Companies that turn out quality products are the best to work for because every single employee ends up invested in the end result. They know they’re making something great, and they commit to it. Quality product is also a sign of quality process. While all that I know about Imagineering’s process comes from Wikipedia and a book about Imagineering I bought when I was thirteen, it is clear that the level of product they produce is facilitated only by a creative process that allows for pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The word Imagineering is obviously a portmanteau of “imagination” and “engineering,” but I think putting those two words together suggests that Disney believes that imagination and engineering aren’t separate things. Imagineers are people who engineer imagination — who dream up whatever they can dream up, and then figure out how to do it. That’s what every designer ought to strive for.

Doctor Overanalyzes Graduation.

On Friday I graduated from the Creative Circus. Every graduate gives a 3-minute speech and shows some of their work. Here’s mine:

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(introductory slide)

Since I started at the Circus, I’ve liked to think of this place as a sort of Island of Misfit Toys. Very few, if any of us, were supposed to wind up here, but something happened at some point or another to set the ship off-course.

Here’s my misfit story.

A couple of years ago, I was going to a very respectable university called Rice, where I took classes from professors among the top in their fields, on topics like the history of the US conservation movement, comparative domestic policy, and 20th century American fiction. The most important class I took at Rice, though was an elective I wandered into my sophomore year called Introduction to Type and Design.

In that class, we learned the fundamentals of typography and design, and after that I was hooked. I designed flyers and t-shirts for school events, and sketched typefaces instead of taking notes during lectures. During my senior year, I applied to a handful of  MFA design programs, and I was turned down from all of them.

I spent the summer sending fifty-five cover letters and receiving only two responses — of any kind, and after a while decided I had to go back to school. I more-or-less stumbled backwards into the Circus.

They tell us at this school to let the work speak for itself, so here’s what I did two years ago…

[I gestured to the introductory slide, which I’ll show you again]

…and here’s what I’m doing now.

[I gave a quick explanation of each of the projects, which you can see in full on my website]

So, I have some people to thank.

First, my family, and especially my parents. I’m so fortunate to have grown up in a family that values the arts and education, and chasing impossible dreams.

All of the Circus faculty, and three in particular:

Colleen, my first teacher at the Circus. Thanks for always having faith in me and always pushing me that extra bit. Your classes all taught me that I can do things that I can’t do.

Ron, you’re more than a department head, you’re a spirit guide. It was never clear whether you knew any better than I did where you were taking me, but following you only led to good things.

And Sylvia. I’ve attended some excellent educational institutions, and you are by far the greatest educator I’ve had the pleasure of learning from. A quarter with you is like driving through a mountain tunnel with no headlights; you have no choice but to keep hurtling blindly forward, not sure if you’ll emerge from the other end alive, but when you do the world looks entirely different than when you came in.

Jessy, thanks for being my co-conspirator, co-adventurer, confidante, colleague, best friend, and the biggest bonus I could get out the last two years.

Jason Reece, my admissions rep — He told me that he would try to talk me out of coming here, and if I still wanted to then I should. So thanks for sucking at your job.

Thanks to all of y’all. Getting to share these two years with you was a privilege and an honor, and a whole lot of fun.

And finally, the Circus itself. You saw potential in me where other schools didn’t. So thanks for believing in this misfit.

Doctor Overanalyzes Doctor.

This week in speech class, the assignment was to talk about yourself as a brand (sorry, Tim). Here’s mine.

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I’m a nerd. A really really big nerd. And I’m damn proud of it.

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was three years old, so I’ve been more-or-less destined for nerddom since the beginning. In sixth grade, I tried out for the school musical, and I got cast as the nerd. Not just any nerd, but the head nerd. His name was Melvin. I saw my first late-night-TV-movie-titty in Revenge of the Nerds. One time in high school, one of my friends and I stayed in the newspaper office during a school dance so that we could keep working on the upcoming issue.

The key to being a proud nerd is making your nerddom work for you. My sophomore year of college, I was starting to become a type nerd. I started identifying the fonts on flyers at the cafeteria tables, and reading i love typography, and posting on typophile, and sketching my own typefaces. I would spout off random type knowledge to friends, which was even more annoying than it is now because back then I was just an English major with yet another unmarketable skill.

