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?

Brand Fidelity (or lack thereof)

January 12, 2010 | No comments

There’s a restaurant right next door to my house with some excellent, cheap seafood.  It’s got great blog reviews (1 2), 4.5 stars at Yelp, a Best of Boston award, and–oh yay–this for a storefront:

Taken together with the online menus & websites, this is the what its brand looks like:

Now, I don’t want Panoply to be the next yourlogomakesmebarf.com (I’d link to them, but I’m pretty sure that the site has been taken down, most likely due to lawsuit threats).  I want to poke fun at more pretentious design.  Pescatore is just a tale of caution.  It’s what happens when you don’t watch your brand.

I’m sure that this restaurant started out with some loose idea about what their logo should look like.  Then they just let it fall by the wayside when they met all the “designers” from the sign shop, the awning shop, the yellow pages, etc.

Not everyone needs an awesome, mind-numbingly-expensive logo designed by Pentagram with a $200.00 font and a ‘+’ sign that the design community ew’s and ah’s about (“it’s so much more inclusive than an ampersand!”) Thank god not everyone needs that.  But everyone with a logo should understand that while “awesomeness of logo” is subjective, consistency of brand is vital (and worth poking fun at when lacking).

Sentinel vs. Sentinel

January 8, 2010 | 2 comments

This is not a post about The Matrix 3.

It’s a story about a guy, working in graphics, trying to make his product look like what the designer intended.  The first thing this graphics guy does is open up the AI file that conveys the intent.  Here is what he is greeted with:

This is a common enough problem.  The first thing he does is hunt for the file.  A good starting point is usually Fonts.com.  And sure enough, he’s got a hit.  And it’s a bargain at 49.99!  So much of a bargain, that you might not pay attention to the fact that it looks like crap.

So then he opens the design document again and he’s hit with the same message.  He’s run up against one of the biggest flaws in the type industry.  There’s no easily accessible unique ID for fonts.  Once you’ve paid for and downloaded the fonts, you could open them up in an editor and see obvious differences.  There’s even a field called UniqueID!  But there’s no universal system recognized across the industry that’s analogous to the ISBN number on a book.

Through further research, our poor graphics guy found out that there’s another Sentinel over at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.  This one isn’t nearly as cheap.  Once it’s purchased, he’s got to go back to the first foundry.  Comicraft, makers of butfonts such as:

…were kind enough to send over a refund form and to reimburse him after he solemnly swore to delete all the downloaded files.  Which he gladly did.

Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Comicraft, other foundries, Adobe.  Can you guys do something about this?  It seems that the whole system is catering to people who do the designing, but we brand stewards need a little help making sure that the design lives on.  And that we don’t accidentally use a god-awful font.

Thanks.

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