-
Time for tea
To celebrate the end of another packed, exciting week at MxM, we had tea and cake. Tim is an advocate of proper tea, made from leaves, in a pot; so I took this picture for him of a sketch I saw in Howies on Carnaby St.
-
How do you say London in type?
A fellow typographer has created a great series of postcards that show the subliminal messages sent out when using different typefaces.
With tongue firmly in cheek, some of the postcards are absolutely spot on. Who can doubt that Comic Sans isn’t the hand of God or that the typeface Stencil isn’t Rambo 4?
However, I was intrigued by the choice of subliminal message for Gill Sans: I am the son of a stonecutter. This is surprising, not least because there are so many things you could hold up against Eric Gill that being a son of a stonecutter is a bit of a cop out, but mainly because to many Gill Sans cries out “I am English”.
The typeface has a long history of being used for organizations that have a national prominence or by companies that are uniquely identified as having British heritage. From the LNER to the Ministry of Information, from Jan Tschichold’s iconic designs for Penguin to the BBC.
It was this heritage that we experimented using when we started the design phase of Metrotwin, the social utility for Nylonistas. One of the first ideas we discussed was signposting the different cities through colour and type:
The choice of Gill Sans for London was clearly cut, as was the choice of Helvetica Medium for New York. Used (in a roundabout route) by Massimo Veignelli and Bob Noorda for their signage plan for the NYC subway system, it’s now a ubiquitous part of the city’s identity, found on virtually every street corner.
Our colour choice was also to be found on every corner: yellow for New York cabs and black for London taxis. (We also had a secondary palette which didn’t get developed which used red British telephone boxes and blue American post boxes.)
In the end, we decided that the 2 colours (especially when reinforced by images of taxis as on the Metrotwin home page) had such a strong meaning that having city specific fonts was over kill.
However, it’s undoubtedly true that both colours and fonts have the power to create associations and send out messages of their own accord. Which reminds me, with Obama surging ahead in the polls there’s a really obvious one that Lars left out:
-
The communication IS the product
Joe Heath at BBH just sent me this link to a deck by Paul Isakson at Space150:
http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/modern-brand-building-presentation/
It’s a very good slide presentation that says, “The product really is the marketing: make better products first”. IE. planners may have finally got it. It reminded me of the piece below which I wrote a very very long time ago as a result of experiences working with Orange, when at Metadesign. It’s about merging product and brand and service development and the importance of defining narratives in enabling a product or service to realise its true value; apologies for the academic tone – it’s called ‘The communication is the product…’ and it goes like this:
The idea that communication is the product (and vice versa) has its root in three conditions: the dematerialisation of products and services; the inclusion of networked communications within products and services; the personalisation of services.
Where products have partial or no material reality we can objectify them in any way that might be desirable. Effectively, we ‘write’ the product’s story upon it. The way in which we communicate what the product does, who it is for, the context in which it belongs and how it is used can determine how valuable that product will be.
And furthermore, when a product incorporates a system of communication – especially when it is bi-directional – a primary route for marketing communications becomes the point of use and the building of customer relationships becomes intrinsic to the product or service itself.
When a service is personalized there is an implicit requirement for bi-directional communication. The customer becomes a co-creator, and must be able to 1) understand the scope and value of personalisation, and 2) use the communication tools provided by the vendor to create their personalized service. Again, this is a means of building relationship capital.
From the user’s point of view the product of networked digital services is almost always information, access to information or a means of control, communication or exchange. The material reality of these services – back end systems, fulfilment systems, cable networks etc. – is entirely hidden from the customer unless it incorporates some form of physical delivery (and that is in itself only a partial manifestation of the customer experience). These services are in many cases entirely novel or subject to rapid adaptations and evolution, and so how their narrative is written and presented at point of use and in marketing communications may contribute substantially to their success or failure.
The idea is not limited to pure information services, but extends to services added to products. Defining narratives are just as important to physical objects and especially those that are mutable, sensitive and communicative. Digital electronic products are a hybrid of physical and logical systems. They are increasingly dematerialised and unconstrained by physical limitations. The designers’ role is becoming the creation of new object languages that define the things they make, and the establishment of mechanisms for building and sustaining a relationship with the customer. A digital radio interface might be a set of cards with station idents printed on them – throw a different card on the deck to change the station; an answerphone might be a tray of glass phials filled with messages waiting to be poured out (thank you Durrell); a car still has four wheels and an engine and a boot, but the definitive value propositions are shifting from speed, status and performance to comfort, lifetime cost and intelligence – services added to the product that provide real value and differentiation. In the future, we will buy cars more for the information they provide about our destination and the road ahead than for their speed in getting there, and more for the relationship we have with the information provider than for the body, chassis and engine configuration.
The conclusion drawn is that brand communication and service delivery often reside at the same interface and that the quality of communication determines the quality of the product. This is what is meant by ‘the communication is the product’. The line between brand development and service development and design is becoming increasingly blurred, and the suggestion is that, as brand strategists, we need to involve ourselves in the creation of value itself rather than simply communicating what that value might be through some physically separate medium. This means being involved at the genesis of product development, not after the event.
-
Protect The Human success re ‘No’ to 42 days
Great news for civil liberties in our green and pleasant land: MPs have dropped their plans to extend detention without trial to 42 days.
This is in no small part due to the relentless efforts of Amnesty International UK and its supporters to highlight the issue with a national petition, and to encourage voters in 20 constituencies whose MPs were undecided on the issue that this is not something the British people want.