I did manage to find a productive use for it the summer after my junior year, when I worked as a risk center specialist at Chexar, a check verification company. In less than a month, I detected over one hundred thousand dollars worth of fraudulent checks, largely by recognizing incorrect type. 

After I came home from college jobless, i love typography released a font identification game for iPhone. The day it came out, I played for hours straight, trying to stay at the top of the worldwide high scores. My crowning moment of achievement came when I beat Martin Majoor, who designed the typefaces Scala and Scala Sans, essentially inventing the idea of a type superfamily. I had beaten this master type designer at type identification. But although this game said that I was marginally better at recognizing typefaces than Martin Majoor, Martin Majoor had still designed Scala and Scala Sans, and I was still an unemployed recent college graduate.

I figured I ought to put this skill to real use, which is why I became a designer.

And being a nerd is totally important to being a designer. Because the essence of nerddom isn’t really knowing more about something than everyone else, it’s about being more excited and more passionate about something than everyone else. Being a nerd is about obsession. And so is being a designer. Because making great design involves obsessing over every detail, and making it better than any sane person would expect it to be.

You also need to be a real nerd for your clients, because the more excited you can get about them, the more excited your audience will get about them, too. Being a computer nerd helps, too, since you more or less live in front of it.

Here are some other things I am or have been a nerd towards at some point in my life: beer, bicycles, Harry Potter, physics, healthcare policy, Thomas Jefferson, shaving, musical theater, fountain pens, fantasy football, and Iron Chef. The Japanese version, not the bullshit American one.

My relationship with my nerdiness is perhaps best explained through my history with corrective eyewear. As I said before, I’ve had glasses since I was three. In seventh grade I tried to run away from my nerdiness and started wearing contact lenses. In college, getting a little more comfortable with myself, I went back to glasses full-time, and right before I came to the Circus, I got these, which are more or less shouting, “Look at me! I’m a pair of glasses!” Design has helped me embrace my nerdiness and view it as something to be proudly declared, rather than sheepishly hidden away.

In the musical I mentioned at the beginning, the nerds had a song that we all performed together; I’m going to leave you with the lyrics from its chorus: We don’t care what you say / we don’t care what you’ve heard / we all know it’s cool / to be a nerd.

Doctor Overanalyzes Apple.

This week in my speech class, our assignment was to give a speech on a brand that we love. Here’s mine.

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This is my birth announcement. I was brought into this world on an Apple computer, and they’ve shaped my life since. There has never been a point in my sapient life when I have not been a Mac user. When I was two years old, my dad installed programs like Alpha Blocks and Reader Rabbit on the Mac SE in his den, and I used those programs to learn to read. My first experiences with computer-aided graphic design were in Print Shop Pro on our Centris 610.

When you look at Apple now, you see this big unstoppable force of a company — the most valuable company in the world, in fact. It’s easy to forget that just a decade-and-a-half ago, Apple was on the brink of extinction. It had lost its way sometime in the early 90s. They were still making what I thought was a superior product, but they were unfocused and bleeding money.

In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs talked about facing death. He said: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

I think the fact that Apple has faced death affects its approach as a company. They may be the most valuable company in the world, but they understand that nothing is guaranteed, and in order to stay a successful company, they can’t get complacent. When Steve returned to the company in 1997, he saved it from total annihilation by refocusing Apple’s mission: making great products for its users. He famously drew a two-by-two grid on a whiteboard, and labeled one axis “pro” & “consumer”, and the other “desktop” and “notebook.”

I got the first of those great products on its launch day, the original bondi blue iMac. I remember taking it out of its box and getting the sense that this was a different kind of computer, a computer that was made for the lowest common denominator user, but able to fulfill the needs of experienced users, too. Everything came in one complete package, just like the original Macintosh and every iMac since, and there were only two cables to hook up in order to get it up and running — a power cord and a phone cable for the modem. It took less than five minutes to set it up and turn it on. It was also aesthetically beautiful, in a late-90s sort of way. This was the computer that sealed my love for Apple.

