OK, let’s settle this right now. I get a lot of incredulous looks from my friends. You’re on Twitter?? Who cares what I’m eating for breakfast? Sounds like a waste of time.
Well, I could argue the benefits of sharing the details of your life with friends and family, but that’s another topic - and I use Facebook for that. For now let’s just say that I agree with you. I don’t use Twitter that way, and I wouldn’t follow anyone who did - friend, family or favorite deity. For me, Twitter is a business and learning tool. I use it to stay abreast of what’s new in my profession, and likewise to share with other interested parties. And I get a LOT out of it. Twitter is a realtime live feed of all the best tips, tricks and discoveries made by people with similar interests as myself, pre-filtered and delivered straight to my hungry brain in a tidy, little package. Awesome.
I said that the feed is “pre-filtered” - What does that mean and how does it work? With Twitter you can “follow” anyone you want. It’s up to you. Simply put: I don’t follow people who tweet about breakfast, movies, moods, concerts, or any number of other uninteresting, “teenagery” topics. I am strictly interested in finding the little gems that make my work better, faster, more relevant, etc. It’s a learning tool. I follow people who post useful, interesting or educational things. If you start talking about Will Smith - you’re dumped in a heartbeat. Don’t waste my time.
About that - Isn’t weeding through all the “bad” feeds to find the good ones time-consuming? This is the beauty of Twitter. First of all, this isn’t really a problem, if you only follow people who say interesting things, as stated above. Second, every post is limited in length to 140 characters, so I can tell in 5 seconds or less if a post interests me. In 1 minute, I can scan all the morning’s updates and move on. Most useful posts include a link to an outside article, blog, etc. If there is something worth following, you can chase it down. If not, you don’t follow the link, and you’ve lost very little of your precious time.
What kind of “gems” do you really get out of this? As a graphic designer and aspiring web developer, I get all kinds of useful content. A link to an artist’s blog can be inspiring for days or weeks. Maybe it’s a link to a website full of free fonts, plugins, or texture files. Maybe it’s a how-to page about using a feature of my favorite Adobe software product. I get a lot of useful information for educating my clients and language for communicating expertly about my profession. Sometimes it’s a link to an industry event that I might like to attend. Web developers find and share snippets of code, online resources, the latest technology trends, updates and how-tos. I’m telling you. It’s a goldmine - if you follow the right people.
So how do you find the right people? Start with people you know, in the business. Look for Twitter links at the bottom of your favorite blogs. Filter the Twitter feed for relevant topics with a tool like Tweet Grid (highly recommended). Publish your Twitter username on your website/blog/Facebook profile, and start tweeting valuable content yourself. When you start gaining followers who are interested in what you are saying, they are likely worth following back. As they say, if you want a friend, you have to be a friend. Network, share, inspire, learn. Go forth and tweet!
I started writing this to share about this life-changing ice cube tray that I discovered, but the topic has quickly grown into something bigger. We’ll get to the ice cube tray shortly.
Charles and Ray Eames, one way or another, introduced to me a phrase/concept that has been stuck in my head for years: “Designer as host.” Try as I may, not even Google can help me find out more about this particular phrase. I’m probably remembering it incorrectly, but the concept is valid regardless: A designer is a host, of sorts, to any user/viewer who finds themselves at the mercy of whatever it is that the designer has designed (products, printed material, websites, etc.). Hopefully they are a good host. If you are a designer or are hiring one, imagine that your users/viewers/readers are guests in your house. How would you treat them?
Example. Bad Host.
I was graciously gifted a stainless steel water bottle. It is attractive, well-made and well-concieved, except for one important detail: the opening at the top is exactly the wrong size for the human face. A little bigger and you could drink from it like a glass. A little smaller and you could chug from it like a soda bottle. The way it is…. nearly impossible to use without choking, spilling or splashing yourself in the eye. I thought maybe it was just my big nose or funny chin so I asked around - the problem is nearly universal. Too bad. It could have been a really nice bottle. If only the designer had imagined (or tested) what it might be like to use their product. Not a very good host, I’m afraid. Makes me think they must have been more interested in making or selling bottles than what it might be like to use one. Puts me off a bit. I feel jilted. I often find myself angry at a product or company, muttering that they must not be a very good host. If they ever invite me over for roast beef, I might think twice (maybe).
