Posts Tagged ‘visual culture’
Monday, October 11th, 2010
The increasing power of brands has also seen the rise of the logo lynchmob, pitchforks and flaming torches aloft in pursuit of another artless arrangement of a few Helvetica characters. This now routine negativity reached a new pitch last week when Gap unveiled its new logo to a tsunami of online invective, much of it from designers. Healthy debates are overheating and professional dysfunction threatens to encourage design-by-mob.
The talking-up of graphic design into rocket science always invited public criticism, but once upon a time the industry avoided attacking itself in public. Somewhere late in the 20th century that began to change. When BP (pre-pinwheel identity) italicised it’s old shield-based logo, the Sun and other esteemed UK print media ran ‘NEW LOGO COST £40m’ and/or similarly misleading headlines (the agency will have been well-paid, but the vast majority of that sum will have been ongoing global implementation costs). A bruising PR fail in itself, but there in the news story text was one of the big branding figures of the time quoted as saying how terrible the logo was—helping to fuel a popular view of designers as overpaid charlatans.
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Tags: brand design, brand names, branding, communication, crowdsourcing, design, design criticism, design industry, Gap, graphic design, iTunes, logo, logo rage, London 2012, MySpace, new logo, Twitter, visual culture
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Friday, September 17th, 2010
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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Tags: art, communication, creativity, design, Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar, inspiration, Tate Britain, visual culture
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Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
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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Tags: art direction, collecting, image-making, photography, postcards, visual culture, visualisation
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
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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Tags: BP, brand design, brand names, branding, communication, graphic design, information design, packaging, retail, service design, signage, visual culture
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
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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Tags: accessibility, communication, design, graphic design, information design, legibility, typography, visual culture
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
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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Tags: brand design, charm, communication, creativity, decoration, decorative type, graphic design, packaging, typography, visual culture, visualisation
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Monday, February 15th, 2010
Well that’s it then. The End of Days. Armageddon. Civilization? all over. I have seen a sign: Someone with sufficient cash for a brand new Bentley has seen fit to customize it not only with a personalised license plate (tacky, but unsurprising) – but one set in design’s least favourite typeface: Comic Sans.
Momentarily traumatised whilst driving I failed to whip out the phone camera to record this portent of doom or to note particulars for the design police, but trust me – its out there somewhere… (more…)
Tags: graphic design, legibility, letterform, license plates, security, typography, visual culture
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