Inspiration Galleries: They’re Fake

December 13, 2010 | 1 comment

I used to have a whole chain of inspiration galleries on my RSS feed.  I’m sure they exist for other hobbies, but in graphic design they are normally just logos that get posted to tumbler-like sites and those sites moderate (often not enough) and post in a quick stream.  There can be hundreds of logos a day or just a few a week.  I’m about to argue that they are mostly useless, but here’s two if you’re interested: Logomoose, Logo Gala.

As you’re zipping down your tumbler feeds, presumably looking for inspiration, you can’t help but notice some clever, racy logos that come by.  The one on the left, for instance, isn’t expertly designed but it does grab your attention.  But then you’ve got to wonder.  The client doesn’t mind having a big ‘ol middle finger for a logo?  Mightn’t that start things off on the wrong foot with their clients?  Was that on the cover letter to the bank when they applied for a business loan?  Having had clients before, logos like this make me skeptical.  How could you and why would you convince a client to go with such a jarring mark?

My theory is that there are no clients.  I look a 3 month group of postings from more than a year ago from LogoMoose and started looking into them on a case-by-case basis.  A year should be enough time (and I’m totally guessing here) to dodge the designers who posted the work to galleries before the brand launch in the interest of self-interest.  I also checked a few comparison galleries to see if there were some that had radically different statistics.  I didn’t find any, but honestly I couldn’t get a handle on why one gallery or another would be different and there must be a hundred of them.  None that I could find were bragging that they only show real logos.  Too much moderation overhead, I guess.  Below were my findings.

Clarification. “Fake client” means that I couldn’t find any project associated with the logo in places where I should have been able to.  Logos with web domains that there was no trace of online.  Really specific names that don’t show up in any web search or if they do are clearly unrelated to the logo at hand.  “Fake project” means that I found a probable client but they were not using the logo.  In many cases it was obvious from their website that they wouldn’t have commissioned one either.  “That’s you” because the project was self-referential.  This was often easy to spot because the listed designer matches the mark, but sometimes I had to dig a little deeper to find out that the client and the designer were both managed by the same person.  Our silver lining category, “real” are entries that were all actual logos used by actual clients.  Finally, “?” means that there is just no way for me to be certain.  You’ve entered a logo for Reliable Construction and I find about a million companies out there, but none of them are using that logo, at some point I get tired of going through pages of google hits with no way to narrow down the search, so I put a little ? next to it in the spreadsheet.

Why is it important that you be inspired by real work instead of fake work?  Because if there’s no client, it’s not work that falls into any useful category.  If the logo is the tip of the branding iceburg, surely the logo without any client feedback or satisfaction to worry about doesn’t even constitute real work.  It’s like writing haikus without worrying about the syllables.   Graphic design without clients is really just straight art.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but that means that your made-up logo needs to compete in a whole new arena… like against Shepard Fairey or at least the designers of the Idiocracy logos.  Designing fake logos teaches us almost nothing about designing real ones.

Brand Mimicry

November 6, 2010 | No comments

So when you weed your garden, you are playing the role of the dupe in a complicated selection process that inevitably leads to useless plants that look remarkably similar to useful ones.  That term, “dupe,” is the scientific term, honest to god.  You’re not going to find every weed and pull it out.  You’re more likely to miss the weeds that look similar to the plants that you’re trying to keep, so you are accidentally but selectively breeding a mimic species that will come to look more and more like the model species.  It’s a type of mimicry called Vavilovian.

Wait, I’ve been assuming that you garden.  This is a probably because I’ve officially joined the ranks of the married and can’t imagine why you wouldn’t.  I’m going to use the then-upcoming wedding as an excuse for why I haven’t posted in so long.  Another excuse is that I never wanted this blog to be strictly about poking fun at other people’s work, I also want to put some of my own out there to make sure other people can poke back if they are a little bitter.  I promise two posts in the near future: my own wedding designs and an act of  guerrilla micro-branding.

