King Marketing

I think designing for the long term is (and should be) considered a fundamental design strategy. In fact, I’ve often considered it an unwritten law. Trends have their value but on a scale, it couldn’t possibly outweigh the importance of the fundamentals.

For example, you could try and update the look of a newspaper to modernize it for a newer audience but people of the younger generation still read and scan a page in much the same way their parents and grandparents did. If you were to discard all the things we’ve learned about how people see in favour of something entirely comprised of modern, trendy, concepts you’d lose the audience and fail to create anything lasting.

This is especially true of brands. Many designers who don’t emphasize lasting designs make a few measly dollars and create a trendy logo that won’t last 5 years in the competitive market. Remember the swoosh phase that logos went through with the influx of trade school designers? I couldn’t place my finger on a single one that stood out. But I can remember the RBC logo, or IBM, Apple, etc.

I’m eager to read your article.

P.S. I’m a graphic designer, but you can take my thoughts on the subject with a grain of salt.

wrote Paolo on April 29, 2005 1:33 PM

Paolo. you’re totally right when it comes to logos. Google “Swoosh No More” and you’ll find a great site full of examples and variants on that terrible curse of 90s dot-com branding.

I wonder if part of the creep away from classical design has to do with differing expectations about the audience. Compare a 1930s National Geographic to a contemporary one, and you can see huge differences in the text-to-photo ratio, and the reading comprehension level of the language. In a pre-television society, radio and print were the mass media, and they presumed both a level of education / vocabulary / literacy and a longer attention span. I suppose it also presumes a certain amount of leisure time.

Compare that to, say, any magazine in the supermarket check-out aisle, where most of the text is captions, tips, lists, snippets. What assumptions are they making about their audience?

wrote aj on April 30, 2005 10:50 PM

Is “timeless” always conservative, or does it mean not to follow the flavour of the moment trend? Because one might always want to try something new. It’s a risk to take. Just stuff I’m thinking about. I love classics, too!

wrote Jack Ruttan on May 1, 2005 4:44 PM

Jack, you pose a really good question. I had to go away and think about it for a bit.

I don’t think timeless means conservative, or hewing slavishly to some Greco-Roman / Renaissance / Classical Revival / Tudor / Edo-period fantasia of what Quality Design is supposed to be; that way lies a themed Vegas casino.

I think those styles persist - and are consistently revived and re-interpreted - because in their core they understand some basics about human visual perception and spatial / object psychology.

The mechanics of a “good page” or layout are well-known to us. From antiquity we get the Golden Section, which, more recently, can be seen as a Fibonacci sequence or even a subset of a fractal. Classical page proportions and measurements are analogs of human proportions; a lettersize page is the size of a face, a book the width of a hand, readable type about the same size as what you can write with a pen. Line lengths and spacing are for the comfort of the human eye; margins are spaced for thumbs.

In photography or illustration, we notice proportions, use of color, the foreground/background relationship, the explicit composition and cropping, the play between object and “empty space.”

In architecture, we may not know what it’s called, but there are definite effects you can feel. A badly designed space makes you feel out of place. A grand and generously designed space makes you feel rich and welcomed. A low-ceilinged entryway that opens up to a cathedral ceiling enhances the “wow” effect, more than a simple door into the larger space; the low ceiling it also has the psychological effect of “pressuring” people through the entryway, keeping it clear. Frank Lloyd Wright used that all the time.

Now, all that doesn’t mean designers need to mimic any particular era, or designer, or even use any magic typeface (although I’d avoid Rotis for text work.) A Paul Rand or Saul Bass design from the 50s is just as timeless as the best Wiener Werkstatte secessionist stuff, and for the same reasons; they are well thought-out, honest, true, and don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are. There is no trace of Situationist camp, irony, or parody.

It’s worth noting that all eras havelots of ephemeral, trendy and tacky design trends too. For every timeless Volkswagen Beetle campaign, there was a Dodge ad that looked dated 5 minutes afterwards.

The question for art directors, I guess, is do you make a conscious decision to encourage idiosyncratic work that you believe has a timeless quality to it, at the risk of angering the client, or do you go with the suggestion to “do something like that other ad for that other thing” and surf the trend?

wrote aj on May 2, 2005 3:11 AM

It’s not that interesting to say, but it’s probably best to have a solid grounding in good design, but not be afraid to experiment once in a while. I get a pleasant jolt looking at “Ray Gun” design and other temporary trendy things once in a while, but don’t like the endless copying of same. I can almost say I like “bad” design once in a while, but not something that resists reading. Still, pure “good taste” can be dull.

wrote Jack Ruttan on May 5, 2005 12:38 AM

Yeah, there’s a lot of copying going on out there. I suppose to some extent that’s the client wanting something ‘just like this other thing’ and to another extent, young designers learning through emulating their heroes. Trends sweep through the design world too; the stuff currently in the window of Urban Outfitters, a literally Baroque style mash-up, is a downmarket version of stuff that was in Wallpaper magazine last year. A couple of years ago, it was all about futuristic fonts and weird extruded 3D techno blobs, this year we have the cult of flatness, stencils and silkscreen.

“good taste” design is usually inoffensive, if it’s well-done it’s not a problem. I think I prefer the honesty of self-assembled vinyl cling lettering on a 99 cent pizza place’s coroplast menu to a “designery,” glossy menu that’s full of type that can only be read on screen (yellow on white?) and full of basic errors like misspellings…

wrote aj on May 6, 2005 2:53 AM

Not to suggest that the masses are stupid but when it comes to design most people aren’t actively analyzing what they see. A good designer, who knows how to use visual elements to communicate mood and meaning will, regardless of a bit of trend here and there, manage to sway the audience. The designer that only uses what looks hip today, isn’t likely to do much other than create a meaningless abstraction that doesn’t communicate or sell. The only hope there is to call it art.

The bottom line is that graphic design has to communicate and sell a message. Picking the designs that do that one can easily see that it wasn’t because the design was simply fad.

I think that the best way to incorporate design trends into a design is to simply use it as a means of keeping the message current and relevant to a specific audience. If the current demographic is turned on by “flatness, stencils and silkscreen” then it would be wise to use that trend to get them to make that initial glance, then use the tried and true methods to convey the overall message.

wrote Paolo on May 9, 2005 2:15 AM

Paolo, that’s a great observation. I think it is when people mistake surface styling for ‘an entire new graphic system’ that we get in trouble.

People may not analyze what they see, but at the same time they instantly know what they like. I always think in terms of product design — why is it that iPods and iMacs and Mac Minis (and New Beetles and Mini Coopers) are so appealing, and most of their competitors are distant 3rds at best?

I think it’s partly streamlining — so much has been taken out, it’s simple and unthreatening. And also size, and maybe a tiny bit of anthropomorphic projection.

The “kawaii!” factor.

wrote aj on May 10, 2005 2:58 AM