Good host: Oxo Ice Cube Tray.
Besides a few special or novelty shapes designed for particular purposes, most ice cubes seem to work just as well as the others for the purpose of chilling your average drink. Some are smaller, some are bigger. They are round-ish or square-ish. You may have a preference, but in the end, the differences are not great - functionally speaking. But what about the user’s experience - in particular: getting the little bastards out of the tray? I’d venture a guess that 10-20% of ice cubes fall to the floor/sink/counter top during the noisy and frustrating effort of extraction. At least as many break in the process, and some of them never come out at all. You twist the tray, bang them on the counter, try to pop the perfect amount of cubes out with a deft flipping motion - without losing any over the edge. I’m picturing the frustrated, bedraggled house wife at the beginning of an infomercial. There must be a better way! Indeed there is. An ice cube with a rounded bottom is easily extracted by pushing down on one side… the other side pops up like a Whack-a-Mole, and you can grab it easily. That’s it. Good host. The designer had the user in mind. Makes me feel welcome, like they care about me as a person, and the quality of my life. I honestly appreciate that.
Why is this so interesting to me? It’s a great example of how a silly little detail can greatly change your user’s attitude about your product or company. It can color their whole experience. The same principle applies to print and website design. Is it easy to find the information I am looking for in your brochure or website? Do I have to dig for five minutes to find your phone number? Where are the office hours listed? Are you really going to make me count the months on my fingers when I’m giving you the expiration date on my credit card, or do you include the numbers in the pull down menu?
As designers we are in a position to play host, and in so doing we not only make people’s everyday experiences a little happier, we reflect well upon the clients that hire us to represent them. Everyone wins when our designs are considerate - like a good host.
I can’t remember the last time I bought an ice cube tray. I guess they come with the refrigerator most of the time. This is worth upgrading. Chalk it up as one of life’s little triumphs and drink to that!
Imagine a hypothetical Web site that is ready to launch. It looks great, test users love it, the client loves it, and everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except the SEO expert.
The SEO expert is, after all, responsible for guiding and delivering search engine optimization (SEO). SEO experts provide methods to drive a site up the Google results page, and because what they do often can be quantified quite easily as success or failure, SEO experts can be very specific about what changes are necessary to ensure that the site shows up when people want to find it.
Or, rather, they help ensure that the site shows up when people search for certain things. We’ll get to that why that difference matters in a moment.
An SEO expert might want the page titles changed. No biggie, right? They might want keywords integrated into site copy and image alt tags. Again: that’s cool. So far the great-looking, user-approved, client-adored site is intact, and the “under the hood” SEO adjustments don’t mean any concessions.
But what if the results aren’t good enough? What is the SEO expert to do?
Answer: they want more keywords. They want more and more keywords. They want links and other adjustments to the site that often not only spoil the aesthetic nor the way the client views the site, but the way that users experience it.
The stage has been set, then, for the classic SEO v. UX battle.
User experience (UX) encompasses how the users navigate a site, how they feel about a site, and how key features and messages are delivered. Good UX adds value and, when coupled with content users want, helps define the value of a site.
An argument for compromising UX in the name of SEO is relatively easy to make: if users cannot find the site, they cannot enjoy the experience. By giving a little on the experience front, the thinking goes, traffic will be generated and the site will be better off for being … worse.
In order to challenge this position, I think it’s necessary, first and foremost, to examine what SEO is at its most basic level. It is the manipulation of the difference between the value of a site and what search engines perceive to be the value.
