I read business books. I do understand that this is a fairly uncommon practice amongst graphic designers. I’m not talking about the full-on, academic, formal MBA business tome, more the middle-brow management, marketing, and ideas genre. I have read Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and Chris Andersen. I can hold my own in cocktail chatter about Tipping Points and Freakonomics. I have worked my way through potted histories of corporations as varied as IBM, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Go, Ikea, Starbucks, Ryanair, and Boo.com. Geek-wise I have even handed over good money for product histories of the Mac, Linux, and even Windows-XP. I have also been seen thumbing the occasional CEO autobiography, Overview of Economic Thought, or Pop History of the Limited Liability Company. I have read the good, I have read the the bad and, far worse, I have read the mediocre.
On the most practical level my clients are business people and to truly address their needs I need to understand as much as I can about the business realities and issues that they face. On another level: I am somewhat of a business-geek. (I am still slightly more of a typography-geek, as I have more books on typography. For now.)
Larry Winget is not a business author whom I have encountered before. You can download his recent essay ‘You are Being Lied To and Other Truths’ at ChangeThis. His essay is a fun read with lots of energy. I recommend it. I appreciate that, as a business author, he is refreshingly candid about how useful business books can be, and the realities of having to write more to keep earning. I also really like his one-line version of business book meta-advice.
“Do what you said you were going to do,
when you said you were going to do it,
in exactly the way you said you were going to do.”
Which is very succinct. It resonates with a lot of the themes I am reading in John Simmons’ new book about Innocent. You can argue that this is a simplistic mantra if you will. But, after mulling this over and then running a rule over a lot of the work issues that are currently bugging me, there is a lot to be said for aiming for something as pure as that. And even more to be said for delivering on it.
Thoughts on creating disruptive organisational transformations with design thinking.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Guideline Weekly Amount
Perhaps I could improve this by including some additional categories. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
It Is All Too Similar, And Yet It Is All Too Dissimilar...
Is your brand undergoing a period of consolidation or diversification? I have observed this organisational pattern where the approach to brand identity management follows a cycle over five to ten years: consolidation, followed by gradual drift towards diversification, then re-consolidation. It can be useful to examine where your organisation is positioned on that continuum.
The benefit of the O2 visual branding system is that it has become instantly recognisable to consumers. All you really need are some shades of dark blue and some bubbles and people will know that it is a communication from O2.* However, to achieve such a high level of recognition involves some interesting trade-offs on the marketing and design side of the equation.
As this class of strongly homogeneous and distinctive visual style is excellent at presenting the master corporate brand, it must, of consequence, be weaker at separating out individual products, services and offers. Think about it: the suite of posters for pre-pay mobile offers that you see in O2 store fronts this week are never going to be all that visually different from the preceding week’s posters for a different service offering. This implies that O2’s marketing teams are going to have to work harder coming up with the core ideas associated with promoting each of their individual products and services.
In my experience, one of the key reasons why visual brand identity systems devolve into inconsistency is that product managers (or whomever owns the organisational briefs informing the marketing department's creative briefs) are often measured by their results at the level of their products and, crucially, not at the level of overall brand performance. This implies that they have some incentive to make the creative work associated with their personal fiefdom as different from the master system as they can get away with. This is why so many design briefs begin with some variation of “...this new product/service/widget is very special and unique and really needs a design that stands part from, and above, whatever we happen to be doing over here, over there, and also over there...”
This push-and-pull between (for lack of two clearer terms) the top-down design centralisation imperative and the bottom-up design autonomy impulse from the tactical managers is a key generator of many design and branding briefs.
Hypothetically, this is how that organisational dynamic typically plays out.
Firstly, the head of Corporate Marketing looks at the collective output of the company and throws her arms up in despair. To her everything has become inconsistent, it looks more like the output of a group of companies rather than the one coherent corporate entity that she needs to communicate.
Consumer research can often reinforce her opinion. Although when brands have a strong and distinctive, yet relatively inflexible, visual system, consumer research often reveals a desire for some more diversity between the individual marketing elements. Conversely, a more varied, looser visual system usually researches as needing more consistency to help it all hang together. (Go figure.)
