Messenger 3.0 Icon Redesign

Last year I wrote about Facebook making the design of all of their app icons more consistent. Yesterday’s release of their Messenger 3.0 app indicates that they have now reversed last year’s decision. What can we possibly intuit about their branding strategy from this tactical design decision?

In the new icon a bright blue iOS7-flavoured oval speech bubble on a white background replaces the previous round-rec speech bubble reversed out of the darker Facebook blue. The new oval bubble looks a lot more friendly and presents a far less corporate impression. So much so that the inset lightning bolt symbol now looks somewhat too harsh.

Previous Messenger icon in the centre.

So, why might Facebook decide to take such a different direction with the icon design for this release? Firstly, and most obviously, they have visually refreshed the complete app UI to benefit from the new design conventions of iOS7. The new icon needs to signify this.

One of the other jobs-to-be-done by the previous icon was to send a strong, clear signal of this app’s Facebook provenance. It seems that is no longer a requirement for this new design. (Note my related observation that although the Facebook app was also updated yesterday its icon has not been redesigned into a corresponding white lowercase ‘f’ within a blue circle on a white background.)

It turns out that the most immediate precedent for this new icon design may be Facebook’s Poke app launched in late 2012. (Does anyone remember Poke? When grabbing its icon off the App Store I could not help but notice that the app has never once been updated. A telling comparison to the main Facebook app which seems to get a revision every fortnight at least.)

But looking beyond the aesthetics of the new icon, there are more substantive issues being signalled by these design decisions. For the first time, this latest release of Messenger now allows users to message people who are not their Facebook Friends by accessing their phone’s address book. Adding this feature now puts Messenger into direct competition with Apple’s pre-installed Messages app. More tellingly this functionality signals a response to the significant growth in messaging apps such as WeChat, Viber and Whatsapp over the past year. (Services such as the sticker-messaging app Line and the disposable photo-sharing app Snapchat can be included within this category as well.) All of these apps are capturing market share at an accelerated rate. Their single-use model is understood to be attractive to those users who see Facebook’s range of bundled services as overwrought and complex.

There are some prevalent icon conventions within this category.

Facebook’s overall rate of uptake and engagement with the teen demographic has been slowing. Teens are among the most active users of messaging service apps. Any increased fragmentation within the messenger app marketplace is an issue for Facebook over the long term. So this release of Messenger needs to address those factors. Deliberately de-emphasising the Facebookishness of this app is a step towards re-engaging with those demographics who perceive Facebook as being too unwieldy for their needs. Messaging has become an increasingly competitive area of focus for all of the social networks, so I think that we can expect a lot of activity and innovation in the coming months.

Bucking the Anti-Skeuomorphic Trend: Yahoo Weather App Icon

Habitually I always scan the developer’s update description text before updating any apps on my iPhone. So that I have a sense of any new functionality and features when I next use the app. Mostly when I see a one-line description it is that most generic of updates: “Important bug fixes”. However last Saturday this particular one-line description caught my eye: “Improved app icon.” While it is rare to see an app update that addresses only one specific issue, it is rarer still to see one that solely addresses a marketing issue.

The original purple icon from April 2013.

Yahoo launched its weather app for iOS last April. A well-designed and well-regarded app, it was another important signifier of the corporate turnaround activities of new CEO Marissa Mayer as she began to reinvigorate the moribund tech giant. The functionality and UI of this app made me adopt it as my default weather app on my home screen. It deposed Solar, which I have previously praised on this blog.

My only reservation about Yahoo’s new app was its poorly-designed icon, which did not reflect the attention to detail given to the rest of the design. Arguably the initial icon was designed within the – currently much-discussed conventions – of ‘flat design’. It was a simplified symbol of a sun appearing behind an equally simplified symbol of a cloud, both on a graduated background of the Yahoo corporate purple colour. While that garish shade of purple was easily sufficient to communicate the Yahoo-iness of the product, someone had made a belt-and-braces decision and included a full width Yahoo logotype as well. The failures of this initial icon design demonstrate some of the difficulties of executing such flat design with skill. If flat design is attempted without due consideration and finesse then the overall effect can easily appear both under-designed and out-dated. I was not the only one noticing the shortfall of the icon design. Many of the initial reviews of the app drew attention to that fact, which is not an issue commonly referred to in product reviews on the technology sites. Prominent tech bloggers also had strong opinions as well.

