JKR

Does this ad look so much worse than many you encounter? The New York Times reports that BETC Euro RSCG has developed software that can produce basic advertising, spitting out quick solutions when given data on brand, target, insight and strategic objectives.

Cue howls of wounded anguish from creatives, and attacks on the results. Even the software creators are not sold…“After this first reaction, they get a little scared when they see that a software program can create the same (mediocre) results in just 10 seconds as several hours of strategic meetings and production” the RSCG executive creative director said. For now, it is being presented as a tool to explain what’s missing when the creative spark is absent. But the company is covering bases, claiming that further development could make it a really useful tool.

I say why wait? There are plenty of clients who are only comfy talking strategy and insights. And only happy to green light work which did ok in the kind of research aimed to ensure that the creative won’t startle the horses. Why not let them use this software, leaving the real creatives more time to be really creative for like-minded clients. Similar software, once developed, could no doubt do much of packaging design’s donkey work (global language conversions and outer shippers etc.). Again, this is a good thing if it frees up creative budgets for creative endeavour.

The real concern is not new software, but a generation of clients trained to always and only value insight over inspiration. Design without strategy is like advertising without a message. But design without a unique and unformulaic idea is never going to make a real difference. Alexey Brodovitch, art director of Harpers Bazaar, famously instructed new recruits to “astonish me”. Tell that to a computer.

Supermarket own label offerings are increasingly being seen as “true brands” in their own right (with essential Waitrose leading the charge). Nevertheless, the passing off approach of imitating lead brand’s equities shows no signs of stopping. M&S were getting flak just last week for the structural similarities between their own vitamin water and the one spending a fortune promoting its distinctively branded bottle.

I hear that one – ahem – discount supermarket has a specific process to avoid litigation: copy the leader, but design in seven points of difference. So that in front of m’learned friend the colour, typography, shape, etc. can each be shown to differ from the source material (although the end result still looks close enough to trigger the desired associations in consumer’s minds). This will avoid the serious transgression of trademark infringement (though an obvious intention to design a pass-off can still be censured).

With this information, brand managers could, of course, follow a counter strategy where their own seven ingredients are all so distinctive in their own right that they baffle the copycats’ attempts to emulate them. I think this is the wrong answer. If you have seven elements that you believe constitute your equities, it’s about four too many. Because seven ingredients make a fairly complex soup, one which can be easily imitated not to the letter, but to the same broad recipe – voilà a successful passing off. If, on the other hand, you limit yourself to a simpler design (say Coke Classic’s flat red, script font and line), it’s much harder to produce a copycat, because the simplicity of the source material makes it more distinctive. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes is really hard to copy since they got the design’s mojo back and focussed on the rooster. Try ripping off our Guinness can design, which is little more than a colour and emblem.

Being legally protectable isn’t the be all and end all (appetite appeal, relevance cues etc. will all need to be considered), but if you can boil your design down to its essentials, not only will you stand apart from the wannabes, you will also be closer to a (pardon the term) “iconic” expression of your brand.

All designers create work by appropriating things they admire, and the good ones convert their influences into something new. If they tell you otherwise, they are remarkable, delusional, or dishonest. In simpler, pre-internet times, there were fewer famous designers, and the pool of influential work was remarkably small. Brody at The Face, or Carson on Ray Gun did their thing and thousands followed their lead (much to the leaders’ chagrin).

But in our age of over information there are so many leaders and styles in play that it’s hard to pick out any one in particular. Business Week listed 27 designers most influential on our era. The list has some obvious choices, but some I am embarrassed to say I have never heard of. And, of course, debate then raged about why so many had failed to make the list. One can’t keep up with the endless stream of thought leadership from the stage of Ted. And where once there were a small handful of books covering the history of design to be plundered and inspired by, now if one wants to find anything no matter how obscure, it’s all there online.

All in all, the depth of choice and resources makes for a landscape richer and more diverse for plunder than ever before. But it’s hard to see the wood for the trees.