To resolve this inconsistent brand identity drift, a detailed brief for a new Unified Visual Style becomes the basis for a tender process. A branding or design consultancy is commissioned and produces the new visual system which then unites the design of all of the communications material to the required degree. This new identity system rationalises and coordinates the current state of the organisation’s master brand and sub-brands. It reflects the current structures of the organisation. If the brand consultants do their job, it will be forward-looking, with as much future-proofing built in as is feasible. Obviously no-one has a crystal ball. For example, how many brand guidance systems can have factored in the arrival of the new social media applications at this stage?
* Disclosure
I tend to use O2 as my example when discussing this topic, as I find that their established visual style has such high recognition that everyone knows what I am referring to. BFK has done some work for O2 in the past. However, as of this writing in 2007, I have not dealt with anyone in that organisation in more than three years.
The benefit of the O2 visual branding system is that it has become instantly recognisable to consumers. All you really need are some shades of dark blue and some bubbles and people will know that it is a communication from O2.* However, to achieve such a high level of recognition involves some interesting trade-offs on the marketing and design side of the equation.
As this class of strongly homogeneous and distinctive visual style is excellent at presenting the master corporate brand, it must, of consequence, be weaker at separating out individual products, services and offers. Think about it: the suite of posters for pre-pay mobile offers that you see in O2 store fronts this week are never going to be all that visually different from the preceding week’s posters for a different service offering. This implies that O2’s marketing teams are going to have to work harder coming up with the core ideas associated with promoting each of their individual products and services.
In my experience, one of the key reasons why visual brand identity systems devolve into inconsistency is that product managers (or whomever owns the organisational briefs informing the marketing department's creative briefs) are often measured by their results at the level of their products and, crucially, not at the level of overall brand performance. This implies that they have some incentive to make the creative work associated with their personal fiefdom as different from the master system as they can get away with. This is why so many design briefs begin with some variation of “...this new product/service/widget is very special and unique and really needs a design that stands part from, and above, whatever we happen to be doing over here, over there, and also over there...”
This push-and-pull between (for lack of two clearer terms) the top-down design centralisation imperative and the bottom-up design autonomy impulse from the tactical managers is a key generator of many design and branding briefs.
Hypothetically, this is how that organisational dynamic typically plays out.
Firstly, the head of Corporate Marketing looks at the collective output of the company and throws her arms up in despair. To her everything has become inconsistent, it looks more like the output of a group of companies rather than the one coherent corporate entity that she needs to communicate.
Consumer research can often reinforce her opinion. Although when brands have a strong and distinctive, yet relatively inflexible, visual system, consumer research often reveals a desire for some more diversity between the individual marketing elements. Conversely, a more varied, looser visual system usually researches as needing more consistency to help it all hang together. (Go figure.)
To resolve this inconsistent brand identity drift, a detailed brief for a new Unified Visual Style becomes the basis for a tender process. A branding or design consultancy is commissioned and produces the new visual system which then unites the design of all of the communications material to the required degree. This new identity system rationalises and coordinates the current state of the organisation’s master brand and sub-brands. It reflects the current structures of the organisation. If the brand consultants do their job, it will be forward-looking, with as much future-proofing built in as is feasible. Obviously no-one has a crystal ball. For example, how many brand guidance systems can have factored in the arrival of the new social media applications at this stage?
* Disclosure
I tend to use O2 as my example when discussing this topic, as I find that their established visual style has such high recognition that everyone knows what I am referring to. BFK has done some work for O2 in the past. However, as of this writing in 2007, I have not dealt with anyone in that organisation in more than three years.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Ballinasloe Blogger’s Blatant Ballot Boost Bid
The Boy Johnny has gone and gotten himself nominated again for this year’s Irish Blog Awards.
So, in keeping with the tradition of all of the free publicity that I have been giving MaguiresMovies here on ThoughtPort, why don’t you all flock to the awards site in vast numbers and cast your votes before the fifteenth. He is in the Best Arts and Culture section.
