this is not a success story per se and
it's also not a cautionary tale it might
be actually a little bit of both of
those things but I mean really what this
is is that I want to give a snapshot of
my organization whitney museum of
american art at a moment of pretty major
transformation for the institution we're
building a new building downtown i'll
touch on that a bit in that presentation
and importantly the different ways that
design the design department has tried
to initiate and sustain an internal
conversation about identity with the
organization so i'm going to talk a bit
about what we've been doing for the past
few years i'm going to spotlight a
couple of different types of
conversations that we had about major
projects one very consensus-driven
conversation and another that happened
sort of solely through design and
finally a conversation that we're
engaged in at the moment which andy may
be surprised to hear is really a kind of
top-down rebrand of the museum
partnering with an outside firm so it
kind of gets at this this issue from
several different angles in house as
most of you realize is a totally
different ball of wax it presents
totally different challenges and i think
what i would like to to sort of point
the way towards is that it also presents
different opportunities and that's what
i'm going to talk about today this photo
was my desktop image for quite a while
this is going to be the end of the
preamble it's a photo from the set of
The Muppet movie I don't know who I
can't figure out what the guy who took
these pictures does I think he's like a
set designer or a lighting designer or
something anyway that's a whole set of
these if you google Muppet movie flickr
they're beautiful but I like this image
because you can see what like a glorious
shambles it is you know this is a
they're projecting a rainbow on to a
scrim you can see that the top of the
scrim the top right corner of the screen
there's this like broken rainbow pile of
junk like art just outside of the frame
and this was sort of like a motivational
image for me for a while because it just
sort of reminded me that sometimes a
thing an image that's in the making can
have its own kind of spectacular beauty
the movie itself isn't totally
spectacular
but a different depending entirely so
just to restate the obvious I'm the
design director of the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York City this is us
our current home is this landmark
building designed by marcel breuer in
1966 as i mentioned before we are in the
midst of a capital campaign to move the
down to the Meatpacking District in in
Manhattan biggest move and biggest
investment of time and treasure that the
museum has ever undertaken the building
is for 1966 that the museum itself is
much older than that it was founded in
nineteen twenty nine by Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitley who's the little lady
in the middle she was a sculptor ended
heiress and an art aficionado and since
its founding it has sought to be the
defining museum of contemporary American
art which is kind of an interesting
mission basically what happens is the
Whitney takes risks on emerging artists
it puts its credibility behind them at
crucial moments in their careers it
collects their artwork often before it's
a sure bet and then it displays it
within the context of other art that has
been acquired in this way and I think
that that is really an interesting sort
of core set of values because it
produces this like constantly evolving
contextualization of old and new working
in this environment if there is a very
like a bad day or I'm feeling
unmotivated I can just go over to the
museum and kind of remember why I'm
doing what I'm doing so the design
department is consists of three
full-time staff there's me I'm the
design director we have a senior
designer named Francesca grassy and a
graphic designer named Meg Forsythe and
a rotating cast of interns these are the
people meaning them who do like all of
the work and most of what you'll see
here is designed by that team they
deserve like the lion's share of the
credit for anything that we've
accomplished really i joined the whitney
in 2008 to start the design department
at the invitation of the marketing
director who his name is jeff levine and
he had just joined the whitney himself
after ten years building the brand at
bam which some of you may be familiar
with it's the brooklyn academy of music
it's a major performing arts
organization in Brooklyn
it's a very design driven organization
their identity was developed by Michael
Bay root of pentagram and Jeff worked
with Michael over many years to develop
what is at least locally known as a as
an iconic brand so when Jeff first
joined the Whitney his sort of first
order of business was to establish a
design department because as the chief
marketing communications officer he kind
of couldn't get anything done without
design but I wasn't hired by the
director I was hired into marketing and
that I think you know I think that
depending on for what your reporting
structure is or whatever within your
institution it can um it can really
change your strategies so prior to my
arrival design certainly happened at the
Whitney of you know still needed labels
and signs and advertising but the
designed function was housed within the
publications department so this is a
book while this makes a certain kind of
