Good design IS sustainable

By definition ‘design’ is ‘a plan for the construction of an object or system’. I would assume then that the definition of ‘good design’ occurs when the designer takes into consideration all the effects his or her design will have on its surroundings, from the highly likely to the remotely possible. Will the design serve its intended purpose, is it cost effective, is it functional, etc. And of course included on this list in which each item is what is its impact – long term and short term – on our environment.

Janine Rewell's sporks

Obviously, no design is perfect and the designer must make decisions about whether they are comfortable recommending a design that fails in one area in order to succeed in another. It would appear that when an effort is made to make a design environmentally friendly, compromises must be made on cost effectiveness. Reclaimed materials are often more expensive than non-recycled. It can cheaper to have something manufactured overseas than have it produced locally.

Therefore, whether or not to make a design sustainable lays within the hands of the designer and it determined by their list of priorities. Personally, I always hold environmental responsibility high on my list of criteria of good design.

If you don't like it, don't look

Advertising is all around us in various shapes and sizes. In my mind, the purpose of it all is to introduce and promote a consumable product to the consumer. Good advertising has a specific target audience in mind. That audience is researched thoroughly and the advertiser designs the creative look and message with the audience in mind. It is then tested with members of that demographic before being launched. The final product should resonate with the target audience. It should speak to them directly and encourage them to act. Good advertising doesn’t lie. 

When an ad campaign is accused of being offensive or inappropriate – overly sexual, culturally insensitive, too violent, etc. – I’m definitely not the first one to grab my pitchfork and join the lynch mob. First of all, if this is a ‘good’ campaign based on my criteria above, then the creator of these ads was hoping that they would speak to a certain audience, not offend them. What’s offensive or inappropriate is completely subjective and if you don’t like an ad that you see, it probably means that that ad wasn’t intended for you.

But then there is also the argument that these ads are placed in public places and everyone is subjected to their message. I approach this dilemma with a passive attitude. There are definitely ads out there that I find disturbing and would rather not find myself looking at. Some are product ads but many of them are for public service campaigns. Transport for London’s “Don’t let your friendship die in the road” campaign is one example. I really don’t appreciate looking up from my book during my daily commute and coming eye to eye with a dead teenager. Although it upsets me, I would never argue that these ads should be taken down. Though I do not benefit from this campaign, its target audience might.

As a student of communication studies as well as a mass media consumer, I believe that it is the job of the audience to choose which messages they digest and which they ignore. To paraphrase an old cliché, if I saw a poster on the underground saying “Go jump off a cliff. Everyone is doing it.” would I go right out and do it? No. Because I was born with a thinking, reasoning, rational brain and some common sense - just like everyone else.

In his manifesto, First Things First, Ken Garland discusses the graphic designer’s role in advertising. He argues that product advertising promotes “trivial purposes that contribute little or nothing to our national prosperity” and essentially that designers’ talents are better spent creating “useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication”. Personally, I agree with him. In my design career, I hope to be able to support myself creating social marketing and public service campaigns. However, there’s a lot of creativity and innovation to be found in product advertisements and I don’t judge designers who choose to go into that field. I think it’s a personal decision every designer has to make during their career. At some point you have to ask yourself what types of messages you want to communicate.

Design with a cause

In order to differentiate themselves from the competition, many communications design firms choose to tailor their services toward a particular niche market. Some become specialists in the retail sector while others select the hospitality industry. Still others specifically strive to work with socially-responsible companies promoting sustainable products and ideas. Here are a couple that I found:

Thomas.Matthews

Thomas.Matthews is a London-based communications agency that believes in “good design” which they define as “appropriate, sustainable and beautiful.” Sounds good! Their services include branding, consultation, print and web design as well as campaign development. They strive to ensure all of their projects are completed efficiently and with minimal environmental impact. Their clients include Useful Simple Trust, Shell Springboard, LIFT Festival and Battersea Arts Centre.