I really believe the original iMac is the third-most-important personal computer of all-time. It redefined user-friendliness and fostered a newfound appreciation for industrial design, and was one of the first personal computers explicitly designed towards internet use. Also, there was no floppy drive, and it used an unfamiliar new port technology called USB. There was overwhelming backlash against these decisions when the iMac was first released, but a few years later the floppy disk was an obsolete piece of technology, and USB became the standard port for both Macs and PCs.

The second-most-important personal computer of all-time came a year after the iMac. At Macworld 1999, Steve unveiled a brand-new portable computer called the iBook. It was impressive enough when he showed us this thing that looked nothing like any laptop before it, taking design cues from the iMac, but the really amazing moment was when Steve picked it up and started walking around the room while browsing the internet. This was the first consumer portable with built-in wi-fi.

When I worked for Apple at the beginning of my time at the Circus, they gave us a retail credo card, the first sentence of which was, “At Apple, our most important resource, our soul, is our people.” I certainly got that sense about Apple’s approach towards its employees, but more importantly, I saw that Apple really understands the people who use its products.

We’re entering a new computer age right now, where every single person in the world is going to have a personal computing device. Apple has refocused itself towards populist computing — computers for the masses. Apple is still making their devices for you and me, but they’re also making them for my mother and grandmother.

Towards the end of my time at Apple, I was piloting the store’s personal setup program, where every person who bought a new Apple product would get to sit down for ten or twenty minutes and get an introduction to their shiny new devices. This is where I saw what Apple is at its best. There was the recently widowed grandmother who was intimidated by her husband’s Dell, whom I helped set up her first-ever email address on her first-ever computer so she could get pictures of her newborn granddaughter. And there was the former concert pianist with arthritis, downloading a piano app to her new iPad and crying as she played for the first time in twenty years.

Our mission in Apple retail was to enrich lives through technology. I know mine certainly has been.

“What you may not know about me”

This is an adaptation of a speech I wrote for my public speaking class this quarter. The week’s topic was “What you may not know about me is…”

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I started going to a new school in eighth grade. I made friends pretty quickly, but I often sensed that I was in one of the far-reaching branches of their friend tree — easily chopped off if deemed unnecessary. The reason I’m telling you this is because I’m not sure what my thinking was behind joining the junior high wrestling team, but it had something to do with that.

The idea of me being on a wrestling team now is laughable at best, but back then it was outright ridiculous. I was five-foot-eight and 98 pounds of nothing.

Looking back, I really have no idea why I did it. I was going to join the swim team, since I had swam — and not terribly — for my neighborhood swim team, but then I decided to take the winter off from sports, maybe try out for a play. Those are things that make sense for me, but somehow — I wound up on the wrestling team.

Coach Chuck Breithaupt was exactly the sort of man you would expect to be a junior-high wrestling coach. He had gone to my high school, where he was a football star, and came back to teach history and coach all of the “manly” sports. He was big, loud, and southern, and I was just a little bit afraid of him. During the first practice, he was calling roll, and people were embellishing upon the standard “here” — things like “hey coach,” “right here coach,” or maybe “howdy.” So I felt like I ought to have some sort of friendly greeting ready when Coach Breithaupt called my name. He called out “Doctor!”

Have you ever had one of those moments where, as you’re saying something, you wish you could reach out and shove it back into your mouth before anyone hears it? Well, that’s what happened as I called out, “Hidey-ho, neighbor.”

The sound of a room of other 13-year-old boys all laughing at you is an unpleasant one. So that’s how my wrestling career started off.

My first-ever meet was a dual-meet against Pace and Holy Innocents, two other local private schools, in our home gym. I was wrestling for the B team, which meant there was some other guy in my 100-pound weight class who was better than I was. So it was with some trepidation that I stepped onto the mat. I was barely able to wrestle against the guys on my own team; why would I be able to beat someone from another school, who was desperately trying to beat me?

I looked up to shake my opponent’s hand. He was another skinny kid who also had absolutely no business there. He went in for the first takedown, but I was able to react fast enough to move my weight forward and get on top of him. I managed to maneuver myself around behind him, giving me the two points for the takedown. I then got him in a half-nelson, and began spiraling my legs around his head, forcing him to turn over onto his back. Not soon after, I heard the whistle, and the referee’s hand on the mat. I had won my first match with a pin in just over a minute.

I went into my next match feeling great — I was an undefeated wrestler! My moment of wrestling glory was short-lived, however. My next match —— pinned in six seconds.

