Recognized for establishing the highest standards of corporate
design through his work shaping the visual identity and sensibility of
American design innovation company Herman Miller for more than 40 years.
Steve Frykholm’s design career at Herman Miller began with a large
ear of sweet corn—a curiously appropriate symbol, its rows of kernels
forming an orderly grid and its roots originating in the watery,
agrarian landscape of Western Michigan. Soon after arriving at the
Zeeland-based furniture manufacturer, in 1970, Frykholm was asked to
design a poster for the company picnic, named the Sweet Corn Festival.
“I said I’d take a crack at it,” he recalls. Working with designer Phil
Mitchell, Frykholm came up with a 29“ x 39” screen print of a pair of
teeth clamped around an ear of corn, printed Pop Art-style in high-gloss
inks. Part of the impulse also came from muscle memory: “I had learned
to screen print while in the Peace Corps teaching at a trade school for
girls in Nigeria,” says Frykholm. The combination proved fruitful.
Frykholm went on to design 20 picnic posters in the subsequent 20 years,
several of which ended up in the permanent collection held at the
Museum of Modern Art.
Having now worked for Herman Miller through four decades, several
economic downturns, and six different CEOs, Frykholm has acquired a
juicy body of work, some considerable experience, and some of the blunt
Calvinist demeanor of his progressive but no-nonsense employer. Like the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Apple Computer in Cupertino,
Herman Miller in Zeeland is one of those few U.S. design-driven firms
with an unusually high commitment to visual coherence and research and
development. An unabashed Modernist zeal runs through Herman Miller’s
communications, from its general corporate guidelines to remain “human,
spirited, and purposeful” to the clean but personable lines of Meta, the
Erik Spiekermann-designed typeface that Frykholm introduced as the
house face in 1999. (Meta replaced uber-Modernist Helvetica, which had
been the corporate typeface for 30 years.)
Frykholm was, for a time, best known for his tireless reinvention of
the annual report, which, in addition to receiving stacks of design
awards, frequently earned the honor of being shamelessly copied. “He
tries to do something different or unique to him every time,” says Yang
Kim, who worked on 10 Herman Miller annual reports with Frykholm. She
adds, “He has a lot of integrity about trying to come up with something
new, and these days it’s a lot easier to come up with something
familiar.” Among the best-known examples were the 1993 report—based on
the theme of customer correspondence and festooned with Post-it notes,
as well as reproductions of postcards and letters received from the
public—and the 2002 report, published after a terrible fiscal year,
which featured a Doppler radar scan of inclement weather and an
emergency rain poncho attached to the cover. However, the most imitated
was probably the 1985 report published after Herman Miller’s then-CEO
Max De Pree introduced profit sharing. Titled “Say Hello to the Owners,”
the report featured a full-height photograph of each of the company’s
employees, along with quotes responding to questions of why they liked
working for Herman Miller and what employee ownership meant to them.
“There were 3,000 employees and we integrated all of them, regardless of
title or position, in 13 spreads including the covers,” Frykholm says.
The people-centered emphasis of the organization is also
substantiated in the fact that Herman Miller has led all furniture
companies in Fortune magazine's “World’s Most Admired Companies”
survey in 23 of the last 25 years, and has frequently been included
among the “100 Best Companies to Work For” in America. Frykholm
straddled the company’s transition from a small, family-owned business
with a reputation for innovation and experimental design, to an
international business with annual revenues of $1.3 billion.
When Frykholm arrived in Zeeland with an MFA from Cranbrook Academy
of Art, Herman Miller’s founder DJ De Pree and designers Charles and Ray
Eames were still actively involved in the company, with De Pree’s sons
running the firm. As Frykholm assumed more responsibility, Herman Miller
grew in stature and size, known not only for high-end classics of the
Eames, Alexander Girard and George Nelson era, but for ubiquitous
symbols of the corporate office interior. Icons emerged in Frykholm’s
print work, for good and bad: The Action Office system developed by
Robert Propst for Herman Miller in the late 1960s was a key part the
company’s growth, even as it mutated through imitation into the
much-maligned cubicle farm. The phenomenally successful Aeron chair,
initiated and developed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick in the 1990s,
also gained a certain notoriety after the dot-com crash. A particularly
memorable image from Herman Miller’s “Good Stuff” brochure of its sales
inventory showed a businessman sitting in an Aeron chair on the sidewalk
amid the maelstrom of Times Square. Chair too comfortable to leave in
the office? A symbol of the company without walls? For Stumpf, it also
became an image of the chair’s negative associations, says Frykholm:
“When Enron went belly up and we saw photos of employees leaving with
their boxes on Aeron chairs, Bill said, ‘Oh no! The chair’s become a
symbol of corruption.’”
Many of the memorable images developed under Frykholm’s direction in
the 1970s emerged out of a taste for the unexpected and impulsive. A
particularly architectonic collection of Fritz Haller furniture was
taken out to a celery field and arranged amid the orderly rows. “I just
decided it would be fun. We bought the farmer’s produce before the shoot
because we knew we’d probably ruin it,” says Frykholm. In another
shoot, Verner Panton’s famous plastic chair was driven to a snowstorm in
North Michigan where Frykholm’s team photographed it on a frozen lake
next to a fishing shanty. “No one challenged what we were doing,”
recalls Frykholm, who by the mid-1980s had a large team of designers and
writers reporting to him.
Today, Frykholm assumes a more advisory, less hands-on role, as the
various divisions and subsidiaries of Herman Miller increasingly farm
out their design work. The atmosphere is different, he says; even
photographing a chair outside risks rejection by his colleagues in
marketing and legal on the grounds that leaving a Herman Miller chair
outside would void the warranty. “I do get a decent print job now and
then,” he writes in a note, describing his role on one project as
“advisor, catalyst, contributor, archivist, agitator.” He adds, “How
does one talk about their contribution in a collaborative team effort?
My fellow team members might add a few suggestions as to what I bring to
the mix!”
Several of the designers who have received commissions from Frykholm
will mention two significant characteristics: first, his long, shaggy
beard—a symbol as malleable as the Aeron, perhaps of a company man in
denial, from a bygone age when creative folk were more inclined to wear
their nonconformity on their chins. Second is the fact that Frykholm is a
client who is first and foremost a designer. “He’s very good at
entertaining all the ideas, whereas a marketing executive would be
annoyed by that,” says Kim. Karin Fong, who produced a video for
Frykholm and Fairly Painless Advertising, recalls Frykholm’s enthusiasm
and playfulness. “He always encouraged our ideas—taking classic [Herman
Miller] designs into animation was new territory. Perhaps someone with
less trust in the design process would want to see more checkpoints and
justifications, but Steve was enthusiastic from the very first
storyboards.”
Ultimately, enlightened design management can only really emanate
from organizations that embrace design to the core. One might contend
that anyone in Steve Frykholm’s position, overseeing the visual identity
of a company that prioritizes design, would do a good job. But
Frykholm, now in his sixties, seems to relish the role of dissenter, not
smoothing operations but stirring them up. “Working with Steve is not
really about adhering to a rigid style guide,” says Fong. “Instead you
feel the Herman Miller history at your back—not over your head.” Clark
Malcolm, a long-time collaborator with Frykholm and a writer/editor at
Herman Miller for more than 20 years, sums up his colleague as “one of
the last survivors from the world of great graphic thinking in the 1970s
and ’80s. For me, he epitomizes all that is magical and delightful in
graphic design, from the process to the product. As someone once said
about Charles Eames, when you’re around Steve Frykholm, he’s never
teaching, but you’re always learning.”