Hi everyone, welcome back to Graphics Project. This is week two of Graphics Project. Last week we had, if you remember, we had a Florian, sorry, Felix Berrichter and Erin Knutson from Pinup Magazine. We had Mimi Ochan, who's an independent design consultant. We have two very different speakers today. Our three speakers, I should say, we have Emile Molen from The Met and Leah Dennis and Florian Muse from 2x4. Very different kinds of projects we'll look at. Both of the speakers, or all three of the speakers, will talk about how they sort of negotiate spatial design and graphic design at their positions at both The Met and 2x4. I think that will be especially interesting to you guys given what you do at the school. So let me introduce our first speaker very briefly. Emile Molen is the head of design at The Met. Originally from the Netherlands, Emile received his BFA from the Gerrit-Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam where he specialized in editorial and type design. Over the course of his career, he has worked on a wide variety of projects ranging from brand identities to wayfinding systems and environmental projects. Animation, print and interactive projects with a strong focus on cultural and architecture clients. Before joining The Met, he has worked at New York based Design Studio 2x4 and Bruce Maus Design in Toronto for a long list of clients including MTV, Prada, Nike, OMA, Perez Art Museum Miami, NYU, Harvard University and Van Allen Institute and many more. Emile joined The Met in 2014 in his current role as head of design. He oversees communication design as well as exhibition design and he is in charge of the visual language of visitor experience throughout The Museum. Today he will share with us select projects from his role at The Met including the opening of The Met Breuer, the Ray Kaukubo Comde-Garçon exhibition, Art of the In-Between and Like Life sculpture, colour and the body and many, many more. Okay, so I'll just hand the mic over to Emile. It's a long presentation. There you go. Who would you like to call? There you go. Who would you like to call? Hi. Thank you, Yoon Jae, for this introduction. I'm actually quite excited to share some of the work that we do at The Met and the wide range of it. I've also have two colleagues of me here, Anna Rieger and Brian Butterfield who oversee spatial design and graphic design that relates to space. When Yoon Jae asked me, she asked me to talk about branded experiences at The Met and how this works. For me, the question that becomes as well is what is a brand? I think it's often mistaken as a brand is a logo and I don't think a brand is a logo. A brand is not a logo or a tagline but more of a wish or an aspiration that you have to create a set of principles to engage your, in our case, visitors. To talk about this a little bit, I wanted to give a brief introduction about what The Met is. I assume that you all have been living in New York, but I think the scale is something that is important to understand about how things work at The Met. It's nearly 150 years old. We have a range of 5,000 years of art and culture. There are 17 curatorial departments and we had, I believe, 7.3 or 7.4 visitors last year which are enormous numbers. This is a graphic I like to share. If you put the Met on its side, it's nearly up to the 80th floor of the Empire State Building. It's a really big building. Besides there, we also currently have, or occupy, at least The Met Breuer that will end the summer of 2020 and there is The Met Cloisters in Upper Manhattan where a lot of our medieval art is. Some other facts just to know, a lot of visitors actually will never physically enter the building but we have about 30 million visitors to our website every year, individual visits, and about 135,000 members. It's also important to understand I think what the mission of The Met is, is to collect, study and conserve significant works of art across time and culture and what the vision is, is to create the most dynamic and inspiring art museum in the world. The reason why I think it's important to understand is I'll talk a little bit about what the overarching brand strategy for The Met is and how does that relate to communication things we do or exhibitions that we design, etc. And then design itself at The Met. It's a team of about 35 people which is in a way, it's not divided but it consists out of two teams, an exhibition design team and a communication design team. There's architects, graphic designers, lighting designers, production designers, there's art directors that oversees these teams and producers to make sure that everything happens when it needs to happen. The exhibition design team, as you can read, is mainly responsible for the design of exhibitions and art rotations in permanent galleries and amongst other things. So that ranges from big blockbuster exhibitions like the Jacoba Kubo Kondogar Saw Show or this is a big show at Breuer, a life-like sculpture color in the body to smaller gallery installations working with live artists and commissions. This is the roof garden commission that we do every year. This one is Adrian Villaroyas but also complete gallery renovations. So this is a render from our African Oceanic and American galleries which we're currently working on with Kulapat Jantrasat's Y architecture. So there's always involvement from the exhibition team in some formal way with any of these projects and there's quite a few. The communication side of things consists mainly of graphic designers and project managers essentially. One of the things that we do is we manage the visual identity that distinguishes the matte experience on and off-site but also a wide array of branded experiences as you will. So basically identity projects for symposia, fundraising events, amongst other things. We work closely with our marketing and communications department, curatorial departments, digital department, communication, membership and our development offices. We do sit all in one space and these are not the best pictures but we recently renovated our studio which now actually looks like a design studio so I just wanted to show that. Graphic designers kind of work cross-functionally so they work both on communication jobs as well as on exhibitions jobs and the only reason for that is that I think a wider variety of work better work and keeps designers probably more engaged with the job that I do. So how does branding play a role in our museums? As I mentioned, I don't think a brand is just a logo or a color. It's more kind of an idea that is based on goals that we set in a long-term strategy and that idea should inform essentially everything you do. That's not a big thought but that's the idea behind it. So I think in 2013 the Met engaged in what we called an audience engagement strategy. The word branding didn't fit well but in the museum felt too commercial but essentially a brand strategy is an engagement strategy. That was kind of the result of doing a five-year strategy about where is the Met heading, what should the Met do about that is that we wanted to create greater access to our collections, scholarship and expertise, broadening our audiences and deepening the engagement with the work that we do and the third one is striving for organizational excellence. So when that project started research showed us that 34% of the visitors that the Met has come for the first time and 50% for the first time in many years. It was filmed and under informed and only 45% of the visitors at the time felt that the Met is a place for people like them which is quite concerning. It was seen as elitist etc. I mean obviously our building which is a neoclassical facade doesn't help. You have to walk up massive steps etc. But what can you do to kind of reach your goals of engaging more people with our collections and the work that we do. It's kind of a diagram that describes our kind of brand idea and what we need to do to reach the goals that were set out in our 5 year strategy. So if we want to become the most dynamic and inspiring museum in the world the brand idea is we need to bring life to the art and art to life. So we need to present art in a certain way so that it becomes lively and bring that to life to people that visit. It's essentially kind of a common goal of uniting the museum to create experiences that celebrate what's special about the Met because it's not your typical museum so to say. We can achieve that by striving to be open which means essentially to be accessible to anybody to be one and I think if you look at the history of the Met and the previous directors it's like the director before the previous director was talking about the museum as 17 museums on the one roof. There are 17 curatorial departments so what you do by speaking about that is essentially building very strong silos for people to focus on their specific area but from a visitor perspective you walk from one museum to another museum within one museum that's not probably the clearest thing that you can do so to make that one to make it one experience was part of the goals and iconic what is distinct and unique about the Met. So to achieve that these barriers that I just talked about we need to take action. Perforating the walls is essentially jargon for saying how do you create a place that is more open how do you show more what's going on and be welcome and appeal to broader audiences by engaging communities outside the museum democratizing the distribution so that's the engagement of visitors opposed to always speaking from a centralized point how do you engage people within that conversation so social media is obviously a typical example make connections and I think also internally we have so many different types of art forms from different periods but there's a lot of connections between those by having that really siloed kind of environment you don't see those connections so how do you make those connections and there's a couple of exhibitions that do that in the time that I've been there do that very well so focus of the new director that we have if you think of the recent heavenly bodies exhibition for example where contemporary fashion is juxtaposed within permanent galleries that show medieval art that influence the garments those I think are experiences that work on multiple levels people that might come for the medieval galleries learn something about fashion and vice versa etc it's hard to navigate so what comes out of that is that we're working on an overall way finding system and it's an underutilized resource so we have a lot of libraries and archives how do you turn certain visitors also more into that they would use the place as a library so opposed to a visitor they come frequently they come for different things etc so essentially this strategy should inform everything we do as a museum so part of what comes out of this is a visual identity and so this is a page from our brand guidelines that talks about all the elements that make up this identity but I think what works for both spatially as well as graphically is the approach that we take to the design and how do we do that so do that in a bold way and do it in a monumental monumental way history through a contemporary lens is like I think we want to use contemporary design qualities to create experiences that speak to everybody so with that I'm just going to run through a bunch of projects and explain kind of how they work and how groups of people work together and I'll do one communication project to start because that's part of what the studio does and then jump to more architectural projects so this project is relatively straightforward it's essentially an identity for a speaker series in our time which I assume you all know because it's about architecture so the visual the visual clues are very simple it's two pieces of typography that are in conversation with one another thinking about the potential longevity of this series it's like it started in 2000 and let me see it's probably on this invitation 15 right before our brand launched but by that time we knew what our brand typography was going to be so we used those two typefaces to make sure that we could keep doing this when our new brand launched now over the course of a couple of years this project's kind of evolved whereas the use of color there's added elements etc there's different designers that work on it within the studio which I think is also important to make things to make them keep evolving so to say and after and I have to look again at when this one is after about a year and you see that that's when our brand launches because you see the new Met logo on that one and the older one on the other one it turned into or morphed into a symposium so with that we created much more assets than just an email blast so to say and the idea behind this and after talking with Beatrice Galilei the curator that hosts these talks we also started focusing on materiality within design as it is a series that is about architecture and design so this this program actually really allows us to be a little bit more maybe contemporary than we usually do so this example is for the symposium in 2017 where another layer of visual was added besides that conversational notion that is essentially the main visual of it which is that kind of stripped that you see over there and it's actually just based on time so there's 365 days a year there's 24 hours in the day there's 7 hours in the time that the symposium is it's just another layer and we treated the images in a special way to distinguish it from things that we did previously and also align it with other elements that you see during the day so for example holding slides but then also started making social media assets that there you see that bar kind of working as in you know showcasing a year of architecture in the day the following year it's actually last, it's a month ago we kind of focused more on you know the symposium was about future tech, space, AI, VR, post-human etc so it was kind of Beatrice her wish to present this more in an energetic, shiny, crisp in a new way so we have this kind of rainbow thing of colors that that is overlaid we printed our materials on a mirrored surface and obviously