Hasta La Ideas

The Japanese counterpart to the European coat of arms is the mon, also called kamon as relating to specific families. Several design elements distinguish mon from the coat of arms: The former are typically contained within a circle, tend to have axial or rotational symmetry, and rely more on abstract geometric shapes than realistic reproductions of real-world items.

Interestingly, mon are also monochromatic, meaning if you painted a particular family’s symbol in black or red, they were both recognized as the same thing. In Europe, if your lord’s banner was a red cross on a white background, and you showed up with a blue cross on a yellow background, you were pretty much asking for a crossbow bolt in the face.

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A Coat of Arms, also referred to (with varying degrees of accuracy) as a blazon, a family crest or heraldic design, is a neat example of an early design solution to a pressing problem of the time. The problem was that in the 1100s, European feudal lords doing battle with one another needed a way to visually distinguish their troops on the field. Watch a scene from Braveheart, or imagine the Rams and the Patriots going at it while wearing their street clothes, and you get an idea of what chaos pre-graphic-design battle must have been.

The solution was to paint shields and banners with graphic patterns unique to the house that bore them. I always wondered if the development of these patterns were cooked up in-house or outsourced to a local artisan, in an early example of a graphic design consultancy; if the latter, I’d have loved to sit in on that meeting. (“If it please milord, the black stripes represent the cultural manifestation of our lands, and the white circles are there because I’ve gotten really good at drawing white circles.”)

Over time the symbols grew increasingly more ornate, rather like our current-day computer renderings advancing in pixel resolution. If two families married, their symbols could be combined, like this:

As that trend continued, the graphics got more complicated:

Eventually what was once a series of boxes, stripes and geometric shapes came to encompass flora, fauna and artistic decorations all representing characteristics of the house. They also became more democratic, as commoners and even individuals began to devise their own.

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Forget the old Red, White and Blue: America is to sell itself to the world via a multicoloured, ‘percolating’ logo by The Brand Union, launched yesterday

Back in 2001, the Bush Administration famously brought in JWT’s Charlotte Beers on a mission to sell America to the world. Bush and Beers may have departed the political scene, but yesterday saw the launch of a scheme to do just that, Brand USA.

Whereas Beers was tasked with the ambitious brief of burnishing, or even rehabilitating, the image of America abroad, Brand USA has more modest aims – boosting overseas visitor numbers in the country’s first national co-ordinated travel and tourism effort. It is the new name for the US Corporation for Travel Promotion, a public-private partnership which itself was formed in 2009 with a mission to ‘promote increased foreign leisure, business and scholarly travel to the US’.

The Brand Union, working with ad agency JWT, was asked to come up with a new name and identity for the organisation. According to the press material, the new design “captures the spirit of the United States: Authentic. Optimistic. Unexpected. Inclusive. Endless Possibilities. It features an arrangement of dots joining together to compose the letters USA. The dots and their varied colour scheme are meant to represent the diversity of people and experiences that can be found in the United States. To further emphasise that there is no single, definitive United States, the identity is not tied to a single palette and can be appear in a range of color schemes.”

According to Brand USA, “The Brand USA logo was designed to capture the American spirit and create a fresh new brand identity that welcomes the world to come experience the boundless possibilities in America. It is not about patriotism, flag waving or chest beating. It is meant to be welcoming, unexpected and inclusive. It celebrates the idea that no one thing defines the USA – but that each visitor interaction and each experience helps create the distinctly dynamic fabric of the American experience.”

The Brand Union’s Wally Krantz has described the mark as a “percolating” image: in animated form, multicoloured dots to resolve the letters USA (you can see it in motion in a rather cheesy promotional video here). “We wanted to find a logo that was both aspirational and true to the heart of the country; the use of a percolating image encapsulates the energy and optimism that draws people to the United States,” Krantz has said. The logo is used with the URL of dicoveramerica.com, the main Brand USA website.

JWT is to create an ad campaign featuring the identity which will launch in January.