Let’s deconstruct that quickly before we move on. A perfect search engine would know what the user wanted to find and give them the best possible value given that request. It would not be fooled by fake Web sites and it would be able to account for minor user error to point them in the right direction. No search engine is perfect, though, and because of the algorithms and logic used by the software of Google and Microsoft and others, inefficiencies exist: gaps between what the user wants and what the search site delivers. SEO manipulates that inefficiency by knowing (or guessing) at what search sites look for and “gaming the system” for positive results. If that perspective is too cynical for you, gentle reader/conscientious SEO expert, another way of looking at it might be that SEO strives to accurately convey the true value of a site given the search engine’s inability to correctly judge what the user wants when she searches.
SEO, then, is a cosmetic cover-up for the acne-riddled face of search sites.
The early days of search sites saw directories dominate. Microsoft and Yahoo employed teams of worker bees to review sites and classify and rate them, allowing users to have a virtual yellow pages. This didn’t scale, of course, as the number of Web pages exploded. Early attempt at user-updated directories were prone to severe levels of cheating and it was nearly impossible to trust ratings and/or believe that the directory was anything near complete.
The next step was the use of software to supplant directories with search engines. Bots would read pages and see what terms showed up and then spit out results for users on the search pages. Proto-SEO actors would game the system, search sites would adjust, and search engines evolved into what we have today: a reasonably fleshed-out coverage of many parts of the World Wide Web.
The good news is that as technology has improved the gap between search site perception of value and actual value has decreased. The bad news is that the gap is still relatively wide in many cases.
It is in this environment that the hypothetical Web site we’ve created finds itself. Search site placement can be very important, but sacrificing value to users in order to gather users can result in an inferior Web site.
Fortunately, the future might allow the best possible sites to exist with the most possible users. The future might have a superior search approach: one that combines technology with communal eyeballs and collective-approved expert opinion.
Earlier efforts at this sort of thing (by sites like Wikia) have fallen short, but hope is not lost. Zakta seeks to augment its search results by letting users edit, save and share the results for their search terms. A standard Google search for “best HDTVs” might have two pages of questionable or even unusable results—either because of SEO or because of the passage of time and weakness of the search algorithm. On Zakta, the same search may point to a user who has taken the time to build a top 10 list of HDTV review sites and five of his favorite online retailers. Eventually, the same search might result in a half-dozen similar lists, with the searcher able to differentiate between the quality of the lists and/or quality of the list-maker as rated by other users of the search site.
Zakta might not be the next step, but the next step is coming. It’s Wikipedia meets Digg meets Google. It encourages value over gaming and substance over style. And it might signal the end of SEO as we know it.
I’m often accused of seeing patterns in things that other people think are insignificant. I’m a collector and an organizer, I guess my brain just groups things. So naturally, I’m a little timid in presenting another pattern, but I think this time you might agree that there is something going on here. Maybe this is a national trend, or maybe just local to Seattle… I’m seeing an awful lot of retro-ish crests out there - specifically hexagons even. I’m not criticizing - just observing - for whatever it’s worth.
All of these businesses are in the greater Seattle Area, the farthest away being Custom Garage Interiors, which is just outside Issaquah. Two of them are within a block of each other in Ballard. Two are within a block of each other on Capitol Hill, two of them have “Garage” in the name, and two of them are just about gosh-dang nearly identical to each other. That’s OK. I doubt any of these people are claiming to have invented the hexagon. And I actually like the aesthetic quite a bit. Please don’t misunderstand. That old-fashioned made-in-America, brass-plate-bolted-to-a-cast-iron-stamping-machine-or-whatever look is pretty cool. Strong. Classic. Timeless. Great. But maybe could we just spread ‘em out a little bit?
Why is typography important for lawyers?
“When you speak to a judge, do you stand at the lectern, eyes cast downward, and read from a script in a monotone? No, of course not. To maintain the judge’s attention during your argument, you change the speed and volume of your delivery; you gesture; you extemporize. You do this because you don’t merely want to be heard—you want to persuade. The text matters, but so does the presentation. So it is on the printed page.”
