Insight Categories: Culture & Events

Over our 36-year history, we have been recognized for many awards and honors, and every one of them is special to us. After all, every award highlights the hard work of our talented staff. This fall, our team picked up a Gold W3 award for the EYA Philosophy video, and two Silver awards for animations we developed for AES and AdvicePeriod. Additionally, we received three awards in HOW magazine’s International Design Competition for the work on AdvicePeriod, Honda in America, and our Grafik signage. Last, but not least, Grafik’s skateboard design for the Matthew Shepard Foundation’s Erase Hate campaign was selected for Communication Arts Typography Annual 2015. Congratulations to the designers, writers, and strategists behind these pieces. Our clients were wowed by the work. It’s great to see it wowed the judges too.

For the past 5 years, I’ve recruited our designers here at Grafik to help promote a grass roots event I co-chair in Rehoboth Beach called “Erase Hate.” It’s a benefit supporting the Matthew Shepard Foundation with the goal of spreading a message of understanding, compassion and acceptance.

Each year we’ve seen the event grow in both attendance as well as in dollars raised. Last year, the Foundation adopted the logo Grafik’s James Wilson created (see below); it’s now on several items in their online store. The logo merges hand-drawn type with a powerful message—hatred isn’t something you are born with, it is something that is taught. The striking red line through the word “Hate” symbolizes three things: the blood shed by Matthew Shepherd, the power of erasing hatred from one’s heart, and the love and passion of a mother who lost her son too soon.

This year, our 5th annual event is expanding. I’m most excited about a new event designed to engage a younger audience. It’s called, “Skate Don’t Hate” and will be held at the new Epworth Skatepark designed by Evergreen Skateparks— it features live music and a skateboarding contest. Come join us; or if you can’t make it out to the beach, please consider a donation.

To get the ball rolling, I asked one of our youngest designers, Raksa Yin, to help design the promotions. To promote deeper engagement, we thought to go beyond marketing materials and design a custom skateboard that would go to the winner. Finally, after reviewing many a young designer’s portfolio with the obligatory skateboard design done as a school project, here was a chance to actually create one—and be on strategy!

Let Raksa tell you the details:

Gregg: How did you approach the design for Skate Don’t Hate?

Raksa: As a team, we landed on the idea that the skateboard should be our focal point. From there, lots of research—Pinterest board, 80+ images, read about the skating culture and board artwork, researched the Matthew Shepard Foundation. I love handwritten type (although it’s not my strength), and saw that board art tended to fill the entire skateboard. I decided to use the powerful mission statement of the Foundation. Choosing a type rather than an illustrative approach was a big challenge for me—it’s a lot of words in a narrow dimension. With that in mind, I researched typography styles including graffiti, brush script, modernist and metallic.

Gregg: Your first designs had a good idea brewing, but your next design review clearly still had something missing. The design wasn’t holding together as a complete illustration. How did you power through that critique to the final solution?

Raksa: I went back to my mood board, and I thought about what type of art truly uses the whole canvas. I recalled studying Mayan and Aztec art in my art history classes. Their art filled the space. I took my inspiration from that, knowing full well that was not my strongest skill set. I decided to take a weakness of mine and turn it into the strength of this piece—I’m so glad I took the risk.

Gregg: It’s been nearly 14 years since Matthew Shepard was killed. Before designing these pieces, what did you know about Matthew and the Foundation?

Raksa: I had heard the name but didn’t know the circumstances of his death. After going to the foundation’s website and reading the whole story, how could you not keep going on the project until it was right?

Gregg: Raksa, I’m very proud of the work you’ve created and thankful to you.

Raksa: Thanks for the opportunity.

My Dad hit Normandy Beach on D-Day 5. He was a mechanic and truck driver in the motor pool; if he even carried a gun he never told me. He rarely spoke about the war.

My memory of him as a photographer was a lot of vacation film shot with the lens cap on. But after he passed I found a box of photos from 1945 Berlin that are consistently impressive. They are tiny, taken with a Zeiss-Ikon camera he bought when he got there, but when you scan them and blow them up, there’s plenty of visual information in those black & white prints.

Sometimes being in the right place at the right time with the right equipment can result in something timeless and wonderful. And because of that, and because of so many cameras everywhere today, it’s easy to think that photography is simple. It’s understandable why clients often don’t understand the cost of quality photography.

It’s one thing to catch a special moment in passing; it’s quite another thing to also create that moment, stage it believably and then capture it in exactly the way that matches what your client is saying. It is a real art to make the staged feel spontaneous—hours and hours of pre-production before the shutter clicks. Yet most folks only think of that moment.

In memory of the 70th anniversary of D-Day 5, we’re posting some of the shots that happenstance made special so long ago.

