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S4E10: Abbott Miller

Abbott Miller is a partner in the design firm Pentagram. He talked about how he approaches research, and the pleasures of projects for companies like Ritz-Carlton and American Express:

Both projects started with this sort of intensive investigation of the culture of the company, which in both cases has an amazing long history with lots of sort of graphic artifacts, representations, signifiers that have evolved over time.

For me, I always go to that material as kind of like my basis. And then you add on the stuff that’s of a more pragmatic nature, like market research and what’s going on with the business, and sort of what the whole focus of the project really is. But for me that, like, peeling back into those layers is really fascinating.

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand is an artist and writer based in New England. A former critic at Yale School of Art and one of the founding editors of Design Observer, she is the author of several books on visual culture including Self Reliance, Design: The Invention of Desire, and Face: A Visual Odyssey. jessicahelfand.com

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