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COMMUNICATION ARTS TYPOGRAPHY ANNUAL 7

Kim Herbst Sleek Machine Dotdash Tyler Gourley Hello Monday Exhibit

January/February 2017 Twenty-Four Dollars commarts.com

Dotdash

By Tonya Turner

I

t’s fitting that an old 1940s pin factory sets the stage for Dotdash, Despina Macris and Mark Ross’s wayfinding studio in Brisbane, Australia. The studio could find a needle in a haystack. Of course, it wouldn’t merely find said needle; it would work out the best way to navigate the haystack in order to reach it. It would place signage in just the right spots to lead you to the pin; design environmental graphics that convey a sense of the barn, the haystack in the barn and the pin in the haystack; and provide appropriate information—maybe which animals eat the hay or how far before you reach the needle—along the way.

The Dotdash team knows how to get you exactly where you need to be. A lot of us would be lost without its wayfinding work—literally. Whether trying to find your gate at an international airport, looking for a ward in a hospital, seeking out a bus station in a foreign city or hunting down the zebra enclosure at a zoo, wayfinders help get you there.

The design firm’s building, spread over three levels, comprises a jumble of rooms. The main action happens on the old factory floor, now an open space with desks and Macs lined up in rows. A neon O taken from a discarded hotel sign shines from the back of the space like a creative power source.

A reflective yellow street sign reads “THIS IS NOT A SIGN,” but you get the feeling it really should read “DOTDASH IS NOT A SIGN STUDIO.” Getting people to understand the studio’s purpose in the relatively emergent field of wayfinding design has proven a challenge.

Macris and Ross lead a multidisciplinary team of ten designers. Senior designer Domenic Nastasi has been with them for eighteen years, and associate designer Heath Pedrola for ten. Both worked in the United Kingdom before starting at Dotdash; over the years, designers from Brazil, Canada, India, Norway, Poland and the United States have joined them. Finding people with wayfinding experience

requires a worldwide search. “I’ve even done Skype interviews with designers in Iceland and Mexico,” Macris says.

Pepper, the unofficial office therapy poodle, trots across the timber floorboards to lay a ball next to Ross. Staff members are encouraged to take her for walks when they need some fresh air. At the moment, there are 50 live projects in the studio, but it’s all hands on deck to meet the deadline for a local council’s project. There are maps on screens and handsketched drawings on tables. “We’re about connecting people to place,” Macris says. “That’s what we do.”

But that’s not what they did 30 years ago. Macris and Ross met in 1984 and married in 1987. That same year, they started Dotdash in a small living room studio. The name comes from the basic building blocks of Morse code. “The idea is that you can do a lot with just a little bit,” Ross says. It also had punch. “There’s a bit of a staccato, percussive sound to it. Boom, boom. It does help define us a bit. It’s not too serious. It’s not people’s surnames all strung in a row. It also represents the business rather than the principals, and that’s important. We’re only as good as the people who are here.”

Before they met, Ross studied built environment, dance and choreography; Macris studied illustration and design. Then she worked with a multinational ad agency in Greece and Canada before starting her own fashion label in Brisbane; meanwhile, Ross was getting up to all kinds of creative mischief, including the creation of an architectural ballet involving ironing boards. But they were moving in the same circles and ended up meeting and subsequently working together on shows for festivals and nightclubs. Then they took the next big step and started their own business. From the beginning, Dotdash scooped up big clients. When Brisbane held the World Expo in 1988, the city brought the young design firm on board for laser graphics, costume design and choreography. And the studio continued to put its diverse

Right: “In early 2011, in the far north of Queensland, the Cardwell community experienced the savage force of Cyclone Yasi, which generated a storm surge so powerful that it left the Cardwell foreshore a desolate landscape. Since this devastation, Cardwell has reconstructed its foreshore with a new sense of identity and vibrancy. We worked with community representatives of Cardwell and the project’s landscape architects to design the signage, pathway treatments and interpretive elements of the three-mile foreshore. Our design approach had to be mindful of working with a community that had lost everything. It was never about the aha moment, but rather about how to work in a meaningful way with and for Cardwell’s residents.” Agata Dworaczek/Despina Macris/Mark Ross/Peter Rudledge, designers; Cassowary Coast Regional Council, client.