In the meantime, here’s where I was going with the Mimicry thing.  CVS Brand hand lotion.  The CVS Brand exists in a mostly sterile form, soaking up only the colors of top-selling brands around it until it lands right next to a top selling brand like Aveeno.  Then it soaks up the entire color palette and the background imagery.  This is almost exactly like the story of the weeds in your garden, except that those weeds lack intentionality.  The brand designers for CVS knew exactly what they were aiming for.

And what seems especially ironic about it is that Generic brands started as an out-and-out rebellion against the idea that branding should influence buying habits.  Why should a company focus its energy on advertising and package design when it can focus on cutting cost and offering the same quality product?  This rejection of marketing seems like it could come right out of Adbusters, but it goes back at least as far as the New Deal with a store brand called Always Save.  Then, somewhere along the way, a few generic brands decided that marketing was useful, but just too darned expensive.  And so why not just mimic a brand that someone else has already paid to build?

Vistas and Ditches

March 17, 2010 | No comments

Sure, it’s possible that in Windows Vista, the prettiest UI you’ll see all day is a spyware pop-up that warns, “You Have a Virus.”  But Vista isn’t a soaring high-spot in the Windows landscape as its name implies, it’s really more of a deeply dug trench or even a mass grave, looking up at XP on one side and 7 on the other.

Among the innovations that Vista UI brought-about: (A) puts your computer to sleep, not the power button, despite appearances. (B) the lock is a handy tool that takes you to the login screen without logging you out, in case you have to step away for a cup of coffee and don’t want any Germans to see what you’re working on. (C) opens a menu where you can power down or reset your computer, in case A and B can’t help you. (D) acts as a full system search for files, sure, but it also replaces XP’s “Run…” dialogue box, and there’s no hint of that in the help files, even if you use the full system search.  (E): Windows logo in a Dr. Shoel’s Shoe Insert?  (F) is a new button that “switches between windows” in case you lose the task bar.  Which this button is on.  When I first saw this button, I thought it might let me switch back to XP, but apparently it only means applications.  (G): Traction nubs.  So you don’t slip?

To compare this to OS X Leopard’s Dock would just be unfair.  In fact, to comparing it to a cheap rip-off of Mac’s dock for use on a Vista machine would be unfair.

PC users are baffled by the loyalty that Apple seems to hold over its followers.  A friend of mine recently forwarded me a very condescending email from Apple in which they said they were willing to–just this once–restore the applications to his iPhone that he had lost when he had to factory restore it.  These are applications that he had paid for.  What they were reluctantly agreeing to do was allow him to re-download the files.  Negligable bandwidth.  I explained that my Android-powered phone would let me re-download those applications as many times as I needed to without me having to write a supplicating email to anyone.  Next thing I knew, I was surrounded by iPhone users, all eager to defend their company.  My friend even insisted that the only reason he sent the email was to show me how awesome Apple Customer Service was.

The only real explanation I can offer for that loyalty is how pretty Apple is.  Everything they make is gorgeous, every ad they create is fantastic.  Most of the best design software caters to the Mac (or even iPhone — Running Double keeps featuring some fantastic shots taken with and edited on their fancy phones) probably because artists are more attracted to the products.  Their color schemes are black and white and all the loudest colors.  Sometimes all together, and it’s not at all garish.  Microsoft trys to play it safe with design that’s right at the top of the bell curve (once the bell curve has caught up with Apple), and somehow it always comes off as tacky.   Cases in point are the new application icons for Office 2010, care of Brand New.

I like the new ads for Windows 7,  and maybe it will really be a hit, but somehow I doubt it’ll last.  Oh well, I can always root for Google.

The Glasgow Cheapskates vs. The Marque Gougers

March 14, 2010 | No comments

Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games  buys an identity from a big firm called Marque.  After all the testing and choosing and cutting of red ribbons, they decide that their brand new logo looks too much like previous work of said firm. They feel that some other client paid for some of that groundwork and so they are entitled to a discount.   Marque feels like they did all the labor and so are entitled to the agreed-upon sum.  Who’s right and who’s wrong?  First, let’s look at the claim that the logos look so similar.  

