We ask a lot
of questions.

What do you do?
I solve puzzles. Since I was young I have loved working out brainteasers and math problems. These days the puzzles relate to programming, communication, and business strategy.

What is your inspiration?
Bold leaders, decision-theory science, and behavioral economics. I enjoy learning what makes people choose the things they chose. I like leaders who to stick to what they know is true and right. I love seeing problems solved in elegant and simple ways, with visual design, clever engineering, or leading-edge technology. Real results inspire me. I’m always looking for people and things that make the world a better place.

How do you work?
Lists, reading, and free thinking. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande convinced me that simple lists are powerfully effective. I make a list every day, on paper. I write yearly goals in a spreadsheet to guide the overarching trajectory of the year. Our team’s greatest value lies in connecting the dots. We draw on an array of knowledge, experience, and skill to bring to light solutions that others might not see. We connect ideas from unrelated fields to identify fresh opportunities. I spend time working out solutions in my head before ever grabbing a pen or keyboard.

How did you come to Openform?
A few of us began collaborating out of an old warehouse space. We enjoyed each other’s flavor of thinking, worldview, problem solving, and communication. It wasn’t long before we realized we were better when we combined forces.

What are you reading?
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky
Finding Ultra by Rich Roll
The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier – always in rotation
Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides – frequent reference
The Bible

Who do you admire?
Digital Telepathy for the way they align their incentives with clients to achieve the best outcomes. Dieter Rams for his simple solutions; he embodies the idea of design to improve experiences that increase value and persist over time. Pentagram for their timeless work–it’s intelligent and pushes boundaries in elegant ways. Rene Redzepi of Noma and Grant Achatz of Alinea for their relentless pursuit of what’s next. They work a lot, produce a lot, learn a lot, experiment a lot; they never stop. Elon Musk. When he needs something he doesn’t buy it off the shelf; he learns how it’s made and then remakes it exponentially better. Entrepreneurs in Tucson, for choosing this place to build something, while enduring a challenging local economy and oppressive heat.

What do you do?
In collaboration with my colleagues, I help an organization be successful through effective communication of its purpose and benefits. This means developing and implementing a strategy around branding, design, technology, and information.

What is your inspiration?
Literature. Philosophy. The ocean and the desert. The view out my window where the sky offers a rare and diaphanous diorama.

How do you work?
Curious questions, robust discussion, quiet thinking, confident action.

How did you come to Openform?
After early experience in economic research, I got an M.B.A. from Wharton then did management consulting in Europe and brand management in the NYC area. I have worked in marketing and strategy for 30 years in a variety of industries including consumer goods, automotive, and manufacturing and chaired the boards of several independent schools. I have an M.A. in English Literature and a parallel career as a writer and editor.

What are you reading?
I have [too many] books everywhere and usually have four or five going. Right now my stack includes Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Winter. I read Spring and Autumn and am beguiled by his relentless interest in the details of the world. Ali Smith has an analogous seasonal quartet, although hers are a modernist take on the rhythm of a year. All of these—I order the U.K. version because for some reason they are better-designed. Italo Calvino’s collection of stories Last Comes the Raven is in a new Mariner edition that is lovely on the outside and disturbingly beautiful inside. Rachel Cusk, Ruth Ozeki, Susan Choi, Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Elif Batuman are all authors I can’t get enough of. Let this put them on notice to please write more.

Who do you admire?
Robert and Austin I commend for giving me the enormous benefit that comes from collaborating with those who see the world differently. My three sons Jack, Neeko, and Quinn, who are kind, loving, and hard working and my father who came out of depression-era poverty in West Virginia to become a global leader in helicopter aviation; they make me want to be a better person. Yayoi Kusama uses art to solve problems, and I agree. The serious humor of her art affects me in a manner similar to the paradoxical heaviness of a James Turrell installation: I feel simultaneously powerful and fragile. I derive pleasure from how each takes a simple idea and makes it persuasive by elimination of the extraneous. In a similar way, the photographs of Mona Kuhn and Sally Mann demonstrate the power of an obsessive focus, although I may love Mann’s work simply because it reminds me of my childhood in Virginia. Some of my favorite thinkers are humanist writers who have an idiosyncratic world view that is emphatically empathetic: James Wood who calls a spade a spade but politely, Adam Phillips who crosses branches of knowledge to understand existential issues, Katie Roiphe for her incendiary prose, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for the delicate way she states urgent truth.

Holly’s CV >

What do you do?
I direct designers, lead project teams, and collaborate with clients. My role is to push them beyond what they thought possible. On a daily basis, I design, learn, find, break things, solve problems creatively, make things, and iterate; I fail a lot.

What is your inspiration?
People who take chances. Also, the work of my peers – their success makes me want to be better.  My design work draws upon a range of disciplines: I go to museums, gallery openings, poetry readings, and live performances. I look at architecture, film, and photography. I listen to music. I love to be outside in the desert.

How do you work?
Not well in the morning … My background is in English, so I usually start with words – typography and language. I think a lot about the problem to solve. I carry it around with me for days, weeks – sometimes much longer. Years. Even when I’m not working on it, I’m working on it. I draw pictures in my notebook, write words, collect images and ephemera; I pin an idea on the wall, take it down, break it, cut it apart, put it back up, draw on it, try it, test it, iterate, print, review, revise, refine, repeat.

How did you come to Openform?
Circuitously. I studied art history, photography, sculpture, and literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, then art and design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I worked in Chicago as a designer before moving to Tucson, where I was a Senior Designer and Art Director at several agencies and then Creative Director at Ventana Medical Systems.

What are you reading?
Designing Design by Kenya Hara
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Design as Art by Bruno Munari
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
Home is the Desert by Ann Woodin

Who do you admire?
Creatives teach me something about the discipline required to design. Vignelli said design should be “intellectually elegant,” and I agree. I am influenced by the pioneers of the International Typographic (Swiss) Style, such as Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hoffman, and Max Huber, who espouse the principles of cleanliness, readability, and objectivity. Recently, I have watched the work of Kenya Hara – his work for Muji especially – and his writings about emptiness, as it relates to design, Japanese psychology, and culture. Some of my favorite work is coming from a small Dutch studio in Amsterdam called Experimental Jetset. I have good friends who are architects, designers, and photographers, and to me, they will always be the ones I regard with the highest respect.