Issue 313 of the Japanese design magazine featured a special article on 2x4. Here's an excerpt from our introduction that lays out the conceit: 12 content organization ideas for a magazine called Idea.

A graphic design practice is a more of less aimless activity. Clients come and go. Projects fall into your lap or are ripped out of your hands without rhyme or reason. One day you are packaging architectural theory then shaving cream the next, making newspapers then wallpapers. On one hand the supposition is that your authorial vision is so solid, so codified, it can survive in any environment from the commercial to the cultural. On the other hand you are expected to be the perfect chameleon, effortlessly assuming your client's hopes and desires. And the hardest job may be simply remaining hopeful.

2x4 meanders perhaps even more than most. The three of us partners have distinct desires and our studio is populated by a cluster of strong-willed designers, each trying to eek out a sliver of authorship all their own. And we work with big, messy teams of people on big, messy projects. No one is quite sure who is in control and everyone harbors the sneaking suspicion that no one is. But we never wanted a boutique, we wanted a supermarket. Our interest ebbs and flows, we go back and forth between hording and ceding control.

When we recently designed an exhibition of our work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we were pressed to lay an illusory grid of order over our meanderings. That process forced us to accept certain things about our work. Its not coherent, how could it be? If there is any coherence it is a coherence of inquiry. It's a litany of essentially unanswerable questions posed in graphic form.

Now we are asked to expose ourselves once again -- in effect to say what makes our work "our work" -- in another kind of public space, the pages Of this magazine. But Idea carries a special anxiety-producing power: it is the magazine where everything is possible and conversely where nothing is possible because everything has been done. It's an orgy of production, of density, of visual extravagance. How do you wedge a distinct concept, a singular voice, in that crowded space? Can Idea have an idea?

Since we are in the business of creating the graphic shell wrapped around other peoples desires, the process should be second nature. But when the process is turned back on ourselves the path seems so much less distinct. So we can only do what we always do, develop concepts, make sketches, make proposal after proposal and try to find an answer that way. So what follows are 12 ideas for a feature in Idea magazine. Any one of them could work... or not. The trouble is choosing.

Dodger Stages was born out of a collaboration between set designer Klara Zieglerova, Beyer Blinder and Belle Architects and 2x4. The concept was to turn a failed cineplex, entirely underground at Worldwide Plaza on 50th Street Manhattan, into a complex of five Off-Braodway theatres.

The design capitalizes on the underground nature of the site. The Dodgers logo and arrow suggests the D for Downstairs and the branding included a custom font that is utilized as a stencil throughout the space. Once inside the ceilings are exposed mechanical systems and the floor raw concrete. Our graphic design is painted directly on the surfaces or in strips of white neon nestled in the pipes and ducts overhead.

The Dodger Stages spaces utilizes several different media, most dramatically a video projection ceiling scrim over the main staircase. As theatergoers exit the lobby the rough ceiling disappears and is replaced by a mysterious, electronic sky.

"Guilt, Incorporated" is the latest installment in 2x4's ongoing installations at the Prada Epicenter on Broadway in New York City. The wallpaper and store fixture wraps depict a "brand manual" for Guilt, a global enterprise of mysterious origins and intents. The installation creates a sterile, bureaucratic identity for that most human of emotions, and creates a striking backdrop for Prada's lush products. In-store video screens play short broadcast spots advertising Guilt's diverse products and services and various Guilt-branded items appear throughout. Guilt's mission statement takes center stage:

From ____ to ____ , ____ to ____ , and ____ to ____ and ____, GUILT people worldwide are dedicated to turning ____ into ____ products and services that take on some of ____'s toughest problems.

On May 13th, 2005 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unveiled "Design Series 3: 2x4", a solo exhibition of our work over the last decade. The show will be open through November 27, 2005. You can access the museum's on-line resource by clicking here.

After spending several years designing custom wallpaper -- what used to be called "Supergraphics" or more mundanely "murals" -- we were given the opportunity to design the real thing. Our longstanding client KnollTextiles invited us to design a collection of vinyl wallcoverings and woven upholstery fabrics for their 2005 season.

The studio charrette produced literally hundreds of proposals from the sublime to the unprintable. From them we winnowed out 2 concept groups: Chatter and Field theory. The two product groups share a similar methodology: create pattern out of a simple, mundane graphic element.

