Hasta La Ideas

How does your pay measure up? Recruitment consultancy Major Players has conducted a creative industry salary survey on design and creative jobs, both permanent and freelance

The survey, Major Players say, is based on 2,000 completed online responses. Participants were asked for their job title, what they were earning, whether their take home pay had risen in the last year, and also their opinions. Using the data collected and, Major Players say, their own expertise, the consultancy has put together the following guidelines on current UK pay levels:

The full survey can be found here

Designers Nan Na Hvass and Sofie Hannibal have created a paintbox-themed visual identity for The Conference, a creative festival taking place in Malmö this summer.

Organised by Media Evolution, The Conference’s five-day programme includes two days of talks and a series of events exploring new technologies, creativity and human behaviour.

Hvass & Hannibal were asked to communicate the “human” element of the event and have designed a cheerful system using hand painted patterns and brightly coloured splashes of paint. The splashes have been applied to advertising, the event website and portraits of speakers.

“We wanted the design to signify a friendly, open, warm atmosphere,” explains Hvass. “The concept evolved around the fact that we knew we would incorporate a lot of photographs and especially portraits of all the speakers, so the idea was to create something that would work with photographs and be layered on top of portraits in varying ways, that would still be recognisable for the identity as a whole,” she explains.

Speaker portraits were generated online, but Hvass & Hannibal also set up a real photo booth in which visitors could pose with painted pieces of card and upload photos of themselves to Instagram.

“The portrait generator was initially an idea for creating a toolbox for us to handle all the different portraits that would be going on the website, so that we could create a unifying theme that would make the photos look good together instead of just being a collection of random photographs,” says Hvass. “For the launch of the website, we decided to make an analogue portrait generator…as a fun way to create a bit of social media interaction,” she adds.

Another key element of the identity system is the word The, which appears in bold italics on all communications. The conference was known in previous years as The Conference by Media Evolution, but Hvass & Hannibal shortened the name at the request of director Martin Thörnkvist, who felt it was “long and confusing”.

“When he saw one of our sketches in which we had put emphasis on and scaled up the word ‘THE’, he really liked it, and we decided that this was the way to go…to turn the disadvantage of the generic name into an advantage,” says Hvass.

Hvass & Hannibal designed The Conference website with Swedish studio Södra Esplanaden. The pair are also designing graphics for the event and a website promoting the conference’s host city and its residents.

“Another important part of the brief was to create awareness of how absolutely amazing a city Malmö is, which surprisingly few people know. This of course led to the idea of saying ‘The Malmö’, which then resulted in  themalmo.com — a site that tells stories of people and places in the city,” says Hvass.

Since September last year, an anonymous duo at Ohio’s Columbus College of Art and Design has been transforming chalk boards into typographic artworks under the cover of darkness. We spoke to the pair, known as Dangerdust, about their creative acts of campus vandalism…

Both members of Dangerdust study advertising and graphic design at CCAD. Each week, the students work through the night to decorate a black board with an inspirational quote about life, design or creativity. Those quoted so far include Nelson Mandela, Stefan Sagmeister and Ellen Lupton, and Dangerdust often draw detailed portraits of the speakers alongside their words of wisdom.

The project started as a way to relax in between course work, but Dangerdust’s art has since been viewed more than 9,000 times on Behance and the pair plan to release a new design each week for the rest of the school year.

“Working on class assignments all year can become tiring, and this was an opportunity to create work just for the fun of it,” they say. “We wanted to get away from the computer and do something that made us feel physically tired at the end of the day. We had never used chalk as a medium before we started…it was just something that was accessible, cheap and if we messed up we could always wipe away,” they add.

Each board takes between four and eleven hours to complete and requires careful planning and sketching, say Dangerdust.”Our process usually starts the night before. We spend a long time agreeing what quote we want to use. After that, we design the board by hand and eventually on the computer. [Then] we sneak into school…wipe last week’s board off and print any references we need. We grid it out, sketch it out and slowly build up the chalk, and after we think we’ve got it, we’ll wheel it out and spend a good thirty minutes squinting at it from all angles until we’re sure we’re done,” they explain.

