Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, I'm curious a person.
I'm sure most of you are too.
And I'm just wondering,
how many of you have tried dirt?
(Laughter)
Thank you.
There are a few that will admit it.
You know, this is a very childlike way to perceive the world around you,
by ingesting it,
because all of a sudden,
we've been dropped into a three-dimensional world,
from coming from a place that is completely different from that
with a whole new set of circumstances.
And so the best way we have to understand it
is to actually take it in and centrally experience it.
So, fortunately, my interest in ingesting dirt
evolved into observing nature and drawing it,
and that turned into my love of graphics,
which I early on discovered that I had a propensity for doing symbolic logos,
which, of course,
set me into really exploring and reading and learning more about symbols,
and that, in turn, brought me back to nature again.
You know,
human beings tend to think of ourselves as incredible inventors -
which we are; we do have a right to that title -
but a lot of what we come across exists in nature already.
Symbols, for instance.
Some of the most fundamental patterns and fundamental shapes
exist all around us,
and we, actually, just sort of stumble across them.
So these are a few examples of logos that I've done throughout my career,
and you'll notice three things that they all have as common properties.
One is they're all black and white;
two, most of them have a fairly equal mix of negative and positive space;
and third, they all tell a story.
So those principles are very important to an effective logo design.
First, the black and white part offers up an edge
so that you actually have definition to work with.
I always have my students start in black and white
because if it works in black and white,
it's going to translate into any color and any medium.
Secondly,
if it has a fairly equal proportion of negative and positive space,
you can be assured that it has scalability.
Scalability is very important to come down from a very microcosm size
going up to a macrocosm size.
So it's sort of emulating what nature does.
And thirdly, the story has to be embedded in there
because that's how human beings make meaning.
We have to have some sort of a connector,
and a story that is contained in a symbol is how we do that.
So most of these, you can see,
probably you have an idea of the sort of thing the client might be,
or at least, you know, I hope it is catching you in some way
that makes you curious and interested in it.
So these are a couple of qualities.
The elegance and beauty of a design are a couple of qualities that theorists -
whether they are mathematicians or physicists
or anyone who's involved in developing a theory -
they look to those two principles
to know that they're on the right track of a correct theory.
So aesthetics are not some cherry-on-the-top sort of an extra;
they actually directly address
the functionality that a piece of design, any piece of design, has.
Now, I came from a very fortunate background
of having a father who was also a mentor.
My father was a designer - he was an architect -
and he worked, in fact, for John Gaw Meem in Santa Fe,
when I was a child there,
and designed part of St. John's College.
And what he said
is the architect's job is to puff up the institution.
It's sort of what I do in a two-dimensional space with logos.
This is an example of one of his designs.
It's called an interfaith chapel at a desert crossroads,
and this is one of the things he did off the clock,
one of his own designs.
He loved nature, and he loved the creative problem-solving process.
So I had a mentor in a parent who taught me those same principles.
Now, this is an elevation of the design,
and that small-scale figure off to the lower left is me
at about five years old.
This was designed about 50 years ago.
This is the plan and the section of that design,
and this chapel, as you can see in the section, has nine legs,
and on each of those legs is incised a religious symbol
from one of the major religions of the world,
including one leg that holds a circle
for atheists
and another leg that is completely blank
for agnostics.
(Laughter)
So, intuitively he's imparting the idea
that all of these concepts that human beings have of God
are on an equal par
because they're just simply coming from different perspectives,
which is a really great way to address that in an intuitive way
the moment you walk into this space and see this all around you.
And then of course, the design itself is based on the concept of a circle,
or the shape of a circle,
because this is the shape of God.
The circle is wholeness
before it's been broken out into triangles, lines.
This is the zero dimension,
when you start at the center point and move outward from there.
It is the whole, or holy, place of God.
And the purpose of this place, my father said,
was to show the astonishing, commonplace origins
of all religious experience.
So all human beings come from that place of wholeness.
