GDF Project: Target Audience

Meet Alan and Janet, my target audience guinea pigs. Not a great deal of science involved here - they're based upon my preconceptions of the "recently retired professional". My parents are both recently retired, so I have the benefit of a bit of insider knowledge from them, but the exercise is more about emptying these pre-conceptions out of my head, and making room for some new ones based upon my research. Also to do something visual. The bulk of my work at the beginning of this project has been in the form of lists and notes, so this is a way of converting some of those ideas into visual symbols. For example, Janet's divorce is represented by a pair of broken wedding rings, and the fact that Alan's wife buys his clothes is represented by a pair of Y-fronts. Hmm.I've also been doing some research into Visual Communication theory, to better understand how to communicate effectively with my audience, and what sort of things might get in the way of that communication. Jonathan Baldwin and Lucienne Roberts' book Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice is an accessible introduction to this area, with the inclusion of references to a range of theories by others in the field. According to the VALS system, my target audience of Recently Retired Professionals are "Actualisers":

This modified version of Shannon and Weaver's process model of communication suggests how a messages can be conveyed from client to target audience, via a team of Media Planners, Market Researchers, and Designers. However well conceived or constructed, the intermediary stages of Noise Source and Media Outlet have the potential to distort the message before it reaches the audience. For example, in the weeks following the 9/11, airlines withdrew advertising to avoid the risk of association with the terrorist attacks (a noise source). Just as an airline offering a premium business class service would be unlikely to advertise in the sports pages of the Sun - in this case the media outlet is inappropriate (does not reach the target audience) and would potentially harm public perception of the brand.

IDEO research methods / Zidane

Last week Darren introduced us to a series of target audience research methods developed by design consultancy firm IDEO.

Techniques include Behavioural Mapping, Scenario Testing, Error Analysis, and Quick and Dirty Prototyping.

Here's a behavioural map showing the points at which visitors paused while moving through a room of Joseph Beuys sculptures at

Tate Modern. The crosses indicate all visitors, the dots represent visitors of the appropriate age-range of my target audience for the project.

Another of the techniques, Shadowing, simply involved choosing an innocent bystander to follow around the gallery for half an hour.

Applying this technique to extreme, Turner Prize winning artist

Douglas Gordon made Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary

of a match between Real Madrid and Villareal, filmed in real time by 17 cameras, with the sole focus of the film being Zidane himself.

With no match commentary and very little dialogue picked up from the pitch itself, the film is a sensory, rather than narrative, experience.

Beautifully shot, and with an excellent soundtrack by Gordon's fellow Scots Mogwai, it's well 90 minutes of your time. Meat pie and Bovril

are optional. There's a low-res version of the entire film online here.

22 logos in 22 minutes

Last week I read a post on David Airey's Logo Design Love blog entitled 33 logos in 33 minutes, in which he includes photos of the first 33 logos he sees every morning - toothpaste, shower gel, etc. I had a go at doing the same thing myself, and quickly realised that I see way more than one logo per minute for the first half hour of the day.

(there are probably trappist monks living in complete isolation at the top of mountains in the desert who would struggle to see fewer than one logo per minute while undertaking their morning routines).

So here's a selection of some of the most interesting ones, including the hubcap from a Morris Minor, lip balm from New York, the Coca-Cola logo on the side of a crate bought in a flea market in Rio, and a tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup, which features the bizarre image of a lion's corpse being picked-over by bees*.

*apparently a biblical reference, as is the company's motto - "Out of the strong came forth sweetness". Wikipedia is useful for something!

Chip Kidd & The Cheese Monkeys

This week I've been reading The Cheese Monkeys, debut novel by all-American book jacket designer Chip Kidd. The novel presents the semi-autobiographical tale of the beginning of Chip's college life, and his transformation from naive comic-book-enthusiast to graphic-design-wunderkind comic-book-enthusiast. It includes some sharp, and very funny, observations on the creative process and the college environment:

"On the first day of class, the Visual Arts building reclined before me like an old brick whore, egging me on to show her one, last, good time."