on the screen doesn't come out so that helmet really looked like a space helmet so we're focusing a little bit more there on the materiality of things as well and then again how does that relate to the space, how does that system work as a backdrop for you know in this case conversation with Liz Diller and David Lang and Beatrice so this slide I thought was a good segue to other things so we do a wide variety of projects in the studio but we also have a lot of kind of things that we need to keep in mind when we design for example ADA guidelines the American Disabilities Act so if you want to be open and accessible as a museum you need to be accessible to everyone the Smithsonian has compiled a set of guidelines that talks about type sizes, how much space do you need in a hallway so two wheelchairs can turn etcetera so you know you need to solve problems for that but you need to keep these things in mind so this is one of the things and I start from I'm going to start from things that are kind of smaller and more pragmatic and then move into a kind of larger exhibition so this is just an overview of a project that we started doing actually quite some time ago but we did an audit of the signage system within our Asian wing where there was no consistency in essentially anything so there might be different type faces, different types of maps, different sizes, no idea about why something is placed where it's kind of all done at Hock and not thought about as one suite of galleries that talks about Asia so after that analysis we determined what are the challenges so consistency the context, orientation and communication and how can you kind of make that better so the opportunities are strategically and consistently located signage actually makes your experience within these galleries just much better so again this is an audit of all the signage that is in that wing how can you simplify that by making a sizing system of course there are exceptions there because there's casework that only allows for a certain amount of or certain size of label in there etc but then thinking about all these thresholds between the different regions is like what are actually better points to place certain things and do you de-program certain corners of art so you can actually inform people that you're walking from Southeast Asia to South Asia or something like that and then granular from a way finding perspective thinking about how can you create systems that become intuitive after you've seen them happen over time so you place a gallery number always in the same corner and sideline from an entrance you place a gallery name in the same place and you place didactic signage that potentially has similar information like there's always a map, there's always a graphic potentially a small map of the entire Asian wing so you know where you are and kind of this is what the result of that is in the render we're still working on certain elements of that but what we did work on is you know very granular making a new label a new didactic system with labels and how do you make that clear there's added the addition of international languages there so if you're in the Korean galleries you have a couple of headlines that talk to you in Korean in the Chinese galleries and Chinese etc and this is also you know I was just new at the Met and I was like well you know all the labels in this building are different why don't we change them and then Susan Sellers the head of design at the time just simply told me good luck there's 60,000 of them so you know I think thinking about this and working through this thinking about consistent placement how does the art shine but you get the information that you need and these type of ideas which is essentially a new label that I thought it looks so much cleaner it's really focused on form but then when you think about these galleries and light sensitivity of certain materials these things get changed out all the time and that's why they have individual labels that go with the artwork and a curator can change this without you know having design and production involved to print a new label etc so these are things you learn along the way then you know smaller shows and rotations what we try to do there is look at you know because of this silent mentality that was there for the longest time there is some form of cohesive design within department so we started documenting and in some cases improving kind of label standards that there are so that we do it the same in a similar gallery and that also means that we don't keep reinventing the wheel a label is a label we know what the guidelines are you know we also need to be try to be a little bit efficient in these things but what we do do for smaller exhibitions is these kind of little title moments that relate to content so in this case it's a show about you know studio photography in Africa so we use this backdrop which is used a lot by a photographer named I might have his name slightly wrong but Malik Sadibey which is you know a well known photographer to use that A to kind of entice people to look at this wall and get in so to kind of make it more prominent but on the other hand you know it's an excellent place to take you know to engage your visitors to take a selfie in front of etc after you've seen the show there's also a lot of different ways how you can incorporate graphics like physically on a wall so you can still screen things you can use vinyl you can do that in depth in some cases you need to make maps how do you stylize them etc so in these type of galleries we try to do that you know in an elegant way there's always the question is well you know essentially we do we do this for the art so it shouldn't overpower the art but how do you do it in a way that works well and is seamless and feels contemporary but this is kind of how you see that work so in order to do so you know recently we've also started working on kind of a set of we have multiple sets of templates to prevent you from kind of as I said reinventing the wheel constantly so this is kind of an example of a deck that is used to create exhibition graphics that is used simultaneously by graphic designers and architects in the studios that are assigned to exhibition so this is what that looks like when you fill it in or when you start working on that so this is a banner on our facade so then this is a scope list that works in a couple of ways it informs like other colleagues in the museum that we work with from editorial to partners in digital etc about what is the scope of this project so we can start planning and know what is needed so that we don't have to do things in the last minute and it has a plan of the exhibition that lists you know you see that a little bit you know there's the intro walls here there's an intro text there in some cases we actually list where labels are subsection text etc there's a place for you to put some references a render of what your ideas around this title are for some reason this image didn't load this would be a render of art and labels and text panels etc but then here I think is a very helpful guideline again to you know these are kind of all the possibilities that we have within the museum of where labels or hadactic signage can be placed so you know we gave them names you see that there's some guidelines also from an ADA perspective like you shouldn't hang a label higher than 67 inches because then somebody in a wheelchair essentially can't read it and then the spec sheets that talk about size, materiality and the more the smaller these things get the more granular the information about them become so it says the text size is about 90 90 points etc and there even more granular that graphic on the right talks about you know when it gets smaller 14 points is very different in a typeface with very long A and D senders than in a typeface with very short A and D senders just to make sure that we keep our kind of information accessible so I'll just flip through these this deck it has many many more pages so then in practice you know how does that work so this is an example for the David Hockney exhibition so working together with the curator and thinking about the content we always try to come up with something that kind of relates to what you are going to see so in this case we use a dimensional letter form that is made out of plexiglass we kind of painted the edges of it white so it kind of looks like a pool which you know David Hockney is known for a couple of these paintings that he did that are around pools and this one specifically that you see in the back so you know relatively simple ways of thinking about it but relating what we do to entice people to come into the gallery and place them in a certain mindset before they start you know looking at the art so in this case William Eggleston who is an American photographer who photographed he was actually known for utilizing color photography in the 50s as one of the earliest artists but his photographs are a lot about everyday subject matter such as you know motel room, store front so in this case we had a sign painter come in and literally sign painted on a wall like you would see on diners in the old days in some cases it's also kind of the opposite like in the case of Diane Arbus the title wall is actually very toned down because when you come off the elevator which is about here the way the exhibition is designed which is actually done by Brian in collaboration with Jeff Rosenheim the curator but you know the idea the photographs these are this is kind of street photography in New York City of Diane Arbus and the idea of presenting them on these single planes there's also images on the back as like you are walking through town and you just run into these people and you know there's no prescribed route etc which is not your typical museum experience so the title wall here is also specifically toned down to create just you know make you focus on go explore what is there another example where Nazarene Muhammady who makes is an Indian artist who makes very delicate work but we you know this was one of the opening shows at Breuer it is a female artist from India and we also wanted to do something of a significant scale so how do you kind of do both so we used a dimensional typography but painted it in the same color as the wall and just the edges slightly darker so it comes off so there is a delicacy to it but there's also presence to it another example where it's I believe this is a paint mask or silk screen but you know it's another Indian photographer mainly color photography where the identity and exhibition graphics play off the colors you know that are very typical within Indian clothing or etc so that also comes back on the kind of the sides of the walls throughout the exhibition and you know maps were colored in that way etc in some cases you know you can also do this by using video so Marsden Hardley is an American painter and this specific exhibition was around the paintings that he did along the coast of Maine so opposed to using a static static entry who wanted to do something more grand so he used this piece of video I believe it did have sound to it I'm not sure you did hear the waves breaking to kind of put you in to put you in the coast of Maine so to say another example Michelangelo so the kind of idea that the designers had here is the show is about Michelangelo as a designer and a draftsman so it was an enormous collection of sketches, models of architectural things as well as the Sistine's Chapel etc so here we essentially built a scaffolding that we wrapped in a fabric that had hand painted typography on it that also had kind of a transparency so you would see on the other side you know a 15% scale model of the Sistine's Chapel that we built that was surrounded by you know the early sketches of Michelangelo for the Sistine's Chapel but then didn't try to hide that we just showed the scaffolding and to add to the experience a completely different thing for a video show where you know the inspiration essentially is movie posters there's four movies shown in this exhibition so movie posters you know the repetition of them to create something that is maybe less expected so but it does show you where you know that there is four movies the title stands out by color and then the individual shows at the entrance where this is essentially available for the individual piece and I'll go a little bit into more depth for this show so we did a I guess I don't know if you can call it a retrospective but a show on him where I think a lot of things that you see happening came together in the show where there's a lot of layers of information and how do you deal with that so obviously we take clues from his designs also in the physicality you know first the way that we actually kind of spread out his name but then also that parts of this wall like the darker parts have dimension to it the lower parts are much flatter and there's a lot of color like you see in his work through the the exhibition there's lots of different kinds of media used so the top you see a projection, there's labels there's a quote and we try to do that in a somewhat more contemporary and bold way because that's in a way also how he functioned as a designer there's small little details here where the edges of the labels had a color that related to sections in the exhibition certain graphics were completely incorporated into the architecture and see you know little numbers were placed to relate to kind of group labels all very seamless with the architectural idea of the show another example where I think the didactics really worked into the design of the show was masterworks unpacking fashion so the idea here is it was a Met collection show so it's all masterpieces that we have in our collection so the idea literally unpacking them out of the crates that they come in in typography that refers to what you see on these packing crates and then how that works within the space so the title wall is kind of it could be the top of a crate that is in there but we used the same material for what we did for the exhibition design so there was foam that was kind of that you see in crates that was used for backdrops to make the art come