Peggy Burke and the art of being understood

Peggy Burke’s first branding brief arrived disguised as paperwork. She was registering a business in November 1985, and the same number kept presenting itself: in the date, in her address, at the end of her telephone number. A designer could take a hint. The business became 1185 Design. Years of helping other companies introduce themselves would follow, but her own introduction had the pleasing economy of four digits.

The arithmetic underneath was less decorative. Burke had $3,000 in the bank and monthly expenses of about $1,000. Boole & Babbage, the software company she was leaving, became her first client, with a retainer that covered those expenses. There was a business, provided she could find the next piece of work. It was an opening measured in bills paid rather than headlines earned.

That combination - an eye for a pattern and a clear understanding of the monthly outgoings - gives her career its particular character. The client names eventually included Cisco, Adobe and Sun Microsystems. The story also includes introductions, classroom exercises, a closed office and savings put aside before anybody needed them. Even a designer’s life resists a perfectly clean layout.

Cincinnati, then the Valley

Burke grew up in Cincinnati, one of ten children, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1980 with a degree in graphic design. By 1983 she had moved to California for Boole & Babbage. She ran its in-house design group before leaving to start her own practice. She had learned the trade inside a technology business before she began selling it to other ones.

The distinction matters. A software company cannot always point a camera at its product and expect the photograph to explain the business. A router offers limited opportunities for glamour. A corporate identity must do some translation: give an unfamiliar name a recognizable shape and make a technical proposition easier to approach. Burke’s work placed her near companies still deciding how to speak to the world.

Her agency’s assignments included Motorola, Cisco and Sun Microsystems, businesses whose products helped build the infrastructure of computing. Working across them meant learning enough about different technologies to represent their differences. A visual identity could be spare; arriving at it required understanding. The simplicity belonged in the result, after the difficult questions had been asked.

By 2014, when she appeared in Silicon Valley’s Women of Influence coverage, Burke’s portfolio also included work for IBM and Adobe. Those familiar names can make a career seem prearranged. They conceal the earlier stage when a designer needed a first client, then another, and a reason for somebody to recommend her.

The introductions behind the work

Burke’s early professional network had human intermediaries. Elizabeth Horn was making a film called My Dinner With Apple, and the people coming through her office included figures from Steve Jobs’s world. Horn introduced Burke to Andy Cunningham and David Kelley, among others. A film project became an unexpected meeting place for a young design business.

Pitch Johnson supplied another route. A venture capitalist and the chairman of Boole & Babbage, he took an interest in her business and introduced her to venture firms. The referrals connected Burke with startups that needed to explain their differences and develop their public identities. Money, ideas and design travelled through overlapping circles of people.

There is something usefully ordinary about this part of her account. The doors opened because particular people chose to open them. Burke remembered their generosity. A portfolio might establish that a designer can do the work; an introduction gets that portfolio into the room. Her agency’s beginnings contain both, with little reason to pretend either would have been sufficient by itself.

When the boom stopped calling

The agency grew with its surroundings. During the dot-com years, technology clients had money for branding, events and ambitious creative work. 1185 reached 60 employees and had an office in Portland, Maine, as well as Palo Alto. Then the market changed. In 2001, Burke cut the company to 30 people and closed the East Coast office.

It is an uncomfortable turn in a career often described through recognizable brands. A client list concentrates risk as well as opportunity. Many businesses spending enthusiastically at once can stop spending at once. Designers still have salaries, rent and commitments when their customers’ confidence disappears.

Burke had saved during the prosperous years. Her family’s losses in an earlier recession had taught her to prepare for a downturn, and the money helped her provide six months of severance. It could soften the consequences of the contraction. It could not make the jobs remain.

“You have a responsibility to your employees.”

Peggy Burke

That sentence gives her management philosophy a concrete test. Saving while business was plentiful had consequences for other people when it became scarce. In her telling, responsibility could require the founder to go without a paycheck. This is a less photogenic part of running a design company. It belongs in the picture.

Years later, recalling the difficulty of keeping the business going, she said, “But I never gave up.” The brevity is useful. The decisions around it were complicated enough. Survival meant a smaller company, colleagues leaving and an office shutting down. Persistence carried those facts with it.

Sketching the next agency

Keeping the business going also meant reconsidering what it did. Burke described writing strategic narratives called 360s, work that helped establish the language behind a client’s brand. The demand changed the balance of the agency. By her 2018 account, she had reconfigured it to give strategists and designers equal weight.

For a founder who identified strongly with design, that required an adjustment. Clients were buying the thinking that helped them describe themselves, as well as the visual work. Words had become a larger part of the assignment. She had to make room for that change in the company she had built.

She also made a habit of looking ahead. In 2016 she described sitting down every three months to consider tomorrow’s agency and the agency five years away. She put ideas on a board, then divided them among teams at a retreat for further brainstorming. The exercise gave colleagues a part in imagining what could come next.

It is a practical extension of a designer’s habits. Put an idea where people can see it. Let somebody else work on it. Keep enough distance from the first version to consider another. Burke was treating her own business as something that could still be revised.

A classroom with movable furniture

Burke also took her experience into teaching. She taught branding and design at Stanford and served as a judge at an innovation challenge. In a 2010 account of the university’s d.school, she appeared alongside Dennis Boyle on the teaching team for Tina Seelig’s Creativity and Innovation course. Boyle, an IDEO cofounder, is her husband.

The class examined personal creativity, creative teams and innovative organizations. Students worked on framing problems, challenging assumptions and changing thinking modes. Even the furniture had a part: the room could shift from a circle for an opening exercise to an arrangement facing the front for instruction. The physical setup followed what people needed to do.

That is a congenial setting for someone whose professional work depends on making an idea intelligible to other people. A classroom gives the problem another form. A designer who can produce a solution must help somebody else learn how to approach one. Experience has to become something a student can use.

Burke’s tribute to designer Sara Little Turnbull offers another glimpse of what she valued. She admired Turnbull’s use of design as a strategic activity and her willingness to defy the expectations of her generation. The emphasis falls on a designer’s judgment and reach: how a person thinks, what she chooses to question and what her work makes possible.

A place for the rejected ideas

In 2002, the Computer History Museum introduced a new name and visual identity, thanking Burke and her team for their help. She served as a museum trustee and is now listed among its trustee alumni. Her relationship with the institution eventually acquired a second dimension: it became a home for the agency’s records.

The collection covers 1985 to 2017 and occupies 110 linear feet. Much of it consists of creative books showing initial directions, with handwritten client feedback. There are finished materials too, including printed pieces and packaged software. The alternatives have survived alongside the approved answers.

This is a satisfying fate for commercial work. A finished logo tends to arrive in public looking settled. A creative book keeps the choosing visible. Different directions sit together; someone has written a note; another revision follows. The supposedly effortless result has a working life behind it, and that life can be examined.

Burke’s interest in other people’s lives has an unexpected reading habit attached. In 2014, she said she loved reading obituaries, particularly in The New York Times. It is an apt detail for someone whose professional world contains so many compressed accounts of what a company is and why it matters. A life, too, has to be given shape on a page.

That parallel has its limits. Companies can commission a new identity; people accumulate decisions they cannot simply replace. Burke’s include leaving a job, accepting help, hiring colleagues, letting colleagues go, teaching students and keeping the drafts. Her career is more interesting with those decisions still visible.

The name on the business began with a coincidence. The work that followed required choices. Four digits were enough for the sign; understanding the person behind them takes a little more room.