Professional Documents
Culture Documents
James Souttar
James Souttar
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introduction
1 articles
3 The myth of content
17 The well of clarity
23 The eye of the mind
37 Seven pillars
47 Atalanta Fugiens
55 Drag me! Click me! Read me?
67 Brand or Identity?
75 Imagined histories
83 conversations
259 soapbox
337 references
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Introduction
For some time I’ve wanted to write a book about visual communica-
tion — to express some of the ideas that have inspired me, or that have
emerged out of nearly twenty years of thinking, working and convers-
ing as a graphic designer. It was only recently, however, that I realized
I had already written such a book. The ideas I wanted to share were
there in the series of articles, emails and blog pieces I had composed
over the last fi·een years. Moreover, the form in which these ideas were
presented — a ragged patchwork of interlocking pieces, each framed
by a particular context — was actually much more appropriate for the
kind of book I wanted to write.
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conversations
Putting the human being back at the centre of our world is o·en
assumed to be a kind of arrogance. However this new humanism is fre-
quently humbling: it shows us how much a part of the natural world
we are, and how small a part we play in the scheme of things (at least,
in an outward sense). But these new revelations about our humanity
should also give us cause to rejoice — if we really were the sovereign
creatures of the Age of Reason, we would be consigned to creating a
world of sterile, mechanical perfection. Instead, what we now know
makes a new and powerful case to place human contact and relation-
ships above ‘e›ciency’, delight in making and using above ‘value’,
sympathy for one another above exploitation of ‘others’.
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x
conversations
The first part of this book, articles, consists of nine essays, most of which
were originally commissioned as articles for Critique or Eye magazines.
The second part of this book, conversations, consists of emails respond-
ing to discussions on the graphics-l e-mail ‘list’. The archives of this
list are published on the Internet, and the original messages can be
read in the context of the full discussion. However I’ve not attempted to
preserve that continuity here. The messages I’ve chosen — and in some
cases, lightly edited — are presented as brief, concentrated reflections
on a particular subject. Since I’ve always made a habit of quoting the
part of someone else’s message that I wanted to reply to, the essential
part of the context is preserved. And in some cases, traces of the origi-
nal ‘threads’ can still be discerned.
The third part of this book, soapbox, are a series of blog pieces that I
have written much more recently, as part of an experimental foray into
the world of ‘social media’.
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conversations
articles
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No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
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Such is the uncritical hyperbole about the Internet, for instance, that
one might be forgiven for thinking that it represents a wholly new
approach to communications. We’re presented with the dizzy vista of
a ‘wild frontier’ where pioneers — provided they’ve freed themselves
from the burdensome legacies of outmoded thinking —can create a
new world, with novel forms of commerce, entertainment, even educa-
tion. It’s an exciting prospect. If only it were true.
The more one looks into the ideas fueling the explosion of the Internet,
one realizes that, far from being a new paradigm, it represents some
very old thinking indeed. Its energy is less that of a vigourous new
idea than that of an embattled philosophy which has rallied itself and
made one last desperate push for victory. And I make no apologies for
that simile. For reasons I intend to elucidate, it’s the same seventeenth
century philosophy of Modernism, which has been behind most of the
dominant ideologies of the last three hundred years, that is staging its
last ferocious counter-attack on the battlefield of digital media.
We have, I suppose, become used to the idea that we’re living in the
‘postmodern’ era — and to some extent this may be the case. Which
makes it both hard to accept, and to understand, that what seems to be
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the biggest idea of our time is wholly ‘Modern’ (here actually meaning
quite ancient) in its conception. But so it is. To really grasp this, how-
ever, requires us to understand where Modernism came from — and
what it is. And to do this we need to divest ourselves of the view that
Modernism is just a stylistic movement of the mid twentieth century.
In an extraordinarily erudite work, Cosmopolis, philosopher of science
Stephen Toulmin traces the origins of Modernism to the middle of the
seventeenth century. And we need to return briefly to that time to fully
appreciate the context out of which this extraordinarily influential
view of the world emerged. Toulmin explains how, following the assas-
sination in 1610 of the tolerant King Henri IV of France, Europe began
a forty year long descent into religious bigotry and conflict of the most
brutal kind. Against this backdrop a group of highly influential think-
ers — led by Descartes — sought to establish a philosophy that would
once and for all resolve the questions that had been the subject of such
violent contention. But in the process, Toulmin shows how they turned
their back on the Humanist tradition — characterized by a recognition
that ‘circumstances alter cases’, and the belief that the validity of any
kind of knowledge depends upon the context in which it is applied.
The new knowledge required certainties that were universal and time-
less — which in practice meant abstracted and decontextualized from
the messy ambiguities of the world.
A·er Descartes came Newton and Locke, who defined many of the prin-
cipal characteristics of the ‘Modern’ point of view — Newton with his
mathematical approach to science, which showed how natural phe-
nomena could be understood (and more importantly, manipulated) by
representing them through abstract numerical relations, and Locke
who asserted that the ‘qualities’ of things were secondary, subjective
aspects, and only their quantitative aspect was real. These points of
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The social revolution that might have happened in the first quarter
of the twentieth century ended up being postponed until the 1960s,
when a buoyant ecomomy and the military deadlock of the Cold
War could once again produce conditions in which it was possible
to challenge the ideological behemoth. Kuhn’s book coincided with
numerous other seminal texts pouring from the presses of Europe and
America, which presented a largely bemused citizenry with the begin-
nings of a critique of Modernism. Which is not to say that they were
in any sense really ‘postmodern’, since they still represented a point
of view that had been profoundly, and unconsciously, informed by the
bases of Modernism. And, in fact, it would be their avid readers, the gen-
eration of sixties ‘counterculturals’, who — in their subsequent incar-
nation as nineties ‘digerati’ — would unwittingly deliver the apotheosis
of Modernism in the guise of the ‘Information Revolution’.
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Two striking points emerge from Toulmin’s analysis. First, that stylistic
Modernism closely echoed the beliefs and priorities of philosophical
Modernism without being aware of its intellectual debt. This observa-
tion is particularly relevant in consideration of ‘new media’, since the
ideologies that are driving it are not always apparent even to its most
vocal exponents. Second, the idea of ‘starting from zero’ is by no means
a new development — even if the way it is framed in relationship to the
brave new world of the Internet is particularly ingenious. Modernism
has been ‘starting from zero’ ever since Descartes climbed inside his
oven, but never more self-consciously than in the series of early and
mid twentieth century experiments in design.
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In the simplest terms, the idea of content is that the information com-
ponent of a message can be distinguished from the form in which
it appears, and manipulated quite apart from it. With all previous
media, ‘content’ and ‘form’ could not be conceptually separated in this
way — one had to commit to form as part of the very act of authoring.
To write, or type, a message, one had to put one’s thoughts directly into
permanent marks. Even speaking on the ’phone involved the creation
of electronic signals that could neither be withdrawn nor converted
into another form of communication. ‘Repurposing’, where it was pos-
sible, involved laboriously transcribing words and images from one
medium to another.
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this for graphic design is that designers can now be used to create lay-
outs into which as yet unspecified content is to be arbitrarily import-
ed — as already happens with some web pages, which use information
retrieved ‘on demand’ from databases.
I urge you to pause and think about this for a moment. Imagine a world
in which ‘content’ exists quite apart from any particular form in which
it could appear, and in which design exists quite independently of any
‘content’ which it might ‘contain’. It’s a world in which a writer won’t
be able to visualize how his or her words will appear — one could not
picture them on a book spread, a newspaper layout, or as a magazine
article, since they will exist only as an abstract commodity to be pre-
sented at a future date in any of a myriad of possible forms and combi-
nations. It becomes impossible to conceive of the way they might move
a particular audience, or how they’ll be interpreted in a particular con-
text, since these factors can’t be determined at the time of writing.
What kind of words would these be? Could they be words addressed by
somebody to somebody, risking a point of view, or will they inevitably
be slippery generalities like the ‘soundbites’ of politicians?
But the prospect for the designer is worse yet, since the idea of con-
tent abstracted from form threatens the whole idea of design as an
interpretation of a given text. How can there be a sympathy between
writer and designer, if the design is simply a container for many pos-
sible kinds of content — a kind of all-purpose drinking vessel that is as
likely to be filled with steaming co‹ee as vintage wine? This is a danger-
ous development, since from at least one perspective it is only as an
interpreter, or translator, that the designer can be said to engage with
the real nature of human communication. In his masterwork, Truth
and Method, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues:
‘The translation process fundamentally contains the whole
secret of how human beings come to an understanding of the
world and communicate with each other. Translation is an
indissoluble unity of implicit acts of anticipating, of grasping
meaning as a whole beforehand, and explicitly laying down
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If the myth of content only a‹ected the way we explained digital media
to ourselves, it might not be such a bad thing. But, as I hope I’ve dem-
onstrated, conceiving of content in this way inevitably diminishes
the quality of our communications. Text drawn from a database can’t
anticipate the context in which it will appear. It can’t, therefore, form
a part of a coherent narrative or argument, since there is no guarantee
that it will appear as a contiguous whole. At best, it can only appear
as one of a series of ‘bite size’ encyclopædia entries, grouped together
because of a similarity of subject. (This has, incidentally, led some
people to eulogize the supposedly ‘simultaneous’ and ‘non-hierarchi-
cal’ nature of the electronic medium — turning an obvious limitation
into an apparent strength.)
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our home, counting the doors. Within a few moments, everybody can
provide the exact number. In similar vein, we o·en struggle to recall
dry factual information — sometimes relying on colourful mnemon-
ics — yet most of us can describe the detailed plot of a feature film we’ve
seen only once before, a·er only a few minutes of watching it again,
despite having watched many hundreds of such films.
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It’s only recently that I’ve discovered that the garden is arranged so
that wherever one stands, one stone is always hidden — an idea that is
at once playful and profound. But even without knowing this, it is pos-
sible to recognize that the relationship of every element to each other,
and to the whole, is far from arbitrary. There is a dialogue that goes
on between the stones, and between the stones and the gravel, that
results from the designer’s perception. Nor does one need to be able to
read in the mythological account that the three groups of five stones
represent a tigress and her cubs, saved by the sacrifice of Mahasattva,
to grasp the garden’s genius. Simply by virtue of what it is, Ryoanji
expresses something fundamental about the way we as human beings
interpret our world — things talk to us, and the way they are arranged
changes in an important way what they are saying.
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Over the last century, we’ve seen how modernism has tried to hijack the
idea of clarity as simplicity, and make it its own. To a recent generation
of designers, this association discredited the idea of clarity — spawning
a genre of impenetrable graphic complexity, now mercifully drawing
to a close. But a moment’s reflection will show that dogmatic mod-
ernism has always been the enemy of clarity — at least in the original
and Japanese senses. The modernist designer was the architect of
sameness, applying identical approaches (whether they were glass
and steel ‘Yale boxes’, or grid and sans-serif typographic layouts) to
every project, regardless of its context. A Mies building, or a Müller-
Brockman layout, tell us nothing about the circumstances they are
supposed to reflect — but everything about an inflexible and homog-
enizing school of design. As much as anything, it is three centuries
of ‘modern’ thought, emphasizing the universal, the abstract and the
generic and, that has undermined our awareness of the local, the spe-
cific and the particular.
I believe, however, that the time has come when we can begin to reclaim
a sense of the given, and thus begin on a truly ‘postmodern’ approach
to design. Perhaps the most compelling reason for this is that the forces
pushing us towards a ‘monoculture’ — the universality of various tech-
nologies, global markets and trans-national media — are, paradoxi-
cally, also helping to make us aware of the distinctive texture of our
individual worlds. Even in the commercial sphere, the pressure to find
‘di‹erentiators’ is finally forcing marketeers to look at the things that
really make their organizations unique: their cultures, their people,
their sense of place and history. We recently suggested to a client who
was contemplating an identity change that she go back and take pho-
tographs of her organization. Not glamorous marketing shots, but
reportage pictures of its many di‹erent dimensions: the journeys
people make to work, the co‹ee bars and sandwich shops they hang
out in at lunchtimes, the elated salesperson who has just won a major
piece of business, the furtive smokers outside the fire exits, the angry
meetings where two sides come head to head, the o›ce party where
everyone is friends for a night, the plush executive o›ces and the sub-
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This was the last of the three pieces I wrote for Critique magazine, appearing
in the Spring 2000 issue (which was devoted to the theme of Clarity). Nancy
Bernard, my wonderful editor at Critique, subsequently forwarded a message
to me from an attentive reader. In it, he wrote ‘…I was, however, deflated near
the end. Up to that point, even with the comments about his client, I felt that
I was reading a contemplation/appreciation of the transcendentally ine‹able.
The last three grafs, especially the sentence near the end that begins “Suddenly
something crystallizes,” made me uncomfortable because it sounded like a des-
perate attempt to demonstrate its value. I mean it’s a great way of thinking.
Why ascribe to it some sort of magical/mystical problem-solving power? You
can do all of this thinking and suddenly nothing crystallizes or, more frequently,
suddenly something crystallizes and the people within the organization begin
to ask “What the hell is that?” I dunno. Again, I loved the piece, but the ending
bothered me for some reason.’ I think he was absolutely right, so I subsequently
reworked the piece to have a more satisfying ending. And this is that version.
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One of the most fascinating insights of the last couple of decades con-
cerns the nature of the human brain. For centuries, thinkers have con-
ceived of this as an organ for thinking — the seat of a rational, analytic
mind. But it turns out that evolution le· us with a very di‹erent kind
of apparatus; much less like a sophisticated computer, much more like
a clever kind of filter. Our brains were optimized to si· through moun-
tains of data, bringing things that look important to the attention of
consciousness — as well as carefully filing away more subtle impacts, to
see if they form part of a less obvious pattern.
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The legacy of this early hard-wiring can be seen in many aspects of our
lives. For instance, we find it hard to register continuous, incremental
shi·s (a principle neurophysiologist Robert Ornstein points out by ref-
erence to the way gasoline prices crept up unnoticed though the 1970s
from 30 to 95 cents per gallon, but triggered a major change in con-
sumption only when they went above the ‘trigger’ threshold of $1).
This means that to signal di‹erence, we need to present it in an exag-
gerated, over-emphasized manner.
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Our minds are constantly anxious to reach a state of closure. Most visual
communications expedite this process by giving us pre-digested mes-
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sages. We create these, o·en without realizing, through layout and the
use of emphasis. By arranging messages in order along the path taken
by the eyes, as well as weighting them accordingly, we provide clues as
to how they are to be interpreted. It is an approach that is most appar-
ent in advertising and direct mail, whose exponents have taken the
predigestion of messages to a fine art. But in experimental design one
can still discern the need to lead the reader to the point — even if this is
apparently at odds with the theories the designer is trying to apply.
slow minds
It might seem from the foregoing that the solution is to wrest more
conscious control over the design process. And becoming aware of
the forces that drive us will undoubtedly result in a more reflective
approach to design. But consciousness is not necessarily the paragon
we think it to be. Indeed, the brain’s selection and interpretation of
sensory data may make consciousness dumber than we had supposed,
but it also serves to make other parts of our mind smarter than we had
ever imagined.
Over the last twenty years, research from the cognitive sciences has
begun to show quite how clever some of our ‘less than conscious’ tal-
ents can be. In a fascinating summary of this research, psychologist
Guy Claxton points out that they will ‘learn patterns of a degree of
subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see; make sense out
of situations that are too complex to analyze and get to the bottom
of certain di›cult issues much more successfully than the questing
intellect.’ He then goes on to say something that has quite extraordi-
nary implications for graphic design. ‘They will detect and respond to
meanings, in poetry and art, as well as in relationships, that cannot be
clearly articulated.’
It may be that this kind of ‘undermind’ (as it has been called) evolved to
compensate for some of the obvious deficiencies in the way the brain
preselects information for consciousness. For subtle patterns can be as
critical for survival as more overt impacts, but are far less perceptible.
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The selection and interpretation of data isn’t one of those things where
Nature and Nurture are at loggerheads. In many ways, human societies
amplify the way that the brain works, through the medium of culture.
And as with the mechanisms of mental selectivity, much of the way
that culture determines what we ignore and what we pay attention to
also operates below the threshold of awareness.
Like the brain, one of the most important aspects of culture is that
it protects us, collectively, from the dangers of information overload.
Hall shows that the way that cultures do this depends on the extent
to which they make use of the context in which communications take
place. High context cultures internalize or embed significant parts of
this context, making them like the old married couple for whom a few
words conveys a wealth of meaning and association. Low context cul-
tures — of which Northern Europe and North America are good exam-
ples — pay less attention to context. Instead, to avoid overload (and it is
arguable how well we manage to do this) we try to simplify and order
the content of our communications — which tends to be fairly explicit.
The way we communicate is less like the married couple, and more like
a couple of attorneys in a courtroom — working hard to be clear and
concise, but struggling to get across all the minute details too.
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intonation, nuance are all part of the way in which the missing part
of the message can be filled in — making the verbal component rela-
tively small and compact. Northern Europeans, by contrast, are notori-
ously unobservant of body language — and, by the standards of their
Southern counterparts, relatively pedantic.
Hall points out that high context communications are o·en aestheti-
cally very satisfying. He says: ‘High context communications are fre-
quently used as art forms. They act as a unifying, cohesive force, are
long-lived, and are slow to change. Low context communications do
not unify; however they can be changed easily and rapidly. This is why
evolution by extension is so incredibly fast; extensions in their initial
stages of development are low context.’ High context communica-
tions require a significant investment of time and e‹ort in learning to
decode them, which accounts for their longevity. Low context commu-
nications, by contrast, may be more prosaic — but they require far less
decoding, and thus are more flexible. Hall was writing well before the
advent of the web, but the expansion of new media can be seen as a per-
fect example of what he calls ‘evolution by extension’. The web initially
has been very low context — its attraction being the rapid turnover of
information — but we can expect that as it matures, it will start moving
up the context scale.
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ler, however, the French approach can be very helpful — one is liter-
ally bombarded with information of all kinds, in all kinds of ways. In
Germany, on the other hand, it is easy to lose one’s way — giving too
much information becomes an intrusion into the all important sense
of personal privacy.
From the perspective, it becomes much easier to understand the phe-
nomenon of Modernism — it is the predictable outcome of a low con-
text approach to design. All the characteristic features are there — a
desire for ‘white space’, a limited range of sizes and styles of type, even
the choice of typefaces with as few a‹ective characteristics as possible.
In the light of Hall’s findings, what might some of the ‘post modern’
approaches to design tell us about what is happening in contemporary
graphic design? Certainly many characteristic high-context features
are there — a richly textured use of space, the creation of numerous
curious type families to reflect shades of personal predilection, the
need to share the designer’s subcultural world to be able to decode the
work. But there is also a sense of transience, rootlessness and a love of
technological artefact that speaks of its inheritance from a more dis-
tinctly low context tradition.
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While the exact distances di‹er from culture to culture, we share the
need to define an intimate, personal and social space — thresholds
that determine how far we stand from di‹erent kinds of people. Only
those closest to us are admitted into the intimate distance, friends and
extend family may come within the personal space, whilst colleagues
and strangers are kept beyond the inner boundaries of our social space.
Interestingly, certain cultures have added a public space — a distance
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Our conceptions of space and time act as metaphors for many aspects
of our lives. We talk about ‘getting our hands on someone’, or about
keeping them ‘at arms’ length’. We speak about ‘reaching out’, as well
as ‘cramping our space’. We’re concerned when people are ‘moving in
on us’, but delighted when families are ‘close’. And the same kinds of
usages are found throughout the world’s languages.
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and personal spheres. From the time of James Dean onwards, the
social sphere has become in popular culture the arena in which young
men make displays to their peers — and this has become true for the
corresponding kind of graphic design. Female designers seem more
interested in exploring the personal space — and in creating means for
others to do so. Type designs such as Zuzana Licko’s ‘Mrs Eaves’, Margo
Chase’s ‘Envision’ or Kris Holmes’ ‘Lucida’ have shedded much of the
sti‹ formality of traditional letterforms, and seem more at home in
this paradigm of personable design.
evolution of language
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But of course language has never lost its connection with rhythm
and space. Spoken language is still the primary form, and we make
it in the same ways as our remote ancestors—as a series of modulated
tones, strung together rhythmically. The only significant development
is written language, which is an entirely spatial form. Yet it is one that
does its utmost to represent its rhythmic origins in spatial form. And
looked at in this way, almost all of our conventions for representing
language pick up on some aspect of its rhythmic nature. The repetition
of letterforms provides the basic rhythm, but beyond that we group
letterforms into words punctuated by spaces, and lines punctuated by
line feeds. Lines become paragraphs, paragraphs sections, sections yet
bigger entities. Even our arrangements reflect basic bodily rhythms:
with each saccadic jump of the reading eye corresponding to one cycle
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of the brain’s Delta cycle. However free we think we have become with
our typographic arrangements, we are still constrained by Nature’s
invisible chains.
communication in patterns
Owen Barfield, one of the century’s most original thinkers and a keen
student of language, observed: ‘To the historical student, language
appears at first sight to consist of what has been well called ‘a tissue of
faded metaphors’. [...] The further back you go in time, the more meta-
phorical you find language becoming...’ As we’ve seen, this finding con-
curs with recent discoveries. But why should language have evolved in
metaphor?
Taking a leap in the dark, it seems not too far fetched to answer
that there was an evolutionary advantage in being able to communi-
cate patterns. Patterns which, embodied in song, story, myth and epic
poem, provided a blueprint for adapting to a much wider range of
situations than could be hard-wired as impulses. And, maybe, which
enriched our slow minds with a treasury of templates, cultivating per-
ceptions that were subtler and more insightful than the brain’s crude
mechanisms for bringing information to consciousness. But our fasci-
nation with pattern goes far beyond a (continuing) fascination with
songs and stories. For millennia, patterns have been an essential part
of our visual language, too. It is only in this century that they have
been disparaged as ‘gratuitous ornament’, derided by the low context
schools that have come to dominate design.
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Conclusion
I wrote this piece, which appeared in the Spring 1999 ‘Depth’ edition of Critique,
before I’d read either Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution
of Language or Tor Nørretranders The User Illusion. Dunbar’s book helped
me make much more sense of the relevance of the evolution of language to
graphic design, especially through the concept of ‘grooming’. Nørretranders
book, on the other hand, brilliantly distinguishes between a reductive and over-
estimated consciousness and a much richer experience of the world that happens
outside of it — a concept I was fumbling towards here.
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Seven pillars
The post-modern age has little time for principles. The idea that there
could be such things in graphic design — axioms which are true for all
times and all circumstances — increasingly strikes us as quaint. For
some, principles are positively disreputable: a relic of ‘logocentrism’,
that doubtful elitism which oppresses all diverging opinions. And for
others, the need for principles has been swept away by a pragmatic
approach which insists that the only thing that matters is e‹ective
communication.
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There is a close analogy here with poetry. The poet doesn’t just want
to convey a message, but to create an experience in which cadence and
sonority, metaphor and ambiguity play an equally important role to
the literal meaning of the words. For the graphic designer this multi-
dimensionality is achieved through the expressive power of images,
letterforms, colour and arrangement.
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If the interplay of text and context characterizes what I’ve called com-
prehensible (as opposed to merely intelligible) design, there are three
principles that determine its e‹ect. For these, we can look to the classi-
cal art of rhetoric for a useful analogy.
