Gerd Arntz-inventor of the icon and the Audi A1 advert

Love the Audi A1 poster advert I've seen around. To me it's a cheeky reference to Gerd Arnts the 'inventor' of the icon. Check out Arntz's website which outlines his life. Note that he developed the ISOTYPE: the International System of Typographic Picture Education which laid the foundations of what we might now call the icon.

Signage at Duxford

With new printing technology comes the ability to make large format, graphics-rich signage and IWM Duxford's new system is a fine example of this.

Below is the welcome sign which greets you at the main entry near the gift shop. This gives an instant overview without being overwhelming, I find. They've used military colours without making it feel drab. Love the air force yellow you see as a highlight colour.

Check out the detail here on one of the triangular sectioned markers which are found dotted around: The screws have been painted so as not to jump out too much. At the top of the photo below you see a photo with 'camouflaged' screw head. Neat.

Next iteration: animated/video screen information points!

Corporate identity portfolio photographs

Alex Bibby did a great job photographing some of my key portfolio pieces illustrating some corporate identity design, scenario illustrations, literature design.

How graphic design affects the buying decision

I've been thinking a lot about this recently and yesterday's meeting and vibrant discussion with a colleague only fuelled this debate further for me. It's easy to see how the buying decision can be swayed by graphic design on a superficial level: only yesterday in the supermarket one of my children stopped in front of the washing detergent aisle and mentioned that one particular brand looked great, "This one's the best!". I asked why to which I was told that it was prettier with nicer illustrations on it. So it works on a basic level: shape of packaging, design of on package graphics. Maybe this can be further pushed to is the packaging innovative and will it enhance my experience of using the product. Mostly, though, I find similar products perform a similar function. Supermarket own brand might not smell as nice as other brands, or may not clean 'as deeply' but essentially it cleans clothes. I'm not saying that product characteristics don't count for anything in the buying process, rather that the initial on shelf experience of the average shopper is dictated by graphic design. (I'm discounting for the moment brand experience built by other channels before this buy-decision).

This is where I'm putting effort into thinking at the moment. Our eyes see the packaging and our brains decode the information and produce a buy/don't buy decision. Why? What occupies this space between design and decision? Gladwell (Blink, Gladwell, M. 2005 ) talks about a consulting firm which helped make a brand of spirits number one seller based on tweaking the packaging shape alone. He also states that not only the shape and colour of the packaging made customers prefer one product over the other but very subtle variances in the design of the label. And the thing is, the product didn't change! It was just the same as before when it was in second place in the sales chart but now the customer perceives it to be better.

So I'm setting off on a deep journey into the world of Design Theory and its affect on the buying decision. Where will it lead me? Through typography, sociology, psychology no doubt, even maybe early human history. Feel free to join the journey with me...

Next stop: Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

Brochure design for University of Cambridge (IFM)

Nokia Facebook page

I really like this vibrant, info-packed Facebook page. Nice piece of graphic design, I think. Looks like a cool classified page for Nokia products only. There's good contrast in the first advert which gives focus, then lighter toned ads surrounding to ease the eye around the page. You could see this is a wall of information; a big block of data. But my eyes don't feel like they're heavily lunking around the page. The parcels of ideas are packaged nicely for me to pick apart what I need.

Plus I love this border edge/background combo here:

Border: D4D6D5, Background: DEDEDE. (Thanks to the colorpic tool)

Rainbow designs for all

Whilst waiting at the doctor's I glanced at the flyers and notices filed on one of the bookcases and noticed quite a few rainbow themes. It seems these brash and bold colours are in vogue. One of them was for a service directed at gay people but I don't think the rainbow motif need only remind us of the gay movement just as pink or mauve should not be associated uniquely with female issues.

Having said that care must be taken when associating each colour with a product or service, as above. Red has been chosen for A&E and as an 'alert' colour may be a wise choice. Skill is needed when partitioning ideas with colours. We try and push boundaries and associations with colour but some associations stick...

Swiss Typography

Entering Switzerland we hit a traffic jam. Normal, we thought, as it was the school holidays so lots of Swiss people will be returning home. Not so. the jam was uniquely foreigners entering Switzerland and being asked to pay the road tax. Some people say that Swiss people are money minded, others just plain boring but for me I think they're sticklers for rules and regulations. And this can be seen in their typography and graphic design.

