Author Archive
Friday, August 10th, 2012
Barely a month seems to pass without someone, somewhere taking a pop at brand design by highlighting the entertainingly high cost of some logos.
This week it is the online enterprise (no stranger to my spam folder) that offers low-grade generic ‘professional logos’ for hundreds, even tens of pounds / dollars. I will not dignify / promote the business by linking to or naming it here, but their pitch contrasts exceptionally fortunate startups paying little or nothing for their first logo (Twitter, Nike, Coca-Cola…) with large corporations (Accenture, Pepsi, BP, Enron, London 2012…) who coughed up six to nine-figure sums for the same thing (no sources quoted of course). So far, so unsurprising.
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Tags: brand design, branding, communication, design, graphic design, logos, London 2012
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Thursday, July 5th, 2012
For something like a quarter of a century, Stanley Green was a familiar feature of the tawdry landscape of London’s Oxford Street. Anyone shopping there between the late 1960s and the end of the 80s is likely to have seen him, his placard and self-produced booklets. I worked with Sedley Place Design for much of the latter decade in the alley off Oxford Street that gave the company its name and Stanley was as much a part of that time and place as the three-card trick, IRA bombs and cheap Italian restaurants. If my colleagues and I admired his eccentricity and outsider typography we ignored the dietary advice in his distinctive monotone and hand-painted caps: ‘LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN…’
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Tags: communication, information design, typography, visual culture
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Monday, June 11th, 2012
Excited D&AD 2012 graduate Student Award nominees pose for photographers as ravenous creative agency heads look on, drooling.
Working for nothing is now a prerequisite for a career in graphic design. The creative industries think little of helping themselves to the best of the year’s graduate brains for nowt in return – some travel expenses if you are lucky, maybe even a ‘gift’, for the most fortunate of all even something called a ‘job’. Apparently this is fine. For agencies and successful graduates, internships really work. For thousands of others? I did wonder how we came to so vigorously embrace this exploitative state of affairs. Then I remembered that this was how I got started.
I am about eight years old. Some people are still looking at large black & white TV sets, not everyone has fixed line telephones and none have mobile communicators, which are barely a gleam in Gene Rodenberry’s eye. I am not sent to work up chimneys, nor live in a workhouse, but at this point in history mothers do still turf their sprogs out to explore the world after breakfast and neither know nor possibly care where they are until they (usually) return at tea-time. On such a day out I stumble across the local museum, a four-storey Edwardian house and universe of its own where live exhibits (newts! frogs! mice!) share space with static displays of gin traps, roman coins and methodically skewered moth corpses. (more…)
Tags: communication, creativity, design, design graduates, exhibition design, graphic design, illustration, internships
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Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
© not London 2012 – flagrant violation of 2012 brand parameters. So sue me.
There is plenty in the London 2012 Olympics for us to get angry about: The magical / mythical ticket chaos; sponsorship & brand fascism from Union Carbide to intimidation of cornershops; the rooftop missiles; the world’s least-engaging Olympic mascots Hemlock & Mandible – and no-one is without an opinion on that logo.
I remain alone in feeling that – whilst no thing of beauty – the 2012 logo did an effective job of what it set out to do: signal a fresh Olympic spirit to humans under 30 not engaged in sport. But the typeface is hideous, most applications of the identity weak (Otl Aicher it ain’t), and the enforcement zeal of Seb Coe’s brand police defies belief. My mother is helping to organize a sport-themed village flower-arranging competition this summer (‘The Blooming Olympics’) and I fully expect a LOCOG-ordered SWAT team ambush with helicopter gunships and a bloody showdown in the tea tent. (more…)
Tags: branding, communication, graphic design, inspiration, London 2012, sport, visual culture
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Saturday, April 28th, 2012
Image via Flickr user Nullalux
A five-star furore erupted a couple of weeks ago in the US as the AIGA added ‘justified’ (effectiveness) criteria to its its established graphic design awards. Stoked by a passionate plea from Pentagram’s Paula Scher the dust is still in the air. Crudely reduced, the argument is about art vs. commerce. Beauty, exploration and inspiration vs. quantifiable outcomes and the somewhat true suggestion that the two are forever opposed.
Product designs must function yet fashion design takes liberties with practicality. Graphic designers – working on apps & apple juice, brands & bus timetables, ebooks & exhibitions, websites & wayfinding – juggle widely varying blends of function and aesthestics. Some good graphic design contributes enduringly to our visual culture, but a great deal of it has a mayfly lifespan shifting sandwiches before being binned. Really good graphic design looks upliftingly great and fulfils an useful function. (more…)
Tags: awards, creativity, graphic design, innovation, inspiration
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Saturday, March 31st, 2012
Art School culture is fading in the thrusting modern world of cost-effective business-facing academia. Design students often have meagre studio facilities, thin access to staff / peers, so learning good work habits takes longer. Students are often found frozen in the headlights of an oncoming deadline and need help coralling their thoughts. I need to actively manage my own remaining brain cells more these days – general decrepitude, plus the distractions that are part of How We Do Stuff Now. Our unfocussed floundering brains need coaxing now and again.