The logo on the left is obviously for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, while the one on the right is for The Common Guild.  They aren’t that similar.  They’ve got some circles and a G that looks like it’s constructed out of part of a circle.  That’s about as far as it goes.  Besides that, it’s not as if the Marque just made a logo and walked away with $130,000 for the work.  They built the whole identity package.  Just as they did for The Common Guild (who claims to’ve paid far less than Glasgow did). 

Then, of course, it’s not as if the client had no say at all in how their logo turned out.  They probably picked this (boring) option from amongst exciting ones.  And, hypothetically, they could have pushed Marque in the direction of other boring logos that they had seen before.  It wouldn’t be fair for them to get a discount for their own bad taste, would it?

Lastly.  You thought you were just buying a logo?  And then you went and spent $130,000 dollars on it?  During a global recession?

Logodesignlove has some trash talk in the comments about the design itself.  I really wanted to poke fun of it myself, but–Sorry, Glasgow–you just made it so hard.

Merck buys Millipore

March 1, 2010 | No comments

Let’s just hope they don’t change the logo to make it look all pixelated.

News Link

How Not to Find a Graphic Designer

February 21, 2010 | 2 comments

There are 16.5 million entries in google that show up when you search for that exact phrase.  If you start clicking, you’ll learn that you should ask your friends and professional acquaintances where they got their design work done, assuming you like it, and start a list.  Start crossing people off of that list if you don’t like their portfolio, if their prices are outside your budget, if they only list an email address as a contact, if they don’t communicate quickly, etc.  All pretty common-sense stuff.

Luckily, this post isn’t about common sense.  Here are some common-nonsensical ways to add to and subtract from your list of candidates.

by reading design blogs.  Here you can get a sense of how excited someone actually is to be doing design work.  Hint: you want them to be excited about it.

by reading what a designer has said about completed projects.  Do they still have respect for the clients and finished work, or do they belittle it or create a bad association with it?  Take for example, the Reuters logo that was supposedly inspired by a toilet flushing.  That brand is now tarnished (a bit like an old toilet).

designers who make it look effortless.  A modest designer at the beginning of their career will make very stripped down, minimal stuff.  A designer with tons of experience will do basically the same thing (though hopefully better).  It’s the ones in the middle there, with their fancy new skillaz, that you have to watch out for.

designers who want to sell you on a bunch of symbolism.  Hey, didn’t I just write about that?

weirdos who keep talking about “vision.”  I’ve recently gotten engaged, and we were out looking for wedding photographers.  One thing that Adrienne (of Hungry Bruno fame) kept noticing is that photographers who would eventually end up way out of our budget would introduce their pricing by way of discussing our “vision.”  This insight prodded me to plot hundreds of data points onto this very accurate chart and publish my results in a peer-reviewed journal (not really).

people who know what ambigrams are and really like them.

people who will sacrifice quality to satisfy their design fetishes.

anyone who tells you that cost and quality are closely linked. The fact of the matter is that sometimes you pay very little for a design and it rocks and sometimes you pay a whole giant load of cash for a design and it rocks not at all.  It’s very difficult to determine quality of work before you’ve received the work.  Because it’s so difficult, giant design firms would love for you to think that there is a tight correlation; their giant bill is not only justified, it’s integral to good work.  There may be a loose correlation.  But below are two of the data points I used to carefully plot my “quality of design” chart.  I should also note that the scribble chart is a direct rip-off of Martin Gardner’s Neo-Laffer curve.

people you like.  Because, honestly, your project is going to be about how well you can work with someone and how much you trust them to do their job.  If you don’t like them, it’s probably not going to work out.  It’s weird how I can’t find that in any of the “How to Find a Graphic Designer” pages.

Suspicious of Symbols

February 15, 2010 | 2 comments

Most designers will point out that a logo doesn’t have to explicitly say what the company does.  There are very few contexts where you’ll win new business by saying–graphically–what you do.  It’s also just a matter of  what works.  Almost all of the logos you can remember right now have nothing to do with what the company they identify does.  And if you don’t need to say what your company does explicitly with a logo, it would seem to go without saying that you don’t need to say it cryptically either.  But it doesn’t.  There are thousands and thousands of companies that have resisted using a tool of their trade for their logo but just couldn’t resist trying to imbue it with symbols explaining what they do and how awesomely they do it.