sense for materials that are related
directly to an exhibition like for
example wall graphics or exhibition
brochures it meant that the more
institutional materials like website
signage etc wasn't anybody's main focus
those items all followed the Whitney
visual identity that had been developed
in 1999 i believe by abbott miller of
pentagram he created the word mark at a
set of colors a set of typefaces and
some templates shown here however for
projects that fell outside of the
template system different departments
were sort of left to hire their own
designers which meant that all of the
most public facing materials so ads
website etc etc were out sourced by
individual people who were not talking
to one another and you know with nobody
over trying to oversee the coherence of
that body of work things were starting
to look very scattershot even for the
templated materials 10 years is a long
time in color and type face terms so
things were starting to look old now
just to give you an idea of what else
was going on at the time the new museum
had just moved into their new building
and their identity looked super fresh
this is designed by Wolff Olins and if
you were to ask people with Whitney you
know this is sort of brand terror
tori that they would feel or we would
feel as is ours too so this was a kind
of a just a new thing that that the
museum had to contend with and also as I
mentioned we're planning our own
expansion we broke ground in May on a
new building this very very realistic
looking picture is a rendering not the
actual building it will be at the foot
of a high line in the Meatpacking
District it's designed by Renzo Piano in
collaboration with Cooper Robertson and
this has been top of mind for the
museum's leadership for since before I
arrived so with the new building on the
horizon you know just a few years away
it was really time for design to become
a specific area of responsibility within
the museum and not just kind of shared
between departments so I arrived and we
started a process of subtraction we took
away everything that didn't seem
relevant the colors the typeface the
templates everything but the logo which
which by this time we felt had
accumulated a lot of brand equity and we
started from scratch we designed every
project almost as though we had like
blinders on we just address the needs of
that specific piece with its main
stakeholders like they were their own
individual client without any other
institutional concerns not really
worrying about whether one thing looked
like another thing type was totally up
for grabs and we started with complete
austerity regarding color everything was
black and white except for color that
came from art and basically I like to
think of this as like a year-long
discovery process through the practice
of making the things that the museum
needed after a little while people
started begging for color especially
like the Education Department Membership
Department and we very cautiously and
sparingly started incorporating a
palette of secondary colors used usually
alone or sometimes down on colored paper
we also experimented with different like
formats or modules or vehicles for
information looking for things that
could be templated or repeated across
channels so at the end of the first year
we were left with a pile of stuff that
didn't have a ton of coherence either
but
we were starting to see some patterns
certain visuals seem to make sense to
the institution and by make sense I mean
get approved while other while others
did not seem to make sense so we
basically threw away everything that
wasn't working and started to
consolidate all of the visuals around
the things that seemed to make the most
sense these are exhibition brochures
that employ they all employ the similar
layering technique where the cover is
smaller than the interior of the book
I'll kind of flip that back and forth
oops see and this the what we liked
about this layering was that it led us
violate the image and show fragments
which can give tension to the
composition but at the same time it let
us treat the image with total purity so
it had this nice balance with the things
that we felt the design you to do with
the museum priority to have the art be
sort of sacrosanct for the kids
materials we wanted to depart from the
usual like multi primary color like
handprint approach and instead rely more
on line and shape and things like that
we also started pushing the spiral bound
notebook form more you can see the
spirals in this but that's what we're
doing so the form of the pieces kind of
encourage the kids to engage with them
these these pieces were like extremely
cheap to make but the things that had
been made before we're like these sort
of full-color one sheet things that you
know kids didn't know how to use because
what do you do if you get handed an
eight and a half by eleven piece of card
stock in a museum whereas these
notebooks sort of in their form
suggested what needed to be done for for
most materials black and white with pops
of color became our baseline palette
these is a refinement of our original
signage design for the museum and
finally we started to take certain forms
like this post it like dog ear post it
form and modularize them across channels
so like you see it here and I remember
calendar in another kind of special
calendar that we sent out to people on
our website we really liked that post-it
