C Studio: Design Hero Poster
We were assigned to choose a hero within the field of design, someone who’s work inspires us and has influence in our designerly decisions.
I’ve had mine picked out since I heard of this project in first year,
Jessica Walsh.
I wrote an essay on Jessica Walsh when applying for colleges as she was a big part of what explained the concept of design to me in the first place and what led me to pursue it. There was really no one more fitting for this role than her, though I did pick both her and Milton Glaser, another iconic and favorite designer of mine, for the first part of this assignment, isolating two heroes and showcasing their portrait, one work, and a quote.
After choosing, we were tasked with mood-boarding, finding work and portraits throughout their life, color schemes they’ve used, fonts we think relate to their work and compiling collages to better understand our heroes. Then write an essay on them their life, what they’ve accomplished, their methodology in design and life practices, essentially everything about them summarized into 1250 words.
Essay:
Possibly subject to change…
Jessica Walsh is a designer, artist, entrepreneur, creative and humanitarian who once stated, “Do the work that feeds your soul, not your ego.” She’s managed to do just that at all stages in her career, but specifically in her current position as founder of her own firm, as she breaks glass ceilings and encourages others to do the same; truly a design hero in her own right.
Walsh was born in 1986 in New York but was raised in Connecticut. She made her first website at 11, discovering coding and a love for design at an extremely young age. She went on to receive her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and then moved to New York to intern at Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy, turning down a $100,000 position at Apple. After a year at Pentagram, she then moved on to Print Magazine, where she had her work featured in the New York Times and The New Yorker. After this time period, one she claimed was the most influential for her style as a designer; she met Stefan Sagmeister in 2010, a very well-known and eccentric designer and typographer based in New York, who founded his own firm Sagmeister Inc specifically curating design for the music industry. After seeing Walsh’s portfolio, he offered her a job, and within two years, she became a partner at 25, changing the firm’s name to Sagmeister & Walsh. Her bold and provocative, often surrealist style took on new waves when working at Sagmeister as she continued to prove to clients her daring and modern approaches had a great deal to offer.
She maintained practices in print with graphic photography and illustration design as well as branding, typography, website design, and art installations, blending all formats seamlessly. She speaks of her design process and creative curative tendencies as organized folders of collected ideas. “When I come across something I find beautiful, I collect it. I take a photo or video of it, tear a page out of a magazine, or copy a passage from a book. For photography and videos, I use Pinterest to organize all my inspirations. I also collect things into an inspiration folder on my Dropbox and organize them by field: sculptures, fashion, psychology, photographs, paintings, nature — as well as by themes: colors, shapes. For writing or text-based inspirations, I organize them in Evernote. I prefer to collect inspirations from fields outside of design: art, fashion, film, furniture, literature or psychology. The more varied and obscure your inspiration is, the fresher your work will feel.”
With Sagmeister, she collaborated on Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh, a five-month exhibition that explored the concept of happiness, at the Jewish Museum in March 2013. During this year, Walsh also worked on a project called 40 Days of Dating, a social experiment that went viral. With fellow designer and friend Tim Goodman, they decided to date for 40 days to see if they could overcome their relationship issues and fall in love, documented on a blog which was then turned into a book. In 2015 she met her husband, Zak Mulligan, so those relationship issues seemed to be solved as they’ve been together since. A year later she created Wine & Design, a nonprofit organization that brings together women and non-binary creatives together to engage in discussion of advice and encouragement, providing a safe space to foster connections within the industry and emphasize diversity and equality in creative communities. As of September 2019, the organization has 273 local chapters around the world.
Walsh left Sagmeister & Walsh to form her own firm in 2019, &Walsh, something she had dreamed about since she was a teenager. Speaking about the transition, Walsh wrote, “It was my intention ten years ago to start my own company before I met Stefan. Have you ever felt a deep voice inside telling you that it was time for a change, but you didn’t know why?” She went on to explain her insecurity over the change but also excitement and gratitude for being in a position to head her own firm, given that 0.1% of creative agencies are women-owned. “I’m also overwhelmed with gratitude for this privileged position I’ve found myself in. Very few women make it to creative leadership positions and even fewer have founded their own creative agencies.” Her priorities in the making of her new firm were refreshing as well claiming, “As part of this move, I am determined to make &Walsh not only known for producing top-quality creative and strategy work for top clients but to be one of the best places to work in terms of agency culture,” she said.
