Transcripts
1. Introduction: You have to understand that you're creating something new. Something new means that it's not well-known, it's not tennis, it has the potential to become iconic over time. I'm Sagi Haviv, partner and designer to Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv in New York City. Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv is a design firm. It was founded in 1957 by Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, who were part of the generation that maybe pioneered identity design in the United States. Designing logos as you will see is all about being persistent and you never stop. You're going to see in this class the considerations that we have for what makes something exciting from a design perspective. Is it a certain relationship between positive and negative space? Is it a certain contrast between a ball geometric shape and delicate serif typography? Or even if it's just a specially vibrant color combination. Those things excite us as designers, but we can't lose track of the main reason for doing what we're doing, which is solving the client's problem. Finding the balance between those two forces is what we're after. I'm glad to join the class. Let's get started.
2. The Power of Symbols: A symbol is a mark that is separate from the name. Identity design, we basically have two types of identifiers or two types of trademarks what we call a logotype, which is essentially just the word. So a good example on the history of our firm is the Mobil oil mark Tom Geismar created in 1964. There is something special about the way that the name is rendered. So in this case, a red o. That makes you remember it, but it's inseparable from the name. A symbol is a very different kind of mark. It has the name written next to it as a wordmark and we'll talk about that later, but what we're going to focus on is the mark itself, the icon, or what we call a symbol, which can take many different forms and can be more pictorial or more abstract, and we'll talk about types of symbols as well. So a good example is the NBC peacock. That peacock is sitting above the name NBC and over time has become so recognizable that it's also used without the name NBC as an extension of the brand. That's a very powerful thing to be able to have a graphic mark that embodies the brand even without the name. We're successful in creating a symbol if somebody looks at it and thinks it was easy. But in fact, creating something simple and distinctive is the hardest thing. Especially today when so many symbols and icons have been already trademarked around the world, to design something that is original and that you can own and is still an effective piece of good design is ever so difficult. If you design a logotype for a name that the client already owns, you have much more liberty to play with the word and create something that ultimately they can trademark and own because they already own the name. When you're creating a symbol, which is a mark that is separated from the name, it's much more difficult to create something original and ownable. That's why I thought it's worth dedicating a class to this practice. The first thing we have to determine when we start working with a new client is whether they need a symbol, and we always say that you have to have a reason to have a symbol. Because if you don't have a reason, you better just to have a logotype just a name because a symbol is something that people have to learn. In addition to learning the name, and what you do, and all that, they also have to learn an additional thing which is your symbol, and that takes time and that takes investment. People are lazy. They want to learn as little as possible. It's probably not good to say that when we're teaching a class, but that's how it is. So there has to be a good reason to design a symbol, and that can be different reasons. If the name is very long, for example Chase Manhattan Bank, which was the name of Chase at that time that the mark was created, you want to have something bold that can add visual impact to the overall identity because long name will essentially becomes smaller in limited spaces. So a symbol can bring impact to a long name. Another reason to have a symbol is if the client has different divisions for their company. So they want to tie together different sub-brands with a master brand. So a symbol can help tie together an identity system. Also, certain businesses that really need a symbol, like if you're a TV station or a bank, a symbol can come in handy in TV graphics and help identify a media company across all touch points. So those are some of the reasons to have a symbol. Creating symbols is especially challenging because of where we are in the history of this practice. After 60 years or 70 years of identity designs, so many marks have been created and already registered that for you to create a mark that is original, new, and ownable within your client's industry is only becoming more and more challenging. I always joke around with my partner, Tom Geismar, that if he had to create the Chase bank logo that he did in 1960 today, he would have a much harder time clearing a trademark search. Why invest so much in a symbol? Why try so hard to create something that fulfills the criteria that we're going to talk about? Because the potential to create value is immense. If done right and obviously in the right circumstances, a symbol that last for a very long time can become famous. We say the word iconic, what does that mean? That means that people recognize it. It's such an effective brand extension that it can spark all the connotations of the brand just by seeing the symbol without even the name, and that's what we're looking for. We're looking for something that can stand the test of time and can become recognizable over time. So how do we even start down this journey? Next, we'll talk about the criteria for a good symbol.
