I found this track on NeilYoung.com today and it reminded me of something I had originally picked up from the (highly recommended) @DangerMindsBlog on Twitter. Having spent half an hour watching this interview I thought it was worth a few comments.
Now to be fair, I’ll watch Neil Young talk for half an hour on anything (witness the outstanding Don’t Be Denied from BBC FOUR which was hours long, and still not long enough). Quite aside from his music he’s a hugely interesting guy. An “evangelist for quality”, when he released his epic Archives set, Young reportedly delayed the release for some time in order to be able to release the whole thing on Blu Ray, with much improved audio quality.
Now Young has given a new interview touching on his desire to see musicians and music buyers given access to an (as yet non-existant) new hi-fidelity format.
“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years,” Young said. “We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”
It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art,” Young said. “The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
As a vinyl junkie I don’t need to be convinced, but I wasn’t aware quite how measurably poor an MP3 is in comparison to vinyl or analogue recordings. Young (“I’m known for getting into the details”) has done his research and the figures are amazing – a CD has only 15% of the data that a vinyl recording does, and an MP3 has 10.3% less than that.
However, I have to say I think the convenience argument put forward in the interview probably carries far, far more weight than Young gives it credit for. The current limitations of technology mean that in order to carry any large number of recordings a portable music player needs to store files at a certain level of compression. Presumably the MP3 file is as it is because it retains enough of the qualities of the music to make it listenable and enjoyable to the vast majority of consumers while it keeps file sizes small enough that the user doesn’t have to insert changable discs or plug the player in and manually select music to load. An iPod Classic will comfortably hold a vast amount of music at this size.
At the risk of getting a bit deep here, perhaps this is the key to the larger issues that the music industry is facing. When records were big, plastic, physical things, they had a value that was beyond what you paid for the object. They had to occupy space in your house (my music collection occupies more space than my daughter – true) and so long after you had outgrown an album, it was still staring at you from the corner of the room. Now we’ve largely done away with the burden of ownership and ‘stuff’. Apple ‘owns’ all of the music and we need only lease it from iTunes at 79 pence per track. The value inherent in a physical object is gone but with it has the value we placed on the quality of the sound. We have sold out quality for convenience to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine how we could go back.
Unless someone comes up with a way to create lossless music files at around 5MB, I fear that Young is fighting a losing battle. The truth is that at present, not enough people care as much as Neil Young does to bring about any real change and if someone was to create such a revolutionary new file format, I’d be interested to see if they could steal much market share from the MP3 without matching it for price. I’d love to see if the new ecosystem exists and if the demand is there to satisfy it, if a new file format could exist alongside or within the existing music industry, delivering a better sound quality for those who cared to pay for it. But much of Young’s argument for a ’21st Century Hi-Res’ ignores the inconvenience of downloading large files (“30 minutes per song”) and completely bypasses the increased costs which this is sure to create.
The fact remains that Neil Young (albeit in the priviledged position he holds as an established and successful artist) is one of few musicians who are still pushing the boundaries. Who else cares enough to ask these questions?
I’ll sum up with the most enjoyable quote from Young in the interview:
NY: “Bose and Beats and all these products… products for your car and all the others… it’s all about the back end of the donkey…”
Interviewer: “So Beats headphones make your badly recorded music sound a little bit better.”
NY: “Actually, I think they make it look better. And they make it have more bass.”
A little while before Christmas I sat down with ‘Twenty-Six Characters’, the big Gestalten book about Nokia Pure, the new typeface designed by Bruno Maag. Apart from the practical use to someone like myself who works closely with Nokia on a day-to-day basis, the book is a beautiful insight into the development of a typeface.
I devoured the book and not long afterwards I was looking around for something to read and saw a copy of Simon Garfield‘s ‘Just My Type’ in a bookshop. For a book that I picked up on something of a whim I have to say it was a really great read.
Being a designer, it would be odd if I didn’t have a love of fonts and typography. I already get a nerdish satisfaction when I’m out and I recognise a typeface, I’m an unrepentant font snob and will almost certainly point out lazy font choices to anyone nearby and I struggle to hide my annoyance when I see a font appallingly misused.
