the COMMAND C design blog

COMMAND C was selected by Fourth Wall Restaurant Group to design the 43rd NYC Wine Week logo. I wanted to give you a sense of where it has been, and where we have taken it. The logo was a bit complex in that it needed to have the ability to communicate more information than a typical logo. In addition to the age seal, it needed a sub-line of text for the dates of the event. While approaching the design, we identified that it was important to design a logo that could work with or without that line of copy. We looked at the two previous logo designs and felt that this additional line of text either did not work with the rest of the logo or just added too much clutter. Figuring out how to do this successfully was one of our top goals.

We also wanted to communicate what the event was without being as over the top and direct as the previous versions. We DID NOT (and will not ever) want to use clip art. We DID want to make it simple and clear, clever, contemporary and reverent. How did we do?

Most recent logo with and without sub-line (designed by us):

Logo prior to the one above (not designed by us):

Logo prior to that (not designed by us):

photo by Helen Pearson

It has always been very clear to me that the reason why I do what I do, and why I love what I do is the multitude of experience inherent to the nature of design. I mean that one of my favorite aspects of the work we do is the insight into endless business ventures and ideas, other people’s aesthetics and general knowledge about things I’d have no other reason to learn or be exposed to if not for design. I love that through design, I’ve learned the ins and outs of how a large scale non-profit organization works, how restaurant groups are structured and how a vintage clothing store succeeds amidst a sea of endless competition.

I used to think that I created this business around the way I like to live my life. And, I still do. I lean towards the belief that design works for me because I’ll never get stuck doing the same thing over and over again, I’ve always thought that it was slightly selfish in this respect. It has also, at times, crossed my mind that having varied interests and a slightly excessive need for stimulation, would lead too being spread too thin and the inability to get really, really good at any one thing.

But… I’ve had a slight perspective shift. It dawned on me recently that me and design have more of a symbiotic relationship that I had once assumed. I now see a 50-50 partnership, I work for design, and design works for me. While I still self-indulge by virtue of COMMAND C, I realized recently that this is what makes us a strong design firm—this is what makes for a mutually beneficial relationship. There were a couple of things that surfaced this latent truth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how design and what we do differs from what most other people (who aren’t designers) I know are doing. I hear so many complaints about boredom and stagnancy in the workplace, and see so many people not working up to their potential because of it. When I check in with myself about this, I feel continuously shocked and grateful that this is something I never feel. I feel other things: pressure, immense amounts of accountability, exhaustion… but I never feel bored, I never feel stagnant in terms of COMMAND C.

I have been reading Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essay’s on Design. Opening the book was a bit like coming home. The introduction explained that it’s more or less a compilation of blog posts written by him for Design Observer, check one, and the first article was along very similar lines to the things I had been thinking that I am talking about here, check two. What he talks about in that very first essay, is so parallel to my experience that it cemented my altered perspective.

I realized that this constantly shifting project focus creates a situation where I (and my employees) am generally at my best, when a project ends, I feel refreshed and excited to delve into something brand new. The thing about design is that it’s a field where having diverse interests really pays off, whereas you wouldn’t really want your heart surgeon drifting off in the middle of surgery to explore some daydream about anything other than what they are currently doing. In fact, I wouldn’t want my heart surgeon to have any other interests aside from the heart.

As designers, we must immerse ourselves fully into inner workings of all of the different businesses we do work for. As good designers, we must strive for content and design to match seamlessly. In order to do this, it’s imperative that we have a clear understanding of the business we are designing for, who it’s target market is and appropriate design methodologies. Being diverse and knowledgeable about different topics is an asset in this sense, whereas in other professions it may make much more sense to be highly specialized in one particular arena.

I guess some people like that kind of honing in, it’s not to say that I don’t, I love being really good at the things I do, it makes them feel worth doing. But, if I had to go to work and address the same topic everyday, I know without a doubt that I’d be bored out of my mind and significantly less engaged and effective. Not to mention, a terrible designer.

One of our newest sites, www.theplotimports.com, was recently listed on www.blacren.com:

That, lead me to these:

… cause when we say “Custom,” we mean CUS-TOM: for you, and only you.

www.inkedmag.com

photography by: Brooke Nipar
styling by: Risa Night and Ariane Dallal

Sweet Jesus. June has set in out of nowhere and the few patches of nature aggressive enough to crack the concrete New York shell have chameleoned to green. Ripe with transition and growth, COMMAND C is now officially a Limited Liability Company (LLC), making it apparent that we’ve entered into a whole new level of maturity in commerce. Growing pains aside (for a sec), having something tangible like an LLC title or a year’s worth of profit/loss records makes what’s blurry clear. What becomes evident is who we want to work with, how we can best leverage your business and that saying “no” is an integral part of doing a good job.