Her firm is relatively new but already boasts clients such as Parle Agro, India’s largest beverage company, Ted for 2020’s TedCountdown, Google I/O, Netflix, and more. The work her agency provides for its clients is beyond innovative, with refined modern themes, using color and typography in refreshing and thoughtful manners. Her work has inspired a new wave of design that uses metallic 3D renderings, giving a certain quality of modernity and contemporary flair to newer design works. This came from her own company’s branding using variations of an ampersand (&) as its logo and an overall branding tool. She uses this 3D technique in her firm’s work for clients as well, notably in their work for Laniege, a Korean skincare brand, visualizing beautiful abstractions in 3D rendered videos as promotional tools. There is always bold and expressive use of color in her works that maintain thought and precision to the client it’s for. She doesn’t shy away from the use of color when it may not always be expected, her work with leafy greens company Plenty uses bright reds, purples, and yellows for its branding. Her thought process was “Imagin(ing) fruits and veggies replacing chips and soda…Rather than sticking to typical healthy green visual cues, we took inspiration from desirable food categories, which reflects in both the identity and packaging work,” a choice and tactic I find refreshing and very smart.
Her ethos implies the creation of design and creative work that makes a positive impact, including the environment the work is created in. She has curated an environment that supports all individuals and causes of the utmost importance. The firm has created social media pieces that speak volumes. They created art in opposition to ICE’s actions at the border, work encouraging citizens to vote in the 2020 election, and designs in support of Black Lives Matter activists and black artists. Walsh works for clients with powerful positive messaging such as SuperShe, an app for women to connect and read articles that provide advice specified for women that aren’t primarily provided in mainstream media, emphasizing the promotion of self-love and empowerment and Lex a social platform focused on providing a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQIA+ individuals to build relationships and connection.
Her work is bright and inspirational, not just because of the design choices made but because of what it stands for. She has done so much good through this medium, maintaining clients, projects, and people on her team that promote moral and upstanding values. She once said, “Do things that matter, things that will make those better, and things that will make you better.” I really believe in creating a design that has a positive impact and supports the right ideologies and messages. I appreciate and admire Walsh for maintaining this set of values throughout her career and then proceeding to shatter glass ceilings, doing it on her own terms within her own firm by hiring a diverse and inclusive group of talent with all types of underrepresented backgrounds. She is my design hero because she has taken modernity past the canvas, past the physical design of her work, and has imbued it into her practice and work environment, actively working to mentor and uplift those in this field that have been cast aside to make more room for the cis white men of the world.
Moodboards:
The set of moodboards, I created was split up based on her early work and some of her portraits, her newer work after the founding of &Walsh and some color schemes, symbol, and type ideas I had initially prior to poster making.
Going into the actual poster making, we had to include certain components and keep to a specific size, 19.25(w) x 31.75(h) inches.
Poster Required Components:
> Your hero’s name (and a subtitle, if you want)
> At least one portrait of your hero
> Images of your hero’s work
> Informational text (a distillation of your essay)
> A quotation by or about your hero
> A timeline
Initial Sketches:
After we were tasked with starting our first sketches, which I found somehow to be incredibly difficult. I for some reason could not allow my brain the space to think of more than one strain of idea and found myself shoving into this one box of design, with one type of portrait, color scheme, etc. I think what boxed me in was the ampersand initially and feeling as though I had to incorporate it. I also think there were time constraints that just didn’t surpass my brain’s ability to come up with ideas and I was just really stuck.