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© Andrew Watson

Captions provided by Dotdash.

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PERIODICALS 1 Marisa Falcigno/Shantanu Suman typographers/designers Open Door Design Studio (Asheville, NC), design firm Condé Nast Publications Ltd., client “When WIRED UK was planning to do a feature on Indian startups, it contacted us to design the editorial spread introducing the article. The publication gave us a simple brief: hand-painted typography on a textured background, created using Devanagari script. After exploring a few concepts, we used the colors and typographic style of truck art in India. The main title of the project is a Hindi translation of ‘WIRED INDIA.’”

2 Katie Belloff/Nancy Campbell/Trevett McCandliss (New York, NY), designers Nancy Campbell/Trevett McCandliss, creative directors Trevett McCandliss, photographer Tara Anne Dalbow, stylist Greg Dutter, editor Footwear Plus, client “To open a feature on classic men’s fashion, we took a literary approach by drawing the display type on vintage books.”

DIGITAL MEDIA 3 (series) Leo Espinosa (Salt Lake City, UT), designer Shiu Pei Luu, art director Facebook, client “Users of Facebook’s messaging app enhance their messages and comments with its sticker sets, which include groups of emoticons based on themes ranging from sports to events to entertainment properties to holidays to countries. This set, El Combito, which means ‘group of friends’ in Colombian Spanish, celebrates Colombian culture through the use of playful illustrations, hand-drawn typography and a tropical palette that includes the yellow, blue and red from the national flag of Colombia.”

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GEORGE WASHINGTON

“Resignation Speech”

December 23, 1784; Annapolis, Maryland

"Having now finished the work assigned me,

I retire from the great

theater of Action; and bidding an Affectionate

farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted,

I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

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“ I Have a Dream” August 28, 1963; Washing�on, D.C.

“ I have a dream that

my four li�le �ildren will �e day

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TYPEFACE DESIGN 1 (series) Nina Stössinger (Brooklyn, NY), typeface designer Monokrom, foundry “Nordvest is a serif typeface suitable for text whose horizontals are just slightly thicker than its verticals.

This subtle reversal of the traditional weighting of thick and thin strokes lends it a unique voice and texture that emphasizes the horizontal direction of the line. A versatile type family in four weights and eight styles, Nordvest combines more displayoriented heavy weights that pack quite a punch with text styles that have been carefully optimized to be useful first and interesting second. Nordvest started as Nina Stössinger’s graduation project in the type and media program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Den Haag, Netherlands, and was published

by Monokrom in 2016.”

2 Maximiliano R. Sproviero (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Lián Types, typeface designer “Skill is a font based on my own way of making gestural calligraphy with a pointed brush. The challenge—keeping the essentials of that style and turning it into a typeface without losing the handmade feel—necessitated an in-depth study of the brush behavior before and during the design of the font.”

color of their s�in but by the c�tent of their �aracter.

I have a dream �oday!”

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FRESH OSBORNE MACHARIA

A blessing in disguise led Osborne Macharia to pursue photography. “I failed a unit in my fourth year of studying for a degree in architecture and had to stay out for an academic year,” he recalls. “During that year, I stumbled upon the photography of Joey L. That was when I knew I wanted to follow this path.”

Completely self-taught, Macharia turned his passion into a creative career and has gone on to shoot for various high-profile clients, including Guinness, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Co., Volkswagen, Kenya Airways, Oxfam and Samsung. Highly inspired by the stories surrounding him in Kenya, he bases his projects’ concepts on three principles: identity, fiction and culture. “Africa has tons of stories that the world doesn’t know about,” he says. “As a continent, we have our issues—but that’s not all there is to see. A lot of times, we are misunderstood. My work intends to change that misconception by showcasing what’s around me in the most aesthetically spectacular way possible.” k63studio.com

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