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InterviewMarina Willer360

Wolff Ollins & Pentagram

A graphic designer and filmmaker, Marina has been working in London as a creative director at Wolff Olins for the last 13

years. She has a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in graphic design and film. She is a member of Alliance Graphique

Internationale, has been a member of the jury at D&AD four times and was until recently an external examiner for the Royal College of

Art.

In a varied career, Marina has helped to create highly successful commercial brands like Oi in Brazil and Beeline in Russia. She

was behind the design of well-known identity programs for Tate, Southbank Centre, Schaulager and Amnesty International.

The Typographic Circle Presents Marina Willer

IMAGE/CONTENT

Wolff Olins: Expectations Confounded

Since the 1960s, commercially-minded designers have complained about their lowly status in the business hierarchy. They have complained about not being listened to in the way other professionals are – accoun-tants, lawyers, management consultants. But most of all, designers have complained that business doesn’t take design seriously.In the 1980s, smart design groups realised that the way to muscle into the boardrooms was to downplay design and creativity, and to elevate strategy and research. The result of this shift in emphasis was that the busi-ness world started to take design—and designers—more seriously. But there was a snag; the creative work that resulted from this change of tack was often sterile and formulaic. Sameness became the norm and blandness ruled.But surely it’s possible for designers to pos-sess the knowledge-based skills that modern businesses require, and yet still produce work that is engaging and different? If there’s anyone who can claim to have consistently done this, it’s Wolff Olins. Since the 1970s (they were formed in 1965), the group has been at the centre of most of the key devel-opments in visual communication. Founders Michael Wolff and Wally Olins have earned guru-like status within modern corporate communications. Olins’ books on corpo-rate identity and branding have defined the terrain for a generation of business-minded designers. And as the creators of the Bovis hummingbird, the prancing BT piper, the Or-ange identity, and most recently the London 2012 logo (below), Wolff Olins has always op-erated on a big stage – and faced the public scrutiny that inevitably entails.

The group is currently enjoying a fertile pe-riod. A run of high-profile work over the past two or three years is causing design’s chat-tering classes to re-evaluate them, although not always in a positive light. And in the case of the London 2012 logo, they have been catapulted into a media firestorm that hasn’t burned itself out yet, and the intensity of which hasn’t previously been seen in design. More on this later.This purple patch is encouraging clients to beat a path to the group’s London and New York offices. The client list is gold-plated: New York City, Sony Ericsson, (RED), Macmil-lan Cancer Support, GE, Tate, adidas, Unile-ver, Southbank Centre and the New Museum, New York’s only museum devoted entirely to contemporary art. There’s also a smart new website which suggests a fresh, genuinely modern sensibility at work.

So it seemed like a good moment to see if Wolff Olins (part of the Omnicom media conglomerate) has found the secret of be-ing taken seriously by top-flight clients and yet still managing to produce work that is successful, news worthy and distinctive. On a cold day in January, I went to their spacious offices near King’s Cross to find out.Having written disparagingly about the London 2012 logo, I expected to be treated like a tramp on the tube with poor personal hygiene. Far from it. Chairman Brian Boylan and creative director Patrick Cox were friendly and discussed what I’d written with calm objectivity. They’re both good talkers, articulate and perceptive, and when they describe the way they merge sharp business thinking with softer, more intuitive creativ-ity, I found it easy to see why their blue chip clients value them so highly.I even found myself reassessing that logo. I still think it’s a mistake, but my gripe with it has always been aesthetic: the drop shadows and the garish buzz of the nu-rave colours make it into a visual irritant rather than an inspirational graphic statement. And yet, the Web 2.0 philosophy that underpins it—users are encouraged to make their own versions of it—is inspirational, and a blast of fresh-ness into the airless world of stodgy brand thinking.Both Boylin and Cox stand by the 2012 work. I expected them to be evasive, constrained by gagging orders from the London 2012 committee, but the opposite was true. They discussed it freely and with quiet enthusi-asm, which made me realise that Lord Coe and his team committed an Olympic-sized error by not allowing Wolff Olins to defend their work. Their considered response would have deflected some of the media criticism.Both Boylan and Cox see the London Olym-pic work as an exemplar of their philosophy of branding. “Our viewof branding,” notes Boylan, “is that the brand is no longer a single neat and tidy logo that you stick in the same place every time. Our thinking of brand has moved on. The brand is the platform, the brand is flexible, the brand is a place of exchange, and it is not fixed, so there is not one logo. There is

