NYU
A Link to the Past
NYU Gallatin AlumniLink Mentor Program Brochure
I’ve been on a bit of a “ribbon lettering” kick lately. For this brochure/identity design, I was heavily inspired by a number of different sources, both old and new.
I wanted to conjure the notion of “link,” without using a cliché chain illustration in the process. The idea of roads and paths intersecting felt apropos to the concept of mentorship, and after doing some Wikimedia Commons research on such structures, I came up with a lettering style based on the look and feel of junctions or interchanges.
"Link" lettering, process
I wanted the composition of the piece to be simple and adaptable. For inspiration, I perused my copy of Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design (best textbook ever), and came across a simple-yet-gorgeous modernist poster by Lester Beall designed in 1937 for the Rural Electrification Administration. According to Philip Meggs, the poster was intended to be “understandable by illiterate and semi literate audiences,” and although my derivation was a bit more complex, I figured it would probably get the point across fairly easily to very literate university students.
After the basic concept was designed and approved, my brother Devin Korwin helped out with some last-minute Cassandresque shading, just as he had for the “Listening to Wine” poster.
3D Ribbon Script Lettering
I’m always looking for innovative ways to set text, and in the process of creating this postcard, I thought I’d give 3D lettering a try. I wanted to use a three-dimensional “ribbon” to mimic the movement of the pen or brush in the process of cursive writing. I also wanted to reinforce the feeling of papercraft in this piece, inspired by sophisticated pop-up books, especially given the recurring theme of Gallatin’s Alumni Day activities, “Return to the Great Books.”
While the process was somewhat laborious, it was interesting to play with 3D tools to create lettering in a somewhat unconventional way. It allowed me to direct the stroke through loops, and to tie knots inside of letters. There’s something rather Tron-like about it. Perhaps I’ll try “light cycle” lettering next time, or experiment with the smoke trails left by skywriting airplanes.
3D ribbon lettering, before red color was added
NYU Stern Orientation Program print photos
This project has been previously detailed, but I recently photographed the actual booklets for posterity. Here’s how they came out.
NYU Stern Orientation Program — inspiration by Erik Nitsche
(Update: photos of the printed booklet are now up.)
New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business engaged with three steps ahead this summer to create a set of program booklets to be distributed to incoming students at Summer Orientation. Our work for Stern thus far (NYU Stern CACE Poster & NYU Stern IBEX Poster, for example) has leaned towards classic mid-century design meets The Naughties, when compared with designs we’ve done for NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. I’ve felt that Stern evokes a more streamlined, straight-shooting feel than the more expressive and eclectic nature of Gallatin. For this project, however, I wanted to branch off in a slightly tangential direction. The design needed to evoke feelings of: orientation; summer in New York city; a first time visit to the most overwhelming of all American cities; business; and a sense of edginess and fun.
I was particularly inspired by the work of Erik Nitsche, a modern graphic designer whose understanding of form and palette helped him to create some of the most iconic designs of the 20th century. I obsessively pored over the Flickr pool devoted to Nitsche’s work, trying to discern exactly what it was that made his work resonate. In my eventual concept sketches, I was influenced by Nitsche’s use of certain typeface pairs (Akzidenz Grotesk + Bodoni, for example) and graphic motifs, but I did my best to make it my own and keep things feeling of-our-era, rather than co-opting the 1960s zeitgeist completely.
The client had requested that several initial concepts be presented. The first set of ideas that I sketched were less related to Nitsche’s work than they were to some of the 1964 World’s Fair pieces I’ve come across, as well as mid-’60s record album art. These initial concepts had a very playful feel and a color palette that evoked New York City. I also really wanted to specify French Paper’s Dur-O-Tone in Butcher Orange as the cover stock. It’s fantastic. I created two different covers, one with a line-art illustration of Stern’s headquarters, and one with a motif evocative of a New York city manhole cover, a vinyl LP, or a stylized depiction of the summer sun (à la Rocky and Bullwinkle).
My next set of designs, which would form the foundation of the final pieces, moved more in the Swiss modernist Nitsche direction. I liked the idea of a diagram depicting a literal interpretation of “orientation.” I liked the associations with the summer season and the earth’s axis being tilted at 23.44°. I also liked the concept of a Little Prince-like planet with New York City as a major topographical feature. The colors I had chosen for this group of sketches was a lot more subdued, in contrast with the orange-and-blue palette of the previous concept. The feedback I received indicated that the perfect compromise was to combine the geometry and basic form of the modernist concept with the brighter, happier colors of the World’s Fair concept.
