Nation Building by Design Greg Durrell TEDxSFU

so for as long as can remember have been fascinated with logos and nothing gets me more excited than when graphic designer can take complex idea and distill it down into simple recognizable and understandable form and when you can achieve that these symbols can become vessels for meaning as kid growing up remember watching films by the National Film Board of Canada that had this really simple logo of person with their arms outstretched that formed an eye mean think about this film production company dedicated to telling Canadian stories that is genius what about our public broadcaster the CBC see at the core which visually broadcasts out to Canada and the world and if you like that one you know the most distilled logo of them all one that is considered in the top 10 greatest logos of all time is this one Canadian National Railways single thickness line symbolizing the movement of people materials and messages you cannot get more simpler and distilled than that or can you look at this this is no-name brands this is brand that we're all familiar with and look at this identity it's one color one typeface that is it and how many people in this room have no-name product in their house right now like what do you guys think like you know that's 75 ish 50% bet there's way more you guys you don't even know you have this in in your house or about this one so this was for the Montreal in 1976 Olympic Games and contained within this emblem you have running track which is the heart of the Summer Games you have podium symbolizing athletic excellence and of course the Olympic rings and this logo beyond all the other ones had the biggest influence on my life because growing up there was two things that loved love sports and loved design and when saw this logo and the identity that was created around it knew wanted to contribute to become designer at the Olympic Games and then in 2004 Vancouver won the bid to host the 2010 Olympic Games and felt like this is it this is why I'm on the earth have to get job there so dropped out of university twice twice actually dropped out to us my parents weren't too stoked about that and moved into my grandparents basement so had no overhead and took up full-time job of trying to get job at the games and it took me two years but got the final spot on the design team and there were six of us and we would have been responsible for almost anything you would have seen from pins to planes to trains to the metals to the torches to the red mittens to the field of play this is photo of Granville Street shortly after Sidney Crosby scored in overtime to win the men's ice meadow ice gold medal yeah how many people like remember where they were in this moment let's see what do we got shower hands okay can't even tell let's just say 70% here but you know this was transformative moment at least in my life as Canadian because for the first time it was cool to wave Canadian flag you know never experienced that and people would high-five you if you did that you know that's powerful and coming out of these games the Canadian Olympic Committee that's responsible for sending the athletes to every games they had acknowledges to like something happened in this country during these games and they also had acknowledged that they had this logo that they were using that was like maybe not that great and there was room for improvement and they approached another designer on our team Ben hulls and myself and the assets if we'd be interested in rebranding the Olympic team it took us half second to say absolutely let's do this and in one of our very first meetings question came up that would reshape the next eight years of my life and the question was this how long the maple leaf been used to represent Canada and nobody in the room knew we had no idea it had just just lived with this flag my whole life the maple leaf is synonymous with Canada Canadian identity don't know since the start thought no that's not true when went home and researched later that day what found was that this was our flag until 1965 at the time our flag was under 50 years old can you believe it like this blew my mind and what started off as just this interesting fact grew into this curiosity and wanted to understand why this change happened and what that meant there was some serious social and justices that happened under the watch of this flag Nicky spoke about some of that this morning and as this grew as this grew inside of me had to had to meet the people that change it had to understand the human stories behind the design the flag so foolishly thought I'm gonna make film about it how hard can that be right six years later Here am but set it on this quest to meet the designer behind their flag and this was the gear just learned how to use it using YouTube tutorials the theme of this conference today is unchartered you want to talk about unchartered had never made film before didn't even know anyone who had made film before was using this gear for the first time when was out on the shoots mean practiced little bit but generally and made mistakes and made ton of mistakes along the way but my passion for the subject kept me going now it's important to acknowledge that Canada's history with the maple leaf and particularly the sugar maple tree goes back to the very first peoples that inhabited this land to the best of our knowledge 12,000 years ago but in 1963 our prime minister at the time Lester Pearson decided that enough was enough with this Red Ensign kena's hundredth year anniversary was approaching it was time to create flag and this