House Special
by Lisa Baggerman
Specializing happened naturally at Hunt Design Associates, which began as a full-service design shop. Now this EGD firm is hotter than ever, all because it found its niche.
It’s OK to produce Mickey Mouse designs when one of your clients is Disney. In fact, Hunt Design Associates’ story reads a little like a fairy tale for designers. More than 20 years ago, Pasadena, CA-based Hunt Design started out as a full-service marketing design firm with modest ambitions of, well, staying in business long enough to make a profit.
When the firm refined its focus to entertainment-oriented environmental graphic design, business took off. Today, Hunt Design is a premier international EGD firm with projected profits of more than $2 million this year.
“Specializing in EGD wasn’t a conscious decision,” says Wayne Hunt, principal and founder of the firm. “It was just the evolutionary flow of our business. We’re fortunate that we’re able to get the work that interests us the most – graphic design for buildings, places and spaces.” Intentional or not, the migration to focusing almost exclusively on entertainment-oriented EGD was a smart move. The firm works with high-profile clients domestically and internationally, including The Walt Disney Co., the MGM Grand, Paris Las Vegas, Samsung and the World Trade Center.
Because many of the company’s projects were so specialized, Hunt Design quickly became known as a leading EGD firm. “I absolutely credit specialization for our firm’s growth,” Hunt says. “For instance, we started out with a project for the MGM Grand. Now we’ve done projects for almost all the other major gaming casinos. They know we speak their language and that our learning curve will be much smaller. Other firms could’ve handled these projects, but our clients often choose us because they know we already understand their customers and their needs.”
But according to Hunt, designers aren’t naturally inclined to specialize. “Creative people pride themselves on being generalists,” Hunt says. “Creatives tend to know a little about a lot of things and want to work that way, too, experimenting with different design disciplines. At the other end of the spectrum are the demands of the marketplace, which tend to seek out specialists. If you want to get your Alfa Romeo fixed, you don’t go to a place that handles all makes and models. You go to an Alfa Romeo shop.”
For proof, look no further than Hunt Design’s clients. Rick Juleen is director of graphics and signage for Park Place Entertainment, the company that hired Hunt Design for the Paris Las Vegas hotel/casino project. “Wayne’s experience organizing and running projects of this size was the primary reason we decided to hire Hunt Design for this project,” Juleen says. “When is comes to wayfinding, I think Wayne’s the most experienced professional out there. He’s got it down to a science.”
All this doesn’t forecast the death of the cross-discipline design firm, but it does suggest more marketability for designers who choose a specialty. “There are plenty of successful full-service design firms, but many of them are full of specialists,” Hunt says. “You don’t find a lot of people who are really good at a lot of things.”
Storytelling and Staffing
Each project Hunt Design tackles starts and ends with a story. “When it comes to our business approach, we’re very big on storytelling, whether it’s figurative or literal,” Hunt says. “Spaces have stores to tell. We work with scripts as well as plans to create a story that we fulfill through a narrative, sequence and hierarchy. It’s a bit of an unreal world-essentially, you’re creating a fictitious environment. But instead of watching the play, you’re sort of in it.”
The production process for most of the firm’s projects is long – Paris Las Vegas took about nine months to complete. Just like smaller-scale design jobs, the hotel/casino started with basic sketches. But the process became much more complicated because so many people were involved in the decision-making. “One of the biggest challenges with a project like Paris Las Vegas was figuring out the right design for the right theme,” says Jennifer Bressler, Hunt Design’s senior designer and project manager for the hotel/casino. “But the second challenge was coordination. We had several vendors to please and juggled crews of people, making sure everyone was happy with the designs. It’s a real political job in that sense.”
Hunt Design created all electrical signage, non-illuminated signage and graphics for the space, working with four different vendors. “When it gets down to the production, it’s our responsibility to manage the various vendors that have been awarded the project,” Bressler says. During the design process, every staffer is entrusted with a specific facet of each project, but everyone involved works together. “I think the best thing about our firm is that we work as a team to get things done,” Bressler says. “We made sure we had the right designers on the right signs. The project manager made sure the sign got to the vendor on time in a digital format. All the while, we communicated with the client to make sure they were aware of when the job would be completed.” Even within a specialist firm, staffers have specialties of their own for every project.
