Good Day. The Grand Prix is weeks behind me now, and the thing I keep returning to is not the banners everyone saw. It is the work nobody will ever notice, which I am coming to believe is the truest measure of the craft.
Because it was Edmonton's first year, a lead designer who had worked the Australian Grand Prix came and stood beside me, one on one, through part of it. That kind of company is its own education. You learn more in a week at the elbow of someone who has done it than in months of doing it blind, and I will not soon forget the generosity of it.
Most of my pride from those weeks is unglamorous. A couple of us in a back room, weeding vinyl by hand, a plotter cutting wayfinding onto sheets of Coroplast, stack after stack of signs, and the quiet, enormous task of knowing exactly where each one belonged. We got every last one done, in time. At that scale, simply finishing is the accomplishment nobody applauds.
Exhaustion is its own hazard in this work. On a twenty hour shift, staring at the same screen, words begin to blur into one another. We caught a washroom sign at the last second that, with a single missing letter, read as something far less dignified. We laughed, and we fixed it, and I learned that proofreading is not a step you perform once. It is a discipline you hold even when your eyes have stopped cooperating.
Then there are the things designed for a camera rather than a person. The graphics on the ground are not printed square. We set them on a deliberate angle, judged against where the cameras would sit, so they read true on a broadcast. The logos around a hairpin are stretched, sometimes as much as four hundred percent wider than the mark itself, because a camera sweeping past at speed compresses them back into shape. I was astonished at how far you must distort a thing for it to look correct.
That is the real secret of it. We were not designing for the eye in the stands. We were designing for perception itself, for the angle and the speed and the lens, giving each logo its best possible chance in the half second it would live on a screen. None of it survives if you do it in a hurry. You take your time, or you get it wrong, and there is no rushing perception into place.
It is invisible, and it matters, and those two things are not in tension. The wayfinding that gets a stranger from a parking lot to their seat, the angle that makes a logo land, the missing letter you caught at three in the morning, none of it is glamorous and all of it is the job. I suspect this instinct, to sweat the part nobody will ever credit you for, is the one I will carry the furthest.
A great many people had a wonderful day at that track and never once thought about how they found their seat. That is precisely the point. The best of this work disappears into a good day, and I am proud to have made some of it vanish.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · September 2005