After selecting from a handful of colorways, we arrived at the final palette and polished the design to completion.
Interior spreads include several photo-illustrations based on the photography provided by NYU along with an extension of the arrow motif from the cover design. The inside cover also includes a map of the Washington Square Park NYU Campus area with important orientation locations highlighted by color for quick reference.
Virtual tours and Flash
I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the many services we offer here at Three Steps Ahead is the creation of “PictureBubbles°,” our brand name for interactive, spherical panoramic photographs. (Say that three times fast.) Creating the full 360° by 180° panoramic photographs is only half the battle (or half the fun, really); where the panos really shine are in the context of a complete virtual tour of an environment. These tours allow us to leverage interactive web technology, most notably Adobe Flash, as we create photographic experiences that tell a story.
Over the past year we had the opportunity to develop such an experience for New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. The school’s home base was recently renovated and received LEED Gold Certification for the environmentally-friendly practices used in the planning and construction of the new floors. After photographing the spaces and stitching everything together, we created a website and tour interface that really ties the room together1. A visitor need only click on a “hotspot” to bring up a sticky-note with more information about the feature underneath.
I have had mixed feelings about Flash in the past—it’s a technology that can easily be misused or abused, but its richness now permits just about everything to be done through a web browser. Thanks to Flash-based panorama / virtual tour software, we’re able to create completely custom interactive hotspots that make a panorama more than just a picture. With text, images, animation, sound, and video, the possibilities are pretty much limitless. But for the sake of accessibility and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we also make sure to provide much of the same content in an HTML-based context.
- To quote The Big Lebowski. [↩]
NYU Stern CACE Poster… on canvas
Back in December of last year, I posted some initial drafts of the Cohen Arts and Culture Experience poster design I was working on for NYU’s Stern School of Business. Through the inevitable revision process, many elements have been tweaked, including most obviously the color palette. We also added and changed the “marker” text on each of the map’s flags, added more text, and simplified the amount of variance between weights of the primary typeface (Tasse). I would usually be more upset about the scrapping of the script lettering in the original drafts, but given the additional text, the poster is much more organized and legible without it. Still, I like the fact that I can utilize this “blog” (as the young ones call it) to show the evolution of a piece, with all the ideas that were either scrapped or integrated along the way, rather than just displaying the end result in the portfolio.
Once the design was finished, I thought it would make a great demonstration piece for a canvas printing service to which a friend had recently referred me. It came out very well indeed—see for yourself through the gallery images below.
Poster draft inspired by mid-century New York
NYU Stern: CACE poster concept preview
By now you’ve probably come to understand that I have more than a small obsession with mid-20th-century graphic design. Pictured above are a set of first-drafts of a poster design we’re creating for New York University’s Stern School of Business, promoting their Cohen Arts and Culture Experience program. The program allows current Stern students to participate in very New York City-centric cultural events—such as walking tours, Broadway theater performances, and museum tours—at extremely low prices.
The concepts I’m working with blend the feeling of Life magazine, MTA graphics, and perhaps just a bit of the travel poster aesthetic that I love. More than anything, though, I’ve been inspired by an incredibly detailed article I read recently about the history of the New York City subway system’s signage (on AIGA.org, via Doug Wilson’s awesome design-related blog). I’ve focused almost entirely on the use of the typeface Tasse, a revival of Paul Renner’s Steile Futura, a.k.a. Topic., a.k.a. Renner-Grotesk. According to Mark Simonson’s post on Typophile, Renner, the designer behind the ubiquitous Futura, worked on Steile Futura from the 1930s until the 1950s. So as I work to evoke a relationship between the CACE program, experiencing New York City, and the MTA transportation system, Tasse feels like an incredibly helpful vehicle. Contrasting weights and sizes allude to the beautiful mess that the MTA signage has evolved from over the decades.
Definitely read the aforementioned article, and if you don’t have the time or energy to pay attention to every nitpicky detail, it’s still worth flipping through the incredible historical photos.
(UPDATE: To see the finished, printed design, read the follow up post.)
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- Ed Rondthaler's Life with letters …as they turned photogenic
- House Industries: The Book
- Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller
- Meggs' History of Graphic Design
- Paul Renner: The Art of Typography by Christopher Burke
- The Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2
- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
- The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook