Archive for June, 2010

of biscuits and Bidies: Anna Steinberg interview

Friday, June 25th, 2010

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.

(more…)

inside out: designing sustainable brands

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…

(more…)

too much information?

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.

(more…)