All this explains why Hunt Design’s 17-employee firm is structured more like an architecture firm than a design studio. Instead of hiring art directors and production artists, Hunt Design hires space programmers, designers and model-makers. Using an architectural structure as an archetype for the firm’s organization was more about using a practical blueprint than making a creative statement.
“Our work process is more similar to architecture than it is to conventional design,” Hunt says. “Since we work so closely with architects on our projects, we create our contracts and schedules in the same language they do. The people who hire us are used to working with architects, and this is also how they communicate.”
Treating Guests Right
The most important goal of an EGD project is making a connection with the visitor or user. More and more, entertainment is being used as provocative design element, and EGD is no exception to that trend. Because traditionally “undersigned” venues like hospitals and airports are trying to enliven their spaces with more engaging design, it goes without saying that the bar is raised for entertainment-intensive places such as theme parks, casinos and retail stores. “Since we now have the technology to enrich any visitor environments, it’s become expected,” Hunt says. “During the design process, everyone’s always talking about the guest experience. We want visitors to have immerged, rich experiences in our environments. We want them to tell people and come back.”
Hunt’s design process starts and ends with the user’s experience in the space. “Everything we do is about how people get to, access or interact with a space or experience,” Hunt says. “It’s a given that everything is designed for the people who are likely to visit the space. Users are different depending on the environment. You treat an airport visitor differently than a retail visitor. The airport visitor is interested in finding the right gate or baggage claim. She’s always in a hurry and needs a lot of information fast. But if you’re designing a museum environment, you have a much more passive consumer who is moving through slowly – who’ll stop, pause and move on. In the end, it’s about making places.”
International Acclaim
It may seem glamorous to have international clients, especially when you can expense travel abroad. But according to Hunt, the glamour is overrated and the trips are only long enough to accommodate client meetings. In fact, Hunt Design’s international client list has more to do with the projects themselves than an international-business strategy.
“We never sat down and said, ‘Let’s go international.’ It just kind of evolved.” Hunt says. “Our work is about places, and places are all over. We’ve found that if a design trend is successful in this country, it tends to be attempted or emulated in other cultures. If we create a successful retail concept for an American client, you can be sure that it will be in Tokyo or London next year. And chances are, international companies will come to us to do the project.”
But international projects bring headaches along with the prestige. Regular client meetings still happen every six to eight weeks and involve whirlwind trips abroad. Everything from travel expenses to language barriers to time zones, not to mention the complexity of international contracts, become obstacles. “Things don’t go wrong more frequently with international clients than they do with domestic ones,” Hunt says. “Problems are just harder to fix when they do.”
Hunt advises designers seeking international work to forget about trying to assimilate into their client’s cultures. “There are classes that tell you how to cross your legs and what kind of gum to chew. Forget that,” Hunt says. “Your clients don’t want you to act like them – they want you to be yourself. The best advice is just to sit still and listen – don’t talk too much. If you just sit still you’re ahead of half the Americans.”
You’d think a firm with nine international clients on its roster would need an office of multilingual designers, but that’s not the case. “We’ve found that, for better or for worse, the dominant international business language is English,” Hunt says. “It’s unlikely that I or anyone else on staff will know another language so accurately that it can be used as a business tool. When we’re hired, our clients know that they’re hiring English-speaking Americans, and they expect just that.”
Employee Anomally
Hunt Design would enjoy none of its successes if it didn’t retain a talented, loyal staff devoted to pulling together these projects. In fact, Hunt Design has the remarkable – if not somewhat shocking, given the current economy – distinction of having virtually no employee turnover.
“I want to make Hunt Design a place where people want to be,” Hunt says. “I think people want interesting work, and we have a lot of that. We try to keep the individual stress levels down. I give people time off when they need it, and staff are pretty much allowed to set their own hours. It’s a we’re all grownups’ kind of attitude.”
An experienced, loyal staff has proven to be a good selling point for the firm. “The best sales strategy is to say during a pitch that here’s a great project we did five years ago and the employees who worked on it are sitting in the room,” Hunt says. “I take a great deal of pride in that.”
VitalStats
Location: Pasadena, CA
Founded: 1977
Number of employees: 17
Principal: Wayne Hunt
Quirk: Hunt Design’s employees take the word diversity to new heights. They live in 17 different cities; practice 12 different religions; regularly play 10 different sports; range in age from 22-54; and while its closest employee can walk to work, its farthest has a commute of more than 200 miles.