form because it felt like a nice
metaphor for a museum that's in the
process of sort of figuring itself
out and trying new things so that was
sort of the the our first year or so
taking a look at the main museum
collateral I'm going to go into a bit of
detail now about a couple of larger
projects the website and the advertising
that developed in parallel with the
research process that I just described
what makes these two projects
interesting for this conversation I
think is that we took two very different
approaches to the conversation with our
colleagues with somewhat surprising
results I think that you'll see they
also both feed into the identity process
that we're currently in and I'll get to
that as well so this is the homepage of
the museum's website around the time
that I arrived design-wise it hadn't
been updated in almost 10 years and
technologically it was starting to just
come apart at the seams so we had two
choices we could reskin it with
something an offensive and wait until we
had a better sense of the design
direction of the museum before
proceeding or we could just get our
hands dirty and see where it took us and
it just we decided on the latter pretty
much right away and being brand new i
also thought that this could actually be
a kind of mini branding exercise it
would I thought that it would be a way
to sort of get a sense of what kind of
visuals the museum could get behind I
hired this firm linked by air two months
after I started based on their work on
the Yale School of Art website which is
built on a wiki model where within
certain basic parameters everyone at the
school can pretty much edit every page
the website launched during my first
year at Yale and I saw actually during
my second year and at Yale they're like
four departments there's painting and
printmaking photography sculpture and
graphic design and they all like live
far away from each other more or less
and there wasn't a lot of like
cross-disciplinary collaboration per se
but in the year that this launched there
was like an explosion of collaboration
because all of a sudden people's work
was visible to each other over the
network and my perception of the Whitney
as a newcomer was that it was a siloed
place and that people focused on their
own
and a lot of opportunities for synergy
were missed even physically our offices
we were in these like renovated
brownstones and there was no like
bulletin board there was no common space
whatsoever so we were very physically
separated from one another and you know
this might sound way outside the scope
of a graphic design departments mission
but this was one of the first things
that I saw when I arrived and I saw as a
major design challenge and we kind of
thought the website could be a bulletin
board in a way and make the organization
more visible to itself via this public
facing surface that everyone would
collaborate on and thus useful for
getting the organization to see itself
as the public does and aligning our
activities around those perceptions this
is an image of the j street subway
station in brooklyn around the time that
we started the project the station was
under construction but like every subway
station it just continued to be a
working stationed throughout the
construction process you sort of don't
even notice it and linked by air offered
this image as a kind of touchstone for
the project I had been struggling to
give visual direction because I had just
started and we had just started this
year long research process but I told
them that I wanted the website to feel
like a scaffold because that's really
what they were building and that it
needed to support future design
development but just be really solid but
it didn't need to hide that it was a
work in progress so this image for us
became about a system that functioned
perfectly even as it was being
continually constructed many of our
colleagues did not see this image as
beautiful and indeed wondered what the
hell we were doing from their
perspective we were about to enter into
the biggest capital campaign in the
museum's history to raise money for a
new building and the idea of being
provisional and raw and scrappy had to
map onto a design that could meet users
expectations of a major museum on the
brink of a momentous expansion so those
were the kind of that was the sort of
attention that we were dealing with when
we were designing this website the
aesthetic that we wound up with is very
stripped back the look sort of arises
from the tools which I'll just show you
in a second and the aesthetic does
express this provisional quality that we
were hoping
or but I think it meets the user halfway
by establishing a very clear hierarchy
of content I mean we had really been
thinking about how like when you look at
a kiosk you don't necessarily know where
to look first and it sort of asks you to
navigate it yourself and that you know
definitely got massaged into this much
more sort of like straightforward
hierarchy core visual principle is just
large scale of images text and content
so we do expect to user to scroll in
this site black and white isn't
organizing principle of the design
because the site goes black at New York
City sunset sunset ties the site to New
York City basically whether you're in
New York or Phoenix or Amsterdam or
wherever the color scheme switches as
the Sun rises and sets in New York City
