One More Question

Natasha Jen: People vs. Design – how to ensure great brands survive handover

Episode Summary

In our 50th episode, Ross is joined by Natasha Jen – award-winning designer, educator, and partner at Pentagram. A four-time National Design Award nominee, Natasha’s work is recognized for its innovative use of graphic, verbal, digital, and spatial interventions that challenge conventional notions of media and cultural contexts. Her work is immediately recognizable, encompassing brand identity systems, packaging, exhibition design, digital interfaces, signage and wayfinding systems, print, and architecture. Ross and Natasha discuss how designers and clients can better understand each other’s worlds to increase their chances of success, how her childhood in Taipei has influenced her work, and how the fast-paced and data-driven world is affecting design.

Episode Notes

Highlights from the conversation:

• Since it's a living organism, a brand can behave really well if it's managed well. But it can also misbehave. There's also no such thing as a perfect brand
• In the industry, we hand out brand manuals and they're sometimes treated as the Bible that the in-house design team has to conform to, but I actually don't see style guide that way – I see style guide as parameters
• [On research] What I want to do is get down to the very bottom of it. What is this thing? What is this subject? What is this topic? And a lot of times these projects came to us as something that is so alien that we [asked] – are we really qualified to do this?
• The total body of the work doesn't have a singular style to it. But rather, we always design very contextually, very specifically. But within that specific context, we want to be as creative and as expressive as possible
• I think that's a fascinating way of thinking about our craft. That part of it is creating the visual, but part of it is also convincing human beings to understand, to make the leap, or to communicate
• I think sometimes clients hold the designers at an arm's length. They don't necessarily let them into the building. They don't let them see the bad stuff or, you know, actually understand how things work

More about Natasha Jen 

Natasha Jen is an award-winning designer, an educator, and a partner at Pentagram. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, she joined Pentagram’s New York office in 2012. 

A four-time National Design Award nominee, Natasha’s work is recognized for its innovative use of graphic, verbal, digital, and spatial interventions that challenge conventional notions of media and cultural contexts. Her work is immediately recognizable, encompassing brand identity systems, packaging, exhibition design, digital interfaces, signage and wayfinding systems, print and architecture. 

Her recent clients include high-profile tech companies and startups, such as Google, Waze, Magic Leap, Essential Products. Past clients include a wide range of collaborators from cultural and consumer segments, including Nike, Puma, Target, Ralph Lauren Home, Kate Spade, Chanel, Tata Harper, The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Guggenheim Foundation, Fernando Romero Enterprise/FR-EE and OMA/Rem Koolhaas. 

Natasha he has earned awards from every major design competition and is frequently published in publications, including Wired, Fast Company, Kinfolk Magazine, Print Magazine, Creative Review, Metropolis, She was a winner of Art Directors Club’s Young Guns 4 and also served as a judge for the competition in 2007, 2011, and 2017. In 2014, Wired Magazine named her as one of nine “Designers Who Matter.” 

She serves on the board of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. She also served as Board of Directors of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 2014 to 2017. She is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts BFA Graphic Design Program and is a guest critic at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Yale University School of Art, Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Find Natasha here: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram

Show Notes

Companies and organisations:

• Calvin Klein
• Donna Karan

Miscellaneous:

• Taipei, Taiwan

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One More Question is a podcast by Nicework, a purpose-driven company helping people who want to make a dent in the world by building brands people give a shit about.

One of the things we do best is ask our clients the right questions. This podcast came about because we want to share some of the best answers we have heard over the last 13 years. We talk to significant creators, experts and communicators we encounter and share useful insights, inspiration, and facts that make us stop and take note as we go about our work.

Hosted by our founder Ross Drakes.

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