Eric Hu

0:03it's time now for our fourth and final speaker of the evening so eric who is a creative director who's held top roles in the design and fashion industry including global design director at nike sportswear and director of design at essence uh he's also known for his critical and considered perspective on the creative industry and the wider world generally um he's joining us this evening from new york to talk us through one or two projects that he hasn't spoken about that much publicly in the past um we're really excited to have you here uh eric you can turn on your audio and video there you are already how's it going how's it going not too bad thanks how are you

0:36good good um i just want to thank you guys for having me here um i just wanted to just give a quick shout out to it's nice that um you know just such a generous thing that you're doing for the public for everyone interested in creativity um it's come a long way you know from when i was a student you know religiously checking it's nice that and to where it is now and you know just really excited that you know this just keeps that momentum and you know just impacts like the community at large wow well thank you so much eric that's that's incredibly kind um yeah i really appreciate that um i'll i'll leave you to share your screen now and start your presentation

1:15um everyone else questions as as usual there's been quite a few coming in which is great um and we'll try and get around to a few after eric's finished great over to you awesome cool um yeah so i'm gonna i'm gonna be talking about one project today that i Chapter 2: About Eric haven't really like shared publicly um and go into a little bit more detail but i also understand that you know maybe not everyone in the audience uh is familiar with my work or does what i do or is it even in the same field right um so i'm just going to quickly just kind of give an introduction to myself uh so my name is eric who and i run it feels so weird to say this but i run eric studio based in brooklyn new york

1:57um and so i'm a freelance creative director with a background in branding or hydration uh typography and digital and i know those are just a bunch of buzzwords that mean a lot and nothing at the same time but you know if i had to just pick one sentence and stick with it what i do is essentially i make images scream and i make words sing and often times maybe even the opposite of that you know i have a pretty varied background um what you might be hearing in the back is my cat gyoza so i apologize on his behalf but he knows exactly what he's doing um but you know i think my biggest passions have been typography and image making and because of the

2:38skill sets that i have i often find myself working in the field of branding um you know branding is kind of nebulous and encompasses a lot of different things right it but brand answers why a company exists you know a brand isn't the company a brand is the point of view of the company and what i help you know a brand do is to articulate itself or in essence i help a company articulate its brand and so a lot of times it's figuring out you know what kind of photography is used or is it even photography at all maybe it's an illustration or perhaps it's like something that's exists in between those two you know

3:16oftentimes it's asking what kind of colors does this brand embody um or does it have colors at all what is that tone of voice is it loud or is it quiet but the writing that most people associate with you know oftentimes it starts with a logo and the entryway into a brand is a logo and that happens to be you know the thing that i'm most passionate about in the branding process i never would have imagined that a lifelong you know obsession with fonts is essentially now the means in which i make a living but you know or the means in which i help people translate their own art into another format but it's taking me to unique

3:57opportunities and unique collaborations with people and you know i've been incredibly grateful using my expertise in lettering or illustration or image making just to create these kind of life stories in these kind of worlds for people you know i've worked for small companies and i've also worked at large companies as matt has mentioned um and i've been in charge of some pretty ambitious rebrands but a lot of what i try to do in my brand work is to try to see how far i can go and how much variation i could have with just one ingredient you know can i make just a single typeface look like the inner lining of a cow stomach by repeating it a couple times

4:36or can i make it look like you know the colony of fungal growth by doing you know another set of filters and so that's something that came into play when i got asked to rebrand one of nike's most cherishes Chapter 3: Nike Lab cherished franchises while i was there uh nike lab um nike lab is essentially where nike puts a lot of special projects uh where it becomes less about the culture of sport and more about sport as a driver of culture itself you know nike lab is where collaborations with other brands happen it's where nike gets to collaborate with comedy garcon or acronym um or kim jones and there's you know there's a lot of

