Posts Tagged ‘design’
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
An awful lot of very good graphic designers celebrate their success in the profession by leaving it. Is this because they cannot wait to get away from design? Surely not…
A recent blog post by Steven Heller concerned one Kent Hunter, a gifted designer I met briefly in the 80s whilst working for a transatlantic corporate graphics concern. Kent is a very talented chap indeed who amongst other things I remember art directed some ground-breaking annual report work for Time-Warner. Having had a very successful career with Franfurt Balkind, Kent and his partner have now opened an antique store in Millerton, NY.
Around the same time, in our London office Suzi Godson was a highly talented, clear-thinking designer I enjoyed working with. She bailed out of a very promising design career to become a successful Author and Times Columnist.
John Larkin was co-founder (with Tim May) of Design House Consultants, which was (and still is as far as I know) a very successful business, although John has long since departed both design and the UK to St Tropez for a new life as a hotelier.
There are plenty of other and higher-profile Poachers-turned-Gamekeeper: For Ben Schott (of Original Miscellany fame) and Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, McSweeney’s and-much-more fame), graphic design activity was just step on the road to greater things.
What makes these escapees so keen to leave design? A desperate desire to never work for the man again? (understandable); a fundamental hatred of hard work? (not likely); A sudden need to assume a new identity for tax purposes? (possibly)…
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, graphic design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving, service design, words
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Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Having lately spent far more time than I care to in and around NHS facilities it is hard avoid noticing how much energy / resources are wasted when information is badly managed. I am no systems analyst, but even without an abacus for a mind the potential benefits of sorting out information in the NHS seem clear in three areas:
In some trusts, budgetary adjustments have reduced willingness to create / maintain good patient communications. Visits to dreary GP surgeries are not elevated by leaflet / poster displays that climb the walls like mutant strains of rising damp. Clip art and Comic Sans feature heavily in DIY print productions in which clarity and communication have taken a back seat. Patients should have the right to clear information in support of their treatment.
Physically navigating the NHS, its hospitals, clinics and other facilities can be complex. Some of the larger hospitals have decently planned sign systems and an air of calm efficiency as a result, but many smaller or regional ones do not, and those that are building / reorganizing often fail to consider users by properly re-routing them. How many late / missed appointments are caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Exceptional facilities like the Kentish Town Integrated Care Centre seem to be from another world entirely. Owing its existence to an opportunity of history, the persistent vision of an individual and a gifted design team, such a paragon is unlikely to ever be anything like the norm, in this universe at least.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, design, graphic design, information design, nhs, service design
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
That nice Professor Cox was on TV recently (atop some picturesque mountain, waving around the Hubble’s holiday snaps) banging on about space-time being a Woonder o’ t’ Universe™. That’s true enough but down here in office/studio space, time and/or space are scarcer – time to reflect in particular. What with lunch being for wimps and none of us having an attention span any more, non-essential reflection has become so widely discouraged that it’s a woonder the world is not full of humans behaving like headless chickens plunging civilisation headlong into chaos. Oh, hang on a minute…
It’s all too easy for busy designers to get burned out, stuck in a rut, demotivated or disillusioned with a profession that will always consume more mental energy than is strictly available (that probably contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics but I’m no Prof. Cox). To be the best designer you can be requires the cultivation of a continually positive and optimistic outlook. A tangible sense of possibility is required to fruitfully inhabit the mental zone where problems get solved and ideas get off the ground. Pressure directs us away from that zone like never before. For many an old fart like myself starting out decades ago in boom times, the urgent need to eat and provide a roof over one’s head was never more than a faint rumour. Now it looms intimidatingly large over one and all, and sustainable creativity is under threat like never before.
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Tags: creativity, design, design process, graphic design, inspiration, problem-solving, sabbatical
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Monday, January 31st, 2011
Feather Times a Feather, 1987
Last month the musician/artist variously known as Don Vliet/Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart died after a long battle with MS. Much will have been written about his influence by now, but I doubt that his wilfully eccentric music, abstract poetry and visual works are too frequently cited as inspirational by many designers (over-rational control-freaks that we tend to be) but… they worked for me.
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, graphic design, innovation, inspiration, language, music, words
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Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
Satisfaction is an uncommon commodity. In the context of work and in tough times, its scarcity and value rises like that of gold—the accumulation of which for some is satisfaction. Designers cannot rely on generous material reward for their labours—with each project unique, there are few easy profits or economies of scale. Wealthy designers have usually arrived there via success in ‘business’ rather than designing alone. But we are pretty fortunate in other benefits that design activity can bring. Designers can often see, if not always touch, the results of their labour and although these might have limited life, their physical existence—and on occasion, their effect on others—produces fleeting glows of satisfaction. Good design also demands a healthy interest in the world that many professions and modern lifestyles discourage.
I recently re-read a book (remember those?) which I had all but forgotten since my late teens: Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is not really about Zen, Art or keeping your Motoguzzi on the road. It is an odd piece of 70s autobiographical post-hippy-lit combining road trip, father-son relationship, nervous breakdown and fairly heavy (man) philosophical enquiry. It takes its time to get going, makes your head hurt here & there and although it does eventually offer some (unsettling) drama, a reprint is unlikely to give Dan Brown sleepless nights. Written at least 15 years before the the first personal computer, some of the language of this book is of its time (the word “groovy” appears at least twice without irony) but the relevance of its central theme—our relationship with technology—has increased a hundredfold.
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, design philosophy, design process, graphic design, inspiration, language, problem-solving, Quality, Robert M. Pirsig, satisfaction, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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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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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
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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Tags: communication, design, graphic design, information design, iPad, legibility, media, newspapers, TV, typography, words
Posted in blog, distillation, information, typerbole, visualisation | No Comments »
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 20th, 2010
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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Tags: brand design, branding, communication, design, graphic design
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