This has gone beyond a noticing bad kerning on a piece of signage. Since reading Just My Type I will, without warning, mumble the names of typefaces that I notice, regardless of where I am or who I am with. This is obviously a bit sad and I am trying to come to terms with it, but this new obsession has revealed to me a few things about my own taste in fonts. It seems that in the same way that my illustrative work often involves a combination of paint, collage or other “analogue” techniques and computer manipulation, the fonts which really stick in my mind are those that combine the two. This is neatly summed up in two examples I have seen recently.
I recently went to The Anthologist for a beer with some work colleagues and was so upset by the standardised ‘Dymo-strip’ typeface which adorns all of the windows, signage, menus etc. (not to mention the typwriter-ish serif which accompanies it) that I stood at the bar taking this with every knowledge that the photo would make it’s way onto this blog:
(I’d like to point out that I love Dymo, but I dislike the lazy and obvious use of a standardised typeface (note the repeated ‘T’, ‘H’ and ‘O’) when the designer could have gone and got hold of a Dymo machine). This isn’t even a font issue, it’s to do with the inability of a computer to recreate something as beautifully analogue as a Dymo strip.)
The phenomenal gentrification of Whitstable has (as well as putting out of business the bakery that I used to visit almost daily for years) brought scores of independent shops to Harbour Street, most of which have rather beautiful and ornate hand-painted signs outside. I do love these and will at some point get around to documenting them on this blog but when I was there recently it was this sign (apologies for the blurry photo) which I fell in love with, a wonderful attempt to hand-render Gill Sans. The kerning is truly perfect in it’s imperfection. I get the impression that the ‘T’ was out on it’s own, so the sign-maker spread the cross-bar to the left to fill the gap. Having done so, they would have then had to even things up on the right, so there is a fantastically elongated T which looks like it’s trying to bridge the gap into the next word. (Incidentally, I have never noticed this sign before and have no idea what the phone number is there for.)
What I love about this is the effort that has gone into hand rendering a screen font. Presumably the sign painter had a printed reference (the sign is too close to Gill Sans to be a coincidence) but did not in any way physically transfer the letters from the computer to the board. The result is so much warmer than had someone had a banner printed and perfectly reflects Whitstable’s charm.
So a warning: Just My Type has pushed me over the edge. It should come with a health warning, but I cannot recommend it enough.
P.S The bookshop I was in when I found Just My Type was the Canterbury branch of Waterstones, which provides a neat aside on the importance (or perceived importance) of font choice, particularly in branding. A few days ago DesignWeek reported that Waterstones have reverted to their original logo (a capital ‘W’ set in Baskerville) following a redesign to a lower-case sans serif ‘w’ by VentureThree.
I found myself in an unusual situation this weekend – I’m a bit of a vinyl junkie and spend more than I can afford in the record shops of Berwick Street (Phonica and Sister Ray amongst others) as well as being a frequent shopper at Rough Trade East. But I don’t live in London anymore and at the last minute I decided to get my Dad a particular CD for father’s day.
Unable to get anything delivered in time and living in Canterbury, I had only a choice of one shop. We used to have an Our Price, which turned into a Virgin Megastore then closed. Then later, in a different location we had a Virgin Megastore which turned into a Zavvi and then closed. There was a place called Volume One which eventually became a Fopp, and two independent record stores, Richard’s Records and Parrot Records at opposite ends of the highstreet, as well as Dave’s second hand Records and CD’s in the Indoor Market – all long since closed. Yesterday morning, wanting to buy a CD by one of the biggest selling rock and roll bands of all time, I was basically limited to the selection in a small HMV in the Marlow Arcade.
Canterbury is a pretty wealthy city, with thousands of students at its 3 universities in addition to 6+ secondary schools, but only one dedicated music store. The papers are full of talk aboutHMV’s profits being in serious (if not terminal) decline, and I find the prospect a town without a record store – let alone it being the one that I have lived in on and off for my whole life – horrifying.
