Your Friday Quote
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Think About This: Better creative outcomes through transparency
A short history of transparency
The restaurants George Orwell described in his 1933 novel Down and Out in Paris and London were not places you’d want diners to see. A wall separated the dining room’s calm ambience from the chaotic grime of the “cold, filthy kitchen.” Architecturally, the wall between these two interconnected worlds was a good thing, and important for both sides. For the restaurant, it concealed the ugly frenzy behind the scenes. For the diners, it preserved a shinier belief in what they were buying.
The model that Orwell experienced persisted for six more decades before restaurateurs and their architects in the early 1990s—mostly in the Bay Area—did something unexpected: they brought the “back of house” front and center, putting chefs and line cooks on display to diners. This was done primarily as a means of demonstrating spotless kitchens and the use of fresh ingredients. Arguably, this design decision also set the table for the celebrity chef craze that began shortly thereafter. With open kitchens, chefs and their staffs were transformed from obsessed, cantankerous artisans to obsessed, cantankerous, celebrity artisans. But more importantly, making kitchens and patrons visible to one another created a transparency that enriched the experience on both sides of the now-non-existent wall. Chefs got better visibility into the dining room, providing an instant feedback loop. Diners got better visibility into the kitchen, seeing firsthand the collaboration, technical skill and artistic inspiration responsible for their gastronomic experience. The “culinary arts” were finally on display to its patrons. Seeing the kitchen enriched the eating experience in the same way seeing a symphony orchestra enriches the listening experience.
It’s important to distinguish the kind of transparency at play in restaurants with the transparency between corporations and shareholders legislated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the Enron, WorldCom and other accounting scandals. Transparency that is inspired by the idea of mutually enriching an experience is different than transparency focused on proving integrity. Sarbanes-Oxley dictates how and what public companies communicate to shareholders. Similarly, many car dealers love to tout customer access to “dealer invoices” as a measure of their transparency. This is totally different than the kind of transparency open kitchens deliver. As an example, one equivalent of Sarbanes-Oxley for restaurants would be to disclose department of health inspection reports in the back of the menu. Whether or not that’s a good idea, open kitchens are inspired by a desire to enrich the experience, not prove their adherence to the most basic disclosure requirements.
At the same time, while transparency for the sake of disclosure and compliance is different than transparency that enriches the experience, they do have something in common. For each, a lack of transparency has a cost. Enron shareholders were kept in the dark and ended up losing their money. Restaurant diners were missing out on the joys of seeing chefs at work creatively. They are different kinds of costs, but costs all the same.
A more transparent creative process
Within the client-agency relationship, a creative process that isn’t transparent also has costs. Put in the simplest terms, these costs are:
- Time and Productivity: Without a transparent creative process, agencies can head down the wrong path. This happens frequently. Ultimately, this lost time makes for longer project durations—time that could’ve been spent doing something else.
- Expense: More time equals more money. Plus, late deliverables can make clients late to market, a direct hit to revenue.
- What Could’ve Been: Is a great idea a great idea if no one knows about it? For clients and agencies alike, a lack of transparency means they will never know what could’ve been. If the client had shared that key perspective before an agency brainstorm, what inspiration would’ve followed? And what would’ve happened if the client had seen the idea that the agency eventually abandoned? Neither of them will ever know, and that’s a painful cost.
So how can clients avoid paying these costs? There are three easy steps clients can take with their agencies to inspire a more transparent creative process.
1) Invite yourself to brainstorms. The traditional model for the client-agency relationship calls for the client to brief the agency, the agency to retreat to their headquarters for several weeks, and then the agency to return to the client with brilliant new ideas. But why wouldn’t the client be involved in the brainstorms where those ideas are born? They know their business best. Plus, they’re thinkers, too, and have plenty of good ideas and bad ideas—just like the agency team. All the reasons for having the client in the brainstorms are about enriching the creative process. And all the reasons for not having the client in the brainstorms are about an agency’s insecurities. So invite yourself.
2) Eliminate all the big reveals. Agencies are addicted to the big reveal—the rush that comes from unveiling new ideas the client has never seen before. A big part of this rush comes from how dangerous it feels. Clients will be thrilled, or clients will be unhappy. But the risk of unhappy clients isn’t the biggest danger in a big-reveal approach. It’s time and expense. Why would either the client or the agency invest so much of a project’s schedule and scope in a leap of faith that the agency has it right? Instead, clients should insert more frequent “small reveals” by the agency throughout the process. It may steal thunder from the big ta-da, but it will ensure a more successful outcome for everyone.