It is easy to do things for other people, generosity feels natural to me, and pleasing people has become somewhat of positively reinforced addiction. What doesn’t come so inherently though, is saying no and not doing things—”things,” in the broadest sense. This is probably a terrible thing to announce publicly. Except, that I do learn from my mistakes, and it was those mistakes that brought COMMAND C to this level that I can now tangibly define in three letters.

The Give and Take.
When you grow your business organically, turning down a job, any job, is scary. I remember when I first started COMMAND C three years ago and my father told me “don’t turn down any paid work, if you don’t know how to do it, figure it out or get someone to do it for you.” This mentality was essential at that point in time, it was the only way to commit to something I had no idea how to do—to be a designer, programmer, project manager, sales manager, marketing manager, and bookkeeper all at once.

Three successful years later though, this mentality has to be completely reversed, and doing so is a bit of an abrupt transition, for both us as a firm, and for the people who know/work with us. We think we like to say yes to everything, but like a bad relationship, it’s a false pleasure that sucks you in like quicksand. Now that we’ve established ourselves as the firm you want to work with, we have to be extremely protective of our work and our clients. This means not doing things for less than they are worth, this means saying no when it’s appropriate and this means putting clear boundaries on the work we do and being selective with whom we choose to work.

Simplicity.
I have learned that saying “yes,” is the most complex response you can give someone. The obvious antithesis, the simplest. This being said, it’s integral to the successful functioning of COMMAND C to fully scope out the inquiries to which we do say yes… cause, you know we’re gonna get all up in your business like no other. You, the client, should take this as a really good sign.

This isn’t to reinforce the pretentious designer stereotype, but rather so we can a.) enjoy the work we do and therefore do good work, and b.) fundamentally stand behind the belief that design and identity are intrinsically connected to the success or failure of your business. It’s pretty straightforward, in order for us to feel like we can give something our all, which a solid business deserves, we need to be compensated well.

We launched two new sites in the past week. These two projects went smoother than ever. The commonalities between the projects are as follows:

- both clients trusted us
- both clients gave us the room to do our job - DESIGN.
- both clients paid us what we are worth

www.theplotimports.com

www.parkavenyc.com

Flexibility.
Because we are committed to growing your business and good design, we aren’t going to be negotiating with you about our prices. What we can be flexible with though, is the scope of the project. If you are on a budget, we’ll still work with you, but on a smaller scale. If we feel that we can’t do a good job with the amount you have to spend, we will kindly do our best to explain to you that ultimately this hinders both you and us. We have never had a great client who didn’t understand this notion.

Attachment.
Attachment is a funny thing. I’ve had separation anxiety (aka attachment issues) my whole life. When I was little and my parents left me, I was absolutely convinced that once out of my sight they’d be slaughtered by a fishtailing mac truck or coincidentally struck by the wing of a crashing plane. I didn’t sleep out of the house until I went to college, and in the rare event that I even tried, I’d panic within an hour or so of them leaving, right in time for them to get home to pick up my frantic phone call and come back to get me.

The moment I went to college I was miraculously cured of this problem, only to find out that years later it manifested itself in a completely new skin. It became about the tools I use and the client relationships I had formed. A consistent client, regardless of how much they pay or what sort of bodily harm they induce, is always going to be there, and in that false pleasure sort of way, consistent clients feel like safety nets, despite the fact that working with them means you are ten times as likely to develop lung cancer and a stress induced heart attack. Not. Good.

I also developed an attachment to technique and systems. At the beginning of this year we completely out grew every system of doing things we had, all at the same time. This shattered my world (being dramatic about growing pains) and forced Darren and I to take a step back and redefine the trajectory of COMMAND C. We decided that we were going to use this cleaning of the slate, so to speak, as a means of inserting our vision in to a structure that couldn’t accommodate it before. Freedom is important to us both, balance is important to us both, and creating stellar work for stellar clients is important to us both. Attachment was hindering those things. Once released, we felt a confidence in the business that significantly downplayed the importance of that attachment. It parallels the nature of all relationships, if you feel confident and trustworthy in them, there’s no need for control and patience is totally doable because you just know that it’s going to work out.