Creativity was more taken for granted than taught in art schools when I attended St. Martins (as much to be with musicians as designers). I found it disappointing: despite being within spitting distance of Denmark Street the muso thing never took off (blessing in disguise #243618b) and my portfolio was ‘mixed’. Fortunately my first job was with Wolff Olins, then more like art school than art school. It was populated with eccentrics from burnt-out 60s casualties to clever inspirational people, applying a wide range of approaches to creative stimulation from Heroin to The Times crossword. It was instructive to compare the the appalling consequences of the former with the more manageable virtues of the latter (still can’t complete that crossword, though). WO was producing some of the most innovative work of that time and it came from those with the more sustainable attitude to creativity.
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Tags: art school, creativity, design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving
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Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Nokia Lumia Windows phone (photographed badly on an iPhone)
Jonathan Ive’s tenure at Apple has produced a long, successful sequence of product design revolutions leading to the touchscreen interface. It is now so dominant that physical design is arguably being usurped by graphic design as the driver of functionality. Apple’s record in graphics is mostly strong (I always liked their instruction booklets) but recently they seem less sure-footed.
iTunes is much harder work than it used to be (and its ‘new logo’ was widely disliked); the iCal leather / stitching effects are retro and retrograde. Even the ‘candy box’ iPhone / iPad apps homescreens, once fresh and friendly now seem more irritating than helpful. The iPhone remains a beautiful piece of work (even if its most impressive features – like the beautifully machined, spookily high-tolerance sim card tray – are hidden from view by the bumper required for practical everyday operation), but sentimental airbrush effects are starting to make Apple products seem behind the curve for the first time. This was thrown into sharp relief for me by the wife’s new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (purchased against my sage advice of course. Wrong again, dammit.). The product design (above) is restrained and elegant and there is a crisp customisable tile-based interface with simple, elegant animations and well-structured, spare typography using Monotype’s Segoe WP typeface. I’m envious of a non-Apple product for the first time in… ever. This is good news – competition raises the game and there is no reason why Apple must have a monopoly on good design. The Windows phone has let in some UI fresh air and is making Apple look just a bit… stuffy.
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Tags: accessibility, Apple, apps, graphic design, information design, iPhone, maps, Nokia, product design, typography, UI design, Windows phone
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
No Phillumenist I, nor proper collector of anything, but like most graphic designers I love a nice bit of printed ephemera. I bought these matchbox labels in Thailand, and as far as I can tell they are mostly (all?) Japanese, made for the Chinese market and stone lithography printed. I can’t read the text (which might explain much) but the use of flags in some puts them in the second and third decades of the 20th century – beyond that my ignorance is complete, not that that hinders my enjoyment of them. What is going on in the example above for instance? A diminutive husband and wife extending hospitality to an outsized westerner? or two smartly-dressed children welcoming Daddy home (wondering why he could not afford a full-sized house)? Either way – the drawing, pattern, texture and colours are beautiful.
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Tags: decoration, decorative tradition, graphic design, inspiration, matchbox labels, ornament, packaging, phillumeny, printed ephemera, visual culture
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Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
photo © Annie Queree
Outsourcing has been a big business idea – non-‘core’ activities executed for you by someone else. We bemoan the loss of skills & knowledge held in companies and have lowered expectations that employees might know much about what a company does beyond an sales script.
On a personal level we are doing much the same. Written a longhand letter lately? Every time I perform the quaint olde ritual of cheque writing, it seems to take more concentration to execute a legible word (admittedly my handwriting always looked like fallen spaghetti). With the simplest typed communication however, we are spellchecked and ‘helped’. Microsoft takes us by the hand, yet I find it hard to be grateful. Does knowing things still matter?
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Tags: cloud computing, communication, information, information design, outsourcing, skills
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Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
York Hall: terrible drawing, great venue
Taking time out from the everyday for mental refreshment is usually sound advice, as is “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. Conferences usually trade in comfortable & exotic locations and the promise of rest and revelation. Getting away from it all is supposed to help you get back into it all – an appealing (if often costly) idea. An alternative is to take Art & Science’s great lesson: Everything Is Interesting If You Look At It In The Right Way – and step in to the everyday.
This weekend (parted from a hard-earned tenner) I made my way to Bethnal Green’s York Hall, venue for the second Boring conference, founded/organised by James Ward, whose business card should surely read Chairman of the Bored had not Insurance Salesman James Osterberg got to that title first in 1979. This year’s expanded event was alluringly titled Boring 2011…
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Tags: Boring2011, communication, conferences, creativity, detail, inspiration, words
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