3) Join the critique early. After initial brainstorms, most agencies set out to sketching lots and lots of ideas in rough form. This is true across all sorts of deliverables, from brand positioning statements and taglines to logos and advertising concepts. Most clients end up seeing a fraction of the initial output and, instead, are presented with the magical “3-5 directions” outlined in the scope of work. Why? What if the agency leaves behind a really good idea in favor of investing too much time refining an idea a client would have killed from the start? Clients should join the earliest critiques, offering their guidance when it arguably matters the most. Agencies will feel vulnerable about showing ideas without their normal client-facing polish and drama, but joining the critique early on will save clients and agencies time and further the best ideas.
Your Friday Quote
Don’t covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.
Magazine Watch: Monocle
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
Your Friday Quote
It was never my design objective that the furniture be different or novel; only that it be good to sit in, good to use, good to look at, and easy for everyone to buy.
Geoff's 4th Annual Clairvoyant Color Cavalcade and Trend Watch
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.)Â
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.
If you were mugged…
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.
Web Redesign Part 1: Why We Did It
About two years ago we decided we were long overdue for a new Web site. The old pbdh.com site, while still mostly functional, wasn’t quite the spring chicken it was when we launched it back in 2003. So we got together and started to figure out how we could improve the site as a whole. The look, the functionality, the usability and even the overall purpose of our site were considered. When all was said and done we came up with one major goal: simplify. In the words of Albert Einstein we decided that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
We started by looking at the many different sections and pages we had produced over the years. Some of them were from the original site-map, others were add-ons cobbled together over various marketing initiatives, and one or two pages just showed up one day out of the blue. As is the case with most aging Web sites it was becoming cluttered and difficult to navigate. It needed a major overhaul.
News
We started with our news content. We had eight different pages devoted to news-worthy information: News, Events, In The News, Newsletter, News Archives, Press Releases, and a blog called Open House. There were just too many places to start. So we simplified. Instead of eight different pages devoted to eight different types of news we decided to route all the news content through our blog. After all a (good) blog is, by definition, a reverse chronology of written information that can be timely, interesting, though-provoking, insightful, and informative. We decided that if our news isn’t any of those things it doesn’t need to be on our Web site in the first place. So now Open House is one page of news instead of eight pages of news. It’s simpler. It’s better.
Portfolio
Early portfolio information architecture sketch.
Next, we tackled our portfolio. As much as we design firms like to champion our processes, a portfolio is still probably the most important part of a Web site. We had a very comprehensive portfolio with plenty of examples of our work and it told a good story of what we were capable of as a firm. But, it had one major flaw: it was designed for us, not our users. The portfolio was was organized by our clients’ names, and as long as people wanted to simply browse the portfolio and see the work we had done for each client they were in good shape. This organization worked great for us too because we know our clients intimately and we could easily navigate to any one portfolio example without much trouble. But then we put ourselves in the shoes of a first-time visitor and started to imagine how they would want to navigate our work.
Let's say there’s a guy named John Doe and he’s looking for a design firm that does fantastic annual reports. His boss wants him to round up some samples of annual report work from Seattle design firms by noon so he can start putting together a short list of people to call. With the old portfolio structure John would have to click through each client individually to see whether or not any annual reports had even been produced before he could start selecting the ones he liked. We figured John probably wouldn’t take the time do this extra work in the end. So we began architecting our portfolio around John’s goals and the goals of people like John. This was easy to do because the development of personas have long been a key step in our own experience design process—we just never had a chance to try personas out on ourselves! (And like we’ve been telling our clients all along: personas work.) In the end we came up with a portfolio that assembles itself on the fly depending on what the user is interested in. User interest can be as broad as work for print or as granular as annual reports and the portfolio will accommodate. And for those want to see it all at once there’s still a comprehensive client list option.
Change of Plans
Things were moving along nicely at this point. We came up with a pretty fun concept for our always popular people page and after a final tally of 3778 photographs, staff camera-shyness was at an all-time low. We were a week or so away from going live when the conversation turned to rebranding the entire firm. (I won’t go into the rebrand process as Devin did a good job explaining it in the previous post.) Since we built the entire site with extensibility in mind from the beginning, it was a fairly painless process to scrap the entire look and feel and redesign the site form the ground up in under three weeks. (When used properly CSS is a wonderful thing—more on that in a future post.)
Transparency
The final touch was to introduce our focus on transparency into the site visually, and the final solution might be my favorite part of the site. We are using photography, illustration and even strategy diagrams somewhat abstractly throughout the site. While each image is visually interesting as presented, it can also be extended to reveal a bit more information or even link to a relevant project. Moving forward we want to introduce a lot more of this “behind the scenes” imagery. We are also having some fun with it on the Open House page by giving visitors a peek into our work areas. Ultimately it’s a pretty subtle feature, but it offers a little something extra for people who are curious.
Both the rebrand of PBDH and the redesign of pbdh.com were very successful endeavors and we’re all pretty proud of the results. Next week in Part 2: How It All Works I’ll give you some insight into how the site works and how we manage content. And feel free to leave any comments or suggestions as we’d love to hear your feedback.