September 17th, 2010

high art & plane speaking

How often do you feel really gripped by a piece of contemporary art? I don’t know much about art and am often unsure about what I like, but I like Fiona Banner’s ‘Harrier and Jaguar’ a lot. I wonder why?

Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are a special context. Tate Britain is so much more approachable than its Modern big sister which, much as I like the building, seems to engulf the ideas it holds, the gazillions of tourists pouring through not helping matters. Tate Britain has less space but the bigger picture – the broader context of art tradition a foil for the limited amount of contemporary works.

The sheer improbability of this 20th century hardware robbed of motion is enhanced by the neoclassical architecture. The Harrier is strung up like a hung gamebird, the Jaguar an impossible accident. The planes could not be more surreally out of context. We can experience their spectacular physicality up close and you can’t help but wonder ‘how did they get them in here’?

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August 24th, 2010

cutting remarks: valuing information

That ‘knowledge is power’ is not disputed, but acceptance of the value of information is under threat. With unprecedented budget cuts becoming ‘normal’, the cost of communicating is called into question whilst its value is ignored.

With Crazy George & chums currently riding roughshod through UK public services, machetes flailing, there is financial pressure of the most intense kind on public institutions. Used to state regulation, detached from the free market’s instant and unforgiving feedback, there is no solid tradition of objectively balancing prioritities. Forced to plan big cuts, decision-makers may already have reached the “if I cut this will the entire institution fail tomorrow?” stage. Can we hope for measured appraisal of the worth of communications design in this climate? This must be a good time for designers to argue for the value of communications and information design wherever they get the chance.

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August 17th, 2010

formaggio italiano: postcards from Italy

Take a break from the pursuit of high quality and savour the historic charm of 1960s art direction and photography…

From a small collection of postcards on sale in Italy in the 70s, a dozen examples of imagery created before the term art direction was coined. You would think Italy’s obvious scenic charm a sufficient lure for tourist cash, but free-thinking Italian marketeers of the time had other ideas: from low-grade sleaze involving aircraft wreckage to bad weather boating and armed forces recruitment, to 1960s US TV stars and a series of unfortunate animals in varying degrees of discomfort and shame. The images beg many questions: Did a perceived lack of virility in the Leaning Tower prompt the use of the Eiffel? Why three embossed gold stars to censor the boat girl? Are the washing instructions for the cat or the quilt? Was the early use of a lenticular coating (to make the army/airforce girls wink – sadly not evident here) the interactive spark that eventually led to the development of the iPad?  We may never know…

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July 22nd, 2010

an accidental education: old news


Randomly chosen newspaper spread with stories grouped under two page headings. The wide field of vision allows many other connections/reasons-to-read

The Death of Print is a phrase regularly bandied about since the invention of TV (and probably radio before that), appearing with renewed vigour with the arrival of every new communications platform. The actual death of some newspapers and print publications lends urgency to the drama, but the reality is less apocalyptic. Jobs are lost, companies fail, the media landscape changes, but old formats (with the notable exception of the unloved videocassette) assume new roles rather than become extinct. The life and death struggle of old vs. new media is the easy narrative but old media has unique value which should ensure at least a modest survival.

New media platforms have given us massive advances in accessibility and empowerment – but they also come with a predisposition for targeted communication, ‘narrowcasting’ and self-selection.  Old media, print especially, has one underappreciated benefit that is absent from the new stuff. It doesn’t decide quite so forcefully in advance what information will be of value to me, limiting what I might learn about the world.

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June 25th, 2010

of biscuits and Bidies: Anna Steinberg interview

An illustrator, teacher and member of the editorial board of award-winning contemporary illustration magazine Varoom, Anna Steinberg creates beautifully drawn, witty and thoughtful images, some of which were recently selected for Images – Best of British Illustration and the London Transport Museum/AOI Cycling in London competitions. In this email interview she reveals the significance to her work of ingenuity, mountains, biscuits & old Bidies…

How do you work?
With professional commissions I usually problem-solve in words first and then develop through doodles into resolved pictures. With personal work I do visual experiments and it emerges more spontaneously.

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June 17th, 2010

inside out: designing sustainable brands

You don’t construct a building façade-first, then install services, framework and foundations. You don’t build a car by starting with the bodywork. We don’t (unless recovering from a big night out) dress coat & shoes first.  So why are some brands designed from the outside-in, imposing personality at odds with experience? Outside-in brand design can set expectations significantly adrift of reality, resulting in dissonant and negative communications and an unsustainable brand.  How do you build a sustainable brand? From the inside out.