I was in Switzerland purely for pleasure with no work commitments at all, but you can't switch your eyes off from the graphic design around you. Looking at the billboards, posters and magazines you can see the differences and in Switzerland the differences are remarkable. Clean use of type is to be expected but also a beautiful appreciation of white space and grids. This was not only present in cool magazines and shops but also for fairly mundane products such as car washes, local radio stations and the like. This sort of design is very often mistakenly called uninteresting by British clients who bemoan the simply sans serif mistaking most for Arial. Not even seeing the beauty involved in the relevant 'Helvetica' font. Sometimes our clients feel a nice twirly font might do the job. and sometimes they're right. Flouncy fonts are sometimes necessary but not nearly as much as the client might think or want it themselves. But can this argument be levelled at Swiss design? Is it boring? Are the lack of 'interesting' fonts creating an atmosphere of blandness? Certainly some of the designs I saw were rubbish; not every Swiss graphic design project I saw was intricate and delicate in its respect for simple design. And if I'm honest it did feel like *lots* of the ads and designs were following the same pattern of typography and layout but I don't think this is because the Swiss are boring. I think it has more to do with their respect of rules and regulations.

The Swiss have obviously settled on the essence of what makes good design for them: clear typography with bold sans serif (although they like some slab serif). Sometimes the typography is all of the design. I like this idea that the information within the piece also makes up the aesthetic. Form and function together. Sometimes this can get messy but see the examples here to see how it really can work.

New distorted world view

Check out this interesting but distorted view of the UK based on the density of where people live...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8280657.stm

Cropmarks xtra for Freehand

Ok so a bit of geekiness here... I like Freehand. Ok, yes I know it's no longer supported and Adobe make Illustrator so why bother? Well it's like a comfy old pair of slippers: feels great and does the job but maybe not as good looking as the new pair you got for Christmas.

What a palaver to sort out cropmarks though! You know, you set up some artwork; it's all beautiful; you have to manually add in cropmarks (Acrobat can do this sometimes depending on the version you have). Not anymore! I found (a rather old-but hey, so is Freehand) xtras plug in that Boris Jerenec has developed which simply sits in your xtras folder and adds another easy to use cropmark-making tool! Thanks Boris and here's the link to his site:

Cropmarks tool download.

Can graphic design make you happy?

Intriguing look at the relationship of our state of mind with our designed environment by Stefan Sagmeister.

Design, camouflage, dinosaurs and exams.

One of the main functions of visual perception is to detect objects in the environment as either a potential mate, predator or perhaps lunch (Scientific American p18. V Ramachandran, D Rogers-Ramachandran). So determining what is not part of the scenery has been vital in the past in order for us to pass on our genes to our lucky predecessors. What use is it in modern life though? I'm not in the habit of popping out to the high street to bag a mammoth or flee from roaming tyrannosaurus rexs (!) on my way home from work.

What's the use of it now in getting our food or our mate then? Well in design terms it means that when we engage with visual communication we tend to see contrasted items much better. It jumps out at us as we say to ourselves, "Woah...is that a dinosaur?!". Use your head, designers!

No point using low contrast text on designs...

When I was doing my O levels the dreaded exam papers were black text on yellow paper. Oh boy did that strike fear in our hearts. We only had to glimpse a registration plate to give us the shivers! Apparently though this is the best contrast for legibility. So I guess we should thank the exam board for making it like this!

If you need some tools to ensure your website text has sufficient contrast for good legibility check out this article which gives some web tools to use.

Design should be business led not technology led

I was having a grumble with a developer friend of mine the other day as we pored over the designs that a creative agency had sent over. We couldn't understand how they could quite blatantly have ridden rough shod over our technical and functional spec whilst designing their concepts! I mean do they realise how difficult it is to implement this design!?

Problem was- the design was spot on. Focus groups of client customers were happy, client was happy: it did the job perfectly. So the developer and I got on with it: tweaking the technology to make it reflect the design. Pushing the boundaries of our expertise in order to fulfil this website. And that's the way it should be!

Visual design in the business environment or commercial visual communications rarely exists to satisfy its own needs. Design can't be led by the technology we use at the moment. If that were the case we'd be riding around in wooden cars. (That's a gag). We have to push technology to fulfil the marketing objectives of (in this case) a website. And of course the marketing objectives are set by the business goals. Design is a function of a business: it has to earn its keep.

So designers of the world unite in your efforts to create websites that look great in their role of doing a good business task. You have nothing to lose but developers who give you grief!

:-)