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In the unpredictable, intuitive environment of San Francisco's Cahan & Associates, fear is not a four-letter word.
Heading to San Francisco? The city's Tenderloin district probably isn't anywhere near your itinerary-and if it is, your local friends and guidebooks and concierges will try to dissuade you from a visit. The Tenderloin is anything but tender: a bleak, violent neighborhood notorious for its high rates of homicides and drug overdoses, and the source of more than one in 10 cases clogging the city's juvenile courts.
While it's not the ideal place to wile away an evening on a street corner, designers Kevin Roberson and Bob Dinetz of San Francisco firm Cahan & Associates recently visited the area to conduct an experiment. Roberson had devised an innovative annual report for a Silicon Valley company, Adaptec; he disguised the report ingeniously as an authentic children's book ("Molly has an Adaptec host adapter and SCSI peripherals. See Molly multitask") that earned raves from stockholders who had never fully understood Adaptec's products before. CNN and CNBC even took notice, booking the publication (and company founder Bill Cahan) on puffy segments exploring the State of the Annual Report. But Roberson wanted to know how a less sympathetic audience might respond to it, so he and Dinetz dumped a copy off on a Tenderloin sidewalk one night and returned 24 hours later. Roberson found his work untouched.
The stunt helps Cahan & Associates keep things in perspective-"It's not like we're doing Nobel Peace Prize work," Roberson says. Well, maybe not the Nobel, but hundreds of design accolades have been showered upon Cahan & Associates in its 15 years of existence. And with a wholly unpredictable client roster, Cahan's repertoire makes the company tough to saddle with a pithy theme or unifying design vision. Its products include surprisingly stunning, engrossing annual reports for unsexy California concerns you've never heard of, with names like Adaptec and COR Therapeutics and Molecular Biosystems and Informix. The 16-person firm writes and designs catalogs for Pottery Barn Kids, a new division of the upscale furnishings retailer, and for Klein, a bike brand positioned to techie gearhead cyclists. Cahan's first foray into packaging-for Apollo beer, launched in blue bottles in 1996-earned it a Gold Clio. Last year, the...