Samar Maakaroun - Partner at Pentagram

0:08Claire:Welcome to My Life in Design, brought to you by the DBA and design-focused PR agency, Red Setter. I'm Claire Blythe, co-founder of Red Setter. In this series, I'll be speaking to more people who are shaping the world of design, finding out how they discovered that design was a thing you could base a career around, and how they got to where they are today. So this week, I'm here at Pentagram's fantastic new London studio with partner Samar Makaroon. She's renowned for her creative multilingual approach to design and explores the spaces in between cultures. She's judged for D &AD, Young Guns and Creative Review.

0:45Claire:She's delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including stages at Typo Circle, Google Creative Labs, OFF in Seville and Barcelona, Apple, London Design Festival, Nicer Tuesdays and universities throughout the UK. She's led ambitious design projects worldwide from city rebrands like Dubai and Derria. She's worked with Apple to launch the new brand in Arabic. She's done campaigns for Porsche and many others in the world of technology, culture and AI. Semar, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Can we start right at the beginning of your life, basically?

1:23Claire:When did you realize that design was something that you could form a career around? Yeah, I always find that question a tough question. I guess, I guess. Where did it start? Where did the interest start? So some kids I find like know what they want to be when they're very young. So I have friends who say, I want to be a writer. I want to be an engineer or I want to be a fireman. But for some people, the options or the opportunities aren't entirely clear. And I was one of those people. I knew I liked creative stuff. I like drawing. I like building things with paper. I kind of would spend hours sort of looking at things and telling stories but I didn't really know of design as a profession that's it how many people do yeah exactly so I didn't really know and it's sort of from liking drawing I sort of maybe there was something about telling stories that was a theme through my childhood so so fascinating I had this French dictionary it was called Dictionnaire Larousse that had illustrations in it and I I was also had this fascination with language I remember wanting to memorize the whole dictionary which I obviously failed to do I couldn't I found the dictionary actually not not long ago and it was a quite nice dictionary with like a lot of technical drawings yeah what's a boss and all of these things so I had this kind of maybe this is I'm talking when I was seven or eight yeah I don't know why I wanted to read all the books in the library until I realized these are not all the books in the world I thought I I could just kind of learn it all for some reason.

2:49It's like a bit of an obsession with sort of storytelling. And in some ways, I knew that the world, you know, is made of stories, really things that come together. And someone's actually deciding what goes with what to tell the story or that.

3:06Claire:Yeah, I even have the idea that you could read all the books in a library and then get complete knowledge. I totally forgot about this. I didn't tell anyone I wanted to do this, but I sort of had this ambition until I realized that there's way more books than I could ever imagine. So that's an impossible task. But, you know, kids dream big. You want to be an astronaut. You want to do big things. And not necessarily, this doesn't come from understanding. It comes from perhaps fascination with certain things. So that fascination was coming from, I think, a love for language, like several languages.

3:43and I wasn't maybe very enamored with Arabic because the way it was taught in schools was very sort of, you have the formal Arabic language and the slang language. So the formal was very heavy and it wasn't always the most enjoyable of our classes. Yeah, interesting. But at the same time, I was scientifically able, so I was good with mathematics and physics. I was a nerd, basically.

4:06Claire:Yeah, so this is not a cool one, by the way. So this is all in Beirut. Yeah, exactly. So I guess from there, when I came to apply, and then I remember this kind of time when you're 16, 17, trying to decide which way you're going to go, which is a really big decision for someone who's a teenager in a way. You're kind of thinking, what am I going to be? It's actually a lot of pressure when you think about it. Definitely. So I decided to have a strategy for my application. I was applying to the American University of Beirut, being a French reader, being French, because I went to a French school. So my English was rubbish.

4:40So you went to a French school in Beirut.

4:41Claire:Yeah. So it's bilingual. Yeah, so you go either to French school and either to an English school. Funnily enough, we are four in the family, two girls, two boys. My parents made this odd choice of sending the girls to a French school and the boys to an American school. I do not know why. So we were all trilingual in the household. So I wanted to go to study my BA in an American school. I felt like the system was a little bit more free than a system that's run by the French. No offense to the French. So maybe because the school was kind of like ran by nuns and very disciplined. I did learn discipline in that school to be like, you know, incredibly focused and disciplined.

