JKR

If you have ever tried to choose a new pair of earphones without too much knowledge of what’s good and what isn’t, you probably glazed over as quickly as I did. In the end one picks out a product within budget in the same random way that wine is chosen – not the cheapest, not the most expensive and, oh, they look the part, they’ll do.

The “EarBudeez” shown here won a Pentaward for packaging this year, and rightly so. Cringe-worthy name aside, not only are they eye catching (they do, after all, literally make eye contact), but they also exploit an obvious but underused truth of the category: earphones are a lifestyle product rather than a technical one, but the convention is for serious and techy looking design. Breathing a bit of fun into the category makes a generic product really engaging. “Reason to believe” focussed communication has its place, but this design shows that it can be just as valid to lighten up and not explain too much.

Could Aristide Bruant be the father of shelf-blocking? He was a just another chansonnier in a crowded market, but he obviously had an eye for design. It was he who personally insisted on having his poster for a residence at the Ambassadeurs designed by Toulouse Lautrec (one of the artist’s first poster commissions). Lautrec stripped things to their essentials, and played up the singer’s dramatic red scarf. When the posters went up on the theatre, the less visionary owner described them as “pigwash” and ordered their removal. In a lovely piece of client/designer solidarity, Bruant countered “You leave it there. What’s more, stick it up on the stage on both sides. And if it’s not done by quarter-to-eight – eight’s no good  – I’ll chuck in my number and disappear”. Surrounded by his image, the reaction to his performance was an overwhelming success. The poster went up all over Paris, making his name and that of the poster designer.

Now, keeping things simple and striking might sound obvious. And that such an approach lends itself to fantastic results when shown in multiples equally obvious. But sometimes the obvious is easy to forget. The new design for Coco Pops might not be hanging in the Louvre in a century, but it has benefited from following this approach. While the old design was OK, its even arrangement of key elements did not add up to the power of the new one. The design focusses full bloodedly on the monkey, and so catches the eye brilliantly when blocked on shelf. The monkey might be no chansonnier, but a simple design gives him the room to be the star.

The lifestyle and homeware brands which dictate/reflect our tastes have a big influence on design in general, including branding (only last week we got a brief requiring a move of an FMCG snack “from Fortnum and Mason to Harvey Nics”). So the opening of US homewares store Anthropologie in London is not insignificant. Everything in the store has a one-off artistic quality, but it’s a chain store with chain store prices. As you can see above, it fits the “pinnie porn” fanciful make do and mend pigeon-hole (indeed, the rolling pin would be my nomination for the design artefact which sums up 2009).

I think its got a lot of appeal – it conjures up in my mind a car boot sale entirely of Peter Blake’s cast offs, and I mean this as a compliment to both the artist and the store. But I think it’s also indicative of the way the de-mac, hand whittled trend is moving, from a resurgence in the use of drawing, to a kind of faux folk decorative feel. There has been so much written this year about consumers seeking comfort from famous homely brands in the downturn, but I think there is just as much evidence that at a boutique level things are becoming more decorative, offering a warmer alternative to designer minimalism. The evidence that much the same is happening in food packaging can be seen with a two minute scroll through packaging blog The Dieline (examples below), and I predict it won’t be long before this style infuses more mainstream FMCG packaging. If one were looking for a hot design recruit right now, perhaps Ukrainian grandmothers would be a good place to start.

Along with generic price war advertising, supermarkets are all promoting their own value lines, which generally share a common design aesthetic…

When launching a line of hundreds of products to be dotted about a giant supermarket it clearly makes sense to go for a simple and impactful design system. And using one’s brand colours makes equal sense. And if you are selling a “no frills” line then the easiest way to communicate your proposition is to get rid of the visual frills. But does such an approach, taken to extremes, look so basic that it devalues both the products and the store?

I won’t forget an impassioned argument put forward at a jkr company chat by designer Martin Francis a few years ago, where he laid into value own label packaging for looking not just cheap but ugly. His point was not a designer lovey one – rather he was saying that everyone, no matter what they are spending, deserves to have nice looking packs – why make folk feel like they are getting the cheapo rubbish with design to match? Making the basics range look more attractive might confuse a “good, better, best” strategy, but I suppose there are degrees of design refinement that can be applied. At the other extreme of the product spectrum Chanel No. 5′s box is simple and basic but it has enough nuance to also be beautiful. Still, Coco wasn’t stuck with making a bright yellow pack look appealing.

John Ruskin, who thought deeper and knew more than most of us ever will about aesthetics, was a progressive champion of the importance of art and beauty for the “common man” – although his writing came before the age of the soundbite, so I’ll leave the last words to him. “A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.”

I do, that’s the problem – but do you find you cut some brands more slack than others? That in fact the more you respect a brand the more you ask of it? I have loved National Geographic since I was a kid. I’m not sure if its photography is always the very best in the world, but put that yellow frame around an image and the image itself is elevated in my mind. As a magazine it reveals the beauty, drama and fragility of life on Earth in each issue. It’s on these high standards that it has been able to diversify into retail, television channels etc. And the yellow frame has become an instantly recognisable badge which is flexible enough to look great in myriad brand contexts. That  yellow frame is a promise of quality and gravitas.

So these Ambi Pur natural scents which team up with the National Geographic brand raise some questions for me. I can see the product to natural expert fit. And I get that the outer packaging is recyclable. But this still feels like a far from green initiative. So why worry? After all, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of these things around, and all National Geographic is doing is endorsing another one. But that’s the trouble with brands which have values, and brands that get you to love them. When you feel like they aren’t being true to their principles, one can get a bit emotional. Perhaps the magazine has no control over such deals. In which case, it’s risking its good reputation by appearing to be happy to sell their good name to things where the fit to values seems curious. I guess the point I am making is that once a brand shows an awareness on certain issues, it has to also act on that awareness. As my boss Andy Knowles often says “ a principle is only a principle when it costs you money”. And ironically, values aside, this does look like a somewhat arbitrary use of the National Geographic logo on the packaging.