How many global power companies stop their normal work for one entire day worldwide to celebrate their safety standards? Grafik client AES does, all to drive home the point that working safely is a way of life. Today, March 28th, nearly 20,000 AES employees from Brazil to Vietnam to nearby Arlington are gathering to recognize the importance of working safely 24/7/365. It was an eye-opening experience for us to see the dedication and commitment throughout the company as we helped them create the presentation for today’s event—and you don’t have to work in the field to take the message to heart. The entire Grafik AES team is far more mindful of all that can be done both at home and at work. Congratulations.

Few things in business are as gratifying as working with startups, particularly those intent on disrupting an industry. Real game-changers are pretty rare in Silicon Valley and New York, and all the more so in Washington, DC. But when you come across one you know it immediately. True game-changers solve real problems for real people. They’re led by individuals who have big, clear visions, and the kind of workaholic, get-it-done drive that enables them to tackle seemingly overwhelming obstacles.

Over the course of my career I’ve been fortunate to work with and for a handful of truly disruptive startups, including NexTone, which was acquired by Genband; Lightningcast, an AOL acquisition; Great Plains Software, which was acquired by Microsoft; and a company called Digex that was acquired by MCI. The founders of each organization had a vision for how they wanted to change the world around them. They spotted the problem and envisioned a solution way ahead of the competition.

NexTone’s founders saw the future of communications and developed technologies that enable us all to enjoy mobility today. The founders of Lightningcast understood that the Internet would transform the media industries, and consequently developed groundbreaking advertising insertion technologies that are still used by Hulu and others today. Great Plains’ founder instinctively knew there was a better way to design accounting software and reset the bar for the rest of the industry. And the founders at Digex saw the future of  “cloud services” before there was ever a cloud.

These days, I am working with another disruptor—an entrepreneur who has figured out that a simple idea could completely transform the way we shop for cars. Khurrum Shakir’s vision was born out of the frustration he experienced trying to find a new family car. There were multiple sites to consider, no options for comparing vehicles, and no way to save searches. Back in 2011, Khurrum Shakir became frustrated with a search that covered multiple sites. Shakir saw the problem and envisioned a solution—in this case iGrabber, a metasearch engine for automobiles.

By the time I met Shakir in 2013, he had already recruited small team of experts, designed, and developed the first version of the iGrabber platform. Named “hottest startup” in DC by TechCocktail, his team had entered into an accelerator competition sponsored by the Ballston Business Improvement District. That’s when Shakir enlisted me to help flesh out the brand, develop a more consumer-friendly user experience, and create a roadmap for the next generation platform. In the next few months, we honed the vision for Carsquare, and won the accelerator competition.

Since that time, I’ve joined the team here at Grafik, continuing my partnership with Shakir and Carsquare. Together, we’ve closed our first round of funding, and invested in the refinement of the Carsquare brand, as well as the development of a user experience for the third generation platform to be released mid 2014. And while I can’t reveal too many details about the features and functionality of the new site, I can tell you this is absolutely a disruptor brand. Khurrum Shakir is a founder like those of NexTone, Lightningcast, and Digex. And Carsquare is another game-changer.

Of course it does, but until recently I didn’t really consider why. However, a recent invitation to hear about the 2020 Women on Boards campaign, a grassroots effort aimed at sparking a national conversation around the need for gender diversity on public company boards, focused my attention.

It’s an interesting challenge because the most of us don’t know a lot about the make-up of corporate boards—in fact, we often don’t even know who sits on the board of our own employer! The 2020wob.com site explains that, “boards of directors make decisions that can impact you, your community, and the country… They make decisions about executive compensation, whether to buy, sell, or merge with other companies, where corporate offices close and relocate, and how much priority a company gives to issues other than profits, such as social responsibility.” Read more here.

One of the more eye-opening comments came from a discussion led by Lisa A. Hook, President & CEO of Neustar and board member of Neustar and Reed Elsevier, who noted that women who want to be on corporate boards need to start working toward this goal while in their 40s —more that a decade earlier than their male counterparts. It is that much more difficult for women to achieve this distinction. This was reinforced by the Washington Post in a recent article presenting research results, from economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, that support efforts to break the glass ceiling. Hewlett concluded that “women and minorities often get stalled in middle management positions due to an unconscious bias and that despite progress at lower and middle management positions, at the top it’s still a wall of white men.” Less than 8% of top earners are female, so clearly there’s much work to be done. Read the full article here.

