BaM at 20: Clients Can’t Walk Around Inside Your Drawing.
Around 1985, my college girlfriend and I rode 500 miles round-trip with Mark in his dangerously undermaintained VW Beetle — holes in the floorboards, no muffler or luxuries like a heater — through freezing rain to West Virginia to see some of the country’s leading graphic designers lecture and be, frankly, surprised to be in West Virginia with other leading designers.
They’d called it the Influences Conference, and in a lucky stroke of scheduling genius, some of the most renowned designers of the time were there: April Greiman, who’d just done the LA Olympics, Seymour Chwast, famous editorial artist and famous for the most famous of all Bob Dylan posters, Steff Geissbuhler who would finally design NBC a logo that would not have already been used by Nebraska Educational Television. It was an amazing conference at a tiny school, and we weren’t going to let potentially deadly transportation (or a hotel room so disgusting we all slept with our shoes on) stand in our way.
Among these luminaries was Michael Vanderbyl, who in the mid-1980s, represented everything we ever wanted to be: handsome, successful, eloquent, funny, taller, wiser, nattily dressed, equally lauded for clever 2D and 3D design which he cranked out of a tiny bay-area firm that served clients with money. One of the many things he said that day was, when it came to branding design, “don’t be afraid to build a model. Clients can’t imagine anything. They can’t walk around inside your drawing. Build a model. They’ll keep it forever too, and it will sit in their offices remind everyone who walks in of your business. People can throw away paper, but it’s hard to toss out a model.”
17 years later. It’s our first really big break. Our new agency consists of four people.
We had been given about a week to pitch environmental branding ideas for one of the biggest financial clients in the Midwest. The same assignment a bunch of New York firms had before, but had thought, “What’s Bank One? Well it’s not like it’s Chase Manhattan. We don’t have to put our top teams on this.”
We, however, would pull out all the stops. There would be no stopping at all, in fact. We’d design around the clock. We would have an architectural model made by some company who does that sort of thing, and then we would dress it in several ways to show options. We’d shoot 35mm slides the result with a macro lens to put you inside, at eye level. We’d even shoot it outdoors, so real daylight would illuminate our tiny rooms. We were brilliant, we thought to ourselves, separately.
One problem. Every phone call Mark made, as I heard it from across our shared desk, sounded exactly like this: “Yes. An architectural model. Removable roof. Yes, we have a final plan and elevation files. Yes. And how quickly… six? Weeks!? Months!?!?”
“Damn you 3D printing technology for not having been invented yet,” said the ghost of my future self as it stood in the corner, taking it all in, unseen. “You’ll just have to build the damn thing out of balsa, foam-core and model paint,” thought my ghost.
“We’ll just have to build the damn thing out of balsa, foam-core and model paint,” said Mark.
The one thing that had been invented by 2003 was inexpensive color desktop printing. We used it to create miniature wallcoverings, wood laminates, carpet and tiny merchandising which we, and by we I mean Mark, cut with a watchmaker’s precision and adhere to foam-core sheets to fool people into thinking it was architecture. We made tiny desks. Tiny teller lines. Tiny TV monitors we imagined would display tiny entertainments to make waiting in line less annoying.
Carrie, who at the time was my girlfriend, later my wife, had a facility with Xacto knives as well, and went to work late into the evenings building tiny door frames and eensy window mullions, which we sanded and painted to look believably like aluminum. I wrote and designed tiny posters that, on the one hand were merely there as placeholders to show the merchandising system we were proposing and could have been Lorem Ipsumed. But hey, you never know who might be in the room, right? So we actually wrote and designed posters and murals as though that were part of the assignment, too.
We designed and built through a couple of all-nighters. And when it was done, it was gorgeous. It was as if toy action figures could get an auto loan or open a tiny savings account. The ghost of Michael Vanderbyl, who in reality wasn’t even dead, surely said, “well done.”
There was always the fear of dropping it, from the studio to the car, in the car if we hit the brakes too hard on the 175 miles to Columbus, Ohio. From the parking lot in Polaris through the mile-length of Bank One’s massive headquarters building. But we made it all the way to the conference room. Before we dropped it.
It was just a little jumble, actually, easily fixed with the glue that I had forgot to bring and that Mark hadn’t. I remember nothing after that. I don’t remember giving the slide presentation. I don’t remember the response to our highly believable photos. I don’t remember reactions to the strategy, costs or merchandising executions. I don’t remember the Q&A. I don’t remember packing up the projector and for all I know it’s still sitting in Polaris.
But it went well. We got the assignment.
Within weeks, a full-size mockup of exactly the branch we’d designed was being constructed in Chicago. Within six months, real branches were being retrofit to match. before the year was out, most Bank One branches were beginning to look like our model. In a few cases, we’d have to look twice to see if a construction photo was a real branch or our mockup.
In fact, years later on a visit we walked down one of Polaris’ many long halls, and there it was. The model branch we’d made. They’d kept it. Just like Vanderbyl said they would.
BaM at 20: Clients Can’t Walk Around Inside Your Drawing.
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