Obviously…

Exhibit runs May 21-June 28th
The Leslie/Lohman Gallery
26 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
(between Canal & Grand-closer to Grand)
Hours: 12-6pm, Tues-Sat, closed Sat-Sun
Tel. 212-431-2609
Opening reception: Tuesday, May 20, 6-8pm

www.sophiawallace.com

The Learners: New Book by Chip Kidd

Just read it, but if you haven’t read The Cheese Monkeys, read that first.
Good Is Dead.

… because everyone needs some emo Mariah.

Top 3 Tracks:

Side Effects (feat. Young Jeezy)
Cruise Control (feat. Damian Marley)
O.O.C.

Last Friday we let 3 sites loose…

www.laviva-home.com

This site is a milestone of sorts for us. We built it using Magento, which Darren, our Head of Technology, ambitiously sought out and learned as a means of increasing the value and functionality of the sites we offer. “Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control.” He did an incredible job, pushing out the entire thing in just over a week. One of my favorite aspects of this software is the one page shopping cart. Go ahead, add a product to the cart and test the checkout. It’s super smooth.

www.yourdecornyc.com

This New York based Interior Design/Services team started a new brand of interior services that combines design with move management, painting and tv and artwork installations. The site was fun and challenging in that we wanted to let their work speak for itself with large images, but they also had a lot of copy to convey. They were looking for the cleanest, simplest way to go about this.

www.ohtheladies.com

The revamping of this site involved condensing the once 15 page HTML site into a 3 page PHP database driven site, in tandem to maintaining a fresh, clean look.

It’s difficult to walk out of the Brooklyn Museum and imagine what sort of exhibition could come possibly come next. Takashi Murakami has done it all, sealed the deal, over, done, literally put art in the grave. Really, he has. Only art doesn’t work like that.

I’d liken this exhibition to the big bang. Murakami has developed an unabridged visual language of his own. It’s deliberate and collective, embedded with dialogs between East and West, business and art, past/present, real/surreal, and high and low culture. The only appropriate thing to do next would be to leave the museum’s walls bare.

Our sweet tooth for sensationalism is obviously exploited here. The problem so often with sensationalism is that what is on the outside doesn’t honestly represent the content on the inside, or it convinces you not to care. Murakami’s work is simultaneously sublime to the eye and mind. The content on the outside and the content on the inside stand unified, firmly pressed up against one another, back to back.

If you know me, you will know why I swoon over this work. I am obsessed with little worlds within little worlds, mass consumerism, cultural obedience, and the dialog between art and product. Built into the exhibit is a Louis Vuitton boutique store, selling Murakami designed LV products. This has stirred up a ton of controversial dialog about this show.

Lee Rosenbaum of CultureGrrl says:

Having finally seen (too briefly) and loved the show, I remain convinced that a Louis Vuitton boutique has no place in an art museum’s exhibition, no matter what arguments you might make (as LA MOCA did) that it’s consistent with the artist’s philosophy.

There are few sights more bizarre than that of two separate elementary school classes of young Latino children being trooped through the land of outlandishly priced plasticized canvas, brightly adorned with corporate logos. Then again, the sight of young children, brought in great numbers to this show of childlike imagery and ogling the very unchildlike subject matter of some of those pieces, was also disconcerting.

I hear you Lee, but I think you have an outdated, surface level argument. Murakami’s work is intended to make that situation awkward. He has designed this work to illuminate these cultural high/low incongruities and confront you with them. Censorship like you are suggesting is detrimental to artists and the work they create. In my opinion, educating children about issues of race and class is more effective and appropriate than shielding them of the reality of these problems.

This is not to say I had no conflict about the exhibit. I did. My biggest consideration is with the use of art as entertainment. This is a consumer’s show for sure. Consumption in this manner shifts the emphasis from the quality of the work to what the most consumers will buy or come see. I think this is a dangerous precedent to set.

Murakami brazenly crosses cultural thresholds in a way never done before. Boundary pushing in the art world is considered legitimate if not welcomed. I have more of an issue with the museum store itself, than with the store-within-the-exhibit concept. The museum store is there only to make money off you. The store-within-the-exhibit is asking you to question why it’s there. In addition to intellectualizing it’s presence, it encourages the viewer to engage on a new, interactive and tangible level.

