`I want you to make type. Like a Peterbilt truck. I want it to collide,” opera director Peter Sellars was saying to graphic designer Rick Valicenti about the poster for the Lyric Opera’s 1993 production of Wagner’s “Tannhauser.”
Valicenti responded with the title spelled out in bold Germanic, gothic black typeface, and over the “a” hung an umlaut of blood red. A television screen filled the middle space, and on its video-blue field a wide-headed TV evangelist had a saberlike teardrop rolling off his big face and spilling onto the border.
The poster now hangs in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.
In the realm of advertising, Valicenti’s Barrington design firm, Thirst, is what snowboarding is to skiing. Same white stuff, new rules.
An advertising campaign “has to resonate,” Valicenti explained. “Just take a look around. Turn on the news. Or look how many people want you to buy something, want you to wear their clothes, read their magazines. . . .
“For people who get (where we’re coming from), they end up somewhere where they didn’t expect to be.”
Somewhere as in over the rainbow. In the Thirst world, men wear pink wedge pompadours, typeface looks like broken windows, words grow faux fur, kids’ smiling faces are plopped on top of plastic robot bodies, and the color palette moves from subdued suburban russet and khakis to city-style screaming lime and lollipop blues.
“It is never ordinary,” said Susan Mathieson, the Lyric’s director of marketing and communications, who began working with Valicenti 10 years ago. “Right away Rick’s stuff jumped out at me. It’s extremely distinctive. Our pieces have to say something about this organization; we’re a world-class opera company. The design has to turn you on, and it has to sell.”
“The essence of graphic design is words, images, context,” Valicenti said. “Whether it’s through letter form or the form of a chair, design is a reflection of the time it was produced in. . . . Three textbook things are: What do you have to say? Who are you going to say it to? And make it meaningful.”
Valicenti’s client list ranges from blue chips to Chips Ahoy. The Chicago Board of Trade turned to Thirst for its annual report and visitors gallery design; the Lyric got its high-drama poster and an elegant logo; MTV ordered invitations, book covers, posters and logos; Fisher Bicycle got a new advertising campaign; Gilbert Paper repositioned itself in the marketplace; Herman Miller furniture commissioned a design for its new showroom opening in June in the Merchandise Mart; and Nabisco adopted a new logo for its snacks and cookies.
How a commercial venture becomes art gallery material might be debated for decades, but Valicenti has no problem explaining how cutting-edge graphic art becomes sensible corporate practice. His high-concept design is like pie, the first wedge going to the client. “We have to care about making the client happy. In normal art, that’s not the case,” he said. “We need to decide what is relevant, what needs to be communicated, how it should reside in the receiver. The answer is always different.”
First his company must figure out how to reflect the client, he said, then “we design a brand identity, a spirit and attributes that come to represent the corporation.”
Drawing inspiration from the seemingly random orbit of words and images, the designer creates a visual gravitational pull “just like musicians, performers, chefs, fashion designers, architects, help make sense of the nonsense,” Valicenti said.
Elaborating on the daily creative process at Thirst, Valicenti added, “Without any hesitation, I’m at the core: push, risk lunacy. It’s all these other people who give it guts, texture,” he explained, referring to his collaborators. They are wife Linda, chester (just chester, with no last name, no capital letters), Patric King, Gregg Brokaw, sister Barbara Valicenti and, at 3ST.2, an on-line design firm based in Chicago, award-winning digital designer and partner Mark Rattin and Rich Hanson.
Their inspirations? “The literature someone reads, the clubs they go to, technical journals they’ve just read, music, food they eat, women they’re dating, your kids and their weird candy and video games,” Valicenti said. “It’s what delights you.”
Collectively, Thirst has shaken up the cold rationalism of corporate identity.
Rich Myers, vice president of communications for the Chicago Board of Trade, explained, “Working with Rick, we took a new direction. He talked through his mindset, how he viewed the world.
“We talked a lot. He went on the floor and met and interviewed our members. We are first and foremost a membership organization with a very spirited human dynamic. We’re also a major employer; there are a lot of family histories here. . . .