Matthew Butterick from typographyforlawyers.com
The awesome power of persuasion is highly desired in any profession, not just for lawyers. What a smart way to make typography relevant (even if it may seem painfully obvious to us designers).
I have a niece who’s now finishing her senior year of high school. Now that it’s May, she’s fervently in the market for a prom dress. And she has the same concern all young women prepping for the prom share: will my dress be so unique—so distinctly me—that I’ll be the only one wearing that dress at the dance? I mentioned this recently while speaking at a marketing conference in Chicago, and asked the women in the audience to remember what the primary driver was in purchasing their own prom dress. A decade or more removed from the event, they all immediately recalled a fundamental desire for their dress to be a one-of-a-kind presence.
Why am I telling you this? Because prom goers have a lot to teach us about positioning. Is your company or product going to the prom wearing the same dress everyone else is wearing? That is, is your brand—including its core message and overall look and feel—very similar to the competition? This is easy enough to find out. Across most industries, a simple competitive audit often reveals too many same-old, me-too messages and shared color palettes. A teenager knows the inherent value in being differentiated on a crowded dance floor. Does your brand?
One of the great things about working on interactive development at a brand design firm like PBDH is the variety of projects and clients we get to work with.
It’s not uncommon for us to help one company collaborate with a business audience one day and then help another connect with a retail audience the next.
One interesting retail project we are diving deep into at the moment is the retail web site for The Shops at the Bravern, a European-inspired shopping and dining experience that’s set to open in downtown Bellevue later this year.
The Shops at The Bravern will feature outdoor plazas, great stores like Neiman Marcus, fine dining like New York-based Artisanal, as well as urban residential towers.
We are heavy into the design and strategy phase of the project and it is exciting to work with folks from Schnitzer West to as we consider all of the things that today’s web makes possible.
Will be joining my pals Kathy Gil, Scott Berkun, Brady Forrest, and Buzz Brugeman (among others) for Presentation Camp Seattle on Saturday April 4th 2009 at the University of Washington.
Here’s the schedule and the skinny –
PresentationCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of passionate folks who want to share, interact and spread the love around the topic of presentation design and delivery. It’s for anyone interested in public speaking, pitching and presenting. Come to learn, come to share: everyone walks away knowing a little bit more.
Sign up now over on the Eventbrite page for the event. It’s $15 until the day of, then it’s $20.
It’s an unconference which, if you’ve never been to one, is a blast. The main idea is that the best thing about most conferences are the hallway conversations, so why not make up a conference on the fly that has that feel to it.
So participants gather in the first hours of the conference and propose session ideas, then the popular ones are assigned slots. Looks from the schedule that this camp will have some good pre-planned sessions and some slots for real time session creation.
I’m proposing a session tentatively titled “Telling Ain’t Persuading (or teaching, selling, or training)!!: Case studies in conversational/Socratic presentation methods“.
It will be a discussion of presentation examples / methods that don’t just give an answer, but that invite people into dialogue / experience — and how that often has much more staying power that just passing along information.
Will be touching on:
- The structure of the attention economy unconference talk I’ve presented a few times — “Starbuck vs. Samwise in a Fight (and what does that have to do with the Attention Economy?)” — and how the form of the talk is an effective design for learning.
- How the unstructured and question driven nature of the classic video game Myst is arguably more involving (and compelling) that most present day games.
- How books like Ken Bain’s “What the Best College Teachers Do” and the American Society for Training and Development’s “Telling Ain’t Training” (by Harold Stolovitch) showcase proven ways to present more compellingly.
So, come join us!
Every year around this time I consult various chromatic prognosticators, gather my divining beams, and plot the celestial activity of our benign spectral overlords. At some point, usually after much wine, I determine which colors will take center stage for the upcoming year and in turn, guarantee ultimate success in all of your design and decorating projects. These colors are for you. Take them. Be fruitful. And we’ll meet back here again next year.
