Category Archives: Interactive

Sharing 06: Music

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To provide a break from the usual kind of stuff I’ve been sharing over the past few months, I thought I’d post this recent project as it’s something a bit different.

When you go into a high street shop or a chain pub there will more often than not (unless it’s a Sam Smiths or Wetherspodders) be music playing. This music generally isn’t merely the result of a random shuffle of the barman’s iPod – like anything else in the world of marketing and commerce it’s actually a carefully considered, licensed, paid for service. My client is one of the biggest providers of this service in the UK.

They carefully tailor music to the particular clientele and setting, with a relevant selection of MP3s stuffed onto the hard drive of a dedicated music server which is then installed on site. It’s geared up so staff can control it, allowing them to tweak the playlist to suit the mood. Say a bunch of blokes walk up to the bar wearing parker jackets and smart jeans, staff can change the playlist to include more Paul Weller or Ocean Colour Scene. That sort of thing.

The system can also be hooked up to the lighting and flat screens around the premises, so at that moment in the evening where the pub’s lights dim a bit and the music gets louder, it’s often all just the result of a simple button press switching the system over to ‘evening mode’. And you know it’s time to go home.

All this is controlled by the staff using touch screen monitors like the one here. Stylistically they’re all similar so I’ll just show the one, but there are various screens which allow for full manual control or automatic play, the selection of various environments and creation of playlists. It’s all very clever stuff but it was in need of a style update, which is where I came in. The above is the result.

Obviously if you’re really cool you just slam the Wurlitzer with your fist and it instantly starts blasting out your favourite 50′s rock and roll hits. But for everyone else there’s this.

Arty Farty Tech Heads?

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Wanted: Graphic designer. Must be really creative yet also happy spending majority of time messing around in code. Apply within.

Scanning the internet recently I came across a job advert that illustrated how many people seem a little unaware of the pace of change going on around them in their own industry. I’ll not bore you with the entire details of the vacancy that triggered this post, beyond saying it was a fairly low wage position stipulating that the suitable candidate would be:

“Fluent using Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, HTML, Dreamweaver”

It’s been widely accepted (if often quietly resented) in our industry for a while that graphic designers have got to just be okay with web designing. As only an idiot would deny, the world has shifted into the online realm quite rapidly and quite comprehensively over the past decade and graphic designers have had to shift with it in order to keep doing what they do. That’s fair enough – stuff needs designing whether printed or on a screen.

The commonly held belief is that you have to move with the times, stop lamenting the loss of the printed page, the smell of fresh ink and any sort of control over the finer details of your typesetting and instead bite the bullet, learn HTML and CSS and stop being so afraid of the internet. Any designer in 2011 still resisting the move is surely just burying their head in the sand, right?

I’m not entirely sure.

Prior to going freelance I spent just shy of four years working exclusively in the digital realm. Designing computer game GUIs I spent my time making things look good entirely in 72dpi RGB. It was interactive and innovative, it was progressive and exciting. I produced work that couldn’t and wouldn’t stand still, where the more immersive and featured it was, the better a job it did. But despite the dynamism, the feature packed excitement and sheer visual indulgence of it all, I found it was causing my design muscles to wither.

The reason was simple. It was all style, and I’m not a stylist. I’m a designer. A communicator. In fact I do this job because I have a passion for communication. I love to write, to talk, discuss, think, to solve problems, to share and develop ideas. I like to interact, to make clear what was once unclear. To see between lines, find themes, to deconstruct and rebuild. That’s what I consider ‘proper’ graphic design – it’s about substance. Style is just the icing on the cake, and as pleasant as icing may be it turns out I can’t dedicate my life to it. A growing lad needs cake.

So I turned my back on my job, a position many would have Gumtreed their kidneys to land, and went in search of substance. Unfortunately the only person that would have considered looking beyond my wilted portfolio and battered motivation at that time was me. So I went self employed and took myself off on a hunt for some good old fashioned print work on which I’d be able to ease my brain back into gear.

Naturally however it wasn’t long before I was required to do some online work. “Do you do websites?” is a request you can only decline so many times when faced with a rapidly dwindling bank balance, and despite my practical professional knowledge of animating, input, feedback and general User eXperience stuff, I’d never actually done any website work. So I forced myself to learn what HTML means and what CSS does. I learnt what PHP is, how FTP works, what DNS stands for and why one needs such a thing. I learnt just enough to put together a basic standards compliant website that could be offered as an interactive side dish to the printed main course I was there to serve. So really, I’ve barely scratched the surface of web design yet I’m already deep within a world of acronyms, of tech, of numbers, settings, rules and code. A world in which the likes of me have absolutely no place.

