Spring Forth

MONOICONO has been working with our good friends over at Innerspring. Based out of the bastion of progressivity in Portland, Oregon, they offer services in hypnotherapy and hypnobirthing. Both of these bring a unique design challenge. After all most imagery associated with hypnosis involves spirals and swirly eyed crazy people.

To combat those associations we went for something that struck the chords of balance and serenity. Almost all the elements are symmetrical the (the rosette pattern, the monogram) or have a specific rhythm (the dots and descending letters in the wordmark). To give the identity a little life there is the stippled pattern from the monogram that subtly suggests a spring bubbling to life.

So if you're in the Portland area and are perhaps in a family way, or looking to quit smoking or any plethera of issues check her out.

Time Is All Relative

Designers tend to bill by the hour, which is why they describe a generally drawn out process by which they arrive at their conclusions. This stems from the fact that they feel they have to "show their work" in order to generate value. Yet as many designers can attest, the big idea is often generated within 30 minutes of hearing the problem. Their accumulated experience allows them to understand what they need to do in an instant. But you don't want to call the client 30 minutes after a meeting and say, that will be one million dollars please. I mean you didn't do anything! It didn't take any time! Except that it did. And in the end your time isn't what they're paying for, the time they're paying for is their own.

First off there's the Paula Scher quote "it took 30 minutes and 30 years. Designers who have dedicated time to the profession can work quickly, but that by no means infers that the idea didn't take time to percolate. More important is the fact that the client is really paying for their time.

They are investing in their brand and their voice. When done right this can be something that holds incredible value for a long time. Hence they aren't paying you for your 30 minutes, they're paying for the years of value their brand gives them. At this point what would a rival big box retailer pay to achieve the brand value of Target? This value exists on a smaller scale as well.

Designers don't need to be afraid to charge good money for their service. Clients are getting something significant in return. Are there sometimes more important things for some businesses to spend their money on? Yes. Do designers feel as though they are in competition with those things? Yes they do. This is why designers need to stand strong in the storm of questions around their value and work with clients to help them gauge how important their brand truly is. If it makes a a big enough difference, a client won't care if the idea came to you after weeks of research or like a lightning bolt while you were on the john. Time is a valuable commodity and the more longevity their brand has the better the deal looks to them all the time.

Design Jobs

There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said about the importance of Steve Jobs. He (along with an army of talent at Apple) has quite simply changed the way we interact with the world, what personal computing actually means and how we entertain and educate ourselves. Not bad for only 56 years of life.

Jobs had a particularly distinct impact on the lives of designers. He created a revolution in design. As with all revolutions there are losers (typesetters, production artists...) and there are those that benefit. The Macintosh democratized the wold of design and while many professionals bemoan those effects, we are all the better for it. Every designer born before 1980 remembers their first experience with a Mac like it was the Kennedy assassination.

Designers' relationship to Jobs was diehard not just because we used his product every day, but because he was the living embodiment of the idea that good design driving good business. Apple has been the shining beacon on the hill. Without Steve Jobs the light is inescapably dimmer.

Cult Of Personality

 

Designers live in fear of the committee. When working through design problems committees are often where good ideas go to die. A huge problem with groups of people needing to sign off on ideas is the fact that once an idea gets run through a bunch of people's checklist all of the things that make something unique get stripped away. Any corners get rounded and anything that yells gets hushed. In the end the design is faceless and blends into the background.

Creative endeavors that are revered often have the stamp of an individual. Great companies are often remembered for the personalities of their leaders. Apple, Google, GE, Facebook, IBM, Coca Cola, Ford... the list goes on but all of these brands at some point were led by individuals with hugely distinct styles of leadership and public perception.

Yet even at companies large and small there needs to be "buy-in" in middle management. Hence committees are formed. It is a management problem and a designers bain. But the idea of personality can help focus committees and also help generate better designs. It is sometimes not enough to have a targeted creative brief. Creative briefs no matter how targeted can be solved in a variety of ways. Perhaps along with the companies rationale the question of what kind of personality this committee or company should have needs to be asked.

