S5E5: Forest Young

Forest Young is head of design and a global principal at the branding consultancy Wolff Olins.

Young and Wolff Olins took on a tough job: the rebranding of Uber, the ride-sharing company saddled with the visual system and aggressive tone of former CEO Travis Kalanick. Uber is a global company, and that captured the attention of Young and his team:

It won us over to see the impact that Uber was having in other places besides the United States. I think it was a lesson for me and the team that we just need to get out of the United States, that the United States can be a bit distracting.…

Young worked with Indian typographers specializing in Kannada or Devanagari, and there were moments where

a Latin letter can actually influence the character in Indic script, and then vice versa. So it’s much more of a fluid conversation than we see a lot of, a degradation — which is that you design for the West and then it degrades for the East, versus seeing it as an enhancement.

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