RICHARD HAMILTON

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.

And then his absolute mastery of pop-art collage. His ability to work with everyday ephemera to create beautifully intricate and detailed pastiches of frantically busy, yet totally vapid modern existance. Among the articles and LP covers, ticket stubs and polaroids on the wall of my studio are a number of postcards of Hamilton’s work – ‘Just What is It that Makes Todays Homes So Different, So Appeaing?’, “Interior” and his glorious, magnificent political works including “The Citizen” and “The State” – following which I strongly recommend you read this article by the Guardian’s Johnathan Jones: “Jesus in Jail: Richard Hamilton’s Political Works”

I strongly urge anyone not really familiar with his work to seek it out. It is beyond compare.

THAT WAS… PARIS

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SIMON MANCHIPP AT BRAND PERFECT (ARCHIVE POST)

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!)

BRAND PERFECT TOUR (ARCHIVE POST)

This is now quite old, but it’s worth a re-post in light of the above video being recently released by the people at BrandPerfect.

Last Wednesday was the London leg of the Brand Perfect Tour, which had some really fascinating talks by the likes of Scott Ewings and Kon Papagiannopolous from Fjord, Simon Manchipp of SomeOne, Neil Christie from W+K and Marina Willer from Wolff Ollins, amongst others.

I can’t hope to go into every talk in the depth that each deserved – the morning flew by in a haze of great ideas and fantastic soundbites – but in this post I’ll focus on just the talk by Fjord’s Scott Ewings and Kon Papagiannopolous and later this week on one by Simon Manchipp of SomeOne.

Scott and Kon’s talk, ‘Where the Brand Breaks’ discussed the issues of branding across multiple digital channels. The primary point made by Scott showed the impossibility of the task facing designers in the new digital world – AT&T now recognise more connected ‘smart’ devices than connected humans. This being the case, argued Scott, designers can’t stress the technology, they need to learn to design for context.

Part of this is killing the brandbook – the ‘logo monolith’, with rigid colour, font and usage guidelines is now missing the point. In the digital space, brand guidelines need to be much looser to allow designers to play with the brand within the context of use.

“Brands that travel well in the digital space play to the user’s desire to be in control ,” said Kon, who referenced a number of brands for whom traditional graphic branding was becoming less important than the way they behave. One example is Amazon, whose visual branding takes up less and less of their website, but have made the ‘1-click purchase’ system inherent in all of their customer interaction, giving the brand a consistency above the need for invasive branding.

Three main strands were identified which might go to make up a brand’s DNA –what makes it uniquely identifiable in the digital world. These were:

• Appearance – the visual consistency of the brand. Far from being a rigid identity defined by a set of brand guidelines which can’t hope to encompass all possible digital platforms, the appearance of the brand must be fluid and scalable

• Behaviour – unique ways in which the brand behaves or interacts with consumers in the context of consumption

• Presentation –  the performance, language and tone of the brand should be consistent

Although each of these elements require consistency to aid recognition and the building of trust, consistency in terms of slavish adherence to brand guidelines is not going to help a brand to deliver on the specifics of their messaging. To do this, brands must consider the context in which their messages are consumed, building experiences that take into account the audience’s immediate situation.

Fantastic stuff,  I was really struggling to take down all the important points as they came up so apologies for any paraphrasing here! More to come from last Wednesday as I decipher my frantic scribbles.

BATTLES – ICE CREAM VIDEO BY CANADA (ARCHIVE POST)

It’s not often that I’m in love with a music video as much as the music, even my favourite videos don’t really do the music justice, but this for the new Battles single ‘Ice Cream’ is occupying alot of my time. It’s by Canada and suits the track perfectly – a sort of surreal video collage. I guess it helps that you can’t really make out any of the lyrics to Battles’ songs, so there’s no basis for any sort of literal interpretation of the song. Below are some of my favourite bits: