This A1 poster came in the post today announcing the 2008 AGDA Conference in Adelaide and call for entries for the accompanying awards. This poster seems to represent many designs, collect all nine posters. Four days, a seductive poster and odyssey in Adelaide awaits. Nice one. Nice one Voice and love the crazy logo…

Award entries close 27 June 2008

Enter online at AGDA AWARDS here

AGDA National Awards Conference and Awards 2008
23rd October to 26th October 2008
AGDA National Conference 2008, Adelaide, South Australia

A message was sent to “Nowality“ by Sydney designer Simeon King of Lifesize Studio — a rant, a call to the wilderness for the Telstra with a graphic play “T“ to be reinstated, King‘s message states:

SAVE THE TELSTRA T.

Nobody told the web department to take down the Notox logo/favicon on the address bar. Took this screenshot today (16.05.2008). This new Telstra identity is a joke, a PR, marketing f(blunder)k up. The old logo is still everywhere, on concrete telecom pit lids, on buildings and exchanges…

The botox lollypop iMacs came out more than 10 years ago… this button, switch on, switch off graphic comes from that vintage… even Mac moved on, back to stainless, black and simple flat logos years ago…

Thats my rave. We should start the SAVE THE T LOGO political activists movement.
Time that design stood up to marketing suaves.

GO BOTOX.

If you would like to — SAVE THE T LOGO, contact Nowality for King‘s details.

That said, we miss the former Telstra logo too, read our article investigating this topic here

2008 has been a year that has seen many familiar Australian logos join the ranks of identities to be refreshed.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Australian‘s ethnic and multilingual media service has undergone an identity make over after seventeen years. The previous SBS identity (left design) was designed by Cato Partners in 1991 when the SBS was officially made a corporation — the graphic depicts an abstraction of the compromised projection map of the Goodes Homolosine rendering.

The new identity in seventeen years has morphed the existing graphic for a new found perspective and sense of dimension. The customised typemark has been dropped for a popular light cut of a typeface like Helvetica, and demerged from the symbol.

From SBS‘s media statement on 08 May 2008…

“We have retained all that was good about the SBS logo and simply evolved it but moreover we have put it into context and developed an overall look and feel for SBS and everything we do as a media organisation,“ SBS Director of Marketing, Jacquie Riddell said.

“The audience told us through our research that while they continued to value the services SBS delivers, we needed a contemporary expression to keep pace with their understanding of modern multicultural Australia.“

All one can comment upon is that the new design has no surprises for young designers looking for inspiration, not like when Cato‘s brand was launched when one’s career starting out. In recent times, the designers of such projects are lucky to get a mention, let alone get a chance to expand upon the design thinking, or the process.

The understanding of how brands operate in contemporary culture is extensive, brands are allowed to be innovative within fixed contexts — in the way in which they are aligned, positioned or applied. Yet the graphic mark itself seemed to have been locked in time capsule.

Contemporary symbols, typemarks, expressions seem to shift from one fixed familiar style to another familiar style — it is very rare to encounter a brand that attempts to push the bounds of the fixed graphic model. A new brand that challenges the bounds of a graphic identity — the nature of the symbol, the nature of the type mark or whether a product needs a fixed graphic to be an effective brand.

Maybe this new brand could be about a colour, or a specific type of imagemaking, a set formula of presentation, or maybe the brand is the product or service itself. Seventeen years ago many new big brands came into the community and influenced company management, marketing people, business owners, designers and they even won design awards.

When will the new graphic expression of brand infiltrate the maintream brands? Will mainstream brands ever shake the ‘60s symbol and type mark model? Will we ever find out who designed the new SBS brand?

In Victoria there are over sixty if not seventy festivals of all description — food, film, sexuality, scarfs, street and culture. Established in 1985, Next Wave happens every two years, and it is a festival designed to break the rules of possibly and find Australian creative people, between 16 and 30 years, seeking answers to things that they don’t have questions yet.

The time frame and subject matter makes Next Wave a highly anticipated event. A special design project therefore presents itself, which requires a thoughtful, demanding and defining approach from festival management and subsequent festival designers.

What comes with the territory with this brief is a festival director willing to push their designers and together present a body of communication that is like an event, or a presentation on the festival‘s roll of activities. Contemporary festival design is attracting a graphic style of elements that are increasingly symbolic. The themes are broad and diverse, the renderings are a multiplicity of fantastic techniques, the language is that of catch-cries.

Festivals are becoming slicker, better funded affairs with a range communication formula. In this instance the audience would be forgiven if they perceive that graphic presentation of festival fixtures appear to blend into each other, year in year out. Resulting in audience that can’t help to blob festivals into one broad category, that competes along with sport, politics, and shopping.

Next Wave pops up every two years and prods the festival marketing scene. When Tin & Ed with Marcus Westbury dropped in 2004 with their Unpopular Culture concept their bold and clunky type teetered above a detailed, delicate and bored drawing come complex doodle of a boiling over cityscape. It was an image that contrasted with the highly refined, symbolic and clean imagery that occupies the visual presentation of many contemporary festivals of the day.

