The L.A. Look

“One of the nice things about working with these people is they’re fun,” publisher Carol Doumani confides, parking her bright orange Gucci purse on the sofa in the sunny conference room at AdamsMorioka. “They seem to be really happy about what they do.”

She has come to the Beverly Hills office of the quintessential Southern California graphic design team--other clients include the Gap, Old Navy, Disney, VH-1 and Rizzoli--to look at proofs for her new cookbook.

Noreen Morioka saunters in with her yellow legal pad. “You want to hear what happened this morning?” she asks, as if about to tell a joke. “Sean and I come in and look at our presentations and realize, ‘Oh, my goodness, this book is not the right size. It’s too small.’ So we’re printing out some new things which we just designed.”

Doumani is unperturbed. “Sometimes those last-minute decisions are the best,” she says. To grasp her vision for the book--timeless, yet a reflection of her personal style--the designers visited her contemporary, all-white home in Venice, to “see how she deals with her personal space,” Sean Adams explains.

With his disarmingly pearly-toothed smile, he is the soul of low-key bonhomie, the perfect foil for Morioka’s sallies. The partners, now in their early 30s, met as students at CalArts, worked in Tokyo (Morioka) and at the New York Public Library (Adams), then returned to Los Angeles.

Chafing at the rigidity they had heard about in large design firms and rebelling against the jittery clutter that then passed for cutting edge, they opened their own shop in 1993 with the watchwords “clarity,” “purity” and “resonance.” Barely four years later, the trade journal I.D. Magazine put them on its annual list of the 40 most influential designers worldwide.

“Beyond the basics, our big issue is the idea that we can make the world a better place,” Adams says. Which is like Modernism 101. “Better living through good design,” quips Morioka. “We just keep simplifying,” Adams says of a promo poster featuring a foamy bar of soap engraved with the firm’s name. “The idea of metaphor has become so important to us. That’s how classic graphic design works.”

“I think Sean and I are a perfect balance, because we definitely are the Zen couple,” Morioka says. “He is Mr. Overachiever and I am more ‘let us relax and enjoy the cool breeze on our faces.’ But there are times when I say to Sean, ‘You know what? We need to get to the airport in 15 minutes,’ and Sean says, ‘Can I just buy another magazine?’ ”