JKR

Page 23 (English subtitles) from Jeroen Houben on Vimeo.

Page 23 (above) is a short, amusing film that considers the ‘interior life’ of Ikea models. It owes something to a similar scene in Fight Club, but basically makes a point about the insincerity of glossy catalogue perfection. I guess by extension it suggests we are all chasing a rather soulless dream.

It’s funny how interchangeable catalogue ‘brand worlds’ are. Even companies like Howies could be mistaken for Boden at a glance. And Boden itself has become a by word for a certain kind of polished middle class aspirational living. “They looked like something out of a Boden’s catalogue” is a comment half admiring, half barbed. I guess credit to Boden for defining a category of people.

But where, I wondered, were the more edgy and distinctive catalogue worlds? Being no clothes horse myself, I asked a few of the bright young things in the studio for tips. Below are some of their suggestions. My observation would be that the more distinctive online brands are generating content that looks like fashion editorial. It’s still polished and vaguely interchangeable, but a bit more nuanced than an Ikea catalogue. Here is Reiss:

And Oki-Ni…

And the really interesting sites tend to be online fashion mags that basically round up all the things you can buy…

Mr Porter

The Good Hood

There is also the world of putting looks together to share via sites such as Polyvore, which we looked at a little closer here.

Lookbook has a sense of idiosyncrasy…

But generally I think the interchangeable nature of the styling reflects the reality that we all want to look pretty much the same these days. It seems like another world that produced youth cults like punk and rave. Even the edgy kids these days seem to offer up diluted ‘lite’ versions of what’s gone before. So being different today seems to boil down to wearing pretty much conventional clothes from slightly obscure sites. Am I being unfair?

Anyway, for anyone (and I am sure there are many) who wants to get the jkr look as recommended by our resident heavy shoppers, here are a few links…

A.P.C LookBook

Acne Studios

LN-CC

Très Bien Shop

Present

The rise of Kindle was supposedly going to clear the shelves of book retailers. But a new company is selling books and novels on memory sticks, encased in book-sized boxes intended to be stocked in those recently cleared shelves. These ersatz books are believed to be more gift worthy. “The problem with giving an eBook as a gift is what exactly do you give? A book token printed on your inkjet?” noted Blasted Heath co-founder Kyle MacRae in The Sunday Times.

It’s much the same story with downloaded music. You don’t really feel you own it, because you can’t touch it. As David Hepworth noted in Word magazine, “When was the last time anyone invited a girl back to theirs to look at their iTunes playlist?”.

A couple of thoughts. Firstly, I was talking to an exec from Ocado a couple of months back, wondering if the kind of virtual reality supermarkets used for packaging research would translate into an online shopping experience for sites such as his. No, he laughed. You have to stop seeing the new way of shopping through old eyes and the old way of doing things. Online shopping should not feel like supermarket shopping. Whatever the future might be, the breakthrough won’t be achieved by looking backwards, I was told.

This opinion struck me in relation to the memory sticks packed in book-sized boxes. While these work in the short term for conservative consumers, it does seem like a very parochial way of imbuing a digital present with value. To consider a couple of possible alternatives: at the cheap and cheerful end, might such a gift not come with the digital equivalent of a customised card from Moonpig.com? Now I find Moonpig screamingly naff, but it’s set up for the customisable digital age. Presumably they could produce a digitally wrapped package that carries the personal touch? And that looks attractive?

Or perhaps the digital file might be made more gift worthy by adding other technical whistles and bells? The new Björk album ‘Biophilia’  is a ‘record’, an interactive App, a game, an educational tool. It possibly makes a cup of tea for you in the morning. A haunting but beautiful Icelandic one. Björk herself describes it as a new musical genre – an ‘Appbox’. The images on this post come from the music.

I guess in the future we will come to terms with intangible products having a sense of worth. It will probably just take a generation or so to stop thinking about ‘things’ in the old way…

The film above is a student graduation piece from last year. I was sent it by a colleague with the question ‘Is this the future of branding?’. It looks fantastical (in that over optimistic tomorrow’s world manner of predicting a near future where robots do our Hoovering). But potentially, it’s not wildly unlikely. After all, Blippar is producing very similar content for phones, where packaging comes alive to animate promotions, claims etc.

So is this the future? Personally I hope not. I can barely boil a kettle while explaining to a toddler ‘why the sky is blue’ as it is. So the thought of doing this while wearing techno specs which give me a live feed on the kettle’s status seems like too much information for this writer.

