10.30.18
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

S5E5: Forest Young


Forest Young is head of design and a global principal at the branding consultancy Wolff Olins.





Young and Wolff Olins took on a tough job: the rebranding of Uber, the ride-sharing company saddled with the visual system and aggressive tone of former CEO Travis Kalanick. Uber is a global company, and that captured the attention of Young and his team:

It won us over to see the impact that Uber was having in other places besides the United States. I think it was a lesson for me and the team that we just need to get out of the United States, that the United States can be a bit distracting.…
Young worked with Indian typographers specializing in Kannada or Devanagari, and there were moments where

a Latin letter can actually influence the character in Indic script, and then vice versa. So it's much more of a fluid conversation than we see a lot of, a degradation — which is that you design for the West and then it degrades for the East, versus seeing it as an enhancement.





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Posted in: Business, Design of Business | Business of Design




Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand 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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