July 17th, 2008
Have you ever asked what a brand ‘feels’ like? Not emotionally, but literally, tangibly. There are lots of ways to translate a brand’s attributes into effective - and affecting - communications and designers ask lots of questions to get there. What does a brand look like? Is it fast or slow, dynamic or solid? Is it modern or traditional, approachable and friendly or rigid and dependable? Qualities like these are reflected in corporate identities, colour palettes, typographic treatment and a whole range of design techniques. But how can the feel of a brand be represented in an organisation’s communications?
The answer is through paper: an essential component in almost any piece of physical communication, from product packaging to annual reports, direct mailers and invitations. With careful thought and research, the selection of the right paper stock for a business’ printed material can be as important as the choice of typography and colour. Texture, weight and finish all send out subtle signals about a brand’s characteristics. ‘Sourcing paper stock is a very important part of the design process for us,’ says Phil Costin, director of the design group Mode. ‘We’re trying to define how a brand physically feels.’
Along with graphics, colour and language, printed materials can also be made to stand out from the crowd through the choice of stock, with speciality papers able to deliver an interesting twist on a project brief. When working with fashion and luxury brand consultant Chris Connors, for example, Mode used a range of materials with high gloss or reflective finishes - including Fedrigoni’s Splendorlux Metal and Zanders’ Chromolux - to illustrate Connors’ method of ‘reflecting’ his client’s business back to itself.
As with fashion, high-end property communication demands something a little above and beyond a standard brochure. In creating promotional materials for a £30m, five-storey private property situated in London’s Belgrave Square, Ico Design Consultancy realised that something special was needed to close a sale. ‘We designed it twice,’ explains Ico senior designer Vivek Bhatia. ‘First, we produced a small book using coated and uncoated paper. A lot of businessmen came to see it, but couldn’t convince their wives.’
So the consultancy produced a second presentation using a paper-backed material called Flockage by Fenner, on to which were printed close-up photography from fabrics and materials used in the property’s furnishings. A box was handmade using these papers by Cathy Robert at Delta Design Studio. The resulting tactile ‘fabric’ of the box ‘brought the qualities of the house into the brochures’, says Bhatia. A book inside the box featured Arjowiggins’ Curious paper on its cover, giving a tactile, waxy finish.
While a certain combination of stock, colour and photography can be used to impart a sense of luxury and opulence, special papers can also be put to more unusual use. In two separate projects by design consultancy Purpose, a paper’s coating was used as a physical reference to the subject at hand. So, in a Christmas mailer for gourmet sausage manufacturer Simply Sausages, a fleshy Pyros Pink version of Marlmarque by GF Smith was chosen because the paper’s finish felt ’sausagey’, says consultancy senior designer Piers Komlosy. Similarly, for Wounded - a portfolio book for photographer Jesse Marlow’s pictures of people with injuries - Plike stock from Cordenons was printed in pink to enhance the paper’s already skin-like qualities.
With this kind of careful research speciality papers can be turned to all kinds of treatments, says Komlosy. ‘A paper that may have been designed for one purpose can often be used differently to the manufacturer’s intentions. So something intended to be soft could be used to feel like skin.’ And as Bhatia notes, playing with paper stock can produce something effective from trial and error. ‘There’s often a lot of testing. Sometimes things happen by accident. It’s often a combination of materials and production techniques,’ he says. At the other end of the scale - away from high-gloss coating and tactile finishes - are untreated, rough and natural stocks, such as Paperback’s Cairn board and Redeem from Fenner. Redeem, for example, was used by design consultancy Ranch for print materials promoting film director Ken Loach’s It’s A Free World feature. The rough, gritty stock reflects Loach’s style and the film’s theme of immigrant labour, notes Ranch founder Paul Jenkins.
The other obvious appeal of uncoated, natural stock is its environmental credentials. Both Cairn and Redeem, for example, are 100 per cent recycled - a speciality in its own right and something that is starting to appeal to clients. Indeed, a rough, card-like stock may now be used where plush materials previously would have appealed. ‘Environmental awareness is something even luxury brands are pushing and it’s actually hard to find recycled stocks, but a lot of clients are happy if you use something that is recyclable,’ says Costin. ‘It’s becoming more of an issue not to recommend papers that look expensive just for the sake of it.’
This article was written for Design Week, 17 July 2008.
