[ recap ]

Last week we looked at Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and John Berger's four-part BBC series, Ways of Seeing, and how we can use these ideas prompting AI.

[ thoughts ]

I am pulled, lately, by what I believe is an incredibly innovative and creative period that ran from the 1950s into the late 1980s.

Today we’re going to look at Saul Bass pitching Bell System in 1969 and the Quickborner Team redesigning the office in 1958.

Saul Bass was a graphic designer, born in the Bronx in 1920. He made film title sequences for Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Kubrick — Vertigo, Psycho, Goodfellas — and corporate identity systems for United Airlines, Quaker Oats, and AT&T.

In 1969, Bell System hired him to redesign the bell-in-a-circle logo that had identified the company since 1889. Bass took a logo brief and turned it into a 27-minute film. He walked executives through a complete visual system: the mark, the typography, the vehicle liveries, the phone booth colours, the manuals, the cufflinks. He used cinema to argue that a phone monopoly's identity was a national visual language and deserved to be designed as one.

The implementation was the largest corporate re-identity programme in US history. A 1970 survey found 78.1% of American adults associated the new logo with the telephone industry. By 1972 the figure was 91.7%.

Eleven years earlier, in Hamburg, two brothers named Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle were doing the same move with a different brief. They founded a consultancy called the Quickborner Team.

Their argument was that the office had been designed wrong for a century, laid out for hierarchy and surveillance instead of for the actual flow of work. They drew on cybernetics, observed how employees actually communicated, and laid out the office to match. They called the result Bürolandschaft -- office landscape.

By the early 1970s the model had spread to Bertelsmann, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Exxon, and Mercedes. The Schnelles treated a corporate floor plan as a theory of how humans should work together.

Bell System wanted a new logo, Bass delivered a national visual system. Bertelsmann wanted a more efficient office layout, the Schnelles delivered a critique of a hundred years of corporate hierarchy.

[ creativity ]

They both studied what was already there before deciding what to make.

Bass examined every version of the bell mark, going back to 1889, before drawing the sixth.

The Schnelles spent two years observing communication patterns at Bertelsmann before laying out a single desk. They counted conversations. They mapped flow. The floor plan came after the seeing.

This is the part most commercial work skips now. Nobody studies because nobody has the time. The result is fluent but average, because fluent and average is what you get when the medium hasn't been studied.

The second thing they shared was harder to name but more important:
They treated the brief as the starting point for an argument the client had not asked for. Bell System wanted a logo, Bass argued for a national visual system. Bertelsmann wanted a better office, the Schnelles argued for a critique of corporate hierarchy.

In both cases, the client got what they paid for and an idea alongside it.

This is the orientation worth taking from these documents. Not "make things look like 1969."
The orientation is: when the brief arrives, ask what it could carry. Most briefs are larger than they appear. Most clients will take the larger version if you make it work.

[ making ]

The Bass and Schnelle methods:

Study the history:
Bass examined every previous version of the bell mark, going back to 1889. There had been five. He drew the sixth as a deliberate response to the first five: modernised but recognisable, simplified but inheriting the line weight and proportions that made the old marks legible.
Before Bertelsmann hired the Schnelles, they had spent two years observing how employees in similar firms actually communicated, counted conversations between departments, mapped the lateral flow of information that an org chart hides.

Refuse the brief as given:
Bell System asked for a logo, Bass made a complete visual system: vehicle liveries, phone booths, signage manuals, even cufflinks.
Bertelsmann asked for a more efficient office layou, the Schnelles delivered a critique of a hundred years of corporate hierarchy and a new theory of how humans should work together.

Make the argument visible in the work:
Bass made a 27-minute film to pitch the logo.
The Schnelles published their own books. Verlag Schnelle became the most important publisher of cybernetics and organisation theory in postwar Germany.

Trust the audience:
Bass assumed Bell executives could sit through a 27-minute film about a logo.
The Schnelles assumed Bertelsmann management would accept a floor plan derived from cybernetic communication mapping.

Take one piece of work you have on now -- a brief, a project, a deliverable -- and run it through the four steps:
What is the history you have not studied?
What is the brief you are accepting as given?
What is the argument the work could carry that you are leaving on the table?
What does the audience deserve that you have not yet trusted them with?

[ sign off ]

Last week I signed off with "test" -- which was a lesson in checking, and double-checking.

Despite countless checks, something always falls through the cracks. I face-palmed when I hit sent and saw the oversight.

But it's a reminder to measure twice, cut once.

See you next week, anonymous reader behind the screen.