My ideas centered around using the ampersand as a place for the timeline to sit and positioning title, quotes, and the distillation of the essay elsewhere across the page. I experimented with different versions of timelines and scales of timelines, and with the overal composition in general changing scale and orientation and some bare-bones elements but overall stuck to the same vein of idea.
Iteration 1:
Leaving that crit, which felt a little off, but people generally liked the concept, I found myself still stuck in this rut, in this very forced box I placed myself in, but I went through with the idea before setting up a meeting with Brett.
I curated some works of hers I found important and influential and placed them in a gridding system. For the distillation of my essay I took the last sentence of my essay and condensed it in places. “She is my design hero because she has taken modernity past the canvas, past the physical design of her work, and has imbued it into her practice and work environment, actively working to mentor and uplift those in this field that have been cast aside to make more room for the cis white men of the world,” was changed to “Jessica Walsh takes modernity past the canvas, past the physical design of her work, and imbues it into her practice, actively working to mentor & uplift those in this field that have been cast aside.”
He informed me about the importance of negative space and wanted me to develop more ideas, giving me some rules and restrictions that would help me expand my box and make something more inspired and visually interesting. No more ampersand, and no use of red. He also advised I play with an idea of a metaphor and work more on the story behind the poster. So I had to go to work and create more iterations.
Iteration 2:
These definitely helped me come up with a slew of new iterations, all of which helped me identify strengths and weaknesses in my work and my overall issue with maximalism and forgetting to let the space breathe. But I was still dealing with an overwhelm issue, as I hadn’t quite shaken it yet.
I wanted firstly to show her breadth of work, something I was able to do in the first poster initially and wanted to expand upon with new typographical ideas. I played with positioning and using fonts that emulate her classical, very elegant serif used in her own branding but maintained the gridding system prior to highlight her work, sometimes even literally highlighting works with opacity shifts to imply the emphasis of certain important projects. Walsh has many worthy quotes as she’s given many interviews and written personal pieces, so there was a great deal to choose from, another decision I had to make. Specifically, with typography, I chose to take letters and reposition them trying to make something visually striking with her last name.
Feedback-wise from peers, I received some points about the font and typographical reconstruction representing that of Disney and additionally just being hard to read. I also again received feedback that asserted my poster to busy, and I decided to switch gears and focus on metaphor for my next iteration.
Regarding some of the typographical constructions, I worked with Illustrator, and this is some of my process.
Iteration 3:
For the metaphor iteration, I was inspired by the idea of breaking glass ceilings and wanted to push that metaphor using some of Walsh’s work tied to the branding of her new firm. She had one piece of the branding, a framed poster of an ideology of her firm “making rules and breaking them.” The frame was being shattered to imply the breaking of the rules, and I thought it was a good way of conveying my metaphor and using her work to push it. She had some other framed work as a part of the branding campaign that I thought could function as her portrait in some instances. I also wanted to play around with 3D effects like she does in her branding and logo; she has this very slick 3D, almost leather-textured ampersand that I thought could be incorporated into these iterations within my typographical titles.
Overall, these ideas had merit, but I felt it was too literal and heavy, not in the literary sense but in more of a too-much-happening sense, overall in type and imagery, so I decided to switch gears change direction once more.
Regarding some of the typographical constructions, I worked with Illustrator, and this is some of my process.
Iteration 4:
I wanted to shift and go a more simplified route but keep a motif or element related to Walsh’s prodigal past. Having created her first website at 11 and firm at 32, she’s really young to achieve everything she has and is almost gifted in a way. I thought a good representation of that could be gold stars, like the ones they would hand out in classrooms, and I started working on variations of this direction. I also considered the use of circular image frames rather than the rectangle ones I had previously to enhance this narrative of playfulness, Walsh seems to carry throughout works (where it’s appropriate).
Although eventually, after speaking with Brett, the gold star idea was abandoned, I got a really solid iteration to work from that used negative space better and was able to work with it to create something new that was ready for critique Thursday.
Prior to iterating further though, Brett suggested that I go back to the inspiration stage and try pulling ideas, not ripping off though, from posters I’ve seen that I really love. The last one is truly my favorite and it inspired the expansion of iteration 4.
