Timothy Goodman Is a Designer, Illustrator, Art Director and Mentor at Big Brothers Big Sisters
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Timothy Goodman is a designer, illustrator, art director and mentor at Big Brothers Big Sisters. He currently lives in San Francisco doing freelance design and until recently, he was working at Apple. He was formerly a senior designer with the New York experiential design firm COLLINS, where he worked for clients such as CNN, Motts, and Microsoft. He enjoys doing a variety of illustration work, which appears in Time magazine, The New York Times, and Wired magazine. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from School of Visual Arts. I am very pleased to present Timothy Goodman. [APPLAUSE] You guys have 30 seconds, I just want to play a little clip for you. [BACKGROUND] That was the clip from Woody Allen in the '60s. The reason I played that clip is because, well, there's a couple of reasons. A, stand-up comedy is like the number one thing I listen to while I work. I listen to the music, I listen to TED talks, but stand-up comedy, and it's usually much more raunchy than Woody Allen, is like the most inspiring thing to me. Secondly, why I think it's important is because as a graphic designer illustrator, that is graphic design to me, it's about the merger of two things to make one solid thing, or it's about taking a cliche and then flipping it on its head to be funny, to be witty, to be clever, to get your humor sensibilities and things. Thirdly and more or less important is that I having a variety of phallic-like jokes in my work in various places, and I don't know, I like doing interesting stuff. Anyways, I'm Timothy Goodman. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to run through some of my work with you. As Tim explained, I just quit working at Apple. I was there for about a year, a year-and-a-half. I moved to San Francisco to work for them from New York City. Now, Apple is an amazing place to work. I mean, it's the most successful company in the world right now, as you probably know. You're working on campaigns that millions and millions of people see on a daily basis worldwide. I'm going to have these little writings that I like to have throughout the presentation. It's not about design, it's about much more. You're telling a larger narrative to the world in a way. As you can imagine, everything is super confidential. As I was explaining to people today, it's like the closest thing that a designer can get to working for the CIA. Because of that, as you can imagine, I don't have any work that I've done on my website, I can't really show it. I can show it to a meeting or something, but you just have to be really delicate about the whole situation. But I'm going to give you a sneak peek of a bunch of work that I've done in the last year and hope you guys really like it, because like I said, it's super confidential, no Facebooking, no tweeting, no picture taking because I will get in super trouble. This was for the iPhone 4s that we did. As you can see, it's in Japan billboard. Look how they captivates the environment around it. I think you guys really get a sense of how profound these things are. These are two posters for iPad 2 that I worked on. There was about four or five of us that worked on this whole campaign for many months. It's always really exciting to work on something like that. You know about the iPad 2 six months before anyone, and you know all the features. It's really exciting. I art directed a bunch of photo shoots in various places for lifestyle things. These were a bunch of the shots that we've already seen, Grand Canyon in Utah and a bunch of studio shot. I think they're really amazing, I don't know. These four, these were website landing pages for various countries like Poland and Czech, how different everything is. This was a whole bunch of stuff for the Beatles campaign that was super exciting to work on, because Beatles came to iTunes. They were never allowed to be on iTunes, I mean, Jolkona would never let that happen. So we were all really excited about it when they came to iTune. This was the much of the work we did for that. That was pretty exciting. More iPhone 4s. I don't know, anybody have an iPhone 4s? Siri, nobody? Not one person? Anybody have an iPhone? [inaudible 00:05:50] What that? [inaudible 00:05:57] I understand. A lot of schools these days are making you use iPads, I don't know if they do that here, for like accounting classes. I guess you guys are not taking accounting classes. More iPad 2 stuff. I hope you guys are inspired by the work that I did at Apple. [LAUGHTER] I think there's a lot to be learned from my experience. Anyways, I've been in branding for the last three-and-a-half to four years. Before Apple, I worked for a man named Brian Collins. Branding is very much pragmatic. You a have a problem, you research, you analyze, you execute. We would use words like robust and threshold. Everything is run with fear, you're collaborating with a huge team and you're auditing and you're super professional and pretty much everything runs on fear in branding. It's an interesting business to be in. I worked for a man named Brian Collins for his brand new studio that I got there when he started. He was at a place called [inaudible 00:07:15] in New York. We would fill rooms up with research. So if you're working on a project, you spend months just researching, auditing and then posting when we have rooms of blank all of researching. We would brainstorm all night and come up with various ideas. You can see there eating really great food as you guys all know what it's like to work all night. You don't do this in college, you don't use words like gestalt. It was this whole experience that really blew my mind apart. This was the company that I was at. It was great because we designed everything from the logo to the identity system for it. It was beautiful. It was all about this idea of the calling that it's a partnership, introduces new ideas. So you'd have calling Collins, whatever client we're working with. We develop the typeface there, there was really hard working, and a website and all these great things. But to me, funny think about this, I'm going to show you the envelope, is that when you write your name, it's [LAUGHTER] where you put a label. It's these jokes. As a graphic designer, you're always going to have to compromise, you're doing work for clients. But for me personally, if I can squeeze these little things in and no one knows about, it's fucking hilarious to me. [LAUGHTER] Because then that can be later at the bottom of my body like, "Look at this envelope we did, nobody knows what was like." Anyways, [LAUGHTER] can we make a story that people can participate in? Can we become a bigger idea? These are the questions that we asked ourselves at COLLINS all the time. What are we working on? How can we push this into a different realm? No better example than we worked on the CNN grill. That was for the Democratic and Republican National Convention in 2008. CNN, they had local pubs outside in both Denver and Minnesota that were not far from the convention centers. So when pundits would like leave, they could go and have a beer and talk politics at the branded CNN grill. This was in Denver and this was the space that wasn't too far from there, just right outside the convention center. We took the space, and at the time the CNN slogan was, "CNN equals politics." We said, what does politics mean to you? So we had a blog and people wrote in and we took their answers and we wrapped it all over this building. I need some water. These guys are trying to give me junk before. [LAUGHTER] So it became this spectacle, and that's what they wanted. It was a homage, there's a lot of ghost writing on buildings in Denver, I'm sure on many cities. It was fancy, [inaudible 00:10:43] like $40,000 sign and everything. We did the whole experience where people could come and report the news and talk politics and all these kind of things. We did all these really beautiful neon signs that we drew that we're in various places. Literally, like three weeks ago, a friend of mine wrote me and he was like, because I drew these neon signs, he said, "Do you realize that that you what you drew?" [LAUGHTER] This went through the client, creative directors I work for, no one ever saw it. It's like literally a diagram that you see in a science book.