It’s the age of the makeover. From plastic surgery to
kitchen remodeling, there’s a sense that a new look
equals greater opportunities. Graphic identities are
no exception. When companies or organizations
redefine themselves visually, it can transform everything
from employee morale to the bottom line.
Too often, though, redesigns don’t include much
more than a shiny new logo, so they miss out on a
wealth of opportunities to create a cohesive, lasting
brand. It’s a syndrome that the in-house design team
at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was determined
to avoid.
In spring 2004—roughly a year before the opening
of a building expansion designed by Herzog &
de Meuron—design director Andrew Blauvelt and
senior designer Chad Kloepfer started working on a
new identity. It was a tall order: The system needed
to live up to the landmark architecture and reflect the
Walker’s multidisciplinary approach, which encompasses
everything from film and new media to visual
arts and design. Graphics couldn’t be stiff or static;
they had to work on a variety of projects and at a
wide range of sizes. But despite this inherent need
for flexibility, the identity still had to create a strong
visual presence. It needed to say Walker.
Today the center’s materials are covered with
colorful pattern strips embedded with descriptive
words. These elements are used alone and stacked
on top of one another. It’s an identity system made
from a kit of parts. “We got our inspiration from
a roll of tape—being able to take a roll of tape and
slap it across something edge to edge,” Kloepfer says.
With this concept, “we could brand anything from a
postcard to a building just by varying the scale of the
words and patterns.”
Flexibility in action
Meet Walker Expanded. It’s an identity system that
looks like a mixture of graffiti, street signs, and firstrate
typography. Unlike most identities, it puts a
good deal of decision-making power into the hands
of individual designers. They choose the patterns
and colors and combine them with vocabularies
grouped by purpose. There’s a set of words, for
example, that relate to the Walker Shop and another
called Peer to Peer for internal use.
Designers are free to stack—or not—as many
patterns as they see fit. They can also vary sizes and
generally use the system’s elements in the best way for
the project at hand. A recent calendar, for example,
needed just a single pattern/word strip running down
the side of its pages; this approach reinforced the
Walker brand while allowing the calendar to maintain
its own look. For the parking garage under the
new building, designers blew up the scale of the system
to brand the walls. Bags from the Walker Shop
feature multiple pattern strips in a variety of sizes.
The letters
When it comes to typography, the majority of words
in the identity are in Avenir. It was chosen because
it meshed well with the organization’s existing typeface,
called Walker, which was custom-designed for
the center by Matthew Carter in the mid ’90s. In
the new identity system, this custom font is used
to display the name of the art center, the website
address, and the shop name. The Walker typeface
appears prominently on stationery, business cards,
and other institutional materials.
Although the typefaces are both sans serifs, their
dissimilarity allows them to coexist easily in the identity
system.
A technical challenge
There’s something else unusual about the Walker
identity: It functions much like a font. There are
eight “faces” grouped under three headings—
Pattern, Peer to Peer, and Public Address—that
largely represent categories of descriptive words.
Each word corresponds to a letter on the keyboard.
Hit the S key, for example, in the Public Address 3
font, and the word screenings will appear in perfectly
set type. Another font is called Walker Expanded
Pattern—it allows designers to type out various patterns
via letters on the keyboard. The lines or swirls
appear in small segments that can be overlapped to
create extended pattern strips.
Since multiple business
cards were
printed on a sheet,
designers took advantage
of the opportunity
to create six
different designs. This
approach shows off
the identity system’s
flexibility, and each
employee randomly
receives two versions.
The technical mastermind behind this system is
Eric Olson, a principal at Process Type Foundry in
St. Paul, Minn. He was tapped by Walker’s in-house
design team to make the identity system as easy to
use as it is flexible. The Walker turned over dozens
of pieces to Olson and asked whether it was possible
to turn the elements into a font. As a former Walker
designer, Olson was in a unique position to come up
with a solution that was both intuitive and practical.
It only takes a few simple steps to build a pattern
strip. A designer types out a pattern, then selects
a word within one of the themed typefaces. The
designer might hit D, for example, to get the word
design, and then hit Shift+D to create a type box the
same length as the word. The type box can be colored
as the designer chooses, and deleting the space
between the box and the word perfectly overlaps
the two. In this way, the designer overlaps the two
fonts—pattern and word—to create a pattern strip.
Thanks to some smart decisions on Olson’s part,
the font setup works seamlessly. Words, for example,
float instead of sitting on the baseline. This means
they’re always centered when overlapped with the
various patterns. In another move to facilitate overlapping,
text boxes and words share the same width.
He also made the x-height of all the typefaces the
same, so it’s easy to swap and interchange elements at
every size.
Beyond the logo
Olson believes designers are increasingly aware that
typefaces, especially custom typefaces, can be vitally
important to an identity. A custom face is flexible,
unique, and proprietary. Walker Expanded has all
the advantages of a custom font with the branding
capabilities of an identity system. As Olson puts it,
the identity’s parts work together like little Legos
that can be combined in seemingly endless ways.
“You can mix and match anything,” he says. “The
possibilities are extreme.”
Another advantage to Walker Expanded is that
it can grow and change organically with the art center.
In-house designers can add word sets or patterns
in the future, or create a custom pattern for a special
project. “I think that the flexibility of a system like
this makes it stronger than a logo,” Kloepfer says.
“An identity doesn’t have to be a logo. It can be a system
you use and change over time.”
