Everyone I know seems to have an immediate pre-pandemic anecdote: some activity they enjoyed that the pandemic rendered impossible, or a project they undertook under pre-pandemic assumptions now shadowed with dramatic irony. Here is mine: On Valentine’s Day weekend 2020, my family joined another family on a last-minute jaunt to an indoor water park in the Wisconsin Dells. It’s an activity that now seems fantastically germ-ridden but also charmingly heedless.

The pandemic caught the Chicago-based design studio Span in a different place. Partners John Pobojewski and Bud Rodecker just founded their studio in January and were preparing for a grand opening event that never happened. Instead of popping corks and pressing the flesh, Pobojewski recalls “packing up everyone’s computer individually, hooking on the face masks and all this protective gear, and then setting up people’s computers for them in their apartments all around the city while they waited in their bedrooms.” He pauses and sighs. “I met a lot of cats, yeah.”

Up until this moment, the plan was smooth and straight-forward. Pobojewski and Rodecker had worked together for twelve years at Chicago-based design firm Thirst. In late 2019, Thirst founder Rick Valicenti decided to close shop and pursue his work independent of running a studio. Pobojewski and Rodecker decided to open a new company, Span, under their leadership. With Valicenti’s blessing, they hired most of the Thirst team, kept working with existing clients and even assumed the lease on the same office space. The goal was a seamless transition for all parties. COVID had other ideas.

Obviously, the Span team figured out pandemic-mandated remote work just like the rest of us. But unlike most people, they also meditated on the pandemic’s impact on culture, both during the crisis and afterward. That meditation embraced multiple timescales and formats, including speculative ones. In the self-published AR project Visibility Mask, the “Instagram filter visibly shows the space we take up with our breath,” as Span’s website explains. “In a sense, it makes the invisible force that has altered our lives visible.” The Reaching Out of Reach video series considers how the pandemic disrupted touch, breath and play. Span also collaborated with architecture firm MASS Design Group and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on two projects situating COVID-19 in a broader historical context: The book Architecture of Health probed the various ways buildings make us sicker. The Cooper Hewitt exhibition Design and Healing examined design’s role in this latest pandemic as well as previous health crises.

These projects are all emblematic of Span’s approach to communication design: a historically informed, responsive, 360-degree process.

“Span takes the long view.” So claims the company’s About page, a provocation I couldn’t help probing when I met Pobojewski and Rodecker, as well as associate partner Nick Adam, at their offices in Chicago’s West Loop. What does that mean in practice?

“It has multiple meanings,” replies Pobojewski. “It can mean sustainability, yes. But for us, it’s actually more philosophical. When we work with clients, we’re thinking about how that design lasts longer than just the one project we’re working on now. How is that organization going to perform and change over time? How can the brand allow for that change?”

Rodecker considers the statement as “both forward- and backward-looking. We’re very aware of where our studio sits in the history of communication design,” he says. “So, we’re always considering what came before us and what led us to the point where we are now. Also, the vast majority of our clients are long term; we’ve become trusted collaborators with them.” The phrase “taking the long view” means “we’re going to do what’s right, not what’s going to make us the most money or be the best for our portfolio at this moment,” as Rodecker explains.

Span’s own branding reflects this ethos. Pobojewski explains how they chose the studio’s name: “We really wanted to resist the gravity toward specialization. We want to be the studio that [does] lots of different types of work and challenges the boundaries that communication design has. Can we make performance art? Can we do our own exhibitions? Can we write our own books? Can we do short films?”

Flexibility and range inform Span’s logo as well. Rodecker recalls the period when he was working on the logo: the days were chockful of logistics and work, leaving only evenings to develop the new company’s identity. “I tried not to rush it,” he says. “I do a lot of custom letterforms, so I was just making versions and versions and eventually hit on this worm-like, NASA-inspired type [to spell out the word Span]. It could stretch, and it could change weight.” The logo’s variable font adjusts along the typical sliding scale between width and weight. But Rodecker threw in a third axis that he jokingly nicknamed Cowboy, enabling the monoline font to go into a reverse-stress “for the type nerds”, as he says. “I’ve always called [the Span logo] kind of gutsy. It looks like intestines.”