Also featured are Himillsy Dodd, a kind of super-cynical art chick who sounds great on paper but would most likely be intolerable in real life, and "shock-prof" Winter Sorbeck, the sociopathic tutor with whom our hero falls in love. Sorbeck is described as looking like Gary Cooper, circa High Noon. Here is an image of Gary Cooper, and one of Chip below it:

...see what he's done there?

Through his work at Knopf, Chip has become extremely well know, and although John Updike (for whom Chip has designed several jackets) once called his designs "monstrously ugly", he remains widely respected. Some of the designs are a bit ugly, and he can be a bit mannered in his use of imagery (enough with the circa-1950s comic books!) but there's a conceptual nugget at the heart of most of the designs that makes them successful nevertheless. There are a couple of good interviews with Chip in Seeing & Writing 3, and Identity Theory, and here are images of some of the jackets that made him famous:

GDF project: Oxfam, the brand

I won't go into great detail here, but I've decided to side-step the dubious politics of smaller Pressure Groups such as the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice (seriously, these guys are just plain wrong. Just have a look at their self-congratulatory FHM-tastic website) and select a larger organisation as the Client of my GDF project. This will allow me to explore a wider scope range of possible formats (larger budget = more choice), and provide a consistent brand to work with. I'd like to see how creative I can be while working within the confines of a set of existing brand guidelines, as a designer in a real world, or live project would. So - Hello Oxfam.

Oxfam's sprawling website contains details of their core Health and Education Campaign, as well as other issues such as Climate Change, Gender Equality, and Fair Trade. Also featured are profiles of Oxfam health workers from around globe, some quite nifty reshaped world maps created by Mapping Worlds, and most relevant form me, branding guidelines, which give details of the correct fonts, colour combinations, and use of the their logo:

Letterpress: part 2

At long last, the conclusion of our letterpress induction project. As you can see, we adopted an "ambitious approach" (Alex's description, translates as: "they don't know what they're doing, oh God why me???") with regards to the colour scheme, with a fade between two shades of green for the word "GREENER", and a silver and green blend for the smaller text. It took a few attempts to get right, but I think the finished print works. Well done, team.

Fuck Buttons

To celebrate the release of electro-noise duo Fuck Buttons' superb new LP, Tarot Sport, here's a selection of their cover artwork, created by band member Benjamin John Power. Lovely stuff. The progression from the 8-bit graphic influence of the artwork from their first album (top) to the more photoshop-y covers of their new material follows the progression of their music too. I found the image at the bottom in an editorial about the band, and while I'm not sure if it's one of Benjamin's, but I think it fits well with the other images.

Periodic Table of Type

I found these images of a periodic table of type at Steven Heller's The Daily Heller blog. Produced by a guy who calls himself Screenprintedbymatt, there are larger images available here. Matt had planned to produce and sell them as a limited run, but discovered someone else had beaten him to the idea.

Matt's table certainly looks better than the one by the Squidspot guys (in fact most of their work is pretty hideous) but theirs is at least more informative, with the inclusion of designer and year of production. The ranking system is based upon surveys conducted by several other websites, more information on that here.

Wordle + $19 Dollar Logos: The End of Graphic Design

Wordle is a website that creates automatic "word clouds" from your own text, a bit like how with Bablefish you can translate text into a different language. Above is one I made using the lyrics to Prince's Gett Off (though the little fella refuses to allow his music onto youtube, so this link is to a clip of Hilary Swank doing a karaoke version in the film P.S. I Love You. Don't rush out to see it.) Wordle reduces the creative process to the push of a button, just as Bablefish reduces entire languages in the same way. Of course, just because you can "translate", doesn't mean you can actually speak another language. And Bablefish's translations are notoriously, er, bad.

