Episode Highlights from Eddie Opara, partner at Pentagram

Harald Dunnink, creator and host of Memberful Design, recently sat down with Eddie Opara, a multi-faceted Pentagram partner, citizen of the world, senior critic at the Yale University School of Art, author, and a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.

Discover our favorite quotes from Eddie and get inspired by decades of insights. The whole episode is out now, and available on all your favorite podcast providers.

Eddie started out as a designer at Imaginary Forces and worked as an art director at 2×4. He lived many lives before establishing his own design agency, The Map Office, in 2005. To spread awareness of his new venture, he created “Stealth”, a wall poster meant to symbolize a layered brand identity. Eddie looped us in on the influence of self-identity on his designs:

“I wanted to take two parallels. Utilize the sense of Moiré patterning that occurs so that you don’t see the text up front but when you move away, you actually see it. So there's this ambiguity, contradiction, clarity, confusion, and that's who I am. The aspects of understanding one's identity are really important to me. I've been trying to figure this out for many years.”

Eddie was born and raised in the United Kingdom, and his father, Godwin Anaememotu Opara, worked as a designer — giving Eddie a heritage to live up to. On the eve of Eddie’s departure to the US to pursue a career in design, his father shared his own design philosophy: that design is spiritual.

Here's Eddie's response:

"It took 26 years for me to unravel this, that design is spiritual, that it's a way of life. I would say it to people and they would be inspired. But what does it really mean? How do I break that down?... If you take the term spiritual... you see that it's not about one's self. It is the idea of transcending oneself, elevating what you know of an idea, of an experience, of your imagination. Isn't that similar to design?"

Eddie is a proper citizen of the world but where does the value of traveling and networking come in? How important is it for designers, and what does seeing design mean?

“I travel a lot and whenever I have to deal with designers’ portfolios, that's the first thing I always state, how much have you traveled in your life? To see design is not to just peer into the internet. You need to stretch your wings and travel, go to other countries, invite yourself into studios, enjoy the lunches, have conversations! And I feel as though that part is missing now because there's this insular element of staying at home, but hey, go to that person's home, that's their studio now.”

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted all of our lives, but Eddie had a unique perspective on how to solve this. He looked at it as an opportunity to forge stronger, more personal relationships with coworkers. Here’s his take on homes as means of understanding each other’s lives:

“I think we're getting to the point where I will be inviting my design team or whomever to my house for lunch and I would like to go to their houses, too. I feel as though we need to have more of this understanding of each other's lives.”

Pentagram is a uniquely structured entity of 22 dignitary practicing designers. Eddie shared the special code within the Pentagram partnership that has already lasted five decades:

“How do you make decisions where we all have to agree? That's a lot of work, but you try to leave the ego at the door. Everybody has an ego. We have a prescription for Pentagram partners: A partner shouldn’t have a black cape that would make them seem like a maestro. That it’s ‘me, me, me’. It cannot, it will never work. And that is an important factor as to why it's worked very well for over 50 years.”

In 2013 Eddie published ‘Color Works’, an encyclopedia on the fundamentals of understanding color within graphic design. One of the chapters couldn’t help but catch our eyes, the one about Ootje Oxenaar’s Dutch guilder. In other words, the acclaimed Dutch banknotes designed by the graphic artist from the 1970s to the 1980s. As Eddie said:

“The exquisite craftsmanship and the complexity of the texture of the line work within the spectrum of color and tonality of the different shades were absolutely exquisite. It projected the idea that money is something to be cherished, to be respected, and the fundamental idea of what the country is about. On another level, how much of the design culture has integrated into the country itself. In those days a banknote was one of the ways to see it on an international level as well as stamps. These are sort of solitary moments that you can also reminisce and it's just impeccable what he [Ootje Oxenaar] achieved.”

Eddie was born in a Nigerian family in London and moved to the US when he was around 22. After thirty years of working and living stateside, we were curious if he identified more as American or British. On never forgetting one’s heritage:

“The feeling of being American really just comes through my two sons. I don't live precariously through my children at all, they are too young. But I observe and so does my wife. Sometimes we're just scratching our heads because we've never gone through this. It's a very different cultural process, how they speak to us. Why do I hold on to my British culture and Nigerian too? It's not just that it makes me distinct, it's what I know, it's what's ingrained in me.”

Dive into the world of Eddie Opara with Memberful Design. You can find the whole conversation wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Memberful Design to never miss an episode!

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