5:22prestige that's within these collaborations drive a lot of um the business itself and so i think one of the kind of issues with is that like the current logo was very much or the logo that was previous like you know now it's now it's my logo but the logo that was around when i first started at nike um it had been about half a decade old which you know in the age of social media feels like a million years right but it also was very entrenched in nike's brand um it looks very much like nike and you know when your platform is supposed to collaborate with other brands um how can you make it say nike without

6:04really making it look like nike um at the same time there is so much kind of equity built into nike lab nike lab is a huge kind of driver um in a lot of the products nike makes and so you couldn't really deviate too far from the original storytelling um but what i like to do is that you know i really try to just get like a metaphorical scalpel and try to pick things apart and and see what you know what could change and what doesn't change um you know one thing that's different from nike live in the rest of nike is that the the swoosh logo is rotated at 90 degrees and that's become kind of like a an interesting shorthand like when it's rotated 90 degrees it isn't always true

6:44but oftentimes you know that's a nike light product and that's something that you know was worth keeping i think the next were these eight little tick marks um Chapter 4: Nike Lab Logo they symbolized the original kind of eight innovation technologies like such as flyknit that nike was responsible for i'm not gonna name all eight of them because i simply don't remember them um but you know that was kind of like the foundation of when nike lab was like kind of built on this innovation and then the rest was the typeface and this seemed to be the most kind of malleable it was really you know these two that felt like the most nike lab for me

7:15um and so i think the first thing in order was to try to get those eight tick marks and sit and ask myself like how can i make these more kind of impactful you know the the current nike lab logo was just like very solid and very stationary one place how could we kind of activate that and so my first inclination and it's funny because i i actually had 48 hours um to show to show people something so i had 48 hours to try to think of like a new kind of branding system for nike lab but the first thing i did was like instead of having it on one line you know i split it into two and by splitting it into two i kind of created this playground that could happen

7:53um it became this sort of grid and what it also did was that you know i thought about like the least divisible kind of components um how much can you take away while still maintaining the brand so you know on the on the left side it's nike lab the full logo and it spells out nike lab but there's also cases where you know just like a piece of lego you could just have it without the nike lab type and if anything you could just have it with just the vertical swoosh now you could also just have the vertical switch itself but you know the four kind of dots on the one on the right at least allows some kind of like orientation or knowing like which

8:34you know which is right side up and knowing that that rotation is intentional and so in practice you kind of see the logo uh you know fully articulated by itself but again it was able to just shrink down because you were able to take pieces out and just give it like a little shorthand that's in nike lab in some cases where you didn't want to spell it out you could just omit all the typography in general but most importantly you know this was really about making sure that the logo is a playground for collaborations and so in the absence of the nike lab text you're able to place the collaboration logo directly there and it was

9:13it was in my opinion a much more interesting solution than just simply doing like the streetwear multiplication kind of x kind of symbol and really it just became this blank canvas you could kind of just put whatever you want in that surface and it would still be fine i think another thing that came later on was like allowing it to change the style of swoosh that you wanted um you know the swoosh with uh the text nike on the left side for example is mostly in kind of vintage or retro kind of streetwear kind of products because that's like an older logo whereas the one on the right tends to be used more in athletic products and more innovation products but you know collaborators now there

9:53aren't just wanting to to mess around with you know an air force one or something classic they actually a lot of collaborators we started seeing at the time i was there wanted to really you know put their mark on um some of the cutting-edge nike products and so you know and another thing is also because you know they were dots it didn't really have to be the exact kind of geometric shape at all it's more about the composition if you arrange a bunch of repeating objects it doesn't even matter if it was a square or a set of uh you know quotation marks as long as it was composed in the right kind of format it's still red nike lab and so it really allowed you know a lot of variation and a loud

10:32kind of just cooperation and collaboration to really sing it wasn't really about trying to force a brand into nike's box it was about opening that box you know um and activating it for just different kind of situations um and eventually you know there's and nike live has kind of like an expanded universe where it's not just nike lab but other kind of lines of innovation and and influencer kind of marketing stuff and that started um flowing out as well and taking on you know a shape of its own and so you know it was it was interesting to just try to think of a brand that's like flexible and malleable like i think my approach to branding in general is like i you know i'm not going to be there to be

