Making the Transition from Design Student to Working Professional: Gus Granger, Brand Strategist
This is episode two of a series of edited conversations between David Karlins and accomplished communication designers on the theme of making the transition from being a student to becoming a working professional. The conversations explore the challenges of making that transition, the insights of people who have made that transition decades, years, or even months ago, and observations of the relationship between one’s passions and talents, making a living, and changing the world.
In this installment, David speaks with Gus Granger, partner at VSA Partners, a global creative brand agency. Gus has worked with companies such as GE, Dell Technologies/Virtustream, and UiPath among others while overseeing successful branding experiences. In this interview, he spoke with us about his job at VSA Partners, what is brand strategy, and designers working for the social good.
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DK: Gus Granger, it is really exciting to talk to you. You are an accomplished communication designer, and I want to start by talking about what you do now. Keeping in mind that you’re sharing with students who have not yet made the transition to being communication design professionals, can you talk about some of the things that you can share from your experience about what design students should be doing, not just on preparing their portfolios, but also preparing themselves and preparing emotionally for that transition?
GG: Thanks for having me. I hear tremendous things about the program you’ve got there. I know a couple of professors. I am excited to be here and provide any insights that I can. Currently, I serve as a partner at an agency which is based in Chicago. We’re called VSA Partners and also have offices in New York and San Francisco. We’re a design and brand experience agency. There are about 160 of us across our three offices. It’s very brand strategy-centric, and I see brand strategy as a foundation that helps our clients to do great, effective, and impact-driven creative work. And when brand strategy is done well, and is working in concert with design, writing, development, or executing things that we’re creating, that creates the guardrails and rules to help us do really exciting, inventive, and risk-taking work. Even when clients might not be as apt to do that because you don’t have the same understanding of the market, competition, or buyers.
DK: Can you talk a little bit about what brand strategy is, the role it plays, and what goes into developing brand strategy? What hard and soft skills do you use? How can students translate some of the things they learn in class to what they’re going to encounter?
GG: I think to distill the brand strategy beyond the jargon: it gets into how do you develop an understanding of your audience. How do you develop an understanding of the market your client is trying to engage? How do you understand the competition? How do you understand the market societal forces that are present in where the experience you’re going to be creating, designing, and solving for is going to live?
When you have a firm command of those things, you essentially have a plan and I always fall back on the saying “measure twice cut once.” This is a matter of developing that understanding before you create. Because if you just jump in, and be like: “I got a cool idea for a website. I’m going to start making it.” You have to answer questions like: “What is the traffic like? What is this your client trying to sell? Are they trying to persuade people? Are they trying to develop a movement?”. When you sit down to get to work, your goal in some ways is to communicate, persuade, and motivate the audience to do a certain thing.
A lot of times we are trained to create things that are going to be memorable, compelling, interesting, and technically sound. There are critical foundations for that, but then it becomes: “How do you take those skills and put them to use to really create an impact in some way?” And it’s not always going to be a commercial impact. It may be creating an app to help people find vaccines, or to be safe in the event of a forest fire, or maybe you’re creating an extended experience for a concert venue. No matter what, there’s going to be some foundational things. Like who is this for? What is it that we’re trying to get them to do? And how do you measure success?
There’s always going to be a process of collaboration. You’re not going to be working in a vacuum. The more that you can have a sound plan and common understanding among all the people you’re going to be collaborating with: your client, writers, web developers, and printers, you can articulate some of the foundational things that need to be happening. It becomes much easier to get everyone to move together, to bring the project forward.
The more that you can have a sound plan and common understanding among all the people you’re going to be collaborating with: your client, writers, web developers, and printers, you can articulate some of the foundational things that need to be happening.
DK: Regarding your projects, give us a feel for what the process is like. What kind of questions do you ask? What kind of online research do you do?
GG: There are so many different client experiences, but one time we did a project for WNYC. There’s a show called Studio360, and they came to us to create a new symbol to represent the South. This was a few years after the shootings in Charlottesville, and there was a lot more attention being paid to Confederate symbols and what they meant for people, and what they experience. And so you have this tension between the people who see the majority of Confederate symbols as a symbol of hate, and the many who, intentionally or inadvertently, see it as a symbol of pride. So there’s this question of: “How do you jump into that kind of situation to create a new symbol to represent the modern era? If one should exist at all?”. They approached our team here in Dallas, and we had to sit down to discuss: “How do we do a deep dive in understanding the history behind all of this?”. We had a diverse team of designers from all over the country with different backgrounds and experiences but we had to understand the audience. We had to understand the history, and what type of context a symbol was going to live in. We were looking at creating a new symbol for something that was most often experienced as a flag. And it’s a symbol that was originally used in battle, or put over fortresses, which is a different context compared to where we see symbols today.
Another question we had to consider was: “How do we use symbols to represent groups we identify with?” In today’s world, it’s different. It may be an avatar we use on a social media profile, a sticker we put on a laptop, or a button we put on a jacket or backpack. So we knew the symbol we would be creating is going to exist in a different context than the one we were replacing. When we had an understanding of the historical and cultural context, and the actual physical environments in where it needed to live, we had a foundation of the different truths that needed to be considered in creating an artifact. This can be seen in the work itself, on a website we set up called thesouth.us. There’s a link there to a radio interview where you can listen to us talk about doing all of that work.