John coped exceedingly well with not winning the award in oh-six, but he has high hopes for this year...
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Speak To Me/The Emotional Type
“How many flavours of vanilla do you want?” — Bruno Maag.
I brought the studio over to the Image Now Gallery for a look at the Dalton Maag typography exhibition ‘Speak To Me’. It was very interesting to see the complete typeface creation process from initial rough sketches on A3 marker pads all the way through to detailed technical film tests.
We also attended Bruno Maag’s lecture ‘The Emotional Type’ at DIT in Mountjoy Squrae. The talk was well titled, as he is an emotional and animated speaker. It is always good to see someone so passionate about what they do. I also think that we always need to have such monomaniacal characters around who obsess about details like the inconsistencies of the diagonal strokes in the light-weight characters of the headline font for The Guardian newspaper, and where the pixels fall in the lowercase O when they are displayed in our interactive television guides. Admittedly I am probably more interested in type and typography than most, but I don’t ever think I would have the mindset to grind my way through the creation process involved in producing the 700-odd characters he was talking about for the standard four-weight Latin A font package he produces for most of his clients.
His talk was wide-ranging in its scope and fairly humorous in spots: touching on some non-conventional topics as typo-porn, the joys of metal type and going to the UK National Type Library and fondling a flirty Fette Fraktur. Indeed.
We also learned why never never to use Helvetica (never) and why if everyone used the nigh-perfect, yet arid, Univers then Bruno would be out of a job. London Underground and Typhoo Tea did not fare well under his withering gaze either.
The headline quote above was his response when asked about the role of custom font creation in brand identity programmes and the observation that so much of that work today is variation around a theme of ‘warm, soft and friendly’ humanist sans-serif typefaces.
I brought the studio over to the Image Now Gallery for a look at the Dalton Maag typography exhibition ‘Speak To Me’. It was very interesting to see the complete typeface creation process from initial rough sketches on A3 marker pads all the way through to detailed technical film tests.
We also attended Bruno Maag’s lecture ‘The Emotional Type’ at DIT in Mountjoy Squrae. The talk was well titled, as he is an emotional and animated speaker. It is always good to see someone so passionate about what they do. I also think that we always need to have such monomaniacal characters around who obsess about details like the inconsistencies of the diagonal strokes in the light-weight characters of the headline font for The Guardian newspaper, and where the pixels fall in the lowercase O when they are displayed in our interactive television guides. Admittedly I am probably more interested in type and typography than most, but I don’t ever think I would have the mindset to grind my way through the creation process involved in producing the 700-odd characters he was talking about for the standard four-weight Latin A font package he produces for most of his clients.
His talk was wide-ranging in its scope and fairly humorous in spots: touching on some non-conventional topics as typo-porn, the joys of metal type and going to the UK National Type Library and fondling a flirty Fette Fraktur. Indeed.
We also learned why never never to use Helvetica (never) and why if everyone used the nigh-perfect, yet arid, Univers then Bruno would be out of a job. London Underground and Typhoo Tea did not fare well under his withering gaze either.
The headline quote above was his response when asked about the role of custom font creation in brand identity programmes and the observation that so much of that work today is variation around a theme of ‘warm, soft and friendly’ humanist sans-serif typefaces.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Never Judge A Book...
Occasionally I come across a site that I am somewhat reluctant to recommend, where I have found myself using up an unconscionable block of time browsing its contents. But if you are lacking a little inspiration (and are not too bothered about being envious of some tasty design briefs) then you could check out the book cover archive site.
At the initial level of engagement you can just click through the pages enjoying the juxtaposition of cover designs from different genres and categories. Clicking on each cover brings you further: to a larger image for closer inspection and comments by designers and non-designers alike, often with additional comments by the original book designer in question.
If you fall within that subset of bibliophiles who appreciate the design of a book as much as its contents, then you should find much to enjoy here. Even better, there is an RSS feed too. So if you do not want to sacrifice a couple of hours a-browsing right now, you can just get one new cover at a time whenever one goes live.
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