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I run a design studio in New York.
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Every seven years, I close it for one year
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to pursue
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some little experiments, things that
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are always difficult to accomplish
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during the regular working year.
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In that year, we are not available
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for any of our clients.
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We are totally closed.
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And as you can imagine,
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it is a lovely and very energetic time.
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I originally had opened the studio in New York
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to combine my two loves, music and design.
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And we created videos and packaging
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for many musicians that you know,
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and for even more that you've never heard of.
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As I realized, just like with many many things in my life
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that I actually love,
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I adapt to it.
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And I get, over time, bored by them.
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And for sure, in our case,
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our work started to look the same.
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You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book.
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Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged
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in a book, in a die cut.
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So I decided to close it down for one year.
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Also is the knowledge that
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right now we spend about
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in the first 25 years of our lives learning,
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then there is another 40 years
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that's really reserved for working.
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And then tacked on at the end of it
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are about 15 years for retirement.
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And I thought it might be helpful
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to basically cut off five of those retirement years
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and intersperse them in between those working years.
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(Applause)
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That's clearly enjoyable for myself.
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But probably even more important is
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that the work that comes out of these years
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flows back into the company
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and into society at large,
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rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.
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There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago,
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Jonathan Haidt,
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who defined his work into three different levels.
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And they rang very true for me.
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I can see my work as a job. I do it for money.
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I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays.
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And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism.
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In a career I'm definitely more engaged.
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But at the same time, there will be periods when I think
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is all that really hard work really worth my while?
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While in the third one, in the calling,
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very much likely I would do it also
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if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it.
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I am not a religious person myself,
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but I did look for nature.
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I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City.
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Looked for something different for the second one.
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Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing
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because I knew them too well. So Asia it was.
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The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia
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were Sri Lanka and Bali.
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Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was.
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It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.
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I arrived there in September 2008,
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and pretty much started to work right away.
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There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself.
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However the first thing that I needed was
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mosquito repellent typography
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because they were definitely around heavily.
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And then I needed some sort of way
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to be able to get back to all the wild dogs
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that surround my house,
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and attacked me during my morning walks.
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So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts.
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Every single dog on one tee shirt.
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As a little retaliation
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with a just ever so slightly menacing message
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(Laughter)
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on the back of the shirt.
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(Laughter)
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Just before I left New York
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I decided I could actually renovate my studio.
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And then just leave it all to them.
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And I don't have to do anything.
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So I looked for furniture.
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And it turned out that
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all the furniture that I really liked,
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I couldn't afford.
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And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like.
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So one of the things that we pursued in Bali
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was pieces of furniture.
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This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs.
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It's not quite finished yet.
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And I think by the time this lamp came about,
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(Laughter)
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I had finally made peace with those dogs.
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(Laughter)
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Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table.
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It's called Be Here Now.
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It includes 330 compasses.
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And we had custom espresso cups made
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that hide a magnet inside,
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and make those compasses go crazy,
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always centering on them.
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Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair.
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I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali.
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And at the same time, I'm extremely aware
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how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses.
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So I will not really go too far into it.
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Many of you will know this TEDster,
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Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually,
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I got it through the TED book club.
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I think it took me four years
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to finally read it, while on sabbatical.
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And I was pleased to see
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that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical.
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And I'll show you a couple of people
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that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.
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This is Ferran Adria. Many people think
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he is right now the best chef in the world
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with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli.
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His restaurant is open seven months every year.
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He closes it down for five months
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to experiment with a full kitchen staff.
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His latest numbers are fairly impressive.
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He can seat, throughout the year,
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he can seat 8,000 people.
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And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.
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If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical,
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it's 12.5 percent of my time.
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And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine,
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3M since the 1930s
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is giving all their engineers
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15 percent to pursue whatever they want.
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There is some good successes.
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Scotch tape came out of this program,
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as well as Art Fry developed
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sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M.
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Google, of course, very famously
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gives 20 percent for their software engineers
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to pursue their own personal projects.
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Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical?
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That's about five percent of everybody.
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So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up.
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Talk to them about if it was successful or not.
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I've found that
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finding out about what I'm going to like in the future,
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my very best way is talk to people
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who have actually done it
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much better than myself envisioning it.
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When I had the idea of doing one,
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the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book.
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And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it
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so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on.
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(Laughter)
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In the beginning, on the first sabbatical,
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it was rather disastrous.
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I had thought that I should do this without any plan,
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that this vacuum of time somehow would
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be wonderful and enticing
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for idea generation. It was not.
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I just, without a plan, I just reacted
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to little requests, not work requests,
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those I all said no to, but other little requests.
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Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that.
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So I became my own intern.
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(Laughter)
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And I very quickly
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made a list of the things I was interested in,
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put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time
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and then made a plan, very much like in grade school.
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What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing;
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9 to 10: future thinking.
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Was not very successful. And so on and so forth.
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And that actually, specifically as a starting point
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of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me.
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What came out of it?
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I really got close to design again.
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I had fun.
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Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful.
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Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.
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And probably most importantly,
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basically everything we've done
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in the seven years following the first sabbatical
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came out of thinking of that one single year.
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And I'll show you a couple of projects
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that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical.
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One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was
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that sameness is so incredibly overrated.
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This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same
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works for a very very few strand of companies,
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and not for everybody else.
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We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica,
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the Rem Koolhaas-built music center
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in Porto, in Portugal.
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And even though I desired to do an identity
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that doesn't use the architecture,
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I failed at that.
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And mostly also because I realized
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out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto, where
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he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning.
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Which I understood after I
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translated it from architecture speech
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in to regular English,
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basically as logo making.
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And I understood that the building itself was a logo.
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So then it became quite easy.
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We put a mask on it,
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looked at it deep down in the ground,
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checked it out from all sides,
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west, north, south, east,
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top and bottom.
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Colored them in a very particular way
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by having a friend of mine write a piece of software,
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the Casa da Musica Logo Generator.
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That's connected to a scanner.
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You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image.
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And the software, in a second,
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will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo.
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Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster,
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comes in handy, because the visual information of the logo
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and the actual poster is exactly the same.
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So it will always fit together, conceptually, of course.
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If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo.
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Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers,
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who all performed there, get their own
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Casa da Musica logo.
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It works the same internally with the president or the musical director,
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whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards.
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There is a full-blown orchestra
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living inside the building.
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It has a more transparent identity.
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The truck they go on tour with.
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Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra,
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12 people that remixes its own title.
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And one of the handy things that came about
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was that you could take the logo type
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and create advertising out of it.
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Like this Donna Toney poster,
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or Chopin, or Mozart,
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or La Monte Young.
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You can take the shape and make typography out of it.
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You can grow it underneath the skin.
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You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house,
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or a rave underneath the house
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or a weekly program,
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as well as educational services.
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Second insight. So far, until that point I had