Noisy Decent Graphics

AUSTERITISE YOUR BRAND! How Top Brands Maximised The Biggest Depression Since The Babylonian War Using Graphic Design, Branding, Marketing, RFID and SEO - a conference 2015

A bad packaging designer, 42, said yesterday, "We realised very quickly that the customers values had become misaligned with the core values of the brand. Extensive research found that users no longer wanted premiumisation in a period of economic woe. Even the key ABCDE demographic spurned premiumisation for simpler, basic (but still luxurious and aspirational) brands.

We looked at some of the post war creativities and began an extensive redesign of the core range. First we removed all serif fonts - sans serifs are considered cheaper and more basic. Then we took off all foil blocking which frankly customers felt alluded to an offensive debauched era. Lastly we made the tough decision to make all packaging two colours, thus giving the impression we had only used half as much design time.

We call this Austeritising Your Brand and we believe we can increase sales by up to 110% using this approach."

7 ways to be a Graphic Design student online

Speak to any graphic design tutor and there's lots of talk about how students are blogging and flickring and twittering. One small problem. It's not true.

Which is a shame for many reasons. Not least that your professional life is going to involve you having to understand all of this stuff. And the best way to understand something is to do it.

And as Sian (Graphic Design, University of Wales) put it the other day, "I think that it is important for graphic design students... to enter the world of blogging... It’s great to see what other students and other designers are looking at. It’s all part of the learning process."

And not only that, it's so easy. Easy, and most of this stuff lends itself to a graphic design course. Think of it as some cheap module scores. For example, imagine you're writing an essay about the Rosetta stone (you're all doing that right?). You'd probably start by Googling it. Every decent result you've found, add it to delicious. Even if you did nothing else on that essay you'll very quickly have a small collection of useful stuff.

Imagine if you wrote a sentence about each of those results. Stuck that on a Tumblr blog. Before long, the essay has written itself. See what I mean? It's a gift.

So to help a little bit, I thought I'd write a small guide to being a graphic design student online. It's not definitive and it obviously focuses on services I'm familiar with. But hopefully it makes sense. So, in a very particular order.

1. Flickr

If you do nothing else, you must set up a Flickr account. There can be no excuse. If you were on my course, I'd fail you for not having a Flickr account.

Flickr is the most graphic designery of all the social networky stuff. (It's a whole website of images for fucks sake!)

Put your photographs up there. All those photos of signs you take. All the blurry experiments with colour and light. Get them up there. When I has at college we used to have to keep a photo log book, where we'd have to jot down every exposure and setting for each picture we took. Digital cameras do this for you, it's called exif data. So, upload your pictures to Flickr and there's another job done.

Images are such a major part of a graphic design course and everyone now has the ability to take and make images quickly. (You've all got camera phones, I've seen them.)

But more than that. When you're working on a project upload every stage to Flickr. Let others, from around the world, comment on your ideas. Build on them. When you have to hand in your workings, point the lecturers to Flickr.

Stick your best work up there, organise your work into sets and you can use it as an online portfolio when you go for a job. a million times better than a 10mb PDF.

And it's free.

(There are other sites available. You could also use Deviant Art or Picasa.)

2. Blogging

To blog or not to blog? I can't really answer that. You need to make that decision on your own. The one thing I can say, is that you need to give it a go.

If Flickr is about pictures, then blogging is about words. Graphic Design courses involve a lot of words too. You could stick your whole dissertation up there. A little bit at a time. You could just post random notes and thoughts. Quotes you find. You could document projects you're working on, like Katie (Graphic Design, LCC) and Tom (Graphic Design, UWIC) do.

You could use it as a project diary. Once again, do a little, often and the project will finish itself.

Try to avoid Blogger. I use and recommend Typepad, but I understand that Wordpress is easier to customise and has nicer templates.