That said, my visit to HMV seemed to say a lot about the chain’s diminishing popularity. The Canterubry store is set on two levels. when it first opened and for most of my teens, the ground floor was dedicated entirely given over to CDs, with a very small vinyl section at the back. Today, all the CDs have been relegated to a tiny section at the back, containing Rock/Pop, Hip Hop/RnB, Metal etc – in short, every genre of music stuffed into the very rear of the store. The rest of the floor is divided into DVD/Blu-ray sale items (40%), books (20%) games (20%). Rails of t-shirts filled the spaces between the ailes, leaving no passing space. It was impossible to browse along an aisle that someone else was already in, you had to navigate all the way round to get past the t-shirts. The whole place seemed stuffed to the rafters, but with no thought put in to how a shopper might actually find anything specific – discounted dvd box sets sit in piles where there used to be well organised feature displays devoted to specific artists.
Much has been written about the importance of great staff in music stores, and this is where independent shops still have the edge. There were no staff to be seen in the main part of Canterbury’s HMV and just two at the tills. With the music section so far from the main doors, and the display systems in complete disarray, it took me five minutes to locate the Rolling Stones section. When I found it there were eight CDs, two of which were copies of the same album. I had to queue to pay over the odds for what I wanted and left feeling robbed.
So why is HMV finding it so hard to get it right? It’s well reported that CD sales are diminishing, and there is clearly stiff online competition from the likes of Play and Amazon etc. but with highstreet competition at an absolute low, HMV are still managing to get it wrong by providing an in-store experience that is uniquely awful.
As a long time vinyl junkie I’ve spent huge amounts of time and a vast amount of money in record shops and it pains me to see anyone getting it so wrong. Yes, I’m sure a huge proportion of your sales are cheap DVD box sets and I know that people aren’t consuming music in the same way, but hey – buying records at somewhere like Rough Trade is a magical experience. The store is like a giant playground – I walk in and I get that rush of excitement. I can (and do) spend hours going from listening station to listening station, studying sleeve notes and the little recommendation tags written by staff. Then I can sit and get a coffee and read through a pile of free music papers, before hauling a giant pile of CDs and records to the counter. More piles of staff recommendations cover the counter and I’ll invariably add two or three more records to the list before I pay. There’s a proper old school photo booth and a wall coverd in gig flyers. A great shopping experience is no exclusive to independent stores either – Virgin used to be a particular favourite of mine, with listening areas that were activated by scanning the barcode of any CD in the shop.
I can only guess that it’s a catastrophic misunderstanding of their audience which is causing HMV to deliver an experience so wide of the mark. After all, is there anything more complex to this than creating a music shop for people who love music?
By now you will more than likely have heard all about Stephen Elop’s keynote speech at Nokia World yesterday. Nokia World is now all over, and I’m back from running all over the ExCeL for two days, so here are a few thoughts.
First, a story. When I was 13, my first phone was a Nokia. My second phone was a Nokia. All my friends had Nokia phones. I had a 3210 from the age of 14 until I went to uni. Amongst my mates was a badge of honour to keep your Nokia handset for as long as possible – I dropped that 3210 down flights of concrete stairs but it steadfastly refused to die. In a world before mobile internet, before you expected anything more advanced than a game of snake on your phone, Nokia was king of reliability and durability.
Then something happened. Suddenly you could do more with your phone. You could play music on your phone. Then you could browse the internet. And not just WAP, real Internet. And just as suddenly, I was the only Nokia user I knew. As those Nokia devices people had relied on for so long began to look dated, they were being replaced by pretty much anything and everything else.
We now all know that my experience wasn’t exclusive to me or my social group. Nokia have haemorrhaged market share, losing out to competitors including HTC and obviously Apple’s iPhone. Not only were Nokia lagging behind their competitors devices, but the devices they were bringing to market didn’t seem to work. Nokia’s reputation took a serious hammering. Nokia, once synonymous with the very idea of mobile phones, became thought of as the also ran of the mobile world. There’s Apple, HTC, Samsung, Motorola a dozen others and way down the list, oh yeah…. remember Nokia? You probably had one ten years ago.