Neo

Neo is a communications agency based in Brighton specializing in campaigns for positive social change. They are committed to sustainable communication and work with charities, social enterprises and public sector organizations. To them, “Sustainable communication is about making the best possible use of people, pound and planet to deliver maximum impact from minimum resource.” Neo’s clients include ActionAid, National Health Service, World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.

My thoughts

I’ve always known that as a communicator, I would also strive to work with organizations that share a similar set of ethics as my own. Why? Well, I guess firstly, to make it easier to sleep at night. Knowing that my work hasn’t indirectly or directly made children too fat, the world too hot or The Man too rich would be nice. Secondly, it’s just easier to come up with creative design solutions for a cause that you believe in. Because, at the end of the day, most communications design aims to persuade people to do or believe something and if you’re already on board, then you’re one step closer to knowing how to guide others to follow suite.

Walk the walk you talk (and design)

Determining exactly how socially responsible a company is can be tricky. Do they really have a soul or do they just throw a few million towards a couple charities every year to distract consumers from how much product they import from poor countries or the low wages they pay their non-unionized work force? I’m guessing that in most cases, particularly if it’s a global company, corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies fall into the latter category.

However, there are a handful of organizations that don’t treat CSR as an afterthought or a safety net. I found a lot of great examples of innovative companies that built socially responsible principles and policies into their primary business plan. A lot of the time this tactic pays off and makes a company a success because a) talented people want to work for a company with sound ethics, and b) consumers want to feel good about what they buy and are willing to pay a bit more to support a company that isn’t evil. For designers or anyone remotely involved with corporate communications, reason a really rings true. Everyone knows the phrase that goes something like, “If you want to walk the walk, you better talk the talk”. Well, it’s a lot easier to design convincing and beautiful ‘talk’ when the subject has the ‘walk’ to back it up.

Here are two examples of businesses I would love to work for one day simply based on their CSR policies and ethics:

The Body Shop:

Founded in 1976 by Anita Roddick, The Body Shop is a pioneer in socially responsible practices. It was one of the first beauty product manufacturers to speak out against animal testing and continues to do so today along with employing environmentally sustainable packaging processes and supporting community or fair trade production practices.

In addition, they head non-beauty-product-related social awareness campaigns every year that range in topics from child trafficking, domestic violence and HIV prevention. They also founded the Body Shop Foundation which to date has distributed £12.5 million in grants to fund global projects for social and environmental change.

Toms:

Founded in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie, the mission of Toms Shoes is simple: with every pair purchased by us, they give a new pair to a child in need. They have incorporated giving into the foundation of their company and have started what they call a One for One Movement.

Since September 2010, Toms has given away 1 million pairs to children in 23 countries. Though the products available on their website come in all styles and colors, the shoes given to children are specially designed to be worn in that region’s environment. Each kid receives a new pair every six months to make sure they don’t grow out of them. The shoes are produced in Argentina, Ethiopia and China in third-party audited factories that pay fair wages and don’t use child labor.



Resources:
http://www.thebodyshop.co.uk/_en/_gb/index.aspx
http://www.tomsshoes.co.uk/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/12/8-revolutionary-socially_n_679832.html#s123215&title=Seventh_Generation

Old techniques create today's trends

Technology has changed design. We all know it. Old news. But, though we ARE living in a “fast-moving computer-generated work of animated digital media design” as this task’s description states, there are still a lot of artists using traditional means of animating to create fresh, innovative work. Just as the print designer likes to pick up the X-Acto knife or set their own type every once in a while, many animators still experiment with stop motion techniques. Both produce a texture, quality and overall traditional look that just can’t be faked by using computer software.



Stop motion is, in my opinion, one of the coolest-looking but most tedious-to-make styles of animation. Basically it goes like this: get a real life object, set it up, take a picture of it and then move it a little bit. Repeat ONE BAZILLION TIMES. Then flip through all the photographs and enjoy your 10 seconds of animation. Kidding aside, the jumpy, homemade quality of this style and the amount of detail put into it by the dedicated animator make it a truly unique and visually appealing format.



Stop motion is alive and well today and is used in everything from commercials, music videos, TV series and feature films. Though it sounds time-consuming and monotonous to produce, many report that it is one of the easier forms of animation made simpler by digital film production tools.

The following are some links to examples of stop motion animation productions: 

Short film:
Marcel the Shell

Series:
Rasta Mouse
Robot Chicken

Feature film:
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox

Portfolios:
Mike Please
Laika
Grandchildren

Wayfinding around Westfield

The wayfinding system I chose to evaluate was that of the Westfield shopping center in Shepherd's Bush. Featuring several restaurants, movie theaters and both luxury and affordable clothing stores, Westfield is one of the largest shopping centers in London. Located just north of the Shepherd's Bush Underground Station, the center is extremely easy to find. There are many signs inside the tube station to direct shoppers toward Westfield.

Outside the main center are several kiosks and marker posts letting the visitor know where they are and how they can find other sections including The Atrium, Southern Terrace, Loft, Balcony, Village and car park. All signs had a consistent modern look made of silver metal material or clean white acrylic. There were a sparse number of digital map kiosks which could be used to locate a specific shop or restaurant. The typography used appeared to be consistent - a sans serif which differs from the type used in the Westfield logo.

Overall, I feel like a shoppers first visit to Westfield can be quite overwhelming due to the sheer size of the center. Naming the various sections and then referring to those names on the many kiosks does not provide much help at first, but once you get the lay of the land it becomes more useful. The digital maps are much more helpful but they are a bit hard to locate when you really need them. Aesthetically, I fell the system does its job by communicating the Westfield is a modern, cutting edge shopping center. Practically, I feel the system is average. 

I took several photos of the signage inside and outside Westfield. They can be viewed here.

The best* fonts in life are free

*well maybe not the best, but some of them aren't half bad

When asked to choose two typefaces to discuss and critique I found it hard to narrow down the pack. Serif or sans serif? Open type or true type? Transitional, modern or slab? To make it easier on myself, I decided to focus on some high-quality free fonts I had recently discovered, not only to have an excuse to play around with and get to know them, but also to share some resources with my blog readers.

Ripe

Ripe was developed by designer Cameron Sweeney in 2008 and released for free to help promote the launch a typography website called RipeType in 2009. A modern-looking and unique serif, the Ripe font family consists of four separate weights containing 577 characters each. The stroke weight does not vary throughout each character and its signature seems to be the stick-straight descenders on the lower-case letters. There are also alternate letterforms with looped descenders as seen in the RipeTipe logo. You can access these via the ‘glyphs’ panel in InDesign or Illustrator.

I would argue that Ripe is a fresh, contemporary typeface and could be applied quite well in titles and headers or redrawn as an effective, aesthetically pleasing logo. I believe its downfall lies within its use as body copy because when it’s placed at a small point size, its legibility falters.

Sadly, Sweeney’s portfolio site doesn’t seem to be working at the moment so I can’t check out his other work. However, the entire Ripe family can be downloaded for free here.

Chunk

When I first saw Chunk, I started salivating. So slabby! So serif-y! So FREE! I’ve always been a big fan of blunt slab serifs like Rockwell but I’ve never been satisfied with their ultra bold weights. Seemed to me they just didn’t have enough….well, chunk!

Designer Meredith Mandel explains the origins of Chunk on her website explaining she was inspired by “old American Western woodcuts, broadsides, and newspaper headlines.”

Chunk is definitely best reserved for signage and display designs. Anything that needs to say “HEY! Listen up ‘cause I’m not going anywhere!” The amount of stability built into each character really catches the eye and calls for attention. I personally can’t wait for the right project to come along so I can use Chunk.

Chunk can be downloaded for free at The League of Moveable Type, a website started by design firm A Good Company as an open source font project.

One might think that a high quality typeface would never be given away as a free download. However, it has been shown to be an effective way to promote yourself as a type designer or your design firm.

Free font resources:

http://www.ripetype.com.au/?cat=21
http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/
http://www.creativepro.com/article/free-all-freebies-us-you
http://veer.com/free