Another great post at Brand Avenue, on the rebrand of Belfast - a remarkably reserved and non-judgemental report (so this is where I wade in) of yet another simplistic one dimensional civic rebrand, employing the highly improbable, (but oft-repeated) strategy of trying to differentiate a place through the deployment of exactly the same simplistic logo and sloganeering of ever other second, third, fourth city in the uk.
If you don’t believe me, read the following quote from Belfast Mayor, Tom Hartley, and try replacing the word Belfast with Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh etc:
“We shouldn’t forget our past as it is important in determining who we are. But this is about here and now and it is about the future, and what a future we can have if we pull together … This is not about a logo on a piece of paper. It is an opportunity for us all to embrace a new, vibrant and forward looking identity and ethos which says that Belfast has come of age. We all know how unique the city and its people are and now we have a golden opportunity to take the message that this is Belfast’s time, its moment and we want to share it with everyone. Be inspired.”
This Guardian slideshow shows the range of marketing and identity/image building work for presidential hopeful, Barak Obama. What is particularly disheartening is the transition from slide 5 to 6, where the creativity/expression/voice of any single individual is subsumed by the party’s ‘on-brand’ placard. What would be even more disheartening is if someone found a way to measure this as being more effective. As we speak, we’re still searching for an off-brand candidate.
PostSpectacular gives us an intro to the generative book cover software for a new service from Faber - printing on demand copies of books currently out of print.
Last weeks talk at the Lighthouse by Kenya Hara, author of Designing Design, exhibition curator, graphic designer and creative director of Muji, proposed some interesting ideas about ‘emptiness’.
A defining philosophy of ‘emptiness’ (as opposed to simplicity or minimalism) in both product and advertising, was something that could have been expanded upon in much greater detail, (or possibly not, if that would defeat the point), but certainly provides an interesting new starting point when thinking about the things we make and the communication we initiate.
I am at the bleeding-edge of interaction design. I contain information which can be accessed in many thousands of permutations and which can trigger mind altering results in the receiver. I can be used in multiple different ways by different users. I am portable. I can predict the future and reflect on the past. I make early 21st century interactive light installations look simplistic and one dimensional. I emote. I am connected through time and space via a complex network of similar objects.
At thurdays Inter_Multi_Trans_Action symposium at Napier University, a great line up of speakers demonstrated how good a design event can be. While the number of design conferences expands exponentially, the chance to go to an event like this which a) retained some focus b) didn’t cost the earth and c) neatly avoided the design navel-gazing which can consume some of these events, came as a welcome opportunity to think and reflect without feeling like you were being preached to, or being asked to come up with the definitive answer of what design is.
The neat thing too was the title, and though the conference organisers suggested it was a flippant joke of sorts, it actually cuts to the heart of the “what discipline are we/what is our discipline becoming/is it art, is it design?” machinations which seem to frequently paralyse these events. By placing the focus on actions rather than the person or the body of work, the conversations were much freer, and liberating rather than constraining. And from now on, if anyone asks me what I do, I’m going to tell them that I’m an undisciplined designer.
Taking a physical trip around some current off-line Visual Communication degree shows, and searching through the numerous online equivalents, an emerging phenomena is slowly forming in my mind. The problem with this phenomena is that in itself it makes me question my own (fairly limited) frame of reference, and highlights some broader issues within the visual communication community, whilst at the same time making me feel like I might just be getting old/reactionary. As they say, you decide…
To describe this phenomena, which can go under the working title ‘feedback fuzz’, we can start with the visual aesthetic. By this I mean an exponential growth of grafik-style graphics (i.e. stuff which has the surface appearance of work you may see in grafik magazine) in student shows. With this comes a disorientation about what substance there is in the work (what it is about) and the relationship between form and content. Coupled to this is a dearth of genuine experimentation and risk, or playfulness with the language of visual communication. I know I’d be nieve to think that Visual Communication has only recently become concerned with surface aesthetic alone, disconnecting the ’style’ from the ’substance’, but it does seem to be reproducing on an unprecedented scale. There must be several reasons for this, but at the core would seem to be the ever shortening visual distribution cycle, enabled by the internet and the recent rise of design-magpie blogs, where speed/quantity is king and critique/comment is, (in the absence of anything that rhymes with ‘king’), non-existent. First and foremost, this, rather than the more detailed critique of blogs like Design Observer, seems to be forming the sole source of secondary research for many students - not a problem as one of many sources, but when unchecked or unbalanced by anything else, creates a distorted view of what graphic design is, and can be.