*Photos: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times, and Helen Pearson

It’s taken me a few days to come down enough to sit in a chair, at a computer, organize my inspirations, and write about this. As I’ve been writing more, I’ve noticed that it generally takes me between 5-7 days to process something enough to write about it, just FYI. Last Wednesday, I was generously invited to attend Spotlight on Pentagram: Designing New York’s Visual Identity. The panel was at the Museum of the City of New York and included Pentagram partners Michael Bierut, Michael Gericke, and Paula Scher, who all spoke about designing some of New York’s most prominent visual identities. I’m still wide eyed and talking too fast…

Each of the three partners talked for about fifteen minutes while showing some of the work they’d done at Pentagram. Paula Scher, Michael Bierut (mentioned in an earlier post about the film Helvetica, Faster Than The Speed of Type) and Michael Gericke each have distinct, pungent personalities, this felt important. Looking at their work while simultaneously hearing them speak about it allowed me to see how distinctly theirs the work is. It became evident to me that their individuality was a huge part of why they are successful and why people want to work with them and specifically them. They all said a few things that stuck with me, pretty profoundly.

Michael Bierut designed the new look for Saks Fifth Avenue and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM - logo above). More about the Saks project here. Something Bierut articulated about this project that was so great was that a client [with regards to identity] is looking for “something that is always the same, but always different; something that’s contemporary, yet respectful of the past.” It just was really right on, and so was the design that followed. Dreamy.

Paula Scher talked a lot about what it feels like to be a part of the “fabric of New York.” I think about this often, from micro to macro levels. I think about the layering of this city, the silt that sets daily, the painted over rooms and street romance, how design and art really only matter if they are seen - it reminds me of that Basquiat (and others) mural they found hidden in a SOHO loft back in November:

Read more about that dopeness here. As someone who anthropomorphizes and visually experiences everything, the graffiti and buildings around me are as much my friends as Jack (not really, Jack). Scher does a lot of large scale site specific signage work and she talked about creating solutions that aren’t purely visual, but also resolve issues of context and content. She comes across as one of those totally committed New Yorkers who gets off on the high level of work it allows.

After each designer spoke, there was a question and answer session, a lot of which was focused on Pentagram’s unconventional business model and its success:

Pentagram is run by 17 partners who are all designers. Each of them has a small, organic team with whom they work. The designers work directly with the client. Michael Gericke and Paula Scher pointed out the flaws of a bureaucratic structure—one that adopts the attitude of shielding the designer from the client and creates several levels in between. The more people you have to go through to get to the client, to more opportunity there is for someone to fuck it up or for information/communication to be lost.

The strength in this sort of company structure is that they are all in it as equals, everyone makes the same about of money and no one is trying to out do anyone else, their goals are cohesive. They said it is a real collaborative environment, built for designers, noting that they all know each other’s strengths (which are strategically varied) and go to the person who is most appropriate for the job, often collaborating on multiple levels within the firm.

One designer in the audience asked what to do about a client/designer relationship where the client just isn’t satisfied or keeps wanting a design that the designer feels is inferior to another prospective idea. The unanimous response from the panelists was that there was a fault in the client/designer relationship, that somewhere, at some point, there was failed communication. Ultimately, though they didn’t come right out and say this, that’s the designer’s responsibility to spot and rectify. Gericke noted that a good client is clear and articulate, but gives you latitude and leeway to do your job.

The audience was predictable and Scher’s final note was along the lines of: It gets better as you get older. You start out and your clients are your age with no money, but as you get older, so do your clients and good clients make good money.

Why am I up at midnight doing this, why am I up at midnight doing this, why am I up at midnight doing this? Well, because, if your day/night was anything close to mine, you wouldn’t be able to sleep either…

Three new sites launched, check ‘em:

www.parkavenyc.com

www.orlisheli.com

www.vodboutique.com

Newark: If you’re ever there, you should check out Aljira.

A nue (?) is a legendary creature found in Japanese folklore. It is described as having the head of a monkey, the body of a raccoon dog, the legs of a tiger, and a snake as a tail. According to the legend, a nue can transform into a black cloud and fly. Nue are supposed to be bringers of misfortune and illness.

WERC (960 AM, “News Radio 960″) is a radio station licensed to Birmingham, Alabama. Its daytime and nighttime power are both 5,000 Watts. In 1982, it became the first radio station in Birmingham to convert to a news/talk format. WERC is the home in Birmingham for the syndicated radio shows of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. WERC is owned by Clear Channel.

I don’t know…