Here they are, your 2009 Colors for Success:
Now and then I come across a product like this genteel pendant light set that makes me happy. It’s the eureka moment that speaks to me, even if I don’t necessarily want to rush out and buy it (although I probably would if I had a place in my house for these guys). I love the two disparate objects combined to make something different. It just works.
For me, having a great idea like this that clicks into place is enormously satisfying and what drives me to be creative in the first place. The “click” happens not when the idea is just interesting and different, but when it meets a multitude of criteria — does it say something unique? does it have longevity? will people connect with it? does it communicate the brand?
Learning to put unlike things together is key to making great ideas that work, and I believe it is learnable. In fact, honing this skill was one component of our company retreat earlier this year. And the more we use skills like this the better we get. Part of that is looking for the great ideas out there, especially those outside your everyday experience. Will knowing about lamps made out of hats lead to a smashing idea in our next ideation lab? Maybe not, but keeping our brains primed for creative thinking will.
In an effort to protect the official sponsors of the Olympic Games from competition by non-sponsored brands, Beijing is taking the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sponsorship-protection practices to new extremes. According to this WSJ.com article, it’s consistent with IOC rules to hide prominent logos belonging to a sponsor’s major competitor. But enforcers in Beijing have gone so far as to apply tape across virtually any logo in any place, whether it belongs to a sponsor competitor or not. Wandering through the Olympic grounds you’ll see pieces of white tape on elevator button plates, fire alarms and even toilets. There’s even an official tape replacement squad to ensure that any piece of tape gone astray is quickly replaced. Which points to the fact that these pieces of tape do tend to “go astray”.
There may be no better way to draw attention to an inconspicuous graphic than to cover it with an out-of-place bit of masking tape. Would a similar campaign actually be an effective guerilla-marketing tactic to promote your brand?
For most people, when you think of creative minds, you naturally think about the arts, music or dance. Science and technology rarely come to mind. But it’s obvious that in order to develop innovative ideas, creativity is an essential part of what inspires breakthrough thinking. This was the shared vision in creating Dexter Station, a new 347,000 sq. ft. office building slated for South Lake Union.
PBDH was hired by Capstone Partners to create the brand strategy, naming, identity and sales brochure for this office building targeting the big brains in technology, life sciences and other innovation industries–scheduled to be completed in late 2009/early 2010.
Everything from the cascading building architecture to the three-story interactive space we named “The Hub,” fosters an engaging environment of collaboration and sharing of ideas. The brand positioning elements, including the sales brochure, were created with this in mind. The challenge was to capture the essence of the brains behind this creative hub in a dynamic way while still being relevant to the uniquely left-brained target audience.
With “A Place for Breakthrough Thinking” concept as the headline followed by “Fill Your Thought Bubble” on the inside front cover, we addressed the big thinkers, but with all the creativity and visual stopping power normally not associated with a property development brochure. The amenities and features are highlighted in cleverly built equations instead of the usual bullet points and the accordion fold interior opens up into an inspiring place of energy and movement with silhouettes forming the thought bubbles.
Now, let the real breakthrough thinking begin…
A simple rule for developing breakthrough ideas
On May 14 I spoke at the University of Washington on the use of process within strategy and design projects. During this presentation, hosted by design faculty member Annabelle Gould, I articulated what I see as the major tension within process: repeatable versus unexpected. That is, a process should be the result of a proven methodology that can be applied over and over again—you don’t want to have to make it up as you go each time you start a new project. At the same time, you don’t want the same process to start churning out the same results. Generating the same results is great for homogenizing milk, but not in creative endeavors. For us, new ideas are entirely the point. So we want an expected approach to yield unexpected ideas. That’s the tension.