The updated icon from May 2013.

Yahoo have taken the negative feedback and acted in it. As I noted above, the updated app that shipped this weekend had only one upgrade: a new icon sharing the successful bright blue colour scheme used by Apple’s Safari and App Store icons. The job previously done by the corporate purple is now solely handled by the large Yahoo logotype at the top. (Watch that logo get smaller in future app iterations.) A photo of a cloud now replaces the original sun and cloud graphic. As well as being more aesthetically pleasing this choice of design treatment is far more true to the product, given that the app integrates with Yahoo’s Flickr service to place evocative location-specific photos behind the weather data.

Given current media conversations about the resurgence in appreciation of the value of design by businesses, I cannot help but wonder whether Yahoo are choosing to make a deliberate statement regarding design by pushing this upgrade now without waiting to simply include the revised icon within a future release based on feature enhancements.

As a parting thought, it is worth asking yourself how much thinking and effort are you putting into the design of the icon for your app?

Evolution of the Facebook Messenger Icon

Icons for the current Facebook, previous Messenger, new Messenger and current Pages apps.

Facebook’s Messenger app updated was yesterday. Its icon now uses the new style established by Facebook’s Pages and Camera apps. Some quick observations about its icon design and how Facebook is unifying the appearance of their suite of icons.

The flat blue background colour has been replaced with a subtle graduated background.
iOS icons that use simple flat colour backgrounds might conform to purist graphic design principles, but increasingly look underwhelming and unfinished compared to the visually rich icons surrounding them. Facebook has historically used a very spare and minimalist aesthetic across all of its products; very appealing to engineers perhaps, but a little too severe for long periods of interaction. Their designers have been gradually softening that aesthetic across all user interfaces over the past year.

The right-angled corners of the rectangular speech bubble are now rounded corners. See above.

The light blue horizontal strip has been added along the base.
This is one of the distinctive shared visual elements uniting all of the icons in this family of apps.

The secondary speech bubble has been removed.
One might argue that using two bubbles better represents a conversation, but having just one still communicates the essence of a messaging product. Also only using one symbol matches the family look of the other Facebook icons better.

The default iOS curved highlight has been turned off.
Most third-party apps now omit this default feature. Only two apps on my home screen still include it.

So the obvious question is when will the primary Facebook app icon be updated? It is now the only app still retaining the original aesthetic. Presumably, they will update it’s icon when today’s tardy HTML5 version is eventually updated to a faster native iOS app.

An Observation on Type Sizes

A short note to any book designers out there. The vast majority of commuters I observe reading Kindles have their on-screen type size set much, much larger than the default text setting. I think that this is an interesting observation, particularly given how people really avoid ever reading large-print books in public. (‘Oh, I don’t need to read a book with big type like that, my eyesight is just fine’.)
I do not know what percent of the publishing market is represented by large-print books, but it has got to be pretty niche. However, now that they have been empowered by the technology, people do tend to pump-up the type size to whatever setting they can read best at.
Perhaps we designers have been typesetting books in too small type sizes all along? A decision that up to now has always been constrained by the publishing economies of paper costs and the human ergonomics of carrying around larger books with massive page counts as much as it has by designer’s preferences for using small type sizes.
So perhaps the default type size for the next ebook you publish needs to be twice as large as what you have been using to date. Think about it.

One-Minute Q&A: What Is The Greatest Attribute Needed To Be A Designer?

I was recently interviewed for Propeller Inspires a new online resource for Irish design students. The interviewer was Joe Coll, who is heading up this new initiative. The whole experience was a lot of fun and we covered a range of topics including brand identity, brand strategy and running a design studio. My aim was to give him thoughtful and comprehensive answers. Hopefully, it is something that design students may find useful. Here is the first one-minute teaser excerpt of the interview.


While the Propeller Inspires site is not live yet, you can view some of Joe’s other one-minute Q&A videos with my peers and esteemed competitors on Joe’s Vimeo page.

Michael Bierut: Seven Home Truths

Michael Bierut. Photo: Con Kennedy

Pentagram partner Michael Bierut spoke on the second day of the Offset 2012 in Dublin in March. His insightful, inspiring and entertaining presentation was structured around seven home truths which he had uncovered over the course of his design career at Pentagram.

I am posting his seven home truths here with visual references to each case study as an aide memoire for myself more than anything else. No further comment is necessary.

Offset 2012 Tweets

I had an intention to tweet a 140 character summary for each of the speakers I saw at the Offset 2012 design conference. I made it through the first day and a half. Things got a bit spotty after that. Given that I am only intending to write a blog post about Michael Bierut’s Offset talk, this is a fun way to record some of my other impressions of this event.

What Is It that You Do Again?

“Designers like to play with shapes and colours.”
I had a really strong negative reaction when I read this statement in an article about differing perspectives between Information Architects and User Interface Designers. So much so that I wanted to quickly analyse why I should be so bothered by a seemingly innocuous and thoughtless throwaway line like that.

One of the downsides of defining my career as that of a graphic designer is that everyone I encounter has their own different take on what that is, what I can do and how I may be useful to them. (My current formal job title of ‘Brand Director’ also suffers from the same subjectivity.) Of course, in many ways job titles are not all that important, but it is always worth asking – as communications professionals – how well do we communicate what we do to our clients and to other interested parties.

Notes on the Wim Crouwel Retrospective

I recently attended the major Wim Crouwel retrospective exhibition at the Design Museum in London. It was in inspiring look at a fascinating body of work. Here are some thoughts and observations from considering the work on display.

The work collected in this exhibition tells me a story of a designer leading his clients. His aesthetic choices always standing somewhat apart from, and superior to, his client’s briefs. The formal experimentation comes before the message. There is a tangible sense of Crouwel pursuing his personal design theories and interests and working out a unique visual language. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes me think about the role of the designer as a leader, as a pathfinder, and as an investigator. (Even if Crouwel himself does seem to perceive himself as the deliverer of objective responses to those briefs. Although I do not see that.) To co-opt a somewhat overused design metaphor, he is not designing the perfect translucent glass to contain the water of the message. Crouwel’s work has different ambitions than that.

Corporate identity systems 
Crouwel’s corporate work exemplifies exemplifies a strict modernist graphic-led school of corporate identity. His methodology starts from a strong European sensibility in contrast to the more American approach of branding-led corporate identities. It is a visual layer of systematisation and pattern and colour. His aesthetic presents as predominantly logic-based rather than emotional. His is a rational and orderly universe. As the Designer (with a capital D) he considers the matter in hand, works everything out systematically and then all of the required elements slot precisely into their preordained places. His approach to corporate identity is very much a pattern language. It is concerned with corporate identification through badging and definition, occasionally to the expense of the specific messages to be communicated.

Brand marks 
His predominant approach to designing corporate marks is founded on mathematical, geometric, and angular symbols. He has explored this approach comprehensively throughout his career. So much so that the inherent limitations are readily apparent in this exhibition. His mark for SHV is a 45 degree triangle. His Teleac mark is a circle within a bisected square. Working at this level of graphic abstraction, there is always the danger of painting yourself into a corner over time with nowhere left to go. Ultimately you end up arriving at symbols such as the Deutsche Bank mark: a diagonal line within a square. How much useful differentiation can be achieved in the marketplace once every business entity has adopted a symbol based on some combination of Platonic shapes and Euclidean geometry? The pitfall of relentlessly and endlessly drilling-down within the single solution set of reductionist geometric brand marks is that you end up with a suite of visual identities which are so minimal that they cannot help but tend towards the generic. That leaves the downstream design teams in a situation where it is only in the manner of how they choose to use those generic symbols in application that provides the unique signifying aspects of each corporate identity system. At that point the relevant questions then become: how complex is that visual system which you need to construct around the central corporate symbol, and how useful and feasible is that system to operate? Unfortunately, the full details of the broader implementation of Crouwel’s identity systems is mostly not shown at this exhibition beyond a set of brand manuals.

