Dear Studio,

How do you maintain a high standard of work throughout your portfolio? The reason why I ask is because a lot of my designs are driven by the client and committees, who have no experience in design. I am always told to ‘give what the client wants’, even though I know it will end with poor results. What can I do as a junior graphic designer to improve the situation?

Kindest regards,

Vincent

It is not often we are asked questions like the following.

While we ponder over the answer, we want to follow up this question with another question, and ask what our readers they think is the answer to finding balance the of making quality communication and addressing the commercial needs of the client:

How do you maintain a high standard of work throughout a portfolio while maintaining a list of clients confident that what you (the studio) produce work that does what it is meant to – generate awareness, sell tickets, grow market share…?

If any one out there has a comment we would be happy to post the differing points of view.

It’s Christmas day and one is trying to evolve the ‘Bumble Bee’ Transformer from robot to car form. The living room is a mess of wrapping paper, boxes, packaging materials and a Christmas song by Wham. In a moment of quizical frustration one looked too hard at a piece of stray cardboard and a grumpy dog face thingy winked back at me.

‘Oh crap’, I muttered. ‘Has my design career entered a new phase where one sees faces in anything and everything? Will this insight then be accompanied by a burning desire to publish a little book (that utilises an elegant design palette) to display the face collection?’ I poured myself another Champagne cocktail, adjusted the lilac paper crown on my head, and dug out a Michael Buble Christmas classic.

A few short hours pass…

The photography and retouching complete and the grumpy packing card has found itself published – as a pretty convincing grumpy doggy face, I thought. The process might get the face thing out of my system, before any permanent damage is done to one’s design.

Next Christmas Champagne cocktails are off the gift unwrapping agenda.

What a heart felt song! No one does fluffy nostalgic like Wham.

This space has covered a range of brand makeovers and the subject has become a little tiresome.

As previously mentioned, changing a brand in recent times is a hot to-do item on a sleepy corporate agenda, as it keeps a studio full of designers employed. One is happy that in this case that the fees, reportedly AU$15million, helped a team of designers keep busy, and hopefully these fees helped knock over a few mortgages, or funded several holidays.

The sad thing about this brand makeover, and a whole lot of other brand makeovers, is that the overall dialogue about design is not a constructive process. The ANZ rebrand has witnessed a raft of negative reviews from a vocal minority – designers and journalists. These reviews have subsequently trickled down to the wider public who assess this news story as a trivial whinge fest.

On this occasion we have mixed up our response to seek a broader and constructive response.

Some good things about the new ANZ brand:

• it employed a team of design and marketing people
• the outcome explores creative and design expression for large companies
• its recall and roll out will employ a range of new trades and manufacturing
• this brand dared to add a symbol to its visual suite
• the lettering is a departure from the extra bold incumbents
• the grey, white and blue colour palette is also a new departure from a prominent blue palette
• it is interesting witnessing the lettering transform from hard corners to all curves
• the symbol has curious abstract quality and has inspired many responses – from lotus to crying baby
• the project commissioned a local creative outfit

Some opportunities from the new ANZ brand:

• hopefully all the materials used in the recall and roll out will be minimised, recycled or reused in some way
• mixing the italic inspired ‘A’ and roman ‘NZ’ is a design challenge which requires a vast amount of design testing and review
• the italic inspired ‘A’ has achieved an awkward shape and relationship with the other letter forms
• the multiple horizontal striping makes a more prominent graphic expression as compared to a single stripe
• maybe the ANZ could move from being a typemark and symbol to just a symbol mark
• there is a vast amount of feedback available for the next round of brand change
• there is a vast amount of feedback available for any company looking to change their brand
• there is an opportunity to keep this new brand relevant over 10 year with an imaginative communication programme in place

We think that it is a given that many brands that don’t need changing will face a chorus of make overs in the future. For generations people have happily superceded great things, that often don’t need changing, for the sake of keeping up with what is hot, hip and contemporary. Why should a company’s brand mark escape this hapless trend? Maybe the next big brand change will be less about creating a contemporary expression and more about having the consideration and craft invested in it to be a brand that gets better as the years roll by.

What makes brands last are the brands that have graphic elements (type and image) that are quirky yet are well crafted. As compared to ANZ ’s incumbent brands, one feels that the awkwardness of the letter forms invested into latest ANZ brand will make it less desirable and as time goes by.

We are considering (as a process for recommendation in our next large brand redesign project), that it may be valuable to seek the opinions of a select panel of peers prior to launch, rather than dealing and assessing feedback in forums like this after the project is officially launched.

Thank you Simeon King for the following links:

News.com.au
Under Consideration – Brand New

From Bruce

We get all sorts of comments, mostly complimentary which we rarely publish… don’t get us wrong we appreciate the feedback, however with a family moto “Don’t believe your hype”, one is programmed with a brutal modesty filter.

Infrequently we get some comments like Bruce’s that get us thinking. One face value Bruce’s comment was a little alarming, with a little more thought Bruce’s comment raised an interesting line of thought – who own things that we all own in a way?

From wiki:
An asterisk (*) (Latin asteriscum “little star”, from Greek ) is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often pronounce it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C* algebra). The word “asterisk” is often mispronounced as “asterick” or “asterix”.