we've commissioned a series of artistic
interventions around this sunrise sunset
this is what it looked like when we
launched there were these like glowing
orbs by eko art tech that responded to
like the number of users that were on a
site in a particular day that they sort
of moved around this was this crazy
thing we're by Stephanie Rothenberg
where all of these little fake ads
popped up and then I gave you a super 8
a magic 8 ball and the we're this
commission series is continuing these
are just the only screenshots I could
find that it has been an interesting
part of the project so you know just to
recap a bit the conversation around the
website design was extremely inclusive
and as a result there is a ton of
support and buying for this visual
approach the thing that that sort of got
us started on the wrong foot was a
misperception that I had which is the
website when I arrived was so bad that
we sort of took it as carte blanche to
do whatever we wanted and indeed we
asked people leaders of the museum you
know what do you want the site to be
like in there were like just anything
anything would be better than this and
we were like okay how about this and
they were like what are you thinking so
what I realized then is that sometimes
you know a bad or neglected design comes
not from lack of caring about the design
but really just from lack of decision
making about the design basically I mean
the institution actually cared very
deeply about how to represent it
visually on the web but they needed
guidance through the design process and
that I think is really the most
important part of our role as a design
department so the advertising was a
completely different process than the
website it was much less formalized less
structured there was virtually no
interdepartmental conversation about the
institutional ramifications of this or
that you know formal choice so we just
did what we wanted to do and we we
really wanted to have that conversation
but the museum's leadership was very
focused on getting the new building
project off the ground and we were just
kind of behind that in the queue and we
needed to promote our program in the
meantime so what we did is it worked
very closely with marketing to develop a
vocabulary that felt right and we
crossed our fingers that what we made
would get through this very short and
steep approval process of like the
curatorial director and the director so
as I showed you before we started from
this situation where the institution was
designing from campaign to campaign with
no institutional consistency from one to
the next and at first you know we were
basically just continuing the strategy
in a stripped-back way there was less
color and variation but we were still
adopting the typography of each show at
the time they're just simply was not
enough ground established for us to draw
on or do otherwise but this was just the
very first season and we kind of started
to move past that right away this is
definitely still the mode that we were
in we were working on this campaign
jenny holz her we had developed an
identity for the show that used this
typeface which is called Joseph which
itself is a work in progress that's
developed by Mike Gallagher of we have
photoshop and we had been just sort of
trying it out it doesn't even have a I
didn't have a lower case it didn't have
punctuation it was just something that
we wanted to kind of take through its
paces but what we found is that when
sketching the advertising Joseph looked
good with the logo it was similarly
geometric and kind of abrupt and severe
and awkward and goofy and it's also all
caps like I mentioned like the logo so a
few months later we use these elements
again on this very minor outdoor
campaign that we did to promote the
summer 2009 season
there wasn't really like a big obvious
blockbuster show that summer so we had a
perfect opportunity to just try to stick
out some kind of institutional territory
I mean we were just dying to do anything
twice at that point and this was a
chance so we grabbed Joseph again and we
grabbed yellow because it felt kind of
neutral somehow even though it's not
white it felt kind of like an
in-your-face white so that was that
that's all the reasoning behind that
idea so the big challenge game in the
fall for our big blockbuster show
Georgia O'Keeffe which would not be an
obvious fit for the awkward geometric
typography and bright yellow color
scheme that I just showed you
complicating matters was the fact that
the O'Keefe estate stipulates that any
image reproduction must be surrounded on
all sides by a white border but the
foreigner turned out to be really
productive restriction for us because it
let us introduce the sense of like
layering and violation of planes while
still treating the image with total
purity which as I mentioned before is
kind of part of the ethos of the museum
we also carried forward the bright
yellow and the use of Joseph which we
used in this lighter weight basically at
their request of the request of the
curator it ended up bugging us a lot
because the thickness of the letters
were kind of like the exact thickness of
the grout in the subway tile so it
didn't have its ass or didn't stand out
as much so we've never used this thin
weight ever again but the nice thing
about this vocabulary is that I feel
like it led us reframe Georgia O'Keeffe
as very vital exciting contemporary
which is really what the whitney does if