Abbé Museum Posters 
In the exhibition space of the Design Museum Crouwel’s striking poster designs came off better than his corporate identity work. There is never any comparison to seeing actual printed examples of large size posters to gain the true sense of their visual impact. This suite of posters deploys a visual language of words and typography, not of imagery. It is a formalist language and expects its audience to be visually literate to a certain degree of sophistication. Any humour or emotion in the work is restrained within visual playfulness and formal experimentation. His work in corporate identity design has to have far broader appeal and be less niche, it cannot be as coded. The inventive use of flat solid colours was refreshing to my eyes. Where so much of today’s printed design work tends towards a reliance on four-colour process printing and everything seems overly-graduated and shaded. It was inspiring to be reminded how much can be achieved with just two flat colours and overlaying inks, always working within strict technical limitations.

These two amusing anecdotes were described within the exhibition. In 1973 Crouwel redesigned the Dutch phone book and typeset it in all-lowercase letters. Talk about a quintessential designer-led move. Unfortunately it was not well-received. They had to reprint it typeset back into the traditional style. In 1974 Jan Van Toorn designed a prominent Dutch calendar. Van Toorn’s aesthetic choices so offended Crouwel that he redesigned the entire calendar in a Modernist mode and then sent it to Van Toorn — along with his critique of the original design and justifying his improvements. So he is obviously an opinionated man.

One final impression that I gleaned from this exhibition is just how influential Crouwel’s work and the broader Dutch school was on a lot of the design work being produced in Dublin in the late eighties and early nineties, back when I was in NCAD and starting my career.

Rebranding the Office for Social Media Effectiveness

I wrote this fake news story for April Fool’s Day 2011 and we hosted it on the BFK site for that one day. I still like it, and want to archive it here.

Social media solutions within the civil service and the broader state sector.

We have just completed a major rebranding programme for The Office For Social Media Effectiveness to help them deliver on their strategic objectives. Established in 2009, the role and remit of the Office has expanded alongside the adoption of social media solutions within the civil service and the broader state sector. From today it is relaunching with a new name and corporate identity as “Status:State”.

Nine Recommended Books on Branding

I have curated this short list of recommended books on brands, brand design and other related branding issues for a lecture on corporate identity and branding that I am giving at the School of Art, Design and Printing in the Dublin Institute of Technology. I am sharing it here as it may be of broader interest.

A (Very) Concise Review Of Offset 2010

Offset 2010 was a three-day event celebrating creativity and the power of the creative process. It was held in the Grand Canal Theatre on the first week of October.

Now in its second year, the independently-financed conference was more expansive this year, with a larger venue, more attendees, and an ambitious programme of presentations, interactive sessions and many related events taking place throughout Dublin. As with last year’s conference, one of the unique charms of Offset is the breadth and variety of its contributors. While some speakers may align with your own preferences and interests, there is always the possibility of discovering engaging presentations by unfamiliar speakers. Given 24 main presentations and 17 secondary sessions, the following are some unavoidably brief highlights of my three days in attendance.

Ticking the Boxes

The Apple App Store has launched. With midnight having passed in New Zealand and customers in the southern hemisphere now able to purchase their second generation iPhones, Apple have pushed the necessary iTunes upgrade. This gives us a preview of the applications that we are going to be able to buy here in Ireland from midnight onwards.

My initial thoughts are how important the usage-generated lists of Top Apps and Top Free Apps are going to prove to be in helping users to decide which applications to install. At least in the iTunes Music Store the design of the album covers afford more visual cues about the nature of what you are buying. Browsing the Productivity section, it looks like this may not be the case with some categories of icons in the AppStore. Good luck with deciding between ‘To Do’ and ‘Todo’.


Disclaimer: Before anyone comes back to me on it, I do need to acknowledge my role in overseeing the rebranding of the Topline chain of hardware stores last year. Said rebranding giving them a new check-mark symbol on a purple octagon. Perhaps I ought to sell them on the idea of their own custom iPhone application...