11:21a cop or a hall monitor and force you know how a brand is articulated every time like oh you use the wrong font or oh like that's the wrong type of imagery you know that's a lot of designers like biggest fears and they write big like guideline books and do's and don'ts and hand it you know to their clients and tell them what to do i don't really like to do that i know that ultimately you know i make a logo but as soon as i drop it off it's not mine anymore you know it's they have to take ownership of it and so i like to make things that not only are okay if you break the rules or leave things out but

11:53maybe perhaps encourage that behavior um in actuality so you know it's it's been interesting just to see it out in the world and eeing like you know different typefaces being used um you know this is this was a flyer by the nike live chicago team for a virgil abloh workshop and you know just simply it's interesting just to see the logo like applied and just like um in ways that i i didn't expect and just to allow that you know kind of serendipity to take place and so you know what i what i wanted to kind of walk away with in the 48 hours was you know this was this was my first attempt and i and i knew that i knew that you know when you work in-house at a corporation and stuff it there's a lot of revisions that go on

12:42there's a lot of feedback a lot of people have different opinions on things and and you know you have to have a thick skin you have to expect that the first thing you come up with um isn't isn't going to make it out in the end and you're going to have to change your design a lot of times to just kind of accommodate that but what was kind of amazing was that you know 48 hours from when i got asked to do this to 48 hours later and like the presentation um to it now in the world it it hasn't changed um and you know i don't want to like blow sunshine up my own behind but like maybe you know maybe this is something that like people felt like that they could take ownership too that you know a lot of things weren't kind of set in

13:23stone it was a flexible logo that you could take on in many forms and that you know people could find a use for it it wasn't really about a particular font or any language at all and it wasn't really about you know the particular shapes that like how to make of it it was more kind of like an empty canvas or vessel um you know i'm going to cut my thing Chapter 5: Conclusion short because i know we're running on behind on time but i think before i end this presentation i i also want to say that you know the myth of a designer being that lone creative genius is is simply not true the design happens oftentimes in in teams and you know these are some of the names

14:03of the people that i've worked with and nike that you know while you know i was there in the trenches with the design files myself and coming up with this were people that you know that not only inspired me but also critiqued me held me accountable um and also you know people that sat next to me and and supported me through a lot of things and and also just led a helping hand in many situations and so you know i wanted to just make sure that you know that as you know as i present as ariku and in what i do you know the eric coo was not possible and this project was not possible without a lot of the people involved at nike and so yeah i'm gonna wrap it up there because

14:44i know we have to kind of wrap things up a little bit but yeah that's um that's the gist of what i came to talk about in my presentation thanks eric that was amazing yeah such a great insight into that um to that project i've got a few questions for you but before that i think Chapter 6: Questions everyone will join me in saying hello back to gyoza the cat if uh if he or she is still there but yeah just wanted to say hello because i think just you know being friendly at the beginning of the call there um one question i guess is i mean it seems it's a really interesting project it seems like one a really good example of

15:15a project whose kind of simplicity you kind of mentioned allows for a lot of variety i'm kind of curious do you get surprised by the opportunities and variations that kind of work when you do that are you you presumably don't start with everything already laid out you kind of you get surprised by what's possible yeah i i do i mean i think what what's been helpful was that like i was a web developer um before i was a designer um and when you build the web you build very differently than a designer does you know designers often see things from the top looking down you see the bigger picture first and you kind of

15:49draw a plan i think when you're a developer an engineer you start with little parts first um and it's not about a grand overarching scheme a lot of times i mean there is but you know a majority of your work is building small components and doing it really well and so and and i think about this quote a lot from the mayor of taipei that you know if everyone puts their heart towards solving small problems there's no more big problems um and you know maybe it's a stretch to say this applies perfectly in a graphic design context but i think just the experience of doing that you know i'm able to anticipate most things but that being said you know i absolutely there's things that people do