Protect The Human garnered a staggering 9,503 signatures for the “Say ‘No’ to 42 days!” petition. Online campaigning in action. If you haven’t seen the video produced by Dark Fibre with music from the Orb and voiceover by Christopher Eccleston (erstwhile Dr Who), go and take a look.
-
See no evil, from Amnesty International
God, I’ve wanted to do something involving this stary thing for ages. Now Amnesty have done it in a worthy cause. (I wish I wasn’t so shallow).
Focus on the red cross for 30 seconds. Tilt your head back and stare at the ceiling, slowly blinking your eyes. (Hint: click the image and load the full size image. The one below is too small)
-
Just say no to Latin
Lorem ipsum sucks. There, I’ve said it. I’ve come out against the designer’s fall back. Need a block of copy, none available from the client? Lorem ipsum will do. Need some sample user comments? Lorem ipsum. Need a headline to fill that space at top of the page? Want people to focus on the presentation and not the content? Whack in some latin. It’s the catch all filler copy, the designer’s best friend. Yet is lorem ipsum actually a friend to clients and, ultimately, a site’s users?Our work at Made by Many falls into two distinct phases, strategy and production design. We don’t use lorem ipsum for either.
In the early phases of a project, we use design as a visual tool to help our clients understand the services we create. We often focus on a user’s key interactions, presented to the client as a series of highly polished screen designs. Whilst the visual nature of these designs helps translate our thinking into something that looks and feels real, it’s often the content that makes the service believable.
In fact, the service is only made real by showing the relationship between form, content and interaction. Taking away any one of those elements (by falling back on latin copy for example) immediately makes the idea less tangible.
As a project moves into production, there’s often the temptation to use latin as a design element – the idea has been signed off, what does it matter if the design becomes progressively less real? However, the most successful sites are those where the user has been considered at every step of the project. How do you do this? By creating designs that mirror the experience real users will have of the site as closely as possible.
Real users don’t see a site with latin headlines or where every comment is the same 50 word fake entry that has been repeated using cut and paste. By taking the time to use real copy, the designer is asked to consider each element from the user’s perspective. Does this form need any instructional copy? Is it as simple and as short as possible? Does the formating for comments work for both entries of 1 word and 100 words? What happens if a headline splits over 2 lines? Without considering these real elements, there’s a strong danger that design just becomes decoration.
-
It’s not all doom and gloom
Whilst there’s widespread cause for panic in these dark days of global economic downturn (which has given rise to Lingo Bingo in our office around terms like ‘challenging economic times’, ‘credit crisis/crunch/crash’ and ‘we’re all going to hell in a handcart’), there is however a small ray of hope on the horizon for us digital folk.
(Photo credit: Ricardo Carreon)
According to the IPA’s latest Bellwether survey, whilst Marketing budgets for Q3 have been cut at a record rate, the investment in digital remains steady. This supports our long-held view that digital is a good place to be in these challenging economic times. Bingo.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s all plain sailing just because we’re in digital – check out Tim Bray’s ‘Fear Factor’ presentation from last week’s FOWA. Happily, MBM are already employing a number of the measures he advocates for surviving in this hostile climate. Things don’t look good for enterprise software, though…
-
Yearbook Yourself
My brother sent me this cool site that lets you upload a photo of yourself, fiddle with some controls, and create a weirdly nostalgic portrait of your changing face across the decades. Check out what you’d look like if you’d been in The Ice Storm. Complete with a period soundtrack. (I used my fave avatar to add to the confusion).
-
Metrotwin Recommends
We’ve been using our new Acts As Recommendable plugin on metrotwin.com and it’s been interesting to see how it’s performing in a real-world situation.
Bookmarks (places) are integral to Metrotwin, and a user can associate themselves with a bookmark by ‘Loving it’, saving it to their profile, or by stating they’ve been there.
So there was potentially a lot of information that could be collected about users preferences from their association with bookmarks. And that information could then be used to improve the overall experience, such as recommending bookmarks to people, and showing similar bookmarks – a great example of a practical application to Collective Intelligence.
Archive for October, 2008
You are currently browsing the Made by Many blog archives for October, 2008.
Our latest tweets
- @chrbutler thanks! glad you like it :) RT @chrbutler @madebymany Your blog is great! It's a never-skip for me. 2 days ago
- @chrbutler mentioned our blog in his post on designing for attention, here: http://bit.ly/aTo8eY 2 days ago
- @apophenia in Technology Review says that people will simply carve out a space for privacy as they think best: http://bit.ly/cbbNdy 2 days ago
- More updates...
Most commented
People
Categories
- advertising (9)
- agile (9)
- Clients (29)
- code (1)
- Conferences (41)
- content (6)
- design (17)
- Games (2)
- Great Stuff (13)
- innovation (25)
- interview (3)
- jobs (1)
- Labs (9)
- Made by Many (142)
- mobile (4)
- New connections (2)
- opinion (50)
- play (1)
- publishing (8)
- Social Web (132)
- technology (2)
- Transmedia (1)
Archives
Sites we like
- Aaron Koblin
- Barbarian Group
- BBH Labs
- Big Spaceship
- Big Spaceship – Think
- Bud Caddell – What Consumes Me
- Creative Applications
- David Armano
- Edward Boches
- Faris Yakob
- Ffffound
- Gareth Kay
- Howard Rheingold
- Iain Tait – Crack Unit
- idsgn
- Manuel Lima
- Mike Arauz
- Neil Perkin – Only Dead Fish
- Noah Brier
- Not For Paper
- Paul Davis – Our illustrator
- TED Blog
- Undercurrent
- We Are Social