Then they do something even weirder.  They ruin whatever effect they were going for with the symbolism by spelling out exactly what they mean on an “about our logo” page.

And that’s where our story starts.

The Technology Firm would like to let you know that those aren’t tiger claw scars you’re looking at there–oh, no–those are contrails representing their consulting services and the height and distance they want you to fly when you enlist their help.  High, metaphorically, not physically.  Though they do think that flight is a symbol of their business because it is an incredible marriage of human knowledge and technological capability.  I guess all that seems clear enough, but why isn’t he wearing a blue-tooth headset?

Dow Wolff has one less excuse for their bad symbolism.  It’s a real company with real financial backing.  Still, they really want to pack that little logo with meaning.  1. The overlapping w element “reflects the strength of this partnership between Dow and Wolff Walsrode” 2. The central green oval “represents the product itself, being the cellulose derivative.”  So they didn’t actually avoid the cliché of putting what they do in the logo.  3.  ”Upon closer examination you will notice a shine. This represents the added value cellulose and our expertise give to the end products Dow Wolff Cellulosics helps to formulate.”  4.  If you take the oval of cellulose and the shrine and the stuff behind them, put them all together “the logo symbolizes an eye. For years both companies have been highly focused (hence the eye-shaped form) on key markets, the development of cellulose derivatives and application formulation.”  I think it’s important to point out that the parenthesis are not mine.  They thought you might think the connection was tenuous if they had only said “eye” and “focus.”

Dow Wolff does not take the cake, though, for attributing lots of meaning to a single graphical element.  Center for Sustainability has a simple circle in their logo that carries an even heavier symbolic load.   ”The burgundy circle symbolizes many different things to us, including the earth, true-recycling, community connections, and the cyclical nature of our world. It represents the principles currently governing our natural world and serve as the foundation to sustainable business theory and practice.”  So keep all that in mind next time you see a red circle.  Like a Do Not Enter sign, the Japanese flag, or a You Are Here dot.

I guess this one is a little unfair, but I want to be sure to show how far this can all go.  And the U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute goes all the way.  ”the logo contains four important elements: the Eye of Providence, the North Star, the flag of the United States, and the triangle shape, reminiscent of the pyramid in the Great Seal.”  Let’s go over these important elements in detail below.  I will not quote the entire two-page parable of this logo, but I’ll be paraphrasing important highlights.

Let’s see, what else have we learned.  Well, “Combined, then, [these elements] reflect perspective, wisdom, understanding, and providence, finding a path to new opportunities while retaining our core values, the humbleness that comes from being part of a great and strong nation, the awareness that we exist as citizens of a global society, and our ongoing commitment to put America first.”  Oh yes, humbleness.  That’s what we’ve learned.

So to recap:  Don’t use your logo to symbolize a bunch of stuff, or really much of anything.  It’s okay that it doesn’t do anything but help people recognize your company.  If a designer tries to sell you on all this stuff, it might be in your best interest to find another designer.

14 Design Books You Can Live Without

January 31, 2010 | 5 comments

Here are 14 books that may–if you follow their advice religiously–permanently cripple your design sense… if the covers are any indication.

C.R.A.P. The Non-Designer's Design Book 2nd Edtn. by Robin Williams Graphic Design Basics by Amy E. Arntson she's actually not a bad fine artist, but... Graphic Design: Vision, Process Product by Louis Ocepek AIGA Professional Practices in Graphic Design by Tad Crawford awesome webiste with stars! Logo, Font & Lettering Bible by Leslie Cabarga a review by ilovetypography Grids: Creative Solutions for Graphic Design by Lucienne Roberts actual grid design resouces Teaching Graphic Design by Steven Heller Contemporary Graphic Design by Charlotte Fiell, Peter Fiell Smear Filter, Garamond Digital Graphic Design by KEN PENDER, Kenneth R. Pender Start Your Own Graphic Design Business by Entrepreneur Press Creative Business Guide to Running a Graphic Design Business by Cameron S. Foote A Similar Idea Playfully Rigid by Claude Lichtenstein Did they die in 2006? Art Marketing 101: A Handbook for the Fine Artist by Constance Smith See Also: Internet 101 (from 2007!) Graphic Design On The Desktop by Marcelle Lapow Toor These designs make me hungry for alphabet soup

You can click away on that image up there, and I encourage you to. Most the books just have a close-up image to offer, but I’ve included a little “further reading” at the bottom of some. For instance, Robin Williams uses an acronym to help you remember her basic rules of design, and it is–I am not joking–C.R.A.P. as in,”if you use these basic princibles, your design will look like crap.”