While some might feel sad about having to wipe away hours of hard work, Dangerdust say starting anew each week is refreshing. “We love to see what we can do next. What’s really fun is that while we are erasing the board, sometimes we can see shadows of chalk from a totally different one, [which] gives the board more meaning to us.”

It’s a long and tiring process, but Dangerdust say creating each board is cathartic – and both students say the response to their designs around campus has been “wonderful”.

“We’ve always loved to work with our hands…it gives us great satisfaction to manipulate something as ordinary as a stick of chalk into something extraordinary.”

See the full set of designs here.

A lunar-themed design for Texas band Reckless Kelly’s album Long Night Moon was named Best Record Package at the 56th Grammy Awards last night, beating sleeve designs for David Bowie, Jay-Z and Metallica.

The packaging for Long Night Moon was designed by sisters Sarah and Shauna Dodds, founders of Austin-based Backstage Design Studios. It comes with a UV light which can be used to reveal hidden codes printed in glow-in-the-dark invisible ink, and a 12-panel poster insert featuring a lunar map surrounded by moons, each representing the moon phase on the night of a significant date in the making of the album or the band’s history.

Stars dotted around the artwork represent various constellations, while moons on the back cover depict lunar phases on the date each track was written. Hidden codes include the chords used in each track and a story made up of selected lyrics from each song. Backstage Design Studios also received a Grammy nomination for their circus-themed packaging for Reckless Kelly’s previous album, Good Luck & True Love – you can see images and read more about the making of Long Night Moon on the studio’s website.

Also nominated was Brian Grunert and Annie Stoll‘s design for New York band Geneseo’s album, Automatic Music Can be Fun, created with band members Zac Decamp and Mike Browne. As well as some striking black and white imagery, the fold-out packaging features lyrics printed underneath scratch-off material. Certain words from each track were left uncovered, making a poem, and Decamp and Browne created a bonus track out of the uncovered words. To download the track, users had to scratch to reveal clues hidden in the packaging:

Fellow nominee Brian Roettinger also concealed lyrics under scratch-off material in packaging for Jay-Z’s album, Magna Carta…Holy Grail. The album is housed in a transparent slip case which contains three four page spreads and a 28-page photo booklet featuring images of the artist. The artwork was unveiled at Salisbury Cathedral in July last year, where the album was placed in a glass case alongside the real Magna Carta. A bold marketing move from Jay-Z – and a puzzling one from the Cathedral.

Jonathan Barnbrook’s artwork for Bowie album The Next Day received a nomination, too – you can read about the concept for the album’s design here and view more images of the packaging on Virus Fonts’ website (packaging uses Virus’ Doctrine typeface).

The final nomination was Bruce Duckworth, Sarah Moffat, Brian Steele & David Turner’s black, white and red design for the sound track to Metallica’s Through the Never tour film. The cover symbol uses the lightning bolt ‘M’ from the band’s original logo, drawn by lead singer James Hetfield:

TurnerDuckworth also designed the identity for Metallica’s previous album, Death Magnetic, and the promotional material for the Through the Never Tour.

Best Boxed/Special Limited Edition Package

Two out of the Grammy’s 78 awards categories celebrate music packaging – the second, for the best boxed or special limited edition package, was awarded to Simon Earith and James Musgrave for their deluxe edition of Wings’ 1976 album Wings Over America.

