Kim Bear held a speech today at CSULA with the title "life of graphic design: 30 years of fantastic four-grade field trips". What she meant with that title was that everything she has ever done or experienced in graphic design was so exciting like going to a field trip in fourth grade. Kim Bear started her presentation with a brief introduction about her path to graphic design. She delivered the information in a very honest and personal way, which I appreciated very much. It made it very easy to me to connect with her.
After the introduction she presented five case studies:
- Annual reports
- Branding
- Information Design
- Natural History Museum
- NHM Exhibit Design.
Her work was just amazing. It had so much variety in it. And it just proved to me that Graphic Design is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I am sure that many people in the audience felt the same way, especially the once who are truly passionate about what they do.
Something very interesting happened during Kim Bears presentation. When she talked about branding, and presented her new logo for the Metropolitan West Asset Management, I think I got enlightened. The letter-spacing looked very off, especially because the logo was shown on a huuuuuuuge screen. Check this out.

Please take a close look at the logo to the right. "E" is not centered between "M" and "T." The gap between "M" and "E" is the biggest compared to the letter-spacing between all the other letters. I know, it doesn't look too bad in a small logo like this one. But on a huge screen, where the logo was 100 times bigger, the gap looked huuuuuuuuuge in my eyes. I was like shocked.
Did anyone who attended the event noticed that?? I would love to hear some feedback.
And another thing I noticed today. Kim Bear was wearing a yellow-green sweater, and a nice (yellow)-green scarf. Her powerpoint presentation was...yellow-green. And most of her work had yellow-green. I wonder what her favorite color is. :-)
I am very thankful that Kim Bear took the time to share her story with us today at CSULA. She is a wonderful woman, and very inspiring. I hope she can experience 30 more years of fantastic fourth-grade field trips. I wish her all the best!