1 character/ethos
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2 emotion/pathos
3 rationale/logos
The relationship between the designer’s art and the third kind of
proof is the most tangential, but perhaps also the most interesting. For
Aristotle, logos meant both the explanation of a thing, and the princi-
ple determining that thing (of which only part could be expressed in
words). To later philosophers, it acquired the more metaphysical sense
of the creative principle by which all things are made — the ‘word’ of
the opening verses of St John’s Gospel. As it applies to graphic design,
logos has echoes of both these meanings — being concerned with the
way the meaning of a communication is brought out by visually dis-
playing its inner rationale.
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4 memorability
It probably goes without saying that all great graphic design is memo-
rable. But in an extraordinary twist of history, it turns out that our
whole conception of pagecra· developed directly out of the require-
ments of the classical art of memory — which means that many of the
features we recognize as giving a document its characteristic look and
feel actually originated to make it memorable.
In the classical period books were scarce, and the methods used to
produce them slow and laborious. The idea of possessing a library for
one’s own reference was unknown; instead collections of books were
made for the purpose of creating a centre of learning. Itinerant schol-
ars would come to one of the great libraries of the ancient world and
commit the texts that interested them — in their entirety —to memory.
This was not as daunting a task as it may seem, since the memory
techniques they practised were highly sophisticated and extremely
e‹ective. The Greeks had stumbled upon an important fact of human
psychology: that while we find retaining and recalling verbal informa-
tion quite di›cult, we have an extraordinary facility for remember-
ing visual information. They discovered that by imprinting parts of a
text onto images held in the mind, it could be easily remembered by
recalling those images. They also discovered that the most powerful
images involved the coalescence of two contrasting ideas (a technique
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that is still used extensively in advertising) — and that the more bizarre
or incongruous the combination, the more memorable it would be.
With our tremendous capacity for the mechanical storage and retrieval
of huge quantities of information, this mnemonic aspect of graphic
design may not seem to be such an issue. Ironically, however, as we are
deluged in communications from all quarters, memorability has again
become a vital issue again. From amongst the thousands of graphical
messages that confront us each day, it is only the most memorable that
have any chance of success. The principle that visual communication
must engage the memory is thus as important as ever.
5 rhythm
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The key to the way we interact with time is rhythm. From the rapid
pulsing of neuronal activity in our brains, through the body’s inces-
sant beat of heart and breath, to the longer cycles of days, years and
generations, we appear to be thoroughly rhythmic beings. Rhythm is
not just a journey through time, but a recognisable pattern of repeti-
tions within it — and it appears that all human activities subtly syn-
chronize themselves with these patterns.
6 symmetry
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7 genius
The garden designer Russell Page came closest to capturing its con-
sequences when he said: ‘In each case there is an exaggeration of
proportion, a pushing of scale beyond the limits of what might
seem reasonable to enforce and enhance our comprehension. “This
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In conclusion
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Atalanta Flees
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the man who holds a ‘chilly toad’ to a woman’s breast in the midst
of a city square. Many of its emblems are familiar, having been exten-
sively reproduced in all sorts of applications — and also been widely
borrowed by other artists (Blake reinterprets Maier’s final emblem of a
dead woman in the grave, encircled by a serpent, in his Jerusalem.)
Its author is not above humour either, as the title of one of his other
works (Jocus Severus, the severe joke) shows. But the overriding impres-
sion of Atalanta is of an intricate multi-layering, which lends it an
enigmatic quality. Perhaps it was this that prompted the eminent his-
torian, Dame Frances Yates, to declare: ‘I am entirely unable to under-
stand all this, nor how it would be possible to work out a mathematical
problem in terms of this kind of alchemy. But I believe that implica-
tions of this kind are present in the Maier emblems…’
The basis of the book is the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes.
For those whose Classical mythology is rusty, Atalanta is a chaste and
feisty maiden who has been told that she can only marry a man who
is able to beat her at some activity. Unfortunately for her suitors,
she proves unbeatable — and the hapless swains are all ruthlessly des-
patched by an arrow from Atalanta’s bow. Hippomenes, grandson of
Neptune, is determined to succeed, however, and to this end acquires
three enchanted golden apples from Aphrodite. Challenged to beat
the swi· footed Atalanta in a running race, he throws them at her
feet — causing her to stop to pick them up. Hippomenes wins, but the
goddess’ apples have already turned Atalanta’s head. Indeed, so lusty
has the race made them both that they slope o‹ to a local temple
to sample a foretaste of marital bliss. Unfortunately, it turns out to
be a temple dedicated to the goddess, who is outraged by such sacri-
lege — and she promptly turns the lovers into a pair of lions.
For Maier the story of Atalanta’s flight is allegorical of the processes
of ‘chemistry’ — Atalanta herself represents the elusive philosophical
Mercury, Hippomenes the spiritual sulphur, and the apples the third
part of the hermetic trinity, salt. And it is really the alchemical proc-
esses of transformation that the book celebrates. The myth is however
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echoed in the series of haunting fugues for three voices that accom-
pany each emblem (the choice of the ‘fugue’ form being an elegant
pun characteristic of Maier). These consist of a lead soprano voice
attributed to Atalanta and a tenor voice attributed to Hippomenes,
sung over a ‘cantus firmus’ that represents the apples. Musically, this
is an extremely demanding and mathematically precise form of com-
position — the crystalline nature of which only becomes apparent from
studying the scores.
Nor does Maier easily fit our stereotypes of the mediaeval magus. Born
in 1568 in Kiel, on what is now the border between Germany and
Denmark, he studied philosophy and liberal arts at the University of
Rostock. Subsequently he travelled to Padua, where he was awarded
the title of Poet Laureate for his prodigious abilities to versify in Latin
(as well as in his native German). He completed his education with
a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Frankfurt and a
Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Basel (where the maver-
ick genius Paracelsus had lectured half a century earlier).
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But Maier entered Rudolf’s court in its twilight years. In 1611 Rudolf
was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother Matthias — and died the
following year. Maier headed for London, and presented himself to the
court of James I. And this marked the beginning of his flair for unu-
sual multimedia presentations — his ‘visiting card’ (preserved in the
Scottish Record Office) consisted of a large parchment,and contains
the first indication of themes he would return to in ‘Atalanta’.
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A·er the collapse of the fortunes of the Protestant cause at the White
Mountain, and the initiation of the brutal Thirty Years War, Maier
moved to Magdeburg. We know little of his life there, except that he
continued to practice medicine and to write. His books slowed to about
one year, until his death in 1622. Unfortunately Magdeburg was sacked
in 1631, destroying any evidence of Maier’s final years.
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rial form. This is the only view that makes sense of alchemical
ways of thought, which must otherwise appear nonsensical.
Obviously, the existence of this intermediate realm comes to a
sudden stop the moment we try to investigate matter in and
for itself, apart from all projection; and it remains non-exist-
ent so long as we believe we know anything conclusive about
matter or the psyche. But the moment when physics touches
on the “untrodden, untreadable regions,” and when psychol-
ogy has at the same time to admit there are other forms of psy-
chic life besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness — in
other words, when psychology too touches on an impenetrable
darkness — then the intermediate realm of subtle bodies comes
to life again, and the physical and the psychic are once more
blended in an indissoluble unity. We have come very near to this
turning-point today.’
One of the most astonishing results of recent researches into the her-
metic movements of the early seventeenth century — prompted by
Frances Yates’ seminal The Rosicrucian Enlightenment — has been the dis-
covery of just how much Maier and his circle were involved in the birth
of the scientific revolution. We now know that the Royal Society, syn-
onymous with orthodox scientific enquiry, was originally founded as
an ‘invisible college’ by hermeticists such as Samuel Hartlib and Elias
Ashmole. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, whose names are closely
associated with its illustrious beginnings, were both practising alche-
mists — for twenty years, Newton rarely stirred from his laboratory
experiments in his rooms at Trinity College, except to deliver a statu-
tory lecture as Lucasian professor (usually to an empty hall). Newton
le· 88 pages of notes, in his tiny crabbed hand, to Maier’s Atalanta
Fugiens — which he believed was a work of the utmost importance. But
such enquiries run up against what is perhaps the last great taboo
in our society — the suggestion that science might not be an a priori,
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Atalanta Fugiens is a true virtual world — a world that doesn’t just enter-
tain a passive imagination, but actively engages it and exercises it to
its limits. There is no sense of closure, no easy resolution for the lazy
mind. On the contrary, if nothing else it is Maier’s genius to have cre-
ated a work of art that challenges us on every level like an exquisite
puzzle. There is food for thought here for everyone who seeks to design
for the media rich environments of our own virtual worlds.
This is the longer version of the piece Maziar Raien and I wrote for the Autumn
2000 issue of Eye magazine (the published version was cut down to 750 words,
to make room for the images, and thus sacrificed most of the historical back-
ground). We’re both fascinated by the alchemical engravings of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and Maier’s work represents the high point of this
tradition. But why do we find Maier’s work so fascinating? Perhaps because
it comes from a time when what we now think of as Modernism was being
born, very much as a result of what Dame Frances Yates’ called ‘The Rosicrucian
Englightnement’. Somehow, though, we only ended up with half of what was
envisaged — a kind of lopsided empiricism without the profoundly spiritual way
of ‘reading’ Nature with which it was originally balanced. Consequently, now
that Modernism is more or less over, it is interesting to revisit this era to discover
what we missed.
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Although the screen is not entirely kind to text, words are o·en more
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e›cient than images in terms of the amount of space they take up.
Many icons, however, are also accompanied by a caption — this is invari-
ably the case with what I’ve called nominal icons, which are the icons
that inhabit our desktops and file management windows. In these
cases, the image is almost completely redundant. Its only residual
functions are to di‹erentiate it in kind from other similar entities (a
function some computing environments achieve more e›ciently, but
slightly less elegantly, with file extensions) and to give it a sense of
‘thingness’.
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paper shredders are supposed to: make the original text impossible to
recognize or reassemble? And some symbols mean di‹erent things in
programs written for the same operating system. A magnifying glass
can call for enlarging type as it does in some Apple so·ware, but it can
also begin searching for something or looking up a file in Macintosh
as well as in Windows applications. A turning arrow can mean Rotate
Image, but a similar arrow can denote Undo; Microso· tried a hundred
icons for Undo and finally gave up.’
Donald Norman, on the other hand, can’t see what all the fuss is about.
‘Icons. Lots of people worry about the design of icons. I can’t under-
stand them. What does that symbol mean? What does this symbol
mean? Bad design they say. No, no, I don’t think it’s bad design. There’s
no reason why a visual icon should be understandable when you first
see it. The real trick is to make it so that when somebody explains it to
you, you say ah, I got it, and you never have to have it explained again.
So a good design means you explain it only once.’ Norman’s point of
view is perfectly reasonable in the context of an operating system or
an application, given that there is ‘somebody’ to explain it to you — and
that you use it regularly. But even icons that you have had explained
can become obscure if you don’t use those features every day, as my
Eudora experience shows. When the same insouciance is applied to
the design of a website — which for the majority of ‘visitors’ is a one-o‹,
unmediated experience — the sense of frustration and disempower-
ment can be an order of magnitude greater.
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Issues of meaning and ambiguity are at the heart of the problem with
icons. Our instincts naturally draw us towards the figurative potential
of the image. But there is little scope for encouraging multiple read-
ings in presenting what is, in e‹ect, a control whose narrow meaning
has been fixed not in design but in the rigid logic of programming. And
it’s this definite denotation that makes me wonder about the argu-
ments about the ‘visual’ user. If there really are such people whose
dominant mode of perception is the direct, imaginal mentation that
the rest of us use only occasionally, do they really benefit from the pic-
ture as single noun? Or would they insist, like William Blake (verbal
or visual person?) that meaning be ‘Twofold Always! May God us keep,
from single vision and Newton’s sleep’.
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Someone once told me — I’m not sure on what authority — that one of
the reasons our computers require us to do so many ‘physical’ things
on screen (pushing buttons, twiddling knobs, pushing sliders) is that
North America never developed a tradition of building automata. Had
the personal computer come from the old world, the hardware would
have had the a‹ordances to allow us to do these things manually. I
don’t have much interest in the historical accuracy or veracity of this
observation, but it does explain what is for me one of the most excru-
ciating aesthetic deficiencies of the graphical user interface — the way
it relies on simulations of the tactile controls of other technologies.
Since icons are o·en — most o·en, in all probability — buttons, this reli-
ance manifests itself in awkward attempts at trompe l’oeil: bevelled
edges, drop shadows, ‘depress modes’, click sounds and the like.
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ingly find this tendency in print — where rows of icons taunt the reader
with the promise of an interactivity they can’t actually deliver.
Conceptually, icons fall into a kind of no-man’s land between the reso-
lutely modernist positivism of Neurath’s Isotype and the post-modern
‘reader-centred’ semiotics that derive from Saussure and Pierce. Both
schools lay claim to them, no doubt attracted by their enthusiastic take
up in the new media. But in reality they are neither fish nor fowl, not
‘positive’, observation based characters nor multiply referential signs.
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When it comes to the way we relate to our computers, the idea that
our world is disclosed to us through the medium of language — and
that language is itself inherently metaphorical — becomes highly sig-
nificant. We understand computing through the mediation of persua-
sive models which supplant any conception of what we are actually
doing with a profoundly anthropomorphic construction, where logi-
cal entities composed of bits become embodied in the images of things
familiar to us from the world of atoms. Under the influence of this
model, we can convince ourselves that we are ‘dragging’ a ‘document’
to the ‘trash’, even though the operations that are actually happening
in our computer’s memory or cpu bear no resemblance to these
mundane analogies. Similarly, we are induced to believe we are ‘surf-
ing’ through ‘cyberspace’ whilst we sit dispassionately, twitching our
mouse and staring hypnotically into a two-dimensional screen. It is an
intimation of the hyper-real world Jean Baudrillard describes, where
signs are no longer used to point to, or even conceal, reality — but to
conceal the absence of anything we could recognize as reality.
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This piece was written for the Summer 1998 issue of Eye Magazine. Re-reading it
three years later, the arguments seem of mixed quality. We hear less of ‘visual vs
verbal’ these days — perhaps as a result of a generally better understanding of
cognition. Less hopeful, though, is the continuing insistence on describing inter-
faces as ‘metaphors’. If we can’t distinguish between ‘simulations’ (or, as I’ve
seen them called elsewhere, ‘simulacra’) and metaphors, we’re in trouble.
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Brand or Identity?
In the last few years, it has become increasingly common to hear the
terms ‘brand’ and ‘identity’ used interchangeably. One even hears
people talking about ‘brand identity’ as if the two terms naturally com-
plemented one another. And following the lead of organizations like
British Airways, the public face of an organization is now as likely to be
called a ‘masterbrand’ as it is a ‘corporate identity’. But are these two
things the same? Do the two terms just signify the same process, or do
we signal a lack of precision — borne of a lack of understanding — when
we talk about them in this way?
It has certainly suited many people to confuse the two terms: identity,
the designer’s term, has traditionally been the poor relation to brand,
the ad-man’s term, and speaking the language of brand has helped to
talk up design fees in lean times. Expeditious though this might be,
however, it ignores fundamental di‹erences in the circumstances that
gave rise to these terms and — crucially — misses the added dimensions
that distinguish identity from brand.
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Identity came out of a very di‹erent context. By the late 1970s, the
‘great corporations’ — in their traditional roles — were in decline. An
emerging global market was weakening the manufacturing base of
the industrialized nations at the same time as far reaching social
changes were radically reshaping their institutions. The convention-
ally hierarchical and centralized approach to management was being
challenged by the far more flexible and e›cient approach of the
Japanese — who favoured flatter organizational structures, a more con-
sensual approach to making decisions, and greater decentralization.
The German Mittelstand, with their tightly woven social and economic
context, were also beginning to emerge as exemplars — smaller compa-
nies whose close working relationships with investors, suppliers and
sta‹ allowed them to think in terms of middle- and long-term futures
and focus on continual improvement of quality. Among the world’s
think tanks, management consultancies and business schools, ideas
were beginning to germinate that would later flower as the ‘stake-
holder principle’.
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One of the problems that faced the companies who were emerging
reorganized and reorientated out of this period of adjustment was
that of communicating a sense of coherence and belonging across
increasingly dispersed operations. In a pioneering study, two McKinsey
consultants, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos, identified character-
istics of organizations that had successfully emulated the Japanese
model — characteristics that included such intangibles as style, ethos
and what they called superordinate goals (the ‘significant meanings’
that motivated corporate life). Were there ways in which these could
be interpreted so that they could be made visible to key audiences?
Graphic design, just coming into its own as a business discipline,
seemed to o‹er some of the solutions: a facility with imagery and sym-
bolism combined with a culture that was more open to subtlety and
ambiguity than the overtly commercial creativity of advertising. So,
from the marriage of progressive management thinking and graphic
design was born the discipline of corporate identity consultancy.
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Lord Leverhulme’s famous gibe, that half his advertising budget was
wasted — only he didn’t know which half — underlies one of the great-
est weaknesses of advertising. By its very nature media is expensive,
transient and of relatively short duration. The brand builder has to
concentrate on projecting a succinct, cost e‹ective — and hopefully
memorable — message, competing against thousands of others pitched
at the same groups of consumers every day. But of course there are
many other ways in which organizations are experienced — ways that
are seen to be far more reliable indications of the nature of the organ-
ization. Above all they are encountered through their products and
services, their premises and their communications (which latter cate-
gory includes the whole range of interactions from face to face contact
to formal missives). And these much more ubiquitous, permanent and
persistent expressions are the media through which identity is articu-
lated.
By dressing up a product or service in theatrical garb, a brand addresses
itself to an audience of prospective purchasers — but in the process can
make itself dishearteningly out of sync with everyone else. Identity,
on the other hand, is concerned with the whole gamut of stakeholders.
Rather than addressing just one audience, it provides a means of unit-
ing all the disparate groups of investors, employees, suppliers, custom-
ers and local communities — bringing them together in the purposes
and aspirations of an organization. Conceptually, the di‹erence is
huge — between showmanship and emotional resonance. But in terms
of visual execution, it is no less significant —between the obvious,
skin-deep and cosmetic depiction of brand and the rich, resonant and
archetypal imagery of identity.
The distinction between brand and identity, as di‹erent ways of inter-
preting a visual theme, was given a psychological twist by Carl Jung. In
Man and his Symbols, Jung di‹erentiates between images that acquire
their meaning through common usage or deliberate intent — as brands
do — and images that have a symbolic dimension, pointing to fundamen-
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tal truths that exist partly outside the reach of human consciousness.
Symbols — images that imply something more than their obvious and
immediate meaning, and which have a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that
is never defined or fully explained, as Jung defines them — have always
had a central role in identity. From the emblems of the great religions
through the colourful pageant of heraldry to the trade marks of artisans
and cra·smen, symbols have traditionally been used to proclaim beliefs,
rally flagging hopes and to indicate pride of workmanship. But what-
ever their overt use, they have also served to signal a depth and reality
to the institutions they represent that goes beyond an obvious message,
and connects with their audiences at a fundamental level.
Any set of values can be used to create a brand — the more colourful
and far-fetched the better. The only constraint is that it must flatter the
pretensions of its targets. Like an actor on the stage, there is absolutely
no requirement that anything of the real organization be reflected in
the brand (except insofar as it adds value) — all that matters is that the
presentation of the brand is always consistent and in character. In fact
consistency is o·en valued above any other characteristic, to the extent
that the execution of many historic brand insignia has deviated little
from their origins in the commercial art of a bygone era. One only has
to look at some of the ‘great’ marques — Rover, Heinz, Hoover — to real-
ize how stultified, and how frumpy, they now appear. They have become
visual cliches, arguably ever more valuable in financial terms — but
ever less meaningful in human terms — the longer they go on.
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What does the future hold for branding and identity? On one level,
it is clear that the circumstances that originally prompted the devel-
opment of branding have changed — in most cases product or service
o‹erings are now much more than just packaged commodities, and
are already distinguished by di‹erences in design, preparation or price
point. And increasing consumer awareness — occasionally to the extent
of what Faith Popcorn has termed ‘consumer vigilantism’ — is redress-
ing the balance of power between vendor and purchaser. People want
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to know where the things they buy come from, what goes into them
and what they can realistically expect from them. More than anything,
however, they want to know where the buck stops — if anything goes
wrong, who is going to sort out the problem for them. Organizations
that have, in the past, operated behind numerous brands are finding
that customers — and not just customers, but interested parties of all
kinds — are coming back to the parent company with their concerns.
Ironically, endorsing a brand with a corporate identity is being seen as
adding value to it — leading to the speculation that some kind of ‘prod-
uct identity’ may ultimately supersede the brand as we know it.
However, it is as a catalyst for change that identity o‹ers its most com-
pelling business rationale to the millennial organization. Management
guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter says: ‘The ultimate skill for change mastery
works on… (the) larger context surrounding the innovation process. It
consists of the ability to conceive, construct, and convert into behaviour
a new view of organizational reality. […] Innovation and change, I am
suggesting, are bound up with the meanings attached to events and the
action possibilities that flow from those meanings. But that very recog-
nition — of the symbolic, conceptual, cultural side of change — makes
it more di›cult to see change as a mechanical process and extract the
“formula” for producing it.’ The symbolic, conceptual, cultural side of
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This piece was written in 1997 as a marketing ‘think piece’ for Precedent
Communications. Since then I find myself increasingly agreeing with brand crit-
ics such as Naomi Klein, Thomas Frank and Douglas Rushko‹. I’m also less sure
that the idea of identity holds — much of the business thinking that impressed me
at the time (epitomized in Charles Handy’s ‘Empty Raincoat’ and Arie de Geus’
‘Living Company’) now seems to reflect the values of a previous era. Perhaps the
real distinction now is between an approach based on hype and an approach
that tries to represent some kind of reality. But there needs to be a real sense of
‘identity’ to represent, and at a time when organizations are busily divesting
themselves of their pasts and growing through mergers and acquisitons it can
sometimes be hard to know where to find it!
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Imagined histories
At this point, I’d like to interpose an objection which one o·en hears
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I’d like, for a moment, to look at some of the weaknesses of the ways
that we teach, learn or use history — from the designer’s perspective.
The first observation is that we tend to objectify history, to set ourselves
apart, as observers and critics, from past generations of designers and
the themes, processes and preoccupations in which they were caught
up. That is, the ‘mind’ we bring to history sets up a subject-object dual-
ism which is largely alien to the mind we bring to design (a mind that
is participated in its representations, to use Owen Barfield’s very useful
term). The second observation is that the fundamental, and irreconcil-
able, di‹erences between these approaches creates a tension in our
relationship with the past and with the tradition of which we are a
part. On the one hand, the view of history as a linear progression or
evolution (sometimes referred to as the ‘Whig model’) highlights our
predecessors’ shortcomings and shows their strengths to be merely
relative. On the other hand, we are drawn — as practitioners — to a
sense of respectful fellowship with them in a way that stands outside
of time. One voice encourages us to become tomb robbers and slander-
ers, appropriating what we will of history’s ultimate clip art collection
whilst slagging o‹ its authors, knowing that they aren’t able to pro-
tect their work against our mocking references and shallow criticisms.
Another voice condemns this as a kind of sacrilege — or to use a more
comtemporary term, piracy — knowing instinctively that the rights we
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accord to the living are due equally to the dead. In the context of teach-
ing design history, it is the former voice: harsh, judgmental, o·en
shrill, that we teach our students to listen to.
The reasons for this seem to be largely historic. Since the decline of
the Romantic movement in the middle of the nineteenth century, the
idea of an active and productive imagination has been marginalized.
Its role in revealing and comprehending meaning has been usurped
by a narrow and quantitative empiricism — so much so that few people
now have a concept of what imagination is, and what it is capable of. At
best, it is a kind of childish whimsy. To get a sense of what it could be,
we have to go bakc to the great thinkers of the Romantic period.