started one of the most heated debates in the history of Canada because you had an older generation that had grown up with the red enzyme that had represented them their whole lives they felt why do we need to change it's been great for me but at the same time you had younger demographic that had grown up in Canada and were detached from Britain they had no connection to the colonial past and that colonial symbol no longer spoke to them and this was debate that took place and the radio and television and magazines newspapers everywhere and so what Pearson decided to do was simple enough we will form committee to come up with the design and this was the committee there were 11 members on this committee and it was bipartisan committee and they were given over 3,000 submissions and six weeks now work in design there is nothing more terrifying than designed by committee especially especially there's not single designer on that committee there's no creative director it's politicians this is like this is the worst like this is red tape all over this nonetheless this was their tax so I'm gonna walk you through the three final submissions first up was what became to be known as Pearson's pennant it was the Prime Minister's favorite it was three Maple Leafs flanking by these two blue bars that represented the two oceans but they're sort of like third ocean so it didn't fully make sense but beyond that there was no way the Conservatives we're gonna vote for this one because the liberal Prime Minister wanted it they were not going to vote it so although it was an option it really wasn't an option next up was Red Ensign part 2 so here you can see that they've just simply taken the Union Jack out through some maple leafs in there changed the shield to speak to the colonial past mean this doesn't this doesn't do anything here and the third and final option they had was this one and this is what you do when you don't know what to do you just put it all in there right like this is one flag but it's three flags like so the Committee Chairman had acknowledged that you know maybe we don't mean we don't have the solution here and literally in the final hour he submitted fourth concept it was this one it was single maple leaf and this was something that all the parties could get behind and it was unanimity voted in however the committee chairman John Matheson he had the foresight to know that you know this was kind of rush job don't know maybe we should have designer like take look at it before it comes our flag hopefully for centuries so he contacted Patrick Reed who was the executive director of design department within the federal government at that time and then he hired the best graphic designer that he had available and that was this person job sense here and unfortunately all through these people are no longer with us today but did have the opportunity to interview Patrick Reed and I'm gonna let him tell us how we arrived at the flag we have today we have design which had the two red bars the formalized maple leaf in the middle and was at 13 points the 13 pointer just looked little too heavy at the base John and discussed this and finally we agreed to draw two points to bring it down to 11 yeah round of applause mean think about that like it was just question of like just to have you down there and they Lymon ated two parts they just chiseled away the access and look at what they arrived at that's beautiful it's beautiful piece of design however flags get it they don't live in isolation they live in comparison and contrast with other flags so let's do two quick comparisons first up our neighbors in the south and it's important to understand you know think the differences in our culture's through the design process here the American flag was born out of war people died for the creation of that flag you know each one of those stripes represent one of the founding colonial states and every star is kind of represented as almost like these trophies of the states where ours was formed by committee people work together next up Australia mean they're probably the next closest to us culturally and their flag is literally called the Blue Ensign like look at that and you know they have six states so there's six stars on the flag but what about their territories they're not represented and then you look at our flag there's not three leaves there's not two leaves there's one leaf that says however many people we are we are one eighty four percent of Canadians agree that Canada's multicultural makeup is one of the best things about our country and believe that is visually represented in our flag and to me it's no coincidence that this flag became almost rallying point in the Canada that we know today shortly after this flag was adopted it gave us the official languages act making English and French equal it changed our immigration policy from racist system to one that was based on point system and it created the charters of Rights and Freedoms and believe the simplicity of this symbol allowed it to become that rallying point for the Canada that we know today two years after this flag was adopted was that hundred year anniversary that prompted this whole flag to be made and for that logo for that event they created this logo and this is maybe my favorite version of all Maple Leaf flags because it's just so incredibly simple this was designed by stuart ashe and it is triangles that's the triangles and stem and what love about it is that it looked is great in 1967 as it does today in park you can find this all across the country if you look for it now don't want to miss guide you not