I'm sort of just warming you up for Salman Rushdie, I suppose.

I'm less significant in every possible way.

But we have a nice, intimate the little space to talk.

I'm a graphic designer.

That's my name, my Twitter thing.

That's me on Easter Sunday, 1969, in suburban Cleveland,

Ohio, which is where I grew up.

That's my mom and dad, obviously,

and those are my younger brothers,

who are fraternal twins.

Their names are Ronald and Donald.

They have rhyming names, OK?

That explains everything you need

to know about what it was like to grow up

in suburban Cleveland in the '60s.

My mom doesn't understand why that's

funny to give kids-- they're twins.

Was I supposed to give them completely unrelated names?

It's a naming problem.

At a very early age, I realized I wanted

to be a graphic designer.

I was good at art, but art always seemed kind of hermetic

to me.

Artists went off to, as I imagined,

they went, like to garrets or studios or closed rooms,

then just would do paintings and things,

and then sometimes would die.

Then their paintings would be discovered.

Sometimes the paintings would be sold in their lifetime.

But it just seemed like coming up

with ideas for paintings just seemed really hard.

When I realized there was this other thing called

graphic design that, in effect, was being creative as a means

to another end, I thought it was really exciting.

And I can still remember the first time

I saw a piece of graphic design that really excited me.

I was probably maybe eight or nine years old.

I was being driven by my dad to get a haircut.

We were stopped at a traffic light.

And my dad looked over to the passenger side of the car where

I was sitting and looked out the window,

and saw a piece of industrial equipment

called a forklift truck.

Do they have those here?

They do that, right?

And he said, oh look, that's really clever.

And I looked at the truck, and I said, what?

He said, the way they wrote the name of the truck.

And on the side of the truck it said Clark.

And I said, why?

And he said, well, look.

It does what the truck does.

And so he said, look how the L is lifting up the A.

And I was like, oh my god.

Is this happening all over the place?

Are these things everywhere?

And so at that moment, I sort realized

that something about that-- it was like art,

it was like creativity, but it had

nothing to do with painting a bowl of fruit, like Cezanne,

or some women with their noses sideways, like Picasso, or just

splattering paint like Jackson Pollock.

This is like, our name is Clark.

We make forklift trucks.

What do you got?

It just occurred to me.

The L can lift up the A.

So I just thought, if I could do that for the rest my life,

I'd be happy.

And I have, and I am.

So I'm with you today.

Here I am at Google.

Thank you.

So I'm just going to show you one project that I worked on.

And you guys recently changed your logo, which

I like very much, by the way.

I was really early out of the box in Twitter

and said something like, this is really good.

And it was one of the few really impulsive things

I've ever done on Twitter.

And then journalists started calling me up

to get me to weigh in publicly about the logo.

But I've designed logos that other people of weighed in

publicly on.

And I'm sort of-- I don't think everyone should be weighing

in publicly about logos.

And a lot of times I sort of think if-- back in the '60s,

there was a little private moment between me and my dad.

Very private.

If my dad was drinking a beer with our next door neighbor,

and he had brought up that logo with another adult,

that guy would have thought he was insane.

You know what I really like?

What do you like, Lenny?

That logo for Clark Forklift Trucks.

Ever seen it?

Like my next door neighbor would be like, what the fuck?

What?

So people didn't talk about logos in these days.

They talk about them all the time now, don't they?

I mean, you put out a logo and all

of a sudden it's like people are analyzing it.

I don't know if you read "The New Yorker" over here.

But some lady in "The New Yorker"

wrote this nostalgic poem about how beautiful the old Google

logo was, which personally, I just

thought that was preposterous.

She was saying, oh, the serifs were

referring to centuries of literary tradition,

and now it's all been sanded away.

I just think the way that all the O's line

up on in the search thing is just-- it's all very nice.

So at any rate, I'm going to going to show you something

that I worked on.

And it's something that actually came out very well,

but had false starts along the way.

So for the first time anywhere, I'm

showing the first thing that we proposed, which was rejected.

I've never shown this before.

The thing that was accepted is, I think, still on view

as part of Designs of the Year at the Design Museum

here in London.