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This is Blake:
And Goethe:
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Despite the fact that what Borto· and Goethe are talking about here is
doing science, and what we’re talking about is doing history, there are
some arresting analogies. For it is precisely the seeing of connections
that designers bring to their work in the studio, and if we can take
that (largely untutored) skill and apply it to seeing historical connec-
tions, we can simultaneously strengthen the use of the imagination
and encourage a more profound engagement with history.
What exactly might this involve? One practical exercise that could
easily be set to students would be to ‘rehearse’ a designer to whom
they are particularly drawn. The first stage of this would be to immerse
themselves in his or her work, and to find out as much as possible about
his or her life. Although this might sound no di‹erent to the research
a student would do for a critical essay or dissertation, the emphasis
would be more like an actor getting into role — developing a feel for
the person behind the work. At the point at which they felt that they
had really got ‘under the designer’s skin’, the project could move into
its performance stage. This would involve tackling a design project as
that person. So, supposing the student had chosen Jan Tschichold, he or
she would tackle the brief in character. Again, this might sound like a
typical college project of the ‘design a poster in the style of…’. But fol-
lowing the very important distinction Borto· makes (and the whole
value of this exercise rests on an understanding of that distinction)
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‘Imagined histories’ was originally a paper that I gave at the 1996 Design History
Conference in London. It was not well received — few of the academics who assem-
bled to hear it seemed to understand what I was trying to say, and of those who
did none were happy about it. This e‹ectively marked the end of my brief flirta-
tion with academia, and concluded my part-time career as a design educator. In
retrospect, I’m glad that the Design History Conference turned out to be such a
watershed — from that point on I reverted to being a practitioner, realizing that
that was where my passion lay.
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leif:
You mention several philosophers, but they come from the more
‘mechanistic’ (positivist: empiricist) pole of philosophy (e.g. Russell,
Popper, Neurath and early Wittgenstein).
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leif:
The research I’ve come across points towards much of our ‘thinking’
being done before we become conscious of it — to that extent, I’m
sure you’re right that it is pre-verbal. But to suggest that we don’t
think — here, meaning consciously deliberate — in words goes against
most of our experience. Your father’s dysphasia o‹ers a fascinating
insight into the way the brain works, but it doesn’t contradict the
assertion that much of our conscious experience is verbal.
Indeed, but I’m not sure how much emphasis one should place on
di‹erent activities being located in di‹erent parts of the brain. For a
start, the human brain is a relatively small organ (about the size of a
grapefruit), and it is criss-crossed by neural connections. Furthermore,
Roger Sperry and Joseph Bogen were at great pains to emphasise that
their research into people with ‘split brains’ — whilst it illuminated the
lateral specialization of the brain — was research into an abnormality.
For the rest of us, the two halves of our brains are connected by a mas-
sive bandwidth link, the corpus callosum, which routinely carries a
huge amount of tra›c between them.
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Over the last few years, I’ve noticed dyslexic students producing some
of the most consistently interesting graphic design. Since my eledest
son is dyslexic, I’ve spent a great deal of time talking to them about
their educational experiences and the way they approach their work.
One of the things that many have asserted is that they found them-
selves approaching ‘visible language’ as form — largely because they
struggled with its role as carrier of meaning (something the rest of
us o·en take for granted) — and as a result developed a completely
di‹erent relationship with it. And it may be that this relationship
gi·s them with such an extraordinary facility in seeing letterforms as
images. I don’t know — but it is an interesting thought.
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More philosophy
27 August 1997
Steve:
Could you please discuss the specific works of Heidegger you feel relate
to the design process? I am very interested in the relation between design
and philosophy and would like to know what parallels you draw from
Heidegger’s works.
Before I launch into this one, here’s a quote from Heidegger (speaking
in 1955 at a commemoration of composer Conradin Kreutzer):
That — in words far more eloquent than I could have framed — expresses,
for me, exactly what I think I am trying to do as a designer. On the one
hand, a concern about the trend that is trying to roll design into ‘calcu-
lative thinking’, on the other, a growing desire to foster in myself — and
provoke in the audiences who receive my work — a state of ‘meditative’
thinking (in Heidegger’s, rather than the New Age, sense).
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I recall that Plato did crop up in our discussions last year. But you raise
an interesting question — which I’ve touched upon before — which is
why design criticism has chosen to adopt the cloudy precepts of post-
modernism when the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions
provide so many insights with direct relevance to our preoccupations.
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nancy:
A couple I’ve known for many years are involved with basic research in
cognitive psychology. He asked me one night how I get memories. I, natu-
rally, said ‘In full color pictures’. He asked if I get sounds, words, sche-
matics, or anything else. I don’t. That, he said, makes mine an eidetic
mind (this does not mean I have a ‘photographic memory’ in the popular
sense, just that I think in realistic pictures). He questioned me for a long
time, eagerly, as he gets so few subjects of this type; eidetics comprise 5%
of the population. That 5% would be us. The other 95% is our audience.
By contrast Goethe was not a natural eidetic — but, through sheer per-
sistence and patience, he developed the extraordinary eidetic capaci-
ties which form the basis of his unique form of scientific enquiry (to
which he devoted more time than his writing). What is remarkable in
his case is that it is almost a complete inversion of Blake’s — Goethe
was first the man of letters, later an eidetic — whilst Blake was a natu-
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ral eidetic who became an autodidact and taught himself Latin, Greek,
Hebrew and later Italian (to read Dante) in his forties.
I don’t see though that this means it is a ‘them’ and ‘us’ situation as
far as the projection of these abilities through design. That, I think,
is one of the mistakes of information design — which believes that the
designer has to meet the ‘user’ on the latter’s terms. The result, inevi-
tably, is prosaic in the extreme — ‘plain’ language that both Blake and
Goethe would have flinched at, layout that looks like an experiment
in syllogistic logic, typography where the demands of maximum leg-
ibility destroy any mystery or magic — form following function down
the road to perdition. Yet information design is the logical extension of
the insights of cognitive science — with its unquestioned assumptions
about ‘usability’ — into graphic design.
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Pat:
I can only speak for myself… and to say that it appears to be learnable.
That isn’t, of course, the same thing as teachable — but it may be an
answer to your question.
Like you, I recall having strong eidetic abilities as a child. Don’t most
children? But I wonder what e‹ect our educational methods — which
o·en encourage abstract intellection at the expense of sensorial imagi-
nation — have on us. By the time I was ten or eleven these eidetic abili-
ties had e‹ectively gone.
For some years, without great diligence, I have been consciously trying
to cultivate my imagination. I wanted to t to develop the ability to con-
ceive of a design concept as a fully fledged image. However, I’ve found
this particularly di›cult — and elusive. (Sometimes it seemed to be pos-
sible in that narrow territory between waking and sleep). Then, a few
months ago, I was describing a concept to a colleague and I realised I
was visualising it, as a more-or-less finished item, as we spoke.
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Since then, this has become a fairly common occurrence. But fine
detail still remains di›cult — it requires more attention that I am cur-
rently capable of giving to resolve much beyond the general outlines.
And, like in a dream, text appears to be impossible to grab hold of (pity,
since that would crack the copy problem!). Since this is a relatively
novel thing for me, previously very much a verbal person, there’s not
much more I can say about it. Except that it appears to be both a boon
and something of a curse. A boon, because it is much easier to enthuse
a client with a project if you can, e‹ectively, see the/an end result there
before you. And a curse because getting anywhere near enough to the
thing I see is beyond my modest cra· skills — any serendipity in putting
a job together (which I used to see as a blessing) has become a distrac-
tion away from the object I see in my mind. Still, I wouldn’t now have it
any other way.
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kc:
I o·en read (especially but not always fiction) in full concept mode. It can
be disconcerting when the ‘real world’ intrudes. Very similar to being
awakened unexpectedly from a vivid dream. Actually, the same thing
happens to me when I get ‘into’ a design problem/solution. I really am
‘inside’ the design.
I’d always assumed that everybody similarly got carried away by some
good descriptive prose, but now I’m wondering if this assumption
needs to be questioned. That feeling of no longer being aware of the
words — or even particularly of reading — is to me one of the great pleas-
ures of literature. But books are not universally popular or appreciated
in our societies, so it is perhaps a pleasure that has passed many people
by? And does literary criticism — which shi·s the emphasis from expe-
riencing a book to analysing its structure and style — cause people to
stop seeing the wood for the trees?
This is, perhaps, tied into another strand from this thread — which
is, should we be creating for people who are like us, or people who
are unlike us? Clearly there are ‘academic’ novelists, who place more
importance on cleverly cra·ing prose than on the experience — but
my suspicion is that for many novelists the experiences of writing
and reading are intimately connected. Certainly this is the case with
designers — we tend to seek out and ‘consume’ good design and also,
as Gunnar suggested some time back, take it apart to see how it works.
But should we actually be saying ‘most people don’t do this, therefore
let us design something that they can understand on their own terms
(whatever those are)’. I feel strongly that we should be inviting our
audiences to meet us on our terms — or at least meeting us halfway. But
maybe a sizable number of people can’t do that?
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Coercion
29 August 1997
leif:
In our culture, the term ‘behavior modification’ has very negative con-
notations, but in the pure sense, that’s what we’re about. A reality of
graphic design is that it intends to influence people. At times, you do
want to elicit one specific behavior. With a campaign to get kids to wear
bicycle helmets, the bottom line is that you want them to do it. More
ideally, I view design as decision support. You want to o‹er audience a
range of choices that they did not have before.
Something that I’ve wondered about a great deal is: if one reads Vance
Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, one comes away with the impression
that the advertising industry knew (most of this book refers to the 50s)
a great deal about human motivation — and that they had a sophisti-
cated ‘technology’ for leveraging this knowledge. Significantly, this is
the same period that media attention was focussed on the ‘brain wash-
ing’ scares emerging from the Korean War — and the belief that the
Chinese possessed extraordinary methods of engineering compliance.
‘Motivation Research’, if I remember correctly, is the phrase Packard
gave to this powerful knowledge.
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We’re in much the same position now — only the ‘big idea’ of today is
the cognitive sciences. No doubt some ambitious academic has a publi-
cation in proof, even as I write, that demonstrates that the advertising
industry has a powerful methodology based on a profound understand-
ing of the neurology of the human brain. And no doubt it will make
chilling bed-time reading for those of us who are too grown up to read
pulp thrillers. But, once again, I doubt there would actually be much
basis to it.
The conclusion that I draw from all this is that ‘behaviour modifica-
tion’ has been a very convenient myth — in whatever fashionable form
it has taken. Whilst advertisers always denied that they did it, they also
loved people to impute it of them — suggesting that they were far clev-
erer than they actually were. But actually, the basic techniques (beauti-
fully described, from a psychological perspective, in Robert Cialdini’s
book Influence) are simple things that most of us do instinctively much
of the time, without thinking about them. Whether you look at them
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So, I think the time has come for a thorough debunking of the whole
thing. I don’t think any serious designer really wants to involve herself/
himself in the visual equivalent of ‘find the lady’, which is what this
amounts to. Nor do I think that we really want to encourage our clients
to stoop to things that should, by rights, be well beneath their dignity.
But unfortunately, whilst advertising has allowed itself to dri· into a
state of somewhat lackadaisical self-indulgence, there is a vocal lobby
in graphic design that wants to push us back into the ghetto of ‘scien-
tific communication’. Which means, as far as I can discern, still trying
to make people think and feel things that they might not otherwise
want to.
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kc:
I was involved in a play that had posters so attractive that people were
stealing and collecting them. We had empty seats every night and people
were still trying to get tickets three weeks a·er the play closed, because
the dates were so unobtrusive that no one noticed and/or remembered
them. It gave a very good artistic impression of the theater and contin-
ued to do so for several years because people kept and framed them. Is
that worth the fact that it failed as an advertising piece? The informa-
tion was there and not di›cult to read, it just didn’t look important.
But then look at the psychedelic posters that Vic Moscoso, Rick Gri›n
and Wes Wilson were creating circa 1967. Not only couldn’t one read
the date, but the venue and the artist were equally obscure. However, I
don’t believe that it was a problem filling the auditoria — Steve Miller,
Van Morrison and the Grateful Dead (minus, of course, Pig Pen and
Jerry Garcia) are with us still, rather than busking in Market Street on
busy Saturday a·ernoons.
A few years ago, I saw Susan Colberg — now a professor at the University
of Alberta — propose an alphabet designed to teach dyslexic children to
read. The aphabet was designed to incorporate phoenetic cues into the
typography. Her initial results were very encouraging.
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Blake
1 September 1997
Steve:
To bring this post back to the design arena, I will bring the poet William
Blake into the fold. In addition to Symbolist poets, Blake’s poetry involves
a great deal of the ‘sense-mixing’ of which Conni speaks: ‘How the chim-
ney-sweepers cry/Every blackning Church appals,/And the hapless sol-
dier’s sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls’ (from London). I o‹er this
line as an e‹ort to link the creative processes of writing and design
together (not as an example of pedantry). One only needs to look as far as
Blake’s own Songs of Innocence and Experience to see how his writ-
ing and design minds came together.
It’s gratifying to know that you’re not alone! For me, Blake is the
archetype of the graphic designer for the twenty-first century — auteur,
visionary, social critic, person of principle and integrity. Now I can add
‘synaesthete’ to that list!
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Language
1 September 1997
leif:
But (as you’d expect me to say!) only some linguists. Chomsky and
Pinker — especially Pinker, since he’s made the brilliant career move
of linking Chomsky with evolutionary biology — are in the ascendant
at the moment. (This coincides with a period of ascendancy of the
‘nature’ lobby in the sciences generally). Chomsky’s love of formal logic
also links him with those philosophers you mentioned before — and
especially with the rather tedious ‘linguistic analysis’ that grew out of
Logical Positivism.
‘We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native lan-
guages. […] We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and
ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties
to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that
holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the
patterns of our language.’
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quality of his scholarship (and his common sense) that the original is
actually Nootka (a native American language of a seafaring people of
the North West), the Apaches not just having no word for canoe, but
having no need (in their inland, desert environment) for canoes.
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words, links with the last quote. Barfield asserts that we have only com-
paratively recently emerged from a ‘participative’ state of conscious-
ness, where the distinction between our individual sense of identity
and that of the world around us was by no means so clear as it is now. In
this state, it was therefore possible for the ancients to concieve of what
we now think of as human faculties as being ‘outside’ the individual
(a good example is the idea of ‘genius’). It was also natural for words
to simultaneously have metaphorical and literal meanings — and for
these meanings to be conjoined (an example is the Latin ‘Spiritus’
which means both ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’ — as it does, in fact, in both the
Greek ‘pneuma’ and the Hebrew ‘Ruach’). Barfield shows — in contrast
to conventional wisdom — that the metaphorical meaning was the
prior one.
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bruce:
I was being sloppy when I said ‘The conclusion that I draw from all this
is that “behaviour modification” has been a very convenient myth’.
What I really should have said is that the idea of a sophisticated tech-
nology of behaviour modification has been a very convenient myth.
In fact, I totally agree with your points. Repetition is the ‘blunt’ end of
behaviour modification. It makes perfect sense to me — and I’m sure to
most people — that if you say something enough times, and in enough
places, it will have some e‹ect. But my point about how all these meth-
ods are quite comprehensible from everyday experience is definitely
true here — one only needs to look at how one’s mother (or ‘primary
caregiver’) nagged one as a child to see the archetype of all repetition
as behaviour modification.
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Gestalt
2 September 1997
tom:
What about ‘Gestalt’? Since I didn’t follow the thread completely, has
anybody mentioned the term ‘Gestalt’? That might connect even more
disciplines…
Even though this stu‹ is now nearly a century old, it can still seem
pretty mindblowing. The deeper one digs, the more one realizes
that our world is built on meanings — not perceptions. We hear a
noise and we see an object moving across the sky, and we think ‘heli-
copter’ — although there is no obvious sensory connection between the
image and the sound. We walk into a room, and on the floor is the
side of a cable spool balanced on a crate. Immediately we recognize
it as a table — although it doesn’t fit any definition of what a ‘table’
might be. And yet for the same reason, the artificially-intelligent com-
puter fails to ‘see’ the tank moving across the centre of its field of
vision — even though it has been comprehensively programmed with
clues as to what tanks ‘look’ like.
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me:
leif:
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Psychedelia
3 September 1997
leif:
john:
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ber, lined with old egg-boxes painted black. But how could anyone have
a stupid name like Barney Bubbles? What little did I know…
Well, fate takes a funny turn. The older brother is now a systems
manager for a government department. The kid brother still loves
rapidographs, fluorescent papers, metallic inks (well, maybe not rapi-
dographs!). And the man with the crazy name and the weird wardrobe,
who died tragically young, is at last beginning to get the recognition
he deserves as one of the greatest innovators of British graphic design.
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rita:
I wish I could explain. But I think you had to live through the sixties!
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nancy:
The person who ‘sees’ the reversing cube in three dimensions (top for-
ward, bottom forward or even both at the same time) clearly does not
just see what is there on the paper. And even though the person who
doesn’t ‘get it’ will complain that they ‘only see a series of lines’, this
is still di‹erent to the person who was blind and now can see — who
doesn’t even recognize what is in front of him/her as ‘a series of lines’.
Meaning is nested that deep in vision, that it is almost impossible for
us to conceive of an image that doesn’t ‘mean’ anything — even if the
meaning we adduce from it is ‘it’s just a kind of blob’.
Heidegger (we’re back to him again, I’m afraid!) makes this distinction
between ‘language as disclosure’ and ‘language as representation’.
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Celebrating imperfection
10 September 1997
leif:
People are conditioned to think they are stupid if they cannot fathom a
design. In reality, the fault lies (usually) in the design.
All sound Donald Norman principles, exorcising the belief that we’re
inept in the face of design. But actually all we’re doing here is moving
from ‘the design is perfect, we’re stupid’ to ‘the design isn’t perfect,
we’re not stupid’. There’s still the implication that underlies much
of this cognitive factors stu‹ that ‘the design should be perfect’. But
designs are (still) human artefacts, and humans aren’t perfect. So why
should the design be? Can’t we have a situation where ‘it’s not perfect,
I’m not perfect, but what does it matter?’ Some of my favourite things
are precious to me because they don’t work as expected — or at all.
But that’s precisely — and perversely (pace Donald Norman) — why I like
them.
A·er all this emphasis on rigour, sometimes it’s a positive joy to come
across something that is totally, irredeemably and delightfully incom-
prehensible. It’s like rushing to get a train for an important presenta-
tion, only to see it pull out of the station as you arrive pu›ng and
wheezing on the platform — and then experiencing that extraordinary
lightness of being that leaves one standing in the pouring rain think-
ing ‘I’m alive! Who cares about the stupid Pot Noodle account’.
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In perspective
10 September 1997
don:
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Certainly, walking around the U›zi last year — with Barfield’s words
ringing around my head — was an extraordinary experience. It was
as if one could actually trace the stirrings of this new consciousness
from the still mediaeval representations of Cimabue through the first
attempts at perspective (still within a mediaeval frame) of Giotto to the
extraordinary breakthroughs of Piero and later Renaissance artists.
And it is worth bearing in mind that perspective-less pictorial repre-
sentations still remained the norm in the Islamic world (as in Persian
and Mughal miniatures) — a world still locked within the mediaeval
paradigm — for centuries a·er western artists had adopted perspective
as a norm.
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julie:
I am still not sure how much I will be able to charge for a logo but I
will follow the thread in the hopes that I can avoid becoming (horrors!) a
dunderhead. You guys may already be saving my reputation.
‘That’s rather a lot!’ says the king. ‘Is there anything else you would
accept?’
‘All right, a single gold piece.’
‘Well’ says the pauper ‘the million gold pieces is what you are worth.
But the single gold piece — that’s what I am worth.’.
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Sound advice
4 October 1997
cheryl:
Yes …I think about these things too...(does it not come down to some
degree at least, operating always as one personally sees fit, whatever the
size of the client…? Am I dreaming perhaps…? I would rather work by
my own standards than be a pawn in this kind of game and be taken for
a ride. I rather not get the job as I’ve said. Why bother…? Life’s too short.
Perhaps the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given as a designer came
from the director of industrial design of a major British multi-national.
As we returned from a lunch at which he and my then boss had con-
sumed more alcohol than I thought was humanly possible, he turned
to me and said (in that uncannily wise way that people can sometimes
get in their cups) ‘the most important thing for a designer is to under-
stand the corporate mind’. I don’t remember being that impressed
with it at the time (in fact, I seem to recall having to excuse myself
during lunch, plunging my face into a basin of cold water in a desper-
ate attempt to restore some semblance of sobriety). But it has been an
infallibly useful guide in the intervening years.
Not all designers who do identity work have corporate clients, but non-
corporate identity must be a pretty niche market. And corporates are
among the most political, games-playing institutions on this earth.
Designers are o·en pawns in someone’s empire building, and automat-
ically inherit all the opponents and enemies of their sponsor. Indeed,
we’re o·en so·-targets too — wet behind the ears when it comes to the
dangers of institutional politics, and without the status that could pro-
tect us from being thwarted.
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gary:
I live in the UK. My colleague and I are both Police O›cers who have
been asked by our Forces to design and construct a Website for our force.
It’s a big project with a big budget. We have been asked to source and
take courses on HTML authoring and graphic design. We have found the
HTML course without any di›culty, but the design side is more di›cult.
Basically, we are both OK on the so·ware (Photoshop, Illustrator, mainly)
but need a course which will tell us what looks good, what catches the
eye, things to avoid, that sort of thing. I would appreciate any ideas or,
particularly from UK residents, names of companies.
I don’t know how to say this without sounding high-handed. But I’m
going to have a try anyway.
I’ve spent the better part of twenty years exploring questions like ‘what
looks good, what catches the eye, things to avoid, that sort of thing’.
Some days I wonder whether I’m any closer to an answer than when
I first started — and I’m sure you’ll find others here who feel likewise.
There are no easy solutions — least of all that could be summarized
in a few simple lessons. And whilst there are principles, design of all
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Encouraging amateurs
9 October 1997
alec:
Why be parsimonious? Why not share with them the great secret of
graphic design. Which is that it is a journey, and not a destination?
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Colours receding
14 October 1997
ed:
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Since those days I’ve noticed color space illusions both in print and on my
computer screen which were working fine, but did not seem to go with
the warm/cool idea. In other words, I noticed blue floating up from a red
field, and sometimes the opposite. These e‹ects may be very subjective,
and the result of environmental conditions and mental states, stress,
a·erimage, all kinds of things.
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kc:
As someone pointed out to me a long time ago. There ARE perfect jobs
and ideal companies out there. Unfortunately, no one in their right mind
quits a perfect job, so they don’t have very many openings.
I’ve seen this from both sides. And the conclusion I’d draw is that
to look towards perfection in employer/employee relationships is to
miss the point. Which is that work involves necessarily abrasive rela-
tionships — abrasion that conduces both to maturity and to bitterness,
o·en simultaneously. In Jungian terms, work is where many people get
to meet their ‘shadow’ — and the resulting ‘projection’ can be a trial for
everyone, as well as a spur for growth.
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As an employer I’m pretty mean (finances are always tight) and I expect
a lot from my employees. It’s certainly not uncommon for them to
work late into the night, for no extra remuneration. I’m also pretty
infuriating — I o·en (but not invariably) insist on things being done
‘my way’, change my mind at the last minute and fail to practise what
I preach. Still, several people have said that they learned more here
than they learned at College — and at least they’ve not been charged
for this opportunity to improve themselves (and their prospects) at my
expense! And I’m continually surprised and gratified by a level of loy-
alty beyond and above what I have reason to expect (although I also
have a fair idea of what they say about me a·er work at the pub…).