3. Tumblr
Tumblr is like blogging but easier. If you're not great with words, then Tumblr is for you. It's a sort of micro blogging service and lends itself to lots, quickly. I don't really like it, but it's a great way to start blogging. And yes, it's free.

4. Twitter
Twitter is like a micro version of micro blogging. A way to publish snippets of text that are no more than 144 characters long. So try that if you're even less of a word person than the Tumblr people. Twitter is very hard to describe, probably the easiest way is to say it's like the status updates on Facebook. It's also a really simple way of outputting text and linking the physical and the digital. Take a look at the Tower Bridge twitter stream and the Albion Bakery Fresh Buns alert twitter stream. Seriously.

5. Facebook

You're all on Facebook, right? Good. Let's see how you could use that for college and not just just pictures of debauched nights.

Kate Andrews (Queen of Networking) sets up and joins lots of interesting groups of Facebook. For example the Kept group, the Design Observer group and the 2gether09 group. You can join them. You can interact with people. You can meet other students and designers. You can become part of a community.

This kind of stuff may seem frivolous but it will be invaluable when you're looking for a job, or even just popping down to London for the D&AD student awards. And then you can upload all your pictures of that debauched night.

6. Delicious

I've already mentioned this above. Delicious is the ultimate Dissertation Building Tool. It's like essay writing for procrastinators. The first thing I do if I'm asked my view on a particular theme, like say tangible digital is look at my relevant delicious tags and instantly I've got lots clever stuff to say and reference. Your dissertation will write itself. Or your money back.

7. RSS Reader

 

Blogs. You need to read them. Everyone has a blog now. Even Michael C Place has a blog. These day you can follow your design heroes almost daily. That's a wonderful thing for those of us who had to make do with yearly Graphis updates when we were at college.

But following all these blogs is hard. The posts come think and fast. The bookmarks folder gets full up. That's why you need an RSS Reader. All blogs have an RSS feed. An RSS Reader graps the feed and chucks your blogs into one reader, one website basically. Like this:

RSS Readers are not scary. They are good. They are to be embraced. I use bloglines but you can use Google's of NetNewsWire or one of the hundreds of others.

And so there you go. You have no excuse now.

Oh and let's not forget Ffffound, inspiration on tap.

The Art of Penguin Science Fiction

I've just had an email from James Pardey who sent me a link to his wonderful website. The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.

Rather than me witter on for ages, let us hand the microphone to James who will witter on for a bit about this fab project.

"The purpose of the website is to complement a series of articles I've written for the Penguin Collector's Society on the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books from 1935 to 1977.
 
The website is primarily intended to be a visual experience (there are over 150 Penguin sf covers, which Penguin has granted me a licence to use) with the articles going into more detail about the sf itself, and the connections between sf and twentieth-century art (abstraction, surrealism, Pop, etc.) which is my main area of interest. This linkage between sf and modern art will also be the subject of some talks and further articles in newspapers and magazines that I am now planning.

My main area of interest is the linkage between modern science fiction - by which I mean Jules Verne and H G Wells onwards - and twentieth-century art (abstraction, surrealism, Pop, etc.).
 
Where Penguin comes into this is that in the 1960s they launched an sf series with covers by the great Germano Facetti. But instead of using pictures of aliens, rocketships, and bug-eyed monsters, Facetti chose reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro and Rene Magritte to name a few. Why? Well, each painting was carefully chosen to tie in with some aspect of the novel, and it is these connections that form the heart of the website and the articles that I've written to accompany it. The articles are being published by the Penguin Collectors' Society (last December and two more due this year) but the articles and website only go so far.

There is more to explore, such as the links between J G Ballard and surrealism, Jules Verne and the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux, Delvaux and Ballard, etc., etc. I am therefore planning to examine this in some talks and further articles for newspapers and magazines. Incidentally, instead of starting in the 1960s I decided that both the website and articles should start at the beginning, when Penguin was founded in 1935.