out more or the garments come out more and then the labels were also made out of the same plywood printed on them and given kind of a more prominent place within the exhibition and then how we dealt with section text which is in this case also directly played on there but also how we displayed books to use the same display technique or pages of a book that were rotating again like the top of a crate was taken off etc so to create an experience that just feels as one opposed to something that feels very separate from the exhibition design so for this show I actually wanted to show a little bit more about process this was the Comm de Garceau show where from Ray Cavacuo the art of the in between so it's very interesting that Ray actually designed her own show she worked with architects that she usually works with to design her own show which is not a typical thing for us to do but it started with this model that we were presented with at a meeting in Paris then of course that becomes a digital model and you have renders but there was a constant kind of discussion between Andrew Bolton the curator and Ray that Andrew was kind of concerned that his curation wouldn't fit within the space and Ray was actually much less interested in talking about her fashion and much more interested in talking about her space so what she did is she built this space at 100% made out of tarp and in a space that they rented outside Tokyo that was roughly the same size as our canter gallery where the show was so we all flowed to Tokyo to look at this and it was really remarkable to see the whole space it was an extreme help for Andrew Brian could make sure that we were all walking around making sure does this work for ADA there were some adjustments based on this but you also see these X's there were there to show that these mannequins actually do fit in this space so that's kind of an extreme example but these are the mannequins that we moved around and we placed them in the space etc from that the space was actually built at the Met but I think the reason why I wanted to show this is when you think about didactics and when we were in that space and the fact that Ray was to a certain extent more concerned with the space that she was designing than her garments that were being displayed I really started talking about how can you give the didactic information to people without influencing this such beautiful and extremely white space one thing to point out is like in museum shows there's not most of the time there's not a lot of light there's light damages drawings clothing because of the colors and Ray really fought for this space to be as bright as possible so there was over 350 tube lights in the ceiling and that was possible because most of the collection came out of her archives so she said I don't care if my clothing suffers because of that because our conservators within custom institute were less happy with that and in certain spaces we had to dim light because we got loans from other institutions so again thinking about that so how do you do that so from a graphics perspective there we almost wanted it not to be there we actually build a light box into this wall painted over the light box so that the light could come through the paint and they essentially booklet with label information that referred to numbers that were next to the garment just flat on the surface so this booklet you would open it up you would go to the section where you are and then in between there would be kind of a plan of the complete exhibition and it would highlight the structure that you were in so the result of that is that you don't see a lot of labels that are designed that don't distract from the garments that were displayed and there's just a set of kind of titles, subtitles and numbers close to the garments in some cases there was a video display this was a collection that was designed for a play by Merce Cunningham and another interesting fact is that some of these numbers are much further away than others so the further you go away the numbers actually get bigger and the numbers actually appear to be exactly the same height when you stand in front if things were too high we made these tiny little plexi stands with the numbers on them so the process actually did influence why we did certain things to make sure that the vision of the artist was actually protected and the vision of the curator was protected as possible so this is another example which is very different but visitors to Versailles was an exhibition about I believe about a year ago maybe and the idea of the Curator Fortress exhibition came from all transcripts of visitors to Versailles in the time when it was still the Royal Palace so Persian princes and other notable persons that came if any of you have been at Versailles it's kind of a real kind of experience of opulence so to say and how do you translate this without doing the obvious so another part of this exhibition was that there was I think it was called a binaural audio experience it was almost like an audio play so you had a headset and you would hear people tell stories about that they would take horse and carriage from Paris and it would take six hours with it etc so it was a very immersive experience certain parts like labels we did use some historic references as these panels that you have engravings in etc but opposed to kind of literally recreating the gardens of Versailles we worked with wallpapers that put you in a certain a certain mood but still within a contemporary setting so this was kind of an infinity space that you talk about the labyrinth that is at Versailles and these drawings were created based on old engravings of Versailles that were made a long time ago but to a certain extent we did adjust them for our needs and extended them etc and then the second part of the exhibition we worked with wallpapers and the individual rooms that you have at Versailles and that idea of an unfilat that you pass through so all these wallpapers you see the direct translation so this is a wallpaper that is recreated by mixing of photographs but in kind of a monotone way on a reflective material to do the same as what you see in the marble of that maquette but to make the art really come off the room but to still give you kind of the idea that you're in Versailles without actually putting a photo on the wall that is exactly like Versailles so here you see that then essential artifacts are built into that structure so the wallpaper was designed to house this door in it and to showcase that painting in front of it and the chair and this is an example of wallpapers that we got from books but also had our photo studio take pictures in our period rooms then recreate them make larger patterns so that we could use them and again to just forefront the art and wood patterns that we found in other rooms even parquet floors that I can't remember where we got it from but it was not a gallery that was disassembled so we just used that to really give you the feeling that you're get an idea of what Versailles is like but to forefront the art and not just make a plain copy of Versailles and that went as far as to one of our architects actually completely redrawing the Hall of Mirrors in a big open space towards the end of the exhibition and this I wanted to share as this is the amount of people that are involved with building an exhibition like this from the complete museum so it's not a small effort these things are planned three to five years in advance and there's a lot of people working on making this happen an interesting thing is that when we finally found this wallpaper we were all happy and we installed it people from scientific research were concerned about the off-gassing because obviously they're not archival materials and there's art in them so these are things that we constantly mitigate and a lot of tests that we do for materials that go into temporary exhibitions and into the casework etc so if you think about branding and branded experiences essentially ideally you would have an experience that has a visual identity that is kind of present along every step of the way of a visitor journey so that goes from a website to an advertisement in the New York Times to a pylon that is outside dynamic display but also for example a publication so when you buy a publication that you clearly connect that back to exhibitions that doesn't always function like that at the Met and there's a wide variety of reasons why that functions or doesn't function but if you think about what is the most effective way to tie everything together then there needs to be a set of visual elements that are kind of present that doesn't mean that it needs to be 100% the same but there needs to be some common threat so what we do within the museum we do 40 to 50 exhibitions a year about 60 the larger shows that we hold in our temporary exhibition spaces we give bespoke identities and it is to offset them from smaller things that we do and to make that also clear to our visitors like this is where we put a lot of effort in and their temporary shows that you should come and see when you're at the museum not that you shouldn't see the other ones but this is where we put a lot of time and effort in and then there is a set of exhibitions that are not in our departmental temporary spaces that are smaller so they could be not even the size of this auditorium in most cases where we have a kind of templated approach so for all of these shows we always have meetings about what we call a signature image so it's the image that you use consistently through all the vehicles that you have and then there is of course all the other elements that are designing those so as I just showed kind of a template for what we use for exhibition graphics we also have templates for or packages that we fill out for communication materials so I'm going to use Monasek's Markina as an example where in this case the show is actually designed by OMA and the book design was done by OKRM London based studio so what we did here is we asked OKRM to also fill out one of these packages to create a form of alignment that we felt is from a branding perspective is needed and to introduce that to the museum this is after our new brand launch as well so usually a lot of this work happens just within our studio but not in this case so what you see is these packages they show a signature image, they show typography, a color palette and then there is a whole bunch of kind of applications that are filled out so these are stanchions that are placed throughout the museum to help you find where an exhibition is that are a wayfinding tool invitations, I mean there's many more pages in this deck but I think you get the point where you're going with a couple pylons outside and then in this case where it started tying back to the book so this is the design for the catalog and when OKRM worked on this they shared pages, kind of layout pages of the book with us as well where you see let's say the look and feel of this book is they gave us some other inspiration of things of how this brand could live within the space and then I'm just going to show a very quick video because the exhibition before this music started playing the exhibition was kind of this cathedral-like structure that was built within our Lehman wing all very seamless with the use of mesh etc and so when OKRM worked on the book and they filled out this package that's when we internally started working obviously closely with OMA on all the other things that you saw in that video so what you do see here is how does the the didactic, so a title how does that relate to layouts of the book like the exhibition we also of course thought about what techniques do we use to give people the information that we'd like them to get but also not influence the seamless nature of the architectural design some of these elements, you know branded elements actually became part of the exhibition and then within these alcoves the videos that were produced behind were kind of close ups of the garments themselves the show was all about technology and fashion and a lot of these garments have very specific techniques or how they were made could have been done by hand in some cases so to show more detail and to create more drama and use of projectors didactic signage but so in this case we created an experience where every single element clearly feels like one and I think the advantage of that is when I look at that book on my bookshelves at home I see this exhibition in front of me when a book doesn't look like that you kind of miss that connection and I think that is kind of what the strength of branded experiences can be when you do it on every single level and this is the last project I wanted to share which is Heavenly Bodies so this was a show I assume that a lot of you saw this the show that was done last year designed by Delos Caffidio and Renfro and the book design was done by Neil Delany now if you think of it from our studio perspective and also the joy of being a designer there I think having outside designers designing everything and then for us to implement it is not the it's not the best way to engage designers so when Neil Delany came on board we had conversations about how can we make this work and how can we work together get updates on what you are doing so we can do what we need to do with alignment that is not 100% but is so close that you don't necessarily see the difference between them so this show was a show in three locations and I think one of the reasons why we selected Delos Caffidio and Renfro is the fact that the show as I mentioned earlier was about juxtaposing garments that are influenced by religion or actual religious objects into our medieval galleries actually I should not say actual religious objects they are influenced by in some cases literally objects that are in our collection and then there was a part from the Vatican and they clearly said that they didn't want their collection to be juxtaposed with contemporary fashion that in Anna Wintour's costume institute but the reason why we selected them is that they opposed to creating a lot of architecture to showcase the garments they really utilized the nature of our galleries and for example this idea of light it's not visible in this render but above there there are like church like windows you see one here you know by creating fake light that just looks like the light is coming through like in some churches like in the Vatican there's this moment where everybody takes pictures where the light comes in and you see the rays of light and a very simple use of materials we thought that was very strong for this specific show because it is about the relationship between the art that is in these galleries and the art that is brought in and the art that is brought into the exhibition obviously also creates a lot of problems because you can't put a lot of light on these mannequins again because of light levels so these are all kind of masked in Photoshop I believe it was done and so that the light that creates the outline is not the light that lights the garment that's done with different light here you see that in the Byzantine galleries I believe I can't remember the design on the top of my head but this actual Byzantine mosaic influenced that collection and then the third part that was in the Kostem Institute galleries which is essentially a temporary exhibition space so it's a white a white cube exhibition space and a smaller space of the site at full galleries and then the last part was in the Cloisters where of course the Cloisters are the Cloisters it's a combination of three different buildings that I think the Rockefellers bought and shipped over from France and built them up in Upper Manhattan obviously this type of art that is influenced by religion really fits in a space like this and here a similar idea where you know the moment of light creates the exhibition the rest of the space is just the space as it is on a daily basis so this is the design of the book and you see that they created a they actually created a couple of Kostem typefaces and they created this mark that went on front of the book that combines all three of them so there's like an infilled version of the typeface there's a version that has kind of an inline in it and there's an outline version and they made this combination like this because it relates to the sections in the three the three sections in the book so the part for the Cloisters the part for the medieval galleries and the part for the Vatican and you know some interior pages so here you see the Vatican collection uses the Kostes or the filled in version the fashion fashioning worshiping the inline version and then the devotion to fashion the open version so with this information our internal team started working on okay you know how do we create a lockup that you know it's not necessarily essentially the same as the book because you know the way they did it related to you know the content of the book but by using same typography and a similar way of using the typography you just you still align everything again similar set of applications that we fill out in this case we needed to create a separate one for the Vatican exhibition what that looks on the facade we had these that animation I showed in the beginning was placed in kind of the entries of kind of the beginning of the exhibitions though there was no real beginning and at the Met you could enter that exhibition from so many different ways there was no clear way to put an entry and then the entry of the Anna Wintour costume center and then from a didactic perspective what we tried to do is you have a situation where you're in galleries where there is didactics present that talk about the art in the gallery so this panel over here just talks about this collection of Byzantine art including labels that relate to that and labels within these cases so we started thinking about how can we create something that is clearly distinguishes itself from the didactics that belong in the gallery and clearly connects to the architectural design of the show so we used not the exact same but a similar museum than what the Assar specced for the platforms and created these leaning panels that we strategically placed to talk about different sections in the exhibition and again used typography in different forms and ways and different configurations to talk about what section the overall show so here you see how that worked in the cloisters and the smaller one over here is a section text and opposed to in the the costume institute where you don't have to deal with art that is in the galleries because again it's an empty exhibition space we just treated it as regular or not having an additional architectural element that didn't necessarily relate to this space but just placed it on the wall so here how these section panels worked within the cloisters and met Fifth Avenue and here how we did that for the Vatican and then how we treated labels on the glass or on walls very simple on the platforms and again to the design that DSR worked on was one of minimal interventions so to add a lot of architectural kind of label solutions would go against that strategy a thing that we did do is so this again is just vinyl put down on steel platforms is utilize the things that the museum utilizes in general this is another example where we had to find a way to put didactics on this concrete we did that in vinyl in the beginning but since there was I believe over a million people that saw this show you can imagine that a lot of this gets picked off so we then had to replace it with cardboard for example in the cloisters or in other areas in the Fifth Avenue these kind of label holders were used so we also just utilized the materials that were present in the gallery to do that so opposed to adding a language we used the language that is present so here you see that we used the label holders that belong to these objects but this object actually related to this object so we changed the color of the label to black but used a similar typology opposed to inventing something else this is another example where it shows this relates to probably this artifact and this relates to the artifacts that were added into this exhibit in the cloisters and this is the example of this actually relates directly in some form or way to that garment so to make that stand out you could kind of experience the show and just get the information you needed that relates directly to the show or you could read everything and inform yourself about all the art there and that's what I had prepared for today so thank you thank you Amil I don't think I have a roaming mic so I'm just going to have if you guys have questions just yell it out and I'll sort of try to reiterate into the mic if you can't hear it any questions for Amil while you guys are thinking about that maybe I will actually start one of the things that I was really curious about I mean just you started with some facts and some slides about you know just the vastness of this museum we will understand how big the net is but the fact that you mount 60 shows a year think about that that's more than one every week that is the crazy number of shows and just the number of square footage and the number of people that are involved and the amount of content is just for me it's almost unfathomable and then every time you put on a show you showed that slide of the number of people that are involved but I think it would be really interesting for us to learn a little bit about how that relationship works so the curators, the architects the graphic designers and other people that mount a show I mean it's also I asked Anna and Brian to join as well well it really depends but in general most projects are curator driven that's where they start they start as an idea, they get approved by an exhibition committee and at some point that gets presented from registrars to people digital publications, design I mean I don't know I'm missing a lot of them probably but there's 70 people in a room basically when an exhibition start when it's a large scale exhibition what we try to do kind of internally is we set up the studio so that there is actually there is kind of clear roles and responsibilities the reason why, when I showed that diagram there's communications and exhibitions there's a clear overlap as well so what we're trying to do and what Anna and Brian are working on very hard is how can you create and plan the internal collaboration from the earliest moment possible because I strongly believe that if you put different people with different expertise in a room you'll get a better idea there's documents to do that it works very well in some cases less so in others but I think the only thing you can do is plan well and make sure that the collaboration the collaboration happens and I think in recent years there's much more a given that an architect usually starts earlier on a project because they start meeting with curators they do fit test to see does this list of objects that you would like to have in the space does it actually fit and then of course they start thinking about what type of sections curators are thinking about etc at some point and I don't know what the best moment is the graphic designer needs to be involved within this it also makes no sense for a graphic designer to sit in every meeting all the time because we simply don't have enough staff for that to happen and also don't think that that would be very helpful I don't know if there's anything that you want to add to that but we did do a lot of indeed over the past 5 years we've instilled a lot of processes to make things possible don't reinvent the wheel every single time and indeed because of that we do have time to talk about what our value is and try to instill what our value is but the size of the organization in certain ways it makes certain things really complex but in other ways it makes things possible that are not possible in other place so it's a little bit of both what I found really amazing when I was looking at your slides many of these shows I've seen in person but to see them all together like this I think is especially sort of interesting because then you start to compare what are the key design elements to each of these shows and I think what's really great is that sometimes that is the lighting I'm talking about the size of the content itself sometimes it's the lighting sometimes it's the photography sometimes it's the color story so there are these kind of different design approaches that you take so in a way you say we shouldn't reinvent the wheel every time but it's also an opportunity to think differently to each of the exhibitions so what I mean is by not having to reinvent the pragmatic side of things you can actually focus on these type of things and indeed it's what you say it's like the great thing about working there is the wide variety of content and making decisions as to where do you focus on A or where do you tone things up where do you tone them down it's like permanent galleries and the simple thing of a label strategy really important for somebody's experience and that's maybe not the most exciting piece of design but it does help our visitor find their way experience what the art is and essentially get access to the story that our curators want to tell so yes I think as I understand that there's several GSAP alum that work at at your studio or as part of the team the bigger team what are their roles sort of on a day to day basis I mean they're all architects so they design exhibitions from small to large so you know they are part of our team they work closely with Brian and Anna on the design of these exhibitions and you know closely with our buildings department curators etc so you know they do the work you know essentially I couldn't give this presentation if and that's I think also why the work has a kind of a really eclectic nature to it which I think is actually what the MED is about like the MED is not MOMA the MED is known for its diversity and by working with people that think in a different way etc and you know kind of promoting that idea as well you get these type of results I think so yeah their role is as architect to Versailles show for example so that was designed Versailles you have to contact when we take all those objects we have to create a contact otherwise there is a bunch of really expensive things so that's where you know you have to sit down I can move with all these different ideas but how do you create contact so you know the sort of audio guide audio guide the table is originally in the context of the photographer wanted to send a photographer to a high-rise photo of Versailles and plastered the walls he said no no no let's think about different ways to do this and you know it was actually the architects in our team in the town of Versailles met and found that the fetching we came up with were different like ulcers of made necessarily architecture I mean the idea of authentication was a bit of a sense of wonder that it came to me it's actually it's one of the you know the experiences where I think you know there was a large team of graphic designers there was multiple architects involved just to make it happen and they were all just really kind of really working with one another to make this happen so indeed it starts with an architect that has an idea indeed and there was an idea that was not so great how can we actually make this work and make it great you know but then you know it's interesting I don't know if I have had another exhibition at Alejandro Design but he currently you know this is not like something that he typically does no it just fit the content and that's what I think is really great it's always kind of a lesson in sort of appropriateness I mean like you were saying what's interesting is how do you choose what approach you know and I feel like we're trying to do this more we should do it more but like 90% of the time the role of design in a museum is actually to not be experienced that that's actually like very pleasant like if you go into a museum and you read all the text panels and you understand the objects and reading the labels is something you don't even think about and your average visitor who's not versed in this perspective doesn't actually think about it even a way like achieve something incredible I mean that's great design actually if