BFK Site Redesign 2008

I have completely rethought and restructured the BFK website for its new version which has just launched. My intention is that this new iteration of the site will not need any substantial redesign in the near-term and that this new structure defines a stable content platform which we can optimise and refine over time.

I wanted to promote the ‘News’ section to the forefront of the site. Rather than only having news headlines on the home page as before, I wanted the articles themselves right there for people to start reading immediately. Therefore, constructing the new site in a blog structure seemed to be the most appropriate way to achieve what I had in mind. I have grown familiar with the logic of the blog approach through my writing here on Thoughtport. All of the sites that I read regularly publish in an RSS-friendly blog format, yet too few branding and design companies so far have grasped the potential of this format for their own sites, most still preferring to continue with presentation-style site structures. I dispensed with the whole construct of a separate ‘News’ section as well: the stream of news posts is now the central spine of this site.

As with previous builds of this site, the CMS back-end is constructed on the Strata3 Publisher platform. Strata3 had not built a blog-format site before and their Publisher product is optimised for more traditional page-based websites. So it took a certain degree of customisation to deliver on the specific site structure and internal linkages that I required.

The whole site is now laid out and typeset on a strict 25-pixel grid to satisfy my more rationalist design tendencies. To draw attention to the image content, I used lots of white in the layout and typeset everything very sparsely in Helvetica.

One of my primary aims was to retain the depth of content that we have built up over the years. The most disappointing weakness I find with so many design company websites is that they rarely feature any work that is more than a few years old. It is as if every time that they redesign their sites, they abandon all of their existing content. There are design companies that have been operating in Dublin for twenty years who only include five or six projects on their websites. I wanted our new site to not only accommodate all of the relevant content we had going back to 1999, but more importantly to make that content easy to discover. No matter how good your design work is, if people are unaware of it then it may as well not have been produced.

After operating our previous CMS-powered site since 2003, we have all gotten pretty adept at writing 150-200 word posts to explain each branding project, but our existing site was limited to displaying our work in images at only 198x198 pixels in size. What had once been appropriate in the days of smaller monitors and pre-broadband download speeds was now looking pretty out of date. As a brand consultancy, it is important that we are able to showcase the visual aspects of our work in a far more engaging manner. My new layout features full-width images in the primary content panel and now allows for multiple images per news post.

I have established a three-stream labelling system that classifies all of our projects by the nature of the work, by client name and by client sector. So we now have a comprehensive network of cross-links between all of our content. These three choices are based on feedback we sought from existing clients. It has been a recurring theme in such client feedback and research over the years that our clients are most interested in solutions we have achieved for clients in their own particular sector who face similar challenges – and dramatically less interested in solutions delivered for clients operating in different sectors and industries. This new labelling scheme will help potential clients to discover the work that is most relevant to their own interests and needs. Greater awareness of relevant projects should lead to a greater understanding of the strengths of our offer and ultimately to increased sales.

Error Message Screens

Error messages are one of the minor inconveniences of our online navigation experience. They are never welcome on our screens. But, when something does go wrong, we do need to know probable causes and remedial actions. How well an organisation presents information when everything goes pear-shaped speaks volumes for its approach to its customers.

Steve Job’s keynote for Macworld on 15 January 2008 began at nine in the morning, San Francisco time. That is five in the evening here in Dublin; still within my working hours. I was able to keep a weather eye on the proceedings with a Twitter browser window open in the corner of my screen. At least four of the people in my Twitter feed were live-blogging the keynote event.


Obviously they were not alone, as the level of Twitter activity (twittering? tweeting? twoottering?) coming from Macworld quickly began to put a serious load on the Twitter infrastructure. Very quickly the updating of posts began slowing down noticeably and after acting erratically just stopped completely about five minutes before the keynote started.


Reloading brought up this nicely crafted error screen. The little bird reminds me of that ironic smiling puppy with the electrical cord in his mouth that is used on The Simpsons whenever an in-show TV station experiences ‘technical difficulties’ or a presenter’s on-air meltdown. The little Twitter bird may be just as cute, but he does not make me feel any better.