The asterisk is derived from the need of the printers of family trees in feudal times as a symbol to indicate date of birth. The original shape was six-armed, each arm like a teardrop shooting from the center. For this reason, in some computer circles it is called a splat, perhaps due to the “squashed-bug” appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.

Many cultures have their own unique version of the asterisk. In East Asia a character with a similar use (?) looks like an X with dots surrounding it. This mark looks like the Chinese character for rice: ?. The Arabic asterisk is six-pointed. In some fonts the asterisk is five-pointed and the Arabic star is eight-pointed.

In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, pointers, repetition, and multiplication.

Written text

• The asterisk is used to call out a footnote, especially when there is only one on the page. Less commonly, multiple asterisks are used to denote different footnotes on a page. (i.e., *, **, ***)
• Three spaced asterisks centered on a page may represent a jump to a different scene or thought. See Horizontal rule.
• One or more asterisks may be used to strike out portions of a word to avoid offending by using the full form of a profanity (f**k), to preserve anonymity (Peter J***), or to avoid profanation of a holy name (G*d).
• Asterisks are sometimes used instead of typographical bullets to indicate items of a list.
• Colloquially, asterisks can be used to represent *emphasis* when italics are not available (e.g. email).
• Asterisks are used to represent ratings of movies, restaurants, etc.: see Star (classification).
• A group of three asterisks arranged in a triangular formation ? is called an asterism.

Sorry Trees by Frost Design

The …anyhow* campaign of 1974 for Winfield cigarettes

Wallpaper Magazine Cover

Tea towel by Pip and Co, indicating linked text

Tea Towel detail

It is amazing how compelling design can be, take a studio like Frost who has adopted a typographic mark like an asterisk, then fill their world with it’s simple black and white form, until people disassociate the original intention of the mark, as a open usage typographic tool open for for anyone’s use, and see the graphic as a brand. Frost also use the sticky dots with a turned up corner, they also love bright colours like day-glo orange yellow and green.

It is not uncommon for studios and other organisations to adopt such things, we love to use similar devices – at the moment a collection of eyes, ears and mouths as our new web masthead, Cornwell Design love to use a tight gallery of fonts, Design by Pidgeon use geometric fonts which they have developed in their research, guess what colour Yello likes to use for their branding? In the instance of this series tea towels we used the asterisks to link., or footnote a prominent image with a narrative contained in the detail of the overall image.

Getting back to the asterisk. The truth of the matter is that it is such a common typographic tool that no one could possibly own it. Winfield cigarettes adopted an asterisk in the 1970s, Wallpaper magazine adopted an asterisk, Frost have adopted an asterisk, and we adopt it in it’s traditional form – to link or footnote ideas, thoughts and narratives together type set in the fonts we selected, which happen to look similar.

The overlap of ideas and forms used by any organisation is infinite and it is something that we all have to get used too. The context of expression is what makes an idea, form and notion unique, and for now we will continue down that path of activity.

Visit Frost here, Visit Wiki’s excellent asterisk article here

* only kidding Bruce, however we enjoyed your comment.

The designer is…the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him by the society in which he lives, because he knows his job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived form the schism of the arts.

Bruno Munari, Design as Art (1966)

Last Wednesday Rick Poynor presented to a Melbourne audience of designers and educators his most recent thoughts and observations of contemporary design. Poyner unlike many design presenters is a writer and observer. Poyner’s distance from the making of the work allows him to explore and observe design practice and its practitioners with a unique knowledge, clarity, a critical eye and objectivity.

After seven years Poynor brought to the Melbourne audience an evocative topic that explores design practice in an around the title of ‘Design thinking or Critical thinking’.

In short form, Poyner pitched the idea that design and designers are at a cross road of threats and possibility. The threat of the traditional design process driven and shaped by wheels of commerce – with its scepticism towards designers and the visual. A picture was formed of business commentators (such as Businessweek’s Bruce Nussbaum) and emerging business academic streams (such as institutions like Stanford University’s D School and its course stream – design thinking), shaping marketing and communication in the future via business channels. On the other side Poynor invites designers to engage with commerce, clients and the public by exploring methods of practice shaped around employing varying modes of the process of critical thinking. Critical thinking is a process where designer and design practices invest in themselves, so to speak, and develop new works and practices in communication design.

It was a presentation that created more questions rather than answers. One felt Poynor’s message was a ‘call to action’, rather than a typical comfy feel good moment of designer to designer presenting design.

We invite designers to read on, read more and invite a process that involves design practices executing work along side with a stream of non client based work that investigates and explores the development of ideas, process and outcomes.

Thank you Rick for putting together a convincing presentation, opening up a worthy debate and reconnecting us with exciting and meaningful design thinkers like Jan Van Toorn and Bruno Munari

Read Fast Company’s A Plea for More Critical Thinking in Design, Please by John Barratt

Read Businessweek’s design and innovation blog by Bruce Nussbaum

Read Design Observer’s Down with Innovation by Michael Bierut

Read Down with Innovation by Rick Poynor

Read a review by Peter Bilak for Eye Magazine, Jan van Toorn – Critical practice by Rick Poynor