it serves its purpose and isn't there and that allows moments like the special exhibitions or particular highlight galleries to really be opportunities to play with design that's more you know forward instead of background so that level of appropriateness and what is the approach and do you use lighting you know do you use color do you use what are the tools you have and only in rare occurrences do you do all of it kind of full blown is an interesting part of the part of their job you know for a designer it is a kind of a unique opportunity because you mount 60 shows and then you have the permanent collection you have these special one-off exhibitions so you have opportunities to both be transparent and sort of opaque with intentionality at the same time which is you know not something that all designers do all the time I mean and then I didn't focus on that today but there is you know a way finding system for an extremely complex building that we're working on it's like it has every single facet of the work that I did in other businesses it's just you live with it it's almost like a city again it's the same thing it has advantages and it has disadvantages but no yeah it's a I think what I would wish essentially is that we have a little bit more time to do certain things because in some cases I think you know there's even more opportunity to do something and to really think about how can you create an experience that is maybe a little bit more experimental you know if you do 60 things it doesn't matter if one or two are maybe you know a little bit out there I would enjoy that personally now I always think of the Met as like a city unto itself but it's also an enormous gift to the city of New York so in the interest of time we'll move on to the next speaker but thank you Amil so let me introduce you to our next speakers Florian and Leah who are making their way down right now Florian Muse is the design director at 2x4 he leads a team focused on environmental design, signage projects he oversees a wide range of cultural and commercial projects from corporate campuses brand experience spaces museums to small scale activation projects he leads large scale environmental design projects such as those for the new Apple headquarters in Cupertino aka Apple Park Hyundai Motor Studio in Goyang in Korea Fondazione Prada Tower Sotheby's HQ in New York Glenstown Museum and Lincoln Center he's been a design instructor at NYU and an adjunct professor at GSAP Florian holds a BA in communications design from the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany Leah Dennis is an associate design director at 2x4 and co-director of the network architecture lab an experimental think tank her personal practice investigates the impact of digital technologies and the built environment working often with documentary form she designs environments, objects and media Leah is currently an adjunct professor at GSAP teaching and representation series where she also holds a graduate degree in architecture she was a Muchenheim fellow at the University of Michigan's Taubman College and a fellow in architecture at Academy Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart her work has been published and exhibited at notable institutions including the New Museum MoMA and the Museum of Studio New York thank you so much can we get the presenters notes up no? you can stick into this they can figure it out sorry can we get some help here do you have an HDMI? this is the HDMI do you want the USB remote? I can use this you can use that there's always a suspenseful moment at the beginning of every lecture is it going to work? you can just use that hi everyone, good afternoon so I'm Florian Davis this is Leah Danes I probably say repeat one or two things that Junje just said we work at a design studio called 2x4 here in New York and we're running an environmental design team 2x4 is a fairly interdisciplinary design studio with about 55 people our team has around 8 people which includes designers with all kinds of different backgrounds and a production team that takes care of production in the later phases of each of our projects so most of the projects we do are environmental designs for museums, for corporate campuses exhibitions, brand pavilions retail there's really a wide range from cultural to commercial from large to small and large really means like 2.8 million square feet corporate campus in Silicon Valley and that goes down to an exterior furniture piece that we design that's part of a DORNA signage program that we develop and more and more often we get actually we work on activation spatial activation projects that have a fairly open brief so we have a space or wall that we have to activate and we really come up with ideas about if that's a graphic mural or interactive audio installation or whatever solves the problem so when we talk about environmental design this includes a lot of aspects that are way beyond any physical manifestation in the space so it starts with such aspects as a user experience which means so how does a place feel like does it feel inviting or welcoming or does it feel very elitist or secluded how does a building announces itself to you for example is someone on arrival, someone there that greets you and if so how does it sound like how is the interaction with visitors then it goes into things like naming, how do we call things how do we, what part of a building has to be named and how do people talk about this building then aspects of placemaking which means how does an existing brand for example gets applied to a building or a campus or a site or several campuses as we more and more have in Silicon Valley because it develops so fast and or in other cases how do we develop an identity specifically for a building and then what are the specific elements that make a place recognizable and enjoyable and coherent from a brand perspective then navigation as so how do we move through space buildings are rarely as intuitive or self-explanatory as architects want them to be so the natural way of moving is not often the intended way so that leads then to signage away finding which also creates a sort of identity by do you want a hyper controlled environment that's all about efficiency or do we have more experience where you explore a space or a site on your own and do you want visitors to understand the building holistically or do you just navigate from point to point and then finally things like programmatic signage or experiential design which are often mostly larger digital or analog graphic moments and it's just simple ways to activate a building to be informative or entertaining oftentimes these elements are actually part of way finding as well because it's a much more natural way of guiding people around the building and saves a lot of actual signage that we always try to avoid so then there's a lot of different design disciplines that inform our work and we while 2x4 is actually a pretty diverse studio in terms of design disciplines we always say that the environmental design team is actually a mini version of the studio because we work with all these with people of all these backgrounds together so currently we have a studio for architects and graphic designs and we have a furniture designer and interior architect exhibition designer so all of these disciplines have to be merged together and that's kind of the exciting part of the work as well so when Junger invited us to talk about spatial, about branded experience we thought this aspect of disciplinary work is actually the most interesting and we thought we'd talk a little bit about that especially because our backgrounds are so while Lea is a trained architect actually graduated from GSAP in regular teaching here and does her research work on the side I'm a trained graphic designer I've worked in Germany and Holland before and then worked actually for years in the branding team at 2x4 before switching to the spatial practice so we thought it might actually be interesting to look at a few projects that we did before we started collaborating and also how that informs our work today because it's actually these projects that are sometimes 10 years ago are actually fairly relevant or they kind of relate a lot to our way of working today in our daily practice so I'll start with a magazine project so this was a design I made for a biannual magazine that was a magazine for sexual science fiction short stories published by some publishers in Amsterdam at the time edited by Pedro Gardaño also was a curator at the MoMA so for this project I created an identity for the magazine and then also an identity for each single issue so the magazine identity you create a logo lockup you choose a kind of sci-fi-ish 70s font for the topography there's a fixed layout which is the logo plus the title of the issue plus the contributors and there's always an image which is kind of a collage with utopian or dystopian image with a kind of sometimes dark or sci-fi-ish atmosphere so those are the framework to create the overall identity and then for each issue I create a typographic theme if you want which is then played out in the layout was the general structure of a title page of each story there were about 20 stories per magazine that kind of graphic principle was played out across so we create a bit of diversity by inverting the colors and then for the second issue we choose another color so the color scheme is always black plus one color and we change the typographic theme it's kind of this halo effect in this case so we go through the different title pages for the third one again we choose a new color have a bit of a cut up patterny a graphic system and play it out so like a lot of magazine or book designs this is a little bit like a multilayer branding exercise in a way because you need to define the consistent elements to create continuity but then also the kind of dynamic and distinctive elements for each issue so it doesn't get boring over time. Another project so this is another project I did with a designer called Alphonse Hoekas a Dutch designer from Holland we did that for the Dutch government that was a research project a research on the development that the Dutch government did and it's actually a prime example why designing in Holland is so fantastic because usually a research report like that we put into a PowerPoint presentation and sent around and the Dutch government actually spent a lot of money on producing these beautiful books so this was about how to better utilize the land around the train stations within North Holland for housing and other urban functions and develop a lot of data that we got so very generic raw material that we had to kind of curate and add it so it's a pretty dry topic on the one hand but the problem was also that this was a kind of call for action for stakeholders for the mayors of 88 cities in the north of Holland so for us the challenge was not only how do we organize this enormous amount of research information but also how do we tell a story how do we create a theme and make this interesting so our conclusion was first of all this needs to be a campaign and the campaign needs to have an identity so as a first step we created a name this is Mark Platt it's actually a word play in Dutch it means create space but at the same time it means get out of my way which works very well in that case we added the exclamation point and then we take that name and turn it into a brand make it flexible and scalable so it's applicable to other places and then also look at the language saying like create space in north Holland or north Holland create space so you're able to communicate both ways to foster dialogue and so you can phrase it as a call to action or in a more passive way as pure information so all of that then manifests in a 400 page book which is kind of designed a little bit like an atlas we create a graphic language that creates a bit of sense of urgency kind of referencing political activist graphic language in a way so very bold, loud large text simple language we create a ten rule manifesto and then we started to develop different map styles so different visual styles for different levels of information so sometimes more diagrammatic or more referential like a subway map here then there's a the bulk of the book was like a detail page for each city with a kind of in depth data and adding different styles for diagrams and infographics to show like the depth of detail of information but still be very bold and simple and then we create these collages to represent eight different types of cities from large to small and then all of this gets turns into an event and a conference where stakeholders were invited and all of this research was presented and with bags and banners and all this kind of stuff so in my personal practice and as the co-director of the network architecture lab a lot of the projects that I worked on were this kind of large collaborative research projects that investigated how technology impacts architecture in the city and as these large projects they involved many designers architects, writers and the outcome of this often was thinking about new ways of collaborating and also coming up with novel ways of representing complex information and ideas so the two projects I'll show you embody this idea the first one is the new city reader which was a project that the net lab proposed with Joseph Grima to an exhibition that was at the new museum in 2009 so this project was again many different designers the graphic designer for this project was Neil Donnelly and essentially the format of the paper was based on a Chinese practice of producing newspapers such that they could be read in public space, posted on walls so in a way more environmental you're supposed to read them collectively, collaboratively they're free obviously they're posted on the wall and that the design of those things is adjusted in such a way where you could read it at different distances or next to somebody so that was a kind of basic framework for this and the way that we produced this project was that the new museum was doing an exhibition called The Last Newspaper in 2009 it was a reader on the time that e-readers and online subscriptions