5:20So at the time, my strategy was to actually choose two majors. So the way it worked in that university is you apply to schools of your choice. So you can choose an art school or an engineering school or and then within it, there's lots of degrees. So I chose one school for my parents. so for my parents it was go to the science schools and apply for mathematics and then one school for me which was the school of design and architecture where there was a course in design yeah and i put architecture i put architecture as my second choice and design was my first choice and it was really random it was just kind of like what's the most artistic that can make a job out of

5:55Claire:without it being fine arts right but the graphic design side of things still sat in the science yes that's really interesting itself isn't it that's so different yeah in the uk and absolutely yeah and i think what i heard from the person who set up the course leila musphia was one who was one of the kind of influences on on my design career that she wanted specifically to put it in a sort of scientific school like with engineering and architecture to give it a little bit more weight yeah as opposed to put it in the final so she was entirely aware of my mindset right the local mindset where parents mindset parents exactly and the fact that if you you can only be an artist if you're actually quite well off because you'll never you know the the the line to actually making this a career is a very long line if you don't although I do know a lot of people who don't come from rich families but have made a career very kind of known career in the arts yeah but generally but generally what your parents advise you when you're at that vulnerable age trying to decide where you're gonna go what you're gonna do yeah and it really depends on the household you grow up in if you grew up in a household that is more artistic or or literary you might have a little bit more information about this world in my household there was no kind of artistic or even artistic interest so all my siblings are in the sciences and the only one who's just kind of the odd one out really in in terms of approach and in terms of what I do and I think even for my parents still today they know I do things that are cool but I'm not sure whether they fully understand what design is yeah it's okay I think we've made peace with that definitely they don't need to it's fine so when you went to university how long were you university for was that a three-year course it's a four-year course four-year course yeah and then was it there that you decided to focus in on the design side of things and the graphic design side of things and do you still have two majors at the end of it or do you share we shared some courses with the architects which was history of design and architecture in the first two years but it was a BA in graphic design right and it was one of the first because the course was set up but I don't remember exactly it might might have been 1996 was the first when was when the BA was open yeah under the guidance of Leila Musfi so it was still kind of being formulated in a way yeah and we were one of the kind of fewer earlier generations so she was experimenting as well with teachers who was willing to teach how do they teach and it was very interesting for us actually specifically my class where we had exposure to a variety of teachers who taught a variety of methods sometimes not the same method sometimes like opposing each other some of them were more didactic so some of them were more open which is kind of what you need which is you know sometimes if you put two and two together like what is this but actually you do it later in life you sort of realize i got this from that person i got this from that person we had some amazing teachers i think in in that specific here that I was studying.

8:49We had people like Samir Sawyer, who was an amazing calligrapher. He's done a lot to the script itself. We had people like Mohammed al-Rawas, who was a painter. He taught us theory of color. Very precise, very specific teacher. People like Jamal Abed, who taught us history of art and architecture, Western art and architecture. But also teachers like Huayyad al-Harisi, who did an elective about history of Islamic art. All of these electives

9:15Claire:that kind of gravitated towards as well, to just understand a little bit about myself. Yeah. One of the things that I remember early on, maybe second year, we were asked to do a paper about an artist, a known artist from a certain era. And the teacher, Jamal Abed at the time, said, you get extra points if you pick a local artist. So of course I went for the local artist. I thought, how difficult can that be? And we picked an artist who was from the mountains of Lebanon called Bosbos. But then we found out that there wasn't a lot of documentation about this artist, because there's just literally isn't the amount of tears you find on someone like Picasso or someone like, you know, so we had to go to his village and talk to his family.

9:55Wow. That's so

9:58Claire:much more interesting. Yeah. And, and we sort of like, that was the only way. And I remember writing it with an architect at the time. This was a joint course between us and the architect called Selina Akar. And he was just making it up. Like, is that believable? Yeah. Yeah. It sounds I mean, I think he's that. So we were sort of like writing it. And when we submitted this, we had no idea where we stood. We just tried to formulate something that made sense. And we got, I don't remember. I would love to find that paper again, because somehow we couldn't really, we found maybe one book in the library.

10:30We couldn't find the content in the archive. And perhaps this is where you start to notice, like, you know, the difference in terms of archival material, in terms of research, in terms of currents of thought, analysis, and how much potential there is in sort of areas in the global south where some of this is still missing.

