Welcome to Room557

Listening to Understand

Listening is a skill. As a designer, listening is as much of a skill as picking the perfect typeface… more so, really. But when we say “listen”, we often forget that the concept has many facets.

Like George Nelson showed us in his book How to see, listening — like seeing (vs. looking) — can have very different outcomes depending on how you approach it. More often than not, we approach it from the wrong angle.

We listen to reply.

We need to listen to understand.

Keeping yourself honest

When you're working on a project, it's easy to get distracted... and even procrastinate. It's important to keep yourself honest along the way. There will always be bad days and time will slip away, but it's important to know where you are and make realistic plans. Conversely, don't try to fool yourself.

For instance, If I was a field hand and I needed to shovel 50 pounds of grain per week, I might look at it this way: If the week started out rough, Monday might be a wash. Tuesday and Wednesday might also suffer... But on Thursday, I might kick it into high gear and finish out the day ahead. For this, I feel really good about myself and the overall scope of work — and I worked hard, so there should be some satisfaction there. On Friday, still feeling good, I treat myself to a slight break... hey, it's Friday, right? I finish out the week feeling pretty good and enjoying the break I gave to myself. Sound familiar? Of course, it does... we all do it. Of course, we also fail to go back and look at the reality of the math and see that we're nearly a day behind schedule.

Brand frameworks: Circles and lines

We know that people have a need to wrap things up, compartmentalize, and see things in tidy boxes. It's how we're wired. When creating communications, we keep that tendency in mind and find ourselves boiling down complex ideas into more manageable bites, or diagrammed out via doodles... or both.

The framework of the universe that a brand creates is no different. The idea behind Mr. Clean is just as easily drawn as it is conceptualized... but when drawn, you can see how something might live outside of the "brand universe" it has created.

In our branding classes, I encourage students to "draw it out" as well. Following my mantra: If you can't draw it, you probably can't properly explain it... by drawing out how a brand presents itself (and where it lives and/or doesn't live) can help to structure it in any number of positive ways for both the designer and the audience... generally helping to frame it in the minds of both.

Genie Questions (+ the 3-question rule)

Students always have questions… which is awesome (when they don’t, we worry). As instructors, we try to help guide them to answers (and sometimes simply provide them).

This semester is particularly busy and time is in short supply. For brevity, I’ve had to qualify and clarify the idea of questions. I’ve not looked at fancy delineations like questions for clarity or questions of intention. Those are great frameworks, but, like a lot of things: what works in a textbook doesn't work as well in a classroom.

Instead, it's about: Genie Questions.

[Boom Zahramay: Do genies really deserve the bad rap?]

Gill Sans and Orange Chicken

Typefaces and their personalities can be like spices and sauces in cuisine — they can be very specific to a genre or area and give off very specific feeling. But, if you’re not familiar with the nuances and subtleties of them, you might miss quite a bit along the way.

For instance, if you’re not familiar with the varied cuisine of China you might think of Panda Express as great Chinese food… and you’d be missing the point (and minimizing a great culinary legacy by way of a mediocre chain restaurant). In a similar way, someone not familiar with Roman typography might look at sans-serif faces and consider them all basically the same.

However, a typeface like Gill Sans has a legacy in Great Britain that is tied to pride during wartime. This sentiment is not shared by their American counterparts — and late 20th century allegations into Eric Gill's personal life questions whether we can separate the art from the artist (For the record, I'm not a fan). They would have feelings towards different faces — also based on where they might have historically encountered them. For instance, faces like Franklin Gothic would make many Americans think of early educational materials like flashcards and children’s books. However, to someone with only a vague familiarity of the nuances of the two typefaces, Gill Sans and Franklin Gothic might seem pretty much the same — they’re both “Orange Chicken”.

“Keep Calm” was one of three posters created by the British Ministry of Information in 1939 in response to public concerns over Hitler’s invasions into Europe.

Brand Thinking is Diagrammatical Thinking

(or how American Apparel took over the world)

In our early classes, we look at Gestalt principles and learn that people are coded to be a bit lazy — that we tend to see things in groups, lines and structured arrangements... and even if they're not truly there, we kind of make them up simply to put our minds at ease. As communication designers, knowing these things helps us connect to our audiences more effectively. The same principle helps movie makers make more enjoyable films. It helps chefs make more interesting dishes.

When we look at brands, we can also look at these same tendencies. We can look at the sentiments of stability, trust, and comfort that these ideas bring to our minds... These are things that brands generally strive to achieve.

[Speaking of uncomfortable: When your critically acclaimed (and awesome) show is canceled, and all that's left are re-runs and bottles of cleaner on the discount rack...]

 

IN THE CLASSROOM

In GR604: The Nature of Identity, the challenge for students is to re-discover the soul of a dead, dying or defunct brand. The soul is not what a brand makes, but what it stands for.

Avon isn't about make-up, it's about women and opportunities. The soul of Mary Kay is similar, but a bit different, a bit more business-focused — and with a pick Cadillac — a lot more demonstrative. Pan Am is about cultural exchange. Maxtor is about preserving information and memories. Tupperware is about organizing the precious things in your life.