Posted in Design | No Comments »
July 10th, 2008
It’s perhaps a little unfair to kick off a ranging look at the state of play in the design industry with a project that emerged in a flurry of controversy, but last summer’s farrago over the London 2012 Olympics logo neatly illustrates a few things. Significantly, it shows the passion and involvement everyone can feel for a piece of graphic communication, the emotional connection lying at the heart of design’s power to influence. Vocal criticism and defence of the Wolff Olins-designed logo shows that people instinctively relate, one way or another, to the creative ideas it presents. Somehow, although ‘only a logo’, it’s important.
We all respond to visual and physical design everyday, whether it be a logo, a store interior or a juice carton. And our reactions can have a profound influence on the fortunes of the business behind the product, even if designers have often found it hard to quantify this influence. This is one of the major challenges facing the industry.
The 2012 responses also highlight a problem that has long beset the branding industry in particular – the huge focus and weight placed on a logo or corporate identity to the virtual exclusion of all the other work the design agency has carried out. And this is not just in branding: whichever discipline of design you’re looking at – retail design, product design, packaging or whatever – a good design process goes much deeper than the ‘colouring in’ of the final output. Focusing on the ‘physical’ manifestation of design work can sometimes belittle this depth, leading to design becoming a commodity purchase – another obstacle for design to overcome. ‘The value of design and design thinking does tend to get lost or overshadowed when people view it as a commodity, which even some people within the industry do,’ notes Lloyd Northover chairman Jim Northover, whose clients include Lexus and Royal Mail.
Finally, in relation to marketing more broadly, the 2012 marque demonstrates something else too: it shows the relative permanence of design, in this case for at least five years. Although design may provide some of the materials to create a marketing campaign, it is seldom a campaign in itself; typically, design hangs around much longer than an advertising or direct marketing sweep. The importance of good, well-managed design over the longer-term is therefore very high. Yet many agency-client relationships are still conducted on a short-term, project to project basis, while ad agencies win accounts that they often hold on to for years.
Each of these points provides some backdrop to the challenges and issues facing the sector. In many ways, the design industry fares differently to other marketing services, partly due to its culture and structure. In fact, some still question whether it is really an industry at all. To many, its micro-business set-up is that of a cottage industry; one populated with independently-minded ‘creatives’ whose lifestyle proclivities and ambitions often actually eschew huge growth or empire building. There has been nowhere near the kind of agency consolidation experienced in advertising and according to Design Council research, around 60 per cent of UK design agencies employ five or fewer people.
‘It is also an industry which has traditionally focused on excellence of product rather than profits,’ notes Tony Walford, a senior consultant at Results International, a consulting and finance business specialising in the marcoms industries. ‘There are many small agencies run by design practitioners who are passionate about their product, rather than concentrating on the commercial aspects.’ Not that ad agencies necessarily place profits above creative quality, but design agencies do often struggle to balance the two.
As design continues its growth from origins in arts and crafts, there seems to be one cardinal challenge to meet. It must communicate and demonstrate the real depth of value it brings to business. To do this, it must strike up long-term relationships at a client’s boardroom level, breaking free from project based, commodity-bought work and forging deeper partnerships with clients. As Scottish & Newcastle chief executive John Dunsmore notes, continually running with project based work means that design agencies ‘have to roll sixes every year’ to survive.
‘Design is the least profitable of all the marketing services sectors, because we’re treated as a talent commodity,’ says Andrew Knowles, chief executive of packaging design agency Jones Knowles Ritchie, which has worked on Scottish & Newcastle’s Strongbow brand. Doug James, a partner at multidisciplinary agency Honey, which works with Tesco and Harrods, echoes this. ‘These big clients usually see you as a service provider with a specialist skill set, so we have to demonstrate the business effectiveness of our services and show how we understand the commercial requirements of a company. They need to start to realise that we can think for them to some extent,’ he says. Then agencies have to start charging for it. ‘I don’t think consultancies charge appropriately in terms of the impact their work has on a client’s business. But this impact does have to be demonstrated,’ says Interbrand chief executive Rune Gustafson.
According to Paul Castledine, chief creative officer of Birmingham consultancy Boxer, once a business impact is demonstrated agencies have a ‘tangible’ sell. ‘Design must be driven by insight and should be measured in its effectiveness. In essence, we are talking about turning an intangible sell into a tangible benefit,’ he says. Some clients are already demanding proof of design’s effectiveness. ‘We’ve seen big changes in client’s demands. Increasingly, they want their design to demonstrate real effectiveness and request a clear way to demonstrate the value and impact design has had on their brand,’ says The Brand Union managing director Simon Bailey, whose clients include Vodafone and SABMiller.
