Jessica Svendsen

The next speaker is of Danish heritage. I just found out. Jessica Swenson, or Swenson, because, yeah, she'll explain that. She's a designer currently based in San Francisco, Novi Valley. I used to stay at Russian Hill. She's really good at it, and she's got some great things for you today. So give a warm welcome to Jessica. Jessica. Thank you. Yeah, no, just drag it over. There we go. Perfect. All right. Okay. Oh. There we go. I'll just use the keyboard. So I titled my presentation Against Predictability because it describes one of the ways in which I approach design. But a week after I titled it this, I remembered this conversation I had with the dean of the Yale School of Art, Sheila LeBretville, and she said this, don't be against something before something. And I realized that this sounds, kind of trite out of context, but there's a certain attitude amongst graphic designers at the Yale School of Art that encourages a certain criticality. And I use that term both in the positive and negative sense. And sometimes I think we were perhaps too critical about design. And she was recommending that we reframe our motivations. So I guess if I could retitle my talk, it would be For Unpredictability, even though that doesn't sound as nice. But it really comes from, I think what I want to tease out today is this notion of unpredictability in design. And this quotation by graphic designer T. Burke Coleman is something that I keep returning to. He said, I'm interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyways. So when I think about the photos that I take on my phone, what captures my attention, it's the irregularities. It's something that stands out against a general, perhaps global epitome of unpredictability. I think perfection and clarity were some of the objectives of modernism. But perhaps one of the repercussions of modernism is some safe and potentially boring work. So this is me. My name is Jessica Svensson, and I'm a graphic designer. A little bit of a brief background. This is a geographic map. And as they mentioned, my grandparents actually immigrated from Denmark in 1951. So I'm, very, very happy to be back. They actually moved to a suburban town in the middle of the U.S. It's called Provo, Utah. I lived there for 18 years until I moved to the East Coast for college. And I stayed in Connecticut for eight years and then moved only an hour and a half away to New York. And then this last year, I moved to the opposite coast to San Francisco, California, which is where I currently live and work. So a little bit of, a professional map. Thus far, my practice combines a full-time design job, but I also do freelance and I teach design. I've also worked at two different studios. So while I was in New York, I worked at the design consultancy Pentagram, and I was working for a partner, Michael Beirut. And a lot of the work that I'm going to show you today was worked on at Pentagram. And most recently, I worked as an in-house designer at Apple, working on their global communications team. So just to frame my work to date, I kind of find that I'm pulled between opposite direct, opposite descriptions. I see my work being both dogmatic and unorthodox, between, you know, being pulled between conceptual and formal design. I'm often asked to design systems, but then again, I'm often asked to design around very specific content. And in some ways, I take a more literary approach versus an experimental one. So for me, these lists are almost interchangeable. And in effect, the work that I have been creating and want to create somehow has this tension of adhering to modernist principles while pushing the boundaries of design. So I've kind of separated this talk into two sections. The first, which I'm calling the literary type. And I use this term because I was first introduced to design through letterpress printing, when I was an undergrad, at Yale in a couple of the basements of the colleges. They had fully equipped letterpress studios. And during my very first few weeks of colleges, I went to one of the demonstrations. And I was immediately captivated by the immediacy of being able to print something yourself. And so as I started to set letterpress type letter by letter, I began to understand the relationship between the textual and the visual in a new way. And I realized that the way that I formed the typography and the letters, it could not only illuminate the meaning of the text, but also add to and contribute new meaning. So I ended up spending my evenings there for all four years, printing and managing the studio. But I do want to point out that design was only one of my many extracurriculars in college. My knowledge of design history and design skills and technology was largely self-taught. I started designing posters for various departments and student groups, but it was only in my last year in college that I ended up enrolling in typography courses. So while I was in college, I was actually studying English literature, and I studied modernist authors who were experimenting with textual composition. I became fascinated with the 20th century modernists, obviously, you know, the canonical Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Eliot. But also authors dating back to the 18th century, people of all age groups, both young and especially AndOps were alternative veganism, And because I