SPARK
SI-032, 2022.
interview by Emma Noel
Stay as Radical as Possible
Ben Ganz develops design, images, and objects for clients in culture and commerce. Ben Ganz is Art Director of PIN–UP and holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University.
collaborator: Ayham Ghraowi
typeface: OBG Hito
collaborator: Ayham Ghraowi
typeface: OBG Hito
collaborator: Ayham Ghraowi
typeface: OBG Hito
EN How would you describe yourself, specifically your practice as a graphic designer?
BG I started off as a typographer in Switzerland. I grew up in Switzerland and went to undergrad there. Well actually, it wasn't really even undergrad. I started in type design school. I was quite lucky that I knew very early on what I wanted to do. I was around 15 years old when I did this. It took four years, with a focus on typography and type design, the whole Swiss shebang. Then I worked as a book designer in Berlin for five years. Then I wanted to expand my practice and grow beyond type design, which led me to Yale grad school. I did the grad program for two years, which was really great and really widened my horizons quite a bit. Since then, I've been working. I’m interested in applying those typographic principles in fields that they're not necessarily applied in. I liked working a lot in fashion because I was very interested in not only type making but also image making and combining those two things. It was a transition from taking a very rigorous approach to type design, that often takes years, to something that is way more fast paced, and is way more immediate, with a bigger kind of cultural impact. Unlike the more traditional production that is common in Switzerland, which I think is great, but it's also very limiting. Now I have started my own studio with the aim to expand the kind of projects I do in a spatial regard. I do PIN-UP magazine, which has a lot to do with architecture, which I think is very interesting because it’s very editorial but it's also very experimental and I can do a lot of different things there. I'm interested in new things. I know how to make a book. I like to do it but it's not necessarily what I want to do in the future. I’ve done a lot of jewelry and fashion shows. Just bigger things, more immersive things, where things like a book can still be a part of it, but it's kind of just a part of a bigger ecosystem. I purposefully try to keep it all very open. I have a very small studio; it's me and three other people. We're renovating my studio at the moment. That's why it's a bit haphazard here, but we're getting there. I'm interested in object design. And I think typography can be a base and a kind of methodology that then can be applied to other other areas.
EN It sounds like your work is very multidisciplinary in terms of your design and it's cool to hear that you have a traditional background with learning type in Switzerland. And then now learning and finding different ways to apply it to design.
BG Type design as a field is interesting to a certain degree. Type designers are always shocked that no one cares about their new grotesque typeface that looks like every other grotesque typeface and I just don't think that's where my personal interest lies. I think as a methodology type can be very powerful, paying attention to detail, but you then have to collide it with something else to make it new or interesting.
EN What are some of your first considerations when a new project lands on your desk or you're starting to conceptualize something. Whether it's for a client or a personal project, how do you go about beginning?
BG The relationship with the client is very important. I try purposefully to build relationships with clients that span over more than one project. If you know the client well and they trust you, everyone involved starts to speak the same language. Then visually you can make stronger projects because they know they trust you and they let you do more. Initially it's important to really understand the brief. Really understand what they need, but then also know you don’t necessarily need to do that. Maybe propose something else. Sometimes people ask for something when they actually need something else, you know? You can't just always do exactly what they want you to do. I think a big part of a project is figuring out what it should actually be on a conceptual level and start from there. I am very lucky. I don't have many clients. This is on purpose. My clients trust me because we have built relationships over years. My work with them is always my strongest work, because there's a shared language. I try not to do too many personal projects because I want to do projects with clients that I love. I am able to make client projects my own. I think that's the challenge of our job; you always have a client. I'm really against this notion of personal projects. If I can, I want to look at a project with a client as a personal project and then kind of see how I can fit it into my own body of work, while also respecting the parameters that come from the client.
EN Who or what are some of your biggest influences for graphic design, and how might they have changed over time or not?