But I also think this future is unlikely because of the way our eyes and brains work. We can only focus on an area the size of a 50p piece. Anything else is in our peripheral vision. So filling up our canvas with flashing screens probably won’t work. The brain only processes about 5% of what we see, so most of this information would be happily screened out by a processor far more sophisticated that a computer. A processor, I might add, which has the common sense to grasp that we can only absorb so much. And only about 5% of our thought is cognitive. The rest is churning under the surface. But visions of the future filled with flashing screens tend to assume we would want to actively engage with them.

So here’s my assumption: just because we can now realise such a future technically doesn’t mean it would work, because we cannot overwrite millions of years of evolution at a stroke. The future might be holographic and digital, but we are hardwired.

And finally, do we actually want more information, infotainment and advertorials from brands? Consider Angry Birds. Not beyond the wit of a good agency to have produced something like this to promote a product. But it has yet to happen (unless I have missed it). Might this be because we want our distraction and entertainment served up pure? Rather than as an obvious Trojan horse whose real purpose is to sell us something? Popular digital entertainment, say Facebook, tends to start independent, then attract advertising. I would imagine a more streamlined virtual future, one where we actively engage with entertainment products with a few sponsor brand’s icons winking in the bottom right of our vision. Brands here being the pilot fish swimming largely unnoticed alongside the interesting whale we actually want to look at.

It’s an argument where one has sympathy for both sides; Polly Courtney has attacked her publisher for packaging her work in chick lit covers.  As she told the Daily Mail “They dressed up my book as something frivolous, light and racy, which is the complete opposite of what’s inside my books. It is degrading to the writing and ultimately degrading to women. It’s sexist. A lot of chick lit patronises women. There’s intelligent writing out there and I don’t know why it has to be sold in such a fluffy package.” In The Guardian she came across more self-effacing, making no claims for her novels as ‘great’ literature, but suggesting they covered social issues that didn’t need the candyfloss treatment.

I would observe that her latest cover (top) is at least a move on from the job done on ‘The Fame Factor’, which would do a ghostwritten potboiler by Katie Price a disservice. My understanding is not that Courtney is saying her books are of equal appeal to men and women, but rather that they make her writing look a bit shallow. ‘Chick lit’ has become a pejorative phrase, be that right or wrong.  But here is the HarperCollins response: “Avon (a HarperCollins imprint) is right behind Polly Courtney’s timely and important book. Our experience tells us it has a great look and feel and we think Polly will be delighted when she sees it flying off the shelves.”

They may have a point – here is another (self-published) Polly Courtney book, which would do a Jeffrey Archer potboiler a disservice in terms of dreariness of design:

In this argument I think we see a classic marketer’s dilemma. They want to do right by the product, which basically equates to making it as commercially desirable and effective as possible. But does this mean selling its soul? I wonder if there is a grey area here that both parties are missing – to target a ‘more selective’ audience (as Spinal Tap would put it) with design that is accessible but a cut above the norm. This would make capital of the integrity and authenticity of the product, rather than selling it cheap (in design terms). Method cleaning, Green and Black’s, the Fiat 500 – there are plenty of brands that use design to put themselves on the aspirational side of middlebrow.

And in publishing terms, I think the recent covers around those lovely Mitford girls show it’s not such a hard trick to pull off. One Day is another obvious example of jacket design that carries itself as ‘mass premium’ (and was fantastic branding in the hands of its many readers).

Below are some images by René Gruau – vintage now of course, but I would suggest they manage to be appealing, striking and not a case of ‘putting baby in the corner’. Perhaps the half way post between the two positions being argued is not over the content of the design in question, but the quality? As Ogilvy said, brands deserve a ‘first class ticket through life’. Even if the truth of the matter is that the compartment being occupied is designed for one sex only.

Belvoir are telling us what we want to hear. It’s quite nice to be chatted up by a brand. I will confess that when I first spotted this pack in the supermarket, I wondered if it was a cheeky rip-off that was impersonating Belvoir. However, it’s not a brand I buy, so I am a bit unfamiliar with it’s equities – I guess ‘brand adorers’ would be clearer and would adore the pack all the more for its compliment. But this does raise a point – if you are going to monkey with your equities you better be sure you are established enough that everyone can be in on the game.

I am guessing this approach has its origins in those hilarious Coke parody t-shirts from the seventies. A personal favourite in this genre is the Levis one below right…

It’s a trick we have played a few times – re-working the Mars’ design to proclaim their optimism for a good result in the 2006 World Cup, and cropping the distinctive Boddingtons arch to highlight that brand’s quirky nature…

There are plenty of other examples around, both topical and tactical. It’s a fun game, but it works best when it’s something familiar being altered – I guess it’s the measure of a good piece of design if the content can be changed without altering the recognition. And confident brands can afford to be playful…