In that world I feel completely lost. I’m quite thankful to have an aptitude for learning that allows me to pick things up reasonably quickly, but even the bits I understand and can handle still feel alien to me. It’s a bit like putting on lipstick, I suppose. I could learn how to do it until it was the easiest task in the world, but I’m never going to be comfortable wearing the stuff.

Paddling as I am in the very shallow end of the web makes perfectly clear to me that graphic design and web development are two completely different skills. Building websites is about coding. Coding is about unflinching structure where design is about intuition. Coding is about accuracy where design is about ideas. Code is literal where design loves metaphor. Code is on off, yes no where design likes playing with those nuances in between. Code is about compliance and logic where design is committed to questioning the boundaries and challenging logic. The two disciplines are mutually exclusive yet the industry still frequently continues to view them as one and the same.

I can’t blame it, of course. It’s a funny time for the design industry, and has been for a while. It exists in the midst of a technological revolution but there still remains at the top of the tree many creative directors who never quite got on board with these computer things. We have established, Adobe literate senior designers who haven’t got the first clue what HTML or CSS actually is and they’re quietly terrified of it. And as recently as ten years ago design graduates (me among them) were coming out of colleges and universities having never learnt – nor had they ever expected to learn – anything about web design. These guys are the middleweight designers of today.

Across the entire industry you’ve got people who haven’t got a clue what they’re doing, what they might want or even how to ask for it. Just note the wording in the advert above. HTML and Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver? Who uses Dreamweaver? People who haven’t got a clue about the web and mistakenly think Auntie Adobe can rescue them.

I think the industry is currently being pretty short sighted by employing young designers who they assume will “sort all that web stuff”. I don’t think that approach recognises just how big a job that side of things is becoming. Employers are still looking for that jack of all trades who can do a bit of everything, hoping that they’ll then have all the bases covered. These versatile design chameleons are the guys everyone wants right now, but I think the sell by date for that way of working might be imminent.

Once upon a time computers were being invented and built by individuals with soldering irons, an aptitude for maths and rigidly intact virginities. They were wiring circuit boards together by day and scripting software by night. Now here we are just a few years later and there is within the field of computing countless different specialities, with entire industries built around them. Not too long ago you could quite validly claim an interest in ‘computers’. Now that’s too vague a statement to even mean anything.

As the industry moves forward and the world of digital media continues to advance, the technologies behind it are going to specialise and diverge further. Since the industrial revolution the progress of our society has increasingly required all its members to specialise, and there’s no reason this is any different. After all, a sure fire way of guaranteeing that progress stalls is to make everyone mediocre at their job.

So digital media will continue to push forward, taking us to the places we as yet can’t imagine but will soon take for granted, and it’ll reach and pass the point where there’s no longer any room for graphic designers moonlighting as coders. It’ll be too far gone, too in depth. Those at the sharp end of that technology will be dedicated coders, those who’ve specialised in the area, pushing it forward by doing what they do best. And those best suited to designing in that world may well turn out to be those who were committed to developing their design minds while those around them were getting distracted by endless developments in code.

There is of course the quite valid argument that designers have to understand how the web works in order to design for it. Of course I agree, yet I suspect that knowledge and understanding could be taking with one hand what it gives with the other. If you worry too much about what the boundaries are you tend to think only within them. We’re not architects after all – in the digital realm we don’t have to worry about those laws of physics capable of reducing buildings to rubble. The only laws we have are virtual, and they’re being smashed every day.

Some of the most rewarding projects during my previous digital tenure were when we designers would dream up wildly ambitious, apparently pie in the sky ideas that initially got us laughed at. We’d generally be forced to back down in the face of mass programmer rebellion, but the seed would be sewn and soon enough their cogs would start turning and they’d make it work. Massively talented, creative and dedicated in their field, there would never really be anything standing in their way. They’d just never have thought to give it a go until some naive arty farty designer suggested it. It’s because we were there to think not of what the technology allowed, but rather what the end user needed. Not what we could do for the technology, but what the technology should do for us. That’s the kind of thinking, and the kind of teamwork that drives progress. The kind of thing that put Cupertino on the map.