BG I think there’s a lot of interesting things to take from the modernists like Karl Gerstner and Armin Hoffman and all of that old school modernist style. I do think it's important that it's viewed through a contemporary lens though, and not repeated. A lot of current Swiss design is very much a repetition of what already happened 60 years ago. Why would we do that? I think that's also why I came to America to have a different set of influences and get exposed to different experimental approaches. Americans used the language of the very commercial Swiss education and modernism, and then used it for Citibank, which worked very well. It’s great not being bound to a specific medium, I think is very interesting. Karl Gerstner did the universe typeface, but then he also did marble sculptures and all kinds of different things. I think there are not that many practices that still think in so many different mediums. I'm inspired, but I wouldn't say I want to continue their legacy. I think there are a lot of problematic views in what modernism was back then, but they definitely provide a lot of inspiration for me. American pop culture is another big source of my inspiration. If you can combine those two things, I think there is a lot to gain. There's also the countless architects and furniture designers that I also look at. I would say that I go back to them quite frequently.
EN What kind of music do you listen to while you're working on projects? Is it the same type of music you listen to outside of working?
BG It's the same type of music. The genre really depends. I always listen to music. Always, always, always. I can't work in silence. Sometimes I listen to classical music. And sometimes hard techno when I need to be woken up. What I like about both of those genres is that they have no words. So it allows me to still think. I can listen to American music and hip hop too because when I started listening to American music, I did not understand English so I can kind of still listen to it without focusing on the words. At the moment I am listening to a lot of Brian Eno. Very spherical, calming sounds. PIN-UP has to be done in a week so that music helps me get through not sleeping a lot.
EN I feel the same way. I listen to a lot of French rap. English is my first language so it's easier for me to not get distracted. Like you, I don't like working in silence. So I always play something. Kind of mindless. You can enjoy the music but your mind won’t get distracted by the lyrics or something like that. Are there certain color palettes or certain shapes or motifs that you find yourself gravitating towards when you're designing?
BG I like a lot of color. I like a lot of bright and poppy colors. I do have some favorite colors, but I don't really think they're recurring in my work much because often it just doesn't fit. Shape wise, there's no certain shape that is necessarily important to me. I like to start with type design as a base of a project and then go from there because you can have a lot of control over your design if you start with the type. If you already have your own type then the design afterwards can be quite simple. You have the most control because you already control the nucleus of the idea. Often if you use typefaces that everyone uses, you want to make it special but then there end up being added layers that are not really necessary but you do it because you want to stand out. I think that's where it becomes design for the design’s sake. I'm very interested in materiality and object quality of a book or a magazine. For PIN-UP I try to make it a haptic experience and not just have it feel like a printed out PDF. Kind of like adding something that you can't experience in a digital format. A lot of color. I love colors. You can't be too scared. You just have to go for it.
BG The problem with print production is you need to give people a reason to care about print. You need to add a gesture that you can’t do online or you can’t do in other mediums. The problem with a lot of magazines that I see is that I often feel like it's a waste of paper because it's just printed and there's maybe a UV varnish on the cover. Editorial design is really the combination of typography and image. A lot of things that I see, especially in fashion, is super, super boring, quite frankly. They come to the smallest common denominator where it's reduced to one size fits all. And in the end it's just something you don't want to keep around in your house and it feels very disposable. You can't be surprised that no one is interested in it or when people are asking: ‘why am I not just looking at this on my iPad’. I try to make my design an object that is desirable that you want to buy and want to keep, while not making it a luxury good. It's a lot of work but you have to have a clear idea of what you want people to feel and you have to really come up with an idea. I see a lot of magazines, they circumvent that process because they think if we make it standardized then we're safe, which is true, but at the same time, then we might as well just have an online edition and call it the day. The good thing about PIN-UP is that it only comes twice a year. So the kind of immediacy is not like fashion. I don't see many radical design moves in print out there, which I think now would be precisely the time to do those. In a way I think the online parallel world is very liberating for print and I think now in print, you can actually do whatever you want. Because you can always have a narrowed version online that is more digestible. Weirdly people go the other way where everything looks a bit like it's not optimized for print, but then also not optimized for online. It gets a bit boring. I think it's up to designers to give people a reason to care about print again. If we can do this, print won’t die. It's literally our job. Making exciting print is the goal. The problem with those big magazines is how they're structured. They’re so big that you can't do most things that you want to. There isn’t the trust between designers and the people who can say yes or no to things. It's especially in fashion intertwined with sponsorships and money.