I did this in order to tell "the whole story" since the early orange-and-white banded covers of Penguin books have since become regarded as design classics and, to many people, miniature works of art in their own right. And after the sf series in the 1960s, the influence of Pop Art and Op Art can be seen in the later Penguin sf covers by Alan Aldridge and Franco Grignani, while those by David Pelham have also achieved iconic status. Facetti was no stranger to sf either, as he appeared in La Jetee, a seminal art-house sf movie by the French New-Wave director Chris Marker."

Revival Conference

Today I spent a lovely day at the St Bride Foundation. (Or St Bride's Library, I'm never sure which.)

I was speaking at the Revival Conference. But enough about me.

The conference was really good. And not because the coffee was good, or the venue was good, or the speakers were polished eloquent speakers - because it had talented people talking about one thing. Graphic design.

These pictures are from David Pearson's talk. I don't need to explain who he is, do I? He talked about lots of things, but one thing I liked a lot was this collection of covers he found in the Penguin archives which all feature circles in the design. There were hundreds of them.

That's Tom Harle, by the way. Far left, purple jumper. Back to the circles.

Another highlight was Yulia Brodskaya who spoke about her gorgeous typographic paper quilling. She even discussed the best way to light them which was good. Good graphic design chat.

There were lots of other good bits.

Kath and Julia from johnson banks were good and it was nice to see some more detail about their work.

I think that's Kath and Julia. It might be Julia and Kath.

And this chap, whose name escapes me, who read through Paul Stiff's paper, because Paul was ill. Anyway. Some great stuff about the earliest tariff documents and distance maps for taxi drivers. Fascinating and with some great maps.

This map is from 1850 something. It has circles at half mile intervals. That way it's easy to work out how far away a destination is. I thought it looked easy, I'm not sure the rest of the audience did.

And this. This is nice.

More tomorrow.

Gotcha FM

You may not have noticed, but The Sun have just launched a radio station.

I think it's interesting for several reasons. Lots of non-radio media owners have launched radio stations, or at least tried to. Or stretched podcasts into sort of radio stations. Channel 4 tried and The Telegraph do lots of this sort of thing, but this feels different.

For a start, it's by The Sun which have the largest readership of any UK newspaper. They're also (I think) the second biggest UK newspaper website outside of the UK. So that gives them big numbers to play with.

They've made the very wise decision to have John Gaunt host the main programme. John Gaunt is a Sun columnist, but more importantly he's an actual proper Disc Jockey. A radio person. So that already makes more sense than a journalist doing it.

And it's backed by Murdoch. Who has great experience of different media channels and of broadcast media, including radio.

So when you add that little lot up, it's a no brainer. As people say.

If you read Alistair Campbell's Diaries, you'll see that Blair does a lot of cosying up to Murdoch in the few years before Labour get elected. That's verification of how important Murdoch (and the associated media channels) are. So it was even more interesting to see that the first ever guest on Sun Talk was David Cameron. That's a big deal, in a litte way. I bet a lot of radio stations would love to have an hour long interview with Cameron.

Of course, a big set piece interview with the (possible) next Prime Minister yeilds a few stories for the paper the next day.

They start with a big, global audience, they have proper DJ's presenting, it's funded by someone who already runs radio stations and they can attract big guests. I think it might work.

WE NEED AN ARMY OF:

blogs.com

A few weeks ago I was honoured to be asked by Blogs.com to write a Top 10 for their popular site. I chose to write Top 10 Blogs Important To Designers (That Aren't Necessarily About Design).

Take a look, you might be on the list.

A bit of housekeeping

I thought it was about time I explained some of the categories around here.

I love the idea of categories and I use them liberally. Surely the more tags, the more useful the stuff becomes? I use categories so that you could, should you wish, pursue all my thoughts on one particular topic.

By way of explanation, some of the less obvious categories roughly relate to these topics:

Complaints Dept - Fairly obvious, stuff which I feel the need to complain about.