Intestines aside, “gutsy” is an apt pun describing Span’s body of work. The studio’s portfolio flexes across media and industries with a few recurring themes, Chicago and sustainability among them. Here’s a lightning round of recent Span projects: A book commemorating the 150th anniversary of kitchen and bath product giant Kohler. A short film with a puppet studio blending analog and digital worlds. Developing the strategic plan and related campaigns for Chicago’s Regional Transit Authority to advocate for transit’s value to the public. A bold rebranding for Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. Another comprehensive rebrand for the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.

Span’s unique strengths shine through in an unlikely project, a commemorative book called Slow & Low for the lowrider communities of Chicago and beyond. Local nonprofit Slow & Low had been staging lowrider exhibitions in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood for years prior to the pandemic. After a pause, in 2022, the nonprofit came back bigger than ever and moved the festival to Chicago’s Navy Pier, a massive convention center that extends eastward from the Loop into Lake Michigan. The organizers expected 3,000 attendees for the one-day event and attracted four times that, making it one of the most successful Navy Pier events in the past 20 years.

Slow & Low curators Lauren M. Pacheco and Peter Kepha approached Span to create a commemorative book documenting the organization’s thirteen-year history. The job was not small: the curators gave Span an archive of more than 20,000 photographs. According to Adam, Pacheco and Kepha “were not interested in organizing [the archive] based on time or place. They just wanted to see what would happen when we’d try to create a narrative out of the images.”

Deep listening characterizes much of Span’s creative work: delving into a client’s worldview and communicating to outsiders what the inside view really consists of. “Lowrider culture tends to be pretty misunderstood,” says Adam. “While it’s perceived to be predominantly adult and masculine, it’s actually a family affair with folks of all ages, all genders, all races.” Cars are owned by clubs, not individuals, and continually decorated and improved in an unending creative process that’s multigenerational, communal and joyous. “Within a club, you may have a member who’s wealthy or someone who’s an expert metalworker or an expert painter, and they all come together to produce the car,” Adam explains. He saw children grow into teenagers and then adults within the archive’s photos, smiling next to the same ever-evolving car. The book design honors the lowrider spirit down to small details: “These cars are always moving,” Adam continues. “Books are really portrait objects, and cars are horizontal objects. So, [the book’s] croppings allow for movement and for width to be shown.”

The studio has done an impressive number of sustainability projects from the ReFramed exhibit about pine’s role in sustainable architecture to Urban Sequoia, a green building concept by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in which buildings sequester carbon like trees. For the latter project, Span created a short film screened at the United Nations’s COP26 Climate Change Conference.

What advice would the Span team offer to other design studios to attract such work? According to Pobojewski, participating in 1% for the Planet—a program in which companies pledge 1 percent of their annual sales to climate-change projects—makes Span’s commitment tangible and brings climate-minded clients to the door. Beyond that, of course, one needs to do the ultimate challenge for communication designers. “Design at its core is an optimistic practice,” says Pobojewski. “We create things and propose new ideas. It makes sense that our work looks at these issues through that lens as opposed to a more dire one.”

“In a way, what design does is helps us navigate environments,” Adam remarks. “It shows you which way you can go, what’s possible. Our work, from climate change to the pandemic and beyond, is a lot about navigation and understanding all these different contexts.” Rodecker amplifies on this remark: “It’s about becoming intimately aware of who [a client] is, what they do, and where they sit in their market and the world. Then, we use our perspective as this outside person; we hear everything they say and play that back to them through design. That is the secret sauce: we show them what they’re saying, and then we can have a conversation about whether it’s right or wrong or if it needs to go this way or that way.”

“I hear this all the time when we present our work,” says Pobojewski. “‘Everything looks so different. You have such a wide variety of work.’ You’re over here talking in one voice and over here talking in another voice. I think that’s what makes us really passionate about design: It doesn’t always have to be about one aesthetic, one style. It’s about going beyond style.” ca