I lost every single match after that in a pin.

I really wish I could say that I learned some sort of valuable lesson from all of this, like persistence, or overcoming adversity, but I’ve got nothing. I do, however, have this:

[This is where I showed a portrait of thirteen-year-old me in a singlet, holding a wrestling pose. It’s labeled “Eric Doctor — 100 lbs.” My friend Kate took it and hung it up at the Circus (I do appreciate humor at my expense), so I don’t have a picture of it to show you. Sorry.]

Doctor Overanalyzes Saul Bass.

Can we safely call Saul Bass the “Greatest of All-Time”?

It’s tempting to judge a logo designer by how many of their logos are still in active use. In that sense, Chermayeff + Geismar might be the statistical champions, but you can’t help but feel that Saul Bass is losing only as a victim of circumstance. Only three of his logos — Avery, Warner Communications, and Kibun Foods — are still being used as he designed them. Most have received an “update” or “refresh.” AT&T got theirs 3D-ified when they merged with Cingulair. The Girl Scouts got bangs two years ago. United Way ditched their unique, recognizable shape in favor of a boring circle in 2004. Indeed, nearly every redesign of a Saul Bass logo keeps the overall concept, only tweaking the execution, and usually in a negative way. The other ones succumbed to the fate of the companies themselves. The United tulip died in the merger with Continental. Rockwell International split in 2001, and neither half got the logo in the divorce.

People who talk about a “Saul Bass style” really don’t understand Saul Bass. There is a style that is identifiable with Saul Bass, and that’s what appeared in the Man With The Golden Arm and Vertigo film collateral — simple, blocky shapes and hand-cut type.

(http://www.creativereview.co.uk/images/uploads/2011/04/poster__man_with_the_golden_arm_the_02_0.jpg)

It’s a style that has been imitated and paid homage to over and over again, often fairly convincingly. If you look beyond those few pieces of Saul Bass’ work, though, the idea of that aesthetic representing his “style” breaks down.

The Title Design of Saul Bass from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

This video from Art of the Title is a great overview of Saul Bass’ work in title design, and it’s clear in just this minute-and-a-half video that very few of Saul Bass’ designs actually fit what we think of as “Saul Bass style.” He has some consistent visual habits, like fractals, large blocks of color, and visual metaphor. These habits, though, are more a product of presenting an idea as simply and directly as possible.

(http://imprint.printmag.com/wp-content/uploads/Continental_Airlines_logo1.png)

His original Continental Airlines logo (the only logo of his, to my knowledge, to be replaced by something entirely different not as the result of a corporate split or merger) is the perfect example of this. Putting outside the now-outdated type, the logo represents the idea of taking off and going somewhere in an impressively simple and understandable way. There don’t need to be any additional executional flourishes — the idea has already been gotten across. On a post I wrote a little while back about design best practices, my department head Ron posted, “A sucky idea done beautifully is masturbatory. A brilliant idea done simply is divine.” Saul Bass’ work exemplifies this aphorism.

It’s also one of the reasons Saul Bass’ “style” is so often imitated — it does not require outrageous technical prowess to make something look like something that Saul Bass could have made. The North By Northwest title sequence, probably my favorite piece of Saul Bass work, uses very basic animation techniques and clean, grid-based typography:

It would not be exceedingly difficult to recreate something like this, especially in a contemporary motion graphics program like After Effects. This demonstrates why the idea matters so much more than a “style” — because there is someone out there who can make something that looks the the same way as something you can make, but there is not someone out there who can come up with the same ideas as you.

That is not to say that the execution is secondary, though. The genius of Saul Bass is that his executions work so well. I added an addendum to that comment by Ron, which was “And an awesome idea done terribly isn’t an awesome idea at all.” Saul Bass’ executions are not afterthoughts, they are direct expressions of the concept. In almost all cases — the North By Northwest titles and the Continental logo among them — the concept and its visual execution are so intertwined that neither supersedes the other.

There are several other designers — Rand, Müller-Brockmann, Glaser — for whom an argument could be made for “Greatest of All Time.” But that’s kind of like arguing about the greatest love song of all time; you don’t mean to diminish the other songs, but you know you’re going to land on “God Only Knows.”