3. The 3 Criteria of Timeless Symbols: So before we talk about what makes a good logo, let's talk about what is a logo because a lot of people have misconceptions about logos. They think that a logo should say very much about them, or that they should like it right away, or that a logo should be interesting. A logo is none of these things. A logo is not promotion. A logo is not communication. A logo is identification. Sometimes we say a logo is not a sentence, it's the period at the end of the sentence. There are three criteria we use to judge any design that we make, and those criteria are true for the logo as a whole, which is the symbol plus the word mark, and even for a logotype. But today, we're going to focus on the symbol part and how we assess the effectiveness of a symbol based on these criteria. A logo has to be three things. It has to be appropriate in form and concept. Note, I didn't say expressive because a logo cannot say very much. In fact, the less they say, the better. But a logo has to feel right, and that's what we mean by appropriate. The second criteria is that it be distinctive and memorable, unusual enough to persist in our mind. You see it once or twice, you can describe it to somebody or doodle it on a piece of paper, that's a good test. The third criteria, perhaps the most important one, is that it be simple, uncomplicated in form so that it can work flexibly everywhere in small size on a business card or in pixel format. So the simplicity makes sure that it looks the same everywhere. It looks consistent. A great example for symbol that fulfills all these criteria and has worked over time is the yellow frame our company designed for National Geographic. If you landed here from Mars yesterday and you didn't know anything about National Geographic, you would say, "What the hell is this? It's just a yellow rectangle. It's nothing." But in fact, in combination with the name and through consistent use, over time it has become the perfect vessel for all the associations and the feelings that people have with National Geographic. So when we see this frame, we think about all these other things. But in fact, doesn't illustrate any of them. It's just for familiarity. So it is so simple, right? But the proportions and the color is what makes it distinctive. At the time that this project was done for National Geographic, we did research into the familiarity of people and the associations that people have with the color yellow, and National Geographic was the brand that was most associated with yellow worldwide. That just made the case even more that that mark really needs to stay yellow at all times. If you look around the way that the mark is used, 90 percent of the time it is used in the color. In essence, we think of a symbol as a flag. It doesn't say very much about the country it represents. In fact, it says nothing. But it's strong, and it's bold, and it's distinctive. Over the years, it has become the perfect vessel for all the associations and the feelings that people have with the country it represents. Distinctive, and memorable, and simple are pretty straightforward. These are things that we can judge looking at something if it's simple or complex. The one that's slightly more mysterious is appropriate. What is appropriate for the client? What do they need in terms of concept, in terms of personality? That criteria we try to figure out based on different points of input. Input from the client by talking to them, input from research. There are things that we'd like to understand about public perceptions, and also our own instincts and intuition. Figuring out what's appropriate will unfortunately be up to you and I cannot really teach you that part. But please pay a lot of attention to what the client says and try to get as much information as possible so that you can make that determination in a responsible way. Funny enough, those two last criteria, distinctive and simple, are kind of contradictory. Because the more simple you make something, the less distinctive it's going to become and more generic. The more detail you add to the symbol, it will become more special, more distinctive, but it loses the functionality. It will become more difficult to reduce it and use it in pixels and so on. The question or the continuum that we work on is how distinctive can you make it while still keeping it reasonably simple in form and how simple can you make it without becoming generic. That's what we're going to learn today.
4. The Design Process: Next, we'll talk about how these principles that we've talked about in theory apply in the real world. I want to talk about one case study that we worked on with the US Open Tennis Championships. This is the most attended sporting event in the world, the biggest prize money in tennis, it's the fourth Grand Slam event that takes place in Flushing Meadows in Queens, New York. There are a few reasons that I wanted to talk about this project in particular. For one thing, in this case with this client, the symbol was really important to them. You will see if you work in the field, some clients that are business-to-business maybe the logo or the symbol is not so important. In the case of an entertainment brand and a sport brand like the US Open, the symbol is unbelievably important. It turns up on TV. It turns up on merchandise. It turns up on the grounds itself. When you think about symbols, there are different types of symbols in terms of concept. So let's just look at this continuum from things that are pictorial and referential. In other words, they reference something specific, something concrete in our universe. If it's the elephant we did for Animal Planet, if it's the peacock for NBC, and so on. Those are things that we understand what they are. On the other side of the spectrum are things that are abstract like the symbol we created for Conservation International or even the National Geographic yellow frame fits there on that side of the spectrum. You can imagine that they are shades throughout between things that we abstract to a certain degree. So even if you look at NBC and Animal Planet side-by-side, Animal Planet is much more pictorial or illustrative than the NBC peacock, which is much more stylized and moved in the direction of the abstract. The US Open mark that I'm going to talk you through falls right in the center of that continuum. It is clearly references something from the real world, but it is also gone through several degrees of abstraction. So it really is more of a mark. That's why I thought that was a very nice example to get you through the process of where do we take something to get it so that it's distinctive and ownable and yet understandable. So we're going to dive into the process and it will include four steps. First, research, then design exploration and development, a little bit about trademark, and then preparing the presentation. In the next lesson, we'll start with research.