did not need a very tweeted phase for reading, we were just doing a sketch book, student practice design. So I'm going to show you a lot of work now, but to punctuate each project, I'm going to begin with a quotation and an attempt to weave this topic of unpredictability through the talk. And this is from a paraphrase from Richard Turley, who's the creative director at MTB now, who was previously at Bloomberg Businessweek, but he said in a conversation to me that there are two types of designers in New York. There are those who design systems and those who design content. And this is an example of working with a very specific, very geeky type of content. And every couple years, Pentagram publishes a small booklet called the Pentagram Papers. A partner at the firm proposes an idea for a paper, and it's usually, it varies from everything from visual anthologies to curating a set of photographs, rare and unique writings on visual culture and design. So my boss, Michael Beirut, proposed this book, which is on the typeface Baskerville. It was written by Errol Morris, who is a documentary filmmaker known for films like The Thin Blue Line, but he's also an author of photography criticism and a regular contributor to the New York Times. He published a series of surveys in the Times, and depending on the user, the survey was displayed in a different typeface. So on my screen, I could be reading the survey and it would be set in Times New Roman, but if you looked at another user's screen, they could be seeing it in Comic Sans. So after some secondary analysis of this experiment, Errol determined that Baskerville was actually the most trustworthy typeface. For the users who saw the text in Baskerville, they were more likely to believe the text they were reading. So we published this article in the Pentagram Papers and provided some additional context, but we wanted the book design to reflect John Baskerville's typesetting of the Book of Common Prayer, which is an extremely old style. But the typesetting, book layout, and physical production all references his style. So for an example, when Morris interviews a statistician, I set the interview in the same way that Baskerville set the catechism with a priest. We also followed the various charts and stylings from that era, including archaic typographic devices like catchwords and the long S. And this is kind of a typical page opener, a detail of the Baskerville G, et cetera. So also while I was at Pentagram, I worked on what's known as the Wyndham Campbell Prizes Identity. And this prize is one of the largest literary prizes in the world. It awards $150,000 each to nine recipients in drama, fiction, and nonfiction. The prize identity uses a range of graphic brackets to reflect both the diversity of the prize winners and how the prize brings them together, as well. So these are the logos. And I think brackets typographically are meant to group items together in the way that the festival brings together these prize winners for a literary festival. But they can also reflect a certain nomination process. So like a sports tournament like March Madness, brackets are a common device to organize nominees, finalists, and winners. While the Wyndham Campbell Prizes is not a competition, we wanted brackets to inspire a similar excitement. So these are lightweight familiar in some ways, at least and beyond peer homicide. by taking them, them to find out more about each other. And then when we do these, We also work on them in the US Development Service in whereas we make them perform the vlog on December 29th. and this was really an opportunity to extend the system across printed materials. So we designed everything from ceremony invitations to festival programs to campus banners to book bags and ultimately the brackets moved beyond the word mark and become devices to contain information or become display and decorative patterns. So my last project exemplifying a more lottery approach, I want to begin with something from Michael Rock who's a partner at 2x4 in New York. He's asking how we elevate or transform graphic design that we do every day in our lives and that we see around the world every day into something that we can have a conversation around. And he said, the reason you can have a conversation around it is because it somehow engages an idea or an argument in itself in its physical form that we can then engage in it as an audience looking at it and it makes us think about it in a new way. It's because it embeds ideas into the surface. And so for Rock, I think design should both articulate a visual argument and position, so these ideas are embedded into the surface formally, but also exploit or convey a specific aspect. I think as well my process is really guided by the content. I really like when projects allow me to use design as a form of interpretation about analyzing, distilling an idea or a concept, and then making it visual. So this next project combines a certain geeky analysis and bold typography, and I'm gonna preface it with a little bit of a pop cultural reference. So the video isn't working. Should I use the clicker? I don't know. We could turn it off a little bit. Hmm. Apparently not. Well, that's okay then. I don't know if either of these are gonna work, but. So I'll just explain that those two videos were kind of how Charlie Rose is a newscaster in the US, and he's