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jennifer:
2 If you feel that part of your task is to make something readable, what
percentage of your clients hire you for you ability to make their product
‘cool’ and what percentage hire you for your ability to make the product
‘understandable’. In other words, are clients aware of your ability to do
this or do they care about it?
I’d like to be helpful and respond, but I don’t think the dichotomy
between styling and usability is right. It’s a bit like asking ‘how
much of your job involves using colour and how much involves using
type?’ — the two are really di‹erent dimensions, neither polarities nor
ends of a continuum.
I’m sure clients have lots of reasons for hiring us (the chemistry is
right, the things we say strike a chord with them, we have the right
kind of experience, etc.) but without a doubt the overriding considera-
tion is that they believe we will help them further their objectives.
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kc:
I’m not sure I agree — although when you put it like this, it sounds per-
suasive!
Not having seen the article (or being likely to), I can’t comment on it.
But I do think designers who work with type will increasingly have to
become far more literate, to the extent that they can write and edit
well. I also think you’ll find many more writers who want to use the
full expressive power of typography.
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Virtuosity
4 December 1997
cheryl:
Absolutely. It’s respect for the individual specialities which is what makes
this work and work well. I would guess that one calling themselves a
‘jack of all trades’ is really a jack of nothing… and merely indication of
yet another on the bandwagon in the same vein as a desktop publisher
calling themselves a designer. We had a great thread on a interactive
media listserv here locally; where someone was posting a position for a
receptionist, that is one that knew HTML, graphics, writing, phone work,
C++, java, co‹ee making… the works. Needless to say, it sparked a whole
slew of responses.
Those who really understand their own field o·en have an intimation
that other forms of knowledge are in some way or another related.
Designers have historically been extremely good at switching mid-
stream to other design disciplines (virtually all the older generation of
Italian industrial designers trained as architects, for instance — Sotsass,
Mendini, Bellini etc.). Di‹erent design disciplines may have radically
di‹erent processes, materials, markets and cultures, but once you
understand what design per se is about, these di‹erences are easily
overcome. Writing is designing with words, Art Direction designing
with images, Typography designing with letterforms — is there any
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great impediment to moving freely across that range? I’ve met people
who have successfully switched from fashion to product design, or
from graphics to music, or from literature to programming. So I don’t
think claiming to know ‘HTML, graphics, writing, phone work, C++,
java, co‹ee making’ necessarily means that one is either a paragon or
a charlatan.
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scott:
Another angle: don’t think you’re at the top of the food chain. The heavy-
duty marketing and advertising people say ‘Yeah, he/she is great with
a tablet, and has tremendous talent, but doens’t know jack about what
sells’. Don’t take o‹ense to this. I’ve been on both ends of this one. I do not
want to o‹end, just educate. I’m not a know-it-all, I’m just passing on
what I’ve seen.
There was a piece on this morning’s radio news about the EU decision
to ban tobacco advertising. A spokesperson for the tobacco industry
was interviewed, and came out with the priceless ‘it won’t have any
e‹ect on consumption’. If it doesn’t have any e‹ect on consumption,
why bother to advertise! (Do they take us for complete idiots?)
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Typesetting
8 December 1997
dick:
Unfortunately my experience has been that most designers are not good
typographers -- at least, not in the sense of the cra·smanship that existed
in the better ad shops before the advent of dtp. Or, maybe it’s just that I
have been around this industry too long and am prone to making unfa-
vorable comparison between a lot of what goes on today and what we
used to strive for.
But I clearly wasn’t on another planet. Because almost from the start
of PostScript, independent type designers were producing fonts with
small caps and old style figures, authentic revivals of old favourites,
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and new and exciting types that were in keeping with the spirit of the
times. Indeed one of the first things that many of us did when we got
our hands on the first versions of Fontographer was to try and fill some
of these gaps between what we wanted and what was available. Then
we met each other at type conferences and realized we were not alone.
Soon the big type foundries (initially Monotype and Adobe) grasped
that their designer customers were driving the market for PostScript
type, and that our preferences were distinctly di‹erent to the received
wisdom of the type industry. The first sixty five or so releases in
the Adobe Library reflected stultified type house choices — Optima,
Souvenir, ITC Garamond etc. Then, quite suddenly, there was a marked
switch to designer choices, capitalizing on the distaste for sanitised
versions of historical types.
But these are only easily illustrated examples of what was a much wider,
and more serious, di‹erence between what designers wanted — and
what the type industry was prepared to give us. We increasingly wanted
type with more authenticity, more ruggedness, more ‘spite’ to it — what
the type houses wanted to give us was more slickness, more homogene-
ity, more polish. And what made it really irksome was — right up until
the end — they thought they knew best. They stuck with their techno-
phobe customers who still liked the sickly-sweet ITC reworkings of the
eighties, and smirked at those of us who were using Macs.
I’m sorry if some of these guys have ended up as janitors. But if they
had listened, and not been so supercilious and dismissive, there might
still have been a place for them.
Note: old style figures (e.g. 0123456789) include some characters that descend
below the baseline and some that ascend above the ‘x’ height. In this respect they
di‹er from the more common ‘lining’ figures (e.g. 0123456789) which range
with the capitals. Because of this, old style figures harmonise better with lower
case. To ‘mump’ a font is to borrow a case of type from another typesetter.
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Graduates
8 December 1997
bob:
This is the problem we have with finding good interns and entry-level
designers. It seems that most of the schools are turning out design stu-
dents with such big egos that they aren’t interested in ‘producing paying
work’ by starting at ground level and working their way up. They come
out of school with the idea that they are ready to jump right into project
management and art direction. We’ve had second-year students inter-
viewing with us for an internship ask how much involvement they would
have in meetings with clients, and said they weren’t interested if the
internship would only involve ‘production’ work.
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To try and turn lose lose into win win, we have to realize that the entry
route into graphic design requires an alternation of learning, unlearn-
ing and relearning — and that employers should work with the colleges
to help manage the ‘human resources’ issues (i.e. bewildered and dis-
appointed graduates) that result.
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irisa:
In my opinion education can sometimes kill what makes art and artists,
art and artists! It has taken me almost ten years to shed the damage to
my creativity that was done when I got my formal education in Graphic
Design. I guess I just didn’t have the ‘balls of steel’ to come out of the
schooling with my creativity still in tact, like some people seemed to be
able to do. What I came out of the schooling with was a group of instruc-
tors, forever sitting on my shoulder, and whispering ‘rules’ in my ear as
I sat in front of a white sheet of paper, hungry to let go and create. Raw
artistic emotion cannot be put to paper, or maybe into a musical form,
if the artist is worried about what is ‘proper’ or ‘in style’. The rules of
layout, composition and color, to create certain moods and get the audi-
ences eye to move as the artist desires, may come in handy occasionally,
when the artist stares at a work in progress and can’t figure out what
just isn’t working… but I think for the most part, these rules and school-
ing do far more damage than good.
It’s not the rules that do the damage, but the blow to self-esteem when
one is made to feel ignorant. Knowledge is power: you can choose to
follow the rules, or to reject them. But being made to feel as if one’s
work is of no consequence, because one doesn’t understand how to
play the game, is one of the biggest blocks to creativity. This is a draw-
back of applying a mediaeval model of academic education — firmly
based on a feudal hierarchy of ‘knowers’ — to a creative field.
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cheryl:
You said: ‘It’s not the rules that do the damage, but the blow to self-
esteem when one is made to feel ignorant. Knowledge is power: you can
choose to follow the rules, or to reject them. But being made to feel as if
one’s work is of no consequence, because one doesn’t understand how to
play the game, is one of the biggest blocks to creativity.’ Do you care to
expand on this very interesting sentence, James? I’d be delighted…
Sorry, it was late and I was less than coherent — it’s not as if I was trying
to make an obscure, profound point!
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other social groups — this is one of the great revelations of life. But
it does depend on the slow germination of the ‘Aha!’ factor, which
means that it’s not as common a perspective as it should be. Many
perplexing setbacks and disappointments — such as when your College
tutor doesn’t recognize your dissertation as the most exciting thing
ever to be written about graphic design — take on a di‹erent, and far
less personal, complexion if you grasp these rules (or even just have an
intimation of their existence). If you understand that someone is criti-
cal of your work because they are operating within a certain frame-
work (which they may be unaware of), you can choose to a›rm or deny
their words. If you can’t, it’s likely you’ll interpret them as a personal
blow to your self esteem.
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Art as brand
11 December 1997
gunnar:
James, The problem is that most people see ‘Art’ as a collection of objects
that have inherent value. The Art world sees ‘Art’ as a dialog of sorts.
Under the second view there is no problem with doing something that
‘anyone could have done’ any more than it would be a problem to utter
a short (brilliant, pithy) statement in a conversation that ‘anyone could
have said’. The phrase ‘fuck it’ could have an entirely di‹erent meaning
in another context. The same sentence might be a conceptual break-
through in reply to one statement and a bit of idiocy in another conver-
sation. To that extent anyone else’s sixty minutes of silent cops video
would not have been more than vaguely similar.
I wasn’t really intending to make a value judgment on Ms Wearing’s
piece — well, not principally, anyway. What I do feel about the Turner
Prize episode, though, is that it beautifully shows how ‘Art’ has fully
become a social construction — a clever and di›cult game, with inscru-
table rules, open only to the eligible. Of course, we’ve lived with this for
years now — with ‘installations’ consisting of piles of bricks or heaps of
old crockery being the butt of many a tabloid joke. But even so there
was always a suggestion that it was ‘Art’ because an ‘Artist’ had graced
it (my previous reference to Duchamp and the fire extinguisher, for
example) — a lingering feeling that there must be some quality in the
artefact that made it Art, Noun. Wearing’s piece is di‹erent though (in
common with many of her peers, like Tracey Emin or Mona Hatoum).
The thing itself has no inherent virtues (it must be unwatchable, unless
one is a complete masochist or in a state of deep catatonia, and my
guess is that nobody will seriously ever watch it). It is the concept that
is Art, Verb — an idea that probably doesn’t even need to exist to be
the subject of critical discussion. The doing of an Artist has therefore
become the art — the artefact is simply an irrelevant by-product.
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As for the ‘statement’ that the piece makes, I’m sure I could improvise
some suitably adulatory twaddle about it deconstructing the role of
law enforcement in mass culture and entertainment, etc. One could
also say that the prize, the hype, the reactions of the critics and the
public is itself some kind of installation/performance with a multitude
of unfixed, reader-centred interpretations. But, in truth, one could say
these sorts of things about almost anything — and I’m not sure what
anyone would gain from it.
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Emotion
17 December 1997
ron:
I think it’s more di›cult for artists to talk about art. What it is, what it
ought to have, etc. There is this tension between technique and emotion.
A good design will move me as much as a good drawing or photograph.
Then I have this desire to find out why it moved me. What exactly did the
artist do?
In this century (and perhaps the last) the arts have come very close
to the danger of believing that emotion is ‘spirituality’ — that there is
something special, sublime about it. Ironically, at the same time the sci-
ences have come pretty close to understanding that emotion is a func-
tion of some of the lowest, most primitive parts of the brain — common
to all mammals, even rats and mice.
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said ‘five years’. The others, who had been moved by the singing about
peace and goodwill to all men, came up with an average sentence of
‘eleven years’. (Moral: don’t get brought up in front of the magistrates
at Yuletide!)
Having said this, I should distinguish between the almost visceral feel-
ing of being overcome by something — that sensation of emotion ‘well-
ing up’ — which is a dangerous pleasure (nobody has ever manipulated
it better than Hitler, whom we shouldn’t forget was an artist by inclina-
tion and training) and what, for want of a better term, I’ll call aesthetic
awe. This latter is what we experience when we witness something
that is so superb in execution and/or conception that we appreciate the
distance between ourselves and its author. Doubtless there is an emo-
tional component to this feeling — a thrill that raises our hackles — but
primarily it is not an emotional experience. More, I would say, it is
an experience akin to the ‘Aha!’ type of realization — but, of course,
di‹erent. It is at once both humbling and empowering. And, unlike
the feeling of being moved by something, it is extremely hard to engi-
neer — the only thing that can provoke it is the exercise of genius on
someone else’s part (and it requires that we understand something of
that genius from having striven in the same direction ourselves).
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Creative demagogues
18 December 1997
michael:
I should have been more careful. Not long ago I was speculating on
why all Internet discussions (no matter what the subject) always come
around to talking about Hitler. And here I am bringing him up again!
At some point I would like to try and collect some of the declamatory
utterances of the early c20 modernists — the ones that sound like
Robespierre or Trotsky, only with a designer’s vocabulary. One that
comes to mind is El Lizzitsky’s ‘War has been declared on the aesthetic
of chaos. An order that has entered fully into consciousness is called
for’. Thank God he never got to govern anybody…
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david:
I was told in design class that graphic design is about seeing in certain
ways, and that the designers themselves have a large responsibility in
teaching the public how to see
That’s usual here, too — very much an Art School view of the world. I’m
not sure it’s right, though. People have always struck me as being able
to see perfectly well — our brains have evolved the magnificent capac-
ity to limit the amount of information processing they have to do, and
whether you’re a bank teller or a bartender it’s not always that adap-
tive to be able to see like Kandinsky.
The public has an appetite for our work (as and when it does) because
we play with their visual world — not because we’re socially respon-
sible pedagogues. Just as most of us love to hear musicians who can
do things that are novel, clever or beautifully fitting with words and
chords, so too do we love the same sorts of things with visual language,
imagery and symbolism. As designers, we don’t really have to educate
this appetite — just cater to it.
So this seems to provide the critic with a useful role to fill. He should
attempt to answer the question: what assumptions does a particular
designer make about the way people see things, what changes might a
particular school of design induce in the way people see things?
Though if you compare the design critic to, say, the music critic, this
would place a largely undeserved burden on her/him. Does anyone ask
what assumptions the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or the Chemical Brothers
make about the way people hear things? Does any critic even ask this
about Mozart or Schumann? That’s not to say that it isn’t an interest-
ing question — only that music criticism goes on without needing to
engage with the big, existential topics. Imagine a design review along-
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side one for a restaurant — the first all angst and anxiety about context,
meaning and interpretation, the second a mouth-wateringly evocative
description of aroma, colour, texture, taste: sheer artistry with the
bain marie and the pastry knife. Why should we designers have to draw
the short straw?
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Ice skating
7 January 1998
ian:
I would read, with great interest, any literature about where or how
Shakespear, Rodin, (or contemporaries like Burroughs or Brody), got the
inspiration to do what they did. And not vague notions of ‘the world,
man’. Perhaps that would give us the didactic tools to deconstruct the
real meaning behind their work. Perhaps if we became more e‹ective
in communicating the reasons for our designs, others would have the
tools to criticise our design. I know of few professions that remain so
aloof and insular in the creation of initial processes.
A couple of things…
Firstly, I’m not sure knowing the ‘where’ or ‘how’ is really the clue
you’re looking for. Many stories of ‘inspiration’ show it to be triggered
by the most mundane things. Without getting too theoretical, I think
one has to factor in some of the ways the mind works — in this case, the
way that ideas can be ‘incubated’ below the level of consciousness. In
my experience, being ‘inspired’ by something o·en has little to do with
that thing itself, except in so much as it catalyses the coming together
of an assortment of pre-conscious ideas. As in chemistry — where the
catalyst only serves to initiate a process — so, I think, in ‘art’.
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that ‘genius’ isn’t simply the product
of what the brain is ‘programmed with’ (to use an awful mecanomor-
phic analogy). Shakespeare and Rodin shared a similar educational
and cultural background with many of their peers, but it’s what they
did with it that counts. As Wilde so aptly said: ‘two men looked our
through prison bars…’ Cultivating inspiration is a skill, not a content-
driven thing. Describe to me how to ice-skate, and I’ll tell you how I
design! Which is to say that like most skills, being able to do it and
being able to articulate it verbally are quite di‹erent things — and that
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even when it’s possible to do the latter, the results are about as useful
as trying to teach yourself to balance on the rink by learning the phys-
ics of equilibrium.
So I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that if we could better
communicate what we do others would have the tools to criticise it. The
tools a critic uses are generally not those the practitioner uses — which
is why we have a tradition of ‘lay’ criticism. I can watch Torville and
Dean and admire their e‹ortless grace on the ice, without being able
to put one foot in front of the other on the rink. And it’s precisely
because it is possible for people to appreciate — and make judgments
about — a whole range of activities (including Design) without the ben-
efit of a comprehensive explanation of how they’re done, that any of us
have jobs in the first place.
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Deference
9 January 1998
michael:
We may be able to work our way laboriously backwards from the aes-
thetic properties of their style to their makers’ purpose, but I doubt that
we would ever reach the point of fully understanding the tattoo, or the
masks, etc. based on aesthetics alone.
Whilst on one level I agree with you, I do wonder why — of all cultures
and epochs — we have been saddled with having to mix our aesthetics
with anthropology and political correctness. The Victorians could col-
lect Japanese prints or African masks without ever having to ask them-
selves what their makers’ purpose was — and we can see how this
eclecticism revitalised their art. And almost every other culture has
unselfconsiously appropriated artefacts from outside itself and applied
its own systems of judgment to them. We, on the other hand, have to be
excruciatingly deferential and circumspect in what we say about cul-
tures other than our own — showing that we understand and respect
their world-view. So deferential and respectful, indeed, that when
anyone takes them up as influences — and the paradigm case must be
Paul Simon with Graceland — everyone shouts ‘exploitation!’
I think one can be overly precious about all this anthropology. Whilst
the Maori tattoo undoubtedly had significances within that society,
so one could argue Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald does in ours
(look at the e‹ort that is spent preserving the integrity of those icons!).
Would we want our remote descendents to put them on a pedestal — to
mutter in hushed tones ‘you really have to understand the seminal role
of popular culture in twentieth century American life before you can
comment on the aesthetics of Duck Tales or the Big Mac’? Personally,
I’d rather that they just take the bits that appeal to them, and put the
rest in the recycler…
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marc:
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to know that something feels right but
not to know how one knows that. Paul McCartney woke up one morn-
ing a·er a dream where he’d been hearing this sequence of chords.
He didn’t know where they came from, but they nagged their way
into his waking consciousness. He started to play around with them
on the guitar and found he had a song. ‘Yesterday’ became his — and
the Beatles — biggest selling hit. Thank God George Martin didn’t say
to him ‘Well, actually Paul, I’m not going to accept this until you can
describe to me the rationale behind this song — what exactly were the
influences, how did you put it together, and why this is relevant to our
identified target market segments?’
Having said all this, I am personally a great believer in the (now very
outmoded and unfashionable) notion that there are harmonic rela-
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Grids
12 January 1998
rodolfo:
I used to be a big fan of grids, but recently I find that I’m working more
and more without them. Obviously there are certain elements of con-
sistency that I still use — the measures of text columns, for instance
(although I’ll sometimes cheat even these for aesthetic reasons), or the
locations of standard hanging lines. But I’m no longer convinced that
the underlying structure is that apparent (or important), especially
when one uses complex grids with a number of di‹erent alignment
points. And I find where there is fluidity in a document (and my docu-
ments seem to be becoming more and more fluid!), the grid constrains
me to putting something somewhere where I don’t really want it to be,
or sizing something to a size that doesn’t feel right.
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john:
The history of design suggests to me that one has to give the designer
her/his due. Paul Rand’s work was inescapably Paul Rand, but did IBM
or Westinghouse su‹er because of it? Likewise Alan Fletcher, Milton
Glaser, Derek Birdsall and a host of others — pretty much every ‘name’
designer one can think of. No doubt most tried to follow a similar
approach to Gill’s — but in retrospect, who were they kidding? A third
year student could probably sort their work into the respective piles…
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gunnar:
One could then postulate a designer who does not think except ‘with
her hands’ and creates designed solutions to problems. She then has to
switch gears to ask herself whether the solutions do, indeed, solve the
problems or whether something else might have done it better. If there
is any negative answer to the former or positive answer to the latter
she could then return to subconscious problem solving and continue
this cycle until she thought she had it nailed. At that point her analysis
becomes an important part of explaining the design to others. Thus the
question is not ‘Why did I do this?’ but rather ‘Why is this this way?’
Not all the things we do are the result of mysterious processes at the
back of consciousness — but a great many of them are equally futile to
talk about. ‘Why have you put this text in three columns instead of
two?’ ‘Why are the folios half way up the page instead of at the bottom’
‘Why are the headings all picked out in green’ ‘Why have you made
the pictures so small?’ If one gets a client who has never emerged from
the three-year old’s ‘why this, why that?’ stage — and they do exist — one
usually ends up with either a sore tongue (from too much biting) or,
God forbid, a suitably chastened client (probably an ex- one, to boot).
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david:
This leads me to a logo question I’d like to pose to the list: what are the
strengths/weaknesses in a logo where there is a close connection between
the images in the logo and the group/thing/whatever the logo repre-
sents, but this connection will not be recognized by most people? Now the
image of the patronness of music looking upward in musical rapture at
the initials of a choral group is full of significance, but most people will
not realise this.
Where to start?
Obviously an issue with identity is that the wider you throw the net,
the more chance there is that some groups won’t ‘get’ the message — so
usually what happens is that the more people it has to reach, the more
dilute and anodyne the imagery is. Needless to say, such an approach
really works for nobody — there’s not enough substance there for the
real ‘insiders’, and still perhaps too much for the real ‘outsiders’.
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With a group such as the choral music group, I would guess that the
key stakeholders are much more cohesive than with a commercial
organization. Even people like backers, management and others will
likely be enthusiasts for the subject — if not cognoscienti. I would also
guess that audiences for this kind of music don’t just dri· in o‹ the
street, either, so that at the ‘customer’ end of the equation people
will actually appreciate an approach that treats them as being more
‘insider’ than perhaps they really are.
So, what I’m saying probably amounts to a green light for the Saint
Cecilia route — and a suggestion that you don’t worry about those who
won’t ‘get’ it (it was probably never intended for them anyway). One
final pointer, however — and that is that I would consider a treatment
that brings out the symbolic, archetypal ‘richness’ of the subject in
the treatment, rather than a straightforward depiction. Unless the
group you’re working with have a particular religious focus, the image
will not have the pulling power that it might for those brought up in
Catholicism. Therefore, it needs to appeal at a more universal level.
One thing that one frequently finds with the representation of saints
is that many of them have specific attributes or accoutrements that
are a legacy — or a continuation — of an older, pagan symbology. A good
example here is the pecten shell, which is an emblem of Saint James of
Compostella — but which is the traditional accoutrement of Aphrodite/
Venus (witness Botticelli’s and Titian’s depictions). Wol‹ Olins played
on this dimension (with greater or lesser degrees of success, accord-
ing to your point of view) in their famous ‘Prudential’ logo — with the
figure of Prudence (as a rather nondescript eighties ‘new woman’)
shown with her traditional mirror and earings made from live snakes
[unfortunately nobody ever gets this, unless they are told]. So, consider
the traditional iconography of Saint Cecilia and maybe see if there are
particular resonances that you can bring out for the group — things
that reach out from beyond the veil of sanctity into the secularity of
modern life.
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Typefaces
20 January 1998
Lindsay:
Stating the obvious, the choice for a detective novel may not be appropri-
ate for a math textbook, or suit a newspaper or magazine announce-
ment soliciting donations for a cancer hospice, or a report to the CEO
analysing the accounts of a subsidiary company, a technical engineer-
ing report to a municipal utility, or scripts for the performing arts.