were becoming more of a common practice for publications and press and the conversations around the death of print media were fairly prominent and so they had this exhibition that sought to recontextualize the newspaper not necessarily as a physical medium but thinking about the power and possibility of the press and we partnered with them there was a couple other organizations that did this as well where we produced the newspaper in the gallery over the course of around six months maybe a little more than six months so we essentially created a kind of editorial studio and each about three to four weeks we would issue one section of the paper so that by the end of the exhibition we had a single newspaper and each of those issues was kind of like guest edited by a different architect or urbanist so I just want to walk you through some of the various issues the first issue the netlab edited and the idea was that because we could design these things so they could be viewed in public space we actually did that this one is at the new museum we have we posted them every week on the storefront for our architecture we were posted here at GSAP but then they were also at various bookstores in different places throughout the city the first issue was one that chronicled the 1977 blackout of New York City because it played a huge role in thinking about network infrastructure and the way in which the New York Times was produced that night so that it could go out to print the next morning it was a way for people to kind of think about the newspaper but also how it relates back to this larger infrastructural conditions of the city and it was also kind of interesting aside that because of the way they had to produce this newspaper outside of the city it kind of benchmarked a new way of producing the newspaper using offset lithography which they weren't doing before and so this particular issue was one where the entire the entire newspaper was this kind of large scale infographic using the kind of techniques that you guys are familiar with in studio architectural accelerometrics, information that kind of flows from one kind of image to another but again, you know, each of these images are fairly large, they're printed on newsprint broadsheets so that they they could be read but holding them but then they're also kind of a real board in the city one thing to one thing is that each one of these issues had a different configuration so you can see the front page of the newspaper there's always a diagram that indicates how they're supposed to be like the broadsheets are reconfigured if you're to put them up in public space so this was the local issue which was more which was smaller, there's only four broadsheets and the content was more traditional what you would see in a newspaper is different types of information, diagrams and photographs the business issue was one that was just a string of you just were lining them up one on one but what's interesting is that some of these pages were these really large scale photographs and this was a project that I had done that like took photographs of the facades of all the financial institutions major key players in the 2008 financial crisis the science issue was one kind of interesting where they all the text was sort of moved to the outside and then the four sheets in the center were more like a singular artistic project CLAB guess edited this issue, the weather issue where the entire the the entire issue was more or less a kind of large scale infographic and then in the smaller text at the bottom which was really meant to be right up close or like holding it was they had asked different architects and designers to describe the kind of by the conditions of their city and here are just a selection of other configurations for how they were meant to be posted up in public space and then building Megalopolis was another project that I did here at GSAP and the NETLAB it was a larger project that was called Extreme Cities that involved an urban planner involved CLAB this was when Mark Wigley was dean and the one part of that Extreme Cities project was this one called Building Megalopolis which I did with Kasey Sornelis as the NETLAB and essentially it was a research studio that we had here at school and then we moved this like four week workshop that was took place at the time with Studio X which incidentally the Studio X space is now one part of the two by four office but so this project was one where we researched in 1960 John Gottman presented this the idea of the Megalopolis as a swap between Boston and Washington DC and so we were kind of we researched a bunch of projects that were took place between 1960 and at the time this was 2013 that embodied the kind of writing that he had talked about during in that book and we produced this kind of I guess you would say interactive timeline and that it was a lot of the research was done in studio with the students but then when we did this workshop we we had it was open to the public so you could come in and add new projects if you wanted there was I'll show images of it later but there was an interactive like online timeline as well where you could contribute more information but essentially this timeline was meant to just represent this like large massive amount of research that was done for this project and here's where you could add a project by writing it or you could print one out here's so the idea there were these you can kind of see these little graphic icons and so each of the projects were described according to four or five qualities of the city and things like trans generational, migration complexity and each of those qualities were represented by one of these icons and so you can see some of these icons were just one thing trans-generational or some of them were multiple things and so there you can see them in the corners of these images and then here's an image of the timeline where you could add more content if you wanted to so I just wanted to show these projects because in a way like Florian was mentioning those projects were like these I guess I first mentioned that the extreme cities project was also designed by Neil Donnelly but again there was a large amount of that work was done by so many different people and with a lot of different backgrounds and that's not dissimilar to the way that we work at 2x4 and that while those are research projects and the stuff that we do at 2x4 is you know it's like we make it and it goes into physical space there's still that sensibility and there's also like a really strong kind of research component to every project so the the studio is very interdisciplinary it's very collaborative we have a culture that's like not dissimilar to the way that you might be familiar working in the studio we hand it out constantly it gets very messy we can see this is probably like three or four different projects that are just pinned up currently and that a lot of the projects on our team the environments team like Florian was mentioning there's quite a range on one scale you have like these cultural projects where we work with museums educational institutions and the other side you have things that are more commercial that are more like brand spaces or office spaces large office spaces in Silicon Valley and then on the other spectrum we have because of this very wide range of clients we also have to do things that are highly systematic and also really expressive and so we thought it was a nice exercise to see if we could actually take some of our clients and distribute them across the spectrum and the interesting thing about this is that not only do we have these four axes we also have scale so like Florian was mentioning sometimes we are doing the reason we need systematic is because we have to apply a kind of system across two million square feet of space but we also have projects where we're designing an open-ended idea about how to activate a single wall but then within the projects we realized that there's sort of challenges that kind of rise to the forefront with each one and so we thought each of the projects are kind of embody all six of these things but to some degree some are more less than others so the idea here is that branding would be the idea of applying a brand to space by really following the existing brand that that company has and like using the system that they've already developed to find a way to apply that to physical space so the interesting thing about that exercise is that most brands don't necessarily have a guideline for how to take something that they're actually developing for print or for online and then to find a way to extend that brand to physical space. Navigation is one where we just something that is maybe fairly obvious but we have to take these really in many cases really complex architectural projects and find a way to make clear to the user how to navigate them how to move through those spaces so in those cases we really are we're playing the role of the user and finding a way to you know make sense of of how to move through a building and then place making is sort of sort of similar in that like we have to find a way to allow people to know where they are, where they can be identity is different from branding in that identity is finding a essentially producing a brand for physical space and information is providing this like complex amount of information mostly for things like exhibitions so that users and we talked a lot about this users can absorb that information without it being something that feels laborious and then transformation a lot of times we do things that are finding ways to take an architectural wall or architectural space and truly transform it to something different and so along those whatever the six qualities we'll describe a few different projects so Glenstone is museum extension project in Maryland close to DC that was done by Tom Pfeiffer architect and PWP landscape architect Glenstone is a private institution with a pretty impressive collection of post-war art and this project was there was an existing museum building surrounded by a sculpture park and this was the addition of a second building complex that consists of 10 pavilions that were embedded in their rolling landscape and the whole experience was designed to really slow visitors down and that aspect of embedding the building into nature or the nature into the building whichever you want to see it was very important also there was an incredible attention to detail and again the goal was is to create a very undistracted way to experience art almost like a meditative experience so to and for behind the brand identity for the museum with a logo mark and typographic layout system with a very neutral and minimalist look and then we take that and start to translate that into materials keep that very subtle and minimal character but then also add this kind of rougher and more natural feel to connect this the idea of the architectural concept and then the brand identity so then we go at the arrival point we create a very strong branded moment and based on the brand identity we develop a typographic system that we then use for all kinds of signage, wavefinding, communication and so we go and created these very thin steel blades that feel very light and elegant I have a very subtle and sophisticated feel to it and then place them along throughout the site then we use the same graphic language and materiality and create location maps and art labels art labels in kind of embedding them in existing conditions in existing environments and in the interior using the same material and have it to sign things in a really subtle way so that it really blends in so the challenge with this project is really to take a branding that we developed and kind of translate it one-to-one into a special environment and create a very seamless high touch experience so for navigation we'll look at the Apple Park project so that's a project we've been working on for four and a half years now I think and still going although the building is occupied now with so this was this for the signage and wayfinding for the new Apple Hard Quarter in Cupertino which is designed by Foster and partners this building has like four levels above ground and about a one mile radius and fits 13,000 employees but the whole campus includes a park, a theater, a fitness center there's like two levels of underground parking there's an external parking structure for another six and a half thousand cars there's a visitor center across the street and a few adjacent office buildings it's really a massive scale we're working on so while for the previous project the Glenstone project we developed a brand identity ourselves in this case we're working obviously with an existing and very strong brand identity and in this case the challenge is rather than interpreting the brand to use it to create a very robust system that is both consistent but also flexible enough to serve all the needs for a campus that's obviously going to change and develop over time so in the first phase of the project we went into we started with an analysis a site analysis in this case it's sites analysis project since Apple owns most of Cupertino so we studied the relationship between the new campus and the existing campus and other campuses that are in close proximity so what is the hierarchy between the campus of this Apple universe and then looking at the actual campus what are the buildings that are considered part of the campus because the fence around the campus didn't necessarily include all the buildings so the question of what is in or outside the campus becomes a difficult question there already then we went into general naming strategy from thinking about which elements we want to name on the scale of more human and intuitive naming and precise then thoughts about providing iconic campus name address and building name so for the campus name we had different suggestions and eventually the suggested name that we had became the official name that's what the campus is called today Apple Park and we wanted to create an official or a more iconic address we suggested to rename the road north Tentar Avenue into one Apple Park as well this is the