For creative professionals, a great process is a repeatable approach for putting yourself in position to connect with the unexpected. Note that I think it’s about putting yourself in position to connect with the unexpected, not that the process itself will spit out new ideas. That’s what your brain is for.
When it comes to using process to get to great ideas, I apply what I call the New/Different Rule. Creating new, unexpected ideas is the result of either:
1) Putting yourself in position to receive new information that helps you think about something in a different way.
Or . . .
2) Creating a different way of brainstorming so you come up with something new.
The first is usually about research. While the term research can sometimes sound a bit overstarched and monolithic, research can be a fantastic means of debunking assumptions. And that’s all about getting access to new information that will help you think about something in a different way. When we started working with the Seattle Symphony, one of the assumptions we were working with was that celebrity guest artists were important to have on the cover of sales materials because their celebrity images sold tickets. However, the research we did with subscribers and other ticket buyers revealed that the truth was citizens identified their patronage with the orchestra—not the guest artists. They were passionate and definitive about this. This new information fueled our creative explorations in a totally different direction.
The second is about architecting better brainstorms. During my talk at UW, I revealed a dirty industry secret: most brainstorms don’t work. I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and I’ve participated in plenty of brainstorms that didn’t generate anything more than some interesting tangents and maybe some toilet humor. Coming up with breakthrough ideas requires a more thoughtful approach to the brainstorms themselves. Putting “brainstorm” on the calendar and then hoping for the best isn’t enough. Last summer when we were concepting for Boeing’s communications at the 2007 Paris Air Show, we structured our brainstorm around a different question: what are the bad ideas? I know this sounds counterproductive, but it worked. Sure, we came up with some stinkers, but we also came up with some concepts that eventually inspired the idea. And we never would have arrived there without approaching the brainstorm in a different way.
So there you have it. The New/Different Rule. Put yourself in position to receive new information that helps you think about something in a different way. Or create a different way of brainstorming so you come up with something new. I’d love to hear how it works for you!
How much vision goes into a design project? Most of us would agree that you have to start with a good creative brief, with plenty of strategy, brand vision, and objectives to draw from. You have to consider your target audience, the personality and tone that you are trying to convey, and the primary message, at very least. Done. We’re past that. Once all the important strategy and branding objectives have been decided, there is still plenty of room for differing and unique executions. How do you start the process of building a layout? Flipping through reference books? Sketches? Start right in with a layout program? Where do new compositions come from? Is it a random process, an exercise in experimentation and discovery? When I see a completed layout I sometimes wonder: Did the designer know it was going to look like this when they started? I’d like to explore a few options that I have tried over the years.
Draw from existing materials.
I had to mention this, just to be thorough. Of course, when creating a piece that is part of a greater collateral package or identity system, we use the elements and compositions that have already been established. But I’m talking about developing new ideas here, so lets put this one aside and explore a few others…
Probe your subconscious.
Albert Einstein (smart guy) said that he has his best ideas while occupying one of the three B’s: Bed, Bus, or Bath. I too have experienced a few of these joyous “Eureka” moments while showering, driving, or lying in bed. I don’t know if this is probing your subconscious so much as just letting it air out. Either way, you can be sure there are a lot of good ideas already in there, and the ceaseless chatter of our conscious minds is just mucking them up. Find a way to let your brain go blank, and see what rises to the surface. Biking is a great way to clear the slate.
Steal it.
Legendary animator Richard Williams, attended acting classes, taught by actor Michael Caine (Austin Powers’ dad). In Williams’ book The Animator’s Survival Kit he quotes Caine: “If you see some actor doing a piece of business that you admire - steal it (pause for effect), STEAL IT! (audience shock and horror)- because they did.” Naturally, I’d recommend drawing inspiration from someone else’s design, more than lifting it directly. Make it your own. Odds are that whomever you were inspired by, was inspired by someone else, and so the evolutionary process goes.
Use a formula.