We’re all getting more specialist, and if any agency thinks it can keep its head above water by forever limping along, bodging through the things it finds terrifying and not taking the world of code seriously, I fear they may soon be in for a shock. Because it may well be approaching the time where we must all start working out what we do best and sticking to it.

Employ designers to design and coders to code. Let shine the strengths of each. The skills aren’t interchangeable now and they’re getting less so by the day. Together they work brilliantly, but we need both – not half of each.

I’m not a coder, I’m a designer. So I might as well stick to doing what I do best. If I’m wrong, if I can’t continue to make a living by using my design mind to design, my second port of call certainly won’t be coding. Between here and there lie a whole host of jobs I’d be better suited to, including but not limited to teaching, fixing bicycles or being a cleaner.

I’m not burying my head in the sand trying to avoid this relentless march of technology. In fact I’m craning my neck enthusiastically, trying to look forward, wondering how best we might embrace it. All I can see at this point is an industry moving rapidly forward at a pace that won’t be carried much further by graphic designers reluctantly spending half their working lives struggling to be coders.

It’s Logo, not Lostop.

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There’s every possibility that by the time you read this it will be on a different site to the one I wrote it on. At the time of writing my blog is called ‘Sprungseven’, but I intend to change everything to my own domain at some point in the near future, by which time the blog should carry my real, given name; the one sewn into my PE kit.

The story behind the name ‘Sprungseven’ is a boring and irrelevant one, as I’m sure are the stories behind many hastily decided net handles. It is however an online name I’ve used for some years in order to allow anonymity from the cyber stalking so prevalent on the various chat forums and social networking sites I’ve once frequented and long since abandoned.

So if you’re reading this and wondering what on earth ‘Sprungseven’ is, it used to be the name of this blog. Sorry if that’s a little confusing, but forgive me for not having too much sympathy. You’re from the future – you have hover cars for crying out loud, how bad can your life be?

To those reading this in its original context around the time of first publication, I’m sorry to have wasted three paragraphs’ worth of what I imagine to be your valuable time. And though it’s hard, try not to be jealous of the swanky future readers above – they might sneer at our primitivity from the seats of their gleaming alloy aircars but the zombie apocalypse is a lot sooner for them than it is us.

Preface over.

Branding is the aspect of graphic design I’m most interested in. Specifically, I’m fascinated by the process of Logo design. It’s often said, and I agree, that the ultimate expression of the graphic designer’s art is the design of a good logo. In my opinion there is no greater skill within the industry than condensing an entire company image – with all the complexities that will invariably entail – down into a single instantly identifiable symbol.

In fact my main professional aspiration is to design a truly good logo. If I can one day put my name to something as clever and elegant as the BR double arrow, the Fedex Arrow, the UPS parcel, the Shelter H or the More Th>n more than, I’ll die a happy man.

That might seem like an unlikely achievement but I’m still young. As the More Th>n designer himself says, “identity designers don’t quite find their feet until later in their twenties”, so by that reckoning I have about a year before it clicks and I suddenly find myself crushed under the delightful weight of a thousand yellow pencils. Until that inevitability I suppose I must keep at it, playing around with logos whenever I get the chance in a hope that my skills develop.

One such recent play came about during a bit of a dry spell. I was eager for a bit of branding work but the only projects coming my way seemed to be editorial design. Though I enjoy editorial stuff I was starting to feel a bit of logo withdrawal, so decided to find something to design. Sprungseven would get its first logo.

One of the most satisfying aspects of logo design is when a gift presents itself to you. Finding it can be like a puzzle the designer has to decode. Sometimes, if you look long enough a solution pops right out of the text, offering the perfect opportunity for a simple, elegant design. Sprungseven offered just such a gift. When set in Helvetica, the numerical ’7′ has a graceful curve to its upright, rather like the graceful curve of a tensioned leaf spring; a length of metal deflected under pressure, ready to twang back straight at the first opportunity.

In my sketchbook I began to scribble various ideas, all the time trying to graphically represent the springiness of that character. I drew dodgy leaf springs in the ridiculous hope that the general public is as familiar with the rather outmoded method of vehicle suspension as I am. I drew comic book style wobble lines attempting to show the pressure, the potential energy stored in that vertical. I tried ugly whiz lines and awkward blurred overlays. I doodled a storyboard idea, with frames showing the 7 springing back to it’s ‘original’ shape (similar to an upturned uppercase L). I had practically drawn a cell animation.

It was a mess of an idea. The whole design relied entirely on motion, and here I was trying to show that on a static canvas, all the time categorically failing to adhere to those rules of simplicity and elegance always so obvious in my favourite logos.