all Canadian design is great and not all iconography that we choose to represent ourselves with is exceptional few years ago was hundred and fiftieth anniversary and the federal government came out with this logo and to me this logo is just complex there's so much going on here it's it's spiky its aggressive like if you fell on it look like it would kill you you know one of those spikes would just go right through your jugular and like I'm practicing designer have visual memory like if look away couldn't for the life of me draw that thing could never reproduce it and you look at that logo on the left mean it is so simple could explain it to you over the telephone and you could draw it and really think that matters and if this one isn't bad enough the government in Ottawa decided well yeah we can't use that one we need our own logo too so then they created this one and then they had two logos and it's like what are you guys doing at least pick one and unfortunately the hits don't stop here grew up in Ontario in Toronto and this logo was one that really mattered to me this was the government of Ontario logo it's depiction of the Trillium the provincial flower and what love about it it speaks to that connection to nature you can find it in the provincial parks all across the province few years ago the government decided you know we're not we're not about that old stuff anymore we're new we're going in new directions we are energetic we are with the people we need to show progress and they created what has come to be known as three citizens sitting in Trillium shape hot tub don't know if you should clap at this don't know don't know if this is clap worthy here but it's just like terrible you know and you can see by them trying to say all these things they end up saying nothing Douglas Coupland in the film refers to it as three white-tailed deer with their butts glued together like who wants to be part of that however understand the world changes know that sometimes things need to change so going back to this moment 2010 coming out of this so I'm going to walk through how we approach the redesign of main Olympic team so this was the logo that they were using mean it's it's not terrible it's not great but again there's just so much going on in here you have maple leaf that has been stylized it's little more curvy you have the cauldron then you have flame that has this like really 90s aesthetic gradient you have the Olympic rings and you have English and French text writing alright like look at how long it took me to explain what was happening in there and so what we wanted to do was using the kind of ethos of 1960s 70s Canadian design let's just strip away everything that is not essential and we put into place for them this it's maple leaf the rings and an oval that's it and now I'm not trying to say today that all design has to be distilled down into simplicity that that's not the case mean think there are opportunities to be louder in other aspects but when it comes to these identities it matters but at the same time we realize everything couldn't just be simple so we also put into place this graphic that is sort of mosaic that is based off the geometry of the maple leaf and then comparison and contrast of these two elements we applied it on things like stationary three-dimensional space now we hear we see it on Canadian athletes merchandise programs and here's like reason for that simplicity mean look at the side of the sunglasses like you can still totally identify what that symbol is that matters and that matters today almost more than ever and few years ago there was study done on all Olympic logos and it came back that Canada was number one the most recognizable logo and I'm not saying like you change your logo and the complete trajectory of your business or organization changes like get it that that doesn't necessarily work that way but with this logo that was recognizable and understandable the CRC was able to attract better partners that led to more funding that led to better opportunity for athletes and ultimately has led to podium success that Canadians have never experienced before so although the stories about Canada that that the the the idea of distilling your communication is relevant to any nation or any business anywhere in the world because good design is good business now set out on the journey to make this film to meet the designer behind this symbol and although never got to meet him did have the opportunity to meet his family and through that learned little bit about Jacques sincere Jacques sincere grew up in small town outside of Quebec City and he is true Canadian mean look at this photo the single canoeist on the lake surrounded by the forest that is photo of Canada and Jacques sincere was also World War two veteran and when he came back from the war he decided that he would no longer dedicated his life to destroying this world but building this world so he enrolled in graphic design School in Montreal and although he created one of the most iconic symbols in the history of Canada he'd never wanted to take credit for it because he felt that this was symbol for all of us and what symbol he left behind this is symbol that speaks to unity speaks of cooperation speaks to hope and if you're gonna take away anything from my talk today take away this that think it's really important that we all acknowledge that we have really young flag its meaning is still to be determined and that responsibility lies with all of us in this room Jacques sincere left us symbol with incredibly beautiful narrative now it's up to us to read the story thank you