We come from a place of being one with everything
until we get separated from our mother and come into the world.
This is a drawing my son did when he was in his terrible twos.
We all come into duality;
we all have the experience
of light and dark, birth and death, male/female.
This is the three-dimensional experience that we all have.
So I'd like to look at
how dualism can be looked at from different perspectives
from religious theosophy.
We come from the Western Hemisphere,
which is a very linear-oriented, sort of a thought-processing culture.
We are analogous, I would say, with the left hemisphere of our brain.
That's the kind of processing that the left brain does:
either/or, direct connectivity,
very linear problem solving.
And it's perfectly expressed in the cross:
two lines intersecting one another.
However, the Eastern Hemisphere of the world
comes from a very different perspective of duality.
It comes from a perspective of more of an integrated idea
that allows for paradox,
and it's beautifully expressed, very simply, very elegantly,
in the yin-yang symbol,
which is two half-size circles contained within the mother circle
that created this shape.
This is a logo that I did for an Arabian horse farm
in the mid 1980s, in the mid '80s.
So when you look at these symbols that carry over time,
there's a component to them
that does not get influenced by style or trend.
Many of my logos are still in use 20 or 25 years later
because they have this component of substance embedded into them.
So I was addressing, for this Arabian horse farm,
the male/female components of mares and stallions
and the ultimate result being a foal.
And I also wanted to express
the elegant beauty of this particular animal:
the dished face, the arched neck,
the principles involved in an Arabian horse.
So there are really just a handful of patterns
that make up all of the complexity, all of the diversity that surrounds us.
It's really kind of amazing the way nature works.
Billions of years in the making, there is no waste in nature.
If something doesn't work, it just simply doesn't exist.
It's a very simple and very elegant formula.
And there are three things that energy in the universe is mostly concerned with.
One thing is moving from one point to another.
Another thing energy does is pack and store lightened energy
that doesn't need to be used right at that moment
but needs to be very stable in how it's stored
and accessible for when it's needed.
And the third is to connect energy with other pieces of energy.
So this first pattern
that I'm going to look at to express one of those principles with
is the branching pattern.
And it's probably quite obvious to you
that branching is a point that starts here and goes to here,
and so it's a linear movement.
It's connected with the idea of movement,
and we most commonly see it in trees because trees are all around us.
So, from coming up through the roots and going out through the branches
and even into the leaves themselves
with the veins,
which are actually providing the function of like hands of the tree,
capturing sunlight and converting it into food.
I mean, what kind of a trick is that?
I mean, if we stood out there for 15 hours a day doing this,
I don't know if you'd feel full at the end of the day, you know.
So nature is quite efficient in what it does.
And there's branching all over everything,
including in our internal systems,
the circulatory, the nervous system that pushes impulses and blood,
river tributaries and lightning - things like that.
And this is a logo that I did for ISTEC,
which is a tech transfer nonprofit at the University of New Mexico,
who brings technology from big organizations,
big corporations in the United States,
into universities in Central and South America
and the Iberian Peninsula.
And they, actually, they do the education,
and the trade-off,
not only the tech transfer of bringing this work into these schools,
it also gives the technology companies
an opportunity to pull out the best students
out of the pool of students that go through the training,
and then the students get a job,
so there's interactive movement happening on both ends.
Within that pattern of the branching,
which immediately gives you the intuitive idea of movement,
there's also technology
addressing the current technology that's coming into the schools,
done by the circuits and their terminal points,
and combined with a headdress from indigenous cultures
that have come from those areas of the world.
Now, we tend to think that our technology -
the latest generation always thinks
that they are the biggest, the best, the brightest,
but actually, there are prior technologies that were quite sophisticated.
Many of those that existed in Central and South America are examples.
And I got into studying the Mayan quite a bit
because I was interested in them.
The Mayan had a system of symbols;
no written language,
but they had such a sophisticated calendar
that it was accurate within seconds every year,
whereas our Gregorian calendar, which is based on a line -
well, we have to have leap year every four years, right?