5. Conduct Your Research: The first thing we want do is conduct conversations with people that are in charge of the brand, and these could be people in different levels of the organizations or the company. We kind of think of ourselves as a sponge. We want to understand everything there is to know about the company or the institution: who do they think they are, how do they see themselves, how are they different from their peers or competitors, what are their vision for the future, who are their peers or competitors. We want to understand everything there is to know about, the identity that they have now, has it worked, what doesn't work, and where does the logo appear. Those are some of the questions that we will ask them. For that, we just conduct informal conversations. Every company or institution has its own culture. So these conversations are unbelievably different from one another. Some people talk a lot. Some people give you yes or no answers. Sometimes the interviews will last for an hour. Sometimes they will last for 20 minutes. It really depends on the type of company and the type of culture and also on each individual person. In some way, we need to be like a chameleon here. We need to really adjust to the person that we're talking to. After every conversation, we know more about the client, and then we can kind of tease out additional nuances or information from the next person we're talking to. So this is really a journey. At the end of this journey, we hope to know about the client almost as much as they know about themselves. Sometimes those questions that we ask help them also figure out things that they didn't even know about themselves. Because as outsiders, we can cut through a lot of emotional stuff and really ask the important questions that help us understand who they are and how they would like to be represented. The questions we ask are oftentimes not at all about a logo, or identity, or even the brand, it's really about them. I mean, oftentimes the first question is, well, what do you do in the company and how did you come to join the company? What are your responsibilities? That's meant to also pick people's mind at ease, but also to gain a sense for the culture. Now, we are here delving into a company, let say is an insurance company, but how is it different from every other insurance company? Well, every company has a distinct culture and we're trying to get a feel for that. Everything we hear goes through a certain filter, and we do understand that they know about their business and they know the best about their business. But you also have to remember that you are the expert in creating a representation for them. Sometimes what they tell you is, "We're looking for this. So yeah, I want to have a sun for my logo." In fact, you in your own mind can determine that sun is not what they need. So everything has to go through a certain filter, and we're going to talk about that phase of analysis a little later. The second point of input for us is market research, and that's not done in every case. Obviously, market research is an investment. That means that the brand really relies on the mark and the symbol, the logo for their essential business needs. So it's important enough for them to invest in research. We can test various things from recognizability of the logo at the moment where we stepped in so that if it has a lot of equity, we may not want to change it very much all the way to other nuances about name and so on that you're going to see when we start talking about, specifically the US Open. Then the third thing is your own analysis, your own judgment. You are not coming into this as objective observer, you bring in your own expertise, your own instincts. It's very important that all the input that you take in that you look at it and judge for yourself what makes sense and what may not make sense, and that's where you might have to push back on the client.