Further reloads and the cutesy illustrated error message was replaced by this far less sugar-coated version. Obviously the problem was escalating. Devoid of all decoration, at least this screen presented me with some potential options. Although, given the scale of the meltdown going on, none of those three links actually worked

There is a definite argument that a disappointing customer experience can be mitigated (somewhat) by considered, thoughtful error screens that inform the user. But all of that is absolutely no substitute for getting the product delivery right in the first place. In this case engineering the server-side to take the expected load.

Update, June 2008


Twitter has learned some lessons and put measures in place to take the strain for Steve' Job’s next keynote at WWDC 08. The Twitter infrastructure made it through that keynote without falling over.

Shouty-shouty Signs

Consider this post as a coda to my A4 Marketing post from last March about the many uses and abuses of the A4 page in contemporary communication.

Last week I came across this amazing example of over-instruction when I was paying for parking at an automated vending machine. I only had my old mobile with me, so these photos are very low resolution. But should be more than adequate for you get the idea. So this class of machines are generally not well regarded for the quality of their user interfaces. But realistically could its manner of operation be so obtuse as to require this amount of explanatory appendices?

This looks like the visual equivalent of those Irish people who speak-very s-l-o-w-l-y whenever explaining something to anyone who does not speak English as their native tongue. What this really says to me is that the people whose job it is to answer the phone whenever somebody cannot get their crumpled tenner into the slot are doing their best to try to ensure that they never have to answer that phone. Surely someone could take them aside and point out that making your customers feel like they are being treated like morons is never a good policy.

Not only where there about twelve notices affixed to every one of these machines, but every door I passed through in the car park had two or three similarly redundant, over-emphasised, A4 notices added to it. In the pièce de résistance, the entrance/exit barrier had three hanging A4 pages sellotaped across it, blowing in the wind, reminding you to have paid for your ticket before approaching the barrier and so forth.

One thing that the sheer abundance of this visual noise made me think again about are those currently popular futurist scenarios where we shall all soon be wearing smart glasses/implants that overlay context-specific tags onto our physical environment. Which is not too unfeasible and may not be too too far off. When there is no physical/spatial limitation on overlaying visual cruft, the results could be far worse than the eyesore shown above.

Inviolate Album Cover Designs And Mutable Book Cover Designs

Comparing the way that the perennially-selling media products of books and music are marketed, it is curious how the graphic design of music seems to be set in stone and rarely repackaged, while books in contrast often take the opportunity to refresh and update their cover designs for new editions.

If I went out today and bought a copy of The Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or U2’s The Joshua Tree, they would have the same cover designs they have had since their original release dates in the sixties and the eighties, even though at some point they made the transition from twelve inch vinyl to the smaller CD-sized format. However, if I went to buy some books that I read in the eighties today, it would be most unlikely that they are still bearing the same cover designs. Ultimately, this dichotomy must have to do with the differing economics driving these two media industries.

It does seem to be a lost opportunity that the collected output of one musical artist rarely, if ever, gets a global redesign. In contrast, look at the way author’s books are periodically given a consistent make-over every couple of years. While linked series of novels forming one narrative sequence have always used a shared cover design scheme, it is also common for an author’s complete output to be similarly visually unified. There is a marketing advantage to building brand awareness in this manner: ‘if you liked this book, then perhaps you will also like these other books by the same author’. The publishing industry’s unified product approach resonates with the corporate identity systems geek in me.

To apply that principle to music: what if all of an artist’s album covers were redesigned and unified to coincide with the release of their latest album? Given that older albums must see some increase in sales whenever their latest album is being most heavily marketed. Wouldn’t a unified appearance across their career output further help their back-catalogue sales?

Why could it be that customers would be less inclined to buy Nirvana’s album Nevermind if it did not have the same swimming baby it has always had on the cover, while they would happily pay for Iain Bank’s novel The Crow Road with the redesigned sepia-tone cover it is being sold with today?

Examples from the redesigned sepia-tone covers introduced in 2007,
consistent across all of Banks’ titles.

