Battle Scars

I am always wary of new beginnings because I have a hard time starting from zero. After five years of proving myself at Princeton, I finally felt like I had established a sense of belonging. Starting a new chapter of anything is not easy for me. Naturally, then, my first week at Pentagram was marked by feelings of tremendous humility and timidity. I don’t think I have felt so very small and insignificant since my freshman year of college.

In his book How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Adrian Shaughnessy describes the design workplace thusly: “Design studios are a mixture of slave camp and enchanted playground. You can’t avoid the slave camp resemblance — you will have to work long hours with not much pay and little recognition. But you won’t mind this, because among all the relentless pressure you will glimpse moments of enchantment. You will see the pleasure that comes from doing good work and making a contribution to the studio’s output. And then there’s the camaraderie of working being with like-minded people. Studio life is often as good as it gets.”

My new desk on the fourth floor of Pentagram’s Fifth Avenue office

Such is the life of the Pentagram intern. I am the junior-most member of one of the best-known and well-regarded firms in the world. And I can’t help feeling like I did way back in 2004, wondering why they would ever choose me over the incredible talent that pours out of the nation’s best design schools. They could have easily selected someone more technically proficient; according to my fellow intern Dan, our team receives more than one application a day. I really don’t know how to feel except lucky, grateful, and overwhelmed.

Paula Scher, the partner whose team I work on, is basically my hero. The agency I headed at Princeton invited her to deliver the keynote address at our inaugural conference two years ago, and it was really that presentation that inspired me to pursue this profession. With a career spanning four decades, Paula has essentially crafted the visual cultural imaginary of New York and touched much of consumer America at-large.

Paula’s identity for Citi, one of the most reproduced trademarks in the world

While she is well-known for her iconic rebrands of Citibank, Tiffany & Co., and the Public Theater, I am most impressed by her refusal to accept complacency and mediocrity. Her work is widely influential and significant because she insists on continually rethinking the way we communicate as a society, making quality design relevant for and accessible to the masses.

Her team comprises four designers (Lisa, Drew, Drea, and Ben) and two interns (me and Dan). While Pentagram is a behemoth firm, the partners maintain small teams in order to work in an intimate, tight-knit environment. Dan has been on Paula’s team for over a year now after graduating from the Cooper Union in 2008. Lucky for me, he is an extremely kind and generous fellow, and has served as a mentor of sorts over the last few days. Because nearly everyone started as an intern under Paula, my team members are very respectful and kind to me despite my patent inexperience.

Exterior of Pentagram’s New York office, photo by Dan Lurie

Though Paula greeted me on Monday, all the partners were in Normandy for the remainder of the week for their biannual international partners meeting. Dan tells me that the downside of working as an intern is that there is very little direct interaction with the partners. Still, I feel as though there is a lot to learn from everyone at the office. Even the interns range from recent Yale MFA graduates to people who have previously had interns work under them.

We work on the fourth floor of the 5th Avenue office, while the partners and Paula’s team are on the second floor. We spend a lot of time, however, in the basement of the office, which used to be a bank vault, creating printed work samples. This is called “comping,” which is basically printing out each piece of design, cutting out everything with a traditional X-Acto knife, and binding sheets into books with either glue or plastic rings.

The partners’ desks on the second floor, complete with a display of their posters

This presented an enormous challenge for me. As someone who nearly failed arts and crafts in grade school, I have always thought myself utterly incapable of doing anything by hand. The last time I cut something out was in the fourth grade for a presentation on the oyster, on which I received a N for “Needs Improvement.” The designers were very surprised that I had no idea how to use an X-Acto knife and promptly had me cut 400 11×17 sheets out of large sheets of paper. Needless to say, I was terrible. I would press so hard that the knife would slip and slide, cutting my finger in the process.

Dan patiently told me not to push so hard — that slow and steady progress would make for a much cleaner cut and no injuries. It’s almost a Zen-like exercise, patiently cutting through foam board by making 50 or so light slices before the material separates on its own. Though it’s usually regarded as a mundane task, I actually enjoy comping. In a strange way, I find it relaxing and fulfilling to produce beautiful-looking printed samples. That’s a good thing because Paula requires that we produce comps of everything — from business cards to letterhead, mailing labels to “submittal stamp forms.”

Dan Donohue, my fellow intern, desk-mate and teacher

As interns, we generate very little actual design. But over the last week, I’ve had the opportunity to help revise banners for Madison Square Park, add type to collateral for the Public Theater, Photoshop sample rum bottles for a project for country singer Kenny Chesney, create new stationery for an architecture firm, and make comps of new contact lens packaging to go along with our rebranding of a leading supplier of eye health products. While I’m not allowed to actually show any of the designs, suffice it to say that I’ve never felt more excited about design in my life.

And while I understand that the 9 to whenever-we’re-done hours (sometimes 6-7:30, more often 8-9, occasionally midnight) and the endless comping over the next weeks will wear down on me, it makes me so happy to be contributing in a very small way to Paula’s legendary portfolio. Though there is still some distance between me and the designers, I hope that I will be able to show them that I am no less passionate about the work we are doing. It has never been my way to rely on flattery to impress. I hope that I will be able to show them that I was worth taking on despite my lack of training.

This year’s poster for Shakespeare in the Park, designed by Paula and Lisa

By Friday, Dan commented that I had gotten “200 — no 500% better” at cutting, and that I seem to learn very quickly. I think that this may be the only asset I have. My education has taught me how to learn. And though I feel anxious every day that I am not worthy of this internship, I understand that my responsibility is to learn as much as I can from the incredible people that are now my colleagues. I can only hope that I will emerge a more confident and capable designer — that I will be able to pick up an X-Acto knife and cut perfect comps without so much as flinching. At the very least, though, I know I will have the bruises and scars to prove that I did my best.

I went to my good friend Jess’ housewarming party on Friday, and it struck me that I would be so happy if I were ever to be able to afford as spacious and beautiful an apartment as the one she now occupies. I found myself wondering if I would ever be able to own my own apartment. My intern salary at Pentagram is barely enough to cover my living expenses, and it will be at least four years before I will emerge from grad school, likely neck-deep in debt.

The Flatiron Building, across the pedestrian walkway from Pentagram

It gives me courage, however, that Paula started as the most junior member of the design team at CBS Records. She often speaks about her frustrations with having to manually typeset Helvetica as a student at the Tyler School of Art and how her greatest accomplishments since then have emerged from being utterly unqualified for the task at hand: “When you’re working and you make mistakes, particularly when you’re young, you make discoveries because you do things that are inappropriate and wrongheaded, but within the wrongheadedness you find an unexpected way to go. These things are truly the breakthroughs. You have to get bad in order to get good. You have to try a lot of things and fail in order to make the next discovery.”

I am less excited than Paula about the prospect of failure. I’m a strong believer in prioritizing experience over achievement, but it’s hard to put ego aside and fight that perfectionistic instinct that has served me well to this point. I think I am starting to understand, however, that the new experiences ahead will necessarily entail making many mistakes that I will be better for. So maybe it’s okay that I’m starting off at the bottom of the design food chain. It means that there is never a day that I don’t learn something new and interesting about the work I love. And maybe one day, I will find the faith to embrace new challenges and to be as proud of my failures as I am of my accomplishments.