it's putting on an exhibition about an
artist who you think you know it's
really trying to show their relevance
now so I felt like it was very kind of
on on brand if you will the biennial as
I mentioned before it's our flagship
exhibition that takes over the entire
museum every two years we propose an
identity that used Joseph and this color
yellow with the same foreground
background effect that is produced by
the alternating white and yellow panels
we use this not just for the advertising
but for the exhibition identity is
so this was plastered everywhere within
the museum and outside of the museum it
was basically a temporary rebrand
finally in our summer campaign actually
this is not finally I take it back then
we stopped being coy with our logo um
which had sort of been kind of pushed to
the side we weren't quite sure what you
do with it but we learned when we were
working on the website that the logo
looked good when it was comically large
and sort of just took ownership of
itself we'd sort of not you know kind of
been trying to come to terms of the logo
we decided to just own it and what we
wanted was to make like a really
institutional kind of content agnostic
you know approach to to advertising
these exhibitions we also expanded our
color palette because we are more
interested in having a unique approach
to color rather than becoming the yellow
museum so we were you know who decided
to sort of move away from that and we
played this out during our following two
campaigns this was a very big campaign
for Edward Hopper this was a really kind
of small campaign for Paul tech but we
just felt like this visual language
could just take anything that any
curator wanted to throw at us any image
any color preference any anything and
still look really consistent it still
sort of had the art on this kind of
front top plane in this art for what we
perceived as an art first way and just
felt like we were we were really on to
something this is a full page New York
Times at it wasn't a campaign per se
just a one-time add that promoted our
fall season but I saw in it how this
vocabulary could be so mutable but yet
still very recognizable and you know in
this I felt like this ad looked like a
museum that was like in the process of
becoming or something like that and it
just felt like I said that we have
really hit on something now everything
that you're seeing was put on the
administration's desk for approval and
they all just kept getting approved so
we thought we were getting buy-in keep
in mind that no actual conversations
were happening we were just designing
things putting them on the desks of very
busy people and interpreting the results
as favorably as we possibly could and
also by this point we had redesigned
everything every ad every song
in every web page every email blast
every everything every piece of
membership collateral everything had all
come through our offices and been
designed from the ground up with its
individual stakeholders and really all
that was left was the corporate
stationery so we were like we're here we
rebranded the museum so we designed some
corporate stationery totally basic we
just played out the typography and a
color palette that we had established in
the advertising we brought this dog ear
element that we love so much into it nod
to the black and white of the website on
the business cards and just the logo as
big as day nothing earth-shattering just
the logical conclusion of the work that
we had been doing and we set up this
meeting with the museum's leadership
where we laid every bit of institutional
collateral that we had made on three
huge tables we hung up every subway
poster we projected the website
basically everything that I just showed
you in one room to give context to our
stationery design proposal you know this
is what the museum looks like now don't
you think your letterhead should reflect
that so no the answer is no we hit a
very big stop sign it was the this is
not my beautiful house moment since we
were asking the museum's leaders
actually did not feel that we were doing
something that matched up with their
vision of where the museum was headed
all those ads that they were approving
were actually troubling them more and
more and more and now that we were
actually having a conversation with them
about it they wanted us to change what
we were doing so this was a big blow we
really were super sad and really bummed
I the director said at one point I'm
complicit in this problem too and I
thought complicit I really we thought
this work was so good but it was
actually really important that he said
that and I actually considered this to
be a huge tidal shift for us because
this was the moment when the museum
finally I think fully realized the role
that design plays in communicating its
values to the public this was when the
real conversation started the bottom-up
process ended at this point it had sort
of hit a ceiling that was kind of below
where it needed to be and then the
top-down process began to kind of link
those things which I feel without the
leader
kind of coming on board I basically I
feel like that's necessary for a
sustainable institutional identity so as
a result of this conversation we were
asked to lead the search for a firm to
redesign the museum's identity and to
lead the design and development process
so while this was a little bit confusing
