Today's post is a guest post by Nicole Newton, Keynote's Marketing Assistant. Though she knows little about design, she enjoyed meeting Mike Salisbury and learning about the design process behind some of her favorite brands - especially Jurassic Park, which was her favorite movie as a child. One of her earliest childhood memories is her father coming home from work and, seeing Jurassic Park on TV, proclaiming, "you're watching this movie again!"
San Francisco's annual TYPO event is a unique opportunity to gather some of the world's most influential designers and listen to them talk about their design process.
One of the speakers at this year's TYPO event was Mike Salisbury, and we were lucky enough to host Mike in our office for an afternoon meeting before he headed into San Francisco to get ready for the conference.
Mike was at our office for an hour but all our agents agreed we could have listened to him talk about his work creating legendary brands all day. Some of his most compelling stories, which he also shared at TYPO, include the process behind some of his most famous, and infamous, designs.
One of Mike's most compelling stories from his TYPO talk stems from running into the Jurassic Park logo several years after working on the marketing campaign for the movie. Looking at the lettering on the logo he thought, "Who did that crappy lettering? ...That stuff really sucks!"
"We had done so much work on this for years. I went back and I looked in our files - and I had cut this out myself by hand," Mike says, referring to the lettering concept for the logo, "and put it together on a Xerox machine."
Mike's story reveals the intense process behind successful branding and design, talking about the hundreds of concepts he worked through before Stephen Spielberg and his team selected the final design for the logo. A logo which, years later, Mike would forget contributing the now-iconic lettering to in the first place!
Aside from Jurassic Park, Mike has also worked on Aliens, Basic Instinct, Goonies, Planet of the Apes, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rocky IV, The Fly, and dozens of other successful film campaigns.
Mike's work with film campaigns, though notable, is hardly his most recognizable work. If you've ever donned one white glove on Halloween and paraded around as Michael Jackson, you're already familiar with Mike's work. If you've ever slipped on a pair of Levi's 501 jeans, hopped in your Volkswagen, and rushed to the store to grab a copy of Rolling Stone, you're already familiar with Mike's work.
To hear more about these stories, and dive deeper into Mike's work, watch his entire TYPO talk or head over to his website.
Image borrowed with permission from Mike Salisbury's website. Please do not reproduce this image with the written consent of Mike Salisbury. To contact Mike Salisbury, please click here.