In fact, if you turn the statement around, you end up with a series of
fairly bewildering questions. What typeface is appropriate to a detec-
tive novel, but not to the magazine announcement or the report to
the CEO? Have I missed a Chandler Roman or a Gumshoe Sans lurking
about out there? What does a script for the performing arts need in the
way of legibility, e›ciency and character that couldn’t equally benefit
a technical engineering report to a municipal utility?
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Hopkins
20 January 1998
michael:
Why do some folks think Sabon is better for a book and others Galliard?
Is it really a case of acquiescing to the ‘lazier’ way that things have
always been done? Or is there just a bit of the proper realization by
the designer that one face evokes responses regardless of how adroitly
you have use the face to go against the expectations? Would you set
the display type in an ad about child abuse services in Broadway or
Klingspor? I kinda doubt it, not because you probably couldn’t pull it o‹,
but because you couldn’t control all those ‘lazy’ responses that the read-
ing public would impose without regard for what you constructed.
[…]
It reminds me of why Hopkins’s sprung rhythm is something few poets
have been able to master — if they tried.
Lázinéss, is it beliéving
That fonts théy should be deceiving?
Typés, made to impress us, true
to their fair outlines always do
confórm. But is your layóut not bólder
Than the contents of systém fólder?
Does not this block of type belie
mere convéntions, that to this eye
a flóck of laziér thoughts imply?
Now no matter, spooled, the name:
Yésterday’s fonts are all the same!
Nor use made, no, nor shape distressed
but that a typographic sin’s confessed.
Is this the job these glyphs were drawn for?
Or is it intégríty I yearn for?
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Dear Ms Relph-Knight
In his piece ‘A visit to the body shop’ (DW 23 January) Michael Evamy
writes: ‘But, who knows, in 20 or 30 years’ time the term “identity con-
sultant” might be taken over by someone who helps clients develop
their personal identity: designing not new logos but new faces.’ I real-
ize he’s being flippant, but it’s not his humour I have a problem with.
Rather, it’s the way he perpetuates the misapprehension that identity
consultancy is in some way a kind of ‘corporate facelift’.
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Paul Rand
2 February 1998
nancy:
He deserves our praise for at least trying to make sense of what we do,
and for trying to link design to the chain of history, but I’m not sure he
fully succeeded. His logic, historicism, and prose were not quite up to the
task, and why should we expect them to have been? Consider not only a
designer’s typical education — noteworthy for its thinness in the liberal
arts and hard sciences — but also the visual, global-perceptual, intuitive
nature of design intelligence. I don’t think we will have a competent
or rigorous literature of design until someone who does have a verbal,
linear, logical intelligence decides to take on design as a liberal study. At
the moment, no one much cares but ourselves.
I agree that Rand’s books read better as poetic musings on the subject
of design than as ‘a competent or rigorous literature of design’. It
might have been much better had he recognized this — it would have
certainly spared him some of the harsher criticism of a younger gen-
eration of designers, impatient with his pontification. But I suppose it
is important for all of us to believe that we are not only in the middle of
the geographical universe but the conceptual universe as well.
If one takes a subject like design history, you can study it with all the
vogue academic tools — but does it reveal what it was really like to be
in William Morris’ or Alexey Brodovitch’s skin? A couple of years ago
I argued provocatively at the Design History Conference (taking a of
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Problem employee
3 February 1998
webmaster:
He will work fine for about 2–3 hours, producing work far exceeding
the expectations of the clients. His projects are on time, and he always
produces quality work. He has been told repeated times not to engage
in these games during working hours or on company machines and has
been wrote up at least twice involving this. Now what I find interesting
is the sort of divided nature of this situation. On one side he is a superior
employee who preforms far above the expected norm. But on the other
side, he has engaged repeated times in an activity that both goes against
company policy and his employer’s orders.
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Mensch
3 February 1998
kc:
There’s also the question of whether the boss wants to help this
employee get over the problem, or whether he just wants it to go away.
I’m reminded of A.S. Neill — the radical headmaster of the revolution-
ary school Summerhill — who was faced with a young boy who kept
smashing windows. One day, he took the boy outside and proceeded to
take him around the school smashing the windows himself. The boy
never did it again… But that kind of solution requires a boss who is, in
that lovely Yiddish term, a ‘Mensch’.
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Rhyme
4 February 1998
gunnar:
One of the appeals of rhyme is that it makes connections that are not
obvious and mundane. The real magic happens when those connections
are combined with other kinds of connections and a synergy of meaning
and feeling results. One of the reasons bad rhyme is so irritating is that it
makes a promise of new meaning and fails to deliver on it. (Lenny Bruce
delicately called the phenomenon ‘Getting it up without getting it o‹’.)
Beautifully put!
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Curriculum vitæ
4 February 1998
barbara:
I was wondering if a few of you could give me your 2 cents worth for a
question I have? I did a resume for my son who lives in the eastern states
(I’m in the central) he is just out of college not too long and works in thea-
tre design. Everyone he works with likes his resume and wants to know
how much I would charge to do their resume. In May I hope to have my
BFA in Graphic Design. I don’t have a clue as to prices for this and I want
charge the usual and customary charges. Do you charge a one time fee or
do you charge a fee with changes extra, do you set a limit on changes and
corrections (spelling, additions, changing a line to another place etc.)
What is the going rate?
Most people who want a CV are usually looking for a new job. Very o·en,
they also have an idea of how much they think they are worth — what
kind of salary they are looking for. Simply, the value of the CV should
be commensurate with that salary expectation.
CVs are key personal marketing tools — they probably do far more for
an individual than a corporate brochure does for an organization (pro-
portionately, that is). If you are looking to be the next CEO of Boeing,
or GEC or Apple, this document could clinch you a job worth literally
millions (plus share options, golden handshakes/parachutes and all
the other trappings of corporate life). Is it then reasonable to expect
it to cost less than that flashy Rolex Oyster you flout ostentatiously
at the interview? But if you’re looking to be the next washer-up at
Joe’s Diner — and want to parade your unhappy succession of previous
McJobs — $5 might seem on the steep side.
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Education
5 February 1998
brian:
Art schools everywhere have someone who utters this warning or dis-
claimer and reassures everyone they have not entered a trade school.
That’s the problem. If you go into engineering, medicine,or law the
schools don’t say you’re making a big mistake. I know a kid who majored
in European History, got a job trading German stocks and within 4 years
makes over 200K a year. Some people grow up and cure cancer, send
rockets to the moon, create Disneyworld or become Bill Gates. Maybe art
schools should be more aggressive about defining the fundamentals that
will let students grow into a life long career other than the few ‘artists’
who will become famous.
Don’t forget, though, that there are other people who go to College
and then go on to do something equally fulfilling, but not necessarily
remunerative, like raising a family. Education isn’t there to make
people financial success stories — that’s an incidental by-product. It’s
there to make them bigger people — with wider intellectual horizons,
more appreciation of the world around them, better understanding of
their own capabilities, and possessed of a conceptual framework that
can give meaning and coherence to their future professional activities.
To some, that’s extremely valuable — to others it may prove invaluable.
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Comrades
10 February 1998
gunnar:
The reason that academia is not, despite the closing and illiberal books’
claims to the contrary, a monolith is that smart people poke holes in
each others’ work with the intent of discovering what works and what
doesn’t. Strangely, I’m in a discussion on another list where I’m argu-
ing against language that demonizes capitalism unfairly. I also object
to demonizing marxism unfairly. I’m suspicious of any argument that
essentially says ‘This is all commie crap; ignore it’.
I’m all in favour of a diversity of views and voices. Sadly, the ideologues
who had a stranglehold on British cultural studies departments in the
late seventies and eighties didn’t share this view. But they did believe
that people would make judgments about ‘commie crap’ if it was not
presented by stealth — a couple of friends went through three terms
of such indoctrination before they realized they were actually being
taught good, old-fashioned ‘dialectical materialism’.
Maybe it’s hard from a North American perspective to realize quite how
pervasive — and, indeed, how stifling — the influence of the le· was in
European intellectual life. Long a·er 1957 — the Hungarian uprising,
when many people le· the ‘o›cial’ (Stalinist) Communist Party, the
Marxist mafia dominated much of British academia — in some places
and disciplines more than others. Even knowing this, I was shocked
reading the second volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, where she
charts her years in the le·-wing London intelligensia. Again and again,
one is hauled short by striking revelations — ‘My God, so-and-so was a
party member — I had no idea!’ One missing piece in the design his-
tory jigsaw puzzle is the extent to which post-war British Modernism
was constructed by people owing their allegiances — not always hap-
pily — to King Street (headquarters of the British Communist Party).
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Success
10 February 1998
gunnar:
James, I’m quite mystified by your recent posts that seem to indicate that
all graphic design can best be judged by profit and loss statements. If
this were true the ethical thing for you to do would be to write Nancy
apologizing for trying to take Critique’s money and suggesting that
they hire an accounting firm to supply all of their future articles.
Like many others here, I do graphic design for a living. No matter how
much I love the subject, this is still my primary motivation — if I can’t
pay my mortgage, feed and clothe the kids or keep coal in the grate, I’ll
have to do something else. And my clients — some of whom are urbane,
civilized people who certainly don’t believe that all there is to graphic
design is ‘bang for buck’ — buy my services because they are looking
for business advantage for their organizations. They might like to com-
mission work just for the sheer pleasure of it, but their primary moti-
vation is to carry out the requirements of the jobs they were appointed
to. So in my life graphic design is closely related — in the most basic
and fundamental way imaginable — to my own and my clients finan-
cial success or failure, and their consequences.
But why do I feel like I’m apologising for this? Graphic design is one
hell of a way to make a livelihood — it’s hard to imagine a more chal-
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I also believe that if we put together a list of the best paid graphic design-
ers and/or most profitable design firms we’d spend a lot of time asking
‘Who the hell are these people?’
Don’t you think you’re being a little unfair? We live in a world where
there is graphic communication wherever we turn our heads — from
street signs to posters to letters and bills to packaging to books to tel-
evision to computer interfaces. What would you say to someone who
walked obliviously past all of these things, until he spotted the latest
Emigre on the news stand and declared ‘Graphic Design at last!’
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Style
27 February 1998
What once upset the staus quo have become run-of-the-mill solutions.
One bankruptcy replaces the next. The number of books beign published
on ‘cutting edge design’ is evidence of the complete exhaustion of what
initially looked like an honest-to-goodness savior of graphic design.
My initial reaction to the writer of this piece is ‘well, what did you
expect?’ Perhaps this is where a modicum of design history comes
in useful — knowing how the status quo always eventually integrates
styles that initially existed in opposition to it. Why fight it? Looked at
in another way, this is just another example of the marvellous evolu-
tionary ‘adaptability’ of human societies.
I do wonder, though, whether ‘style’ is ever really radical. Ideas can be
radical — certainly — as Oscar Wilde recognized when he said that ‘an
idea that isn’t dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all’. But
style? How can the adoption of distressed or vernacular type as a gener-
alized kind of statement be considered an ‘idea’ — or, for that matter,
pose any real danger to anyone or anything? My own impression of this
nineties movement in design is that it has been ‘intellect on idle’ — and
I’d really have to be convinced otherwise.
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Arrogance
27 February 1998
greg:
I suppose that depends on what really turns you on about design. Sure,
there are technological challenges aplenty — and the new dimensions
(time, sound, interaction) are, in their own way, exciting.
I’m not sure that any of this is changing the way people communi-
cate, though. Once one understands how people — biological entities
with this magical gi· of language — do communicate, one sees that
they communicate in largely similar ways whatever the medium. The
thing that gets me going, however, is what they communicate. Is this
an ‘exciting and important time’ in terms of the messages and ideas
they are communicating? For me, that’s the real question.
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Pectens
6 March 1998
John:
What do you consider to be the best books, etc. on principles and philoso-
phies of logo design?
In my opinion there’s only key book: Carl Jung’s compilation Man and
his Symbols. I was put onto Jung by my former boss, Wally Olins, and I
have to say that I don’t believe anyone should be designing logos with-
out having read him (or at least being familiar with his distinction
between symbols and signs).
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The worship of ‘Mary Gypsy’ (which is, amongst other things, intri-
cately tied up with the Robin Hood legends) was brought to England
from the Levant, via Compostella in Spain, by pilgrims who became
known as Palmers (because they carried Aphrodite’s sacred palm,
as well as having pectens stitched to their hats — ‘cockle hats’, as
Ophelia calls them in Hamlet). The pecten thus became associated
with St James the great, through his supposed shrine at Santiago de
Compostella — and is still used as the visual indicator for the pilgrim-
age route.
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Note: Since this message was written, I have acquired a lovely book called ‘The
Scallop’, published by Shell in 1957. It is a collection of essays on the subject of the
pecten, beginning with its biology and ending with ways to cook and serve it.
There is also an excellent investigation of the heraldic dimensions of the pecten,
a dissertation on its use in Pre-Colombian art, a piece on scallops in Renaissance
painting, and another on their role in early Christian iconography, as well as
a brilliant contribution by Sir Mortimer Wheeler about its symbolism in the
ancient world. Shell may have been an insu‹erably patronising and paternalis-
tic company in the ‘fi·ies but, compared to the narrow and reductive way it now
talks about its ‘brand’, it also had a much greater sense of respect and custodian-
ship for the symbol it had adopted.
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Manuals
6 March 1998
john:
Has anyone seen any good books on the creation of corporate i.d. stand-
ards manuals? I’ve seen quite a few books on logos, but none that discuss
a comprehensive usage strategy.
For all sorts of good reasons, multimedia is now the de facto medium
for communicating identity. For a while, it was Director (delivered on
cd), but intranet delivery is taking over — and here Flash seems to be
the way to go. We’ve handed over two Flash based identity communica-
tion systems in the last six months.
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If you find your good book, prize it. It’s a snapshot of a period in the
history of our business. But apply its precepts with the same wariness
you might bring to a sixteenth century book of medicine (most of them
will seem antiquated to modern managers, many will be wrong for the
contemporary organization — and some will even prove pernicious).
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Communicating identity
7 March 1998
john:
Still, the approach needs to be di‹erent if you are going to get people
to take notice. In the bad old days, it was enough to say ‘you must do
it this way!’ Must and should don’t go down too well these days — if you
want people to observe things like minimum areas, etc. you have to
explain why they are a good idea (and actually, you need to make sure
that they really are good ideas first). People need to come away from
the explanation feeling they have gained something — not having lost
some of their enthusiasm, autonomy or self-respect.
Sure, talk about ‘consensus’ and ‘buy-in.’ Does that mean that everyone
should do what’s right in their own eyes? True creativity is rarely fos-
tered in an environment with no boundaries. Real freedom exists when
we understand certain standards and are confident that anything we do
within a proscribed framework is acceptable.
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In the end, management has largely twigged that there weren’t any
tangible benefits to be had from 100% visual homogeneity. Many com-
panies have flourished despite a range of visual interpretations of their
identity — whilst others (take IBM as an example) have floundered even
though they had the most anally retentive identity police.
My clients are smallish, I usually work directly with the ceo, and rarely
charge more than $5,000 for an identity program. Still, that’s a decent
chunk of change for most of my clients, and they want some advice about
using what they’ve paid for.
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Who to trust?
7 March 1998
gunnar:
Graphic designers are the last people you should trust to understand
and build on an identity program.
Ths is very true. Sadly, corporate identity programmes bring out the
worst in designers. Most su‹er from the ‘Not Invented Here’ mentality,
which means that they are less than inclined to try and understand
the spirit of an identity — or even play by its rules. And this destructive
competitiveness is o·en exacerbated by a strong streak of ‘visual fas-
cism’ inherent in the scheme itself — where the designers who created
the identity insist their (usually limited) conceptions be applied to
absolutely everything.
The people to trust ‘to understand and build on an identity program’
grasp the relationship between the organization — its businesses, strat-
egy, markets, culture, ethos — and the way it represents itself visually.
They are prepared to accept and work within an existing identity struc-
ture — but also to articulate it with flair, imagination and intelligence.
They need to be flexible enough in their thinking to drop ideas when
changes make them obsolete, as well as to think new thoughts when
tomorrow comes. And above all, they are able to communicate the
principles of the identity to people who don’t have any interest in aes-
thetics or the finer points of design, and just want to know what it will
do for them.
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gunnar:
Some general suggestions for a manual -- Make sure it explains what the
system is and why. Make sure it shows that a range of great things can be
done within the system. Make sure that you’ve made it easier for people
to do what you want them to do rather than something else. In designing
an identity program it is very important to figure out how people are
actually going to use it -- make sure your manual shows that you under-
stand what they are going to do with the identity. Make sure that it’s
easy to get to a general understanding of the program; many people
are not going to read through a long, boring list of rules. Make sure
there are resources for people to go to for answers (even if the answers
are in the manual). Remember that di‹erent people get information
in di‹erent ways; a good manual combined with Q&A sessions will be
easier for people to understand than just a manual.
The danger of the manual was that it exaggerated this latter part — it
was too easy to show examples of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do things,
and to give other designers a clear message that the creative aspects
have been worked out in advance. Pointing them to the spirit of the
thing is much more di›cult, because it means accepting that there
is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way — only a greater or lesser fit with the cor-
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Absorbing identity
9 March 1998
karel:
That is really interesting. However — and this is a big however — I’m not
sure that attempting to analyze a corporate personality is the right
approach. Words are o·en inadequate in describing what is — for many
people — a palpable, but non-verbal experience.
Better, by far, to cut out the verbiage in the middle. Let the designer
spend time in the client organization, soaking up the culture and
ethos, the dreams and aspirations, the daily realities and the politics.
And then let her represent what she has experienced.
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Real symbols
9 March 1998
kc:
I agree that it will still be a good few years before it’s possible to use
the swastika. But it will be back, I’m sure of that — it is such a potent
symbol that it will not remain derelict for ever. And in some cultures
(e.g. South Asia), it has never had that break in continuity.
It’s an extreme example, but meant to illustrate the fact that you must
tunderstand the context where you are applying your ‘meaning’. The
logo you choose may have all kinds of rich history and depth behind it,
but if it resembles the local gang symbol that’s painted on every flat sur-
face in town, that is the first, and sometimes the only, association people
will make.
A ‘real’ symbol might — of course — come about in this way. But it’s
making it pretty hard for it. Another approach — one that I would
endorse, and believe is generally more fruitful — involves a di‹erent
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Real symbols always fit. That’s because they have been called into
being by the circumstances, and not retrofitted to them. It may even
be — and these are the most interesting cases — that the designers aren’t
aware of what they are bringing into being. (I’ve been collecting exam-
ples of these for some time.) Ironically, though, it’s more likely that the
local gang found their symbol in this way than the large corporation
whose walls they daub it on. But one of these days they’ll learn, too.
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Finding symbols
11 March 1998
stephen:
The first thing is to understand what the identity is for. It’s my belief
that identity comes out of a need to identify — to belong, and to repre-
sent the thing to which you belong. This is far from the usual viewthat
identity should be a marketing thing — making people take notice of
you, and perhaps expressing some aspect of what you can do for
them. I’m suspicious of the idea of associating a company with what
it does because companies are bigger than what they do. The world’s
oldest companies, Stora in Sweden (founded in 1288) or Sumitomo in
Japan (founded 1590), have changed focus many times in their life-
times whilst having retained a distinct sense of identity. Companies
are about a group of people who, by making common cause and pooling
capital, skills and experience, create an entity that takes on a life of its
own. So I think that identity should symbolize the vision, ethos and
values that binds them together — and not the thing that they happen
to be concentrating on at the time.
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To find symbols, one has to have some sympathy with them — not a
thing our age is known for, but not entirely forgotten for all that. A
symbol will appear through a dream, an insight or an unexpected ser-
endipity — but in all cases, there will be one or more significant coin-
cidences that identify it as being right for your purposes. Without
an easy familiarity with the worlds of dreams, mythology and poetic
expression, one might easily miss it. To say more on this subject is not
easy; some people will know what I’m talking about, whilst others will
think it idiocy — and there is not really any middle ground.
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Filling up
11 March 1998
gunnar:
James’ objection to the cleaned up Shell and Jim’s disgust at the Mobil
wordmark ignore a major emotional justification for the modern aes-
thetic applied to the gas station. In addition to the reasonable (and
largely successful) attempt at linking the products with a notion of tech-
nical progress, remember that before the mega chains most gas stations
were grimy places where people didn’t want to let people touch their
cars. Going to the bathroom was, by middle class standards, a horrible
experience. In this sense less - is - more.
I’m sorry that there isn’t more of this kind of individuality le· in the
(developed) world. I’m certainly glad for many of the a‹ordances of
modern filling stations. But does the price of progress have to be bland
brand homogeneity? Where the only human contact is a conversation-
less kid behind bullet-proof glass — and the standardised experience
leaves one feeling that, since everywhere is anywhere, one might as
well have stayed at home…
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karel:
I am afraid that the answer to all four areas is no: graphic designers
leave these questions to be answered by others…
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gunnar:
There are some general questions that should be considered when you
decide how restrictive a corporate identity should be:
Good points, but I still have a problem with this idea that an identity
should be seen as ‘restrictive’.
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Ironically, this idea that ‘one dresses for others’ was one of the rea-
sons we were given at school for having to wear uncomfortable and
outmoded uniforms. I think we’re all pretty much agreed that it’s not
a bad idea to wear clothes that you feel comfortable in, and that do
something to project your own individuality and self-esteem — even if
you are conscious of your public-facing role. When ‘dress codes’ were
dropped by corporations, the expected sartorial disaster never hap-
pened (some of these same corporations even used — comparatively
recently — to reserve the right to approve an employee’s choice of
spouse!). It’s taking organizations a while to come to the same conclu-
sion about their identities, but I believe they are getting there.
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leif:
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someone in the executive can write the script for other people to live
by. The enormous flaw with this is that the human spirit is irreppress-
ible — and, like a weed through concrete, wayward individuality breaks
through even the most monolithic systems. One sees this, of course,
in the multitudinous ways in which employees subvert and personal-
ize corporate identity schemes — the nightmare that makes ‘logocops’
busy people. The lessons of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ — and its equiv-
alents — pertain here, too. Monolithic systems can only exist where
people sustain them by fear and conformity. When everybody finally
begins to realize that they are bankrupt — which is what I contend is
happening in many corporations — they simply fall into dust.
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Is research possible?
16 March 1998
karel:
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And the factors behind the way people respond to graphic design are
so hugely complicated that it can’t be anywhere near a predictive sci-
ence. For instance, human beings love novelty — sometimes any new
thing will work just because it is new. Market research methodologies
give misleading and conservative responses — which is why the ‘next-
big thing’ in graphic design never comes out of research that is sup-
posed to indicate what people will respond to.
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karel:
Much of the information we all have to use is dull. Good design won’t
make the information any less dull — which is where I think much
information design fails. Introducing little elements of delight is a
pleasant way of enlivening otherwise turgid materials — but, unfortu-
nately, one that is anathema to the puritan Modernist sensibilities
of many information designers. Consequently — and rather sadly — the
logo is sometimes the only element to have any emotional or aesthetic
resonance on some documents.
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Consensus
30 March 1998
nancy:
Just before he died, Paul Rand said that he doesn’t believe ‘great design’
can be done in the corporate world anymore, as one has to work with
committees. He said he was lucky to have been able work with single,
visionary, decision-makers.
If you can only convince one person that it’s ‘great design’, and not a
small group sat around a table, can it really be that great? Although
my ambitions are slightly more modest — I’d settle for ‘good design’ — I
work on the basis that I’m ultimately going to have to convince audi-
ences that vary from thousands to millions.
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Competition
30 March 1998
david:
Really? Why is it then that so many ‘creative’ people in the arts and the
sciences have cloistered themselves away from the clamour and com-
petition of the world? And does a client get a more creative solution by
asking three agencies to do a free pitch, or paying one to really think
about the problem?
