Image Courtesy Laurence King
The other week, I finished reading another book by Adrian Shaughnessy, Graphic Design: A User’s Manual.
His earlier (and more well-known) effort, How to Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, has a cherished place on my bookshelf, so I approached reading Graphic Design with a fair degree of anticipation. And suffice to say, Adrian didn’t let me down.
The book is comprised of 26 chapters, organized and laid out alphabetically, with each “chapter” containing a variety of terms associated with that letter. Whether it’s Art Direction or Helvetica or dealing with clients, each topic is a nugget-sized introduction into that particular topic. Covering the artistic, business, theoretical and practical sides of the design business, it’s the prototypical “bus book” (a lighter size or bite-sized organization, ideal for reading on the bus, compared to “bed books” which tend to be lengthier and weightier, for reading before bed).
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Note: this piece is cross-posted with the Applied Arts Wire: link.
Pundits have been spilling ink on digital media for a couple decades now. Calls to the heavens, appeals to logic and emotion and all manner of hysteria have dominated the digital debate since the 1980s.
Chuck the dot-com bust of 2000 and the past few years of recessionary thinking, the rapid rise and tentative destabilizing of Flash, smartphones and the iPad in to the mix, and you’re left with a messy pie that everyone wants a piece of, without necessarily having a clue why.
Needless to say, this has been a media in flux, going through its birth pains. Looking back on the history books, it’s easy to get the impression that the printing press spread across Europe at Gutenberg’s touch, or that photography overtook illustration in advertising as soon as it became practical. But these developments were measured in decades, not months, and entire careers could be spent in flux, with those (un)fortunate souls who were of working age during these periods of revolution stuck in both directions.
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Following my recent discussions on scarcity and value, a third cherry has fallen off this particular tree that has caught my eye: the notion of commitment.
Commitment is a funny idea. It’s defined as the act of dedicating yourself to something, and it’s a concept that, to my eyes, is perhaps not quite as meaningful as it once was, or at least not as immediately obvious.
In various parlances, people vote with their feet, their eyes, their time, etc. But are those votes becoming increasingly meaningless in terms of hits and time spent on site, dovetailing with the commitment-less nature of online media? The metrics of advertising have undergone a seismic shift of thinking in recent years, and that gotta-have-it-now mindless click-a-thon that has become the intake of online media is mutually exclusive to any long-term retainment of knowledge or inspiration.
We’ve been having similar arguments for generations, but resisting the urge to carry on along those polemic lines, I’m taking this piece in a different direction.
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My single-minded aim in my career is to enrich the creative dialogue. I want people to like what I have to say, I want people to hate what I have to say, and I want people to think about what I have to say. Not because I think I have anything wonderful or unique to say (I don’t, really), but because that’s something we all need to do more of, whatever stage we’re in over our careers: think.
Beneath the surface, it’s what we try and do with advertising, and it’s what we do with design: try and make people stop and think about something. The point isn’t to hook them immediately, it’s to make them think about it, and hopefully change their habits as a result. Timidity is not an option. That doesn’t negate a healthy respect for the audience or the product; even the most heart-achingly luxurious spreads carry within them the seeds of confidence. But that’s what makes effective work effective.
The rat race mindsets of western society – higher, faster and stronger – do not equal better. This is not a rant against the breakneck pace of the modern world (it’s just as worthwhile to immerse yourself within it as it is to disconnect from it), but it’s a call to consider the consequences of trying to “out do” each other on the same playing field.
I have a problem with that: doing what someone else does, but doing it twice as much or twice as loud. By doing so, you acknowledge that they’re the leaders and that all you’re trying to do is merely replicate their success under your name. Whether it’s how you build your own website or branding, how you write your own blog or how you serve your own clients, it’s absolutely essential to, wherever possible, strive for that sliver of difference. Otherwise, what’s the point?
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Yep, another piece of punditry on Old Spice.
The campaign was a success, sales are up, Isaiah Mustafa has a movie deal, Wieden+Kennedy have hit another one out of the park; we know the facts. But beyond that, the campaign re-validated the role of advertising despite a tumultuous media landscape by creating the first truly, buzz-worthy campaign (based on an idea, no less) with demonstrable results in recent memory.
The marriage of social media and “creativity” has been, to my eyes, an awkward match virtually since day one. Akin to the age-old battle of marketing vs. creative, the pendulum’s been swinging more towards the broadcast-converse-win mindset than the big-ideas-converse-and-win one. Besides the fact that both can (and to some degree do) coexist peacefully, a real harmonization of the two approaches to advertising a product or service has been lacking. Until just…about…now.
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This recent post by Frank Chimero made my thoughts crystallize on why I can sometimes feel frustrated by the perceived and real dominance of interactive design.
Websites are essential. Social media is essential. And I’m not for a second arguing the validity of the online sphere in providing immeasurably valuable experiences and insights. I’ve spent the better part of my life on computers since I sat on my dad’s knee with the Apple II, and since the first time I browsed the internet a few years later, I’ve been on that constantly too.
But I’m also a historian, both by interest and by education. My perspective on life involves questioning why and how things happened throughout the past, in order to better understand the present and, dare I say it, the future too. I look at things with a view to how they’ll be remembered, and that kind of long-lasting memorability is something that the online world is not meant for, and was never meant for.
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Posted in Design
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Tagged 8 Faces, Chimero, Chris Anderson, Design, Editorial, Frank, Graphic, Interactive, Media, Nick Carr, Print, Social, Web
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Peruse the lion’s share of design blogs long enough and your mind will be as closed as the day you graduated from high school. Packed with posts devoid of insight or true inspiration, they’re a leech on the intellectual bloodstream of the creative industry and they’re harming the world we all live in and work in. Put on a larger scale, the online design blogging community is a flashpoint for what’s ailing the creative industry as a whole: there’s far too much “what,” and far too little “why.”
In a sense, it’s the opposite crisis to what art school education seems to be in the midst of at the moment, with ill-prepared graduates taking the entire length of their studies to explore their creative vision but lacking hardened technical skills. This could be one reason for the genesis of the earliest design blogs, and the best among them still serve their purpose of supplementing a pre-existing or developing theoretical knowledge with practical guidance. But that good-intentioned ship sailed by 2007 when the web exploded with an army of look-a-likes barely distinguishable from the next one over.
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