The rise and fall (and rise again) of the political designer

This year saw the end of renowned design studio the Designer’s Republic, tDR for short. The CR blog gave an excellent account of what happened here, well worth reading for anyone interested in this ground breaking agency. For me their end has signaled something that has been a long time coming; the end of the politically motivated designer. Ian Anderson, tDR’s founder, has always been outspoken, especially on the subject of consumerism. Some of his most memorable work were the manga dolls and his slogans “Work, Buy, Consume Die“. There are few designers that I am aware of these days working within the mainstream of graphic design that are producing work with politics as the central theme. Most studios will produce some altruistic work for charities, events and so on, but the appearance of design like some of the political stuff done by tDR is increasingly rare.

Political is probably the wrong word, very few designers make direct political statements in their work, outright, unsolicited support for one political party over another. The obvious recent exception is the recent rallying cry behind Brand Obama, with artists and designers lining up to create their visual messages of support, most prominent of those being Shepard Fairey. This grass roots support undoubtedly helped to secure victory for America’s first black president. The man owes a huge debt to the creative industries, one he is indeed starting to repay.

The subject of Obama’s promises brings me neatly to next week’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, the first of it’s kind since the only mildly successful Kyoto agreement in 1997. Once again world leaders will meet and attempt to thrash some deals on carbon emissions etc, and there has been much speculation on how much will be actually achieved. I like the Guardian’s in-depth analysis of how it’ll all go down.

Of course there’s been a load of blog activity on the subject of the conference, but I have been unable to find any chatter at all about the graphic identity that has been produced for it, not even on the usually-reliable Brand New. I’m pretty disappointed, especially when you consider how bent-out-of-shape everyone got when Ikea announced they were using Verdana as their main font. Is this really of more interest to designers than this potentially world-changing meeting?

Go and check out the identity designed by Denmark’s NR2154 on their portfolio site, and decide for yourself.

But I’d be wrong to imply that designers don’t care about politics anymore. Whilst the world focuses it’s attention on Denmark, back in the UK, the British government is introducing a Digital Economy Bill that has among other boring bits of legislation is a rather heavy-handed and unwieldy attempt to block internet piracy. There has been a massive swell of discontent among internet types, chiefly against what is being seen as ideas from stuffy old men who don’t understand the web being pushed by corporate fat cats to try and contain the free file-sharing that is part of everyday life online. The Open Rights Group have all the detail of what’s wrong with the bill over here, and Fellow Creative (it was Carl’s blog that first made me aware of the existence of the bill) has the some more approachable methods of taking action as well as great collection of links here.

Should designer’s care? Well yes they should, I for one am getting very twitchy about it. I’m taking the view that “they’ll be coming after us next”, I’m imagining a world where Peter Mandelson, drunk with un-parlimentary power, starts to ban us from posting images on our own website and sharing links on twitter. There hasn’t been the kind of fly-posting that characterized the old style of political graphics, but people have started talking and, I hope, this is just the start of resistance to the Digital Economy Bill.

‘Til design do us part

There are definitely some similarities between the designer/client relationship and a marriage. Stay with me, there is a reasonable and straight-forward explanation for this statement. Both require considerable commitment from both parties and the actual ‘wedding’, the affirmation of intent whether through the signing of a contract or the exchange of little gold bands, will, generally, take place after some period of courtship and fact-finding about each other. And it is more often those relationships that are rushed into, where there hasn’t been sufficient time to get to know the other’s bad habits, that falter.

This thought swirled around my brain whilst I sat at the wedding of my cousin last weekend (see I told you there was a good explanation). A wedding is a celebration of the commitment that two people are willing to make to each other. Designers seem spend a lot of time bitching about their clients, but maybe if they viewed the relationship more like a marriage they would be more willing to compromise rather than sticking their heads in the sand. That and we’d also have an excuse for a big party with cake.

This week’s dilema – saving the environment

As well as a follow-up to last week’s article on living the good life, this post is part of (cue trumpety fanfare) Blog Action Day. If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, it’s essentially an attempt by the good people at Change.org to get the internet talking about the totally shit state of the environment. Bloggers all over the world have been signing up, including the blog for the government of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, to write about environmental issues relating to their own interests. The plan is not to cause direct change (although that’d be a bonus) but to start discussions and bring the environment back into the public arena.

All right! So it’s nice to be part of a global initiative, but what will I be bringing to the party? Well it’s definitely more of the pineapple on sticks than the main course. However as some obscure retail chain once quoth “every little helps“.