recognisable form and recognisable commu-nication and behaviour, but it’s not one type of constrained and fixed thing.” This strikes me as enlightened and progressive, but it only works if the execution remains in the control of skilled people who fully under-stand the brand’s visual codes. The dismally designed literature (not done by Wolff Olins) that is currently being pushed through let-terboxes in East London shows what hap-pens when communication is freed from its moorings; it slips into muddle and cliché. Similarly, Wolff Olins’ logo for NYC & Com-pany, the New York tourism body, met with a hostile response when applied clumsily to its iconic taxis by the client recently.

Although Boylan and Cox remain committed to the 2012 work (“I stand by it on the basis of conviction. Sometimes you just know, and in this case, I just know that it’s right,” says Boylan), the media ramifications of the logo have left them bruised. Boylan and Cox were subjected to a vicious campaign of harassment by the press. Cox, who has young children, found the door-stepping and intimidating phone calls alleging malpractice particularly upsetting. “We didn’t mind the criticism from within the design community,” he says, “but what we got from the media was pretty unpleasant.” Boylan agrees: “The experience has actually made me sympa-thetic towards celebrities who are subjected to this sort of treatment. And it didn’t come from the tabloids. It was the weekend broadsheets.”

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The 2012 logo is only one of many high-profile branding projects that Wolff Olins has undertaken recently. In the room where we meet, we are surrounded by giant blow-ups of logos and bits of brand architecture. They make an impressive display: a series of smart graphic statements that look like the product of careful thought, but which retain the kick of freewheeling creativity. I was curious to know how Wolff Olins has avoided producing the bland monstrosities that big brand agencies are so adept at?The group’s philosophy has been forged over a long time. In 1992 the company moved from identity to branding. “The move can be defined as a move away from corporate strategy made visible,” says Boylan. “In other words, corporate identity was very much about the corporation and the corporate world – a bit one-way, a bit inside-out, and a bit rational. Today we see it much more about the relation ship between the corporation and the consumer, and the corporation being positioned in the real world. We see it as much more two-way, and a bit more emotional than rational.” As an afterthought, Boylan notes: “Curiously, identity is a more meaningful term to describe what we do today, and branding less so.”He continues: “After the management buy out in 1997, we had a partnership model,

with five strong partners with different views. Four of those people left after the acquisition by Omnicom in 2001, and Patrick came on board. Not only are we now a smaller number of people, but also we are much more focused and aligned in our views. We have a singular appreciation of what it is we’re trying to achieve – both for our clients and for ourselves. Patrick and I, as two of the leaders of the business, are much more aligned than I was with the previous people.” Cox adds the point that “we’re very lucky to have people in the organisation whoare aligned with that thinking too: Karl Heiselman, the ceo, and the creative directors in both offices [London and New York] and our senior strategists.”The result of this new-found alignment, according to Boylan, is that Wolff Olins speaks with one voice, where it previously spoke with many: “The fundamental thing, though,” says Boylan, “is that it’s not all done sequentially. It’s not about arriving at a strategy, full-stop, and then handing it over to other people and saying to them ‘now illustrate this strategy’.”