Changing the diversity of American corporate boards and top management teams will take time, but there’s much we can do today. For companies, this should be as much of a marketing concern as it is a corporate governance issue. Women make major purchasing decisions on most everything and I was surprised to learn how many of my favorite brands are run by boards with only one and often no women directors. Frankly, this information has major implications for my holiday shopping plans. To learn more and to see how your favorite brands compare, go to http://www.2020wob.com/learn.

For many years Grafik has had the privilege of working with the National Museum of the American Indian. As the designers of the museum’s identity, we often worked with curators to make sure that we were capturing the essence of the museum. One such curator was George Horse Capture, a legend in the in the museum professional community. Mr. Horse Capture died in April at the age of 75, and upon seeing his obituary I was reminded of a wonderful encounter that one of my partners, Lynn Umemoto, and I had with him.

Lynn and I were charged with designing a logo for a fundraising campaign in the mid-’90s. The theme of the campaign was The Great American Spirit, and our long time colleague, Maggie Bertin, requested that we use a feather as the emblem of the campaign. As with most of the NMAI projects, budgets were tight, and I was glad to have the client give us a clear idea of what she wanted. To us, a feather was a feather, and I started the design team off and running designing marks.

As with all NMAI projects, all designs were passed by a curator, and in this case George Horse Capture was our man. I distinctly remember presenting a wide variety of beautiful feather marks to him for his approval—all lovely forms. And, I will never forget his face as he looked at our feather logos. “You can’t use any of these feathers! They are all wrong,” he proclaimed. I was stunned expecting that he would love several of our designs. He paused, and in a calm voice taught us that all feathers are not created equally. For one thing, all of our feathers looked like crow feathers, a symbol that was not appropriate for the new institution. And our designer had sensitively broken the structure of the feather at 3/4 of the way down—also a no-no. Quality feathers are those of an eagle or a hawk and the feather’s edge could not be broken—the way we had shown it. George took that opportunity to educate us, not put us down, and yet he would not accept anything that was not perfect. We worked on that feather for weeks until we got it just the way he wanted it.

I have worked with hundreds of clients over the years, but few are stored in my memory bank the way George Horse Capture is. And while I have not seen him in years, the impression he made is indelible. I will miss him.

Packing up 34 years’ worth of work is not only daunting, it is therapeutic. It has given me a chance to purge the things that I do not want, to look at the hundreds of samples we have that no longer need to be kept, and to revisit the many technological changes that have taken place. As I throw out old Rubylith, ruling pens, spray mount booths, photo disks, and roll-a-binding machines, I can reflect on how far we have come and how much has changed.

Going through client samples over the last three decades has been a fascinating review of where technology has come, and what part we played in the Northern Virginia tech scene. Many of these companies are long gone—having merged or been acquired—but we served a who’s who list of clients that included MICOM, IBM, DEC, Oracle, VM Software, UNIX Systems, STSC, Systems Center, Software AG, Intel, Infinite, Cable and Wireless, and MCI, to name just a very few.

Grafik’s Far Side postcard design for System Center’s UNIX network services.

A page from The DBA’s Dictionary, which Grafik designed for Systems Center.

And we promoted clients who were dealing with these “new technologies”:

• WAN to LAN communication—33 years ago
• VM and UNIX operating systems—32 years ago
• Enterprise software that could connect a mainframe to a PC—30 years ago
• Satellite communication—27 years ago
• Interoperability—26 years ago
• Digitized imagery—25 years ago
• Cloud computing—15 years ago
• Geo-spatial location—15 years ago
• Digital asset management systems—15 years ago
• The first PCs—14 years ago
• Content management systems—10 years ago

All of these terms seem pretty familiar now, but they were unknown when we started to work with them.  It has always been our job to translate difficult concepts into understandable language and we have been good translators. Looking at all our samples, I am reminded of the golden age of photography and illustration—before stock—when our photographers and illustrators worked hand in hand with our design teams. And our designs did their jobs. Along with the many wonderful copywriters that we worked with that could make something boring seem alive.  I remember one client where we created a series of three puzzle posters that became collectors’ items for UNIX programmers and made our tiny client look much bigger than it was.  Or the series of Far Side cartoons we commissioned for another systems integrator. My trip down memory lane took me from a time where a technology company was represented by a pixelated image—or anything in silver and black—printed on very glossy paper, to the present time where nothing is printed on any kind of paper!

Grafik’s Far Side postcard design for System Center’s distributed printer tools.

For almost 35 years I have led teams that have had to wrestle with hard-to-understand technologies, sometimes wishing that we had clients that made socks instead of “fourth generational languages.” But at the end of the day, if you can sell technology well, you can sell anything, which is what we have done and continue to do. So for now, I am still content to  wonder what interesting path the next tech client will take us down.

Grafik’s software packaging design for eMotion MediaPartner.