EN Makes you start to wonder what things will actually start to change or if it's destined for a specific fate.
BG I mean, it's up to people like you to implement that change. Be a bit bold, especially in print, if you deem it's something that is worth preserving or continuing. Find the outlet to do it.
BG This question is why I do my own typefaces; then I'm already saved from this whole discussion in a way. Maybe people think it looks horrible, but at least it's unlike anyone else. I think if something is done for a reason and it's done in an interesting way, it can be good and isn’t about a specific trend. The problem is that like everyone looks at the same kind of stuff and then it gets like there's one key visual that ends up getting diluted. I couldn't identify a specific trend that I think is bad. I think it's really about finding a methodology for yourself that keeps you away from trends and then I think you don't really have to worry about it too much. Trends come and go. I guess the unreadable, crazy typeface trend I think is very bad. Often people start with a reference point of what is deemed cool in the moment, which I think is any kind of loss, because you're already building something from something else. To actually answer your question, I hate fake paper texture on posters on Instagram. I hate those weird distorted typefaces. It's a lot of things running in a circle. With typefaces it's a big problem. There's so many great type foundries that make great typefaces, but then a new one comes out and everyone uses it for two years and then it becomes a part of this canon. It's why I never use contemporary typefaces from other people. It’s why I like Univers. No one can say you copied this from me just because Univers has been around for 60 years or something.
EN You said you knew you wanted to pursue graphic design, specifically type design when you were 15 years old, which I feel like is really rare. How did you know that's what you wanted to do, especially so early on?
BG I dropped out of high school three times. I was a horrible, horrible teenager. I always liked art classes. I came about my school and was quite conservative in a way but it was one of the only things that I really enjoyed doing. I thought it was interesting because every project you work with completely different people. As a designer I can work with a brand like Nike, but I can also work with an architect from Iceland, and I can work with a superstar like Frank Ocean and I can work with a writer. There's so many different things you can do and there are so many windows into so many different worlds.
I didn't really plan it out when I was 15, but it always felt like there's more to learn. That's also why I like PIN-UP. I'm always curious about what's going on in different fields and I get to learn through my design. It's really a win-win for me. I was really into graffiti as a child and a young adult. In my design now, I'm doing kind of the same thing. But now people pay me.
I got an internship there when I was 17 or 18, very early on in my second year of undergrad. I was very lucky. Then I went back to Switzerland to finish school and after the founder gave me a job there. It was a really small studio; it was just him and me. He gave me a lot of responsibilities right off the bat. I learned a lot and then I went to Yale, where I met Susan Sellers from 2x4, who became my mentor. She was really, really supportive and offered me a job afterwards at 2x4, which was very important to me. This second job was something very different. Suddenly it was a 40 person office. I got to see both worlds, which was super, super helpful. It helped me realize that I didn’t want to stay at an Agency for too long, even though I learned a lot of important things. Without that experience I couldn't have started my own studio, quite frankly. It all just worked out somehow.
EN How do you balance working on multiple projects at once?
BG It's never two weeks on just one project. There's always a lot of happy accidents when working on multiple projects. You might be working on one project and then you realize something for a different project. Or if a project is stalling, you can pause that one and go to another project. I really enjoy that and for that reason I couldn't just work on one project at a time. I wish I could plan better, but sometimes I have a great idea for this one project and I have to do that first, but also working with deadlines. If I'm inspired, I work on that project. Yeah. It's good to use your time in the most effective way. Move on and circle back later or something.
EN I think that leads into the next question that I have, which is, how do you combat creative exhaustion?
