By Andy Chen

Child‘s Play

My dad and I usually communicate in Chinese, as I spoke it regularly growing up. When I Skype home, he is always the one to pick up. He asks me how I´m doing, pauses briefly to listen to my response, and hands the phone over to my mom. We rarely share long conversations and never speak in English.

This one time, though, last year, when I was telling him how difficult it was applying to graphic design grad schools, he paused for a moment and said, “If you think you can, you can.” I didn´t know quite how to respond. I´m not sure if it was his use of English or his seeming support for my plans that startled me. To that point, I had always thought him disappointed in my refusal to apply to law school. And here he was, telling me to live life on my own terms.

I´ve thought a lot about those words over my second week at Pentagram. In moments of self-doubt, I have tried to draw strength from the man whose expectations I have tried so hard to live up to. While I know that my dreams will never be his dreams for me, the thought that he is confident in my choices makes me willing to believe in my work despite my feelings of inadequacy.

The last few days have been extraordinarily busy. Though interns do not usually get to create designs, there was so much work this week that I was given the opportunity to make stationery sets for two clients and concert tickets for a well-known uptown symphony orchestra. Given that I had never designed anything like this, I was excited but had little idea what I was doing.

You would think that letterhead or business cards would be so simple that anybody could design them. All you have to do, presumably, is apply the client´s logo and contact information onto a blank canvas. When I brought my first round of comps to Lisa, however, she immediately pointed out details that had never before crossed my mind. Direct but patient, she indicated inconsistencies in the spacing of elements and half-point differences in type size that rendered my work inelegant.

In an article about the importance of detail, Naz Hamid posits, “It´s a phrase you hear often: design is in the details. With design, paying attention to small details—and in some cases, obsessively focusing on ‘what isn´t right´ — can take a design from ‘nearly there´ to ‘there´ and beyond.” Paula tells me that this specificity is the basis for craft — what makes Pentagram Pentagram.

Craft takes a lot of work. Three nights this week, I stayed at work until 10:30 to complete and comp the designs I was working on. Ali, our building supervisor, had to tell Dan and me to go home one night because he had to lock up. The magic that happens when the last trim comes off the comp never ceases to amaze me, and despite the long hours, the work is its own reward. Over lunch one day, Brian from Abbott Miller´s team and Kai from Michael Bierut´s team discussed the importance of approaching even the smallest tasks with enthusiasm; dedication to details creates a trickle-up effect.

The most exciting moment of the week was when Paula asked me to customize Chinese characters to match the type for an identity we are creating for a Hong Kong-based client. She seemed excited that I could read and write Chinese, and immediately relayed that we wanted to create a rounded version of a sans-serif face that Lisa had found — but in a way that preserved interesting details present in the English version. While Paula drew what to aim for, Lisa showed me techniques in Illustrator, emphasizing that the detailing should also match the stress of the pen when the characters are written calligraphically.

I have never felt so glad that I slaved over memorizing all those characters in Chinese class. I am starting to understand that the liberal arts education I gained at Princeton has its pragmatic applications. While I am still disappointed that the Visual Arts department at Princeton has refused to incorporate graphic design into its curriculum because of its “applied” nature, my education as a student of sociology has given me certain skills that I ought not take for granted. Chief among these are the ability to draw connections among diverse fields of thought and a respect for the irreducibility of human experience.

I am most grateful that the University gave me and my friend Tiffany the opportunity to start a graphic design agency during my sophomore year. We originally thought of it as a fun extracurricular way to get the student body excited about design, but sooner than we realized it, the agency was producing more than 200 jobs a year — mostly posters for student events.

We worked 40-hour weeks on top of school, trying to figure out what graphic design was and doing our best to educate our team despite our own inexperience. And it was never for the money: we initially charged $17/hour, earning pennies after we paid our designers and the University took its cut.

Over the course of the next three years, we learned about concept, kerning, client temper tantrums, Paula Scher, and more. Eventually, I tried to bring social concerns into the pro bono area of our practice, attempting to merge my academic interests with design. Unbelievably, a graphic campaign we created to protest anonymous online hate speech made it onto national television.

About a year ago, I started to understand that design was the right thing to do with my life, as difficult a transition as it would be from sociology. As I look back, so much of my identity over the last years has been invested in the Student Design Agency, and I´m not quite sure who I am now that I´ve left it behind.

On Friday, after finishing up work, I went into the Pentagram conference room to look at some of the design books in the amazing library. I sat myself down and flipped through the Type Director Club´s annual from 2007, the year that Paula was awarded the TDC medal. The craft value of each design was so unbelievably high; it was a mind-blowing experience to look at the selected pieces, some of which were produced in the very building I was sitting in.

I wonder if I will ever be able to produce work of that quality. More than ever, I understand why my plan to study design after the year in London makes sense. I am surrounded every day by people who make grid systems look like child´s play when I don´t even know the first thing about how they function. But all the designers around me are so encouraging and passionate about their work that I can´t help but feel inspired by their example. I´m still not sure why I´ve been given the privilege of working at Pentagram, but I know that everything I´m doing is essential to my education, whether it's as glamorous as customizing Chinese characters or as tedious as manually typing out and placing hundreds of names for a donor wall.

I often wonder what my father would do given the same opportunities. I doubt that he scarcely comprehends why I´ve chosen to become a graphic designer or even understands what it is I do. As a man who has had to unload cargo containers and live in a car to make ends meet, I doubt he will ever fully understand why it is that his son would so staunchly resist a more predictable career with tangible financial rewards.

Will I fail in his eyes? Will I ever make him proud?

I think back to that conversation so many months ago and meditate on that single sentence. In most ways, I´ve ceased to look to my dad for approval. The path I´ve chosen is so very different from the one he´s trod. But that spirit of self-belief, that willingness to pour endless energy into the people and causes worth fighting for — that is what I will take from him. I cannot be the man that he is. But I can be the man he would have me be.

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		Andy Chen originally from Los Angeles, graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in Sociology and a certificate in East Asian Studies. Over the summer of 2009, he is completing an internship at Pentagram Design under art director Paula Scher. Subsequently, he will serve a one-year appointment as Fulbright Research Associate at the Royal College of Art's Helen Hamlyn Centre, where he will create design interventions for non-profit and charity organizations in London.
Editorial USA Contributor

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		Anthony Kurtz One hour into his first Psychology class, Anthony walked out of the sciences forever and into the arts. Quitting his long-time home of Geneva, Switzerland for San Francisco, he began attending the Academy of Art University in 2001, studying New Media and Graphic Design. In the Fall of 2002, Anthony attended a mandatory liberal-arts class: Intro to Photography. Without any further education in the field, he continued to learn on his spare time while simultaneously pursuing a degree in New Media. In March 2003, he acquired his first SLR camera and documented the anti-war protests that shut down the City of San Francisco following the invasion of Iraq.
Creative USA Contributor

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