Lola is a brilliant example of exuberant design. Today’s Guardian tells us smiles are back in fashion and here is a design that delivers one. Against a general trend for stripping things back, I wonder what might happen if a few of our Superbrands chose, instead, to guild the lily.

Wandering the British Museums rooms showcasing European design of the past few hundred years is rather like eating slice after slice of rich gateau cake. Lovely, but filling. Opulent, intricate, bejewelled and complex objects, all with a high level of craftsmanship at every turn. One could truthfully say “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore”. Often because we can’t – industrial design has robbed us of the skills and process. But I wonder, in our ‘less is more’ current phase of design, might we be about to see this very different aesthetic making a return, with maximalism replacing minimalism. Please indulge me in this whimsical line of thought…

My rationale is pretty thin, but here’s why I think it might be possible. Firstly, the downturn is not going away. If we face a few more years of this, we will be crying out for a little more design opulence and glamour to offset our mood. ‘Stripped back and minimal’ is a great look in times of plenty, but those cabinets in the British Museum came from times of poverty, where design’s task was often to transcend the crude and everyday, and to dazzle. There is something going on when iPhone’s protective covers are embroidered, beaded or covered in Swarkovski crystals. We are already wanting a bit more bling.

In addition, craftsmanship takes time and time costs money. As society polarises into haves and have nots, nothing will say ‘I am in the top tier’ like sporting design which is handcrafted – time intensive production says ‘luxury’. Industrial design, particularly in the stripped back sense, is too much of a level playing field on which to stand out. The more intricate and complex the design, the better to display the artisan’s skill and the client’s deep pockets. And retailers like Anthropologie show this look can, in any case, be mass-produced…

One obstacle to such a swing would be global brands aiming for a broad global market, where the design minimalism is culturally bland enough to fit in anywhere (IKEA for example). Maximalist design will carry more cultural reference points and might travel less easily. But the more we start to look the same, the more I believe we will start striving to be different.

Of course maximalism is already here – I just wonder if it will become a more general approach rather than just the odd gold-plated Oligarch’s sports car or fancy perfume design. We’ll really know it is making a big comeback if we see a less minimalist design approach applied to a mainstream car design, or a can of budget price beans. As belts tighten further, we all might be left wanting a design tonic. And high craft carries the ultimate expression of premium. So, might we be entering into a golden age for the florid and the excessive in design? It’s kind of fun to think so…

Note – the images here are all from the British Museum website – well worth an explore…

Here is my image to encapsulate the trend I see in brand design for 2012. Of course, all trends are waves. They build up momentum and energy over a few years, peak, then crash on the beach…uh, I think that’s where the metaphor ends. But my point is this ‘trend’ is really nothing new, but I think 2012 will be a big year for it.

It’s all about being sticky, hence the chewing gum. That represents the glue that ‘brand visual identity’ is claiming to be, the stuff that makes brands have a pattern that holds together across all channels. My question is who is the chewing gum? I think for years the advertising agencies have held this role, with ‘top table’ client relationships. But increasingly it seems that design groups have more aptitude for applying iconography and developing brand ‘look and feel’, and it is becoming an ever growing part of our workload as an industry. This might sound a little self serving, but it is interesting that more and more we are encouraged to think of ‘the bigger picture’.

So that’s my perception: if design is the block of chewing gum, it’s being pressed on to make it wider and more influential. Not a very elegant image to conjure, but an exciting prospect for design agencies. Author Austin Howe in his book Designers Don’t Read describes designers as drummers, holding the beat for all the channels of comms and keeping things together. That’s probably an alternative and slightly sexier description of the same point.

What do you think? Is this more of the same? A growing reality? Or am I doing our advertising colleagues a disservice?

It has been suggested that backwards italics might be a slightly more elegant way to telegraph one’s bon mots. I think this misses the point but hits on one limitation that typography can’t transcend. While choice of font, emphasis and suchlike are all basic design elements that can compliment content and bring text to life, the whole point of sarcasm is that it works under false pretences. It is delivered straight to heighten the subversive nature of its content. So flagging it up just removes its wit, making it crass and the typographic equivalent of a bad comic’s ‘nudge nudge’ delivery.