16:29that kind of surprise me and you know when it when it doesn't fly and when it doesn't look good i think it's fine i think it's just like kind of part of the process you know it's like i don't want to live you know i don't subscribe to the kind of vision that you know some designers maybe in the past and present have had where everything needs to be fully planned out and things i just don't think that's just a realistic view of how the world works or how it happens and so you know i i do my best to kind of give a helping hand and you know people could remove things and change things as they should um

17:00does it break my ego sometimes like maybe but i think just you know the positives that way the negatives for sure well that's more more Chapter 7: Working Process honest than a lot of people would be i think that's great to hear um interesting question from david here i guess you mentioned that you had 48 hours roughly to kind of turn this around and david asks what's your kind of working process with a tight deadline like that i mean which bits do you truncate and which bits do you kind of make sure that you keep in at their length yeah i i would say it's probably like you know being like an raf pilot in world war ii where it's like nine hours of

17:32sitting in your chair and then ten minutes of sheer terror uh when the you know fighting comes but i think you know i think like most of my peers who maybe have the same neuro divergences and tendencies like you know i have a short attention span and i procrastinate a lot um but you know i've over the years i've instead of trying to fight it i've learned to just kind of like cope with it um i've learned to just kind of run my head and run my brain so you know the actual design it's placing a couple squares in in illustrator what what happens a lot of times it's like a lot of it's like 10 hours just in my head and really just 10 minutes of just like kind of executing it um and i wish it weren't i wish i was

18:14one of those people that could just kind of iterate things and there's times where i do but i think um just to just kind of survive and to try to deal with like my adhd and things that i also kind of struggle with i've had to just practice to just like figure out what could go wrong and all the problem solving and the aesthetics like very clearly in my head and then just like you know measure twice cut once kind of um kind of approach to how i work right and just finally one one final question for you if i've got time um i guess just you know you obviously Chapter 8: Negotiating have such great experience of working in a big corporate i mean nike's they don't go much bigger than that how do you kind of get your i guess negotiate so that you

18:53your ideas get taken through i know you kind of touched on it a little bit in your presentation but maybe just go into a bit more detail maybe um i think it's you know i think like it you know it really rarely when an idea gets rejected is it actually like a bad idea you know a lot of times it's how it's sold um my father was a salesman and so frankly like there were just a lot of like salesmanship books that i had to just read when i was younger when i wanted a playstation i had to prepare powerpoint presentation so a lot of it is kind of like sheer practice but you know there's definitely like a lot of books you can read that's helpful about

19:33presenting stuff good in a room um is one book that i highly recommend i think a lot of times it's also just knowing like how to negotiate and how to defend yourself and things like that like i think for example you know a lot of times people focus on the whys like if somebody asks you to do something you don't want to do it you're you're like why do i why and that's a kind of asking a question that starts with why gets you kind of nowhere but when you ask like how do you expect me to do that when it's how you know you kind of force the other person to have empathy for you and have put themselves in your shoes like if someone's like you should i think you should make this red instead of saying

20:12like why should you make this red it doesn't make sense it's like well how can we make it red but still communicate you know x and y and z or sorry z that i wanted to communicate and you know you get kind of people involved and i think another way that brings me to my next point and i'll try to be succinct i know i ramble but a lot of times it's just like if you could make people feel included it goes a long way you know a lot of people want to just give their feedback and if they the more involved they feel the more it feels like it was an idea that they also came up with they're more likely to advocate it for

20:44it as well so i know this might sound kind of creepy icky house of cards style negotiation but i think in the corporate world that is maybe um kind of necessary and it's frankly also a big reason why i left that world it's it's not you know how i want to do things every day but i i think it's naive to think you know i would say it's naive for people that want to avoid these kind of situations to act to act as if they're never going to encounter those right and so i think the more you learn and the more you're able to understand it um the more you're able to kind of have things work in your favor i think amazing eric thanks so much um we are going to have to leave it there but i really appreciate the the presentation and those uh those

21:23great insights at the end there um so thank you very much no thank you