When FORM Brought Screen to Stage

Paul Schlacter is a senior designer for Google’s Search Design System. He joined Google in 2014 and helped launch FORM and design.google; worked on Google Design and SPAN for the next four years; then joined Corp Eng to help improve internal tools and branding.

Here — as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design — Paul remembers the creative beginnings of FORM, Google’s first design conference, which took the dynamic principles of Material Design and presented them live in San Francisco.

When Material launched at I/O in 2014, I was working at Yahoo. I had previously done some freelance motion and animation work for Google when the design system was still a concept called Quantum Paper, which allowed me to see glimpses of what it might turn out to be. I knew it was coming, but I remember standing in the Yahoo office kitchen, watching Matías [Duarte, VP of Design] present the keynote, and thinking: “They did it. It happened. It’s happening.” Quantum Paper was real. My next thought was: “Oh man. I wish I had stayed at Google.”

I got my chance to return a few months later. I thought I’d be working on product design, but my first project was a design conference called FORM.

FORM was the first of its kind for Google. Material was new, and the idea of Google being a design leader was new; we saw this event as a way to help strengthen that perception. To do that, we transformed a hall at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture in San Francisco into an immersive experience. From a branding perspective, it was incredible — the kind of thing you do in design school, but never think you’ll have the opportunity to do in real life. Basically, a dream job.

I was involved in all aspects of the conference, which was a major learning curve. As we went through the process I got more hands-on, going from simply giving feedback to designing certain elements myself.

All conference visuals evolved out of the FORM logo, which I designed from a round of initial explorations by Jesse Kaczmarek and Andy Gugel of The Rivalry. It was all big, abstract shapes — squares, circles, triangles — in the original Material palette. We took that language and developed an entire geometric alphabet that was used throughout the project, from invitations and name badges to coffee-cup sleeves to posters to magnets. This was a “small” event from a Google perspective — nowhere close to I/O — but we really wanted to get it right.

Then there was the venue itself. I was used to working at “monitor scale,” but this was another level. Fort Mason is a massive building, almost like a hangar. Production timelines gave me a new respect for deadlines. So many of the physical design components had to be ready by a set time, or else we couldn't include them. I also learned a lot about working with all kinds of materials; for instance, we had scaffolding built to break up the space, and hung huge graphic fabric panels backed with acoustic foam to help with sound management between the different spaces of the event.

The screen on stage was huge, right in the center; you could see it from almost anywhere. It was constantly shuffling through presentation graphics and screensavers — a mix of branded “vibes” and scheduling content like what talks were coming up, info about the afterparty.

When they were building everything out, I walked in and the scale of everything blew me away. That year we had so many questions: Will people come? Will they be into it?

People did come! It was a success and paved the way for the SPAN conference in 2015 and beyond. I think the event design played a part in that. I was really proud that Google had committed to building a creative space to host discussions, welcomed people to be critical and curious, and invited different points of view.