It was a project where collaboration was essential. We had two creative directors and five different designers collaborating and working on it. Some people on the team were from the North, some from the South, some who grew up hearing stories related to these old symbols from a positive standpoint, and some who grew up hearing the exact opposite. We were having those types of conversations to find a common way forward. It’s a different thing than if someone is creating a campaign for Nike shoes or an app. I think there will be a similar process that you’re going to go through in that type of situation, but you can’t sit down and start creating without understanding the full context of that project, where it needs to show up, and how you’re measuring success.
DK: Maybe you could flashback in time, and talk a little bit about what did you take away looking back on your school years?
GG: Oh sure! I think about where we spent an entire semester where we could only use two different fonts for all of our projects often. It was like: “Take all that off the table, just pick two fonts”. It was rigorous, set-up exercises around really understanding typography, hierarchy, and the fundamentals of the relationship between just contrasting styles, and how you use space.
This was during the mid-90s, in the rise of Emigré and David Carson’s work at Raygun magazine. There was this explosion of expressive typography and type, in search of using letterforms as illustration. But what that did, even beyond that one semester, was that it gave us such a clear, orthodox rigor on how much work the fundamentals of typography can do. And that goes directly into maybe being a better UI/UX designer. If you are great with typography, you can design anything. I’ve always very much felt this way. During design school, I was asked: “Are you going to focus on print, or are you going interactive?”. I genuinely don’t draw a line between the two. I’ve always been hybrid in that case.
Today some people go one way or the other, but if you can design one thing, you should be able to design everything well. A book as an artifact is different from a website, but there are certain principles that a book shares with a website. I think of the certain things that are used to navigate a book: you’ve got page numbers, chapters, a table of contents, and the index. All of those things need to be clear and easily accessible in order for me to find my way around that. There’s always going to be some kind of typographic system, consistency, layout, and grid.
Once you see it and have clear command over all of those principles, you can break those principles as something elastic that can work across all mediums and platforms. Whether it’s a book, a signage system, an app, or a website. Suddenly the things that you need to do to translate into an actual artifact becomes about production. You would be like: “Alright, I know what I want this to look like. And I’m going to have to work with a printer to bring this to life for my audience. I’m gonna have to work with a developer to bring this online for my audience. I may have to work with a videographer to bring this to life for my audience.” That conceptual core is going to be living with you as a designer. You need to figure out how to breathe life into that.
It always gave me pause, when subprograms were emerging that were just specializing in web or interactive design. Those can be fine…but a lot of the things that you’re going to be learning is being able to design those things well. It should translate very well to other areas if you cannot be limited to the medium.
Once you see it and have clear command over all of those principles, you can break those principles as something elastic that can work across all mediums and platforms.
DK: Part of what I’m getting from you is that students’ strength is that they are in tune with the latest trends. But there’s a tremendous amount of value in detaching yourself from the latest trends in technology and developing skills that transcend that.
Ok, the last thing I want to ask you is how do you apply your skills or other skills to passions outside of work? We talked to a book designer whose passion is to engage young people in reading books and finding ways to do that. I was just curious if you wanted to share anything like that.
GG: What I feel as designers is that we are being trained in developing superpowers for persuasion of impact and communication in the most efficient, emotionally resonant way. And more often than not, it is commercial interests that create the opportunity for us to hone those skills. But the ability for us to put those skills to use for the common good is what I feel like we have a responsibility for.
I think of how I spent about 7–8 years, and I’m actually continuing to do this now, doing pro bono work for the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. When you look at their mission, it’s basically educating the community on the consequences of when you let hate and intolerance go unchecked. We look at what happened in 1930s Germany, the horrors that led to, and apply those same lessons to today. When we allow hate and intolerance to go unchecked, the ultimate result is genocide, which has happened in other places around the world. Or even what’s happening today with anti-Asian hate, Black Lives Matter, and the horrible things that happened throughout the LGBTQ community.
So what my team and I have been involved with, and continue to do work in, is helping promote the exhibits that the museum would bring in. On a quarterly basis, there’s a new lecture, exhibition, or something made that is needed to promote to the greater community. And these are usually really hard topics. There would be an Anne Frank’s exhibit coming to town, and we would take that project in. It’s a collection of unseen photos of Anne Frank and her family. And then we go: “How do we take that and create something which is really wonderful, appropriate given the subject matter, attractive, and compel people to want to come in and see that exhibition?” We went through that process time and time again.
I ran an agency for 15 years and we would budget about 10–15% of our time to go into efforts like that type of social impact work. It was some of the most fulfilling work that we were involved with. I’m more proud of that pro bono work than anything that we did for our clients. This is not to discount the for-profit work, but that’s work that I knew that I was actually making a positive impact on the world. In comparison to helping a client excel more cloud computing, there’s more of a distance between my work and social impact. Even the work that we did for the modern South project for WNYC, I continue to get people praising a project that happened about six years ago. That’s some of the work that I’m proudest of is what we did as a team, because it had such an impact on individuals, and helped move the conversation forward on how we can progress as a country.
DK: That is so true. Again, thank you so much.
David Karlins is an adjunct professor of design and digital and written communication at NYU and CUNY, and author of 40 books on digital design technology and culture. His courses are distributed through LinkedIn Learning and other channels.
The following links to the rest of the episodes in this series are here:
