Posts Tagged ‘communication’
Monday, December 31st, 2012
The world’s least favourite logo—but for how long?
Was 2012 the year that brand design failed? Certainly the general public and a large number of designers did a heck of a lot of complaining as a long list of high-profile new / reworked logos appeared to increasing derision — so much so that you have to wonder: is a logo launch free of moan-brand misery even possible in 2013?
One by one, ever more brands joined 2012’s year-long turkey shoot culminating in October with the University of California: a logical, reasonably well-executed new device incorporating references to the 150 year-old seal it replaced (see below, or here). Yet it inspired new heights of hostility, finally being withdrawn after widespread media taunting and a 50,000-person petition. Not a work of staggering genius perhaps (the applications did seem a bit dull) but deserving of that much crazed torch-bearing lynch-mobbery?
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Tags: brand design, communication, Ebay, Gap, logo design, London 2012, Twitter, University of California, Windows
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Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
Don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that twang… © Alembic
Most designers enjoy music for mood-management or constructive distraction and many also grapple with an instrument in their spare time. Finding significance in detail is another inextricable part of design activity—A History of the World in 100 Objects and the Boring Conference attest to the the wider appeal looking for big stuff in minutiæ.
I enjoyed Boring 2011 hugely but could not attend this time—so an invitation to contribute to Keechdesign / Yamaha Design Studio’s Something Like A Musical Instrument event was timely consolation. For it, contributors were asked to speak for a minute or two on an object with some connection to music. Talks ranged from a concise presentation of the flosspick as “the world’s smallest stringed instrument” to a demonstration of trombone mute development by David Keech (not only a fine designer but an actual proper musician as well). A fuller selection of contributions can be found on Johnson Banks’ ‘Thought For the Week’ blog. My effort was something like the following:
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, inspiration, music
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Thursday, November 29th, 2012
Cap’n P. points from somewhere in the well-designed future to the inadequate user experiences of the early 21st century.
You might think that by now we would be getting to grips with the information age and that with endless data literally at our fingertips that certainty and progress would follow. The reverse seems more true. The combination of sheer data volume and vested interests make it harder than ever before for us to separate signal from noise.
The human mammal, supposedly superior to corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods (and other smartarse earth life forms not beginning with ‘c’) has built its success so far on exceptional pattern recognition skills and an aptitude for making sense of complexity. But more often the widespread response to our self-inflicted Infogeddon is a toxic combination of ignorant denial and rampant egomania, most obviously illustrated by (though far from limited to) rightwing US politicians and widespread fundamentalist religious groups. It often works: state your case firmly, loudly and often enough and like rust or some fungus, the maddest ideas take hold. Add power to such posturing and you can take any barking notion and Make It So (as I understand slaphead space commanders of the future will be fond of saying).
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Tags: branding, communication, graphic design, information design, social responsibility
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Friday, August 31st, 2012
The 1950s new town dream: envisioned, achieved, forgotten.
“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” (Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus).
Some of us avoid ruining clothes by checking washing instructions. Fogeys young and old appreciate looking after a good pair of shoes. Some humans may have read a few pages of the user manual that came with their car / TV / computer. But most of us pay scant attention to looking after stuff. Our high expectations and short attention spans have made ‘care’ a tiresome inconvenience.
Architects, designers and other creators are blamed when their enduring work ‘fails’ in the long run. Poorly maintained 70s buildings routinely get torn down where a little care might have preserved the optimistic social statements they once made. The City of London’s Barbican Estate is a rare exception to the rule.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, creativity, design process, industrial design, information design, maintenance, Stevenage, vision
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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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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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