For agencies able to do this, businesses are willing to pay. ‘You see this come through in the pitch process, where clients are asking tougher questions from their design groups, but are willing to pay for it,’ says Jonathan Ford, creative partner at branding and packaging design agency Pearlfisher. ‘They are starting to realise they can get a good return on design investment and are making sure they get it right, so it can be a long-term investment.’
As Ford notes, long-term partnership-style relationships between client and consultancy are increasingly important. Since its inception seven years ago, UK financial protection firm Bright Grey has worked with design group Navyblue. ‘They are very much a partner in our business,’ explains Susan Sneddon, communications director at Bright Grey. ‘We share the same level of information with them as we would our own marketing team, which allows them to be a true extension of that team. We have the view that we will get more value from our external suppliers if we invest time and money in developing a relationship with them.’
With the huge consolidation of big business – and a concomitant lack of consolidation in the design sector – there are a large number of agencies chasing fewer and fewer clients. In this climate, long-term partnerships are even more important and many consultancies and clients are now viewing their relationships in this way. ‘Over the last year we’ve been working a lot more with above the line agencies and I think this is partly because clients are looking for longer term relationships with their designers,’ says Barry Seal, managing director of strategic branding agency Anthem Worldwide. ‘Ideally designers have stopped being suppliers and are starting to become partners with a business. It’s about having a real relationship with your clients, not just a supplier relationship. I can’t stress this enough.’
Or, as Knowles puts it: ‘If clients give us more lock-in at the senior level we’ll work with them to deliver effective design. But the project nature of the industry terrifies agencies because if the client doesn’t like your face, there’s something in your portfolio they don’t like or they’ve got a mate they used to work worth – bang, you’re out.’
However, for all the challenges in proving effectiveness, winning boardroom buy-in and improving agency margins, the picture for design is not at all bleak. There’s little doubt that the strategic – and financial – value of design is being recognised at a higher level amongst business, helped along by the Design Business Association’s Design Effectiveness Awards and the Design Council’s Designing Demand programme.
‘I don’t sense there’s any boardroom doubt about the value of good design,’ adds Knowles. ‘The uncertainty is more about how they acquire it and manage it. There are therefore huge opportunities for design consultancies to show how design can be of benefit to the business.’
As the economy wobbles and consumer credit dips, design must compete even harder to prove this strategic value to business. As Walford notes, design can be one of the first marketing services to be cut in a tight economic period and the last to be reinstated when things pick up. Indeed, within the last couple of months network-owned branding giants Interbrand (Omnicom) and The Brand Union (WPP) have both cited ‘uncertainty’ as a reason for senior redundancies.
But where agencies demonstrate their strategic understanding of consumer behaviour, along with the power of design to influence that behaviour, corporate chiefs are more likely to keep them in the fold. This is true not only of branding consultancies, but also in product, digital, retail and packaging design disciplines. Before taking the view from some of these sectors, it’s worth picking up another trend that connects them all and perhaps fundamentally changes the nature of all marketing communication.
Shifts in the way we communicate are creating what Seymourpowell director Richard Seymour calls a ‘paroxysmal change’ in the relationship between products, communications and marketing. ‘So much so,’ he says, ‘that most people, including design agencies, don’t know what’s going on; we’re right at the centre of it.’ What Seymour is referring is the transition from ‘push media’ – where marketing activity pushes messages about products and services towards consumers – to a Web 2.0-style of communication where people, everywhere, are sharing, re-appropriating and commenting on these messages like never before.
‘Push media is evaporating. Not the places to put it, which are still there, but what people are doing with it, which is that they’re talking to each other. It’s like going back to the Middle Ages. If the blacksmith in the village is shit, everybody knows about it,’ says Seymour. As an example, he cites a YouTube video that shows how to crack a Kryptonite lock with a biro. The video’s author reportedly said: ‘Your brand new U-lock is not safe’, causing huge implications for Kryptonite’s products and brand.
‘Basically, if you lie, you die. If you promise something great and the product isn’t up to it, there will be an onslaught,’ continues Seymour. ‘So, you start to see a re-emancipation of the object or the product as the truth. In this new order you see a new way of communication developing. If you say something in the old way – “we think this” in a pompous way – then there’s a massive negative reaction. This is a huge relief. It’s honest trading again. We can’t just take some stuff and advertise the bollocks off it.’
If this is the case, it affects not just design, but the way consumers receive all products, services and marketing communications. ‘It’s a fantastic time to be in the creative industries because we’re witnessing a complete change, a new dawn,’ argues Seymour. ‘And it’s not technology, not the “it” of the internet - that’s just the “how”. It’s anthropology; it’s emergent behaviour which arises from the tools we’ve now got.’