10:47Claire:Yeah, absolutely. Or if it exists, it doesn't exist necessarily in the GEOs themselves. Yeah. It exists in places like the British Library or the British Museum, the V &A. Yeah. This is where I saw most of the work coming from that region. Yeah. So it's crazy, isn't it? so it's not accessible to you well not if you were yeah exactly if you were studying in lebanon and also to come to london at the time you need the visa and there's a whole process and yeah yeah definitely interesting so what what was next was at that point you thought i want to be a graphic designer i want to learn about this so i kind of like had these two acceptances one was to be a mathematician and one was to be a graphic designer oh interesting so i love that so i was like mathematics is black and white too many numbers i mean i like numbers but not to dedicate my life to numbers so i decided to go for graphic design almost on an intuitive decision thinking it's going to be more engaging and it was maybe more of an intuitive decision it wasn't a brainy decision that i made in a split second when i was registering i was supposed to register as a mathematician i changed my mind and last minute and i swapped and i think the first two years were very hard because you need to be exposed to maybe more design and I didn't know left from right and and also my English was very bad so I spent all my lunch breaks taking wow extra classes to actually be able to write in English because we have to write for the history of art and architecture papers in English sort of gone to an American school I think we were divided it was common in Lebanon it was maybe you get people from everywhere and I think luckily some of the teachers also were sensitive to this so they knew you came from a friend's school and they don't like if they judge you on the content, not necessarily how good your language is.

12:27So it's sort of, it's like they know it will come with time. And that's why maybe I'm not very precious about spelling mistakes. I know like language is actually, you know, you want to encourage people to be exposed to more or to try things.

12:40Claire:So it was my third language. Yeah, of course. So the first two years were very hard. I think by the third, first year, I started to kind of find my footing. But I wouldn't say when I graduated, I knew that was going to be the best designer. I had a very good final year project that had to do with perhaps a narrative that comes from my work, which is how do people perceive design outside design, right? Like I think design often tries to talk to design and designers. This is my area of fascination. But actually what we're talking to is the world. Yeah, absolutely. So when you rearrange things, when you question things and when you write what things mean, this is what design is.

13:15So I did this kind of interactive thing. I mean, looking back now, maybe it's just, it's probably quite rubbish, but it sort of like tells you a little bit, maybe it started to reveal the sort of questions that I asked myself when I design.

13:28Claire:You know, what is the story? What is the meaning? What is the core? How do I get to define that meaning? Who gets to define? Who gets to write the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves or about other things? So there is an element of writing and there's an element of language and there's an element that is visual so for me it was always like a combination of all these things yeah so i would say when did i actually confirm my allegiance to the design community i mean you shouldn't have to take a vow at some point like adopting i'm not sure i have done that yet i'm on the edge like that don't think you should don't think you should just yeah i'm on the edge i like being on the edge i actually like to sit on the fence you know even in my work I'm like between languages yes definitely so um I I got I got comfortable with this position I guess in a way you know once you you sort of navigate from one place to the other you find that the interesting place is to be at the border where you can see yeah sides definitely yeah so what did how did you get your first job did you do any work experience or did you I applied there weren't that many studios in Beirut at the time there was a job called Mind the Gap which was one of the best studios in the industry so I applied I spent a year and a half there.

14:40I learned a lot and they were great studio. They had two or three people who kind of led the studio. And this was my first formation about how you build the file. How do you actually send something to print? Because obviously when you graduate, you don't have any of that information.

14:54Claire:It suddenly gets real and you have to know exactly how it works. So that was a great experience. Then after that, I went freelance and I started experimenting at the time. I kind of had a co-working space with a friend of mine before co-working spaces were a thing. Oh, really? And And within those co-working spaces, we just kind of took the approach of doing everything that came to our mind. Because Beirut at the time, you could make things happen very quickly. One of these side careers that I ended up doing was volunteering to do the set design of a theatre director, Rabi Amrouwe, whose work I really liked.

15:26Yeah, Kat, I was reading about this.

15:28Claire:So you were a set designer for quite a long time. I mean, I wouldn't call myself a set designer. It was like a total accidental career. here he particularly liked to work with people who are not trained in the field they work in which I think is an interesting message because he thinks that sometimes when you get trained you get uh boxed into a way of thinking so yeah and somehow for him it's like you're a designer so you're kind of close to this so why not have a go yeah and my first performance that I designed the set for called looking for missing employee was basically a bunch of screens with a little bit of tables, but there's no one on stage, was a volunteer job.

