I’ve been so amazed at how this became a thing.
The story is, my first year at Stanford (Y2K) we were having a party at the Loft, and it’s a bit hard to see from the street, so I thought, hey, it’d be fun to make a sign so my friends know when they get here. And it’d be a fun existentialist double-entendre about being present here and now; maybe a triple-entendre that if you have impostor syndrome (which I definitely did), you can remind yourself that it’s ok, you really are here, do what you can with it.
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After the party was over, I didn’t know what to do with it, so I hung it in the library over the door to the main loft. It wasn’t a big thing, and when I graduated & moved away, I just left it there with the hundred other things people made, to disappear in its own time.
…imagine my surprise when I came back to teach in 2007, and found it bolted to the wall outside! And I was told that Bernie Roth took it to Burning Man one year, driving around a golf cart with the sign held aloft (I was on the playa that year & didn’t see it, but it’s a big place.)
In 2009, the students had it on their flyer for the new loft design. David Goligorsky made a lollipop of it.
And when it was on the PD website, I was beside myself! (Though I never got a screen shot of it–anyone got a record?) Eventually the elements took their toll on the sign on the Loft wall, and it got a revamp by Purin Phanichphant, with the help of Eugene Korsunskiy, who I later taught with at Dartmouth, on the opposite end of the country!
When I was contracting for Autodesk, I was again flabbergasted to find Cory Bloome had hung the original sign in Pier 9. When Bill Burnett wrote his book Designing Your Life, he made a different version of You Are Here in it. In 2019, Purin made lapel pins of it.
I think the sign’s influence is dying down again now (?), it’s off the website, but I’m delighted at what a splash it made over the years. I wish anything I’d intended to be a big deal had gotten nearly so much traction!
Long live You Are Here. ❤️