“Oh blow it” I resigned, casting my pen down across the desk, sitting back in my seat. “Why can’t it just move? It would be so much easier if logos could move. Why can’t logos move?” I studied the page. “Actually, why can’t logos move?”

Can logos move? I’m tempted to say yes. In 2010, given the right circumstances, why not? In this instance, certainly. Sprungseven has no offline presence in any form. The logo never appears in print. If it exists only in the virtual world, surely a logo need never be static?

I do recognise that there is no shortage of logos that animate. Some of the most familiar logos have animated versions.

There are plenty of logos that can move. But is there room for logos that must move?

Today printed media is rapidly losing out to digital media. Magazine and newspaper publishers struggle to get themselves on the iPhone and the iPad in the hope of tackling the ever dwindling sales threatening their continued employment. High street record shops struggle to keep their doors open while MP3 download figures soar. It’s no surprise when you consider that there now exists an entire generation of consumer that has grown up without that in-built requirement, that feeling of satisfaction to actually hold something physical, to have it sat on a shelf in order to claim ownership.

I’m as clueless about the future of media as everybody else except Jobs, Ive and Schmidt, (well, perhaps I’m a bit more clued up than my mum but that hardly makes me an extra from The Jetsons) but it certainly makes you wonder what changes are around the corner. I must admit to feeling slightly scared about it. The rules have changed – the industry as we know it is transforming rapidly and beyond almost all recognition. It feels as if the rug is being yanked from beneath our feet, and it’s quite disconcerting.

But do you know what? My fears are overwhelmed by excitement. Just a few years ago the thought of designing a logo incapable of standing still would have been laughable, but now it doesn’t seem so daft.

There are a heck of a lot of good logos out there. Sometimes it can be hard to think of new ones without stepping on the toes of those already in use. Often you’ll find a nice solution only for a colleague to walk past your desk and instantly break your heart and crush your spirit by saying those two words most feared by genuine graphic designers: “Been Done”.

Perhaps then as we enter the age of motion-friendly media, an age where timelines play an equal role in design alongside X, Y and Z coordinates, we’re open to a whole new dimension of graphic design opportunity.

Surely there can’t be a designer on the planet who doesn’t find that fantastically liberating.

Addition: Interestingly, it would still be possible to make printed versions of a moving logo using Lenticular Printing. So as it happens, logos don’t even really need to stay still on the printed page. Well, as long as your production budget stretches far enough. Google’s first hit for ‘lenticular business cards’ gave me a quote of £2500 for 2500. A quid per card – eek!

Webgnorance

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It is said that to be a true Cockney, one must be born within earshot of the Bow bells. Similarly it is said that to qualify as a true Sheffielder, one must adore without question Henderson’s Relish.

For anyone unfamiliar with this masterpiece of a condiment, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration if I were to describe Henderson’s Relish as the fundamental meaning of life, bottled. There exists a local bylaw actually stating that should anyone claiming to be a Sheffielder merely make known any feeling other than utter loving devotion towards the Spicy Yorkshire Sauce, it is legal for members of the public to beat them with a David Mellor candelabrum or lump of cooling tower rubble until dead or apologetic, whichever arrives first.

It is not for fear of an intense beating but rather with genuine feeling that I speak of my love for Henderson’s Relish. It is one of the greatest products of our time and anyone claiming otherwise is mistaken, an idiot or worst of all from Leeds.

However, there is one aspect I’m not so keen on. The website. It’s a bit too… good.

It’s widely accepted that any company must have web presence to be taken seriously. In 2010 it’s unthinkable that any company would ignore the internet and fail to provide a page for display on the world’s biggest shop window, particularly now we’re in the broadband-enabled world and the net increasingly becomes the consumer’s first point of contact with the market.

There are though certain brands that I think should ignore the internet. Or at least not really bother with it.

Anyone and everyone can have a website. I have one, for a start. As do you, most likely. Your newsagent could have one, so too the dog walker up the road. The tariff at your barbers might be checked from the comfort of your armchair just as easily as you can price up your next Bang & Olufsen showpiece. An organisation may be large or small, multinational mega-corp or community theatre group, but a half-decent and professional web presence is reasonably easy to achieve. So you see occasionally, I think it pays to rise above it.