16:03But I kind of like adopt that method. When you do something for free, you're sort of thinking, I can learn something here. Yeah. And I want to learn that thing. Yeah. And the reason why I'm doing this. So it was sort of like an experiment. And I think some 10 years after I ended up designing six or seven of his performance, I only worked with him. I wouldn't kind of say, I, you know, I worked with him and and his wife and i think for me that their work is quite contemporary it had to do a lot with the existence of imagery or perhaps visuals on stage so in a 3d setting so a different type of

16:37Claire:perception well that's the whole thing i love as a tailor i love set design yeah even if i go and see a play and i don't particularly like the play the aspects of the set and how it's designed and how it all fits together and how it conveys the where they're supposed to be and what i love that That fascinates me. And of course, and essentially it's storytelling. That's what you're building. As I said, you're building a sequence of images that people come into the stage to see. And then you have a set of visuals that happen. And then at the end, you conclude with another image. Yeah, absolutely.

17:05And what struck me, I remember like I traveled around to all the festivals we were invited in Europe. I got a lot of exposure as well from being in festivals where there's other work that you can look at. Yeah. I remember that people, when they ask questions, when there's a Q &A after performances, the reactions and the questions and the approach to the questions was so different depending on where you were if you're in japan people wouldn't laugh at certain jokes well if you're the same jokes if you're in beirut people would just like really be in in fits of laughter and this is where you sort of start to realize the difference the kind of perhaps cultural nuance that comes into my work as well yeah and what people value or don't what people find funny or not what is serious what is not serious and how actually your reality shapes how you perceive what's serious and what's painful and or what's not yeah so i remember one of the performances was a sort of a relationship between the body artists in vienna and a guy went to the ministry one of the ministries in lebanon and decided to kill everybody wow right so what is more serious

18:09Claire:like the idea of pain i think it's interesting from the point of view of learning what applies to what people and what cultural difference is it's entirely you know yeah really relevant yeah and it's not like there's a fixed formula or template actually it's always interesting to see how culture changes culture is always in flux it's what's happening now what today's mood is like yeah the younger generations versus older generations it's always and I find myself always drawn to this kind of idea of flux and that's sort of what I explore when I work with design and language and stories. This is sort of where I like to dig deeper.

18:44Claire:Because this is where I find things can become interesting. Yeah, absolutely. So when did you decide that you wanted to go more into the design side of things within brand? Within brands? I think actually it was very early. In college, I kind of liked doing brands. I think there's something about the simplicity of brand identity and how much meaning you can actually imbue into that very simple form. It's not easy to get to although it does look easy that's almost the problem of the whole thing isn't it it almost looks like if it's right it looks like it should have been like that anyway exactly what was it that said to simplify is complicated to complicate is simple yes i think this this is a quote i use sometimes in my talks i can't remember but it's actually not easy to simplify because often in the process you complicate complicate you try you flush everything out and then you start taking things out to just the core idea even in the strategy as well the strategy phase which is kind of trying to understand what this brand or business is about you do the same thing so there's a lot to say in this one little mark and I've always been drawn to this kind of core purity of one form that symbolizes a whole yeah and then with projects I worked pretty much everywhere in the industry I kind of moved to London in 2006 with this after mine the gap yes it's after after mine the gap moved to London I had a freelance for a while then I applied for a scholarship.

20:07I got a scholarship that paid for, you know, my life in London for a year, which was great. Yeah. Because obviously I couldn't afford it at the time. And somehow I started working with different studios in the industry where you learn from people. And I think there's no template perhaps to how studios operate. So I kind of quite like this position of you come into different environments, be it, and I worked in advertising for a while at MC Saatchi, I worked with Apple. Ah, so is that not yet? No, this was kind of like over the next 10 years, the next 10 years in London, we're just kind of like perhaps moving around all of these different places.

20:47And I would always like take a project and finish it. I like to finish the work that I kind of take on. But it gave me a lot of exposure of kind of learning from people who are not necessarily trying to be mentors or trying to mentor me, but just by observing how they lead, how they run their team, how their team feels and what works and what doesn't. Right. So this is sort of, maybe it's an interest that I was clocking one of these things without necessarily noticing, but it was an interesting, and you see the texture of the industry. And yeah, this is kind of where I tried different things. I would always say yes to doing something.