Chatter was originally conceived of as a kind of ASCI pattern but ended up composed entirely of punctuation. Pause uses commas and periods, Plus uses plus signs, and Command only exclamation marks to make repeating patterns.

Field Theory uses one form -- an extruded box -- in three different scales to create diverse effects. Urban is a grand scale pattern with dynamic forms. Exurban is a long strings of the boxes with moderately varied extrusions. Suburban is a houndstooth of repetitive boxes.

"[The] wallpaper for Prada's flagship store in New York is a landmark exercise in communicating...self-condemnatory complexity with guile. Here is the dilution of the individual in favour of the mass. Here is the final destination for an industry built on generating the need to appear different (as opposed to being different); the regimentation of desire to the point of mass hysteria, a nod to dictatorship (of fashion). All present and perfectly incompatible."
- Tank Magazine, Volume 6

Prada employs design as an act of intellectual speculation. The epicenters are sites of architectural exploration, frames for shopping, and most importantly for us, graphic and environmental test cases.

Our work with Prada stems from early research projects in collaboration with OMA-AMO. It started with a website concept proposal and grew to include wallpapers and videos for both the New York and Beverly Hill epicenters, fashion show environments for the Milan shows and a variety of print work including invitations, press kits, look books, brochures and catalogs.

Waist Down is a traveling exhibit originally sited in the Prada Tokyo Epicenter. The show is organized around the simple (and not so simple) skirt, the often over-looked and underappreciated step sister of those more glamorous figures: the dress and the coat.

"Watching video clips of models strutting up and down the catwalk, one notices the camera typically fixes either on the upper torso or on the entire figure. Not that there's anything wrong with this, it's just one seldom sees the camera focus exclusively on the waist down. Think about it. While upper body and whole body shots seem perfectly natural and obvious, it is often in the lower half of the figure where the real action happens."
- Kayoko Ota, Curator

We joined forces with exhibition designers at OMA-AMO to develop the name, the visual identity and all of the graphic material in and around the exhibition including all advertising, outdoor media, information design, labeling, titling, maps, and a 300 page catalog. The project was extremely efficient, working together at first in Rotterdam and then simultaneously in Rotterdam, Milan, New York and Tokyo. The exhibition first opened in Tokyo in November 2004 and will move to Shanghai in May 2005.

Say it with flowers. Work for the inspired florist-cum-spectacle designers that includes everything from their own studio identity and book to gifts, party invitations, products, websites and huge-scale video projections. Working with Avi Adler and David Stark is much closer to playing actually. They assemble their events like massive collages and attend to every detail with the utmost care. The graphic design is always a central component to their designed experience.

Its our experience that the best work comes out of a direct, dynamic relationship between inspired, confident clients and their trusted designers. The Nasher Sculpture Center is the brainchild of the inspired, confident figure Ray Nasher, the real estate mogul turned art collector who endowed and built the Center in downtown Dallas to house his private collection of modern and contemporary sculpture.

The story is that Ray challenged architect Renzo Piano to design him a museum without a roof. We were compelled to design a similarly transparent logo (inspired by Piano's remarkable perforated ceiling.) What followed was a complete design system - identity, print material, books, catalogues, advertising and environmental design -- based on exquisitely crafted, ultra-understated typography with a healthy injection of a piercingly bright green.

We imagined the Brooklyn Museum as the alternative Museum. Alternative not in the sense of either the marginal or the counter-cultural, but in an significant way. Alternative in the sense that "mainstream" is imaginary, that everyone, and all important things, are alternative.

Brooklyn Museum is not tourist-oriented, it doesn't cater to prefab, highly polished and well-rehearsed cultural fantasies about elegance, connoisseurship, purity or refinement. It is family-centered and facilitates a process in which visitors readily form their own interpretations of great art through many different, easily shifted and customized paradigms."

Brooklyn Museum combines authority and the active questioning of authority. If there is a central trope, perhaps its the intelligent, informed question, wittily framed. So, in our eyes, there is be an intellectual weight to the Brooklyn Museum of Art's identity combined with a certain quirkiness: Solidity destabilized.

The logo starts as a modern seal, but the seal continuously morphs. Each new iteration draws from a different trope, both high and low: a stamp, a flower, a violator, a thought bubble, a drop of water, etc. The morphing system plays out over the range of graphic materials from business cards and shopping bags to uniforms and site signage.

"There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold."
- Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace.