But the rejected thing has never been shown

publicly outside of the client.

So here you go.

Oh, this is for this book.

And so what I really find interesting

is how design is about solving problems and doing things.

And so it's art or creativity for a purpose, right?

So the purpose has to do with how you do something.

And when I'm working with a client,

the first thing I try to do is figure out

what they're trying to solve and how to solve it, basically.

OK.

So this was actually the end, about designing two dozen logos

at the same time.

So the client is the MIT Media Lab.

You guys know what that is?

It's Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1985, or 19-- I'm trying to do the math here.

It was the 20th anniversary in 1910,

so 1990-- I thought it was 1985--

celebrated their anniversary.

And they had been started at MIT to sort of explore

where media and technology could all meet up.

It's actually a couple of buildings

that house a bunch of small research

groups, two dozen little research groups that

more or less have free rein to just explore

whatever they want.

On the occasion of the anniversary,

this wonderful new identity system

was created by a guy who was then at the Media Lab

named Richard Tay.

Then he came to Google.

I think he might still be at Google in California.

He's a great, great, great designer.

And if you don't know what that looked like,

this is what it was.

And the trick with this was, that thing

you see there was just one permutation of the logo.

He had written an algorithm or something,

or someone wrote some algorithm.

You guys all know what algorithms are.

I use that word a lot.

I really don't know what it means.

I went to art school so I didn't have

to take anything beyond Algebra II in high school.

I apologize.

You can kick me out now if you want.

So within that system, there's a bunch of squares.

And then those squares have colors

that extrude off the squares.

And then it makes 40,000, supposedly, different versions

of that thing, OK?

So it's really-- I thought was really cool.

I saw this thing and I was like, that's really, really cool.

I wish I'd done that.

To my surprise, the founder of the lab,

Nicholas Negroponte, called me up and said, hey,

could you design a logo for the Media Lab?

And I said, but you have a logo.

He said, what do you mean?

I said, that thing that Richard Tay did with the 40,000

different versions.

He said, oh, you know, that's not really a logo.

That was a thing for the anniversary.

We want a logo logo.

And I wasn't sure what he even meant by that.

So I went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts,

where MIT is, where the Media Lab is, and we

had a series of meetings.

And I finally figured out what he was talking about.

I met with some other people up there.

And yet I sort of really-- I actually

met with Richard and [? Rune, ?] another designer.

The two of them had actually done that system.

And I said look, they've asked me to mess with this thing

and I don't want to mess with it.

So give me some advice.

So I met with them to understand what they were doing

and to see what the whole system was.

So I'm just going to show you the presentation I did

for the first time we did it.

This is the thing I've never shown anyone before.

OK.

So the Media Lab actually has a history

based on the architecture of the original building, which

is by IM Pei.

And then in the IM Pei building, there

was a couple of art installations

that a designer named Jacqueline Casey riffed on.

See all these little stripey things?

So she created this identity that had little stripey things,

see?

So that was her idea.

So everyone's business card had a different bunch

of stripes on them.

So this idea of everything kind of being the same but different

was already there right back at the very beginning.

It was the 25th anniversary, not the 20th.

The 25th anniversary, Richard and his team

did something based on a new building

that the Japanese architect Maki did for them

that was-- in addition to the Pei building, the IM Pei

building.

And this shows a little bit of that in action,

if you can see that.

So the good qualities of that are that it sort of extends

that original identity in a way that I thought was thoughtful.

It's a metaphor for the new building,

because the building had atriums,

and it sort of did stuff like that.

And the last one, it sort of was just

a demonstration of how ingenious and innovative and imaginative

the MIT Media Lab was.

However, the shortcomings were-- as I finally

got them figured out-- it sort of is

very-- what's the word for it?

It's a look at me sort of logo.

It kind of like demands attention.

And part of the issue they have is that all

these other-- they have all these other things going

on there that like to be the protagonist as well.

So here's this other thing that really

is supposed to just be kind of signing off or endorsing

those things, but it's very active and clever for that.

And then it has this entropic sort of thing.

And entropy is another thing I'm not sure I fully understand.