Conferences / Speaking - Reports from conferences I've been to, or details of things I'm speaking at.

Design Is The New Management Consultancy - Is Design the new Management Consultancy? Does design have a bigger role to play? All is revealed here. Really.

Examples Of Bad Communication - This is different to Complaints Dept as it's specifically about bad communication. So no posts about my hatred of saucers.

Exhibition Reviews - Does what it says on the tin.

Graphic Design Consultancies / Creative Companies - Stuff about Design agencies. Might  be reviews, news, gossip or interviews.

Graphic Design Industry Stuff - Stuff that concerns the design industry, more generally. Not the place for in depth explanations of kerning.

Graphic Design Reviews - Straight forward reviews of bits of graphic design I've seen.

How To Get A Job In Graphic Design (Kind Of) - This is where you should go if you're a student. It's got all the stuff about colleges and education and trying to get a job afterwards. Warning: might not be terribly helpful.

How To Start Up A Graphic Design Consultancy (Sort_Of) - Something I have some experience of. Contains thoughts on the day to day business stuff. Warning: might not be terribly helpful.

New Thinking And Ideas - Lofty theories so new and innovative they don't fit into another category. Yet.

Quotes - Quotes. See also my quotes delicious tag.

Seen And Heard - The most generic of all the categories.

Sustainability In Design - Way back in January 2007 the late great Lebowski asked me to write more about sustainability. All that stuff is grouped here.

The Design Disease - The best explanation of this is to read this post.

Things I've Learnt About Design - Warning: might not be terribly helpful.

That's about it I think. All the other categories are pretty self explanatory.

"In the last 20 years I have drawn more than 7,000 logos, mostly for black- and death-metal bands from all over the world"

"I am 37 years old, I come from Belgium but I live in Exeter, Devon, in the UK. In the last 20 years I have drawn more than 7,000 logos, mostly for black- and death-metal bands from all over the world, including Emperor, Moonspell, Nachtmystium, and Enthroned."

Meet Mr Death Metal, brilliantly spotted by Mike.

(Picture borrowed from Vice magazine, usual stuff applies.)

Chicken Graphics

Ages ago I saw a brilliant interview with Mr Chicken. A designer who has created 90% of the Fried Chicken logos in London. Ninety fucking percent.

That interview was over on the CR Blog and is an exert from Siâron Hughes' excellent new book 'Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie'. You should read the interview and then you should buy the book. The blurb says it's an "Honest and charming look at fast food establishments from a design perspective – eatery aesthetic, logos, signage, menus, etc" You don't get that every day.

 

I'm sorry that the best title I could thinking up was Chicken Graphics. Surely you can do better?

Does this logo work in black and white?

Busy x 3

Today I wrote a list of things To Do. Then I went to save it on my desktop as a file called TO DO. The computer said, 'there is already a file called TO DO would you like to erase it?' So I opted to call it TO DO 2. 'There is already a file called TO DO 2 would you like to erase it?'

So now I have 3 TO DO lists.

We were talking today about how we're pretty busy right now. There are some great projects coming up which I'll be able to tell you about soon. Including one very exciting announcement.

All of which is good, very good. And bad, you know, in that lots of To Do lists way. But as I said here, just over two years ago, always remember when you're busy, that it's infinitely preferable to not being busy. Infinitely preferable.

There. A whole post without saying "current climate" once.

Black and white update

The "Is it time to retire the black and white logo?" post continues to receive much traffic and many comments. You should read them all.

Robert has just argued in favour of keeping the black and white logo and in doing so has included the best and the worst points of the debate.

Best point: "TELEVISION - Yes, TV logos are mostly in color. However, they are requested by the station in black and white. The TV studio then generates the color from the submitted bw art and Pantone® match chips."

That's a valid point and I bet there are many forms of media we don't know about yet that will operate in the same way.

Worst point: FAXING - Necessary for rapid faxing of info. The company does have its logo on the fax sheet doesn't it.

No comment.