Working on these small sheets is an idea stolen from David Kennedy. As early as 1992, David would go to the printer room at Wieden & Kennedy and dig out used photocopier paper, cut them in quarter stacks with the paper cutter, bind them up with a bulldog clip and use them for notes. It was sort of crazy but cool.
Fifteen years later I noticed John Jay worked on little quarter-sheets of paper too. He'd treat each sheet as a slide as he created his presentations. He'd tape the sheets to the wall and move them around and take pages down and add to them, tearing down and rebuilding his presentation as he went.
It's a great way to work. I like that each sheet is small, so ideas have to be singular. I like that you can get rid of and add pages easily and change the flow. You can work the sheets like a book, like David does, or lay them out like a map, like John Jay.
And pencils I like for all the reasons you can imagine: they erase, they're tactile, they encourage flow, they invite expression, they smell wonderful. The glass of sharp black pencils and white scratch sheets sitting on the table is very seductive.
Today, our pencil sharpening has moved into the 20th Century. The studio has added a brand new Boston schoolroom-style manual wall-mounted pencil sharpener.
Progress and technology are not without their aesthetic trade-offs. As you can see, the cone of the hand-sharpened pencil is shorter, giving it a distinctive, artisanal profile, and the wood reveals the human hand and hand-tool that made it, versus the perfectly smooth and regular wood of the machine-sharpened pencil.
As we begin to shift over to the Boston, I'm sure I'll be nostalgic for our last batch of artisan pencils. I'm glad Betsy, the designer who started with us last week, and who inherited the job of Director of Pencil Operations, got to experience life before and after this 20th-Century marvel.