So I came to Nokia world wanting to be convinced. Even since yesterday morning, enough has been written about the new Lumia and Asha devices, but will excite people is that Nokia feels like a brand to trust again, to care about. Very little of this is to do with the new tech – although that’s obviously essential in turning this brand story around – it’s more the little touches both before and during the Nokia World that have added more to the Nokia brand than any big device launch could.
Throughout nokia’s decline, something which has been very clearly evident is the inconsistency in the way that Nokia speaks to the world. It’s websites have been little more than repositories of device specifications. Nokia’s advertising has been device specific and no one campaign has looked, felt or sounded like any other, everything unified only by the logo in one corner. Reliant on a once great but rapidly worsening reputation, Nokia seemed to have stopped trying.
But even before Nokia World, the designer in me has been blown away by the superficial improvements in Nokia’s identity. The introduction of a new font, Nokia Pure (see this beautiful film by DesignStudio), designed by Bruno Maag has been followed by a complete overhaul of all Nokia sites, starting with the N9 launch site, swipe.nokia.com and including nokia.com, nokia.conversations, nokia.blogs, nokia beta labs and maps.nokia.com. Some beautiful HTML5 features have allowed Nokia’s team to deliver websites which mirror the experience of using the device. The sites have moved on from their predecessors to really slick looking sites which showcase the new devices beautifully and which are an actual joy to explore.
At the actual event, you can’t miss how important this change is. The Nokia pure font is on absolutely everything. The Nokia logo is almost nowhere. it doesn’t need to be. Everything feels like Nokia. The tone of voice is fun and endearing. The devices are unique, colourful and easily recognisable. There is light and film and colour everywhere.
This approach to branding, the building of a complete visual language (as opposed to just throwing a logo in every now and then) is going to do Nokia huge favours. Across all of their devices, which will continue to operate a variety of operating systems, Nokia needs to communicate this personality, so it has to be as fluid and adaptable as possible. It needs to exist where a logo cannot exist, on tiny screens and tiny corners of screens. It needs to be evident not just in TV advertising but in SMS messages. It needs to be there in the way you navigate their website and in their print ads. This is where the personality of the brand becomes more important than what we have come to think of as the traditional aspects of a ‘brand identity’.
There were a number of other moments which really showed where Nokia are beginning to find space to differentiate themselves from the competition. During Stephen Elop’s keynote speech, I saw an announcement on twitter that Carphone Warehouse had Lumia devices to test in-store immediately. With a (slightly cheesy) video link-up to the actual factory floor in Finland, Elop announced that the Lumia would be shipping the Lumia InNovember. Brilliant. I’ve worked in this area for a few years now, and one thing that I have come to realise is essential to selling mobile is getting the tech into the hands of the public. Finally, Nokia have realised this too.
The cut to the factory floor was an especially nice touch, not only giving the production side a human face but also highlighting a side of their company that Apple would never willingly show.
Other great marketing plans show how Nokia are really moving to address their competitors. Steven Overman, Vice President of Marketing Creation spoke both at the keynote and at a number of other times during the event about the new marketing approach for both the Lumia and Asha devices. He spoke about Nokia’s key target Market – 25 year olds:
“They’re brand savvy but not neccessarily brand loyal. They don’t remember when all the information in the world wasn’t at their fingertips. We aren’t going to reach these guys with advertising that looks like advertising.”
He then outlined an approach which includes a myriad of stunts, or “experiences’:
“We are going to invade cities with amazing everyday moments. DJ sets on sidewalks. People dressed as tiles running for busses.”
These are supported by a series of more traditional ads as well as ‘blipverts’ – two second teaser tv ads with no obvious branding. These went out during the X Factor on Saturday, prior to the Lumia launch to build expectation. Apparently, these were a huge success, attracting large numbers of visitors when they were placed on YouTube and Facebook.
Apart from a little scepticism about how appealing “brand savvy” 25 year olds will find people dressed as Nokia/Windows tiles running down the road, I really was impressed by all of the marketing plans on show. There is always a risk that stunts like these can look a little… false? (Yes, I’m looking at you, Microsoft). The blipverts look great and are a really clever and effective use of expensive advertising time.
