S2E6: Michael Rock

Michael Rock is founding partner and creative director of 2×4, a global design consultancy that has worked with brands including Nike, Prada, Target, and Kanye West.

Rock talks about branding in relationship to religious and political belief systems, and how something as “seemingly quotidian as signage” can frame how you move of the world:

When you’re on the U.S. highway system, and you see these big green signs and that assures you that you’re in the jurisdiction of the United States Government. And when you veer off that to some unmarked road, you suddenly become anxious.

This framing, he says, is “the essence of what design does.”

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