This is a version of an article written for Marketing, 8 July 2008.
Posted in Branding, Design, Interiors, Packaging, Product, Retail | No Comments »
July 10th, 2008
Electrical and electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the UK, with 1.8 million tonnes generated annually, according to the Government. It’s easy to see why: an abundance of super-cheap goods has led us to view many products as practically disposable. It’s easy to throw things away and replace them with newer, smarter ones at relatively little cost.
And nowhere is this disposability more prevalent than with mobile phones, an industry largely sustained by the perpetual upgrades of subsidised or apparently free handsets. Try telling staff in a phone store that you haven’t upgraded your handset in over two years; they are quite disbelieving. According to a Science Museum exhibition in 2006, over 1,700 handset upgrades are made every hour, around 15 million a year. In this scheme, where constant desirability is paramount, where does design sit? Is it curative or complicit?
When it comes to limiting the environmental cost of manufacturing and using electronic devices, designers and engineers clearly play a crucial role. ‘If the brief allows us to offer a solution that integrates a sustainable approach then we do it. Sometimes we do it when not asked,’ says Factory Design director Adam White.
But at the same time design as styling is a major factor in millions of handset upgrades. All the big players – Motorola, LG, Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and so on – have evangelised the power of design to create differentiation and desire. Design, like marketing, can encourage consumption. ‘It is fair to say that, as with fashion, a cool design is often why people want to change their handset. But with environmental issues firmly on the agenda, designers’ skills will make a significant difference to, say, a product’s lifecycle. They will also be used to make things pretty if that’s what’s called for,’ adds White.
Real sustainability, in any industry, can only be achieved with control over the entire product lifecycle and business system. ‘To have a truly sustainable product, it’s got to be designed in tandem with the business delivering it to the consumer and for mobiles it generally isn’t. It’s the network operators which control what happens to their products,’ says Ryder Meggitt, director of design at Element 06. ‘Controlling the whole process would change the design because you can look at ways to get repeat revenue from each handset. A phone would act almost as a service system, rather than a one-off unit with a one-time value,’ he says.
As ever, Apple’s iPhone emerges as a model to consider, with its user interface perhaps the most important feature for sustainability. The unit’s glass screen and multi-touch operation become a blank canvass, adaptable to any number of future functions by upgrading the software inside. ‘One way of reducing disposability is to keep high-level functions going, lessening the desire to upgrade. The iPhone is highly adaptable as it’s not restricted by buttons and layout,’ adds Meggitt.
Working with its exclusive UK phone operator 02, Apple might also start to ‘close the lifecycle loop’ and seek proper take-back of iPhone handsets at the end of their lives, allowing high value components to be reused in lower level phones. In the meantime, it already gains extra revenue from services, via iPhone purchases of music and videos from iTunes; in other words, Apple already controls some of what happens with its phones post sale.
Nokia designers are working on similar concepts, dubbed Homegrown, where a phone ‘wears in, not out’ by using digital, rather than physical, upgrades to its functions. In this light, Nokia Design head of strategic projects Rhys Newman rejects the idea that design is a vehicle to promote consumption of new products. ‘Within Homegrown design was more about defining a set of guiding principles that could result in products that are both desirable and sustainable,’ he says. ‘If you change the way that you create products and use materials that are 100 per cent recyclable, you not only create sustainable products in environmental terms but sustainable business models. Design in my world is no longer an inconsequential activity seducing people into purchasing things they don’t need.’
Eventually though, all handsets will reach the end of their product life and it’s at this point where the real business end of long-term sustainability kicks in. ‘When a factory is building an assembly line they don’t usually think about building a disassembly line too,’ notes Phelan Associates director Philip Phelan, echoing an emerging ‘cradle to cradle’ design philosophy. Phelan is working with Hong Kong group Product Solutions on a range of sustainable technologies, including solar power gathering ‘energised surfaces’ and electrostatic fabrics that generate power from movement.
But technology changes, although realised by designers, are driven by industry, says Phelan. ‘We wouldn’t have moved from Bakelite to modern plastics if people like BASF hadn’t been walking the streets to show the materials to design houses. There’s a plethora of new materials out there and designers are the focal point for a lot of the vendors. But at the end of the day it has to be money driven. And as designers, we’re able to help charge a premium on the product because of its new characteristics.’
This article was written for Design Week, 2 July 2008.
Posted in Design, Product | No Comments »