I don’t think I’d suggest this kind of thinking, but sometimes it can get you past a creative block, or at least past a deadline. You know what works, odds are you’re trying to be too creative or too ambitious. The clock is ticking and you’re staring at a blank page. Sometimes we spend so much time waiting for the perfect idea, that we skip plenty of great ones.
Take inspiration from something completely unrelated.
I once read in a forum on poster design (http://www.gigposters.com) that one could look at the clothes they are wearing at a given time, and use those colors in their project. That’s a start, how about composition? Look at a city skyline or a bunch of random advertisements stuck to city light post. Take an existing design, turn it sideways and crop it real tight. There are infinite possibilities if you look around. I once based a package layout on the unique shape of the backpack worn by a motorcyclist who was in front of me on the way to work that morning - It was a winner, everyone loved it, and it looked nothing like a backpack when I was done.
Imagine what your design hero would do.
This one has worked for me a few times. Instead of going down your usual paths, imagine what the end result would look like if executed by your favorite inspiration or competitor. You have to squint your eyes and try not to hover over one thought for too long. When you see that award-winning logo or show stopping identity set, all hazy in your mind’s eye, chances are that it is your own unique creation. The trick is capturing it before another thought replaces it.
Imagine what it would look like in context.
Picture your brochure sitting on a coffee table. What does it look like? Imagine your logo in frosted glass on an office door. Perhaps these are just ways of tricking your subconscious into giving up its best creative secrets. You never know what’s already in there, and you only have a moment to capture it before it evaporates like a morning fog.
Work around the content.
This is less of an inspiration and more of a situation in which we often find ourselves. You know how long the content is, you know which photos you have to use, now make it all fit and make it look good. Trying to organize a lot of content into a sensible and attractive presentation sometimes leaves you with only a few solutions from which to choose. This is what brought it up - this is the rut. I think that even in this situation, we can reach a little farther.
We get so caught up in the day-to-day and the deadlines that we can forget the great many places that creative inspiration and new compositions can come from. You could look at this as a list of ways to fight creative block, or maybe just a reminder to take the time to get back to where your own best ideas come from. Instead of attempting to give you a list of answers here, this is more of a question - What works for you? Where do new ideas for layout or details come from? I’d like very much to hear from you, with your own little tricks or thoughts on the subject.
As graphic designers we might presume to know our clients’ business in and out — we might even be presumptuous enough to think we know our clients’ business more than they do. However, we do not go to their workplace everyday, we do not experience the ins and outs of their business, we do not participate in the small intricacies that make their business flourish. So, in fact, we will never know as much as our clients’ know about their own company and workplace.
But, because we must know all we can about their company to do our job effectively, we must become diggers — or design archeologists. It is our responsibility to know how to showcase our client’s company in the public marketplace. By researching their competitors, interviewing those who play an integral part in the success of their company, and simply listening to them — we can come to play an important role in their success and become their valuable collaborator. Together we can uncover a world of treasures that might be surprises or gems — chunks of knowledge or details that we or the client may have never imagined or anticipated.
This search for treasures can result in a smarter, better designed product for the client and can help stretch what we or they may have ever perceived possible. Surprises are good and spark enthusiasm and great work. By doing our research we can preserve the integrity of the client’s style, work ethic and build on the foundation they have already established on their own.
Getting to know our clients and understanding why they make the decisions they make, and where they want to go can only give our solutions a stronger point of view and a sharper presence in the outside world.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin (historian)
Design Observer links to a slideshow featuring 30 different varieties of well designed table of contents pages from various publications. Cool stuff. Michael Beirut on the collection: “Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary.”
Thirty Tables of Contents
I am somewhat of a magazine hound and I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting publications. A recent find is Monocle from Tyler Brûlé, the man behind Wallpaper* back in the nineties. Monocle has a lot in common with its predecessor and the attention to detail is what you would expect: great typography, tight layouts, stunning photography—even the various paper stocks are worth noting. What makes it better than Wallpaper* is that the articles themselves feel a bit more substantive. In a recent review of the magazine Business Week asks: Can rarefied information be sold like a luxury product? That appears to be exactly what Monocle is trying to do.
