S2E12: Dana Arnett + Patrick Palmer

Dana Arnett is a vice chairman and a founding partner of VSA Partners, a branding and marketing company based in Chicago. Patrick Palmer leads the strategy practice at VSA.

When Arnett founded VSA in 1982, his clients provided information about what they thought their customers wanted. For the past five years, VSA has been working to integrate data science into their design-driven work. To facilitate this shift and to avoid what he calls “organ rejection,” Arnett explains VSA has their data scientists and designers sitting together:

You can’t say, This is a department in the basement and we’re going to bring up decks of information. The data science people we brought in needed to learn how the creative and design process worked. There is this forcing function of inclusion…

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Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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