Wayne Hunt: Ten Easy Pieces
by Wayne Hunt
Wayne Hunt founded Hunt Design in 1977. Based in an historic building in Old Pasadena, California, the firm takes pride in design excellence, enduring client relationships, and professional activism. Wayne was honored as the 2004 SEGD Fellow at the recent SEGD Annual Conference & Expo in Philadelphia, an honor he shares with SEGD Fellows such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, and Massimo Vigneili. Wayne’s new book, ENVIRONMENTAL GRAPHICS: PROJECTS & PROCESS (Harper Design International), provides an illustrated look behind the scenes of over thirty successful design solutions to challenges posed by today’s marketplace.
What’s on your mind these days? “Something is going on here and you don’t know what it is.” Bob Dylan said that and he was right—something is afoot in environmental graphic design and in American placemaking. Museums look like theme parks. Theme parks look like shopping centers. Shopping centers look like downtowns and public spaces look like museums.
Smart clients with good projects have a lot of choice in who they hire these days. They are smarter and expect more than ever before. They talk our language and even use the term “wayfinding”!
What do you like about the business aspect of your work? I really like proposals, presentations, contracts, planning, and so on. We have a lot of projects with direct client contracts and many long-term relationships. We’re in the middle of Disney Hong Kong, our fifteenth or sixteenth project with Disney over the past twenty years. Like many EGD firms, we work with a list of architects who regularly include on their team. This produces a slight trade off for cash flow issues: the relatively low cost-of-sale. Last year we wrote more new business than our previous best year. Even with all the competition, there is a lot of work out there.
What are you doing with Clear Channel? Clear Channel is in the broadcasting business, but they have an exhibitions company authoring exhibits and partnering with museums to develop and create exhibits that travel. This is still a new concept in the rather conservative museums, few of which have the resources to put together exhibitions. They develop the concept, the exhibit, the funding, and share or rent it to the museum. Maybe a couple dozen exhibits have been done to date, including the very successful Titanic exhibit.
We’ve done eight or nine of these shows, including the Vatican exhibit and the Space show that just opened at the Seattle Science Center. The exhibits are assembled on a team basis, much the way the movie industry does things, with a producer pulling together a creative team.
Is this a trend? I think you are going to see museums and other firms going into this business. If the numbers work out, it gets people into the museum, perhaps people who haven’t visited in a while. The good news for us—and maybe the bad news for traditional exhibition design firms—is that these shows are very graphics driven and depend on lightweight display technology. Perfect for EDGers competent in marrying information design with entertainment and experience design. Just for the record, I have never used the term “edutainment”!
Okay, you brought it up. What about entertainment? Several stars from the world of theme parks and entertainment are now employed in museums as Directors of Exhibitions or Visitor Experiences. Is this the beginning of convergence between the theme park world and the museum world? I don’t know, but it is a very exciting time to be in this business.
And it’s not just museums. Visitor centers, libraries, corporate centers, and others are calling in the same “formerly entertainment” consultants. The top attraction design firm, BBC Imagination Arts, is doing the Lincoln Presidential Library with almost no conventional exhibits but very energized and immersive story telling.
The respected Themed Entertainment Association is changing its name to TEA. These powerful storytellers know how to attract and hold visitors. But they are no longer comfortable in the theme business and don’t want to be only in entertainment but in placemaking as well. We are just at the beginning of this movement in changing the way stories are told. EGD will play an ever-bigger role using high impact graphics and related elements to transform a generic space.
How long have you taught at the Art Center College of Design? I stopped counting at 25 years, but now it’s only a half-day each week. It’s a priority in my career and often the best day of my week! Of course, there is the usual frustration with academic bureaucracy and I’m a perpetual advocate of EGD just to keep my one class in the curriculum. Art Center has a very big—and increasing—menu of classes so it gets harder for a class to stand out. We wish a course in EGD was required, but so does every other sub-discipline.
Students are drawn to digital design and dynamic media, the entire electronic world—the mosquito and light bulb syndrome. So I pulled off a little politics to keep the class viable by tweaking my syllabus a bit. That got the class moved to a prioritized list of typography electives. Now it’s called, “Typography for Places and Spaces,” with a flow of interested students.
What’s the difference between graphic design and environmental graphic design? Over the years, I have identified ten specific points of difference. You can read about them in my new book (see box). The points are a challenge to debate. I’m looking forward to someone calling me out on this approach to discipline definition!
Have any of your projects been especially satisfying? The cliché is “what I’m working now.” But the most satisfying was working on the visitor center at the Kennedy Space Center. We got to work with astronauts on one of the greatest stories of the 20th century. We were on a big team, working with BBC for three years.
The new Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles will be very exciting, with architecture by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca. They have built three detailed mock up rooms—pretty dramatic. It is a totally new building with a plan so well done that the wayfinding is quite simple. That’s very unusual in architecture.
Have you worked on very many hospitals? We’ve dabbled a bit, and have done a lot of children’s environments with architects before. They and the clients at the hospital want fresh environments, not images that are over-used. The nursing staffs say, “no rocking horses, no clowns, no teddy bears.” Often donors think kids like that stuff, but it drives the staff nuts. So we clearly needed to rethink the healing environment.
This hospital theme was “Our LA,” looking out and reflecting cultural diversity. It is not just looking out, but also up—literally and metaphorically. So all rooms have ceiling murals; it is very optimistic and engaging. Because we worked so closely with the architects, we were able to incorporate the concepts for environmental graphics into the design of the building.
Is your practice more general than others? A consultant once told us that, but my 2D friends think we’re very specialized. I have frequently described EGD as having the three separate but equal parts: wayfinding design, placemaking, and interpretive design. We work in all three.
If you were 25 again, what would you be doing? I’d probably be another clueless Gen-Y type trying to make sense of the world, naive to the power of design and its potential as a terrific career.
THREE DIMENSIONS vs. TWO
While environmental graphic design shares many principles with its two dimensional sibling, clear differences separate the two disciplines. Such fundamental as proportion, contrast, figure/ground relationships, and basic composition underlie all graphic design. The use of color and application of typography compromise fundamental knowledge of all graphics practitioners.
However, when “flat” media becomes dimensional, new and additional principles and complexity emerge. The rules and conditions—and opportunities—are suddenly expanded. Here are ten ways in which environmental graphic design (EGD) differs from graphic design (GD).
1. PHYSICALITY: EGD exists in real space. It is tangible and touchable, not virtual and merely implied. It has thickness and dimension—a side view. An EGD element can cast a shadow; one can stand next to it or view it from different angles. EGD designs are fabricated, not just printed or projected on a screen.
2. SCALE: The elements considered and designed in EGD often exist at human scale and larger. From people-sized map kiosks to sign pylons of eighty feet or more, these EGD designs demand a different process of creative development—the understanding and use of scale, both human and architectural.
3. CONTEXT: The designs and results of EGD have to coexist with an existing setting or context. Signs are inevitably next to something else; a landscape background exists; the sun is shining in a set direction; the architect has specified certain materials for the building. While designers of GD may consider such quasi-contextual factors as demographics and brand positioning, they don’t need to consider the color of the reader’s desk when designing a catalog.
4. COMPLEXITY: The projects, processes, and elements of EGD can be very complex. Finished projects are often made up of hundreds of individually designed but integrated pieces. One assignment can require knowledge of multiple materials, difficult fabrication techniques, and even engineering—all in addition to the conventional skills of the graphic designer. Also, more than just production or camera-ready art is called for; detailed fabrication and installation drawings, bid sets, and technical specifications are needed to implement the work.
5. VIEWED IN MOTION: EGD is frequently viewed, understood, and used while in motion. The human factors of perception for drivers and active pedestrians place different demands on the EGD practitioner. Design solutions need to be effective from multiple angles and viewed and understood from great distances as well as close up.
6. DURABILITY: Graphics printed on paper not only usually have time-limited content, but are prepared on an ephemeral medium—paper. EGD, conversely, is usually designed and executed to last for years. Durable media, from metals to stone, withstand the test of time; Roman inscriptions from 200 B.C. are still with us today.
7. THE ENVIRONMENT: Light conditions change during the day; moisture, salt, air, and sunlight have physical effects; colors look different in the shade than in bright sun. Environmental graphic design must, in fact, engage and react to the environment.
8. TEAMWORK: A conventional graphic design is often the product of a single individual; one designer can design a logo, brochure, or a package and all that goes with it. EGD, on the other hand, is not only usually created by a team made up of signage programmers, designers, and drafting technicians, but it is often co-designed with an architect, landscape architect, lighting designer, and other specialists in a multi-disciplined process.
9. PRODUCTION TIME: Graphic design projects take from a few weeks to a few months from start to completion. EGD assignments, conversely, can require years to design and implement. The creative process is often parallel to architecture in sequence and pace.
10. PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER: The biggest single difference between these two design fields is that the results of EGD are seldom ends in themselves. EGD is inevitably part of something larger—a building, an airport, an entire theme park, or even a city. As complex as the work is, EGD is but one element in a designed, coordinated place.