21:24Now I'm learning to say no because you can't say it. I think it's a good start.

21:28Claire:The start of your career is saying yes and then figuring it out. Absolutely. it's a really good mindset to get into but possibly when you get to the stage that you're at the you know partner at pentagram yeah can't say yes to everything can figure it out i would say my first 10 years my first 10 years were all about like kind of trying everything and someone would ask me like the way this kind of set design thing came i was like would you do set design i was like yes and then i just ran back to the office work and told my friend i just said yes to the thing i have no clue where to start can you help me uh so it was it was sort of like this but i used those first 10 years because then I always kind of tell that to my team this is the time if you're between 20 and 30 this is the time to explore what you can do and what's the worst that can happen if you do something that's not successful at least you tried and you learn from that experience and you learn whether you can enjoy or not enjoy and obviously like all of this within health and safety rules I'm talking about the design field because obviously the design field is now completely mixed right like there isn't a digital design or or this design or that like it's all now interdisciplinary and collaborative yeah so it's nice sometimes to kind of steer away a little bit from the core the core let's say of brand identity you do something a little bit on the side because whatever you learn there you can bring back into your core practice yeah absolutely can we talk about the sort of destination branding and placemaking and yeah that side of it because you've done some amazing work there and if you could talk about even just the core of what it is yeah and what's what's the point of it yeah so i guess um i mean this is a there's a big field in destination branding at the moment which is basically cities trying to attract tourists and to define themselves to attract tourists yeah and when you pick a holiday destination obviously there are a few cities that come to the top of your mind but there are some cities that are trying to open up to tourism economically yeah i think yeah absolutely a lot of these cities are places like in the United Arab Emirates or in Saudi Arabia, places that wouldn't otherwise be maybe some 50 years ago on your bucket list, right?

23:27Claire:So when you worked on Dubai, the tourist industry over there, I mean, obviously it's massive tourism now, but this was what, 2016, is that? I think it was about over 10 years. It's now maybe 12 years old. Okay, 12 years old. It means an uplift if anybody hears this. You talk about tourism, but... Yeah, absolutely. But it was actually when Dubai started, I think they, maybe it was a city that was going through a very fast growth. Yeah, absolutely. By the time they kind of approached MC Satchelor to do this exercise, they kind of got to a point where they were like, okay, now we're formed. We need to talk about who we are to the world and sort of define that vision.

24:01And it was a very lengthy exercise. It was my first kind of work in destination planning. And the team was very big. There were lots of account directors, the strategists are sort of working through what is the core story behind this brand and many, many, many auctions.

24:16Claire:So this is at M &C Saatchi. Yeah, exactly. So lots of kind of ideas. And it was actually nine months, I think, of just looking at how do we do this. Wow. And eventually, perhaps the solution was a real estate efficient solution. That's what I kind of call it. It's basically when you overlap the Arabic and the English, typically what you see when you have two languages, you see an English version, Arabic version, and bilingual version. Yeah. And that's what a lot of people do. And it's become a thing, although it's not necessarily good from a brand point of view. What you want is one face, not three faces.

24:47Yes. And often if you have the bilingual root, it gets used the most, but it's usually the most cumbersome because you have maybe if the name is two words, you have two words in both languages, English and Arabic. And sometimes you're trying to migrate the concept from in between two scripts that don't necessarily align and they don't work in the same way. Right to left, left to right, no uppercase, like lots of technical and scriptural differences. So when you're trying to kind of come up with a brand that sort of is efficient from a real estate point of view, and this is effectively what city brands need to do.

25:18For example, Dubai is on the car number plates and it has to be somewhere invisible.

25:23Claire:So everyone sees it all over the place without realizing. It needs to be recognizable as a form. We did Sharjah, which was a different approach instead of actually combining the scripts. We use the same DNA to create the same face. We're currently working on a couple. I also collaborated with Dom at Pentagram to do a city called Diria City. Yeah. Again, there's always like lots of complexities to these projects because there's a layered sort of approval process. Of course. From government all the way down. I've got to imagine that's complex. Yeah. So it's not always simple. And especially with cities that are newly formed.