But I think what most attracts me to Monocle is a seamless (and beautiful) transition from print to Web. So few magazine Web sites live up to their print counterparts and magazine brands are quite often diluted and dumbed-down online. Not so with Monocle. That same attention to detail found inside the pages of the magazine are right there on the pages of the Web site. And it’s not just a copy and paste effort. Stories are extended with broadcast-quality video, slideshows offer rich, high resolution photography, and there’s even a companion podcast available. It’s obvious that the whole effort was intended to be multi-platform from the beginning.
For an excellent in-depth look a the entire process of designing and developing Monocle’s Web site check out the designer Dan Hill’s blog post. He covers it all in great detail. One of my favorite quotes form the article:
“We wanted to really give a sense that the website would have the same quality threshold as the print magazine in terms of production. Building a 2.0-style service, or a ‘platform for journalism’, was not at all relevant at this point.”
That’s a refreshing approach. www.monocle.com
Sorry I’m late with this year’s picks for trendiest must-have colors. I got mixed up in some Web site redesign project and I haven’t really seen the light of day in several weeks. But, like the groundhog who ponders his own shadow, I’ve crawled out of my design cave just long enough to see the future of color for 2008: It’s five more months of rainbow! (I have no idea what that means.)
Anyway, here are the colors that all the cool kids will be forced to use from here to December. Get used to them, you’re going to be seeing a lot of these. (CMYK and RGB values available upon request.)
Remember: if it’s not trendy, it’s original.
I regularly teach a workshop at the School of Visual Concepts (SVC) on writing creative briefs. I always set up the workshop with what I believe is the fundamental tension within creative briefs: being comprehensive versus being concise. And while a big challenge in writing a creative brief is cramming a whole bunch of important information into a one-page document that should also be inspiring and…well, brief, this tension goes way beyond just creative briefs. This tension is at play in all communications, especially brand design.
This is the set-up I use: If you were mugged at the ATM, you might end up at the police precinct to give a report and offer your description of the villain. While it’s unlikely for (just) a mugging, a sketch artist might be brought in and the two of you might go back and forth with the charcoal pencil and sketch pad, endlessly adjusting details such as ear size, eyebrow height, lip shape, and on and on. If it was a slow news night, that sketch might even be shared with the public. And then what do you think would happen? Probably nothing. That’s because police sketches don’t work very well. Over the years, researchers from MIT, the University of Central Lancashire in England, and others have conducted studies that show police sketches work less than 10% of the time. Have a look at these police sketches and the actual criminal faces that informed them.
There’s not a ton of resemblance. And, just to take the Unabomber and Son of Sam as two very high profile cases, neither sketch aided in their capture at all despite press coverage that dwarfed the media buys of most brands.
Conversely, take a look at these political cartoons of George W. Bush and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il.
The proportions hardly look human, and yet we instantly recognize these individuals. And if you think this is just about having a face that everyone sees over and over, think again. The same truth is at work with those caricature artists depicting everyday citizens at waterfront piers, amusement parks, county fairs and birthday parties around the world. This isn’t about celebrity. This is about the way the brain works.
The human brain recognizes faces and other images by exaggerated characteristics, not finely tuned details. I think this also holds true in communications. Which is why there’s a lesson here for those concerned with marketing and brand design. The most recognizable brands are about big, bold strokes, not lots of details. They are concise, not comprehensive. It’s why the innovator’s use of white space is better than the stalwart’s gazillions of bullet points. Remember this when you’re having difficulty focusing your brand on just one or two exaggerated characteristics.
The inclination to be comprehensive is human. And so is the human brain’s inclination to ignore all those details. So it’s a simple formula for your brand: be bold, be concise, and be remembered. If you’re a criminal, you should hope police sketch artists keep focusing on all those finely tuned details no one will recognize.