BG It’s some distance and time but also having a discussion or opening discourse with people from my studio or with clients. I have a lot of clients that I really trust, for example PIN-UP. We discuss a lot and I think that can be super helpful even just to bounce off ideas. Maybe someone else has a little tweak and it makes your work better. It's good to work on your own but then if you work on something for too long, you risk losing sight. A set of fresh eyes is always good. Sometimes I want to just work on the end like silence but then eventually I always want to show it to someone to get their immediate reaction. And they don’t have to be another designer. They can be someone that maybe is not even in design or your brother or something. The joke is type designers only design for other typographers, but it’s really ordinary people who matter.
creative director: Fernando Vederi
creative director: Fernando Vederi
BG I still struggle with this. I think good design is good creative direction. They are the same thing by nature; a good designer also has to be a good creative director. I call myself a designer, but to design also involves conceptual work. That's always a part of design. In America people think design means you put the logo on things. It's more of a tool to visualize your ideas. The idea and the design should be one connected thing. For me it's the same thing. I don't think they should live separately; I want to do both. As a designer, you have the tools to do both. In school you learn the tools which help you visualize ideas. Once you can visualize your ideas, you can bring them to life. But yes, I always want to do both. So many great creative directors can do so many different things. You don't have to get caught up with the naming convention. At the core it's about ideas; having good ideas and then visualizing those ideas. If you have a lot of different tools and you know how to make a lot of things, like a typeface, that's already something that other people can't. So yeah, then you can use them and implement them into your creative process.
EN As far as typefaces go, when you're working on something you said to make your own custom type. How do you go about creating a typeface or choosing an existing one?
BG It depends. I often start with a reference, maybe a word or something I see somewhere. Then you’re forced to build a typeface around only a few letters; you automatically make something unique because you haven't seen the other letters. I pull inspiration from random books and posters from the 50s.
I don't spend two years on a typeface; I spend around eight hours on a typeface. It's a very different mode of working. Taking references and redrawing them by hand makes it dirtier and more haptic. It's a case by case situation. I try to connect the design to what I want to say and what the content is. If you do a special typeface for cover, you can obviously be way more precise. I have a bunch of typefaces I made and never used years ago. Sometimes I find an opportunity to use those which is cool. There's no one way for me to get to a typeface. I never wake up and decide to make a typeface; I wouldn’t know what to do without a connection to a project. And I'm also not a type foundry. I'm not selling typefaces. My typefaces are all made to specific things. They work for the exact purpose. Type foundries often want to emphasize the versatility of the typeface, you can use it for this or that and you can use it very big and very small. I don't want to do that. And I also don't have to do that. I can work much faster this way and it's a good way to make a project special. The design then happens within the type design itself. Once you have a special typeface you can put it on a cover; you don't have to go all crazy in the layout. This works for my process and for me is much easier.
creative director: Fernando Verdieri
photography: Timur Celikdag
art direction: Ben Ganz, Daniel Sumarna
typeface: OBG Prada Morse
creative director: Fernando Verdieri
photography: Timur Celikdag
art direction: Ben Ganz, Daniel Sumarna
typeface: OBG Prada Morse
BG For Prada, I worked with them through many different clients, starting with 2x4, then with Ferdinado Verderi, which is funny because it is basically the same work but from different angles. There it’s always a bit more removed because I was on a team. It's very important that the chain of people making a decision is as short as possible. Basically, then my client is Ferdinando, who then can sell it to Prada. Whatever your ideas are, he can portray. Fashion is a very fast paced environment; it’s always 50% Real, 50% fantasy. With Nike there is more danger there because there's so many people involved. I don’t want to work in an agency because then you're a designer working with an art director, a creative director, and a partner. And that's only only on the agency’s side. Then on the client side, you’re working with even more people and it’s very, very hard to make something radical. You can’t really defend your work as a designer. So with Nike I give them a typeface and a lot of assets and then what they do with it is out of your control; maybe they do something with it which I wouldn’t have done. You have to let it go and just see what happens. Any kind of campaign is never the work of one person, it's a combined effort. In general, the goal is to really shorten this line between you and the person who has the power to decide something. This goes back again to building client trust and relationships and I think that's what I'm trying to do; to remove those middle players and be able to control the concept and how it looks. To get there is a process and it takes a while.