“At first Rick didn’t know about the open outcry method of trading, which is very Chicago. It was invented here. So he learned all about it. He doesn’t tell you what you are; he helps you explain what you are from a little different angle.”
For the CBOT annual report, for example, Thirst staffers not only told the story of the institution, they also designed dozens of fonts, they took family pictures, they balanced dry economic indicators with lively human players. The raucous typefaces worked as homage to the first-ever handwritten futures order, whose frantic scrawl is included in a photo.
Thirst’s graphic pyrotechnics have been criticized by some, including Emigre Magazine, which described its work as “in-your-face, super-stylized digital kitsch.” But the consensus, validated by Valicenti’s shelf of design trophies, is that the company is setting a standard against which future graphic arts can be judged. The Harvard Business Review wrote that Thirst “restores humanism and populism to corporate images . . . reveling in the richness of American society (with) non-elitist design that people can enjoy.”
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Valicenti, 46, received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Bowling Green State University in 1973. He worked in a Pittsburgh steel mill for a year, then moved to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa, where he received a master’s of fine arts in photography. He landed work in Chicago as a typographer and in 1981 launched R. Valicenti Design, renamed Thirst in 1987. He has served on the board of several graphic arts organizations and has lectured and exhibited in San Francisco and also abroad in Australia, Germany, Japan and Sweden.
After 10 years on the fast track in Chicago, Valicenti moved with his wife and two children, Lyndon and Sonny, now 16 and 12, to Barrington Hills. Their home and offices were set on 6 1/2 acres, where business got done at the far edges of the metropolis.
“No one forced us to come here,” Valicenti said. “It was a place to regroup, rethink, re-evaluate personal and professional concerns. I don’t think we were the only ones doing it. I think I like it. (But) I don’t like how far away it is, the lack of choices for food.”
Although his expanding business forced Valicenti to move the offices from home to downtown Barrington recently, Thirst has been operating like an artist’s colony, not an ivory-tower compound. Valicenti has used co-workers and neighbors and their kids for subjects in his design books. His home has been the backdrop for publicity photos.
“If people come to us simply because they’ve seen our product, they’re only responding to the evidence. They’re thinking, `Make it be like that one.’ I don’t think that works well. One hundred percent of the time, the better opportunity is relationships. `I’ve been told to call you because you did a fantastic job for my friend.’ It’s custom, it’s delightful.”
Still, the irony of pitching the traders’ pit from the land of suburban barbecue is not lost on him. His city venture with Rattin, 3ST.2 (a visual way of representing Thirst II), is the logical step, he said, for modern-age design.
“At 3ST.2 our mantra is: choices worth making. Look at the (Internet). There’re 30,000 new Web sites a day, three or four clicks per page. Which is going to delight you, make your life better?”
Said Rattin of his partner in the endeavor: “Designers can rush to solutions. . . . We’re very much involved in words and talking conceptually. Rick has created an atmosphere for everyone to be creative. It all begins with discussion between all parties. That’s why I came back to Thirst,” said Rattin, who had worked with Thirst 3 1/2 years previously before leaving to work on software campaigns for Sony, Sprint, the U.S. Postal Service and McDonald’s, among others. He returned last fall to work with Valicenti in the new 3ST.2
As for Valicenti and his personal likes, Valicenti won’t spell it out in black and white. “Why say it’s Letterman, Scorsese, Philippe Starck, Man Ray or Radiohead? I hesitate to do that,” he said, because “one day I’ll like red, the next day I’ll like blue, and people who like red will think you have nothing to say to them. Whatever feels appropriate at the moment. I am the king of contradiction.”
Fearless of reversing himself, Valicenti quickly predicted the next sea change in design.
“Going into the millennium, we’re cleaning out the closet,” he said. “Here comes the VW Beetle. Just clean it up. Simple value statements. Object fetish. Voila, it’s ready for the millennium. No funny faux finishes. I don’t need curtains. Minimalism becomes a symptomatic reaction to the onslaught of consumerism.”
Enough said.