After choosing their brand and doing a lot of research, students are then challenged to envision where else their chosen brand might be able to take an offering like this. If Mary Kay was about opening doors to business opportunities for women, in 1963, that meant (to them) selling make-up door to door. What could that mean in today's context? What kind of service could they offer? What kind of educational offerings or co-branding opportunities could exist? This obviously goes far beyond the logo. This is also why this class lives at the graduate level. It's a lot of fun and yields some amazing projects. Our students can not only make pretty things, but know how things work — and most importantly why they work.

However, in the knowing of how and why, the idea of structured thinking comes into play... or as I've begun to call it in class: Diagrammatical thinking.

I often say:

"If you can't draw it, you probably can't really explain it."

The Rise of the Brand of Brand(tm)

Branding is bullshit. However, it’s bullshit that people willingly line up for, pay extra for, and — in some very sad cases — will incite very real pain in the lives of others. And it’s something that good designers need to understand because the reasons that people subscribe the idea of “brand” gets at the very should of why we sign up for anything… and to understand that gets at the very heart of communication and cut-through (if that’s even possible these days).

In the 2016 election year, the need to reach people in very meaningful ways has become dreadfully apparent.

On the flip side, it’s gotten out of control in a very different way. I’ll present to you… a slipper.

It’s a cool slipper. It’s clever. It seems well designed and fairly well made, but it’s a slipper. You put it on your foot. You wear it around. It’ll stink pretty badly after a short while… and you’ll need to buy more.

And like a lot of new brands trying to get a foothold in today’s cluttered brand-scape, you’ll find it first through social media and Mahabis came to me through Facebook. After the 843rd ad viewing, I finally clicked on the little square partly in the hopes that it’d go away after I did.

Ok… interesting site. Cool slipper.

 

Get Un-confused

Yesterday, when working on a conceptually difficult assignment in an early class, a student said: “But, I’m confused!”…

We paused, reflected on that statement and I replied:

The things about that, is that there are two ways that can be interpreted: (1) 'I’m confused as to what to do' or (2) 'I’m confused as to what I’m going to do next.’…

The student had a knowing look cross their face and nodded... 

Typographic How-to (some basics)

Combining type has often proved vexing for early designers in the same way that combining flavors might be vexing for early chefs. Proficiency will come with experience and you’ll begin to rely on a few tried and true combinations, but you’ll need a place to start. Like with many things, you have your go-to's: Those jeans you look great in. That song-list that always lifts your spirits. That combo of wine and chicken risotto that is always a crowd pleaser. What's your type go-to?

In your earliest type classes, you might have been presented with a list of approved or safe typefaces. These are like the USRDA is to nutrition: this is the amount of vitamin-C will prevent scurvy, but might not lead to optimum health. In the same way, those dozen or so faces might not get you in trouble (and they're a great place to start), but they probably won’t turn heads either. At this point, you need to begin to do your own investigation and find your own solutions to create your own plan for optimum typographic health. We’re not saying that you’ll never use Garamond and Univers again, but it’s likely that you might find combinations that evoke more of the type of style and emotions that you’re after with a bit of investigation. Also, this list does not take context into account. In many cases, you'll want to choose type based on context in the same way you choose an outfit for a party... what type of party is it? Not every party is a white-Tshirt-and-jeans type of party (that's you, Helvetica.). However, few parties are costume parties, so be careful of faces that are too decorative—or costume-y.

[You might even consider a categorical "pick-one-from" approach to type selection...]

Meanwhile, at the airport...

(I'm teaching this summer. I'm also traveling this week. I typed this up for the class as a way to think about the depth of engagement of the communications they design.)

While brevity is great, do not conflate it with inadequacy. As designers, you need to communicate on levels that are succinct at the surface, but give an opportunity to "dive in" a bit more if the reader has the time or inclination. Sometimes, I call this the 2-second, 20-second, 2-minute + 20-minute read (and 2-hour read, if appropriate).

Imagine yourself at the airport waiting for your plane. You're at the newsstand. You look over at the magazines and all have a 2-second read on the cover. This entices you and tells you immediately, through visuals and text, which one might suit your fancy. You pick one one — Shape magazine, because you're on a fitness bender.

Thumbing through the magazine quickly, even for 20-seconds, you get a very good idea of what the entire magazine is about.

You check your watch... Dang! You still have quite a while before your plane begins to board. You give the magazine another flip-through and this time look a bit deeper into some sections — you get a bit more out of that pass (and in some areas more than others in particular) with a 2-minute pass through the magazine.

You hear an announcement that your plane is delayed and you figure: Heck, it's a good magazine... and buy it. You sit at the gate area and start to read deeply into a single article — the 20-minute read.

Your plane boards and you settle in for a long coast-to-coast flight only to discover that your iPad battery is a 2% — Dang! ... good thing you bought that magazine. You settle in to read the magazine from cover-to-cover for the 2-hour read.

Designers are challenged every day to tailor their communications to the ways in which the audience will best absorb them, but even then, it's hard to tell exactly how it might go. In this case, your audience is a fitness-minded person with extra spending money (for magazines). But if they have little time or a lot of time is hard to tell (and might even vary from person to person), so giving them something at every level of engagement is a wise move.

(How can you use this the next time you deliver something to an audience?)