for us because we thought we had just
done that what I also realized was that
this meant that design had become part
of the museum's kind of competency we're
in order to be able to do this we had to
be a museum that could articulate and
control our vision of what we wanted
whether we were making it ourselves or
whether somebody else was making it for
us the museum wasn't our client anymore
we were the museum we with client and
this is I think a really sort of new
place for me to be so what we did is we
put forth about a dozen firms from
around the world for initial review
there are no visuals here we are not
done I'm not showing you anything just a
bunch of black screens with white type
just to prepare you and I want to set
you up so we collect about 12 firms from
around the world a few others were
recommended by stakeholders from more
than the institution we invited eight of
those to present their work to an
internal panel and of those eight we
selected for to participate in a pitch
process this is a pretty unusual process
for graphic design we copied it from
architecture where paid competitions are
totally routine for designers but we
felt like we needed to put something
forward that would have its best chance
of working for this group that had as i
described a very long feedback loop so
we kind of wanted to short-circuit that
by starting with a conversation about
visuals one of the firm's asked us are
you pitching to and we did actually
debate a lot whether we should pitch as
well after all we are convinced that we
know the museum better than anybody we
decided not to do that because we felt
like to do so was going to take us out
of the conversation and to put ourselves
outside of the process sort of outside
of the museum just for the sake of
getting our hands dirty and in design
and when I thought about the outcome
our process with link by air where we
made a really good partnership with an
outside firm established trust over a
long time through a really open
conversation and let our colleagues have
a little bit of breathing room to get
comfortable with some of the ideas it
seems to me right now like this path
holds a lot of promise so I think that
this experience shed some light on a
common friction that comes up a lot in
relation to in-house design which is how
to reconcile being a service department
with leading the conversation about
design so it's that service department
versus strategy question and in our case
I feel I feel that our role is to lead
the museum with your design decisions
whether this is happening in a top-down
strategic style way where we're bringing
in outside consultants who have
expertise that we feel I can help us or
whether this is happening in a bottom-up
way where we're designing a signage
system for a set of exhibitions that
requires a different solution I would
say that the lion's share of our
leadership is happening through daily
practice but leading a larger
conversation about design with all these
multiple players and stakeholders is
design of a different sort I think Andy
touched on that a bit when he when he
introduced this talk so this is a
question that comes up and will come up
i think in this process it's the kind of
question that that sort of lets me know
that there's still a lot of work to be
done we often face skirmishes over who
has final say i know that you guys all
do too and the thing that I always tell
my colleagues and I don't know when this
will sort of become internalized but
that nobody should have final say if in
a healthy working culture colleagues who
disagree should understand that everyone
plays a role it's vital to the health of
the organization and that people need to
come to an agreement before they can
make a good decision I think the thing I
said in the last time I gave this talk
was it's like asking whether the heart
or the lungs have final say it's it's
just it's part of becoming integral to
the museum that or the organization that
you work in so I mean all of this is
really based on kind of trying to
establish trust you trusting
organization them trusting you the
organization trusting itself I think is
the core thing I mean when your in-house
you as a designer
have the same one-to-one remunerative
clarity that you do when you're working
the client and instead we work in this
sort of like trust economy gift economy
where you kind of give your work away
and you hope that the community will
return the value of your work to you in
ways that you may or may not be able to
predict and you know in our case it was
certainly a kick in the ass when it
didn't come back the way that we wanted
it to or the way we expected it to but I
still think that things are trending
upward for the thing that I think is
most important which is that the museum
should come to trust itself I think
ultimately that's the goal my hope for
the museum is simply that it continues
to be a place where a conversation about
design and through design is taking
place and that the museum sees itself as
the ultimate authority on what it should
look like the idea is that you know even
working with an outside firm is still a
sort of research based process that no
matter what comes out of that process
it's the the museum's visual
manifestation if itself is still a work
in progress which i think is only
possible when the design direction comes
from inside the organization rather than
the organization looking out