First impressions? No red, white and blue, which would have been the obvious choice. As stated at the launch, those involved were conscious of avoiding anything that could be seen as too “flag-waving” and instead have attempted to concentrate on America’s diversity – of environment, of opportunity, of potential experiences for visitors. America has always meant different things to different people and, of course, is founded on the notion of the diverse ‘poor and huddled masses’ coming together to form a new nation, so the adaptive nature of the mark seems logical. Many, I’m sure, will argue that the country’s traditional colours are so closely associated with it that it seems odd not to include them, however. Perhaps a red, white and blue version may yet emerge? America has so many powerful and instantly recognisable visual icons – stars and stripes, the statue of liberty, the eagle – that it does seem strange to abandon them all for a project of this nature in favour of something nebulous.

As with all identity schemes, we’ll have to see how it looks when applied across a wide variety of media before we can really judge how effective it may prove to be. Here it is applied to the launch brochure in a single colour:

It’s distinctive and highly adaptable which should mean that JWT will find it easy to work with on the campaign elements, which is vital for such a scheme. As we get more examples of it in use, we will follow up.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the interesting comments so far. As an experiment, and given the contentious nature of the subject matter here, I’m going to trial a new comment policy on this post. We’re going to moderate comments for quality. Only comments that CR feel contribute to the debate in some thoughtful, insightful, funny or otherwise valid way will be published. It’s shit! or Fail! will not get through. It’s an experiment, let’s see what happens. Afterwards, we’ll ask for feedback

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

‘My three year-old could’ve done that’: Pierre Soulages’ poster for Munich 1972 (left) and Howard Hodgkin’s poster for the London 2012 Olympics (right)

The 2012 Olympics artists’ posters come from a fine tradition of involving the visual arts in the Games, but they have left designers and illustrators feeling further frustrated and excluded

First, some context. For the 1972 Games (for many designers the ultimate Olympics for visual expression) the organising committee decided to produce a series of posters to “represent the intertwining of sports and art worldwide”. This Artists series was to be in addition to the more functional Sports and Culture poster series produced under the direction of Otl Aicher’s team. In collaboration with a publisher, 28 artists produced images for the series which were turned into posters for sale. The series was successful, generating over 2m Deutschmarks for the Organising Committee (more here).

Munich poster by Horst Antes

The London 2012 posters are attempting to revive this “artistic tradition”, a decision for which LOCOG should be applauded, but this context hasn’t been made very clear. Commenter simondk summarised the issue on our post announcing the posters “Perhaps the problem here is the description of these as ‘Posters’. If they had been titled as ‘Prints’ taken from works of art inspired by the Olympics and Paralympics, then I suspect they could be seen for what they are – a series of individual creative responses to the events with no purpose other than to communicate that artist’s emotional response, and perhaps then be criticised on the basis of their artistic merit.
 By calling them Posters, the Olympic Organising Committee puts them into a more commercial arena in my mind, where some of those parameters we are all familiar with come into play – communication objectives, visual messaging and an understanding of the audience to name but a few – and to my mind, it is here where these fail. I can admire and respect them as works of art, but I cannot see how they work as posters for the Olympics.”

The artists were given a brief which “encouraged them to celebrate the Games coming to London and to look at the values of the Olympic or Paralympic Games”. The responses are just as varied and at times obtuse as those of the Munich artists. What, for example, would today’s blog commenters have made of Hans Hartung’s 1972 response (above)?

Or that of Serge Poliakoff?

Max Bill?

Josef Albers?

Do they represent Munich? Do they directly depict Olympic events? No, because they weren’t asked to. There were other posters for that purpose.

And it wasn’t just for the Munich games that artists were encouraged to produce imagery. Over the past three years the Century of Olympic Posters exhibition has been touring the UK providing further examples of the sometime controversial intersection of art and sport. Here, for example, is Per Arnoldi’s poster for the 1996 Paralympics – anyone else find the misshapen rings a clumsily offensive metaphor for the disabled athletes?

And what about this poster for the Montreal games? Does it say ‘Montreal’ to you? Or Yong Seung-Choon’s spectacular Seoul poster?