And it’s supermarkets that have proven to be the inspiration for this blog. Since I moved house a week and a half ago (into the middle of a city for the first time in my life), I’ve been attempting to ’shop local’ and avoid large chain stores wherever possible. It’s been pretty interesting and pretty flipping difficult, mainly because it’s been busy at work and I have to walk past two large supermarkets on my way home. However I’ve persevered, and despite several lapses, I reckon I did quite well, considering my previous, supermarket-dependant lifestyle.

I successfully found some sink and drain unblocker from a small hardware shop. Then I couldn’t find an independent deli to buy some olives from so I went to Sainsbury’s (admitably from their deli counter). I bought a rather nice open fronted wicker cabinet from the Salvation Army, but then I went to Argos and got a shelf. Hmm… I reckon so far my ethical-shopping report reads “must try harder.”

Let’s back-track for a minute. Why am I putting myself through this awkward and, as it turns out expensive, trial? Clearly it’s partly a sense of middle-class guilt, that as I can afford to change the way I live I really should, but also I really, genuinely believe that individual positive change can influence others into the same patterns that might (might) prove beneficial for us all.

But what is so wrong with supermarkets? Well plenty, but I’m not advocating the abolishment of the capitalist system, just an adaptation to our unsustainable way of life. And the evidence is getting overwhelming that we (and by we I mean everybody) do need to radically change the ways we consume.

Right, I’d better nip off to the open market to get some nice fresh, seasonal veg and a pound of pork chops. I’m trying my best to change, what about you?

Turning over a new leaf

So I’ve moved into a lovely new flat in the middle of Norwich, described by many as a “fine city”, very exciting and all that. Amongst other perks it means I have only a short walk to work rather than a 40 minute drive or an even longer train journey. Major, major bonus.

And a fresh start has given me some thoughts on other areas of me. If you watched BBC’s excellent Future of Food series, researched and fronted by the ever reliable George Alagiah, you might be thinking along similar lines. For those that didn’t catch any of the programmes I’m talking about the increasing evidence that the modern Western lifestyle, my lifestyle is unsustainable.

So I’ve decided to see if it’s possible to radically change the way I live my life, the way I consume. Now hold on a minute chums, I’m not about to go off on one of my ethical rants. This time the focus of my wrath is just me. Confused yet? Yeah me too…

Basically I want to see if its feasible to stop buying everything from just a handful of generic shops, supermarkets, high street fashionistas, all those big corporate places that have shaped the way we live today.

I’m no fool and I’m also no radical, I like the easy option. So I’m planning to start small rather than immediately stripping off all my clothes, going to live in a hedge and forage for mushrooms.

Food I reckon is an easy place to start. Luckily Norwich has a plethora of shops which makes this even easier. Not just shops, good old Norwich is home to the UK’s largest open-air 6 day-a-week market. The challenge is going to be find the time to do it what with having a life and all.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

[image credit: magazinewood.com]

Happy birthday dear blog

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I started this blog. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I left uni. I really can’t believe how fast it’s gone and much fun I’ve crammed in. But anyway no first birthday celebration would be complete without one key ingredient – CAKE!

Recently the CR blog asked designers, “do you blog and why?”. I think I began this blog in order to promote myself to potential employees in a different and more adaptable way than my portfolio site. I also was determined that I would actually write interesting and informative posts, not just endless lists and links to other people’s work, which seems to be the staple diet of many designer’s blogs.

As time’s gone on I’ve found that blogging is sort of addictive. I felt a strange sense of duty to keep updating my blog and coming up with interesting and worthy topics to write about. The simple analytics that WordPress provides also gives me a rough indication of how many people are reading my blog and where they are coming from.

That being all well and good, I’ve now that achieved the primary reason I started this blogging thing (got me a job), so maybe it’s time to shut it down and move on. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to think up stuff to write and to find the time to write it in. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it really doesn’t work out at all well…

But like I said, it’s addictive, and I do enjoy writing. Whether or not other people enjoy reading it I really don’t know, but the more I involve myself in the internet, the more I love it, and if people can use blogs to post stupid pictures of their cats, or to document their emigration to India, I can flipping well use it to unleash my whinging and practice my spiel.

So keep watching this space because hedoesdesign ain’t going anywhere just yet.

“Happy Birthday to me, happy birthday to me” etc.

Design is a meaningless word

In a recent audio post on designobserver.com, William Drenttel said that the term ‘design’ has become “ubiquitous to a degree that it’s almost meaningless.” And he’s bloody well right. When I recently informed someone that I did web design, their response was “surely anyone can do that.”