For London’s Southbank Centre, Wolff Olins created an identity system utilising a set of geometric devices to be combined in different patterns, a strategy somewhat similar to that employed by the Walker Art CenterBut as Cox and Boylan are quick to point out, to make this philosophy work, you need good people. Both are clearly proud of the intellectual heft of the Wolff Olins team, and as an example they mention Mohsin Hamid, md of the London office, whose novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist was one of six books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. “Although Moshin is ex-McKinsey,” says Boylan, “he’s primarily a creative person. And that’s what is important about him.”Boylan is fond of the word intuition, and uses it often. He is keen to emphasise that intellectual firepower is no good if it results in what he calls branding by numbers. “Our process is about getting a deep understanding of our clients,” he says, “which is why we have people who come from a strategic and business background. But then we start exploring, and that’s where intuition comes in. All in all, from beginning to end, it’s a creative process, as opposed to a step-by-step, logical process. Because if you only followed a logical process you’d inevitably arrive at a dry answer. Some of the answers we arrive at are beyond logical processes.”Looking at current Wolff Olins work, and talking to Boylan and Cox, there’s a sense of a company stretching itself – and stretching its clients, too. It’s a view that is reinforced by digging around in their new website. Some of the statements have an almost utopian flavour, and there’s a sense of being in tune with new advanced business thinking and radical approaches to traditional business practices. Some of it is borderline New Age: Boylan makes a wry

comment about being a child of the 1960s. For Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art Wolff Olins created a mark in which the title of the institution frames a space which can be used for supporting information, promotional messages etcBut how good is the work? Does it measure up to the rhetoric on their site? To use Patrick Cox’s favourite word, is the work ‘extraordinary’? Inevitably, their best work is in the cultural sector, but perhaps their most important achievement is in the way they’ve moved branding away from the tyranny of petty rules and suffocating diktats, into something more fluid and expressive.Wolff Olins’ work is as good as it gets when working for big public-facing businesses that need to measure and evaluate everything they do. But, small design groups who rely purely on intuition and their innate aesthetic abilities also do good work. In other words, brilliant pieces of visual communication are done without the intellectual pyrotechnics Wolff Olins can call upon. Yet the big difference, and what makes Wolff Olins’ achievement so remarkable, is that they do their work in the full glare of public and corporate scrutiny. They have to sell their ideas to hard-nosed businesses and public bodies drowning in account ability and evaluation criteria. High-end creativity is not easy in this environment, and it’s rare to find it.“What we do can’t be bottled,” says Boylan. “This means that we will never have 20 offices around the world. Our approach is based on results and something that’s appropriate for the circumstances of the client. Intuition is important because all rational will get you is rational. There has to be space for thinking and rethinking and imagination. I’ve been here 27 years, and I still get excited every day.”

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Spread dedicated to work

Perhaps less well known is that Willer is also a film-maker. Her short films have been shown in festivals around the world while, in 2004, Cartas de Mae won best short at the Sao Paulo Film Festival. Her film Ex-

posed (below) introduced Richard Rogers' exhibition in the Pompidou Centre and Design Museum

Marina Willer

exposed / inside out

Marina Willer An Independant filmmaker

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CD INSERT

Game ChangersA report by Wolff Olins

Doing Good Is Good Business

People buy from people. In this choice-filled, transparent world consumers engage by recommendation and relevance. You can advertise until you’re blue in the face, but if you’re not part of your customers’ lifestyle and culture why would they want to spend time with you? In the past, society was more forgiving of transgressions. You might say we suffered from cultural amnesia.We could ‘forget’ unsavoury aspects of figures, personalities, leaders and even companies whose work we respect and admire. People still overlook Winston Churchill’s racist remarks and Charles Dickens’ philandering. Our cultural landscape is littered with figures that would disappoint us if we scrutinised them too closely. Yet they have enriched our lives in so many ways that we have become adept at separating the content(the book, the painting, the policy) from the individual. We can approve of the former without liking the latter. In the case of companies, we tended to do the same. We were on the same page after all: they miximised profits while we maxed-out our credit cards. Amnesia was comfortable. The age of transparency changed this. The tensions became uncomfortable. We developed memories like elephants rather than goldfish. We remembered the sweatshops, the guzzling of coal and the greediness of bonuses. We remembered the excess and the hypocrisy, especially where it came at a cost to the people. And today,

by Sam Wilson, Wolff OlinsBeing part of your customers’ world is good for business.

Help people want to buy from your story.

High-growth companies see ways they can create win-win economic value

for the company and the society they have elected to Participate in.

