Facebook’s Minister of Propaganda

How do you make something like Facebook real?

You hire Ben Barry as the cultural czar and let him let employees create their own cultural values. All he needs is some screen-printing equipment, couple of letter presses, laser cutter and Risograph. Think paint over pixels.

A Fast Compant article by Mark Wilson reveals the work produced by Barry’s Analog Research Lab. About 50 percent of Barry’s job is fairly traditional - devoted to maintaining brand standards like wikis full of the latest logos and typography - the other 50 percent is a somewhat self-guided exploration of reinforcing corporate culture.

This ranges from printing aspirational posters (of whatever unedited slogan he’d like) to consulting with architects on the Facebook work environment to convincing Facebook’s notoriously engineer-driven crew to get their hands dirty screen-printing.

His latest mass creation is a little red book that was placed on every employee’s desk after Facebook recently acquired their billionth user. A beautifully crafted piece of work, filled with global photography and countless original, inspirational one-liners that reference Facebook’s humble origins, tireless work ethic, and hacker ethos.

Its title? “Facebook was not originally created to be a company.”