If one looks back over the fruits of human creativity, by far the
greatest examples — from the Lindisfarne Gospels through the Gothic
Cathedrals to the paintings of the Renaissance — have been motivated
by something quite other than competition. The greatest contribu-
tions of ‘Free Enterprise’ to visual culture, on the other hand, appear
to be packaging and advertising.
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randal:
I have a theory that there is a much closer link between music and pro-
gramming or the sciences than between visual art and these le·-brain
subjects. I’m not sure why, but I have studied the natural sciences and
also art and in my feeling they were very di‹erent experiences.
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Robert Ornstein, The Right Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1997, p.97.
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randal:
I’m not so sure I would agree they are as similar as you make them
sound. I probably agree that they all use aspects of the same set of mental
skills, but they have very di‹erent emphases. For example, I love the sci-
ences, and seriously considered science as a career -- until I realized that
in order to be a really successful scientist you really have to have a mind
like an accountant (with a really active imagination). I have the imagi-
nation, but not the orientation to details. Similarly, a programmer has
to be obsessively concerned with not making mistakes, whereas for a
designer or artist creative ‘mistakes’ are part of what they do.
Back in the early 60s, Thomas Kuhn showed that what scientists think
they do, and what they actually do, are quite di‹erent things. The
idea of empiricism — that science is about making observations of
Nature and then forming deductions from those observations — didn’t
stand up to the investigations of the new history and philosophy of
science. Kuhn and others showed that most great ‘discoveries’ — like
Copernicus’ heliocentric universe or Newton’s optics, began with
an already formed idea (o·en from a completely di‹erent source).
Copernicus’ theory came from Neo-Platonism, and he never managed
to get it to yield calculations as accurate as the convoluted Ptolemaic
astronomy it set out to replace. But it is taking a while for this message
to get through to the scientists!
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respectable. So, like Newton, clever designers are not above disingenu-
ously telling their clients that the ‘solution’ emerged from a respect-
able, ‘empirical’ problem solving exercise.
There are other similarities, too. At a practical level both graphic design
and the sciences are primarily concerned with politics. Graphic design
is concerned with the politics of getting projects through to comple-
tion, Science with getting them funded. But despite these di‹erences,
the skilled politician will always do well in both fields.
There’s an awful lot of grunt work in both, too. And it’s detailed grunt
work — I lose sleep over the thought that a job will go out with a literal,
or that that there will be an error on the separations. Is picking over
a job before sending it out much di‹erent from checking and double-
checking one’s findings before publishing a paper? Reputations rest on
the accuracy of both.
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nancy:
Most applications we receive are heroic, but stupid. Heroic because the
applicants put a lot of time and e‹ort into mailing hundreds of design
companies (usually up to six weeks a·er they leave College — a·er
which point they seem to give up), stupid because they are so obviously
inadequate and doomed to failure.
• the applicant gets my name right (if you can’t manage to tran-
scribe a seven letter name correctly, some other career than graphic
design is indicated);
amazing how many fail this first test
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Daydreaming
8 June 1998
john:
I learned something the other day which I’m still chewing over, but
which seems to pertain here.
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One factor that might definitely help all of us who, from time to time,
depend upon this kind of inspiration for our bread and butter, is an
understanding of the so called ‘ultradian’ rhythm. This is a natural
cycle of about 90 to 110 minutes, where our brains peak in conscious
alertness and then dip to reinvigorate themselves (it was first discov-
ered in studies of Air Tra›c Controllers, and is now built into their
schedules). During the dip phase, which lasts about 10 to 20 minutes,
we have a tendency to turn inwards (and to switch from the literal le·
hemisphere to the metaphorical right one) — which hypnotists have
learned to exploit, as it is apparently the easiest time to put someone
into a trance. (You can always tell that this is happening if you ask
someone the same question three times, and they respond ‘Uh, what
was that?’) According to this hypothesis, most of us hit one dip around
the time we get to work, and the next about 1.5 to 2 hours later. The
natural inclination is to take a break at these moments, and fix oneself
up with a he·y hit of ca‹eine. But if you’re looking for a good moment
to hand the screen over to A·er Dark, and swirl your pencil in mesmeric
circles, this could be it.
Note: I’m led to believe that this ‘ultradian’ cycle is the same as the cycle of Rapid
Eye Movements (REM) that occurs in sleep, and which is responsible for dream-
ing. The periods of REM sleep cycle get longer over the night (from less than
10 minutes to about half an hour), whilst the intervals between them reduce
from about once every 90 minutes at the beginning of sleep to about once every
20–30 minutes before waking. I have a gut feeling, based on my experience of
giving and listening to presentations, that the ultradian cycles of audiences
‘sync’. However, I raised this with one of Joe Gri›n’s colleagues who didn’t think
it could be the case. It would be an interesting subject to research.
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Presentation
9 June 1998
nancy:
Here’s another thought: we have been ranking on the FUSE people for
giving less-than-fabulous performances. While I also found some of what
went on in San Francisco tiresome or insular, I wonder that we are sur-
prised that a group of professional designers may not be experts at per-
formance-based presentations. It seems to me the two activities demand
di‹erent sets of skills.
Part of what we see here, though, is the recent myth of the designer
as shambling, tongue-tied ‘right brainer’. I was talking about this to
someone the other day and I realized that most of the really great
designers — and, for that matter, painters too — have been simultane-
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nancy:
And here’s an observation that ought to arouse some debate: The lib-
eration movement has begun to allow that women can be as good as
men. At things like being soldiers and CEOs and bicyclists and pilots.
Nowadays, if a woman is so·, or vulnerable, or domestic, or uncomfort-
able with confrontation or competition, she’s derided. Rather than just
be able to do the things men do, I’m looking forward to the day when it’s
actually okay to be a woman.
The FUSE thing sure has brought this to a head — and rightly, too, since
it is downright perplexing that a supposedly ‘cutting edge’ ‘right-on’
graphic/typographic design project should end up such a den of misog-
yny. The first FUSE conference was criticised (very vocally, I recall) for
the lack of women speakers. And so has each and every FUSE confer-
ence since. But we’re not talking about the Model Railway Congress
here — women design students are a majority now, and the profession
has a demographically representative gender balance. So what’s going
on?
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Ms Tannen astutely points out that the ‘strong silent’ type of man is ‘a
lure as a lover but a lug as a husband’. To which I can only add that he’s
also a ‘liability as a colleague’.
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Play
10 June 1998
john:
I used to feel a tremendous sense of guilt for the amount of time where
I appear to achieve next to nothing. It was only when I read about the
way that the novelist Doris Lessing — who, in terms of output alone,
I’d consider to be a ‘high achiever’ — works, that I realized the value of
all those hours of apparent idleness, playing around and not ‘getting
on’ with things. In fact, I don’t now think I could do what I do without
spending a significant amount of my time playing. But the bugbear
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Can one relax sitting ergonomically correctly in an o›ce chair with their
focus stuck on a screen 16” away? How the hell can one daydream in that
posture?
I’d agree that the computer, with its ever increasing clock speeds (a
revealing metaphor, if ever there was one!) and its interface that seems
to be making a polite but pointed statement when it is not being inter-
acted with, is not conducive to procrastination. Its sheer physical pres-
ence dominates our workspace, literally marginalizing any activities
that don’t happen on the keyboard or the mousemat. Which is one of
the reasons why I think that ‘laptops’ — with their much slighter pro-
file and unassuming presence — will revolutionalize the way we work.
There’s room for a layout pad alongside a laptop, but it is elbowed
out of the way by a desktop. It’s also possible to have a conversation
with someone over the top of it, which is practically impossible with a
desktop. And a laptop becomes just a tool among many, to be pushed
aside when you are not in the mood for it. A·er a week away from the
studio (with my little powerbook at my side), I begin to realize quite
how oppressive — and domineering — is the influence of the giant tel-
evision I’m now staring into as I type.
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Extensions
5 June 1988
jerry:
This may sound pedantic: it’s not meant to be. But it is my understand-
ing that ‘where the thought processes take place’ is in the brain — not
on paper, nor on screen. Both pencil and computer are extensions; very
useful ones, at that. However, extensions have their drawbacks — cer-
tainly when it comes to the way they impact on their users’ thought
processes.
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But the point is, I think, that that process becomes almost inevitable
once one starts shi·ing the locus of creative thought away from the
head and into the extensions. There’s not actually a lot of di‹erence
between ‘thinking aloud’ using a layout pad, and doing the same on
screen. The constraints and possibilities of each are di‹erent, but in
both cases one is playing around with visual configurations until some-
thing starts to look right. The big di‹erence is between those processes
and the ability to ‘envisage’ — to mentally conceive of a solution. Sadly,
though, the idea that one needs to have ‘vision’ — not just in design,
but in every sphere — is deeply unfashionable.
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Creativity
5 June 1988
randy:
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Capitalism
25 June 1998
randal:
People get emotionally involved in the pro- and anti- arguments about
capitalism. However I think it is best seen as a powerful natural force,
inherently morally neutral. Properly harnessed, it can be a tremendous
power for good. Unleashed without knowledge or wisdom, it can be a
potent destructive force.
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Style
28 June 1988
christy:
If we accept that the way in which one says something can be as — some-
times even more — important than what one says, then the definition
of a great communicator must be someone with a great way of saying
things (along with some pretty interesting things to say). But does this
have to be a chameleon type approach, like that of Meta Design who
claim to be able to design ‘in all styles’? I’m not sure. This would be
like suggesting that politicians should be actors, capable of putting on
any part the moment requires. But within our personal styles we can
achieve a dramatic range without having to sacrifice the sense of sin-
cerity and integrity — of being ourselves. And just as the perception of
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being ‘true to oneself’ can be the deciding vote clincher for a politi-
cian, so it is also — I contend — a key factor in making visual communi-
cations convincing.
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Deconstructed
29 June 1998
michelle:
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randal:
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Visual culture
18 July 1998
matthew:
I have been looking at the mixing messages website and I would like to
know what you guys think about visual communication as a part of our
modern culture?
Given the enormous priority that the human brain gives to the inter-
pretation of visual data, visual communication will inevitably form a
huge part of any culture. ‘Our modern culture’ has the added benefit of
technologies (architecture, print, film and television, computing) that
allow us to make substantial visual statements that can be seen and
thought about by considerable numbers of people. So we’ve been able
to build on the advantages given us by evolution to create a set of cir-
cumstances where, in terms of sheer volume, visual communication
has reached a degree of hitherto unimaginable complexity.
And this, I think, is one of the real challenge for modern cultures — to
enable more and more people to be able to e‹ectively use visual com-
munication to extend (and enhance) their communications repertory.
Unfortunately, despite the opportunities provided by more or less uni-
versal education, an extraordinary communications infrastructure
and a plethora of empowering technologies (from pencils to pixels), I
believe it is a challenge we are failing. Instead, I think we’re seeing a
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Corporate hoo-ha
18 July 1998
Donna:
Part of the real problem is the idea — which has largely come down to us
from the Enlightenment — that we are fundamentally ‘rational’ crea-
tures. When we take this view, it seems as if we and our institutions are
constantly falling short of the mark. Ironically, by believing that we are
essentially reasonable, logical and fair, we condemn ourselves to live in
a world where we are surrounded by examples of unreasonable, illogi-
cal and unfair behaviour. The contrary view, that we are stucturally
partial, prejudiced and partisan reveals a quite di‹erent world. One in
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This has repercussions for the way that we work. Many of my col-
leagues — both in design and other forms of consultancy — are per-
petually disappointed by the outcome of projects in which they are
involved, and quickly become disparaging of the client organizations
with which they work. Coming from a similar background and men-
tality, I am however beginning to realize quite how delightful and
fascinating corporations are — precisely because they are so human. To
watch someone derail a project in which you have invested consider-
able time and energy can be a crushing and demoralizing experience.
But it can also be a fascinating little drama in which one gets to be
both a player and the audience. You can’t always do anything about
it, but you can learn to recognize its various acts and scenes, and how
they unfold with the predictable timing of a repertory performance.
And — this is where the optimism comes in — knowing this, maybe one
can begin to step outside the part circumstances have cast one in, and
even help others do likewise.
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History of communication
20 July 1998
Randal
I don’t think we can call these ancient visual things ‘graphic design’ any
more than we can call them ‘art’. The use of such terms is not free from
our own cultural history and baggage, and as Gunnar points out, we
have no real idea why people painted on cave walls. To call what they did
‘communication’ seems a gross oversimplification.
Also, trying to get outside our own ‘cultural history and baggage’ is
an impossibility. Vico pointed this out more than three centuries ago,
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and his observations are as true today as they were in seventeenth cen-
tury Naples. Yet here again is another point of contact. The ancient
cave painters carried their own baggage, just as we do. It was di‹erent
baggage — baggage we can’t hope to comprehend. But the experience of
being a ‘baggage carrier’ is the same, whether you belong to the stone
or silicon ages.
But this isn’t strictly accurate, even in the contemporary context. When
I take up a chisel and carve an inscription in a piece of slate, I don’t stop
doing that same thing — call it graphic design, or whatever — that I do
when I assemble artwork for printing, or a ‘page’ for the web. In all
cases, though, I’m engaged in a kind of visual ‘talking’. Communication
is not my favourite term — although its etymology is so lovely that it
deserves to be reinvested with some of its original meaning — but it is
accurate. The letterforms we use come from the architectural masonry
of the Romans, and the scribal activity of the Carolingians. Both, by
your criteria, would be excluded from a definition of graphic design.
To me, though, this can’t make sense — how can I work with their arte-
facts, doing much the same job (putting signs onto buildings, and
words into pages) and yet be doing something di‹erent?
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Kung fu
21 July 1998
Randal:
I would like to reiterate this point. I like the idea of expanding the defini-
tion of graphic design as much as anyone, but it becomes meaningless if
you go too far. Graphic design is not all I do, and I don’t need a defini-
tion of graphic designer which includes everything I am. When I cook, I
am a chef -- not a graphic designer. If my training in graphics influences
my cooking (inspiring me to create stunning plate presentations), that
still doesn’t make what I’m doing graphics rather than cooking.
I half agree with you, but think we worry unecessarily about whether
the term is meaningful in the way we want it to be. One of the reasons
I like ‘graphic design’ is that it is such a bad term — one that nobody is
quite sure what it includes or excludes. Because that is the reality of
our business. I’ve done it for years, and still am not clear what parts of
my day are or are not graphic design. But actually it doesn’t matter.
Jean and Gunnar brought up the series that starred David Carradine,
‘Kung Fu’. And I think it’s worth touching on this before we let it go — be-
cause for many of us it was the first taste (albeit watered down through
the filter of Hollywood) of a ‘comprehensive tradition’. What I mean
by that is a tradition of being and knowing which is experienced rather
than explained. The ‘Grasshopper’ bit seems overdone in retrospect, but
it did strike a chord. Our experience of ‘education’ in the seventies was
of a system where everything — pretty much — could be learned, taught
and conceived in terms of the transfer of information. What the milky
eyed Shaolin monk showed us was that some things — things to do with
what we are, rather than simply what we have retained — need to be
‘caught’. And that this process is very uncertain, sometimes failing
despite the best attempts of teacher, student and circumstances. I think
it is a testament to the quality of that tradition that enought truth was
le· in the program despite the best attempts of media moguls to con-
vert it into entertainment.
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Narcissism
28 July 1998
Mike:
Edward Hall talks about the reaction of the Native American peoples of
the South West — particularly the Hopi — to the intrusion of Anglo’s into
Pueblo life. What he says, I believe, explains just why Native American
rituals can’t be likened to contemporary (urban, white, middle class,
art school educated) concepts, like the ‘installation’.
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Suspensions
29 July 1998
michael:
True; but the putting aside you mention is only a superficial suspen-
sion (if you’re not sure about that assertion, consider how much of our
language supposedly contains deeply embedded racial, class, wealth, or
sexist biases) and the insight is Western insight. What we must put aside
is the ‘baggage’ that judges this or that practice as unmodern, undesir-
able, dirty, wrongheaded, senseless, whatever — and also the practices
and customs that seem sensitive, open, receptive, generous, graceful, etc.,
because our judgments of those ‘good’ customs are just as susceptible to
our foreign biases as judgments of ‘bad’ customs, at least until a later
time when their purposes are revealed to us in the context of the society
that supports them.
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swordsmith. Such was the dedication of of this group that some could
undoubtedly become rated experts by cognoscienti on the other side of
the Pacific. It is possible to make that bridge.
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Scarcity
14 August 1998
nancy:
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new garage door, the thought that we might miss such a unique oppor-
tunity makes the o‹er irresistible. The mechanism is crass — yes — but
the template is crude (and undiscriminating).
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Governance
14 August 1998
daniel:
Nancy — at the risk of being nit picky — you don’t mean this as purist
as appears in your statement do you? It sounds as if these activities are
at some point free of governance. What I mean is that the process you
are describing is by nature self-referential and the flow of information
is both directions. From the other levels of unconscious thought toward
conscious thought and back the other way. I can’t imagine any activ-
ity that isn’t so governed. I think it is the amount of governance that is
in question — excessive linear thinking can get in the way but when
assimilating new experience it is very important to ‘focus’ on those most
recently learned adjustments until they become ‘internalized’, ‘auto-
matic’ and ‘unconscious’ and even a·er that there is some degree of over-
sight taking place.
But this also works the other way around. Ask the interviewer why she
didn’t believe the freelancer’s story about having designed the FedEx
logo (or whatever) and she’ll say that she had a hunch he wasn’t being
straight. In fact, she will have noticed — beneath the threshold of con-
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Michael:
As for graphic design books, there are many out there, and I will defer to
other subscribers to recommend good ones.
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Teach yourself
28 August 1998
randy:
Ok… where can I take a crash course in the basis principles of design? I
don’t beleive these distinctions are something folks can just dabble in or
self-teach themselves.
Sure they are — the same way we teach ourselves to hold conversations,
to express our feelings, to make love. Graphic design is learned through
doing, doing, doing. There are no rules that are worth anything, save
those that you discover for yourself. All that a course will do — whether
it is a one day crash introduction or a seven year PhD — is to provide an
environment where you are constantly brought back, confronted with
the task in hand. But it will also mislead you that there are authorities,
experts, conoisseurs, masters. All of which will have to be subsequently
unlearned. In graphic design, there are really only travellers. Some of
us have been on the road a long time, travelled to strange places, expe-
rienced wondrous (and not so wondrous) things, worn out more boot-
leather. But we’re all either en-route, or fallen by the wayside.
Fortunately, fate has ordained that there are ‘starter clients’ for ‘starter
designers’ to make their mistakes with.
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Fighting fires
28 August 1998
randal:
The majority of demand for design in the ‘real’ world is really demand
for bad design. It is only by setting up ideal job requirements, putting
in completely uneconomical amounts of time on a job, and holding alo·
perhaps unrealistic ideas of what design can be that one really learns
quickly what one can achieve. A person driven to be a designer will even-
tually learn to create exercises for themselves which meet those unrealis-
tic goals (and put in the required months and years of unrecompensed
work). It is sometimes easier to let a teacher help you and make you do
them.
Just as with fires, no two circumstances that designers have to meet are
likely to be the same — and any apparent similarity should be treated
with more caution than confidence. In Fire School, they can create con-
trolled blazes that allow you to test all the skills — and let’s not forget
the teamwork — that you’ve been taught. But faced with your first real
fire, the outcome is likely to be scary and unpredictable. It’s up to you
show your mettle, to demonstrate your knowledge and discipline in
the face of uncertainty. Then, the person you look to isn’t the theory
teacher, but the firefighter who has already got a good few blazes under
his belt.
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Learning to be a student
31 August 1998
gunnar:
I’ve taught at a few places where most of the faculty (including me) were
working designers. There is a tendency for each teacher to try to supply
the ‘real world’ assignments that they are sure that the students aren’t
otherwise getting. The result is o·en that students get a mishmash of
their teachers’ last problems without anyone really asking what students
need to know and how can that be taught in a reasonable order.
I’ve ‘taught’ both in and out of Colleges, and the di‹erences are sig-
nificant. It has always been easier to teach in the workplace, because
the ‘student’s’ motivation (and desire to please) is greater. Workplace
learning is underlined by the bottom line, and consequently the gloves
are o¤. ‘Here we do things like this’ — Eric Gill’s famous line — is a tre-
mendously potent instrument. I’ve also found, both in my own experi-
ence and from watching those who have worked with me, that more is
‘caught’ rather than ‘taught’ in the workplace. It’s awfully di›cult to
factor ‘caught’ into an examined curriculum.
Having said that, there are exciting things that one can do within the
structured — but unpressurized — College environment. It’s not easy
for a creative director to suggest to a junior that she look at Picasso,
read Plato or go to Paris — but a College Tutor can do a great deal to help
a student open her or his mind to possibilities that will greatly help his
or her development as a designer.
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Beginner’s mind
3 September 1998
‘reader’:
When ‘Mr. Cheapo’ meets ‘Mr. Mean, gets the job, delivers fancylooking
PrintShop-files to a PostScript based service bureau, and there are six
spot colors, lowres images, bitmaps with rgb, mixed up with cmyk out
of print range, and the service bureau encounters problems, and who is
to pay the bill?
This is not inevitably the case, and it is more than a little unfair on
the unqualified designer. There are lots of cowboys, in design as well
as outside it, and they have to answer for their own actions. But any
responsible person will want to make sure they are doing things prop-
erly. If they carefully read the documentation that came with the pro-
grams they use, they won’t make these mistakes. Also, most printers
and output bureaux are o·en incredibly helpful to the newcomer,
qualified or otherwise — and enjoy working with someone who is keen
to learn. Rarely does anything in real life happen the way the textbook
suggests, and dealing with real life print jobs is the only way to acquire
a working knowledge of repro.
Nor is the colour issue a true caricature of the di‹erence between the
trained and the untrained. When I started, the only thing my clients
could a‹ord was one (or, at most two) colour printing (process colour
was then considerably more expensive). So I learned to do inventive
things with black and white, which discipline has proved indispensi-
ble. I later discovered this to be typical of others who came into design
in a similar way. Subsequently, when I was working at ‘name’ consul-
tancies, I found there were graduates from prestigious Colleges who
insisted on four colour plus specials plus varnishes as the indispen-
sible requirement of being able to demonstrate their skills. It didn’t
impress the clients — nor, for that matter, did it impress me.
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Neeleesh:
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Assimilation
27 September 1998
I was reading something the other day about the relentless way com-
merce appropriates ‘style’ — so much so that what is featured in a radi-
cal magazine one month appears on a billboard selling some consumer
product the next. It was one of those pessimistic ‘what can we do about
it?’ pieces. Needless to say, I didn’t have much sympathy for its whiney
tone — or its rather crude characterisation of late capitalism as a kind
of rapacious monster exploiting the innocent designer.
But it did set me thinking. Not least because I wondered what will
happen to people like Emigre. Here in the UK there’s currently a
massive poster campaign for toothpaste that uses the typeface Keedy
Sans — so well, in fact, that for many people it may well become an icon
of the dentrifice industry, rather than a subversive statement of the
early nineties. Likewise, another campaign is using Rudy Vanderlans’
‘Suburban’ — which has been tamed by the might of advertising into
quite a sweet little scripty face. Presumably, though, as the orders flood
in from Madison Avenue, Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzanna Licko don’t
feel too much of an ethical dilemma.
Of course this is one of those issues where some design history helps.
Anyone who knew how 50s corporate America embraced modernism,
and turned it from the rhetorical device of a few European reds into the
voice of the establishment, would see that the scattered seeds of post-
modern design could scarcely avoid the same fate. But I’m intrigued by
the paradox that avant-garde graphic designers are constantly trying
to stay one step ahead of acceptability, and yet in so doing focus on the
one thing that poses no real threat to the appropriators — style.
