Greg Chinn
“It takes a little bit of courage to do things that are different.”
From hit “M Is for Modern” flashcards to stunning limited-edition illustrations for the The Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation, creative director and designer Greg Chinn is known for unexpected solutions to design questions.
He’s the founder of The Local Brand Co., a Los Angeles-based design studio, and longtime Outer Voice readers may already be familiar with Chinn as the creative director of our illustrated series, The Beat: A Cultural Mixtape.
We’re discussing the difference between creating things and curating them, or, as Greg says, “things that are more handcrafted rather than just using the right template.”
“You're not just getting the right font, with the right stock image, with the right color,” he explains. “Which is all important, I'm not dismissing it in any way, because you need to know that. But a lot of people know how to do that now, how to be curators, design curators, and not [creators]. And this is just what I'm after, creating things that are just not so stock. I'm not saying that mine is the most original, but I think having that fortitude or drive to do it makes a difference in terms of how it’s interpreted by whoever's viewing it. I mean, I think we're all pretty savvy now about when items are just curated versus an actual new, fresher image.”
Greg quickly digs into what defines a designer’s personal creative voice, and how they can protect it from being watered down by endless ranks of client and internal stakeholders while still honoring the mission to serve the client well.
Design is a process, and it requires back-and-forth between designer and client, executives and creatives. Walking the line of championing a vision while serving the client can sometimes be tricky.
“I would say that some people are just innately good at it,” he says. “They just have a way to just process what they're saying, and guide them to see your point of view and then move forward in that way. But if you don't have that skill, because I don't necessarily think I had that skill, I think you need a mentor. You need somebody to be able to teach you this. Because it’s a super-important skill in terms of how you present projects and getting the most out of the design that you're presenting.
“What works best with me is when there's a story involved. There's some sort of story that brings it to a level that's not as confrontational … I think if there's a story that sort of softens it, and makes the client feel a little more at ease about the why, it's an easier sell because you're having a conversation, you're not just coming directly at them saying it, ‘you should do this.’ No one wants to be hard-sold”
Ultimately, it’s about a good match between designer and client. Chinn chose to scale down his operation to do the kind of work with the kinds of clients he enjoys most.
“I stepped back and said, ‘Well, exactly what kind of work do I really want to produce?’” Chinn says. “I would rather have smaller to midsize clients that have more creative freedom, and work a little more. The larger clients are a little safer and probably more steady, but less inclined to do anything edgier or newish. Because they want to keep the machine going, and really don't want to push anything new.”
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The Local Brand Co. operates on a boutique scale, creating brand identities and campaigns for clients including The Amistad Center for Art & Culture, Shintaro Akatsu School of Design, The Connecticut Audubon Society, and businesses around the U.S. and the globe.
“Before the internet, to be an international designer, or international creative, you'd have to travel,“ he says. “You'd have to go to Italy or Paris or whatever. You'd have to stay there for a little while to figure out the ins and outs of what's cool, what you're sort of attracted to. Then you move to another city or another country, you stay there for a couple years, you learn it, and you keep going, and then you you get this collection of concepts and ideas. And then, wherever you end up, you take all those ideas, synthesize it together. Now, you can go online, and you can look at what's cool in Tokyo in minutes or seconds. What’s cool in Italy. And it's curated for you, because somebody has already done it. So it's not like you're truly investigating something that maybe fewer people have, or haven't seen. Everything begins to look very similar … I think it becomes a little less authentic now than it was previously. There's still good work being produced now, obviously, but it's just a different way of becoming true to yourself.”
Greg is quick to point out that the process of becoming true to yourself, and to finding your creative voice, is always ongoing.
“I think it just comes with mileage,” he says. “First of all, it's school because you get your influences, and you study the masters, and people who are doing the work … As your life goes on — and I think it's affected by where you live and what you do and who you are surrounde by — that affects your aesthetic. And when you put those all together, and if you're sort of aware of who you are, and the kind of work that you want to do, I think your personal style comes out.”
The shaping of a personal creative voice is also holistic in a way we often overlook. Our creative work isn’t crafted in a vacuum. Our homes, family, friends, pets, and lifestyles all play a part in shaping how we approach a creative work.
“I think it depends on where you are in your life and where you're living,” Chinn adds later. “Because I think when I was in Los Angeles, I definitely had a more modernist kind of forward sense. When lived and worked in Connecticut, I blended sort of an East Coast, sort of traditional style, with a New York edge to it. But I still had sort of an LA attitude about it. All those things come into play. Your family or your friends have a big part of it as well. So at the time when I first started my first business, my daughter, Lily was three or four. And so my first product that I launched was these modernism flashcards, and I did them so I could teach her about modernism.”
The “M Is for Modern” cards went on to be picked up by the Cooper Hewitt design museum store. Soon, Design Within Reach, Apartment Therapy and HGTV were featuring it articles on their sites.
While Chinn’s aesthetic has traditionally leaned into modernism with clean lines, it’s also known for a unique human touch — quirky, and less restrained than by-the-books modernism. Recently, he’s embraced more organic shapes and rougher lines.
“I've gone back to a more sort of Swiss style,” he says. “It's clean, but there's shapes and there's texture, and the color palette is a much more neutral palette than some of the other work that I've done that's a little brighter, or warmer, or cooler. And it may just be the fact that as I as I age, I just need something that's more calm. I mean, that's what appeals to me more. And the sort of kick comes from scale or from contrast in form, not necessarily color.”
People often wonder where a designer, or any creative, starts on a new project. This is why people ask designers, painters, writers, composers, “where do you get your ideas?”
Chinn’s straightforward in his approach. “I think, in a lot of ways, whatever the project is, it has its own answers already in there, and I'm just molding the form … You get all these clues from when you're working with somebody, and I think you just internalize it, and then, all those little aspects together begin to create a sense of what you're going to present to whoever that person or people are.”
The development of a logo for a recent project, a wellness company called Anako, is a prime example. The company, founded by caterer and entrepreneur Anna Cherubini, focuses on the benefits of the plant moringa, popular in her homeland of the Philippines for a myriad of remedies.
The name, “Anako,” comes from the Tagalog words “Anak,” which means “child,” and “Ko,” which means “mine,” to form “Anako,” or “my child.”
“That came out of the problem,” he explains. “The fact that no one really knows how to pronounce it or spell it. So I broke it in a sort of more modern way than a dictionary would do it. It’s usually a slash but I just broke it this way. Again, the solution was in the problem.”
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That project has fewer stakeholders to weigh in and water down the design intent, but whether a designer is facing a small business or giant corporation, Chinn points out the most important common denominator in getting great work seen: people.
“Keep pushing out the kind of work that you want to do,” he says. “You're going to get some people to go, ‘oh, that's not my thing.’ But other people might say, ‘that's my thing!’ Try and gather all those people to get out the kind of work you want, because you’ll have more cheerleaders and voices helping you get to that. Have people around you that have that similar vision, because I think that makes a difference about getting really creative work out there.”
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