Graphic design is superficial, ephemeral.  Much of it ends up, if not as yesterday’s fish & chip paper (they don’t do that any more), in the bottom of the budgie cage’s (no-one keeps those any more either), binned and recycled until fit only for landfill.  Pixels or paper, graphic design is largely transient, disposable. Its outcomes may be all about about the surface but there is every reason why its process should have more depth.

At Wolff Olins as far back as the 1970s a much-used maxim was “you can’t paper over the cracks” i.e. if your company/product/service is poor, a stunning visual identity will not help you long-term, it only creates a credibility gap that makes things worse. Advice that clearly never reached the ears of hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward…

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June 10th, 2010

too much information?

This is my favourite road sign.  I like it because it treats me as a sentient human being rather than a mindless drone incapable of independent thought.  It encourages me to consider the possible hazards of my situation and trusts that having so reflected, I will make good decisions.  Were I not barrelling along at 70mph it would also inspire me to muse further on the meaning of life, the universe and everything…

The rarity of such ‘thoughtful’ road signs makes me wonder why few communications assume an intelligent audience.  Too much ‘telling’ surely eventually breeds disinterest.  On the roads we all see plenty of poorly regulated over-signing: badly placed, ugly ‘street furniture’ laden with overly instructive signs, sometimes there (it would seem) as much to prevent the local council from being sued as to actually help the public.  Credible research now shows that careful removal of oversignage increases road safety.  De-signing can be good designing.  As in most areas of communication design, consideration of the user and limiting the number of messages to be processed increases the likehood of effectiveness.  More thoughtful communications crediting users with some intelligence would be no bad thing.

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May 27th, 2010

charm/offensive

Artwork, print and cheap uncoated paper – 1950s/60s comics’ matchless charm (pic via Half-man Half-static).

Forty years back (in the Life on Mars era) the fashionable aesthetic is an informal, natural look. There is lingering hippy talk of ‘getting back to nature’. These are lean years for the high street hairdresser, ‘male grooming’ is a laughable concept and clothes are mostly cheap and nasty or homemade. Design is still a cottage industry but it is looking to the future: Michael English’s Hyper-real airbrush illustrations seem new and extraordinary. Robert Moog’s synthesizer is the future of music (although he hasn’t yet worked out how to keep it in tune)…

March 2010, Farringdon. I’m in a tube carriage near an extraordinary-looking young woman who appears in no way real. Her hair, nails, makeup seem somehow beyond human and her high brow and flawless surface reminds me of the actor/digital hybrid as the Red Queen from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Blankly shiny, expressionlessly ‘perfect’, she is the HD-ready paradigm of contemporary beauty. Music seeping from headphones is also soullessly bright, sampled, virtual, autotuned. All of this is in sharp contrast to the immediate noise and grubby texture of London, where illustrators, designers and musicians, bored with software slickness are increasingly going ‘wonky’ (surely the most irritating/overused phrase of 2009), working with the look and feel of handwork, crafts, ‘outsider art’ and forgotten technologies to rediscover ‘charm’….

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May 20th, 2010

original sins?

Why do so many brand logos appear unoriginal?  Reading some press you’d think that graphic designers sit around all day either copying each other or channeling Vic Reeves: ‘that was my idea’.  Are we running out of ideas?  Is the media running out of stories?  Are strangely familiar logos coincidences, remixes or ripoffs?

Tempting as the brand theft narrative is there are other factors at work.  Designers work with the logical and the lateral seeking the ‘original’ – not just to impress their peers, but because an original and distinctive logo is more noticeable, memorable and protectable – a more effective and valuable brand property.  This search for originality is not quite the free-spirited enquiry of the fine artist, being at least in part anchored at some level to brand messages and requirements of the client brief.  Companies are rarely as unique as they would like to be and often want to communicate many of the same things. ‘Global’, ‘fast’, ‘efficient’, are just a few recurring themes (how many companies do not want to be seen as those things?). As global consumers we swim in an increasingly homogenous media soup (apologies for distasteful mixed metaphor), sharing the same cultural references, so perhaps it is not so surprising that brands are getting less distinct and that designers sometimes come to similar conclusions.

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