kind of become this icon that other filmmakers and television shows he appears in. So the first one was in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, and the second was in the finale of Breaking Bad. But this is the Charlie Rose show, and this is the setting that appears on every single show. And it started in 1991, and all guests sit at the same wood table across from Charlie, and it's all set against this stark black background. And the show itself reflects this simple stage. The interview is a conversation with the guest, and there's no frills, no added infographics, no interruptions. But this was his existing identity, and if you've ever seen the title sequence, this was animated with all the cliched tropes of American news channels, and there was gradients and drop shadows and random highlights moving across the screen. So it was a good opportunity. When Michael was approached by Charlie Rose, we wanted to create an identity, an identity that would reflect this iconic status of the show. And as far as identity design goes, we knew that the logo would be primarily a wordmark, because the identity itself is Charlie's name. So this was actually one of my first sketches, where Charlie's name fits inside a perfect square, or sits alongside a perfect square, or a perfect circle, the metaphoric wood table on the stage. And I'm not sure if this is gonna work. Okay. So we started to develop the logo, as functioning within a larger toolkit. This toolkit includes various squares and circles that abstractly reference the two shapes on the stage. So those circles and squares can be filled with images, or type, or become play or pause buttons. And the logo of the sponsoring network, PBS, was also serendipitously a circle shape, so it fit quite nicely. And this is the final logo. It's set in a 1954 typeface called, that we digitized, called Schmalfette. And this is the original specimen that we used, from the alphabet source book, Lettera. And I used this skin to draw a first draft of the digitized version. And then we commissioned the typeface designer, Jeremy Mickle, to draw the full family. It was originally designed by Walter Hattenschweiler in 1954. There's no lowercase, which has been a question for some people. And the name roughly translates as bold condensed. But we knew and loved this typeface, primarily because of the work of Willy Fleckhaus, who was a German designer. And beginning in 1959, he designed the avant-garde magazine, Twen. And for over a decade, this magazine published political and intellectual criticism, but we loved it because it was unparalleled for its photography, its layouts, and its use of Schmalfette. So in looking at some of these layouts, you'll notice how we kind of took and followed and was influenced by it. And we were influenced by Fleckhaus and its type grids, its use of really bold, iconic typography. And everything just really locks into place. But we also wanted to use this typeface to kind of subtly reference the history and typography of print journalism, especially because we were brought on to strengthen the show's digital presence. We wanted its balance between this history and making it contemporary. So let's see if this video works. So if you can think about a title sequence, this is what we would hope The Charlie Rose Show will ultimately adopt. This is from Alou Dorfman. He designed this when he was a creative director at CBS. But it was for the 21st Century, which was the Walter Cronkite show, using Schmalfette. And this is the whole family. But one other element we included was decorative quotation marks. And you'll see from these spreads in Twen, these kind of, it's hard to see from here, but those kind of darker black dots are actually decorative hairline quotations for pull quotes. And also these ads, which were also designed by Lou Dorfman for CBS News, in here the quotation marks become a much more prominent graphic device. So for us, these quotation marks emphasize the in-depth interviewing and conversations that take place on this show. But we also thought we could use these quotation marks for sound bites for guests. appearing on upcoming shows. But more importantly, we wanted this typeface because it was strong and bold enough to become an identity for the show. So even if you didn't see Charlie Rose's name, you could still recognize that these guests were appearing on the Charlie Show of Rose that week. And then the identity just plays out on simple grids, using the toolkit and the black backgrounds across a variety of formats. I also couldn't resist showing this identity in Instagram, which at the time we were designing it was still only allowing square images. And we worked with the development firm Area 17 on the website, which was the main reason for the redesign. So now all 25 years of interviews are searchable online by guest or topic. And my personal favorite feature is every video has a transcript that you can read in real time. So that work may have reflected my kind of undergraduate preoccupation with a more literary approach to design. This work that I'm going to show you now, more experimental, and it may more closely align with the work that I was doing at the Yale School of Art, which encouraged conceptual experimentation. And I show this image because it kind of marks a turning point or a different approach of my work. I made a