Mending the schismSome companies have tried to solve this awkward mess with a superficial Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, or rather strategic ‘offsetting’ — a lukewarm bath of reactive, ad hoc corporate policies designed to neutralise or bury embarrassing aspects of a business. Banks stayed greedy but continued to pour money into the arts. Forests were planted and homeless shelters received handouts. Hence, the consciences of corporations — and let’s admit it, consumers too — were eased. But CSR is not a proven substitute for passion. The 2001 Harvard Study by Mohr, Webb and Harris showed that although CSR activities inspire a much more positive image of a company, it is far from certain that customers will change their purchase behaviour as a result. As modern discerning customers we need more. What we want from companies, just as from our public heroes, is consistency and honesty driven by a clear and transparent sense of purpose. A purpose that we can align ourselves with. A purpose that moves us, and moves us forward. Wait a minute! Societal purpose? Bringing meaning to people’s lives? Isn’t that what NGOs, charities and governments are for? Why does social purpose matter to business?

Purpose is motionAnd there’s the rub. The belief that having a ‘purpose’ means ‘being social’ relegates it to supplementing welfare or offsetting bad deeds with good. This denies it the bigger — and far better — role of playing an active part in the lives and passions of customers. Companies and organisations that put pur-pose at the heart of what they do unleash a renewed passion in their customers and employees. They’ve taken the power of their brand and fine-tuned it as a force for good. And in doing so, they have made themselves incredibly and indelibly relevant to their cus-tomers. And that’s good for business. Social impact is fast becoming a widespread, rigor-ous business metric. More and more busi-nesses are choosing to explicitly link their economic decisions to the value created through environmental, social, labour and governance efforts. The UN Global Com-pact already has 8,700 corporate members across 140 countries.

The most effective are those whose openly stated purpose links clearly to progress in the communities in which they operate:— Unilever, for example, delivers to the bot-tom of the ‘economic pyramid’ with afford-able, micro versions of essential products in developing countries.— IBM reinvented itself around a renewed purpose of creating a ‘Smarter Planet’, an impressive example of a company finding a renewed purpose for its organisation and reconfiguring its business to fit.— GSK is building a health care infrastructure for its products in areas where the health distribution system is lacking. It gets its own medicines to people in need, and in the pro-cess builds systems that local governments are unable to provide.— Nike Foundation seeks to expand the opportunities available to girls and young women around the world, with a passion for fairness that is shared by its current and future customers.— Google’s mission to ‘Organise the world’s information and make it accessible and useful’ is a defining principle for everything it does, informing users where to look for new value from its core advertising revenue streams. These companies are experiment-ing with new business models built around a strategic purpose and in a way that is inex-tricably linked with their corporate strat-egy. High-growth companies see ways they can create win-win economic value for the company and the society they have elected to participate in. They’ve learned the lesson that business can create value that is di-rectly connected to the interests of society and shareholders. It is no longer passive and reactive ‘accountability’ but an active, gritty, genuinely held passion for change that is ripe for creativity and collaboration

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live without walls The economics of the twentieth century were based on predictable processes Turning a business to your advantage used to mean removing inefficiencies, grouping like with like, dividing to conquer, and keeping the interdepartmental ‘friction’ to a minimum. It also meant guarding your intellectual property as the one thing you couldn’t afford to lose. You had to compete at all costs. But today, core competence has never been more important. Smart companies use their brand to focus on what they do well, and they open their arms to partners, customers and outside forces to complete the puzzle. They are boundaryless in developing an ecosystem that builds value by extending its reach. They reinvent their supply chain. They find ways to share their intellectual property and discover new shared value in the process. Game changing businesses recognise the world’s complexity and celebrate its newly created need to collaborate rather than just compete. They turn that partnership into a business model in its own right. Collaborative projects multiply the value of every brand involved. Nike and Apple brought exercise and music together when they developed the Nike+ Sport Kit, a wireless system that allowed shoes to communicate with an iPod. While focusing on what they each do well, Nike and Apple were able to move outside themselves and collaboratively create new value. Their products continue to evolve and Nike+ grew users by 50% in 2011, to over five million. In this shift from corporations to constellations, brand no longer serves to divide one organisation from another. Instead of building walls, brands break down barriers by working to identify shared purpose and like-minded collaborators.