EN I know you mentioned your interests don't just include graphic design; I'm curious to hear you speak more about your experience working with Frank Ocean on his jewelry brand, Homer. What was the experience?
BG In a way this project was also a happy accident. What I enjoy most about the project is that with Frank and Michael Abel, the Chief Design Officer, it always feels like a conversation. We've been working together for three or four years now so we really speak a similar language. I think they trust me enough to let me do things that they know I've never done before. That's what I really appreciate and love about this whole project. I can do jewelry design for the pendant and then there's so much work going into realizing those things that are super super technical and that I have no idea about. I can also then think about the object itself; how this object should be photographed and what the communication should be. So it's really one step further in design; you not only make the campaign but you also make the object. I find they go hand in hand and that's super interesting. It’s something I would love to continue to do. It's not only the object but also how the object is represented and photographed, it all goes back to creative direction. You can build a whole universe around an object. You can make typefaces, you can photograph it, you can make a book out of all of that. There's so many different ways and I think those are always the projects I'm most excited about. When it starts with an idea and they say “what do you think?” There's always different opinions involved, but I think that's the challenge to navigate. It's a lot of discussion which I really enjoy. The more you know and the more techniques you can do, the more freedom you have because you have created opportunities that a lot of agencies can't.
collaborators: Frank Ocean & Michael Abel
photography: Tyrone Lebon
collaborators: Frank Ocean & Michael Abel
photography: Tyrone Lebon
collaborators: Frank Ocean & Michael Abel
photography: Tyrone Lebon
collaborators: Frank Ocean & Michael Abel
photography: Tyrone Lebon
BG Every project you should learn something new. I think that should be the goal; to force yourself to learn a new thing, either on a technical level or about what is out there. There’s no stopping point. There is no “this is what I can do and this is what I can’t.” At the moment, I'm learning a lot about 3D rendering. I have people on my team who are better than me at that, but if I can learn, it's always good to know as much as possible. You can't be an expert on every level, but the more you know, the more freedom you have in expressing yourself.At PIN-UP I learn 400 new things with every issue just because I read it while I do it. That plays a big part in my education as a designer, it is on-going, all the time and why I love doing it. You design it for other people to learn things while you're also learning it for yourself, if that makes sense.
You have to be culturally engaged to make meaningful work. Otherwise, it's a pure kind of formalism or it's not super interesting. You get to know so many things even before others because you work on things that come out maybe a year or two later.
EN What piece or pieces of advice would you share with young designers looking to follow in similar footsteps to you as far as a career in graphic design?
BG Stay as radical as possible. It's great when you're younger to get a lot of experience in different fields. Be a part of a big agency and then maybe a small studio just to see what the differences are. There's a lot to learn in both places. Give yourself a bit more time to develop things and don’t be so scared of what other people will say. I didn't have a website until I was 26 and I’m very happy about that. There were a lot of bad things that I'm very happy no one ever saw. Being very proactive is always a good thing; if there's something you want to do and it doesn’t exist yet, then maybe it's on you to create those things and follow through with it. Don’t lose sight of what you like to do and find a way to do it. You have to be a bit tenacious and a bit annoying to the right people. Be vocal. You can always just say nothing and you still have your job. But you also have to care about what you do. Say yes to everything when you’re beginning. So many random projects that might seem unimportant, but then someone else sees and it opens a door. Have fun. It's a bit of a stupid thing to say but it can be hard. I feel very privileged in a way how my career so far has turned out and I think a lot of it was just being at the right time at the right place. When someone offers you a chance, you really have to go for it. Try to make it yours in a very positive way.
Follow Ben Ganz here
interview by Emma Noel
Spark Interview-032