Examples from the previous monotone covers that all of Bank’s books
had since his debut novel ‘The Wasp Factory’.

At the macro level, does the book publishing industry value the utility of design more by reinvesting in it to constantly repackage its products? Or does the music industry value design in a different way by respecting the integrity of the original cover design and its relationship to the time and context in which the music was first released? Why do book sales benefit from redesigned covers whereas music does not?

Examples of Paul Auster's books which have now also been unified
under a consistent design aesthetic.

There is also the related fact that the same book can be published with completely different cover designs on the translated editions for sale in different countries.

Examples of variant cover for Harry Potter novels in different languages.

Finally, another design opportunity that publishing has which music lacks is the change in format when a book moves from its hardback edition into paperback. This allows for a focusing of the sales message and a subtle or indeed not-so-subtle repositioning. Taking an example to hand, the original hardback edition of John Simmons’s book The Invisible Grail sitting on my shelf uses the subtitle ‘In search of the true languages of brands’ while the later paperback edition available on Amazon uses the subtitle ‘How brands can use words to engage with audiences’. The messaging, the design and the wording on the cover can be finessed based on feedback from the initial hardback sales. In this instance moving from a more oblique passive statement to a more active, strident declaration.

Building A Blog For ‘We Are Here’

All of my blogging starts to pay off.

After three or so years of blogging here at ThoughtPort, I have picked up some blog construction skills. I recently applied all of those self-taught skills building a blog for Loretta and her marketing team in the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.

Developed in partnership with Project Arts, ‘We Are Here’ is described as a ‘season of alternative projects probing the physical and cultural landscape through interactive film, mixed-reality gaming, mobile theatre and gently subversive audio tours’. Given that these events deal with the interaction of culture and technology, I believe that having a dedicated blog gives DDDA the ability to build some community of interested parties prior to the events and to then generate some audience interaction once everything starts to happen.

When I created the blog, I also built-in some social networking features that hopefully will be adopted by users of the blog. I set up a public Flickr pool so that all sorts of imagery around the events can be posted online. I was inspired by looking at the quality (if not the sheer volume) of images that appear on Flickr clustered around events like SXSW. There is not too much content up there now except for some test shots of Eddie’s way-cool logo stencilled around the Docklands environment*. Ideally, that image pool will be populated with photos taken in and around the WAH2.0 events themselves.

The teams in Docklands and Project Arts are now set up as authors on the blog and will be populating it with up-to-date content from here on in. Go and have a look

www.wearehere.ie

*Eddie and his posse were out last night stencilling away, doing the on-street viral marketing campaign, tagging the Docklands with lots of lime green logos. They did not have too many run-ins with security guards and An Gardai!

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Big Typeface? Cló-éadan Mór?*

How is the broader adoption of Irish Language and accessibility obligations impacting literature design and typesetting?

Bilingual requirements
2006 was the year when I experienced the real impact of the roll-out of the recent Irish language legislation requiring the majority of State and Semi-state communications to become bilingual publications. While many of the relevant State organisations were able to previously get by with paying lip-service to the bilingual requirements there has been a noticeable tipping point in their adoption over the last twelve months.
The preference today has become to produce one combined bilingual publication. A few years ago it was more common to publish Irish language editions as separate documents. In my experience, the inventory costs of storing a large quantity of unasked-for publications is the real driver for combining the two. Under the new approach, hundreds of Irish language editions are not left sitting in storage.

Accessibility requirements
The second factor influencing literature design projects is the increasing awareness of, and adoption of, accessibility and legibility requirements. These are being adopted in a more à la carte manner — presumably because they intrude more directly into the remit of graphic designers. One common approach is to produce two separate editions of each publication. A printed edition typeset at today’s standard type size (or, more accurately, falling within the gamut of current design conventions for preferred type size parameters) and an accessible version typeset in twelve point text with the page count running about 20–30% longer. I think that the economic realities of running such double editions will result in more of the accessibility conventions migrating into the primary edition, and eventually the two merging. This would not be the worst-case scenario that some designers claim, as most established accessibility conventions align with what I understand to be good typographic practice anyway. I have had a preference for setting ranged-left sans-serif typefaces with large x-heights for years. (While I was able to specify the only hardback book that I have yet designed in Scala, I still could not bring myself to typeset that text justified.) Although I still find it difficult to get over how large twelve point type looks in practice. It is 33% larger than nine point and 20% larger than ten point. Which only shows me how ingrained my design preferences can become, based on what I have been exposed to.