Basically, sarcasm (and irony) are forms of expression that cannot be aided by design. They rely on the quality of the writing and the intelligence of the audience. Is this why they are almost non-existent in branded design? Surely an opportunity for some brand who wants an audience engaged by being in the know and in on the joke?

However, the only day of the year brands seem to allow themselves a chance to be sarky is April 1st, letting the date do the excusing for them. The BMW images here all come from this particular day.

Of course, it’s not just in writing that sarcasm can be missed. Consider Jeremy Clarkson’s poker faced suggestion that striking public service employees should be shot. That got a few complaints.

On reflection, sarcasm might just be the nitroglycerine of branded copy, but diffusing it with a typographic convention would leave it utterly pointless.

Well, that was a brilliant insight, wasn’t it?

A recent exhibition in the U.S. discussed how current Japanese design is influenced by the country’s cultural history. I couldn’t really follow the examples given, but this pair of paper glasses by Azumi Mitsuboshi clearly owe a little to Japan’s penchant for folding and exploiting the properties of paper. They would not look out of place in Shoreditch. They work by making the viewer focus their vision through the tiny holes and cost about £7.

What inspiration might we take? That the past is a great thing to plunder. That simple ideas can look cool and cheap. That smart thinking has universal appeal – I imagine this design might have real benefit in developing countries from a cost perspective.

Final nerdy observation – I seem to recall that the space suits in the original Alien film were in part inspired by Samurai costumes. Makes sense as the hapless crew worked for The Weyland-Yutani corporation. Now that really is using the past to paint the future!

’tis the season to be promotional. And seasonal calendars are amongst the first examples of branded promotional marketing that we have. The earliest date back to the nineteenth century. They endure because they make a nice Christmas gift, are useful and, if appealing, they guarantee your advertising will be hanging in your prospective customer’s eye-line all year ’round. Of course, this basic principle has got a little less simple over time…

Being agnostic the calendar hangs on where other ‘Christmas gifts’ have been dropped out of sensitivity for multiple faith society. And the really big production numbers, Pirelli or Lavazza are unlikely to be hung anywhere. Their appeal lies in using famous photographers with huge budgets and tiny print runs to ensure highly collectable editions. So the calenders will be kept in their envelopes rather than making it to a wall. No matter, as all the really valuable publicity will be generated online. The calendar holding the images is merely the MacGuffin.

Lavazza have put up a great website showing their two decades of calendars. It’s fascinating to track their progress. In the nineties (above) it was all pretty generic (albeit shot by Helmut newton and suchlike) black and white sophisticated stuff: coffee =classy.

Then at the turn of the century (several years worth above), Lavazza  developed a sense of irony and enjoyed a purple patch of exuberant fantastical and colourful imagery. Although each year had a different photographer, the sensibility was coherent – the classic ‘how will they top last year?’ approach.

All good things must come to an end however. This year (above), to celebrate their 20th,they are getting past collaborators to shoot self-portraits. When a brand starts making its campaign the subject rather than focusing on the little universe it’s created, it feels like the beginning of the end. Self-referential marketing just seems a bit self-indulgent.

And the Lavazza style seems to be drawn on heavily for the new Campari calendar. Another surreal high production Italian number, but with Campari rather than caffeine in the (super) model’s hand. Perhaps it’s time for Lavazza to turn to a new page?

So, how to be original as a brand when surely every calendar approach has been tried? Stella Artois are doing things a bit differently, giving away a downloadable album that owes something to the spirit of Phil Spector’s ‘A Christmas gift for you’ but even more to the recent beautiful communication…

…from a beer originally brewed for Christmas. It’s a neat idea, a neat build, a neat brand fit and a neat new way of giving us something to remember the product by as the holidays roll around…

The Lavazza, Campari and Stella Artois work was all found on Popsop, a great place to follow global branding activity…

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.

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…