However it struck me that this stu¤, which now looks so tame, did once
seem disturbing, shocking, alternative. What happened to that edge,
exactly? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that it had to do with the
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framing, the context in which the work was seen — and not much to do
with the work itself. If this is true, it would be a bitter pill for graphic
designers to swallow — that it is the climate of ideas that filters the way
we receive design rather than any quality of that design itself. And
that as the context changes, the meaning of the work mutates in ways
over which the designer has no control. But how else can we explain
the historical facts? For instance the way that modernism, which was
once seen as so subversive, is now the face of every trendy metropoli-
tan eaterie. Or the way that Carson’s The End of Print has become a style
manual for marketeers selling to bored kids?
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peter:
I have seen clothes go full circle in approx 20 years. When you consider
that there are style changes every year or two, and the number of vari-
ations possible, to have gone through all the permutations and back
again in around twenty years is indicative of the high rate of change.
That was before the mass popularity of the internet that has propelled
the rate of exposure to new things to what must be an all-time high.
Even more than television I think the web has overloaded ‘nextbigthing’
meter. Look at the way we went from single font text on grey background
to all-singing and dancing multimedia with interactivity in around five
years. Nobody knows what’s going on anymore.
Well, the web is just about catching up with the cinema and television.
Perhaps the only significant di‹erence is that you can ‘push’ a button
on screen to make something happen (but this is much overestimated,
since what one can actually achieve through this kind of ‘interactivity’
remains sorely constrained). It’s now even possible to have web pages
that look like graphic design. Almost.
But it’s a big jump from this to suggest that nobody knows what’s going
on. The nineties has actually been a fairly conservative decade — most
of the big ideas are just extrapolations of things that were conceived
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decades ago (the Internet iteself, for instance). Likewise graphic design
has spent most of its energies reacting to the legacy of the past (it’s no
coincidence that words beginning with ‘post-’ dominate the theorists’
vocabulary). Even the future is still conceived in ways that derive from
Ridley Scott’s and William Gibson’s 1980s technological dystopias.
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transforming communication
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the soapbox
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I’d like to go a step further than this, and make a suggestion that ties
information back in with this idea of communicating as a form of
interaction. This is that we should see communication as an exchange
of energy. Energy meaning here something that e‹ects a change of
state. And interacting with each other is clearly a way of changing each
other’s state. We only have to look at everyday conversation, where one
person can delight, thrill, horrify, intimidate or seduce another simply
through the process of talking. But the same thing can also happen in
impersonal communications, too: something written or recorded by
someone we don’t know can move us just as much as a conversation
with a loved one. Plato or Homer, for instance, can reach us across cul-
tures – and across the centuries – to bring about a significant change,
not only in what and how we think, but in how we feel and act, too. In
the same way that physicist David Bohm described matter as ‘frozen
light’, we could describe information as ‘frozen interaction’ – poten-
tial for transforming our thinking, feeling and behaviour, locked up in
the content of the communication.
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marks – with the advantage that the ‘speaker’ didn’t need to be physi-
cally present with the ‘listeners’. Today, we do the same thing on an
even vaster scale, using new technologies. But what really matters is
the process that takes place in the individual – the change in their
state, as a result of this energetic encounter. In the case of ‘Hi Honey,
I’m home!’, this is the day-to-day maintenance of a loving relationship.
In the case of Plato or Homer, it can be a complete revitalisation of our
intellect, emotions and behaviour.
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It’s this, in fact, that makes the relationship between attention and
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Attention has many di‹erent facets, all of which are fascinating. The
one that concerns me most here is the phenomenon of ‘paying atten-
tion’. Something strange happens when someone pays attention to us,
that has the ability to make us feel much better. We take pleasure in
receiving attention (assuming, that is, that it is not ‘unwelcome’ atten-
tion!). It has the ability to enhance our moods, boost our confidence
and self-esteem, a‹ect the way we think and feel about things. Even
negative attention can be preferable to none at all, as anyone who has
small children will testify. Attention has an e‹ect apparently regard-
less of the content or context. It’s being attended to that is important.
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Engineering trust
13 September 2006
It’s not hard to imagine a time, not very far hence, when it will be pos-
sible to do a ‘Yellow Pages’ type search on the Internet and get an ‘eBay’
type response. Want a plumber? 297 people gave positive feedback
on this chap and only one negative. Looking for a Lawyer? “Lapwing,
Roebuck and Whelp were wonderfully helpful with my divorce, but
when I eventually got the bill it was more than three times what I had
been led to believe!” There is a kind of inevitability behind what people
are calling ‘The Social So·ware Revolution’ that makes this kind of
thing not just possible, but very very likely indeed.
eBay hasn’t solved the problem with trust, but it has given us a remark-
able mechanism with which to address it. If you think about it, the
kind of endorsement that is provided by a number of happy customers
through a trusted intermediary is about as good as we can get. It has
the benefit of saving us the background research we know we ought
to do, but never get around to, while giving us some genuine peace of
mind. And in areas where we are taking a real risk, with someone we
don’t know at all, it makes a huge di‹erence.
The eBay model turns this concept of the brand inside-out. Instead of
relying on the vendor’s claims, it puts their reputation firmly in the
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hands of their customers. If the experience was good, one can hope that
they will recognise it. If it was bad, on the other hand, one can almost
guarantee that they will say so. Instead of rhetoric about ‘putting cus-
tomers first’ or ‘being committed to quality of service’, it’s possible to
see the real, unvarnished, performance.
Of course we’ve had something similar in the form of professional
reviews for many years. Restaurant and entertainment columns appear
daily in newspapers and can be highly influential – a damning remark
from a theatre critic can still close a play. There have also been periodi-
cals like Which conducting comprehensive tests of similar products to
see which is the best buy. In some areas, like computers, hi-fi or cars,
there are competing monthly magazines devoted to making compari-
sons and reviewing products. Enthusiasts wouldn’t dream of choosing
without first hearing what they have to say.
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a great deal wrote lengthy complaints about the co‹ee or the air con-
ditioning. Marketeers might pretend that such and such a product is
the answer to our dreams, but even the most satisfied customers are
unlikely to give it more than a “yeah, it’s OK!”
Web 2.0, with its emphasis on social so·ware and networking, prom-
ises to accelerate and spread this kind of active consumerism across
pretty much all sectors, from government to b2b. Thinking of voting in
a local election? 495 people said that Cllr Perkins dealt with their prob-
lems in four to six weeks. But, hang on, what’s this about him here?
Want to give some money to charity? 56% of funds raised by ‘Flowering
Deserts’ went for work in the field – putting them amongst the top ten
performers. And so on. By putting our institutions into a virtual gold-
fish bowl where all can see and comment, the technology is bringing
about real transparency.
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Over the last few days, I’ve been playing with a fascinating program
called ‘Omnigra‡e’. Although I don’t consider myself a particularly
analytical person, I o·en have to create ‘box and line’ diagrams and
this is a very elegant tool for doing so. Indeed, it’s the kind of so·ware
I have always loved – the kind that with just one click can take a typical
hierarchical tree structure and turn it into a ‘bubble’ diagram, with
all the elements radiating from a single hub. And everything is beauti-
fully spaced, too. None of the lines cross over, nothing gets garbled as
a result of the conversion. Needless to say, it’s a Mac only program. But
the point of this piece isn’t to sell someone else’s so·ware (or to get you
using a di‹erent kind of computer). Because, despite the pleasure I’ve
got from this beautiful and clever little application, it has also helped
me to see some of the real limitations of the whole lines and boxes
paradigm.
The Mulla Nasruddin – the butt of a thousand Sufi jokes, who is either
a fool or a wise man (depending on how you interpret his antics) – once
observed: ‘There are two kinds of people: those who divide everything
into two kinds, and those who don’t...’ And I have to admit I have prob-
lems with the whole idea of ‘analysis’, of breaking things down into
labelled parts as a way of understanding them. Not that it doesn’t work:
clearly, it does. Nearly all of our technologies have come from someone
looking at a phenomenon, a process, a system, and turning it into a
lines and boxes diagram. Treating things in this way makes them con-
trollable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re designing a chemical plant,
building a website or running a department. In every case the analysis
is helping you to identify the necessary components and determine
what sort of sequence they need to be arranged in. Nothing wrong with
that, except what gets le· out.
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ships, yet it’s o·en the relationships that are the most important part:
the lines that connect the boxes. Consider a simple example. We have
three people: Peter, Brian and Sammy. Peter is Brian’s father, so let’s
put them in separate boxes and join them with a line. Brian is Sammy’s
father, so ditto. That probably seems quite straightforward, and it is if
we are considering the three individuals, and the fact of their being
connected. But suppose that instead we are interested in the experi-
ence of having, and being, a father. Then everything is reversed – sud-
denly it’s the lines that we’re interested in, and the people in the boxes
much less so. What’s more the lines become much more complex than
we’ve represented because they mean di‹erent things depending
on which direction you follow them. Brian’s relationship with Peter
– son to father – is not the same as Peter’s relationship with Brian. It’s
a quite di‹erent experience being someone’s son to being their father.
Something that Peter will understand, because his relationship to
Sammy, whilst obviously being unique and personal and not reducible
to a generality, is of a similar kind to Peter’s relationship to him (and of
a quite di‹erent kind to his relationship to Peter). Our diagram fails to
represent both the two way nature of these links, and the connections
between what are shown as separate relationships.
Let’s push this a little further. Brian, who I’m going to put at the centre
of my diagram, is also connected to Francesca, Sammy’s mother, Rose
his sister, Qasim his boss, Winston his friend. He’s got six boxes around
him, with six lines. But each of those lines means something com-
pletely di‹erent. Having a brother is totally di‹erent to having a hus-
band. Friendship can be said (at least, in a very general way) to mean
the same in both directions, while the employer-employee relation-
ship clearly cannot. So at best, our diagram can show how individuals
are connected (emphasis on individuals). And Brian being surrounded
by six separated people doesn’t really tell us anything: it’s a ‘so what?’
kind of diagram. However, if Rose is Qasim’s neighbour, and Francesca
turns out to be having an a‹air with Winston, and Sammy is teaching
Peter how to download free music onto his iPod, we’ve got some more
links in there and the diagram is beginning to model a pattern of con-
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Okay, what’s this soap opera got to do with the kinds of diagrams we all
need to produce? Lots, in fact. Because although our day to day models
may be less colourful, we face exactly the same problems of exaggerat-
ing the boxes and downplaying the lines. What goes in the boxes isn’t
as stable, consistent or united as the diagram suggests. And the rela-
tionships that we represent with the lines lose most of the information
they can give us through such a simplistic depiction. In fact, in almost
any situtation we choose to model, it’s the relationships that define the
entities. Circumstances alter cases: context is everything. If we look at
ourselves, this should be obvious: I may be chief executive of Bloggo
enterprises, but when I’m changing my daughter’s nappy I’m a poor
substitute for Mummy. “Do you know who I am?” “Yes, Mr Prescott, but
you’re still getting a ticket because your Jaguar is parked on a double
yellow line!” Emphasising boxes give us control, but few opportunities
for understanding. Emphasising lines, on the other hand, facilitates
understanding. Particularly if we don’t feel the need to control.
One day, I like to fantasise, I might get to play with a program that
doesn’t just turn one style of diagram into another, but can at the click
of a button foreground the relationships and diminish the entities, or
vice versa. Now that would be something!
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In fact this process started many centuries ago and has merely been
accelerating in recent decades. We can easily trace it as far back as the
Protestand Reformation in Europe, where the central issue was the
right to define one’s beliefs for oneself, privately and – most impor-
tantly – according to one’s own conscience. That word conscience,
although it seems a little quaint and old-fashioned today, is the key
here. Because what it really means is not a narrowly conditioned moral
sense, a feeling of ‘must’ and ‘ought’ and ‘should’ (which are always
the internalised voices of external parental figures) but the expression
of something beyond this, of who we really are as unique individuals.
The Reformation was only one of the first stirrings of this, though. When
we look back, we see the early Protestants as still fixated on authority
and conformity – although this is clearly not how they saw themselves.
But religious reform quickly led into political reform, witnessed by
the three great revolutions of the Western world (where most of these
developments have first taken place): the English, the American and
the French. These first mooted the ideas of political self-determination,
that people were equal and that they had the right to shape their own
a‹airs. Again, though, it has taken years to shake o¤ the hedges and
assumptions that originally accompanied these changes: to recognise,
for instance, that women had as much right to a place in the national
polity as men or that the franchise belonged as much to uneducated
labourers as to the property owning classes.
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(with the women’s movement). But this has o·en been seen, frequently
in Marxist terms, as a purely political development (as the famous
feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’ indicates). The two big
changes at the end of the twentieth century, the empowerment of
consumers and the freedom of information (particularly through the
Internet), are thus not usually recognised as being part of the same
evolutionary process.
And this is the bald fact about ‘Leadership’: there are no followers any
more, nobody who wants to be led. Only those of us who, through iner-
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tia or low self esteem, don’t feel able to take control of our own lives,
of our own destinies. Leadership sells because we all feel able to be in
the driving seat, but the only people we are going to be driving are our-
selves. And this is where the Leadership industry needs to recognise
what is happening and change direction – from teaching some kind
of updated Public School vision of the ‘Jolly Good Chap’ to showing
people how to lead themselves. Of course, this requires an understand-
ing of which part of us should be leading (which is another subject
altogether).
Professor Arthur Deikman called this new paradigm ‘the eye level
world’ (in his book The Wrong Way Home). At the end of the book he gives
this particularly beautiful and poignant description:
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For a long time I’ve believed that our choice of words conditions the
way we see things (in linguistics this is referred to as the ‘Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis’). For example, I dislike the use of the word ‘patient’ in the
health service. It implies that someone has no role in understanding
and resolving their health issues, which contradicts everything we now
know about the importance of a positive, active attitude towards our
own healing. It’s a dependency word. And, indeed, this is how people
have o·en been treated – I remember once waiting on a surgical ward
to see the consultant and his group of acolytes, ordered by the Sister to
keep quiet and not say anything! Needless to say, I saw this as a provoca-
tion rather than an instruction.
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A·er considering this matter for a while, the word I would like to sug-
gest in place of consumer is respondent. It’s not o‹ered as an exact
equivalent, because I’m more concerned with drawing attention to
the phenomenon of o‹er and take up, which is fundamentally about
communications. This o‹er could be as straightforward as a retailer
promoting a product, or as abstract as an author presenting an idea.
And I like the word respondent to describe someone having an inter-
ested reaction because it implies an active stance. We respond to some-
thing because it moves us, and our response may be in any number of
di‹erent ways. It suggests involvement as well as choice, dignifying
rather than belittling the person so described.
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And statistics...
4 October 2006
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It strikes me that this is one of the big issues that faces marketing. There
are patterns of behaviour that can be discerned from looking at human
behaviour en masse and it is very tempting to do so. Predictions can be
made on this basis, strategies developed, decisions implemented. But
looking only at the statistical picture blinds us to what is really going
on. These meta-patterns are made up of many individual events, each
of which are quite di‹erent. Statistics give us an overview of the ‘what’
of human behaviour but they cannot give any insight into the ‘why’.
The forces that are driving trends are not impersonal and collective,
but personal and individual. On the other hand, looking at particular
cases, which some of the newer marketing practices like ethnography
try to explore, can give us the individual ‘whys’ but conceal the bigger
picture.
Many years ago a friend’s dad, who understood more about physics
than we did, explained that in a boiling kettle there are tiny particles
of ice. What appears to be a homogenous mass of water at 100°C is in
fact made up of molecules with all sorts of di‹erent energy states. It
only seems like the whole is boiling because the average of those bil-
lions of individual micro-states is at boiling point. It might even be that
not a single molecule is at exactly 100°C. Looking at the aggregated
picture enables us to use this phenomenon – and make a cup of co‹ee.
But focusing on the detail enables us to understand how this is actu-
ally happening. And to realise that just because the whole appears to
be boiling it doesn’t mean that each molecule must be boiling too.
Thus far I haven’t really said anything that isn’t already widely under-
stood. But what I would like to add is that we need to find e‹ective
ways of looking at phenomena that allow us to integrate the two per-
spectives better. So, for instance, when we look at the statistical level
to remember that we are looking at a diverse community of events,
challenging the temptation to think that everybody is doing the same
thing for the same reason. And when we drop down to look at the indi-
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A dark place
17 October 2006
The recent controversy over ‘size zero’ models raises some fascinating
and disturbing questions. How has the fashion industry got itself into
such an unhappy situation? Why is it that it can’t seem to get out of
it? And how come this is so far removed from everyone’s possible ‘best
interests’, from shareholders to consumers?
Size zero is not about business, even of the most cynical kind. Indeed
the average British woman’s dress size has gone up over the last few
years to 14, while these skeletal waifs are only 4s in our measurements.
Nobody wears size 4. Customers aren’t queueing up to buy such tiny
clothes, they are starving themselves to fit into them. Nor is there any-
thing alluring about what has been called ‘heroin chic’. Many years
ago the novelist Anthony Burgess described a relationship he had with
a model as ‘like making love to a bicycle’. And this girl was positively
ample by today’s standards! For every reason one can imagine, from
the evolutionary to the aesthetic, men are not attracted to emaciated
women. Sex with bones is no fun.
But it is not the models who are responsible. These girls are the vic-
tims. Victims of what, though? Some kind of collectively traumatic
misogynistic fixation that seems to have infected the whole industry,
but most especially the designers, stylists and photographers who are
responsible for the look. There are some deeply disturbed people at the
top of the fashion industry, too — I know, because a friend works for
one of them. His trail of smashed up hotel rooms and drug-frenzied
rages makes even Keith Moon look like Father Christmas.
And the key point about size zero is that it is about abuse. Most girls
are already bigger than this by the time they turn ten, so there is noth-
ing ‘natural’ about someone in their twenties or thirties having these
measurements. The only zeros we might otherwise see are women
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What does the fashion industry say in support of size zero? Opposition
to the proposed bans focuses around the argument of ‘creative free-
dom’, which in itself raises interesting questions. How free are the
designers? Given that this look has obsessed fashionistas since the late
1980s, it appears more likely that they are in the grip of something
that is controlling them — not the other way around. And some com-
ments from the industry even suggest a sigh of relief that someone else
is taking charge of this situation. Fashion is in a thrash. It has not been
able to pull itself out of this downward spiral, and the consequences
have become more and more destructive. We should remember that
what made the debate recently hit the headlines again was the death
of 22 year old Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos, e‹ectively of starvation.
Style has become a killer.
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The more I’ve gone on in this business, the more convinced I become
that design doesn’t just reflect the unease of a society — it amplifies and
broadcasts it too. The analogy I would draw is with trauma. We don’t
just su‹er traumas, perhaps as children, living quietly and patiently
with them ever a·er. Instead, as time goes by, they begin to influence
more and more of our behaviour. In the worst cases, they take control
of this behaviour totally, driving us to traumatise others. Investigate
an abuser and you will find someone who was abused. The hurt, which
throbs away in the backround, is reactivated at times of vulnerability.
Only heightened awareness and conscious restraint stops it.
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weight of insult and hurt in the world. And rips through the fabric of
our aesthetic faculties in the same way as a knife through body tissue.
We need to stop it. Now.
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But what would design be like if it did embrace the New Age? Many of
the central themes of New Age philosophies and practices have con-
siderable relevance — and resonance — for design. And there may be
answers here for how designers can find a positive and productive role
for themselves in the emerging era.
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Identity crisis
8 November 2006
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(and it is now widely understood that the Qur’an does not require this
of any woman — it is a cultural practice, not a religious one). Why were
her parents dressing her in this way? To my eye this practice is just as
distasteful as sending a seven year old out dressed like a streetwalker
(which, of course, also happens these days). In di‹erent ways both types
of apparel sexualise children. The hijab also politicises them.
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It’s not that I want to dwell on conspiracy theories — far from it. Because
it occurred to me that almost any news story is unverifiable for us. Did
Sven really have that a‹air? Jade that punch-out? Tony and Gordon
that famous falling out? Everything we are told about these events is
hearsay, from people who have a vested interest in elaborating, embroi-
dering and sometimes plain distorting. Most are contested. And there
is precious little concrete evidence in the public domain.
When we come to Science, this is no less true. We are told, for instance,
that if you bring together a critical mass of fissile Uranium, a nuclear
reaction will take place. Advocates of Scientific Rationalism — die-hard
materialists like Richard Dawkins — assure us that this is ‘an established
fact’. But I have no more possibility of testing its supposed replicability
than I have of establishing the veracity of the virgin birth of Christ (or,
for that matter, of finding out who has been in Robbie Williams’ bed).
Sure, I can learn the theory. I might even be allowed to witness the
detonation of a nuclear device (although this lies in much the same
realm of unlikelihood as becoming, at 46, an astronaut or a brain sur-
geon). However there is no possibility that I will ever be allowed to play
with masses of Uranium. Indeed, just as with the religious dogma, I am
really being asked to take this ’on authority’. And at a time when many
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‘authorities’ reveal themselves to be far more partial, and have far less
credibility, than most of us would like.
Now the interesting thing about Occam’s razor (and, like many of these
things, no such principle appears in the writings of William of Occam)
is that there isn’t a logical or rational justification for it. It is no more
reasonable that a natural phenomenon should have a ‘simple’ expla-
nation rather than a complicated one. It is, instead, based on a feeling
for evidence. And, indeed, the fundamental principles that underpin
the whole edifice of modern science are all, similarly, rooted in feel-
ings. For instance, the ‘Scientific Method’ is based on the feeling that
all natural phenomena must be repeatable and predictable. There is
no reason to believe this, even if it appears to be true for some aspects
of our experience. However, because the method that hangs o¤ of this
feeling gives us the power to predict and replicate complex phenom-
ena, we rarely look at where it comes from.
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When we can verify almost nothing of what we are told, either because
we will never have access to the true facts or because we will never have
access to the apparatus to put them to the test, it has become vital that
we can access these feelings (and recognise them for what they are).
The only rigour that can exist in an unverifiable world is the degree to
which we can be true to these feelings — which are not only to do with
evidence, but also with things like justice, integrity, health and pur-
pose. And I should point out that I’m not talking about a feeling that a
particular belief is ‘right’, which sensation is most o·en simply a con-
ditioned response, but something much deeper and more fundamen-
tal. The feeling that there is such a thing as ‘rightness’, for instance.
Unlike beliefs, which vary enormously, these feelings are broadly con-
sensual. And evolving. Before the Scientific Revolution, for instance,
the feeling for evidence I have mentioned wasn’t widespread. Before
the Middle Ages, the same was true of the feeling for logic. These feel-
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Makeover madness?
22 November 2006
As you can see, Transforming Communication has had its first makeo-
ver! This is a response to my beloved Maria insisting that my grey web-
site was saying something about me! And there is more than a grain of
truth to this. When I first thought about what I wanted to do with the
site, it was to open doors to all kinds of new ideas, approaches, energies
– to bring exuberance and vitality into the o·en stale and staid way we
communicate. And arguably there is still nothing like enough exuber-
ance and vitality in the site design. But it is a start!
In fact, we can chart the rise of freethinking from its first emergence
in the Classical era (witness Socrates’ rejection of the gods) through
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Some commentators saw the nineties, which were really the begin-
ning of the makeover era, as bringing a new ‘tribalism’, discerning
new sub-cultures in all sorts of di‹erent areas from surfing to street-
gangs. What seemed to be di‹erent about these ‘tribes’, compared with
the youth cultures that had been with us for the last forty years or so,
was their fluidity, spontaneity and multiplicity. Unlike, for instance,
more established groups of Mods, Hippies or Goths, these sub-cultures
tended to emerge, mutate, and disappear, quickly. Marketeers who
saw them as an opportunity were frustrated by how elusive, and how
resistant, they could be towards traditional techniques of promotion.