official campus address and so you start to create this kind of seamless experience of Apple Park and this is where your Google pin drops or in this case Apple Park pin to be super consistent then we were looking at the question of the building nickname because we know from experience if you don't give a nickname to the building someone else will do it for you and you might not be happy with that so we went in an exercise of what potential nicknames were and we were beginning on very concerned about calling at Spaceship which is a problem when you have the Spaceship memes all over the internet already so we came up with this calling it the ring or the infinite ring infinite loop, infinite ring there was this relation I think in the end so in the end it became the ring building and then looking at what other things need to be named on the campus finding the entrances naming the entrances and the addresses for that naming the other buildings and landscape elements and then this was an earlier proposal to rename the street then we go inside the building and look at that building is actually vertically organized so that has an impact as well on how we name things or navigate through the building we figured it's actually incredible difficult to organize a circular building to deal with the relentlessness of moving around so we created that numeric dial and then started to integrate the nine entrances and how that relates to the different departments and how that relates to the colloquial way of referring to the areas so that the employees can also create neighborhoods or refer to the neighborhoods where they work in like I work in the 30s or I work in the 40s so we always have this kind of both aspects they're very accurate and the kind of human aspect as well and all of that goes down to the pods and the offices and then eventually down to the single desk so that maintenance people are actually able to refer to a single desk but even here like how do we how do we talk about these things the same exercise we do for parking the parking structures are organized in different ways so we go and we try to integrate that into the same system and down to the numbering of each parking spot look at how information is provided along the campus so that you get more high level information upon arrival and the closer you move to your destination the more granular the information gets then we look at develop graphic language and go into this semiotic exercise of what how we use symbols and colors and all these graphic elements and this is an example of studies for these huge totems that show you the availability for parking spots and there's like these multiple different ways of how to visualize that using a lot of different brands like visual references obviously and and all of that then ends in just a small selection obviously and results in a lot of large visible public facing signs that are then well documented on social media a lot of signs that are more visible in the area of the building since it's for people that are there every day and just to show this really plays out in a large variety of different conditions scales materials colors so the system has to be really robust and then we took all of that project book to just document all the work of that time so this project is one a lot of the projects that we do we collaborate with other architecture firms so like Laurie mentioned in the previous two projects was Foster and Partners and Thomas Pfeiffer but this is one where we there's actually an architecture team within 2x4 as well and pretty much this entire brand pavilion for the Winter Olympics for Samsung last year was this huge collaborative effort with every team at 2x4 involving interactive digital teams, the architecture team, our team, strategy essentially what it was was a pavilion that showcased a lot of the VR capabilities that Samsung has for Samsung Galaxy so it was kind of the idea for this was that it was supposed to be playful, that it has all of these games that you can go and experience in these VR environments but then it also has a lot of product so we have both these two conflicting kind of tones of voice the idea of like this kind of existing brand of the Samsung Galaxy product display but then also this idea that it's like this playful playground and they also have we're working a lot with the kind of internet of things so there was also this tone of voice that was more domestic as well and so one thing that we developed in this project was the spatial design for all of these things but then we realized these are renderings without any of the graphics in them that in order for this idea of like a playful active space to really be communicated that the graphics really played a huge role in producing that sense of place so here is a rendering without any of that information as soon as you start to bring in things there are more typical types of signage like area IDs or desk IDs we had the floor graphics system ways of communicating to people where they should be and where they can go that allowed the space to kind of take on more of a kind of athletic or playful vibe and the other thing about this project is that obviously Samsung has an existing brand and so it's all not nearly as strong as Apple's but people are familiar with it so the type of graphic system, the color system all of that is established and so we have to work within that brand to produce something that they've never done before and it has this kind of like exuberance that they're not quite as familiar with so this project had this like I mentioned before pretty minimal in terms of signage but the overall layout of the building was more or less a completely open floor plate and so there were no walls or anything for us to really apply signage to so we had to do this we had to navigate using the floor and then also do these kind of lit large typography beacons so you can see where you should go so in the distance you can kind of see the cafe is back there these stripes on the floor there's a single line that kind of draws you through the five main programs of the site like I mentioned most of the navigation is really that you should be able to see where you're going as you're moving and most of the signage was not done using this kind of typographic wayfinding that you see on the right here and that we had this like this this floor, this line that kind of passed through every program and this is an exhibition that two by four worked with Samsung in designing that shows the history of the Samsung Galaxy brand and that this floor graphic as you pass through different spaces this is the area that's more traditional product display just identified it so here this space was called Connect there was an auditorium where they did public programming and this was called Discover so as the line passed through it kind of identifies that you landed there and the upper floor there was this this during the time was very right now there's nobody in these images but this kind of really like rich play around of all these different VR experiences and this line kind of passed through these like lit beacons and one of the problems or one of the constraints of this project was that although it was quite large for temporary pavilion it was also very dense in terms of the amount of program that was there and a lot of these things required the significant queuing line so we had to find a way to communicate to people like where they can go to a queue like where they should line up and when the space was really full it was actually really useful in terms of letting people know like when they can walk by this crowded assembly people in front of these VR experiences and here it is that exhibition that was called Unbox that passed through this floor plate and you see it on your way out as well so the when Florian was talking about the Glenstone project and the Apple project in terms of branding like we're mentioning those two projects have a really distinct brand and the way that the environmental design was implemented was to kind of literally translated into the space so a project like the New York Public Library we worked with ARO who was doing the interior design for this, this is the library that's near MoMA in midtown and there is the public libraries in New York City all have a single brand so this image is kind of an interesting way for us to juxtapose this way of working where we didn't necessarily want to use the existing New York Public Library brand within the space because it didn't feel appropriate to the architecture and potentially the site and its location in midtown but we still wanted it to be used as a way to identify where you were so the exterior signage that the red sign there was the 53rd Street Library that is the New York Public Library's existing brand and then when you move into this space what we did was use a different typographic system to kind of brand the architecture and so this is very highly site specific it's this kind of bold kind of urban feeling typographic typographic system that relates not only to the architecture but to the materials of the architecture which are mostly metal and concrete and wood but also just to the kind of urban nature of this midtown site when you move into the space this what interesting aside is that this large wall within the auditorium although it's inside it's considered exterior signage because of its location and how big it is so again we use the existing New York Public Library brand here and this was a kind of in this case while the typography is fairly like thin and light it worked well because the sign was so big and then when you move into this space we had this kind of chunky bold dimensional text and so this is an example of floor directory where the dimensional text indicates what floor you're on and then the white screen printing on the concrete indicates the floors above or below here is how it plays out within the library space identifying different genres area IDs that communicate my programmatic spaces within the building and then also that idea of like this urban typographic system get played out as a kind of environmental graphic on the exterior of the children's reading room so another example for creating distinct identity for a building or for a site is the Hyundai Motor Studios again this brand this brand identity was developed by 2x4 and the Hyundai Motor Studios is kind of a series of brand identity spaces and Hyundai that are all over the world so these are just three examples in Seoul, Beijing and Moscow and you can see not only the architectural conditions are fairly different so it could be a ground up building or integrated into an existing building but also each of them has kind of a different theme so for example while the Seoul one is fairly product or production focused the Beijing one is all about sustainability and the future of transportation so we were working on the Motor Studio Goyang which Goyang is a suburb of Seoul is about 45 minutes outside of the city and the funny thing was a little bit that this building was supposed to be a car dealership and then they had to kind of retrofit kind of a Motor Studio in there so that made the whole navigation issue also a bit tricky but in the end for this Motor Studio they had a large car showroom an exhibition on car manufacturing a few cafes and restaurants and a tower for offices so the character of it is fairly bold and very bold and geometric design that's also very present in the interior so the graphic identity and it kind of developed we took the type phase we kept the type phase but otherwise we created all kinds of signage and graphic elements working just very integrated with material or more towards the character of the building so to complement the boldness of the building we created that large idea on the plaza in the front which is kind of rocket launcher as they started to call it and then we went into a kind of material or graphic slash material strategy so we developed this perforated pattern with a gradient which creates kind of this idea of motion and speed and then also it allows us to actually integrate this into materials so we can easily cut that out of metal and there were a lot of metal flattened walls and besides that it also allows us to work in a very large scale because as you saw the lobby is really large to apply really large graphics making them look too heavy and so we go and apply this gradient to all different in all different scales and all different signs and materials the side IDs and we also try to be not to again not try to be this balance of being recognizable and still have the feeling of you still you're still in the same place you still recognize the identity but not be too rigid with it you know the elevator IDs that and then down to the exhibition graphics through the car exhibition so there was a navigation system that were guiding you from point to point hence the numbers and then every larger space had this kind of gradient perforated topography so we could use it on glass and then combine it with with smaller topography and icons the room signs were perforated as well there was a museum shop and as for information we have a exhibition that we designed for together with the architecture team at 2F for with that very entertaining name which was an exhibition that was held last year it was it's about art in fascist Italy between 1983 and 1943 as a fairly long time span it was a huge exhibition that took over the whole space in Milan over 600 works and over 800 supporting documents was a huge amount of content that we were working with and in that case our job was to facilitate to really provide the information structure information so we have this kind of panel system at the entrance of the galleries and the kind of booklets and flyers in different languages then we did the art labeling the art label system which had to be very flexible and then very also consistent with this kind of burlap material that was used you can see there's the year we created a timeline that since the exhibition was spanning over a lot of different rooms we had to create elements to connect the whole exhibition so we created this timeline to always remind you that this is