Because time is not a line.
Time is cyclical; it goes in a circle.
Another pattern is stacking and packing,
and this is because there are so many pieces of the universe that are spherical:
molecules, cells, viruses - things like that.
And when introduced into three-dimensional space
and having pressure and gravity and heat
and those kinds of things imparted into it,
it collapses into a tessellated shape,
closing all the spaces and all the gaps
and no overlap,
so it's a perfectly oriented shape
that can rotate;
it works really well in two dimensions.
It's actually the basis of six degrees of separation,
lateral diffusion,
and it also works very well in three-dimensional space,
like in the beehive.
And bees, of course, are known as ultra-efficient animals,
and the reason they use the hexagon
is because it holds between 9 and 18% more honey
than the other tessellating shapes of either a triangle or a square.
And the structure of six runs all through the bees' system,
from being a six-legged insect to the compound eyes they have
that have these little lenses that have the power
of a 6,000-power microscope in each one of them,
to their epidermis that has all of these little connectors.
This is actually a micrograph of an antenna
that is showing the connectors that are all pretty much six-sided -
most of them are six-sided.
And one of the molecules in honey is a six-sided molecule.
Buckminster Fuller realized this when he designed the geodesic dome.
It is, for human-scale building,
the most efficient, the cheapest, the easiest
and the most structurally sound.
So what kinds of clients, what kinds of corporations,
do you think would be interested in having a visual
that conveys this ultra-efficiency?
Guess who?
And you know, money is actually performing, in human terms,
the same purpose of storage of energy
because money is just a form of energy.
And you can go into the store
with a piece of plastic or a piece of paper
and come out with all of these goods
because we have an agreement that it's worth something.
It's only the agreement that keeps that in place, you see.
So what we agree to is what we get.
Another pattern, and this is my favorite,
the spiral.
When I do the shapes test with my students,
the spiral is almost always the shape they choose as what they love.
And it starts at a center point,
slowly and methodically moving outward from there,
a very beautiful and elegant design
because it's talking about connecting into the future.
This nautilus is showing a whole history about this animal's growth pattern
that moves out in a geometrically progressed visual.
Every star - the reason I'm showing you a star
is because the five-pointed star is the symbol for humanity,
and I will show you a little bit more about that in a moment,
but inside every star, there is a spiral existing,
a logarithmic spiral.
All you have to do is add curves to the angles to get this,
what most human beings consider beautiful proportion.
So the human being
has got four appendages plus the head, making five.
We have five fingers on each hand
with which we manipulate space, create technology, alter our reality.
We have five toes on each foot, which we use to move through space,
and we have five senses.
Interesting to note that all the flowers,
five-petaled flowers that produce fruit are compatible with our bodies.
So I don't suggest you just go randomly out eating things you don't know,
but, you know, if you're ever lost in the forest or someplace
and you find a plant that has five petals with fruit,
you can rest pretty assured
that you're going to get a piece of nutrition
that is not going to be in conflict with your body.
And this is a spiral design
that I've integrated into a logo I did for a nonprofit,
a musicians collective called "Swan Songs."
And what these musicians do is go in and transition people who are dying -
AIDS patients, cancer patients, people in nursing homes -
who want to connect with music, something they love,
when they're transitioning into the death process.
Our culture tends to look at the mechanics of death;
it doesn't really look at death as being a transitional process.
Because energy, you know, doesn't die.
Energy just moves from one point to another point.
So I think we can all know that there's something on the other side,
whether or not it's got anything to do with consciousness is another question,
but our energy will continue to go.
We are an incredibly creative and ingenuous species,
and we come into the world containing these symbols,
down to our own DNA as the double helix, within us.
We know what to do if we just look to nature
and follow nature's model
to create whatever we want to create in the world.
So I think it's just a wonderful opportunity
to be able to look at the most simplistic patterns
that exist in the world
and use those in our own creative problem-solving process.
And it creates good logos.
Thank you.
(Applause)