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Communication as giving
5 December 2006
Over the last few months Mark Walter has written an extraordinary
series of posts for his blog eternal awareness on the subject of The Art of
Giving. These posts o‹er deep and unexpected insights into the nature
of a process that a‹ects almost everything we do. They have certainly
helped me to understand why some activities become a virtuous circle
of increasing returns while others (which may not appear all that
di‹erent) peter out into oblivion. I would strongly urge anyone who
isn’t familiar with Mark’s writing to take a look.
The Art of Giving series has also prompted me to think about how the
process of communication might be similar to giving, and about how
we might usefully apply these insights to make it more e‹ective. But
before I go on, I should first summarise one of Mark’s key points, which
is about the relationship between the four principles of giving: respect,
appreciation, gratitude and value.
The third principle, gratitude, is less familiar to us. Yet this is the one
that makes the crucial di‹erence between whether the giving prospers
or goes to ground. This is about returning a tithe of what is given to the
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The fourth principle, value is not another stage but describes the
intention of the process, the increase and sharing of value.
Perhaps another example will allow us to look at how giving can work
with intangible value. Imagine a counsellor with a client. The first
thing the counsellor does is to listen, and this is respect. The more the
counsellor can attend to the client, to give him full attention rather
than allowing herself to be distracted by interpretation and judgment,
the more value comes through. She then appreciates what she has
heard, by using her knowledge, experience and skill to frame a ques-
tion that can help the client to resolve the issues he has been describ-
ing. There is a circularity here that many people would think achieves
what counselling sets out to do: you talk about your problems, I help
you to understand them, you can then resolve them.
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Where is the gratitude? This is a good question, and I believe that this
is where many communications fail. Or, indeed, where some unexpect-
edly succeed – without anyone really understanding what their suc-
cess is based on. What could it mean for a communication to ‘tithe to
source’? At the most basic level, something like good writing or design,
if it li·s the communication beyond being just a product promotion
into something that is also beautiful, appealing, interesting in its own
right, is making a tithe back to the place where the skills and experi-
ence of the communicator(s) come from. At the same time, it’s giving
something back to the audience: if one is making demands on their
attention, it is not enough to give them your marketing message in
return. There needs to be an element of ‘something in it for me’. If
the communication is funny, joyful, life-enhancing, it is increasing the
amount of positive energy in the world, regardless of whether anyone
is interested in what it has to say.
But this isn’t going that far back ‘upstream’ (even though many mar-
keteers are resistant to giving away even this much). The ‘source’ of
communication is much deeper. It comes from the place that mystics
describe as the Logos, the coming into being of our world as language, as
‘words’, as meanings that are comprehensible and distinct. To mouth
a sentiment which might seem a bit rich for some readers, communi-
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cation has a Divine source. ‘In the beginning was The Word...’, and all
that. How do we return a part of the communication to that Source?
Not necessarily by smothering our promotional materials with hymns
and prayers (although it is interesting to note that this is exactly what
happens in some cultures, for instance in the almost obligatory ‘786’
that sits above the signs of many Indian Restaurants, which refers to
the Islamic invocation ‘In the Name of God, the most Compassionate,
the most Merciful’).
The Art of Giving can enable our communications to bridge between the
essence of what human beings are and the mundane, everyday activi-
ties we involve ourselves in, without becoming portentous and obscure.
All work has this potential. The ‘tithing’ that gratitude requires doesn’t
demand total devotion, only a hint, a ‘whi¤’ of something else. And, as
I’ve said so many times before, ‘something that is created with love and
delight communicates that love and delight, but something that is cre-
ated with other qualities communicates those qualities’. The engrav-
ings that William Blake made for Joseph Flaxman’s ceramics catalogues
came, unmistakably, from the hand that penned ‘To see a world in a
grain of Sand. And a heaven in a wild flower...’ But they sold pots.
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Promoting ethics
7 February 2007
I saw this on the ‘Design Observer’ site today and was intrigued by it.
Like others I had no idea that the Vatican had a code on advertising.
Nor, indeed, that I would be so inclined to agree with it. Here, anyway,
are their ‘ten commandments’ of ethical advertising from a report by
the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, 1997.
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These principles raise some important questions for me, though. For
instance, if advertisers are to be held ‘morally responsible for what
they seek to move people to do’, where exactly does that responsibility
lie? With the client, for sanctioning the advertising? With the direc-
tors of the advertising agency, as the people legally responsible? With
the creatives, who made that advert? Or shared (equally, or in varying
amounts) between everybody involved, from the commissioners who
paid for it through to the shopkeepers who stocked the product on
their shelves? If anything is to change in the way advertising is done,
somebody needs to have ‘the buck stops here’ on their desk - to actively
take that responsibility. Otherwise this moral responsibility is simply
going to disintegrate in ‘kitchen fitter’ syndrome: “No, mate, it’s the
electrician’s job” “That’s plumbing, that is!” “Blame the cabinet maker,
it’s the doors what won’t fit” “I’m only the plasterer, me...” “This is John
Doe Design. Currently nobody is available. If you want to leave a mes-
sage, please speak a·er the tone...”
And I like the way the Vatican puts the emphasis on ‘moral’ responsi-
bility in these protocols – rather than arguing in favour of regulation
or legislation (except in the case of political advertising, which most
people would prefer to see banned in any case!) But there are lots of
words here with ambiguous, if not totally slippery, meanings. What
constitutes ‘manipulative’, ‘exploitative’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘corrupting’
methods – and how do these di‹er from more innocent sounding ‘per-
suasion’? I have my own ideas, but these words will need a much tighter
kind of definition if anybody is actually going to be able to make this
distinction. In fact, I think it will call for a totally di‹erent attitude to
communicating, if we are to really get away from the kind of mental
ju-jitsu that uses the ‘weight’ of the consumer against them. Whether
this is what is meant here by communicating ‘honestly and properly’
isn’t clear.
Finally, I’m curious to know how the authors see advertisers ‘repair-
ing the harm done by advertising’ (and this prompts the mischievous
thought that perhaps the Vatican ought to be asked to repair the harm
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I’m in no doubt that advertising can do, and does, quite a lot of harm. If
we look at a whole ra· of social concerns, from climate change through
to childhood obesity, we can see how irresponsible advertising has
made the situation much worse than it might otherwise have been.
But consumers should equally share this responsibility. Advertising
asks, but it cannot demand. By accepting and acting on the message
– which we do because it appeals to what we already want to do – we
make the choices that cause the harm.
Maybe ‘the buck stops here’ should be stamped on every banknote and
credit card?
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Musammem
23 February 2007
What is most interesting about the Arabic roots (and Arabic preserves the
range of meanings better than, for instance, Hebrew, which was actually
‘reconstructed’ by the Arabized Jews of Spain, in the middle ages, having
become more or less a ‘dead’ language) is that there is a distinct sense
of connection between the words that make up this range of meaning.
However this is more of a poetical rather than a logical connection.
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What else is there to say about design that this ancient language hasn’t
already beautifully expressed?
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Now I should admit that when I had the dream I was, to some extent,
already familiar with Spencer-Brown’s work, through Henri Borto·’s
magnificent book The Wholeness of Nature (although to be honest Spencer-
Brown is confined, here, merely to a long end-note). I also enjoyed read-
ing Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s The Tree of Knowledge a
few years ago, although I didn’t know that Varela had also done a great
deal of work extending and applying Spencer-Brown’s mathematics to
the life sciences. Peter Senge I’d heard of, but I had never read any of his
books. For those who aren’t familiar with him, he is the man credited
with coining the phrase ‘the learning organisation’.
Returning from Italy a·er Easter, I thought about what I knew of Spencer-
Brown’s work — which, to be honest, wasn’t much — and realised that it
could be applied to branding. This was something that had never previ-
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ously occured to me. Not only that, but looking at it in this way revealed
the whole idea of branding in a much more interesting light. But before
going on to that I think we may first need a math lesson.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the
light from the darkness.
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But that’s enough math! (And there are some excellent sites on Spencer-
Brown on the web, if anyone is interested). On to branding. How is this
similar?
The simplest answer is that branding is all about making value laden
distinctions — indications. I’m going to talk about the area I know best,
which is corporate branding. But in principle this applies to product
and service branding too.
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I’d also like to humbly suggest a fourth axiom, which comes not from
mathematics but from my experience of branding organisations. This
is that when several di‹erent indications (i.e. value laden distinctions)
are nested one inside the other, they can be collapsed to two — the
greatest and the smallest. This is di‹erent from the law of crossing in
that each distinction indicates a subset of the one that is greater than
it, rather than the same distinction. If you’re wondering what I’m talk-
ing about, think of the hierarchy of any organisation. Since I work a lot
with universities, I’ll use a university as an example. At the top level,
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you have the indication that distinguishes the institution itself. Inside
this, you may have a faculty. Inside the faculty, a school. Inside the
school, a department. But when you take these together, the ‘middle-
men’ can be e‹ectively dismissed. One is dealing with a general sense
of ethos, culture and values that are defined by the university brand
and a specific attitude that is defined by the department. The ethos,
culture and values as well as specific attitudes of faculties and schools
are subsumed within these. And I’d like to propose that this axiom
be called the law of subsidiarity because it demonstrates exactly that
principle. How it might be mathematically proven, I leave to the math-
ematicians.
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Being ourselves
25 September 2007
Who am I? How do you answer this question? And what’s the first thing
that comes to your mind when you try? Is it your name? “I’m James!” Is it
a feeling? “I’m me, of course!” Is it your body? Your abilities? Your memories
and experiences?
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bank-robber, I might see the world very di‹erently. Likewise the acci-
dents I didn’t have any choice about: my nationality, my ethnicity, my
family and my education, for instance. The fact that we would find the
same feeling answering to “Who am I?”, whether we had been born
into this family or another, whether we are brought up a Muslim or a
Catholic, doesn’t wipe away the enormous impact these factors have
on the things we identify with. We’re like a troupe of actors who have
taken on roles. But then, from years of playing those roles have come to
believe we are those roles. (Interestingly, the word ‘personality’, which
very nicely describes this kind of outwardly conditioned sense of our-
selves, derives from the Latin persona, a mask.)
Not only does “I AM” express our most fundamental sense of identity
— the true identity conferred by the simple act of being — but it is also
the ultimate source of all our energy, our passion. Everything we do
receives its vitality from who we are. And another way of looking at
this being is as pure possibilitity: it is our potential to be. Essentially, it
stands apart and before (‘ontologically prior’, a philosopher might say)
our particular identifications. It is that part of ourselves that could be
anything, the fluidity to take on any role (even those that are inconceiv-
able to us). It is also morally neutral: it includes as much our potential
to be a serial killer as a philanthropist, a genius as much as an ‘ordi-
nary Joe’. And even though we may live a dozen demanding roles, it
remains detached from all of them.
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Exquisite tact
9 October 2007
Tonight, Tuesday 9th October 2007, is the 27th night of the Islamic
month of Ramadan*. Which, by tradition, is the night celebrated by
Muslims as The Night of Power. ‘And what will explain to thee what the
Night of Power is? The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.
Therein come down the angels and the spirit by God’s permission, on
every errand: Peace! This until the rise of morn.’ (Qur’an 97:1-5)
The Night of Power comemorates the night on which the Qur’an was
first transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad. Although there is actually
some question about when this occurred, as the Prophet is reported to
have forgotten which day it was, and to have said: ‘seek it on the twenty
first, twenty-third, twenty-fi·h, twenty-seventh or on the last night’.
Why do I mention this? Because I want to talk about a prayer that
Muhammad gave to his young wife Ayesha, when she asked him for
something to say on this night. And why do I want to talk about this
recondite (and apparently o¤-topic) subject? Because, for me, it exem-
plifies a quality that we rarely see in communications these days: exqui-
site tact. Indeed, although I wouldn’t describe myself as a Muslim, I
have long admired the prayers of the Prophet for this very quality. They
show the cra· of communication at its apogee: simple, succinct, but
revealing vast depths. And putting things in the right order, which is
how his tact most clearly manifests itself.
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This prayer was narrated by Ayesha, who long outlived her husband to
become the grand old lady of early Islam, recounting many stories of
his life to subsequent generations. And for those who are interested in
such things, it was transmitted by the compilers of tradtions Ahmad,
Ibn Majah and Tirmidhi. In English it translates something like this
(with an rough transliteration of the Arabic as well):
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If you look at the transliteration, you will see that a word from the root
’a—f—w (from which Al ‘Afuw comes) occurs three times, in each of the
first three lines. First as ’afuwun, forgiving, then as al ’afwa, forgiveness,
and finally as ’afuw ’aniyy, forgive me. The prayer can thus be seen as a
play on this root (and spoken in the original the repetition gives it a
rather unearthly cadence).
But to return to the main thrust of this piece. The four short lines of
this prayer establish an extraordinarily tactful relationship between
the invoker and the Invoked. First God is called in the most personal
way: ’Allahumma, My God. Since I am less religiously and more mysti-
cally and psychologically minded, I see this not so much as a call to the
‘God out there’ as to one’s own indwelling divinity, to the ‘God in here’
(or what Jung referred to, in a more secular sounding way, as the Self).
Divinity is then recognised with the quality of forgiveness, or wiping
away: ‘You are forgiving’. Like many of the Prophet’s prayers, this
begins with an a›rmation of the qualities of Godhead — the request,
the asking for oneself, comes a·er establishing the Divine nature of
the quality that is to be asked for. You are forgiving.
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Finally the prayer ends with the invocation of another quality, Divine
Generosity or Nobility. It is worth observing here that karamat, from
the same root as Al Kareem, also means ‘miracles’ in Arabic. A miracle
is asked for, from the Divine generosity: the miracle of wiping away,
of obliteration. But whether this petition receives an immediate or a
deferred, a direct or an indirect, response, the Generosity and Nobility
of the Divine (which also inheres within ourselves) is explicitly recog-
nised and remembered.
* The Islamic year is based on a lunar calendar, so the dates of Ramadan vary.
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Misplaced belonging
29 October 2007
The problem with romantic love, if we may put it in these terms, is that
ordinary human relationships are not able to sustain its expectations.
However wonderful he or she may be, another person cannot continue
to meet our constant demand for meaningfulness. At a certain point,
the ‘magic’ vanishes and we are le· looking at our partner in their
unvarnished ordinariness. Instead of seizing this opportunity to build
a truly human relationship, one based on an appreciation of the other
as they are, strengths and weaknesses, faults and virtues, we tend then
to start looking for the ‘magic’ elsewhere.
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The remedy for our romanticism, Johnson tells us, is to realise that we
are mixing levels. Our romantic longings properly belong to our inner
world. Expressed in that world, they lead to psychic health and integra-
tion. Turned outwardly, they create a kind of hell for us as we try to live
up to — or, rather, expect others to live up to — their impossible expec-
tations. And for as long as we are under the spell of romantic love, we
are incapable of human love: the everyday appreciation of each other
that makes for enduring, realistic relationships.
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The next time you hear the story of a suicide bomber, consider this.
The problem may not be that he devoted himself to a toxic cause, but
that rather the cause itself became toxic because — like so many causes
in the modern world — it couldn’t support the intensity of belonging
demanded of it. Without an understanding of what our urge to belong
relates to, we will attach it to institutions that buckle under its weight.
We belong truly only to OurSelves. And unlike outward causes, that
realisation alone can give us the fulfilment we seek; will never fail us.
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My previous post, Design for the New Age, ended with this question:
‘But what would design be like if it did embrace the New Age? Many
of the central themes of New Age philosophies and practices have con-
siderable relevance — and resonance — for design. And there may be
answers here for how designers can find a positive and productive role
for themselves in the emerging era.’ A·er a few months for reflection,
this is my attempt at an answer.
One of the central themes linking many New Age philosophies is the
concept of harmony. Harmony is usually conceived on the model of
musical harmony: two or more notes sounding together to give a pleas-
ing concord. And the interesting thing about musical harmony is that
although it can be described in mathematical terms, as the ratio of
pitches, it depends on human aesthetic sensibilities to distinguish
between what is, and what is not, harmonious.
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You might argue that designers have always applied such acuity of per-
ception in their work. For instance, even the Modernists —not other-
wise known for their considerations of harmony — talked about the
‘balance of unequal masses’. What was lacking before, however, was an
understanding of the harmonious as the basic principle of well-being
throughout the whole of existence: a principle to be strived for as a pri-
mary consideration in all enterprise. This understanding of harmony,
and the harmonious, has’t been a part of Western thinking since the
Renaissance.
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The aspect of resonance holds that, just as a tuning fork can spontane-
ously begin to resonate when the same note is played near to it, so com-
munication might work by a similar resonation of the ‘tuning forks’
within the human being. This analogy also goes some way towards
explaining the phenomenon, mentioned earlier, of how suitably sen-
sitised people have the same perception of what is harmonic and what
is not.
The really interesting things about resonance is the way that it shows
us that harmony involves the communication, or transference, of
energy. The tuning fork doesn’t just start to ‘sing in tune’ because of
some process of sympathy, but because its state is actively energised by
the instrument played near to it. This point, I believe, is of the greatest
possible significance to our understanding of design — and particularly
to our experience of designed communication. What is communicated
is energy. Not as a secondary or incidental part of the process of com-
munication, but as the principal activity. Communication doesn’t
transfer ‘information’: information is, instead, the outward and vis-
ible aspect of the transmission of energy.
It’s this recognition that I believe will signal a truly ‘New Age’ design.
By which I don’t mean an approach to design that is all incense, crys-
tals, tinkly music and half-understood eclectic spiritual jargon, but a
genuinely new kind of designing that echoes the central themes com-
monly associated with ‘New Age’ ideas. A design that reflects a new
humanism: design as if people mattered, design that respects the
integrity and — above all — the possibilities of the individual, design
that heals.
And that’s the last, and perhaps most controversial, point about har-
mony that I’d like to make. New Age thinking sees harmony not just as
a reflection of wholeness but also as healing. Disharmony is dis-ease
but that which is itself harmonious exerts an influence that predis-
poses towards harmony and thus to healing. This was well understood
to the ancients, whose ‘sacred art’ was considered not merely symbolic
and representational but also therapeutic. For the communication
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Over the last few months I’ve become fascinated by the psychology of
narcissism. Since this was first identified as a pathological condition
by Freud, it has stimulated a great deal of investigation with some very
interesting findings. What I find so striking about it, however, is the way
that it seems to describe a fundamental condition of our whole society.
Like the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who was doomed to fall in love
with his own reflection until — unable to consummate this impossible
love — he pined away, a narcissist is someone who is heavily invested
in an image of himself or herself but, behind the image, may be living
a much impoverished reality. So, for instance, a narcissist may give a
great deal of attention to other people’s problems, because he wants to
present an image of a ‘concerned’ person, but may fail to attend to his
own needs. Indeed, he may berate himself because he doesn’t live up
to the image he has created. This description might sound strange to
those who imagine that narcissism is related to vanity, but a moment’s
reflection shows that the ardent supporter of causes may be just as
vain as the fashionista or dandy.
The DSM also gives a list of indicators of narcissism, with the display
of more than five of these suggesting that a person is su‹ering from a
Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It states that such a person:
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is interpersonally exploitative
lacks empathy
[source: wikipedia]
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The phenomenon of the brand can be seen as one of the most potent
expressions of a widespread corporate narcissism in our societies.
Behind the managed image that is a brand a very di‹erent reality may
be in place: as with the narcissistic individual, the more investment
there is in the image, the more ‘impoverished’ this reality is likely to
be. Meaning, here, that the ‘body’ of the organization, the wellbeing of
its sta¤ and the integrity of its social fabric, is made to su¤er the dis-
sonance of an image so far out of kilter with the reality — a dissonance
that will ultimately produce irreparable damage to that fabric, just
as the body obsessed narcissist ultimately does irreparable damage to
their body. But it is the impoverishment of the real self that is even
greater in narcissism: the authentic feelings, perceptions and values of
the individual are ignored in favour of those that look good and a cal-
lousness su›cient to put the cultivation of image above all else.
‘An enduring truth, a wise friend once explained to me, is that
important social change nearly always begins in hypocrisy. First,
the powerful are persuaded to say the appropriate words, that
is, to sign a commitment to higher values and decent behavior.
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Then social activists must spend the next ten years pounding on
them, trying to make them live up to their promises or persuad-
ing governments to enact laws that will compel them to do so.’
a good film.’
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references
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338
references
Further reading
Barfield, Owen
Saving The Appearences isbn 0 8195 6205 x
The Rediscovery of Meaning isbn 0 8195 6124 x
Bortoft, Henri
The Wholeness of Nature isbn 0 86315 238 4
At first sight this book, ostensibly about the unique method of sci-
ence developed by the great German writer Johann Wolfgang Von
Goethe, wouldn’t appear to have much interest for designers. Let it
su›ce to say that it has extraordinary implications for the practice
of design — not least in the parts that deal with Goethe’s system-
atic cultivation of a rigorous faculty of imagination, and its role
in understanding holistically. Towards the end of the book, Borto·
examines the nature of language from a phenomenological per-
spective and his revelations are so astounding that this in itself
justifies reading The Wholeness of Nature.
339
transforming communication
Cialdini, Robert
Influence isbn 0 673 56751 1
Claxton, Guy
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind isbn 1 85702 451 6
Wise Up isbn 0 7475 4069 1
Deikman, Arthur
The Wrong Way Home isbn 0 8070 2915 7
340
references
Dunbar, Robin
Grooming , Gossip and the Evolution of Language isbn 0 571 17397 7
341
transforming communication
Hall, Edward
Beyond Culture isbn 0 385 12474 0
The Dance of Life isbn 0 385 12448 7
The Hidden Dimension isbn 0 385 08476 5
342
references
Heidegger, Martin
Basic Writings isbn 0 415 10161 1
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transforming communication
Milgram, Stanley
Obedience to Authority isbn 0 06 131983 x
Nørretranders, Tor
The User Illusion isbn 0 14 023012 2
344
references
Ornstein, Robert
The Psychology of Consciousness isbn 0 14 022621 4
Multimind isbn 0 333 43803 5
The Evolution of Consciousness isbn 0 13 587569 2
The Roots of the Self isbn 0 06 250789 3
The Right Mind isbn 0 15 100324 6
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transforming communication
Page, Russell
The Education of a Gardener isbn 0 14 007254 3
Shah, Idries
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin isbn 0 86304 023 3
The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin isbn 0 86304 022 5
The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin isbn 0 86304 021 7
346
references
Seligman, Martin
Learned Optimism isbn 0 671 01911 2
What You Can Change… And What You Can’t isbn 0449 90971 9
Tannen, Deborah
That’s Not What I Meant! isbn 1 85381 512 8
You Just Don’t Understand isbn 1 85381 471 7
Talking from 9 to 5 isbn 1 85381 546 2
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transforming communication
and everyday life, which makes her books very enjoyable to read
but infuriatingly di›cult to quote. Reflecting on her points makes
one realize quite how ‘masculine’ our tradition of visual communi-
cations — explaining why graphic design awards, conferences and
publications are still dominated by the status displays of young
men (and why today’s ‘Young Turks’ become tomorrow’s stifling
establishment). Tannen infuriated many feminists by daring to sug-
gest that men and women are di‹erent. But her books are a power-
ful argument for more inclusive approaches to communication.
Winn, Denise
The Manipulated Mind isbn 086304 025 x
348