WKNY Design Dept.

HG:

Hi Luke. Lets start with your background. How did you get into this mess?

TL:

I had a weird roundabout path to where I am. I went to a no name, liberal arts school in the Midwest, Taylor University, but I was always really motivated to be a graphic designer. So I did a couple of internships when I was in school, one was at Wired magazine and one was at Sports Illustrated. The Wired internship lead to freelance work really quickly while I was still in undergrad. I was hired at the New Yorker as a designer, and we were working on a redesign.

HG:

Wow, what a legacy. The New Yorker has essentially been a version of itself since it started; what was the process for that like? How much was getting updated?

TL:

Yeah, it’s really slow-moving. There’s this modernist thing; it’s also decorative. I had really strong convictions about what the redesign needed to be and what it couldn’t be.

HG:

Like what?

TL:

The most recent redesign was by Massimo Vignelli and, super modernist. It happened in the early 90s, I think, under Tina Brown. Like anything with The New Yorker, it wasn’t a big deal at the time. When I came in, everything operated with this hyper-logic; every layout element had a reason for being where it was. There’s a whole idea with The New Yorker’s layout where there’s a harsh division between image and text and everything is a frame for the content — it’s a very crystal-goblet vibe. My feeling was that you couldn’t just mess with that idea. Architecturally they wanted to make it look and read more like a newsstand magazine — this stronger differentiation between sections with more distinct art direction. Initially they launched the front of book, and just the Goings On About Town section was drastically different which to me was the ultimate violation. It was built on a different grid. Eventually, I did get to go back and at least redesigned that section to where it is now.

HG:

Your brand and logo work has such a specific style. Pictorially they’re not always the same but there’s a sensibility. It’s something from the world of 60s branding, even the Japanese brand marks and going back to craft guilds. Those little signatures at the bottom of prints or whatever from Belgium in the 1600s, or medieval crests. There’s definitely an etching quality, but the curves are so clean and digital feeling.

TL:

Yeah, I love those. I feel so very invested in iconography. I don’t think of it as a specific influence, more what I like to think of as a long tradition of mark-making.

HG:

It’s so interesting when it gets applied to something like your work with Charli XCX. It feels modern but definitely more calligraphic than something Paul Rand might do. And there are all these goofy cultural references mixed in.

TL:

Yeah, I mean honestly, it’s something that I feel like I haven’t totally answered. There’s sort of this analogy that I have in my head that — I’m interested in practicing graphic design that mirrors pop music production, or what
it investigates.

HG:

I can see parallels for sure.

TL:

I think pop engages with something elemental. It’s distilling or condensing musical forms. So you’re in 4/4 and C Major or something. What does that mean? Parts are mathematical and parts aren’t. I think there’s something I feel a kinship with visually between color theory and music theory, optics and sonics. Visual ideas take on cultural meaning over time, but there also seems to be something intrinsic to the form itself. Looking at my Aerospace branding project, there’s just something about this bilateral symmetry.

HG:

So it’s like the way music relates to Gestalt and color theory and the way the eye organizes space. For reasons both cultural and phenomenological, we perceive certain combinations as beautiful.

TL:

Yeah, there’s something cognitive happening too, where these forms seem to be better equipped to carry meaning or something. But there’s something I don’t love about color theory — I don’t really want to reduce it to a science.

HG:

Well, people talk about how compositions need balance, but I think the word balance is actually the wrong word for it because what we really mean is some kind of resolution, which can be off-balance. It’s not necessarily scientific, although you can reverse- engineer it scientifically a little bit.

TL:

Yeah, I do think that the notion of a resolution is inherent in my work. And I have to force myself to fight against the instinct to overly resolve something. But at the same time, it is an idea that I am interested in. I think that ties the idea of mark-making. I’m really more motivated by capturing a certain formal idea rather than executing something really perfectly. But sometimes that formal idea involves something really over-wrought and technical.

HG:

I like this music analogy, and I think one thing you’re saying is there’s a combination of a cultural expectation around the history of a certain kind of mark or sound, where it brings up this Proustian recollection — like a string quartet in a song will always refer to the history of those sounds but it also has a purely physical timbre that we respond to.

TL:

Yeah, and I think there’s other parallels between graphic design and pop music. It’s a profane form culturally,
but we afford it the capacity to do something transcendent. A graphic designer can traffic in these popular forms and investigate visual ideas that are not super experimental or avant-garde. They can still be transformed or elevated to a surprising or more imaginative place.