The marketing has been well planned too. Apart from placing the blipverts before the Nokia World event, many of the print ads are already in stores. On my way back from the ExCeL I saw Lumia posters in the windows of phone stores at Westfield Stratford City.
Most importantly, it all feels like part of a single entity, like one voice speaking through multiple channels. Nokia are establishing a real personality and they seem to have the desire and ability to communicate it well.
We’ll soon see if Nokia can really make this work. From everything I have seen over the last couple of days, the fact that they have such a great infrastructure and a series of new devices which will certainly appeal to markets around the world where nokia already have a firm foothold, I’d say they have a very good chance of regaining their crown as the number one smartphone manufacturer. More importantly, they might get back a little soul.
Last Thursday Asad Dhunna and myself were invited along to the Moving Brands 13th birthday event. Along with the opportunity to look at some of the great work that they’ve been doing (and get a nosey around their offices), there was a great panel discussion on ‘Brands in a Moving World’. Panelists included Sean Krepp, Greg Johnson from HP Global Marketing, menswear designer Patrick Grant and Mat Heinl, MB’s creative director.
Asad has written a great blog about the debate which you can see here. Rather than repeat what he had to say, below is more of an extension or a reply to him which follows on from a comment I made on his original posting.
“…the holy grail for brands is to strike a good balance between your online and offline brand presence so that the interactions created are similar, if not the same for your customer.”
As Asad says, the most successful brands seem to couple great online and offline interactions. Those that will suceed in the digital arena are the ones that are blending their online and offline activities to create one seamless user journey. When I think of services that really make a difference to my day-to-day life, they’re the ones that are just there, as if by magic when I need them, integrated experiences that are simple to use and can be relied upon to deliver whatever they promise to without my having to expend any real effort.
I think that the bottom line is that ‘online/offline’ might be a dated way of thinking. When you go into a shop, you have any number of expectations for everything from customer service, atmosphere, price etc. based upon what you know of the store and the company that runs it. Your expectations of the in-store experience are intrinsically linked to the brand and both what you have experienced of the store in the past AND all of your other interactions with that brand, from the ad you saw on the tube to the word-of-mouth recommendations from your mates. This is all taken as given, so why do we treat the experience you have online differently?
The twitter feed, the experiential/PR/guerrilla marketing campaign and every part of the website must reinforce, build upon and deliver on the promises the brand has made. To differentiate between online and offline is to miss the point. Learning to be fluid in the way they interact with audiences, but consistent in the experience that they provide is one of the key ways that all brands must evolve in order to stay ahead as audience attention is split between the physical and the digital.
As a designer, my interest will inevitably stray towards the aesthetic, and I have already discussed in previous posts a world where brands can rely less and less upon consistency in their graphic branding, as often mentioned by Simon ‘the logo is dead’ Manchipp and a number of other speakers at the Brand Perfect Tour, such as Scott and Kon from Fjord. This forward thinking approach is central to the way that joined-up audience experiences will be created in the future.
A great discussion, thanks again to all at Moving brands for a great night. Photos from the night are here (by some amazing luck, I’m not in any of them!)
Last night myslef and Asad Dhunna went along to The Hospital Club for a D&AD Sharp’ner debate. Chaired by SomeOne’s Simon Manchipp, the theme of the talk was using creativity to ‘get people to give a shit’.
The video from the live stream is well worth a watch (here) for those that missed out on being there in person, featuring contributions from Richard Huntingdon (strategist at Saatchi and Saatchi), David Harris (of Wunderman), Sanky (AllofUs) Meirion Pritchard (Art Director at Wallpaper*) and Rasmus Bech Hansen (strategy director at Venturethree).
After some lively debate and a couple of near fist-fights, the general consensus seemed to be that there is a host of examples where creative thinking and campaigns have managed to change behaviour to make the world a better place, but that individuals and in turn global companies tend to be very short-termist in their thinking, missing the importance of trying to make a difference.
I think that the ability of the creative industries to affect behaviours is a given. My feeling is that what the creative industries do is to add value to the CSR initiatives of big companies. These firms can never be expected to act altruistically, handing over vast portions of their profits to charity or to fund social initiatives on the quiet. What they want are exciting and newsworthy projects that they can own, that they can wave in front of the world to show that they are committed to real change. I think that’s where creativity comes in to the equasion.