It’s certainly packed full of content, with an 80-page book of drawings by artist Humphrey Ocean, a 60-page photographic journal documenting the ’76 tour, a 136-page replica tour book and a 112-page book featuring editorial by David Fricke. See each item in detail in an unboxing video here:

Also nominated was Ross Stirling’s deluxe edition of Mumford & Sons album, The Road to Red Rocks, which comes in a gold foil-embossed case housing a 96-page book with interviews and footage from the show:

Charles Dooher and Scott Sandler’s artwork for the deluxe box set of Rolling Stones album, The Brussels Affair, which includes a watch, a lithograph signed by Mr Jagger and a book containing rare and unseen images from the 1973 tour:

A box set for Mayer Hawthorne album How Do You Do, featuring 12 7″ vinyls in individual photographic sleeves and accompanying plastic display sheet:

And my favourite, art director Masaki Koike’s design for The Smith Tapes – a limited edition collection unheard interviews with musicians, artists and cultural figures from the 1970s which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign. Each disc is housed in an individual case with a retro graphic cover and the box set comes with a cassette-shaped USB stick and exclusive print:

You can see more images on Koike‘s website or read more about the project at thesmithtapes.com

While each of the winning designs are very different, there are some similarities: winners and nominees in the Best Record Package category all feature either an interactive element or monochrome cover design. Koike’s work for the Smith Tapes is the most visually striking in the deluxe and limited edition category, but the Wings box set isn’t a particularly surprising winner given the wealth of content and behind the scenes footage included in the sold out package.

To see last year’s winning designs or the full list of Grammy categories, click here.

Squarespace’s $10 logo service has caused outrage among the design community on Twitter. But, Tom Actman argues, good designers should not be worried…

I saw the Squarespace Logo hullabaloo explode yesterday, but quickly tried to distance myself from it. This type of tech news story has, in social media terms, a two day lifespan; something that quickly annoys the majority until the next witch hunt begins on someone or something else.

In this instance, I felt that anyone marginally threatened by an online logo generator was likely in the wrong game. That certainly wasn’t me, so I was happy to move on.

But then I started thinking about the bigger problem here, and that unfortunately is designers themselves. Well respected creatives were openly expressing their disappointment of the news, as though Squarespace had let them down; as though Squarespace owed them something.

If you stand back to think about what Squarespace (and the Logo service) is, they’re under no obligation to seek the approval of anyone – they can do what they like, and have done. And good on them for it, too.

The issue for many it seems is that this new service cheapens their own offering, or somewhat undermines their own skills. Neither are the case. McDonald’s can comfortably exist alongside Michelin starred restaurant The Fat Duck. They both offer a culinary solution, but they’re not in competition with each other, or importantly, trying to be.

Squarespace’s Logo service isn’t in competition with the work of good designers. It’s merely a (pretty good) creative tool to help those visualise their own ideas.

Did Squarespace’s online web development tool put thousands of digital agencies out of business? A resounding no. And the same too applies to Squarespace Logo. This service after all operates in the $10 logo design market; a space hopefully very few designers are working in.

We’re in the time of the entrepreneur and everyone has a business idea. Some people have financial backing to bring their plans to life, and others don’t. Squarespace Logo exists for those who likely need a quick solution, or don’t yet have the budget to hire an experienced designer.

An important point that many seem to be missing is that this new service is actually getting design out in the open again. Branding is being talked about, better understood and appreciated.

I have two hopes for the outcome of this story (and people using Squarespace Logo):

1. The market gets saturated with bland and familiar logos, driving good clients towards great designers for better stand out.

2. Designers stop feeling insecure about those who are trying to move the industry forward.

I would ask that good designers continue to focus on doing brilliant work for brilliant clients, whilst at the same time better educating people in the value of design. There’s proven ROI in what we do, so look forwards to developing a service people can’t avoid using.

Clipart didn’t threaten the future of talented designers and agencies, and nor will Squarespace Logo. The next time such a story floods into your timeline, ignore it and concentrate on being a better designer.

Tom Actman co-founded design agency Mat Dolphin in 2009. See matdolphin.com. With Phil Cook he wrote about the agency’s experience of a low-cost logo design service in The £25 Logo, published on CR in 2012. Squarespace’s Anthony Casalena introduces the new Logo product at blog.squarespace.com.