JKR

Yesterday The Times reported on Facebook’s floatation plans. They’re all going to be richer than Croesus. In eight years the dorm room startup is now approximately valued as having the same worth as McDonald’s. I’m sure we are all delighted for them.

A couple of pages later in the same newspaper, I found this message encouraging us to follow the journalists on Twitter. If I’m not mistaken, it’s kind of a bastardised version of the Twitter logo. One can’t blame The Times for taking liberties – a quick Google image search for ‘Twitter logo’ shows up a dog’s breakfast of various versions, birds etc. But if The Times was offering their readers a McDonald’s related experience, my hunch is they would strive to use the correct logo, not one that’s sort of right but also fits the design style of the paper.

Yet presumably Twitter can be considered to be a major, if not profitable, brand. Digital brands seem to be taking the whole business of corporate identity in a looser direction – Google famously so with ever changing variations on their core theme. Is this because they are funkier? Are they sticking it to the man? Or is this a result of startups that become huge before the owners have grown up enough, and become square enough to regulate their identities in the way IBM would. Perhaps they see less value in this approach. But as Facebook proves, success alone will give them old-fashioned monolithic status.

It’s going to be interesting to see if the new bucks continue to be so loose, or if they eventually decide that there is benefit in getting their identity acts together. Perhaps the guys at Twitter might respond, “Who wants to be like McDonald’s anyway?”

There is a great article on Fast Company which questions the effectiveness of brainstorming. It is a review of a longer piece from The New Yorker, so saving us the time of reading the original detailed article. Do you enjoy brainstorms? Have they worked for you? I think it is over simplistic to argue that they are either a great or an awful way to unlock effective creativity. Horses for courses really. But from my perspective as a creative who has attended many of them, I would offer some subjective thoughts. These lean towards the negative, but stepping back the principles of collaborating and getting creative thinking from all angles, are clearly sound ones. ‘Creative’ is an odd job title to have, especially in context of the democracy of brainstorms. But in the real world it is how folk such as me tend to be set up at such meetings. So it’s from this perspective that I offer my views.

1. There is such a thing as a bad idea. I created the slide above about a decade ago, to make the point that ‘blue sky’ – the ‘let’s not be judgmental, all ideas are great’ brainstorming approach is unrealistic. Because loads of the ideas this throws up are awful, so can’t we just cut to the chase? Kill off the ideas that are dogs, and challenge the half-baked ones to go from good to great? It might make for a more bracing meeting, but real creatives are used to being challenged and having to justify their ideas – why should the marketing department get to be big babies who (in this creative context) can ride a wave of positive and unrealistic energy? I’m exaggerating to make my point. Sort of. But it was nice to see support for my prejudice in The New Yorker piece:

“Other studies have shown that the presence of criticism actually increases the flow of ideas. One experiment compared two groups: one that brainstormed with a mandate not to criticise, and another which had the license to debate each others ideas. The second group had 20% more ideas and even after the session ended, the people in the second group had far more additional ideas than those in the first….. The problem with traditional brainstorming is the assumption that good ideas can spring up unbidden. In real life, the process is more interesting than that. Usually, inventions often begin when an inventor spots a problem. Good ideas usually don’t hang by themselves, unattached. They come about as solutions. Thus, allowing criticism into a room full of people trying to brainstorm allows them to refine and redefine a problem.’

Or to be more plonky, giving an average idea the respect of being challenged (rather than positively received then quietly ignored) might actually turn it into something of actual value.

2. When you invite design ‘creatives’ into a brainstorm, don’t kid yourself that you are fully utilising their talent. Why? Because they tend to express themselves visually, but you will typically ask them to express themselves verbally – in the comfort zone of marketing. You are getting right brain thinkers to use the left side of the brain, or asking them to thrash out a visual idea that would make sense in a medium where it falls dead. How’s this for an idea – ‘use a bicycle to make a bull’. Pretty crappy right? But a bit better if your Picasso was allowed to draw up the notion:

In fairness, design legend Bob Gill used to tell his students that when they had come to a visual solution to a project he set, they should ring him up and describe it. Good ideas can be described. But at an embryonic stage brainstorming does not allow creatives to use the tools of their trade. Imagine flipping the scenario – asking the marketing department to set out its plan for the next year without using words or figures. Actually, this might be quite interesting. Moving on…

3. Power dotting rewards mediocrity. So, all those flipcharts are on the wall, now we do the ‘power dotting’ exercise – where we surreptitiously award our favourite hobby horse three stars, then plonk another couple on some other thoughts, the ones we can easily locate. But if you get the idea from a couple of words on a chart this is because it’s a pretty obvious and graspable concept. Which means it is pretty ordinary. The really out there breakthrough ideas will get no dots, because they will be too hard to wrap one’s head around in a brainstorm. They cannot be boiled down to a couple of words. They will attract no dots and will be dead before they were ever allowed to breathe. Too bad.

4. One-on-one is better. I don’t do too many brainstorms back in the studio. We have conversations. Often one-on-one with someone who will see things differently to myself. Ideally this gives me 1+1=3.  Personally I think duets (or solos) follow a train of thought far better than a bunch of instruments all playing discordant free jazz at the same time. To offer a convoluted metaphor. The jazz free stylists in this scenario being all the random folk in the room talking over each other’s train of thought. The New Yorker article offers a great anecdote about the power of random rather than structured brainstorming creative collaboration (and the power of one-on-one):

“Studies have shown that the most successful groups of scientists also work in extremely close physical proximity. Just being around another creative person is vital to the process, because so many ideas happen as a result of water-cooler chatter and passing contact. The best support comes by anecdote: building 20, a famous hothouse of ideas on the MIT campus. It worked because its design was so crappy and haphazard. It was nothing more than a sheetrock box, but in its maze of corridors and cramped offices, scientists of all stripes often found themselves happening upon conversations with others from wildly different fields. It’s no accident that so many breakthroughs came from that building, including radar, microwaves, the first video games, and Chomskyan linguistics.”