The true masters of this are Bristol. Not the city – the car manufacturer. Most people, even car people, are unfamiliar with Bristol Cars Ltd. They manufacture – by hand and in exceedingly low volume, at a steady and considered pace – the most exclusive luxury cars in the world. To visit their single showroom on Kensington High Street and buy one will, after easing you of between £160,000 and £350,000 depending on model and spec, put you behind the hand-trimmed leather and walnut dash of a vehicle so rare as to make Aston Martins appear tediously commonplace.

With this fresh in your mind, I’d like to direct your attention momentarily to their website. Have a quick scan around.

Pretty clunky isn’t it. Basic, visually rather poor in fact. And utterly sublime.

The genius of Bristol is that they trade on mystique. They would prefer 99% of the public be oblivious to their presence, and 99% of those that aren’t to remain incredulous at their existence. And they know that the remaining one percent of one percent will be helplessly drawn to their marque. Their web presence aids this perfectly. Included on the site is all the information one might require; prices, specifications, differential ratios, aerodynamic properties, contact details; it’s all there in the text for the keen potential customer to read. And beyond that there’s nothing. A total lack of decoration, of attention paid to the layout, design, even functionality.

Compare this with the animation and graphic-heavy homepage of the above mentioned Aston Martin; a true bells and whistles approach to the online shop window far more typical of the prestige car manufacturer. Here the clicker is faced with flash animations, lush photography, embossed logos and soft-fade slideshows, greeted with such vapid marketing language as ‘initialising personalisation engine‘. It’s just the sort of website expected by the consumer, yet personally I can’t help but feel such visual vulgarity devalues a brand.

I don’t want to think of Aston Martin execs in meetings with web development teams, marketing gurus and brand image consultants deciding over icons and typefaces. I don’t want them concerning themselves with such irrelevance. I want them to be hand crafting amazing sports cars. It’s what they do, so they should do it.

Thankfully, Bristol appear too cool to have really noticed the arrival of the internet. Their website looks to have been built by the panel beater’s nephew after someone casually suggested they should perhaps get themselves online. They’re too busy being unique and exclusive, slowly working their way through the order books to be too distracted by such a passing and unnecessary fad as ‘the internet’. I notice among the price listings that VAT is still quoted at 15%, and instead of being unimpressed by their failure to update the figure over the previous three months, I’m hugely surprised that they bothered to update it at some point during 2009.

As a result of this indifference to the public, the casual observer is left to decode for themselves the legend of Bristol Cars Ltd. Left to read about the eccentricities of former owner Tony Crook, his vicious snobbery apparent in his frequent tendency to reject those customers undeserving of his cars. Left to scour the land for the handful of books, photos and reviews. To hunt out snippets of information about the illusive and mysterious manufacturer of exceedingly rare and expensive cars. To ponder what possible wonders might reside in the Filton factory, much like the residents of the houses surrounding Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

I love Bristol Cars because the closest I ever came to seeing one was by pressing my nose nervously against the glass of the showroom, hoping not to be beaten away by an angry man with a stick. The brand exists beyond the achievable – they wouldn’t want my attention, and therein lies the magic of Britain’s most exclusive luxury car maker. If you don’t like them, if you struggle to see the value, then please feel free to go quickly and quietly away. Perhaps sir might be more satisfied with an Aston Martin? Look at their website, they’re practically begging for your custom. It’s pathetic.

Bringing things back from Bristol to Sheffield, from the Avon to the Don and from car to condiment. Henderson’s is a truly wonderful company, loved by a devoted public mostly incapable of even describing the taste beyond “reyt nice”. So when I Google it, I don’t want to see a website packed with flash animations and funky graphics. I want no website, or at the very least a rubbish website. I don’t want to know that D4 were briefed to go up the hill and design a ‘funky’ homepage for the brand faithful to visit. I don’t want Henderson’s to acknowledge our existence. I’d rather they just continue to leave us all in awe of their wonderfulness.

I want to think that deep within their anonymous, tatty and rather unimpressive premises lies a labyrinth of racks, tunnels, pipes and tubes; vast halls filled with whirring machinery, pumps, bellows and conveyor belts, fuelled by stainless steel and magic and operated by unicorns and umpa lumpas in ways my human brain could never fathom. I want the production of Sheffield’s Spicy Yorkshire Sauce to remain a mysterious and fantastical legend and that any promotion be accidental and, at best, entirely dismissive of us. I want to be able to make up bylaws about them. To define my locality by them. What goes on behind the doors? Nobody should ever know.

Because I’m convinced that occasionally, just occasionally, in design it really is better to be worse.