Of course, one can see this is brilliant, as it throws up more eclectic designers and fewer sheep. But movements can be good things too – individuals clustering around a few leaders, borrowing and building a style which defines an era and adds something to culture. We live in a time when it’s harder to see such movements catching fire, faced as we are with so much choice. Does this make for more spirited individuals, or blander overall results? One could argue that, say, the punk era saw more creative, independent and vibrant fashion than we get today, with everyone dressed more or less the same by the same brands, despite a tsunami of trend information posted daily.

There is no particular point to these observations, but we are operating in interesting times. Talent imitates, genius steals (as Picasso supposedly said). The influential designers of tomorrow will perhaps be those most capable of filtering all the information. Because finding the rough diamonds which can be held high for us all to admire is a skill in itself.

The wonderful image of Devon’s Racing Rams was taken by Rick Turner. I hope he does not mind me appropriating it.

Fabien Baron has been inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame. A great art director, he has produced famous work for Italian Vogue, Interview and Bazaar magazines. Since gaining star status he has also designed perfume packaging, furniture, his own line of eye wear (of course) and is now editing Interview. It’s notable that his own star status comes largely from designing the ultimate celebrity document of the 90s: Madonna’s Sex book.

There is no doubting his talent, but it runs counter to one view of what makes a great designer; that designers should be chameleons, able to conjure up whatever style the job demands, and focussed on making the work famous, not the creator. Indeed Barron was removed from one high profile job because it was felt he was just doing his thing rather than the right thing:

“With Fabien’s design there was an overall sense of sameness, from article to article, and issue to issue, which is his strength, even his gift, but just not my preference,” Luca Stoppini told the New York Times when explaining why she dismissed him from Italian Vogue.

But I think we need a few more Fabien Barons. Our industry is becoming increasingly populated with clients who see design as a function, something they are well qualified to meddle with at a pedantic level (“take that key-line a fraction higher, and make the red blue, I think blue is better”).

We designers need to be open minded that the client might be right, but even if they’re wrong it’s going to be hard to resist the changes. The risk for clients is that a misplaced confidence in their own abilities as designers, and a lack of respect for the skill of the designer they have employed can lead to the solution being ok but not great. Ironically, this behaviour is becoming more prevalent as designs role is taken increasingly seriously within marketing departments. Against this trend the Barons of our world offer a reminder that sometimes you buy the vision and the talent and should cherish it. Guys like him help save the rest of us from being perceived as jobbing plumbers.

Of course over-bearing advice is nothing new. There is a story that when Michelangelo presented his sculpture of David to Florence a dignitary suggested the nose was a tad large. Michelangelo duly climbed his ladder and pretended to make corrections. Tapping with hammer and chisel, he sprinkled some dust from his pocket onto the crowd below. On his descent the dignitary proclaimed himself pleased with the results. Perhaps there’s a lesson there for designers and patrons?

It’s a great idea – twenty six writers, each in sixty two words, create a piece of art which compliments or re-frames a piece from the V&A British Galleries collection. You can read about the project’s genesis here, and more about the project here along with some considered musings on the relationship between words and pictures.

For someone who works in graphic communication the marriage of words and image are a daily preoccupation. Being dyslexic, I have a bias towards drawing over writing. To my mind, pictures deliver a clarity and can be appreciated at their surface, where words can be more broadly interpreted – they have depths which offer ambiguity. This is as true of a piece about a sculpture as it is a marketer’s written brief. The brief comes alive when concretely manifested in a picture.

That’s my prejudice. Of course, one medium is not superior to the other; when they fuse together, the results are greater than the sum of the parts. Indeed, to nod towards one cliché, if pictures provide the cover, words offer up the book beneath.  An obvious observation, but some folk lean towards the image and others the word. I think the knack for judging the merits of a piece of design, I believe, is to focus equal attention on the effectiveness of that aspect of the work, be it words or pictures, which is outside one’s personal centre of gravity. Because powerful branding comes from meshing them brilliantly together.