6. Define the Problem: This first phase what we call research phase is really the point where you define the problem to be solved, and oftentimes this is done in those conversations with the client. But ultimately, you have to come out of this phase with a clear understanding about what is the problem that you're trying to solve, what needs fixing so that you can define the criteria for success. So it's not about what we like or we dislike; it's about what's going to work to solve the problem. So let's talk about what this meant in the case of the US Open. When we walked in, they had a reason to take this on at that time. They were celebrating their 50th anniversary of the Open era. Oftentimes there's kind of a milestone that gives an organization a reason to look at a fresh identity, and that was the case there. But there were so many other reasons to look at the mark and specifically the symbol for the US Open. The first is that just from us looking at it, it looked a bit dated. They also had a very hard time using it. It had this gold gradient inside the mark. So from a technical standpoint, it had challenges. In the interviews, we went after two things. One is we wanted to know: Does the US Open logo need to have a reference to the sport? Does it need to be about tennis in some way? The reason is that when we looked at the other three Grand Slams, some of them have a clear reference to tennis. Like Wimbledon has the rackets, or the French Open has a nod to the color of the court which is the clay with the lines on it, but Australian Open has no reference to the sport. So we wanted to know: Do we need to have a reference to the sport in the mark for the US Open? Because in the back of our mind, there was always the US Open golf that is a very famous, very popular event in the US. So we put that to the test. For that, we went and conducted research and we wanted to know what people associated just with the words US Open. So we asked that. A 1,000 people were asked, "When you hear the words US Open, what do you think about?" The results were very interesting, 42 percent of people said tennis. But exactly the same number, 42 percent said golf and the rest were confused. That truly gave us a sense and pointed us in the direction that we absolutely have to have a nod to the sport. If somebody buys a t-shirt at the US Open with the logo on it and then goes out into the world and it has no nod to the sport, then it did nothing. You can see that that's a case where research really helped kind of point us in a direction of what is that new thing have to be and what is the criteria for success here. The second question we had for people in the interviews, which is a question we often ask, is meant to help us with what in a conceptual starting points for the symbol. How do we start? Where do we start coming up with this symbol? What should it grow out of? What should it represent, and also what kind of personality does it need to strike? We start by saying the symbol has to be very simple, so it cannot say very much. But if there was one idea, or one feeling, or one personality trait that we could distill into that simple mark, what should it be for the US Open? The wording of this question is actually very helpful because it immediately sets up to say we cannot say very much with a logo, and that helps manage expectations at the end. But that also forces them to focus on the one thing that they want to be differentiated, that they want to be known by. You're going to get a lot of huffs and puffs from the clients saying, "Well, that's really difficult." It is difficult. That's the point. They have to focus because the mark has to be focused conceptually and also visually has to be very simple. So when we asked that question, we got different words from different people. What we realized is that all these words kind of pointed us back into their old mark of the idea of a flaming tennis ball. So we thought we have a situation where the personality and the idea really is appropriate for the current design, but we think this design is looking old. This is where we had to turn back into research because we wanted to know if the current silhouette, if the current representation of a tennis ball has equity in the market to people recognize it. Because if we were to find that it does, we would do very little to change it. We would want to keep it similar to what it looks because building equity is very difficult, building recognition takes a lot of time and investment. So the first thing is do no harm. We have to make sure that if there is equity, we maintain it. We wanted to know: Do people recognize the mark? So we put the mark in front of 1,000 people in the company of other famous marks and asked what is it. The results came in and they were surprising in many ways. We were wondering who are the two percent that doesn't recognize the Olympic rings. But for the US Open, it was pretty sad results and they were surprised. They thought that they will see greater recognition of their mark that they used for 20 years. In fact, only nine percent of people recognized the US Open flaming ball. If you look at it in comparison to others, even the French Open was more recognized in the US compared with the US Open. This input is kind of complicated, right? Because on the one hand, we hear from people that the personality traits and the ideas of the flaming tennis ball is the right direction, and on the other hand, the current rendition of the flaming ball is not very well recognized. So this is where we define the problem. The problem was we need to reinvent the identity but retaining the essential idea. So we need to update the identity presenting them as a modern brand, as a forward-looking brand, as a timeless brand but with a clear connection to the idea of a flaming tennis ball. That was our marching orders. This was our mandate. The research phase and specifically the conversations that we conduct is the place where we figure out what is appropriate, right? That's the mysterious one. That's the one that we're after. Distinctive and simple, that's us. We know how to achieve something distinctive and simple, and we also know when we see it. But appropriate is the one that we have to dig in with a client and understand exactly where do we draw inspiration from both for the concept and for the personality.