deliberate decision to start working off the computer. Resulting in projects where I began to push and experiment with typography. I started working with at least one analog device because it required that I work in physical space with physical objects. And I found that when I worked with these tools, it created unplanned and unimaginable results. So for example, I used a projector to create a typeface I called Project, and it has two different weights. I projected each letter of the alphabet onto a cornering curved surface. The letters retain a light-emitting quality, but they also become spatial, dimensional, and distorted. The curved typeface in particular begins to collapse foreground and background. And this was the other weight, which was projected onto a corner. At the same time, I started using a laser cutter. And I was excited by the possibility of using precisely cut type as physical objects. So for the Yale Symphony Orchestra, I laser cut their acronym, YSO, in a wide range of typefaces. Spray painted them white, and then layered them on top of each other. And the effect leaves traces of YSO while playing with depth on the flat surface. So this is the studio motto of the Korean studio, Seolki and Min. And they say, Clarifying is our business, obscuring is our pleasure. If I could adopt that as my own studio motto, I would take it, because I think that's what I hope to achieve. And I think it's a good introduction to this project. Which I apologize, it's another Yale project. But every semester since 1998, Michael has designed a poster for the Yale School of Architecture. And it lists all the exhibitions, lectures, symposiums, and events for the upcoming term. And to be honest, this was the series that made me want to be a graphic designer. And while I was at Yale for eight years, I managed to collect probably over 40 of these posters. And so when I finally joined Michael's team at Pentagram, I was really excited when it was one of the first projects that he gave me. So this series, the posters, follow two specific design restraints. It has to be black and white, and it has to be on the same standard poster size. But within these parameters, each of the posters uses custom typography to announce all of the lectures and exhibitions. But I think one of the other things is we try to push the forms to either extreme simplicity or experimentation. The last requirement is that the Yale School of Architecture marks, the mark appears somewhere. And the mark is simple enough. It's just the letter Y in a circle. But the Y somehow has to reflect the designer typography of the poster. So typically, these posters need to balance a large amount of information with an attention-grabbing visual. So for my first poster on the left, instead of condensing the event information to make room for a visual, I just condensed the title typography. And obviously, this pushes legibility, but I also found it to invite and challenge the viewer to closer inspection. For the one on the left, I designed custom letters in an isometric perspective where ground planes are flattened in an Escher effect. Or for the spring 2015 poster on the left, instead of placing the Y in a circle, I designed each letter form out of circles. Or for the 2014 open house, which is an event where prospective students are invited to visit the school, we photographed a neon open sign and placed it in an arrow that simultaneously becomes a directional on how she looks. Then for a symposium on exhibiting architecture, a paradox question mark, I created a dimensional question mark which also references exhibition pedestals. Or for another open house, I photographed condensed type in a rippling effect that appears in an open house flag. So I think the Yale School of Architecture series managed to push experimentation and also the boundaries of the format. At the same time, it still feels kind of strangely beholden to modernism. But I think Richard Turley, again, sums up some of the complexities of being a modernist today. And he said, modernism is the result of design by committee. It's a simple reductive form of slippery groupthink. I see modernism as being a fear of personality, clean lines and an absence of mistakes, tasteful and compliant, easy to navigate, fearful and elegant, unarguably average, confidently minimal. So I think his ideology feels particularly resonant with me today where design has become increasingly minimal, reverential, safe and boring. So to be against predictability is perhaps a reaction against being unarguably average. And so I think a large part of this work that I'm going to show you now is an attempt to create something unexpected and new. For two years, I designed weekly posters for visiting critics in the MFA photography department. And each poster references the work of the visiting artist, but across the series, I also focused on various formal devices. Largely trying to decontextualize the work. For example, I was investigating light as a subject matter, so I took long exposure photographs. Some gestures were abstract, and some became drawn letter forms, resulting in this final poster for photographer Anmei Li. Or this poster for photographer Arthur Ou, which uses digital abstract marks to reference his own ink abstractions. Or for a poster for the curator of photography at MoMA, I spent an afternoon photographing frames at the