We were tasked with presenting two directions for crit on Thursday that peers would help us decide between. I firstly chose an idea from Iteration 2 because of the strength held in typographic experimentation.
But with the second direction, I wanted to work further on what I had in iteration 4. I decided the very saturated backgrounds didn’t allow for the breathing space I was advised to present repeatedly, so I switched to a cream-beige color and placing the brighter color in the type instead. I kept the same formatting of layout, having Jessica Walsh stretch vertically but using the inspiration I gained to place circular elements across the page, not just in clusters like the poster I chose, almost as a decorative element. The goal was always to showcase her breadth of work, which was another way to accomplish that.
I also used this opportunity to create a numbering system that would function as the timeline. I had to change some of what I had already curated of hers in terms of work to make the body of it more cohesive, and once that was gathered, it was easier to go in and place work across the page. I also changed the quote to one I feel is more relevant and crucial to her story, the last sentence of the piece she wrote when she launched her own agency. “If you’re unsure about making a big change that you know deep down is right, trust your gut, take the leap,” and took that last bit to be the quote.
Final Iteration:
After crit, I was able to choose my second poster design to move ahead with, and I think it was the right call moving forward. I wanted to experiment a bit with the quote and how it can become more dynamic on the page as well as make some typographical decisions, maybe not as distinctive and out there as my past ones but something more subtle yet relevant and well-integrated. This came in the form of the stacking of S’s, which felt like a great way to accomplish this. I also wanted to work with different background ideas and gradients trying to be more dynamic with my design decisions. Lastly, I changed the portrait I was working with to the one I initially had fallen in love with, and worked better with my overall color scheme.
I experimented with gradients and integration of bubble elements that I didn’t really like, but I stuck with this subtle peach gradient that created some depth within the page.
I was also deciding between having the paragraph below the j or not, the number of columns in the index, and the circular gradient symbol I had placed on the dots of the j and the i. After getting feedback, I did some more reworking and restructuring, changed the repeated quote to the entire quote, and kept the paragraph with the index just above it. I kept the symbols on the dots but removed them in the quote, and I think that created a better balance of elements.
This is what I settled on prior to the second to last critique.
In the critique, we put up post-its with feedback on each other’s works, and I received some good points, but some I didn’t exactly agree with. Some said they didn’t like the leap, going off the page, but that was a really conscious choice I wanted to maintain. I also received some feedback on the incorporation of circles surrounding the title like I had in my original iteration of this and maybe putting that back in. These were ideas I ultimately did not agree with and decided in the end not to change, as they were specific choices I really believe in. Someone said they wanted the 13. in orange too just like I did when highlighting the &Walsh founding, a great suggestion, which I did implement. I also zoomed in on her portrait and shifted her right a bit to provide a less in the middle head-on shot of her.
So this is my final poster:
Nevermind this is my final poster after having finished the booklet and getting feedback from Brett I added outlines to my circle to tie in the double-lined motif from my booklet, restructred the numbering system without periods and placed dates at the end rather than the start of the system, and changed fonts for it to the one from my booklet body text, changed the brown to the purpley-magenta from the booklet, and finally tracked in jessica walsh, like I had in my booklet headings and pull-quotes.
Reflection
Overall this project taught me a great deal about how to iterate and which parts of process evolution I need to improve upon. I think I started off in a really boxed-in spot and moving forward with ideating and overall design brainstorming; I need to expand my ideas in as many directions as possible in order to find something great. While I did end up doing that eventually, I feel like it was a lot later in the process than it should have been, and for future ideating, I need to prioritize experimentation early. I also learned more about the power of negative space. I think I’ve always had a problem with maximalism and taking up too much space on the page, and I think for me, my process involves doing so much and then detracting over time, and that needs to happen quicker. However, I’m excited to keep working with Walsh and using her creations to make work that lives up to her icon-ness, and I have a better understanding of how to present her work and what style I want to work in for her, so there is a jumping-off point for the next steps.