in chronological order and where you are within the sequence and then yes not only for the artworks but also the supporting documents we had to create this label system and then down to these kind of wall wallpapers so occasionally we we work on these projects or within each project there might be a condition where we're asked to do something that's less pragmatic let's say it's less about signage and wayfinding or communicating information but more about transforming an existing space and so this is a project that is currently under production we're working with an architect based in LA who is transforming the existing Los Angeles I guess maybe it's the first Los Angeles Times printing press into kind of like large scale office space and so these are photographs of the historical project it's this huge huge site these large concrete walls because it was a factory and the architects are taking that existing site and they're kind of building in office spaces by breaking into those walls bringing in light and air using this kind of this kind of glass storefront system but they still had this issue that they have these enormous scale concrete walls and they were they couldn't just take down every wall and put it in a glass of sod not only would that not do service to this like really beautiful existing site but it also just like wasn't feasible for them and so they came to us and asked to develop a series of murals and so we the interesting thing about this project is that we've done in the studio a number of murals but they wanted us to do upwards like I think there's 11 murals on site and each one of them is like a significant amount of production work we have to find artists to do these things for us and so we instead of doing an individual like a different mural for each site came up with a system that would then be kind of in a way systematically applied to different parts of the of the site so you can see the kind of scale of these murals are quite large some of them are smaller but none of them are that small and the idea here was to take the the idea of a kind of California landscapes and abstract them in such a way where you were kind of using the idea of ink and press and giving texture to those landscapes on the one hand when you're up close you might see them as just this beautiful color palette from farther away you might actually start to notice that it's a mountain or a sky so that was a big thing with this project that we were thinking about how to view it up close from afar and then and then how to really like add a kind of warmth to this like very gray and concrete space and so this system there were a couple different things that there's a series of mountains and the way that these were developed is that they have this paint stroke that we're working with an artist in California to think through how to produce that obviously here the paint stroke is in it like a much larger scale than a paint brush but then we also do this thing where we like produce these knockouts within the within the mural and the coloring so that the concrete shows through because we want to celebrate the existing materiality of the site it is quite beautiful even though it can be overbearing at times and so we have these moments where you're layering the concrete and the concrete actually kind of looks like the mountain here and then in some cases we're actually laying wayfinding graphics as well in this case with arrows and this is another mountain landscape this address marks the entrance of the site and one end so again just taking that idea of layering so you can see that not only is the artwork layered and that we have these kind of degrees of opacity and we're showing the existing material of the building in different ways so this one isn't using that cut out it's actually just that the artwork is only aligned to the bottom but we also we wanted to really cross over and layer in front of the architecture in different ways as well so here like we cross over the windows but we also kind of turn the corner a bit just a little bit so that when you're walking you might see a little bit of this trace of red and when you turn the corner you see this large mural again this one turns a corner and it crosses over an entrance into a tenant entry this one kind of draws you into the main atrium of the project where you kind of can orient yourself where the welcoming desk is and then this one is this kind of like trump loyal where it's like a little bit a little bit like a highway with the sky again we're abstracting these like different landscapes so the other ones are mountains and the next set are more of these kinds of like gradients of colors that represent sky or water or sunlight so these are murals that we're doing on the bottom of these patios that represent the sky the sun and like a watery texture this is a this is a beach very abstracted this one is there's a little bit we try to do these little hints so that this is an interior space most of them are on the exterior so we have on the exterior just a little like hint of the blue inside so that when you enter that space you can see it's a kind of nice like point of discovery and then we also did the environmental graphics for the space and so in this case the wayfinding system huge large scale directionals and area IDs and again that idea of layering happens in different forms so you can see with the large arrows for directing people into this space we have them always like turning the corner there's always a base element so there's a white arrow and then we layer the type of graphic system on top of that you can see we're doing that here with the floor directory that the number of the floor is the base and then we're indicating what's happening on the floor as we layer on top of it same thing with large area IDs that they're kind of crossover the architecture in different ways and we kind of kept the system fairly loose and then even within the map artwork that this idea of like layering different elements is extended to the iconography indicating where entrances are and again using the materiality of the concrete to produce the artwork just one more example where our work has more transformative effect and where we also work more expressive rather than systematic is the Prada wallpaper which is this wallpaper and it's a 220 feet long wallpaper in the Prada flagship store on Broadway in Prince this we do a design twice a year for that for like doing that for 20 years now I think and by the time when OM-A was designing the store this wall was actually intended to be so this wallpaper was part of the design as an architectural feature and also the fact that it's changing all the time was part of the initial concept but in several ways that it's interesting because all the this is just one example where we used this kind of collage with the brutalist architecture the collage of brutalist architecture but actually all of these designs always have this kind of play with depth so that the Z dimension to play with the Z dimension and play with the fact that it's a block long wall but it's actually a fairly narrow store and so this kind of tension is very interesting on the other hand it also has this different from other projects like Glenstone or Apple or Samsung it's really when you think of it in terms of branding it's expressing a brand in a much more abstract way that you can actually hardly rationalize it because each of these designs has to feel right rather than you can actually put it into actual parameters and compared to the brand guidelines it's a hard way to work out but also obviously very exciting and rewarding one so that same design then got at the store at Dover street market which is a weird space itself has a weird asymmetric geometry so that it worked actually well with all these perspective lines and work in contrary to the geometry of the actual space thank you thank you Florian and Leah I'll take questions if you have any questions can you talk a little bit about the material exploration or aspect of the graphics you do versus two dimensional more straight forward it varies depending on the project but in general we strive to do something that is very integrated so the wallpaper project obviously is one where it's just like it's a very mundane architectural material the wallpaper is hardly maybe you wouldn't consider architectural but for the most part because we work with a lot of architects at the beginning of their phase of design not only do we have this collaborative way of working within the studio we also work with these architects in a really collaborative way as well so generally what happens is that we try to get brought in around the time that they're finished with the schematic design and so once at that point the goal is to be able to get our work that's highly integrated and takes on the material of the building maybe they might change certain materials for us it can get into their construction set but then in terms of I don't know if this is answering your question we do just try to experiment with materials in different ways in different forms we're pretty we always try to have a kind of like long prototyping phase so we can test we have ideas about what we want to do if it's mirrored or it's transparent but we always have to test to see if it's working but in general I think it just ranges within a project and also from project to project whether something is like applied and really typographic or something is really like physical and formal certain projects that maybe it also depends on the brand of the space so in certain projects when we're working in now that's a museum project instead of doing something that's highly typographic that concept is actually to use super informal materials in ways that feel very flexible and so that entire project had less to do with finding a nice typeface and applying it at different scales it was more about finding the right material that might respond to the existing architecture in different ways I had a question which was after seeing Emile's talk which was so it was about this kind of really enormous scale I thought wow this is the one that's about scale but you guys also deal with enormous scale the Apple Park example is kind of astounding and what was really fascinating for me is it's not just you guys talked about this very very well but it's not just about picking a typeface or defining the corner radius of a sign or finding the perfect material and the perfect etching method it's actually you think about what is this place called what do people refer to this as and then having different ways of fragmenting the space and applying nomenclature to it you actually in some ways in some sort of way you define how people experience that space the visual experience which I thought was really interesting and so you deal with this scale but what was also really nice I think was to see the work that you showed at the beginning of the presentation which was like a book kind of a reader series so when you go from really specific and small scale projects to things like the Apple Park or Hyundai Motors are there certain principles that you're always sort of you know thinking about or do you sort of shift gears dramatically from sort of one kind of project to another yeah I mean in a way we shift gears in a lot of ways that's why we made this categorization a way there's different emphasis on on different project and the most the most obvious one was for us this systematic versus expressive one obviously but I think the book project in the beginning it was more looking back at these it's kind of surprising how similar the approach is so you get the client ask you to design a book and that turns into like a whole larger thing and you think about an identity and you think about what is that thing actually supposed to do so you turn it into a campaign you develop a logo you think about how does it speak to you and you build all these things around and it's the same way and if you do an Apple I mean the same thing but decisions are the glance on this may be better examples often times decisions or clients can take things for granted there's an entrance we have to put a sign there but you question that same as in graphic design do you actually need a logo do you actually need a sign there and how does it speak to you it doesn't make it feel much too formal and don't you want something more intimate and all these questions and then you start to think through the whole experience that do you need any information on the entrance no because it turns out you got all of that beforehand because they send you an email and you basically have everything so you can keep you can leave that out and then we were thinking about how do they greet you in the arrival hall and do they have a uniform and do they give you little flyers do they talk to you we thought about the language how do they greet you is that formal or informal and the docents in the galleries they're now wearing new balance sneakers because to give it more of an informal feel like all of these little elements tie into that and that's basically yeah that's user experience right thinking like going back to the original question and I was thinking about the question what do you do in terms of if you're able to systematize part of your process and to some degree I think it's very similar for us and that we have this desire for certain things to become systematized because they're so complex but at the end of the day it does feel a little bit like every project we do start anew we kind of have to reinvent the wheel every time even though there are a lot of times we're working on different types if it's like signage systems or wayfinding parameters are maybe similar but it is a little bit like reinventing the wheel and maybe people actually come to us to do that we really make a huge effort to kind of codify the process a little bit as Emil was saying but there's always something every time there's something new we have to figure out a different challenge every project is unique in that something always goes wrong but in the way that it goes wrong is different every time ok I think that's a pretty good note to end on thank you so much guys