Faced with this ever expanding number of distribution channels with low/no cost thresholds in terms of either accessing information or starting your own distribution channel, we strangely (and perhaps conversely to what you might expect) seem to be creating an increasingly homogenised idea of what graphic communication is, a giant leap from the pre-internet days when design magazines were prohibitively expensive for students, and graduates (speaking from a personal perspective here) graduated with only a vague idea of what was happening in industry, (and most of that was probably 10 years out of date due to poorly stocked libraries). Of course neither of these situations is better than the other, but with the rapid expansion of design/creative-industries as a desirable area of academic study, and a seductive pathway, (via its broadly vocational ethos), to a creative and exciting job, it might be interesting to think about what kind of world view graphic designers are graduating with, and whether what we’re seeing is a vicious navel-gazing circle of graphic design about graphic design.
As mentioned earlier, there are probably other forces at work: Globalization, increasing student numbers, the low-cost entry threshold to becoming a fully kitted-out graphic-designer, our in-built love/hate relationship with ’same-ness’, the transient rapidity of anything to do with fashion or popular culture, but it also may be interesting for visual communication to look to other design disciplines to see if similar forces are at work. From a reasonably secure market sector and an already well defined customer base for what might be termed Graphic Design, it is easy to rest on laurels and not be forced, as is perhaps happening across product/interaction/service design, to look out to the world and test/stretch/redefine what a discipline is.
To return to the original point, this is only a half formed thought, and in many ways, the more you try to think about it, the more impenetrable it becomes. As the internet and all its wonderful enabling qualities are there, and aren’t going to go backwards, it may be for us as designers and tutors to promote a critical analysis of the visuals that saturate our world, rather than their direct appropriation, and to consciously place less emphasis on design graduates being the ‘finished (ready-for-industry) article’. Or maybe I am just seeing more (through the better, further reaching distribution of student work) of something that was happening anyway. Either way, I would love more students to be more confident in saying ‘this is graphic design’, being disruptive in the best possible sense, and setting the agenda, rather than conforming to what the industry perpetuates. That, and many in industry agree, is surprisingly beneficial for everyone.
* This article contains many generalisations, as it is intended as a broad overview. I realise that non of the assertions are absolutes, and there are, as ever, many exceptions to the rules.
This ethnographic study undertaken by Sanjeev Shankar, looking at the lives and practises of road side vendors in India, provides some interesting starting points if thinking about brands and service design. The topic of food in india and information design is approached from a different perspective here, by Steve Rigley.
In the process of researching a new project I came across this great (and some may say visionary, given that it seems to have been written in the early 1990’s) article on the Doors of Perception blog. Also prescient as it references the economic downturn of the 90’s, given the imminent ‘Credit Crunch’, (which I’m reliably informed is an economic phenomena, and not a new type of breakfast cereal as I’d originally suspected).
The recent excitement about a Government U-turn over the abolition of the 10p tax rate had me reaching for my copy of the Art of Looking Sideways , sure that I had seen a precient quote about signs of intelligence and being able to change your mind. I know this reflects a certain nieve/optimistic outlook, but I’m a bit lost as to the problem with the parliamentary labour party listening to their constituents, pressuring the prime minister, and achieving re-evaluation of a policy by the government. Isn’t this how its suppose to work? Anyway, back at the book, of course I can’t find the quote I’m looking for (but had an enjoyable half hour searching through the joy that is the Art of Looking Sideways), however I think it’s similar to (if not the same as) something said by Daniel Gilbert…
An interesting debate, (and I use that word loosly in relation to posting comments on blogs), rages on the Creative Review Blog, about Stefan Sagmeisters new book. The interesting criticism is that it is ’self-indulgent’ which says a lot about the mindset of designers and a continued difficulty when it comes to mentally traversing discipline boundaries (and their associated ‘codes of conduct’) - Of course this doesn’t necessarily mean it is good but it doesn’t necessarily make it bad either.
