Notes from a professional Loafer

Education

The seeming disconnect between designers and everyone else feels bigger than it should. On a couple of occasions over the passed week I've had to deal with a weird design prejudice. I have a client at the moment whom I'm doing a fairly large rebrand for and whilst they are very smart they also have little experience in dealing with design in a formal way. This is totally fine of course and is part of the process (that word again) but what I found odd and very interesting was that when presented with work outside of there fairly limited window of understanding there was immediate suspicion that it was design stuff that no one else under stood. This isnt an unusual response and after a few meetings and a fairly simple non-bullshite explanation and education they came back to it and actually loved it. All pretty par for the course.

Then this week I've been helping out on a new retail brand admittedly not directly with the client but one step back. The client has engaged a marketing agency to launch the brand and because of the lack of budget the agency has pushed to do the identity work as well as all the marcoms stuff. Without getting into the nuances of aesthetics (which to be frank I thought was shite) the work they came back with failed technically to work as a brand mark. Namely it had to work online and small, it had to work embroidered (not too dissimilar) as well as all the other apparel variations. The thing I found shocking was the client’s response; he genuinely couldn't see why it was awful. Anyway the bottom line with this is that there simply isn’t enough main stream design understanding and there is a massive hole there waiting to be filled. In part its the job of designers to do that with clients but when you look at the amount of interior or architecture mainstream media it makes one wonder why? Is it graphic design is some how irrelevant to people’s everyday lives?  my feeling is it's a mixture of shoddy designers baffling clients and the fact that it’s simply not presented as well as other design...an opportunity me thinks.

oxford stuff

okay here's some of it

Got more leccy on the key

I've just got around to sorting my typepad account but I have been very busy honest. It seems the xmas rush wasnt just a seasonal blip. It does in fact feel like the economy is looking up but I wont edge my bets. Work this month includes a brand and ad campaign for Oxford University (which Ill put up as a case study as soon as I get an hour). I'm currently developing a brand and all materials (web, marketing etc...) for a Facilities House in Soho, again Ill post examples soon but the process has been a real pleasure...at least so far...

The Xmas Rush

My silence is proof of a ridiculous surge in work where I'm litter ally having to turn stuff down. Work recently has been so diverse its almost comical, everything from a home furnishing business road show - literally concepting an articulated lorry that showcases furniture and has a range of touch screen devices inside, to a brand strategy and "adcepts" for a motorsport division of a car business, to a store launch design concept for a major sports brand. I've just finished a marketing strategy for a leading education establishment whose proposition was "selling the university to those that have the talent but not the cash" by way of bursaries. Tomorrow Im flogging data services to SME's...this is esentially putting ideas together and then realising them and all I can say as an Art Director is thank fuck for Copywriters!

Its all feeling rather random at the moment... I'll put examples of stuff up as and when I get five minutes as its another interesting example of ideas v execution...in this instance almost all the work has been won on good ideas basically executed.

Ideas

Something struck me recently whilst looking into copyright for a client. It's a thought I've had before about the nature of ideas. A friend of mine, Matt Jones  who is a very clever chap, came up with the idea of Warchalking and for a while there the idea looked set to out grow its owner. Rather than Matt "owning" the idea the idea started to own him to the point that no matter how far away he tried to position himself from it the more it came back to get him. It got so bad that various government bodies in the States wanted to talk to him regarding the threat this idea had posed. Kinda cool really and begs the question about copyright. I guess others weren't keen to claim ownership of his idea as the idea itself was dangerous and not valuble so the laws of copyright weren't needed. Which is both sad and extremely exciting. I love the thought that an idea can run amock and become far bigger than any individual. I guess history is littered with examples of this...Communism, Capitalism, dare I say it but most of the big religions... Its almost the test of an idea; can it be bigger than the simple context in which it was created? Yes? then its a corker but dont expect to own it it now owns you!

Approach

Following on from my thoughts on process I've found that there seems to be two basic approaches to the creative process in terms of idea generation. The first is to approach the problem purely conceptually and seems to be a very Ad driven direction where a great deal of thinking and "Planning" goes in up front before the craft of creation takes place. The second approach is so deal with the problem from a layout or design point of view where the thinking is done in the craft. I quite often find this the only point of difference between Advertising and Design where advertising can often charge for the thinking seperately and design lumps it into the design process. In reality I think the two concepts merge but agencies do tend to lean in one direction or the other.

So the following work is for a small agency Ive been working for on and off who approach problems from a design perspective and while I think the solution works (in fact Im very happy with it) I feel it may limit any stretch or campaignability the solution might have.

The work formed part of a pitch that the agency won, the image with the player and the type is the final solution. I've only included the work I created directly, that said the final solution was very much a collaborative process.

Street Football

Process

In Octobers Blue Print there is a comment piece about the faliure of Graphic Design to be taken seriously and the lack of good journalism on the subject. Its by the venerable Rick Poynor and he does what few journalists do when commenting on Graphic Design, he actually slags people off, he actually has an opinion, which is applaudable. Commenting that some "...already regard Graphic Design as lightweight..." and not taken seriously when compared to other disciplines ie Architecture, Product Design, Photography etc... He comments that most design journalism is at fault by lauding the next big thing without much substance," why run a whole article lauding the barely established Neasden Design Centre?" - (an article that ran in Blue print itself). He goes on to say, rightly, that there isn’t enough critical design writing out there, especially in main stream media, targeting magazines such as Graffik for merely offering pictures and not much depth, this goes for Creative Review too in my opinion. Anyway to my point...

Why would NDC's lack of establishedness mean their work is anyless intelligent and incisive? Poynor has talked at length about the likes of Peter Savile and seems to suggest that his breadth and depth of work allows for deeper critical analysis and presumably better critical writing? To be fair if we are drawing parallels between other disciplines, say architecture, then the same argument would have written off Future Systems who only really got on the map after the Lords Media Centre. Presumably, one significant piece of work isn’t enough to offer good critical writing? The point Im trying to get to here is that looking indepth at design doesn’t mean writers can only focus on established big names. In fact it seems much more interesting to look at emerging talent and encourage critical debate at that level than retread the usual suspects.

SO why is this called "process" you ask? Well I've been working at various design studios recently and have found the process of creation at each a real eye opener. The process itself being as interesting, in fact very often more so, than the actual work itself and this seems a very interesting way to approach design critique, to look at the way the work has been produced (and I dont just mean on a Mac) and then apply the analysis.

The underlying rationale from brief to client reaction adds the depth that graphic design writing misses. If the writing itself started to properly engage with the design process then I think it would not only improve but also make graphic design that much more accessible to a bigger audience and by default elevate its standing through understanding and believe me the amount of architects I know that don’t have a clue about graphics is very surprising.

Mike

Is this thing on?

So it's taken me a few years to get around to this and in all honesty I remain unconvinced. My main impetus for doing something so frankly vain and self indulgent (others Im sure will correct me on this) is to catalogue my work and thought processes as they happen. I've spent many years working either with my own business or as a gun for hire and have failed to keep track of all the work and and the processes involved. I've made an effort of offering my passed four years work at loafism.com but feel this blog is a more interesting way to keep upto date and may well prove interesting to other designers out there who are or plan to freelance.

Where possible I intend to show the workings and daily thoughts of the agencies and projects I work for as well as any other inane ramblings that pop up.

As a designer I reserve the right to spell and write badly you'll have to take me as I come, or to quote:

"how many designers does it take to change a light bulb?"

"I'm not fucking changing anything!"

Mike