A little something I learned while researching these books. People take them seriously. No one mentions (except Ilovetypography) that the covers are terribly designed or what that says about the techniques they teach. It’s weird.

Lesser Evil of Spec

January 19, 2010 | No comments

Here’s the very simple fact of the matter: more people want to design than can get paid to design.

you poor, unfortunate souls :( Link to Good Design

We can call it an unfortunate result of the human condition or we can call it a result of a hippy-dippy education system but it’s a glut.  There are many fine volumes–written by economic masters of our time–about this sort of occupational supply and demand.  I haven’t read them.  This is a way-better kind of analysis because it’s completely made-up (and so authentic).

When you have an over-abundance of would-be designers, something is bound to give.  In the real world, we got spec work.  Companies like threadless and crowdspring encourage you to design to your heart’s content, without getting paid, and if it’s really good or you can convince people that it is: you get paid.  Sometimes in cash, sometimes in robots or other valuable merch, sometimes just for the glory.

As a designer, if you’re worth your weight in CD clipart collections, you’re supposed to despise spec work.  The AIGA insists that it devalues the work of designers (i.e. makes it cheaper) and they would insist that to participate would be unethical if the FTC hadn’t told them that they couldn’t.

If you haven’t heard, this is a really contentious issue.  I don’t really want to add to the long list of arguments, but I do want to take a moment to consider some alternative universes where the glut of designers didn’t lead to spec work, but instead led to…

AIGA as Mob: You’re either part of the family or you aren’t, and if you aren’t, you get your knuckles broken for doing design work on our turf.  Our customers give us a percentage and we provide protection from papyrus.

Analogous to:  garbage hauling, small business insurance, union elevator operators

Why it wouldn’t work out: How many really tough graphic designers do you know?

So You Think You Can Graphic Design: There’s a panel of judges, none of whom can know what kerning means.  They throw really derisive insults at half of the applicants and send them home.  For the other half, they ask the public to ask all their friends to myspace everyone on earth to text a code to a number and only the people who have the most votes will get to be “designers.”  It won’t matter if they really have any talent, because each of them will be backed up by hand-picked professionals who will ghost-design everything.

Analogous to: singers, dancers, fashion-designers, script-writers, cooks, basically any skill that would have been needed to preform in or operate a vaudeville burlesque theater.

Why it wouldn’t work out: I’m not sure that it couldn’t.  They made a reality TV show about M.C. Hammer.

You Don’t Want to be a Designer:  Lower supply by discouraging people.  Graphic design is art without meaning, meticulousness without respect.  The only client feedback we ever get is, “My 5 year old could do that,” and “don’t you just have to push a button?”

Analogous to: you don’t want to be rich, you don’t want to live in Maine (but please vacation there!)

Why it wouldn’t work out:  Higher education.  They make way too much money keeping the “supply” part of our equation high.

Pay Your Dues: Invest 50-100k in an education, volunteer as an intern (where you’ll mostly serve coffee), work until you’re 30 at nothing more than improving other people’s designs.  Maybe when you’re 40, you can be a partner.  Maybe when you’re 50 you can design a real logo or something.  Each step in the process sheds a certain percentage of people who just aren’t willing to suffer for that long to achieve their dreams, so by the end there’s no more supply problem!

Analogous to: architecture, acting, getting a good seat for the 4th of July fireworks in Boston.

Why it wouldn’t work out: I think it has.  And if all the big firms and agencies got to decide, it would continue to work exactly that way ’till the end of time.  That’s why all the fuss about spec-work, don’t you think?

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