You don't even have to talk in specific traits. You can speak in generalities. Are they Elvis people or Beatles people? Are they conservative or progressive? Are they Joe Friday or Monk? These things help to define the voice they want to use and are more relevant to attitudes than color and form. The right personality is the essence of a brand. And a committee doesn't have to stand in the way of that fact.

Design Snobbery: If You're Going to Blow, Might As Well be a Blowhard

A little while back over at Design Observer, Adrian Shaughnessy posted a tidbit about the riots in London. It was soon clear he touched off a nerve as 95 comments came rolling through ranging from "great article" to one commenter calling Mr. Shaughnessy a dick.

The thrust of the article puts part of the blame for the riots at the feet of designers. More specifically he addresses designers involvement in a culture of consumerism. This consumerism creates desires that some cannot meet and Shaughnessy suggests when the right spark comes along it releases a pent up frustration in the havenots to loot and destroy storefronts. Here's Shaughnessy:

The principal target was a highly successful chain of shops called JD Sports. It sells fashionable street wear. Other popular targets included mobile phone shops, electrical goods stores, and outlets of leading UK fashion brands.

All these shops spend huge amounts of money on branding, on store layout, on window displays, and slick advertising. Their ads leap at us from newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and the Internet. Celebrities endorse their products. They are little shrines of desire.

Despite one or two gleefully publicised cases, the majority of the rioters came from poor homes in the least desirable, least well-resourced areas of England’s major cities. They come from places with low achievement rates in education, and where employment prospects are low.

These young people are not poor in the sense in which we understand poverty in the undeveloped world. They have Blackberrys (the encrypted Blackberry messaging system was used extensively to coordinate attacks), fashionable jeans, and cool footwear: but they are poor enough to have a sense of being excluded from the great orgy of consumer acquisitiveness that is flaunted in front of them daily.

Specifically, they are excluded from the world of desire and consumption created by the brand owners, advertising agencies, art directors, graphic designers, photographers, product designers, retail designers, architects, stylists, retouchers, and copywriters.

I can see how something like this can provoke the idea that this is all patently ridiculous. Shuaghnessy does himself no favors by being overly myopic in his description of the targets. Perhaps JD Sports were targeted using smartphones, but rioters were burning cars and destroying mom and pop stores all over the city. Private property, businesses, lamp posts... it didn't matter.

Additionally it's hard to reconcile the notion that people running around with Blackberries and $100 Nikes are so upset over the fact that they can't have Mercedes and Louis Vuitton handbags that they decide to steal more $100 Nikes. I can't have Louis Vuitton luggage either. I won't even get into the armchair psychology he gets into in terms of the level of the rioters' education or manner of upbringing.

All of that said, I don't want to let designers off the hook for the role they play in consumerism. Nor do I want to downplay how consumerism and the economic realities that result from it don't have ramifications (sometimes riotous!) Designers love to talk about the "power of design" yet shy away from the idea that they would be partially responsible for something that sounds as diabolical as consumerism. We don't want our work to be labeled as "slick advertising." That makes us all sound like shysters trying to dupe someone out of a buck.

Yet you can't have your cake and eat it too. Design works. Design is good business and indeed design generates desire. Truly good design also creates beauty. In the world of branding it creates a rewarding experience. In the world of products it can create simplicity. When done correctly no wonder design creates desire. It's almost the whole point. Massimo Vignelli describes design as getting rid of "vulgarity." Design replaces those things that degrade our visual environment and improves them.

The moral question designers need to deal with are how to balance making a living (as Madonna says, we are living in a material word) with perhaps turning down work for folks that want to use design to exploit, mislead or generally inflict more vulgarity on the world. I'm not going to say the folks at Landor were amoral when they created a beautiful identity for BP that suggested BP was a shiny happy eco-friendly company. Besides, I'm sure they sleep well on their mattress full of $100 bills.

When thinking about design and consumerism, we have to remember that design doesn't create haves and havenots. Economics, public policy and political battles create them. Your moral duty as a designer is to decide who you serve and what ends do they serve. That's all you can take responsibility for, not criminal behavior of others*.

*None of this is to say that that the politics and decisions made by those in power don't deserve some sort of reaction It is above my pay grade, and out of my sphere of knowledge to know anything about politics in the UK.