HG:

How did you get involved in the F1 project?

TL:

They were pitching logos at the time, and they were interested in working with me particularly on that, and I was literally on vacation in the UK.

HG:

And they were like, oh, you’re in town, can you come into the office?

TL:

That is literally what it was. So I came in and drew logos for a couple days initially.

HG:

What was the creative direction, where did you start?

TL:

They had done a lot of work before I got there and basically showed me directions that they had developed. And then I think once I was there we probably did a couple hundred logos.

HG:

Was it just to iterate on F and 1?

TL:

There was a lot of F and 1 stuff, but I think we also felt like we didn’t want to do an F1. We wanted to do some sort of icon. The idea of capturing pure speed was one, a mark where you can own the idea of speed.

HG:

Which sort of ends up in the final.

TL:

I think so.

HG:

Can you remember specifically some of the things you were trying to capture the idea of speed?

TL:

We had little bursts; things-rushing-by sort of thing. There was an idea in the mix that we were all really gunning for that was just a horizontal line with a trademark sign just above on the right side. And that would be it.

HG:

I can see why that didn’t pass.

TL:

In conversation with F1 it was taken seriously. It was mostly a legal issue — the ability to trademark it.

HG:

Right, you can’t trademark a rectangle.

TL:

Exactly, that was the issue in the end.

HG:

How did the final direction come together? When was the type language introduced? And what were you basing it off of?

TL:

I don’t know that I was basing off of anything in particular. I was interested in capturing this thing which is generating letterforms that have this mythological, world-building quality where a character can be really unusual and it doesn’t feel like an overly expressive gesture, it feels more like some sort of alternative reality. It feels like it’s supposed to be that way. And I think what I like about that is the way that it sort of creates a sort of capacity for belief in the visual language.

HG:

Like a script from a lost culture.

TL:

There’s almost something fantasy about it. Mythologically is how I like to think about it.

HG:

What would you say the core idea is? I see a lot of references from the history of racing to more sci-fi takes on that style like the WipEout racing video game graphics by The Designers Republic, which comes back to this conversation of mythology or world-building.

TL:

The overarching thing is that motor sport in the last few decades has given us this vocabulary and I think the surprise I was interested in giving the viewer with this was sort of how seriously we can take that aesthetic, how hard we could get into those gestures. I think the driving concept is the grid — this notion that all of the design would be hyper-controlled, where everything would have a space and a way of fitting in that space and that elements would lock together.

HG:

Is that about precision, in terms of precision motors and the engineering?

TL:

Yeah, there’s definitely that vibe of emulating the engineering process. The result of all of that engineering is a degree of control over these vehicles that we can’t even understand. If they put on these tiny little fins, they know what that’s doing for the car. That was an important thing we were trying to do was getting everything to feel hyper-resolved.

HG:

Everything locks. An engine — there’s no parts that feel like they’re loose.

TL:

Right, everything’s gotta be tight. Everything’s got to align perfectly.

HG:

And a lot of those racing aesthetics come from the aerodynamics and engineering. The curves of the cars are not necessarily visually driven.

TL:

Yeah, in the aesthetics of the typography, a lot of what it was to me was realizing why these aesthetics exist in the environments that they do. There’s a reason why you would have extended typography in motor sport. The typography that I was doing here, it’s all very streamlined; we named this proposal Streamline.

What I really loved about the project initially was that Formula One, and racing in general, is so architectural. The different circuits and different races all have these long histories; everything down to different turns mean different things to different people. I was really interested in embodying that visually, like by giving different races different icons. A really big part of this whole proposal was an idea to create this sprawling visual landscape rather than something really tight. And I think that’s what people really love about the sport. It’s all very technical. Everything’s very organized, but if you’re a hardcore fan the range of possibility in the sport is quite wide. I’m very interested in the capacity for visual language to do that for a viewer. To make those separations.

HG:

But you must also be aware that this could easily be for a contemporary techno release.

TL:

Yeah. And we talked about that a lot. I think what Richard and I felt like at the end of the day, Formula One has the right to do this.

HG:

But it’s also kind of a wink in a way; you’re being a little bit ironic almost. In the way that you personally must approach it from a cultural lens. You’re not hardcore Formula One guys, you work with record labels.

TL:

Yeah, it’s a wink. Right? But also this is the place where it works. It’s come home.

01.2019