Here's that first paragraph translated into French and back again:

Wordle is a Web site which creates the " automatic; clouds" of word; of your own text, a little as the way in which with Bablefish you can translate the text in a different language. In top one is that j' made using the texts with Prince' ; S Gett with far (although the small type refuses to allow its music on the youtube, thus this bond is with staples of Hilary Swank making a version of karaoke in l' love of book per square inch of film you. Don' ; T precipitate outside to see it.) Wordle brings back the creative process to thorough the d' a button, just like reduced Bablefish of the whole languages in the same way. Naturally, just because you can " ; translate" ; , doesn' ; T mean that you can really speak another language. And Bablefish' ; the translations of S are manifestly, heu, bad.

See what I mean?! Now imagine the same thing happening when translating text into visuals. Wordle seems to provide a way of being "Creative" and "Visual", without having to understand or be either. I can imagine this kind of thing would be very popular in pitches within the boardroom...

Here's one from the Tory-blogging-hub that is Conservative Home, and another (taking the Bible as its subject!) from from St Mary's United Methodist Youth, or SMUMCYOUTH:

Perhaps the boardroom exec's (or their flunkies) is exactly who Wordle is designed for, and I shouldn't get upset about it. But then I can't escape the feeling that it, or other online tools like it, will eventually be harmful to the Graphic Design Industry. We had a discussion in VCT a couple of weeks ago about the recognition and acknowledgement of expertise that Graphic Designs receive as professionals. Not nearly enough, we agreed! The problem being that "Graphic Designer" is a job title that only emerged fairly recently (1950s, or there abouts), so the role doesn't have the heritage possessed by, say, silversmiths or architects. There's no Guild of Graphic Designers to hand-out licenses or certificates of competence.

So, give people the power to create something quickly and without any thought or expense and will they run wild with it, ruining the party for everyone else? Maybe not. Look at the proliferation of £10 logo websites, such as the very straight-forward 19DollarLogos.com:

Would you buy a logo from a company who's own logo looks like that? Credit to them at least for standing by their product. Perhaps someone with not much money and no sense of pride in their own company would be persuaded by arguments as compelling as this -

"FACT 1: In majority of cases the initial logo idea is usually the best.

FACT 2: The more revisions you make, the less professional result is."

...er, okay. Well, at least their work is consistent. In fact, many of their logos look like they could have been automatically generated using drop-down menu parameters. Take a look at this one, where they appear to have spelt "mom" wrong:

Anyway, the point I was eventually getting round to is that plenty if these websites exist quite happily alongside the likes of Wolff Olins. They're at different ends of the food-chain. VERY different ends.

100 Bill Murrays: Part 2.

Okay, another 30 if these damn things out of the way. Less than half left to complete. I've cheated a bit this week and printed off some cut-out element sheets, from images I looked for online. Actually, I thought about this for quite a while and I don't think it is cheating, I'm just "using the available resources". So what do we have?

Rhythm: employing the old fold'n'cut technique.

Humour, perhaps? This is not just because I like Garfield. Bill Murray actually provided the voice of Garfield in the live action/CGI film and it's sequel, Garfield 2.

Texture (though it's not real wood. You have to imagine it is.)
Repurposing? I don't think I've done any of those yet.
This could be Editing, or Composition. Jack Nicholson, of course, from the famous bar scene in The Shining. By this point in the film he had long ago started talking to himself, so it's no surprise to see three Jacks lined-up for a drink here.
Same scene, different cast. Look how similar they are!
...and same guy, different movie. This is Bill Murray as Steve Zissou in Wes Anderson's film of the same name.
Is this wearing thin yet? Bill Murray again, in the same set-up this time, but with better company, in Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. I think I've given up for now on deciding which theme to put these under.
Like a well-oiled machine...
Okay, I know this one, this is definitely REPURPOSING!

And the final one for now, the three characters and the beer reduced to RGB blobs.