5. This is the one I cannot emphasise enough: folk dancing or other physical ‘warm ups’ to the day are ABSOLUTELY GHASTLY. And POINTLESS. They are a cringe-worthy way for a designer (who is pretty much in a service relationship) to first encounter their new, important client. And the activity is so brain freezingly uncomfortable that it will smother any creative vibe that might have been drifting about. Similarly, being invited to go on a Native American Medicine Walk (‘but in half an hour, rather than the typical three weeks’) is bollocks of the very lowest order. Perhaps talking about the task at hand might be a better use of the time? It’s curious to me as a ‘creative’ how un-workman like so many sessions tend to be.

Yet, back to the big picture brainstorms can offer a lot of value. And the best of them at least give one the chance to think about a project in a long and uninterrupted manner. I think what bothers me sometimes is that a kind of soupy ‘groupthink’ is being seen as a substitute to or equivalent of real creative thinking and by ‘real creative thinking’ I don’t mean exclusively with ‘real creatives’. My most stimulating ‘brainstorms’ are generally with clients, not colleagues. And the smartest answers come from the smartest questions. My favourite kind of ‘brainstorm’ involves a pint, a pal, a pen and the back of an envelope. Horses, as I say, for courses.

Bright design for a gloomy winter’s day. Swedish pharmacy chain Vårdapoteket are distinguishing themselves from the category norm (clinical, white, reassuringly boring) with a human body inspired design. What’s most significant to me is less the style and more the subject matter.

Typically we see pharmacy communication which is non-figurative and softens the message, so this feels quite bracingly visceral. Illness and health can be quite icky to contemplate up close, but this design calls a spade a spade. Might my view here be culturally informed? After all, we uptight Brits would wryly admit that those progressive Swedes seem a bit more in touch with (and a bit less embarrassed of) their bodies. Whatever, the design reminds me (in a good way) of Damien Hirst’s ‘Hymn’, itself drawn from a Humbrol scientific toy.

It’s the more abstracted elements drawn from various organs which appeal to my eye. The human body is such a miracle in its detail and workings, and the design team here have hit on a rich seam of visual inspiration – one that can re-manifest in infinite variety. It’s odd how little current design connects us to our own bodies, and to nature in general. Perhaps we have stopped closely observing things in the way we once did? Maybe we are living less in our bodies and more in our heads this millennium? Sorry, I seem to have veered off into a rather philosophical line of thought. But what I love about this identity is how it takes something as seemingly generic and familiar as the human body, and shows how it can be the root of a distinctive and memorable look and feel.  See more here.

Name a car that epitomises French style. How about the Citroën 2CV? Or the DS? To create a vehicle that defines a national character is quite something. To do so a second time, from the opposite end of the market, is a remarkable achievement.

As designers, we regularly glean the germ of our most successful ideas from the subtext in the brief. The 2CV, for example, took its inspiration from the desire to ‘provide the peasantry with a motorised alternative to the horse, capable of transporting a tray of eggs over cobbled roads’. The resulting suspension had the travel of a coil-spring mattress.

The aerodynamic DS, conceived in secret during the latter years of the German occupation, was deliberately designed to reassert French pride and became so closely associated with De Gaulle it might have been created for him.

Sadly, however, the story of Citroën has not always been so happy. With weak cost management, its Avant Garde designs necessitated high prices, and after the market weakened due to the 1973 oil crisis, the company went under. Rescued by Peugeot, Citroën was led to pursue diluted designs built on shared components. However, mass mediocrity is ultimately unsustainable without cost-leadership, and we should draw inspiration from Citroën’s recent success in commanding higher prices following its return to more progressive design with its new-look DS range.

By Andy Knowles, Chairman, jkr

“When the world zigs, zag” is BBH’s formula for successful advertising in a single phrase. Here, I think, is a great example of design that zags. As reported in Friday’s Guardian police in the Siberian city of Barnaul are questioning the legality of an anonymously placed tiny-town protest against Putin, which calls for clean elections.

“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests” AndreiMulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”

I love this – Lego characters described as ‘new technologies’. There are two zags in the approach to my mind. Firstly, the use of humour. Protest design leans towards the shrill, angry and shouty. What passes for humour typically seems to be not much more than a photo of the opposition leader with devil horns and dripping blood added. A notable recent exception would be the sign mounted at the Occupy St Paul’s event (‘tis the winter of our discount tents’). These little characters could have stepped out of an exhibition by Maurizio Cattelan or David Shrigley, and carry those artists’ sense of both the absurd and of sly observation.

The second zag is of course scale – big statements tend to demand a large scale of people and graphics. The bolder, typically the more effective the message will be. Here, a tiny scale has achieved two successes. Firstly, it’s a protest that is being reported around the world. And secondly, the scale has managed to make any official reaction difficult – ignoring it is probably not an option, but crushing it makes the police look ridiculously over sensitive – this is satire in a very smart form.

So, this is a great example of ‘the mouse that roared’. I think it shows that in the realm of protest a charm offensive can be as effective as the full frontal attack. And that little is not the same as weedy. What a fantastic design initiative, and inspiration for what breaking the rules can do…