Implications
Combining the bilingual and accessibility requirements, and assuming that the amount of verbiage remains consistent, there has to be an upwards pressure on page counts. The increasing use of PDF as the primary distribution mechanism helps defray large amounts of printing costs (essentially by passing some of them on to the end-user, if they choose to laser-print a hard-copy before reading.) But, in the near term, there is still going to be some form of printed edition for the majority of publications, no matter how short those print runs are. At present these regulations primarily apply to literature projects for Government and Semi-state clients, but these implications may affect a broader base of business clients eventually.

(*My Irish headline is undoubtedly ungrammatical, being an automatic online translation of two separate words out of context. Gaeilgeoirs can comment with corrections please.)

A4 Marketing

“Today I will be showing you all how to make your very own marketing communications. All that you will need to get started is one sheet of A4-sized paper (white, or coloured if you prefer), your very own laser-printer and one roll of sticky tape...”

After conducting a number of visual audit projects over the last two years, within a broad mix of retail, banking, and office environments, I have identified one of the most unsung, yet all-prevalent, marketing and communication channels in use today. Sure your Creative Agencies will try to talk you into investing in ambient media, viral marketing, corporate blogging, SMS advertising or building a virtual showroom within Second Life. Whatever. Put all of that high-end marketing to one side — the real ambient medium du-jour is the humble A4 laser-printed page.
I have encountered the same scenarios in every location that I have audited. Both in supposedly visually managed customer-facing environments, such as bank branches and High Street retailers, and in more visually cluttered environments, such as offices. Look around you, there are always lots of A4 pages taped up everywhere. The desktop publishing revolution is alive and well and is now part of our environment
Some of the most blatant examples are notice boards choked with a collage of current and outdated pages accreted since the last big clean-up. Any editing and prioritising of notices is usually non-existent. When everything is equally important then nothing is really communicated.
Why does this happen? Often it is a case of people being proactive and attempting to be helpful to their customers: trying to pre-empt and answer common questions. Not so helpful are the ‘go-away’ signs that only serve to make the customer feel like a nuisance.
Other scenarios involve staff on the ground having to address some larger design issues which fall outside of their immediate remit and are imposed from higher up the corporate hierarchy. I have seen self-service kiosks where the affordances of the chosen user interface and product design were so counter-intuitive that handmade instruction signs had been taped onto the terminals to somehow manage the barrage of queries about how to use them. Ad-hoc directional signs also fall into this category (particularly memorable are the delightful sort with multiple-angled or U-shaped arrows).
Microsoft Word is the default design tool for these A4 Marketers. The exquisite feature that produces such beautiful pseudo three-dimensional headlines is particularly beloved of the more creatively-inclined of these ad-hoc marketers.
Unfortunately, on the client side, too many corporate identity teams see this sort of tactical messaging as unworthy of their attention. This is a mistake. If you do not give staff appropriate and useful tools to address their needs they are going to find their own way. Then on the designer side the unpalatable truth is that, in my experience, most designers have little or no facility with Microsoft Word. (Mea culpa.) In their view, if a template file is not being constructed in Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress then it is not worth their time.
If you are happy with your client’s customers experiencing a lot of their contact with your client’s visual identity in the form of centred all-capitals instructions set in Times New Roman Bold (or even better, Comic Book Sans) then you are not doing your job. I believe there is an unmet requirement for identity management systems that include mechanisms addressing the ad-hoc communicative needs of staff. Facilitated via a suite of appropriate digital templates, useful examples and straightforward guidelines or frameworks. The availability and distribution of these ought to be centrally managed, but their use should be decentralised throughout the organisation.
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