Yale Museum. and then collaged them and placed the poster information on one of the gallery placards. Or for a poster announcing a lecture by photographer Jack Pearson, I referenced his enamel and neon letter sculptures by collaging photographs and neon signages around New Haven. This references Jim Goldberg's handwriting, and then I also collaged flora and deconstructed type letter forms to represent some of the idyllic landscapes in Justin Kerlin's work. Todd Hiddo, his work focuses on light in various empty spaces, so I projected various color waves and photographed them. Or I used a laser cut stencil in front of a light bulb to reference one of Philip Lorca de Cource's earliest photographs. But one of them in these series managed to combine my interest in architectural space, light, shadow, and distortion. And this, both of these photographers, they capture certain human residue or transformation of the natural landscape. So what I did is I put vinyl letters on plexiglass, and then I photographed how some casts angled and distorted shadows behind the letter forms. So to find appropriate backgrounds, I spent several afternoons exploring spaces and materials around New Haven. And the final posters are the photographs of the vinyl letters and their shadows in the same frame. So this next project I'll preface with another Tibor quote, which is, I'm always trying to turn things around. to see if they look any better. And this was a project with Linda Van Der Sen who asked us to design a display system or catalogs for a specific syllabus of archival books. And both of these libraries require that you view these kind of design specimens propped in one of these angled book blocks in the reading room. And so you're kind of required to see these rare books in an angled and distorted perspective, and I was really interested in that, because you can't leave these books flat as you would see them outside the archive. So instead, I photographed the books from the angles of the book blocks. So in doing so, it attempts to recapture some of the dimensionality of the original object. I then layered all of these collages to create not only a false depth, but it also suggests movements as if these prints were stills of valuable books exploding, rotating, and falling in midair. I'm not sure if this is going to work. Oh, it is. Okay, so as I was creating these collages, I was referencing Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film, Zabriskie Point. And in the final scene, Daria leaves the house, drives away, looks back, imagining the house being repeatedly blown apart. He then cuts to a more fantastical imagining where household appliances, furniture, clothes, and even books explode in slow motion. So these are the final set of prints. So I'll end with one of my more recent projects with another quote from Michael Rock. And he talks about being a real believer in the impractical in school. That's not making things that are relevant. Impractical doesn't mean irrelevant. But I don't think the restrictions of the commercial world are necessarily meaningful. And I think he's calling attention to the fact that the technology we use today as designers may not be the same in five years from now or even a decade from now. So in order to adapt and evolve, teaching students and young professionals to be format-specific or teaching a particular software, that may be obsolete by the time they even begin their careers. So for me, this comes back to an understanding that design is more about your ideas and your conceptual framework than necessarily the technical skills you have right now because it's about how you can adapt and evolve those skills over time. So I'll end with this recent project, which shows a little bit of my process. But this was an attempt to create an unexpected image on newsstands. And these are a selection of some of my proposed covers for the MIT Technology Review, their most recent issue, which was 10 Breakthrough Technologies. And the topics in this issue really are, everything from the immune system to driverless cars at Tesla to reusable rockets to Slack. So it was really kind of a broad range, but they also wanted it to coincide with the launch of their new website. So they wanted something bold and commemorative. So these approaches were attempts to reference some of the aspects of the technologies they featured, but also the visual culture surrounding technology. But I also wanted something that kind of stood out against some of the visual tropes of technology magazines. So this was originally a cover design proposal that became the opening illustration. And this was the final cover that they selected. It's open circular forms to subtly reference some of the DNA technology. But to truth be told, this was actually my very first sketch. So I guess that's the process for you. And thank you very much. Thank you, Jessica. Thank you. Very nice. Any questions? I got a question for you. Do you use Illustrator to do all of that? I mean, the posters and stuff? Yeah, so everything that, all the images that I showed was me. Yeah. All right, cool. So I'm interested, I don't know about you, but I know Photoshop and I know Sketch, but some of the print stuff I have no idea how to do. Okay. I guess it's Illustrator. All right. Well, thank you so much, Jessica. Thank you. We will be right back with Mathias and Thomas.