(Have a look here for a complete list of the posters featured in the exhibition)

In commissioning contemporary artists to respond to the upcoming games, LOCOG has continued a tradition of longstanding: the eclectic nature of the responses and their varied quality are an inevitable part of that tradition. It’s just the way projects of this nature work: there will be good work, bad work and indiffererent work.

Amongst the design community there has been the suggestion that, had designers and illustrators been invited to respond to the same brief, the resulting images would have been a significant improvement on the artists’ efforts. I’m not sure there is much evidence of that. And I’m sure that had, say Peter Saville or Neville Brody been invited to design a poster commenters on here would have been queueing up to tear their work apart.

In my experience, designers and illustrators work best when responding to a tight brief or solving a visual problem. Give them as open a brief as the 2012 artists had and the results will be just as mixed. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the response to the Designers for Japan effort or LDF’s London Posters show.

Looking at the 2012 posters I can see some direct parallels with design poster projects I have been involved in. You have the works that virtually ignore the brief and just quote from existing practice (you might say Bridget Riley falls into this trap in the Olympics series).

The works that are more about the artist/designer themselves than the project theme (Tracey Emin).

And those that cause you to think, ‘no, sorry, I have no idea where this is coming from’ (Gary Hume?)

Out of every dozen or so, there will perhaps be two or three standouts – no more. In terms of the Olympics posters, those standouts for me would be Sarah Morris’s re-imagining of Big Ben,

Martin Creed’s riff on the winner’s podium

and Howard Hodgkin’s joyous Swimming.

But that’s an entirely subjective choice, as any response to this project will surely be.

Where I think the frustration for our readership comes in is that this is a high profile visual Olympics-related project from which they have been excluded. And one to which they feel eminently suited.

This comes on top of widespread disappointment (outrage even) over the logo, typeface and mascots, followed by the incredibly dreary ticketing advertising campaign. Our readership is itching to get involved in producing work for the Olympics that, in their eyes, will show off the best of what UK visual communications has to offer. Will they get the chance?

There is a whole raft of 2012 visual material to come but LOCOG has so far inspired little confidence that it possesses the ability to buy work that will blow us all away (the single ray of hope having been provided by Von’s Paralympic posters for McCann). It’s not been for a lack of trying from those involved. Sources close to 2012 have told CR about numerous projects involving leading designers and illustrators that were kyboshed by the client in favour of banal alternatives. Perhaps the problem dates back to the logo: LOCOG was brave to buy that piece of work, whatever you think of it aesthetically. And look where it got them. The fear is that, following the outcry over these artists’ posters, on top of that surrounding the logo, a mixture of fear of adverse public reaction and a lack of clear creative direction will result in an already timorous LOCOG shying away from anything the least bit adventurous in future.

Instead of providing a vehicle to celebrate our creative industries, there is a very real danger that the 2012 Games will forever be remembered by the visual communications community as a missed opportunity of truly Olympian proportions.

Related content
See our original post on the Olympics posters here

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

As one commenter pointed out in our post on the newspaper designed for Occupy London, the visual material of protest is often rooted in the means of production available. Reflective of the fact that modern movements are organised online and on-screen, freetoprotest.org aims to offer graphic support to a host of different causes…

Launched today, Free to Protest supplies visual material for protest marches and demonstrations. Visitors to freetoprotest.org can select a particular movement or cause from a drop down menu (at the moment it features only the Occupy movement) and from there choose from a range of slogans set in 12 different coloured discs. Click on one of the 192 options and it downloads as a PDF, which can be printed off to make badges, signs, t-shirts or posters.

As a resource, it’s simple, quick to use and will benefit those without the skills or equipment to create bold graphics. Of course, effective protest depends upon good organisation and the distribution of a clear message, so designers have a vital role to play in the process.

But protesters have always found ways to create striking imagery without the hand of the designer. Kristopher Rae’s short film of the sheer range of placards and signs on display in New York’s Foley Square in October is testament to that.

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.