Boundaryless Living Without Walls

Learn From With a stead y stream of revenue from (RE D), The Global Fund now provides 25% of all international funding for HIV /AIDS-related program MEs, 50% for tuberculosis and 75% for malaria.

(RED) (RE D) pioneered a new model of charitable giving by harnessing the powerof brands and consumerism to create partnerships for change. 100% ofthe funds generated by (RE D) partners and events goes to Global Fundprogrammes, which provide medical care and support services for peopleaffected by HIV /AIDS in Africa.The (RED) system is designed for mutual benefit — brands get an elevatedprofile through the custom product design and the cause’s own marketing,and the effort generates a steady stream of revenue for the Global Fund, farexceeding traditional one-off payments from corporate philanthropy budgets.

Pass it forward by Nick Keppel-Palmer, Wolff Olins

Growth in the 21st century means sharing your ambitionwith your partners and customers — and maybe even with your competitors. Once upon a time, a friend and I ran the coffee bar in the UK’s flagship Next retail store. It was the first modern espresso bar that London’s West End had seen and was hugely popular, as well as hugely profitable. George Davies, the CEO of Next, came in most mornings and we would make him breakfast. During the nine months I was there, Davies took Next from what was predominantly a clothing brand into a lifestyle brand. Alongside womenswear and menswear (and the coffee and cakes), we had Next interiors, Next wedding wear, Next jewellery, a couple of Next restaurants and even Next hairdressing. It was too much. As a member of staff, my whole life was Next — my hair (with highlights), my clothes, my food, the chair I sat on. Everything I touched or possessed was Next. I felt owned by the brand — as though it were seeking to control and dominate every aspect of my life.

That was 1985. Such brand excess couldn’t happen nowadays, and as it turned out it wasn’t sustainable then — even at the height of 1980s branding. Brands have changed and are changing — for the better. The best, and most effective are no longer market-ing mechanisms designed to flog products. They are not even about establishing and defending competitive positions. The best brands play a different, connected, col-laborative role. And they are fascinating. In

2012, growth is no longer a matter of market share. In a world dominated by constraint, the brands that grow do so by understand-ing and meeting more and more needs and producing products and services to meet those needs. Growth is about share of mind and wallet, not simply share of market. It’s no surprise that the world’s most powerful brands can jump categories at will. Apple, Google, Tata, Innocent, Sony, Sky, Virgin, Tesco can gate crash almost any category they choose. Credibility, not capability, is king. It’s easier for a trusted brand to be-come a bank than it is for a bank to become trusted.

Smarter businessAnd the brands that will have the greatest impact on all our lives are those that see themselves not as citadels that need de-fending, but as causes that need joining. The most important, most effective, most im-pactful brands are those that have put petty competition behind them and embraced collaboration as an operating principle — it is their core DNA. These brands are clear about their ambitions, and are not shy about seeking out others who share those ambi-tions. And with these partners they will pool resources to create a better future. Vat-tenfall and Volvo came together to work out how electric mobility

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Marina Willerjoins Penatgram

The addition of Willer marks another step in Pentagram’s recent diversification. In years gone by, Paula Scher would be the only female figure posing in the partners’ annual team photograph. Lisa Strausfeld joined in 2002 but revealed earlier this year that she was to leave. However, as well as Willer, the Penta-gram New York office recently announced that Emily Oberman will also be joining as a partner in April. In 2010, Eddie Opara became the firm’s first non-white partner in New York while Naresh Ramchandani joined the London office later that same year.Pentagram insists that it is not consciously attempting to diversify in its choice of part-ners and maintains that all the new joiners are there strictly on merit and for no other reason. Nevertheless, it is gratifying to see the firm continue to move away from its previous ho-mogeneity, hopefully encouraging female and non-white young designers in the process.A full profile piece on Marina Willer will appear in the April issue of CR.

Marina Willer Marina Willer

"Marina has carved out an impressive reputation in the Lon-don design scene over the last 10 years for both her cultural and corporate work. And it's this combination that we feel fits perfectly with Pentagram's approach," Domenic Lippa

“I am really proud to be invited to become a partner at Pentagram. I have huge respect for their work, their principles and their uncom-promising passion for design,” Willer says of her new role.

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