In 2006 Qube Konstrukt with Westbury continued to push onto the audience an image rich with detail, layers and themes wrapped up in an idea Empire Games — a playful companion to the the 2006 Commonwealth Games Arts Festival. A series of utopic islands in the sky evolved, places of the future for the future, remote, busy, peopleless. Floating worlds in an outer space from an old Warner Bros cartoon starring Daffy Duck and a big ray gun pointing at Earth.

The detail in both festivals seemed almost impossible to achieve and economically stupid for an average studio to undertake. Hundreds of hours were thrown at outcomes that could never be recovered in a financial sense. As other festival design studios streamlined processes to break even, a new breed of festival designers devoted every spare hour they could muster in the interests of making their idea of good work, whilst working on projects that paid the bills.

In 2008 a new artistic director Jeff Khan along graphic designers Chase and Galley, tore up the rich image making of the past and developed an outcome that contrasts with bold thought provoking statements and a style of image making that mimicks concept based art. A careful process dictated the outcome, which involved the serendipity encountered when employing the services of computer based search engines. It is a multimedia based outcome, it is clunky and ugly, it is a solution at the finger tips of any computer operator, it is text book like, it is without one graphic to fix ones gaze, it is a set of components with an infinite set of outcomes.

The type face choices are default and familiar. The festival type mark is out of focus; layers of fonts used for motor vehicle number plates, expressed in single solid over layed impressions of colours process. The headlines are unique combinations; layers of bold strike through lines and number plate type in single colours process again.

The layouts are careful, crude and squared off along with default maps, liken to the encylopedia sets of the 1970s and 1980s sold to families by door to door salesmen. The body text is a crappy cut of Times Roman. Black ink that is closer to used motor oil, soaks into non acid free newsprint, in the broad sheet format, yuck me, yes.

It is an outcome about the messages, poetics, the merging of similar and disparate ideas. It is a theme about engendering the audience and it starts the threads of thinking that honors the idea of Closer Together. The fruits are bitter sweet. The audience is given a challenging and effective design outcome, however are we closer together with all the infinite possibilities to connect and reconnect? The restraint of the work seems to also raise another question: with all these options to connect with each, are we indeed any closer?

Visit Tin and Ed, Qube Konstrukt, Chase and Galley and the Next Wave festival here.

Images of 2008 Next Wave courtesy of Chase & Galley.

One noted in the media that Garry Emery‘s Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre identity has been replaced by Richard Henderson‘s Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre brand. It is old news, as this iconic identity was changed in February 2008, never-the-less the change didn’t miss a slinging from the mainstream media up in the stalls.

With interest one reads the mainstream press coverage of the change over at the time. In typical fashion it is a beat up. The Age readers will enjoy another compelling view point of graphic design from writers Carbone and Money in an article titled “Convention changes on Convention Centre“ Here is a sample:

As part of the MCEC launching its “bold new identity”, cash has been splashed on new signs, uniforms and stationery, the centrepiece being the new “M” logo devised by Richard Henderson from the “brand, identity, design and image business” R-Co. His take on the logo: “In creating a brave, and engaging brand mark with a three-dimensional effect, it reflects the layering of experiences you can have in and around this diverse space.” Exactly what we were thinking. We suspect Henderson doesn’t comes cheap, given his clients have been the cashed-up AFL, the MCG…

Whether you like the change or not, this style of editorial seems to be the only format that graphic design is presented to the community in the mainstream media. No wonder our clients are suspicious of the fees designers charge and the process. No wonder the graphic design industry is still a cottage industry in Australia, as compared to our colleagues in the US, Europe and Japan.

As we mentioned in our piece about the London 2012 Olympic Games brand “Branding shot by the messenger, again…“ this type of editorial is a nightmare for a volatile industry like design communication. Designers often work with tight budgets that can be cut without hesitation in any economic climate. The average young designer‘s salary swings from $35k to $45k (who is typically university qualified), working for 40 to 60 hours a week — has Ms Carbone and Mr Money ever retrenched a young designer $30k HECS debt? It is no fun, especially in an industry that offers very few positions in quality studios like Mr Emery‘s and Mr Henderson‘s.

The profitability and incomes made by many studio‘s is a pinch on incomes from professions like law and accounting — just compare Australia‘s biggest graphic design studio‘s premises and employee numbers with Australia‘s biggest law and accountancy firms. If Mr Emery and Mr Henderson have succeeded in the Australian market place they without doubt would have put in long hours and a great effort to earn it.

There is a lot more say about graphic communication than questioning the point of it and its cost. Graphic communication is product that everyone interacts with countless times a day — it is time that the general public gets a sense of this concept and contribute to making the process more effective and enriching.

Read The AGE article here, read Branding shot by the messenger, again… here

Visit Emery Studio, R-Co, and Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre here