Alan Siegel

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Siegel stood before a TED audience in 2010 and delivered a challenge: make clarity, transparency, and simplicity a national priority. It was not an abstract appeal. Siegel had spent decades doing exactly that work himself, reshaping the way corporations, governments, and nonprofits communicated with ordinary people. He had rewritten tax forms for the Internal Revenue Service. He had simplified bank contracts. He had built a firm that counted Dell, MasterCard, and the NBA among its clients. How does a kid from Long Beach, New York who once took a leave from law school to serve with an artillery battalion in Germany become the country's leading voice for plain English? That is the story this documentary will follow.

• 2. From Fort Sill to Madison Avenue

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  Alan Siegel was born on the 26th of August 1938, to Eugene and Ruth Siegel in New York. He attended Long Beach High School, where basketball occupied much of his attention. Cornell University's Industrial Labor Relations School came next, and after graduating he enrolled at New York University School of Law. In 1962, before finishing his degree, he accepted an army commission and trained at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. He was then stationed with the 2nd Howitzer Battalion, 18th Artillery, in Butzbach, Germany. When he returned, the law no longer held the same pull. He chose communications instead, spending the rest of the 1960s at a succession of major firms: BBDO, Ruder Finn, and Sandgren & Murtha. It was at Sandgren & Murtha that he met both Robert Gale, a designer, and Gloria, who would become his wife. They have a daughter together.

• 3. Building Siegel+Gale

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  In 1969, Siegel and Robert Gale launched their own agency, Siegel+Gale. Early on, clients came to them primarily for help developing visual identities. Then in 1974, Gale sold his stake in the firm. Without his co-founder, Siegel steered the company away from pure logo and design work toward something broader: corporate voice and the idea of simplification as a strategic discipline. Over the following decades, the client roster expanded to include names like American Express, Xerox, 3M, Caterpillar, MasterCard, the NBA, Dell, and The New School. Siegel also brought his ideas into the classroom. He served as an associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, where he designed and taught a legal writing course. At Carnegie Mellon University, where he held an adjunct professorship, he helped found the Communications Design Center. In 2012, he retired from Siegel+Gale and took the title of chairman emeritus.

• 4. The Plain English Crusade

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  Throughout the 1970s, Siegel became the leading public voice for a movement that proposed stripping complexity out of financial and legal documents. The plain English movement, as it was known, argued that ordinary citizens deserved to understand the contracts and forms that governed their lives. In 1979, that argument attracted an unlikely client: the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS hired Siegel to overhaul its existing tax forms, and the work produced what became the 1040-EZ form. He also turned his attention to bank contracts and Census Bureau forms. The visibility of those projects brought him onto national television and into national print. He appeared on The Today Show, The McNeil-Lehrer Report, CNN, CBS News, and ABC News, and was featured in People magazine. At TED 2010, he closed his talk with a direct provocation: "There is no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate. There is no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible. So, how are we going to change the world? Make clarity, transparency and simplicity a national priority."

• 5. Writing and Siegelvision

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  Siegel has translated his convictions into print across several decades. He contributed to The Wall Street Journal, authoring guides including The Wall Street Journal Guide to Money and Markets, Writing Contracts in Plain English, and Simplified Consumer Credit Forms. He also wrote two books on photography: One Man's Eye: Photographs from the Alan Siegel Collection and Step Right This Way: The Photography of Edward J. Kelty. In 2013, he co-wrote Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity with Irene Etzkorn, Siegelvision's chief clarity officer. Strategy+Business magazine named it the best marketing book of the year and one of the best business books of 2013. After leaving Siegel+Gale, Siegel founded Siegelvision, a brand identity consultancy built around a different kind of client than the corporate giants of his earlier career. Siegelvision works with nonprofits, educational institutions, and foundations, including New York University, National Public Radio, Cornell's College of Engineering, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the Legal Aid Society, the Lupus Foundation of America, the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, and Phoenix House. Siegel also serves on the board of the American Theatre Wing, where he votes for the Tony Awards.