It's one of the hottest days of the year in San Francisco, and the air conditioning in the offices of design firm Cahan & Associates has failed. It doesn't seem to bother Bill Cahan. He's used to heat.
The founder and creative director of the highly successful yet edgy firm is talking animatedly about "I Am Almost Always Hungry," a 262-page monograph published recently by Princeton Architectural Press. The book, through interviews, essays, and project notes, offers a glimpse into the intense creative cauldron that is the firm's hallmark.
"It was very difficult," Cahan says, describing the work that went into writing and designing the book. "For the first time in 15 years we had to articulate a process — who we were, what we were about."
Cahan & Associates has made a name for itself doing exactly that for other companies. Piling up an obscene number of awards (more than 1,400 at last count), the firm is famous for turning federally mandated annual reports into splashy marketing vehicles for high-tech and health care companies. Apart from blowing away traditional conceptions of how an annual report should look, the genius of Cahan and his designers lies in their ability to give a personality to what are often faceless or little-known corporations. We're not talking General Electric, Ford or IBM. Try Collateral Therapeutics, Molecular Biosystems, and Tumbleweed Communications.
Giving a face to the faceless
"I Am Almost Always Hungry" describes it thusly: "In the corporate environment our clients inhabit, anonymous corridors and windowless conference rooms are the norm. Yet, very often, what's going on in this world is some new form of business that may revolutionise the way in which the world lives and works. So how do you communicate the excitement of that to a company's audience? How do you get beyond committees? The habits? The status quo? What are the limits, anyway?"
Quite simply, for Cahan & Associates there are no limits. The company made the front page of USA Today for designing the 1996 annual report of Adaptec as a children's book. (The previous year it was a comic book with a cover that would have made Roy Lichtenstein proud.) The 1996 report for Heartport featured die-cut bores mimicking the "ports" created with the company's innovative surgical instruments. The same year, Cadence's report had a blue velour cover with bold reversed type that read, "Feels different, doesn't it?"
Aggressive type and photography play leading roles in each design, a reflection of what Cahan says is the main function of many annual reports: to educate readers about what the company does. Some of the firm's more famous reports feature page after page of large sans-serif type reversed out of photographs or flat background colours. Others have text on the front cover laid out like an e.e. cummings poem, but which nonetheless tells a compelling story about the company.
Turning the tables
With "I Am Almost Always Hungry," the firm had to turn its attention on itself, which to hear Cahan tell it, turned out to be an uncomfortable reversal of fortune. In the foreword, Cahan calls the book "the toughest job we've ever done" and describes how playing both client and designer led the firm to lose sight of the "process that has served us so well in the past."
"We don't have a style," Cahan says. "We do have an approach."
Designing outside the box doesn't come easily. Cahan & Associates employs a novel approach in which up to three designers are assigned to each new project. This is a windfall for the firm's clients, as they have the luxury of choosing from three distinct design solutions, but the competition between designers can lead to heated moments in the firm's offices.
It's that kind of heat, and the kind that comes from constantly pushing the design envelope and selling the results to clients, that Bill Cahan foments in his firm. He is unapologetic about it, pointing out that some of his designers have been with the firm for six or seven years, "which in design is a lifetime." Still, Cahan & Associates has achieved a reputation for being — to put it politely — unconventional.
Cahan says: "I think sometimes with first-time clients there's a respect, but there's also a fear factor. They hear things."
Despite the difficulties involved in self-examination, "I Am Almost Always Hungry" is a beautifully designed and written book. The difficulties Cahan discusses are hardly evident in the final product. Instead, it succeeds in giving the reader an honest picture of what makes Cahan & Associates unique and famous, as well as numerous examples of the firm's award-winning work.
The title was originally written by one of the firm's designers as a straight piece of text, a confession about always wanting to eat. Cahan, the perfectionist, reads in a different meaning, what might serve as the firm's creative ethos.
"I'm still waiting for that perfect piece," he says. That kind of hunger never goes away.
Adobe.com Senior Editor Matt Davidson is almost always thirsty.