7. Design the Solution: So only when we feel like we gathered all the information, that we defined the problem is when we start sketching. Sketching, we always do by hand. You can use any tool. Is it a pencil, or a magic marker, or a pen, or even a brush and paint, or ink, either way, it's something that you hold with your hand and it's not a mouse. So there's a reason that this computer is off. We only sketch by hand in the beginning because if you jump on a computer right away, the pre-program function of the computer would always draw you to make things that look more expected and ultimately generic. It's your hand and your mind that will make something that's truly creative and original. In your sketching process, you start with an idea. You don't touch the pencil or your tool before you have an idea in your head that you want to translate into form. Those ideas, once you sketch them and they are in front of you, then your mind will start reacting to the sketch that you are looking at and we'll take it places. So I want to just talk about the sketches that we did for the US Open because that process was very rigorous and we came up with thousands of sketches. So this pile is some of the sketches. The problem that we defined was to create some iteration of a flaming, moving, hot, energetic tennis ball. With that in mind, we went into kind of a frenzy of exploration. You can see that these things are of every sort of every type of mark that really takes many different shapes and different approaches to it. Some of these are on envelopes. Some of these are on airline menus because that's where we do our sketching. We're not looking for quantity or for numbers. We're looking for quality of sketches, and we're looking to flesh out all the possible iterations and all the possible ideas. Persistency is key here. You have to think about it all the time and you have to try it every which way in different versions, different line weights, different orientations, different proportions, all will lead you ultimately to something that's great. Maybe things on the way will not be great, but every idea leads to another idea. The tiny ones are the ones that we're most interested in. Because if it works in tiny size, it will also work in large size. Sometimes we will blow it up on a Xerox machine just so we can have something bigger to trace on, and then we will place the tracing paper on top of our sketch and maybe create something completely different of the same idea. This is how the ideas are developed and taken forward. Within each direction, we have different iterations. Because once we come up with a direction that we think has a promise, we try to follow it to its ultimate conclusion. In other words, peeling information, peeling details, trying to find the simplest possible way that is still distinctive to render that idea. I'd like to just walk us through the ultimate direction that ended up with the final logo. So when you look at these and you follow this progression, each step really brings us closer to something that is simpler, more focused, and sharper. Sharper not in shape, but sharper in rendition, in concept. So this one looks the closest to what they had, and then we see that it gets simplified and becomes these shapes that feel like they're all of the same family, and then it becomes tighter, and then it becomes only three shapes, and then those shapes become even more abstract all the way to this mark, a gesture, a swish. It's really no longer an illustration. It's no longer a direct representation of a tennis ball. Because if you think about a tennis ball, those are rounded. So usually, people render them like this because that's how we usually see the tennis ball. But the power of a logo is that it shouldn't be the way you usually see it. It should be some tension between the way you see the ball in the real world and the way it's represented in the mark. When we started thinking about it, as the ball is moving, these are no longer curve. They're going to be straight. So this is where we ended up here, where actually these are straight. They're no longer curve. So we finally had a rendition that had kind of something innovative about it, and we got very excited. So once you get to something like this, a silhouette that you're truly excited about and feel like there's nowhere else you can take it with your hand, then you jump on a computer. I'm not going to teach you how to execute designs on Illustrator or in vector form. I'm sure there are other classes that can teach you how to do that. So you know these cooking shows where suddenly the chicken is ready and you pull it out of the oven, that's what we're going to do now. We're going to go to the computer and the logo is already going to be there. That symbol has been drawn as a perfect vector. Yes, there were some steps on the way from this sketch to the vector. But ultimately, you scan it in and you trace it. That's the idea. Don't try to make it blind. Scan it in and trace it exactly. Because as we said, your hand knows best. Obviously, on the way from the sketch to the vector, we had to make some decisions, some tweaking, and especially decisions about color. Obviously, in this case, according to what we heard based on the research that we really need to have a direct nod to tennis. There was not a lot of question here about color, but obviously what shade of yellow and also the background here with the blue that they've had traditionally. As you saw, the original design had a version that they call the patriotic logo that they really liked with the red, white, and blue. But we really didn't think that we needed to worry about the red here because the name is US Open, for God's sake. So the idea of the US is built into the name, and we felt that we really had the liberty here to really focus on those two colors, the yellow and the blue, as their brand colors. I want to pause for a second and talk about typography. The wordmark that they had that you can see here in the corner of the screen, as we said, everybody felt that it was kind of old fashion and lacked impact, and really looked old and rigid. When you think about the typography that will go with your symbol, you have to think in the same way that you think about the symbol itself. What qualities do we want the topography to capture? What kind of personality do we want it to project? In this case, we were looking for something youthful, something energetic, something bold, and something with movement. So we set out to draw sans serif, modern, italic typography which we set in all lower case. The nice thing about the all lowercase is that when done right, the u and the n are the same exact shape upside down. So it bookends the wordmark beautifully as one unit. The idea of the typography is to make it look as if it was meant to be, that those letters that you were dealt in the name were meant to be together and coexist together and really something harmonious. Then we went into one of the most important parts of this process, which is to make the logo looks real, to make it look like, "Yes, that can be our face." When the client comes into a presentation, they never see the logo just on an empty screen because nobody will see the logo like that. They see it in context. This is the next phase that we're going to talk about, preparing a presentation.