In early 1999, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture won the competition to build a new student center on the campus of IIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology. OMA chose the site, perversely the area wedged UNDER the elevated railroad track that bisected the campus, and designed a building consisting of a 530 foot long sound dampening tunnel atop a block sized one-story building.

IIT was imagined as a Junkspace funhouse. We spent almost 4 years developing an array of surfaces for the building: special textured and lenticular wallpapers, digital murals, fritted glass walls, LED digital clocks, florescent tube chandeliers, smiley faces crafted from foam pyramid soundproofing, walls covered in elevator pads, faux woodgrain walls, maps embedded in the floors, numbers embossed in the doors, figures routed into wood, and a sixty foot light box.

Nestled in the bosom of the ersatz charmlessness of the humungous Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, lay the ill-fated Guggenheim Las Vegas. The project designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA consisted of two spaces: the corten-clad Guggenheim-Hermitage and the cavernous kuntshal Guggenheim Las Vegas. Working in close collaboration with OMA we developed all the branding and signing elements for the spaces including mega-scaled typography, super-graphics, murals and a transparent version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling stretched over the skylight.

After years of losing architecture competitions collaborating with others, we thought we would try losing one on our own. It turned out to be more fun that way.

Andrew Goetz: In 2002, I joined with my partner Matthew Malin to develop a new line of unisex skin and hair care products.

Matthew Malin: The project was as much about brand creation as it was about packaging. But as a start up, everything had to be done as simply and economically as possible.

Georgie Stout: We wanted to create a package that would function both as a logo and an architectural element in a retail environment without feeling over-designed or over-produced.

Susan Sellers: It also had to be comfortable for either a man or a woman to have in their bath, nothing too masculine or feminine.

Georgie Stout: And we wanted it to look like it had been around for a while, not too trendy, but still modern. The simple bottles use the required typography as a color field: each color signifying a separate line. When stacked together they form a bigger field, each bottle a pixel in a color composition.

The challenge: Conceive of and design a text book that teaches English composition using both literary and visual examples: a kind of collision of "Norton's Anthology" and "The Medium is the Massage." Our part: Create a format for the book and serve as "visual editors," assembling the objects that form the pedagogy. The result: A new kind of textbook, now highly imitated, that as been adopted by colleges and universities across the country.

Michael Rock is a founding partner and creative director at 2x4 and Professor of Design at the Yale University School of Art. At 2x4, he leads a wide range of projects including strategy for Prada and Condé Nast in collaboration with AMO/Rem Koolhaas. He leads environmental graphics and media design for the Prada New York Epicenter Store and was principal-in-charge of the IIT McCormick Tribune environmental graphics program and the Vitra Branding/New York Headquarters. Previously he was co-founder of Information Incorporated, in Boston. From 1984-91 he was Adjunct Professor of Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. In addition, he was a fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, The Netherlands, and a contributing editor and graphic design journalist at I.D. Magazine in New York. His writing on design has appeared in a variety of publications in addition to I.D. including Print, AIGA Journal and the British journal Eye. He holds a B.A. in Humanities from Union College and a M.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the recipient of the 1999/2000 Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome.

Susan Sellers is founding partner and creative director at 2x4 and a lecturer at Yale University School of Art. At 2x4, she leads diverse projects from large-scale identity and branding projects to exhibition and set design for major cultural institutions nation-wide. Recent projects include comprehensive positioning for the Museo Picasso Málaga and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, exhibition design for Tricia Brown Dance Company, and several major book projects with the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Berlin. She has been a visiting design critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ohio State University School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin and SCI-ARC. Her articles have appeared in a number of journals including Eye, Design Issues and Visible Language. She has held positions in several studios including Total Design and UNA in Amsterdam. Sellers holds a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.A. in American Studies from Yale University.

Georgianna Stout is founding partner and creative director at 2x4. She leads diverse projects at 2x4 from extensive retail and packaging projects to large-scale identity and environmental graphics/wayfinding programs. She has recently completed branding, identity, retail and environmental programs for the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dia:Beacon, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She led retail and packaging projects for Vitra New York, Malin+Goetz and spearheaded the product development of two new lines of textiles and wallcoverings for KnollTextiles. She has been a visiting design critic at Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. She also collaborates with husband, designer David Weeks, in his design studio David Weeks Studio. Prior to founding 2x4, Stout worked at Bethany Johns Design producing publications and identity programs for arts organizations and other cultural institutions. Stout holds a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design.