Frontify presents: How Order and Herman Miller refreshed a design legacy

Welcome to The Dialogue, a series presented in collaboration with one of the world’s leading brand-building platforms, Frontify. We are exploring the collaborative relationships behind exceptional brand work through paired conversations with creative partners, revealing how studios and brands work together to produce transformative results. For this conversation, we sat down with both Order and Herman Miller to discuss their partnership in refreshing the identity of a furniture company synonymous with modernism itself. What emerged was a story of patient alignment, archival revelation, and the kind of trust that only comes from knowing when not to change something. The introduction came through design media circles – that small village of New York practitioners who keep mental lists of dream collaborators. Kelsey Keith, Creative Director at MillerKnoll, had been tracking Order’s work for a decade, ever since their Standards Manual project began documenting legacy design systems. “I had kept Order on my shortlist of designers to work with ever since, just waiting for the right opportunity,” Keith explains. “It finally made sense once I’d moved to the brand side and lobbied the Herman Miller powers-that-be for a brand identity refresh.” For Jesse Reed, Co-founder of Order, the connection felt inevitable. “This is the second time Order has been contacted because of our work at Standards Manual,” he notes. The studio’s reputation for handling historical systems – NASA, MTA, EPA – had naturally extended to their client work. “Besides Herman Miller, another dream client that came out of our Standards Manual work was MoMA. The two organisations are rather similar – both have a longstanding history, prioritise design excellence in every way, and provide spaces for the public to find their own ways of expressing themselves.”