8. Present to Your Client: A silhouette like this, a mark like this, a symbol like this, no matter how much we as designers are excited about it and think that it perfectly solve the problem, it will never ever reach a place where it is adopted by a client if it's not presented properly. The idea of a presentation is to really bring it to life and prove to the client that it can become their face over time. That is done by very carefully applying the mark to a cross section of communications that are important to the client. We start by showing the most visible places, the most important places, like on the back wall in the case of the US Open, and really marrying it with, in this case, the face of American tennis, Serena Williams really brings in an emotional engagement with the client and their world, and immediately we move it into social media, because the idea of the mark being able to translate into different media was for them top of mind, very important, in the way that we also arrange and order the applications in the presentation is to really hit on the important things to them. You can see that we take great care in presenting it in the right environment. This is actually somebody that's sitting on the subway watching the game on social media. We then go into a vision from far. It's very important that the logo will look good from far. If the symbol was complicated, if the symbol was not simple, it would fall apart from far. In fact, a silhouette like this it is so simple and distinctive flourishes in those extraneous conditions of a view from far. That's what we want to prove. Also, an embroidery. We create these mock-ups to show that it will work well in every situation, and then as we work through these things, we're proving to them that it would work in broadcast, in any type of reproduction, whether it's letterpress, or whether it's gold foil, or on jerseys and so on and so forth. The idea is to show them that the possibilities of reproduction are endless because the mark is so simple. For them, this gold stamping was very important because the idea of something that can look premium for very premium event was again top of mind. We want to show them that it doesn't rely on the color. We talked about the advantage of a distinctive silhouette. So in some cases, color is not available. So on the tennis balls themselves, it is just stamped in black. So to show that it retains its distinction and it retains its recognizability in the silhouette form is very important. Same thing onsite. Arterized stadium is like the Olympus of logos. All these famous logos white knocked out of a blue bar. So the idea of showing the mark in white silhouette on that bar was very important for them to see that it can work. Digital was almost the most important thing for them. You can see, shall we say less successful app icon for the French Open and much more complicated app icon for Wimbledon. They really felt very good seeing this app icon as something that commands attention. Sometimes you will hear people talk about a visual language. It's very important that the logo does not rely on a visual language to work. A visual language, what we call the graphics around the logo, color palette, graphic elements, typography, all has to be there and all will be there, but our concern is that that silhouette will work with any visual language. So in this case, we developed this visual language of these ribbons that behave like tennis balls, and that worked very well for them for the launch because it really goes with the graphic feeling of the new logo. These applications that you're seeing here are obviously tailored for the US Open. During the conversation with them in the early stages, we really tried to figure out what are the most important moments where the logo will be seen and what are the most important contexts for them. When you design an identity for a client, you will have to figure out what are the applications that are important to that client. It's very important to get into their head and understand what will make them tick, what will elicit an emotional response, and use it to your advantage. Now, bear in mind that what I just showed you are applications for this silhouette that ended up being selected. Obviously, we show options. Every client gets to see at least three options no more than six, and all of these options are shown in the same exact applications. So this presentation can get very repetitive, but this is really the only way we know how to judge which is the best logo. I will also say that before you get into this presentation and present it to the client, you should know which is your favorite. You shouldn't tip the scale. You don't even need to let them know which one is your favorite, but be ready to be asked and good clients will ask you which is your favorite, and you should also be ready to explain why. Really, the product, what they're selling is all this excitement around these superstar players, around the energy of the game, around the sports itself, and the logo just comes at the end to punctuate, to drive home who is sending me this message, and that is the perfect functionality of a good logo.
9. Final Thoughts: This is the process that we fall every time we develop a symbol like this no matter for whom. For a large company, for a small company, it's always the same process. As I said, this process hasn't changed in a very long time because it seems to work. The one thing that is kind of the X factor is what you bring to the table in the form of your talent. Everybody has their own tendencies, their own sensitivities, their own sensibilities, and now it's time for you to go out and get a client for whom you can really create something that will become meaningful for them over time. As I said, this is a problem-solving discipline. You need a client to provide you with a problem. This is not going to work for you sitting at home just doodling. You have to have somebody that needs a solution, and then you can put your talent and what you learned today into good use. I hope you go and find a client, whether it's a small business in your neighborhood, or whether it's your school, or whoever it is that can actually participate and engage with you so that in conversation you can discover what the problem is and then offer some options for a solution. Thanks for spending this time with me. I can't wait to see what you'll create.
10. Explore More on Skillshare: way.
Sagi Haviv, Designer
