Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

This is Design Matters with Debbie Milman,

from Design Obs.com.

On this program, Debbie Millman talks with Jonathan Ford about brand design and about an early rough patch in his career.

He said, what I'm wearing, do I look too full, do I look too casual, do I look strange, is my work any good,

I'm a good designer, I'm terrible terrible I went through all these emotions and I can

really remember it thinking you know this is just not good here's Debbie Millman

odds are Here's Debbie Millman. Odds are you've probably enjoyed an innocent brand smoothing. Maybe you've also enjoyed a green and black chocolate bar,

then topped off the evening with an absolute martini.

If so, your experience of these products was shaped by Pearl Fisher, the design company that

created the packaging and identities for these brands

and many others. Jonathan Ford is a co-founder and creative partner with the firm. He joins me today

to talk about the business of branding and

design and about his illustrious career. Welcome to design matters Jonathan.

Thank you very much for having me. It's great to have you here. It's a pleasure.

So I have a question I've been dying to ask you.

What's with the name Pearl Fisher?

Well, branding a design agency is an interesting thing to do and if you start your agency up then you

only get a chance to get it right once really.

And when we started out our business in 92, we found it the hardest thing to do was to name ourselves and I think to this day

brand naming is the hardest creative act you can go through. We knew that we really didn't want to name the company after ourselves. We wanted to create it.

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