Like I say, there was a lot of great opinions being thrown around, if anyone has anything to add, make sure you get in touch.
Last night I caught this on BBC2 – awesome piece of animation, trailing BBC Radio 4′s serialisation of Love and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It’s by creative agency Devilfish, and you can see more of their work here.
Among a number of artirsts and designers that I have been obsessed with on and off over the last 15 or so years, I have always held the work of Richard Hamilton in particularly high esteem.
I came to his work as so many graphic designers become acquainted with the idea of design, through record sleeves. His contemporary Peter Blake was the gatekeeper if you will, Sgt. Pepper being the first LP I ever bought, at age 11. Following the beauty of Peter Blake’s masterpiece of cover art, Richard Hamilton’s cover of The Beatles next full-length effort stands as a rebuke – it’s stark white cover is the antithesis of the gaudy and decadant Pepper, but as lovely and absorbing none the less. The poster is even better, so many details to pick out amongst the myriad of photographs (which all seem to be out-takes), all put together so beautifully.
At school I really began to dig out his work and just spent hours staring at the spaces between the shapes. The power of negative space that Hamilton mastered is phenomenal – there is so much to learn there.
Second archive post from the Brand Perfect Tours ealier this year – as I slowly migrate posts from my old Blogger site.
In the second blog based on my notes from the Brand Perfect Tour last week, I’m going to give a brief summary of the talk by Simon Manchipp of SomeOne entitled ‘Creating Identity Systems to Allow for Flexible Branded Platforms that are recognizable With, or Without the Logo’.
Simon first talked about the death of the logo. The logo – once central to the idea of branding – is now just one of many tools which a brand must use to communicate with customers. “When I first started in branding, it was easy. You only had to three things to play around with – logo, color and typeface. A few years later you now have an almost infinite number of channels to worry about.”
Simon talked for some time about the irrelevance of the logo in the digital age, highlighting the futility of the familiar ‘Design a new logo’ brief. “The thing is, that no-one likes new logos. People hate logos – the press will moan about how much they cost and say that they look like Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob. Staff hate logos – they invariably say that they loved the old logo and feel that they should have been consulted before it was changed. Business hates new logos – new logos worry business, they imply that something has changed – that everything is not as stable as it might be.”
“There are other problems with logos – you cannot hope to delete old ones, and they just don’t work when reproduced very small.” This probably reflect the experience of many designers – in fact, I have often received logo artwork from a client only to check and find out that it’s not the logo being used on the company website. As we move further and further from print, we lose control of all the potential versions of a logo that will inevitably be used. This echoes talks by others during the day – specifically that by Scott and Kon of Fjord – that the brand book has outlived it’s use. There will always be some shady part of the web where someone is referring to your company and using an old logo.
The crux of Simon’s talk can be summarised in this quote: “Logos just don’t tell you anything.” A logo is just a visual reference for a set of behaviours and values which must influence everything that a company does.
As designers, we have spent so long tied to the importance the idea of ‘branding’ and ‘identity’ as a set of visual codes which make up a the recognizable face of a company that maybe it’s been forgotten that the only thing that gives a logo it’s power are the behaviours and actions which it stands for. As brands seek representation on an ever-growing number of digital interfaces, that relationship is changing, with the graphic becoming only a part of what users recognize and expect from a brand. Here the logo is just one part of what SomeOne would call a ‘BrandWorld’ – the all-encompassing environment that the brand lives in, including tone, behavior and context. Scott and Kon call this the ‘Brand DNA’ – part visual but also taking into account behavior, tone and performance.
The Brand Perfect Tour had much more to offer than I have managed to summarise here – but I hope you get some idea of at least these two talks. I believe that the tour returns to London later in the year – you’d do well to get yourself a ticket.
(As usual – apologies for any paraphrasing, it’s more my intention to give an idea of the direction of the talk than to reproduce any actual quotes. As such, any quotes may be to a greater or lesser extent fictional!)