I blame the internet. It used to be the preserve of a sort of cultural elite, the high powered creative, but now any pleb with a copy of Photoshop can “do design”. I like to think of myself as a sort of liberal minded person. I should be pleased at this leveling of the playing field, the idea that design is available to everyone to create, at the twitch of a mouse pad, the sort of effects that twenty years ago would have taken skilled professionals weeks to produce. You no longer have to spend years at university earnestly copying the styles of past masters, and then, inevitably, spurning their rules and striking out along you own creative path. A couple of YouTube tutorials and you’ve got yourself a career.

Architects don’t have this problem. No-one would ring up their best mate’s cousin and ask them to knock up some designs for an extension, just because they’ve got an iMac. I do feel that graphics is an under valued profession, too often it is dismissed as a last consideration, little better than a fancy embellishment, which inevitably means that people under-estimate how much time, energy (ie. money) it costs.

I feel this applies much more to web design than print, where the printed word still retains some level of mystique and reverence. I expect people from all other professions feel the same way about their jobs, but I bet they don’t have clients constantly questioning their decision making, as if simply looking at a computer screen somehow makes them better qualified to choose fonts than someone who works with type every single day, including weekends (geeek that I am). But I can’t imagine someone turning to their solicitor in a court room and saying, “actually I think I can take it from here”.

I’m all for would-be graphic designers taking the self-taught path up the creative mountain, I even applaud them. It’s not something I could have done; I needed university to give me some basic grounding in design principles and theory. Turns out I could have read it all on Wikipedia in one afternoon.

But unless people start to take web design more seriously we’ll never see the back of shite like this.

Also if you haven’t clicked on the picture of the kid at the top of this post, go and check out that link too.

Reading too much into it

Recently I’ve been looking at house shares in Norwich, with a view to moving closer to where I work and avoid the soul-sapping commute in and out of the city. This has involved a bit of me asking everyone I know if they’ve “heard of any rooms going”, but mostly it’s been trawling Gumtree online.

It works like this; someone has a spare room going in their house. They can’t find/can’t agree on anyone they know moving in, so they decide to throw it into the arms of fate and place an advert on the internet. They spend (possibly) hours constructing a short description of the available space, taking photos of their living room from fifteen different angles, then moving the pile of laundry and retaking the photos, then plonking the whole lot online so prospective tenants can indiscriminately click through them. And competition is fierce. For the house-hunter (ie. me) there’s no a lot to go on. It seems everyone has a “Lovely Large Double/Single Room within 10 mins/30 mins/Walking Distance of the City Centre.” The pixelated photos, taken at ‘artistic’ angles are no help whatsoever in judging the size of the room.

So I’ve donned my finest Sherlock Holmes headgear, waxed my Piorot-like moustache, and raised one eyebrow, Columbo style, in order to undertake some detective work and unravel the clues left in the style and tone of written description of each property.

As the following examples show, you can tell alot about a person from the way they write.

I would argue that gender actually matters quite a bit, gay or not. Needless to say I did not contact them.

Now I found this advert much more appealing, full of actually useful information and charm, especially the bit about nice pots and pans. Though I found it a bit surprising that the first advert and recieved double the number of viewings as the second, despite being posted only three days before.

By the way I blurred out those people’s email addresses so that I can beat you to viewing the house. So long suckers!

Inspiration leaking from me like custard from a pillow case

My thoughts recently, ever since the sojourn last week down to London, keep coming back to to inspiration, and more precisely the sources of it. And reviewing my most recent posts on this ‘ere blog it seems that my mind’s meanderings have found there way into my writing.

What a hopelessly elusive topic to try and pin down you might think, so naive to attempt to define a term that poets and artists have striven to capture, to harness, for centuries. Well you may well think like that, but as you’ve clearly been at the uzo collapso, I’ll ignore you for the moment and let this particular train of thought steam onwards across the viaduct of possibility.

Now obviously inspiration comes from all around us, everything we see everywhere around us is stimulating our unconsciousness mind, influencing us in ways that science has yet to fully understand. For designers, inspiration can come at the literal click of a button, there are flippin’ hundreds of websites and blogs whose sole function is to scour the web, collect and then numerically display other people’s work, in easy to view pages with little or no comment on the work (apart from the ubiquitous tag “cool” and “graphic-design”). There is a real danger that design “inspiration” will simply become a horrifying circle where each supposedly fresh work is simply a mimicry of the currently popular selection of images doing the rounds on the blogs (and they all seem to feature the same content), which in turn will be picked up by  these erstwhile aggregators of hip graphical trends and then swallowed again by us in our continual search for ideas, limited by deadlines and frustration to our pop-up RSS feeds.

Deep breath.

Yes, you’re right in thinking that I have been spending a lot of time recently trawling such sites searching for the proverbial thunder bolt that would ignite the single tree standing lonely in the field of my thoughts. And there are a good number of excellent sites for plucking ideas and styles from. The best thing about the web is the breadth of information available at one’s keyboard-tapping fingertips and there’s plenty of talented people shoving their remarkable, ingenious and down-right nice work up all over it.

However by inspiration I’m not referring to copying the drop shadow or colour palette or font style from someone else’s work. Maybe I should have been clearer at the beginning, inspiration for me means an indefinable beam of genius, a eureka moment, a cross between Archimedes taking a bath and that seen in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark where he uses the morning dawn and a bit of stick to pin-point the location of the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Inspiration creeps up on you when you least expect it, springing out out the page, or the screen, and you knew it all along, it’s just that now you realize that what this logo really needs is a halftone effect. Or whatever.

Most importantly I think, inspiration for design does not have to come from design, so I’m going to step away from my screen for a bit and go and stand in the park. Or phone a friend I haven’t seen in ages. Or go sailing, or cycling, or wakeboarding.

Anyway in keeping in line with the hypocritical nature of this ramble, I’m going to list some sources of recent inspiration on my blog; a song, an interview, a poem.

Tommy C – Dan le Sac and Scobius Pip

Salman Shaheen’s Interview with Tony Benn

Finally I heard Luke Wright poet this all over Radio 4;

On a stale and dusty summer’s day
as dull as British sport
a waitress serving smoothies to
some skateboarders in shorts

stopped dead in her high-heeled tracks
Stood gaping with her load
as seven khaki-clad strange men
came ambling up the road.

In front a round faced gentleman
short legs and lennon specs
with just a tad of what we call
Napoloean complex.

Behind him was a taller chap
effete and upper class
saying: Fall into three lovely rows
to the men as they walked past -

a good old boy with medals and
a lad not so enthused,
a spiv, a Scot and a white haired chap
saying: May I be excused?

The skaters sat there staring at
the men’s peculiar state
then the cockiest of their number
shouted – oi what’s your name mate?

The words aimed at the scarf-wrapped lad
who didn’t look quite right
but shorty stepped right in and said:
Don’t tell your name, Pike!

Which made the skaters crack right up
and call out to the lad:
Oi mate, is you called Pikey? No!
Oh mate, that is well bad!

Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring
the chap with the medals crooned
which set the dour faced Scot right off:
We’re all doomed, we’re all doomed.

But despite an inauspicious start
they sooned waved their white flags
and the men and skaters sat together
smoking Walker fags.

And the skaters told the men how life
was these days less intense
and how it was partly down to them
as the last line of defence.

Fun in the city

This is a prologue to a lovely day out I’m having tomorrow. I’m venturing out of Norfolk and heading down to the big smoke (smog) of London. I’m visiting the New Blood show and also staying up past my bed time for the 8×8 conference and I’m counting on coming home thoroughly drenched in inspiration.

This will be my third year at New Blood, once as an impressionable student, once as a highly strung undergraduate, and now once as a fully fledged designer. I’m really looking forward to seeing what this year’s bunch have come up with, especially since I had a bit of a preview at Norwich University College for the Creative Arts (not part of where I went to despite the same names) degree shows last week. Bit heavy on the branding but I’m expecting great things. Also according to all the usual blogs, Bath Spa are again worth a look.

The speakers at the 8×8 are top draw as well, the two guys who run It’sNiceThat, the guy who did the new coin designs for the Royal Mint, and a lad from Airside. I freakin’ love Airside’s work.

All in all I’m excited as I’ve been about anything in ages!

Probably should go and have a lie down…

That time of year again!

That’s right, it’s graduate end of year show time! Lots has already happened which I’ve missed, including Free Range and my former college’s degree show which happened last night. I couldn’t make it down, but people tell me it all went well. I intend to go down to New Blood and see if it’s painful this year as it was last time.

All the design blogs have been linking up the hottest selection of this year’s crop and there’s clearly a lot of talent out there. I feel sorry for these guys, I really do. Not only are they graduating in the middle of the most over-publicised recession of all time, but they’ve been told flat out not to bother getting into the industry at all (remember that article? No? Well I can’t find it online so just take my word for it).  Many people I know who graduated last year have been struggling to find jobs, but interestingly those who chose to go freelance are doing quite nicely. Possible alternate route there?

There’s plenty of advice floating around for those who want to read it, so I won’t clog up the information super highway with my own pearly wisdom, well let’s face it, I can’t really comment on successful job hunting. Anyway if you studied at a London college you’ll almost certainly be fine.

Stupid London centric industry.

UPDATE: Found that article at DesignWeek online, but you have to be registered to read it, so instead you should read this interesting critic by James Corazzo here.

Thank you Thoughtful6!