David Bauer, Michael Ko et Sara Shin nous présente leur dernière création pour BL:ND appelée “Fail Again, Fail Better”. Reprenant l’univers des agences de créations, et soulignant les difficultés de répondre aux exigences des clients, voici cette vidéo d’animation très ludique.
Copyright Fubiz™ – Suivez nous sur Twitter et Facebook
Growing numbers of designers are refusing to pitch for work. Not just unpaid pitches, any pitch at all. Pitching, they say, is bad for designers, bad for clients and produces bad work. They have a point
On Saturday I chaired a Q&A session with Stefan Sagmeister at the Cheltenham Design Festival. During our discussion, he revealed that his studio never pitches for work. ‘That’s all very well for a big name like Stefan Sagmeister’, you might think, ‘what about the rest of us?’ But Sagmeister revealed that refusing to pitch for work is becoming more and more common in the US. And there are sound reasons for doing so.
Sagmeister’s argument, and one that is shared by many, is that the pitch process is bad for designers, clients and the work. The work that usually ends up winning, he says, is not necessarily the best solution for the client but the best response to the brief in the pitch. Such briefs typically ask work to respond to a list of criteria: an identity must be ‘dynamic’, say, or reference ‘diversity’. So the respondents engage in a box-ticking exercise to address these criteria and the winner is the one that does it best.
Sagmeister cited the example of his studio’s Casa da Musica identity (above), which was the result of a direct commission. If it had come through a pitch, he said, he would never have been able to spend time with the client and fully understand the project and the resultant work would have been very different.
And then there is the problem of the pitch team versus the team that actually does the work. Larger design consultancies often put their best people on pitch teams, but when the actual work gets done, it’s not the A team but the B team that the client finds themselves dealing with. The A team are off pitching for more work. All this pitching is very expensive, meaning that a consultancy’s existing clients end up subsidising its search for new ones.
Given the choice, no doubt all designers would happily give up the tiresome and dispiriting business of pitching, even when they get paid for it, but what’s the alternative? An article by Blair Enns (who also wrote The Win Without Pitching Manifesto) for the AIGA website suggests a combination of ‘phased engagements’, opt-out clauses, money-back guarantees and case studies.
Clients can be re-assured, it says by offering them an alternative to total commitment in the first stage of a project. Instead, agree to carry out an initial phase (say, research) for a proportion of the total budget: after this, the client can opt out of any further engagement. You might even offer a money-back guarantee, it suggests somewhat optimistically.
Finally, the piece argues, you need to show how you work and how that process has delivered for clients in the past. “Take your defined process (that four or five step model on your website with the interlocking circles and the steps that all start with the same letter – usually ‘D’) and frame your case studies around it. When you show three different case studies that all use the same approach to problem solving the client will infer that little variability in process equals little variability in outcomes.”
But this article was written in 2005: designers complaining about and seeking relief from pitching, especially free pitching, is probably as old as design itself. And of course not all work comes in this way. But what is new is that buying design via competitions has become much more of an issue thanks to sites such as 99designs.com. In order for designers to prove their worth in the face of this potentially hugely disruptive new model, perhaps the only way is to avoid contest-based mechanisms of acquiring work altogether.
Could there ever be a future where designers can ditch the pitch for good or is that just hopelessly wishful thinking?
Have any readers employed methods similar to those proposed in the AIGA piece? Or other alternative ways of working?
And does anyone think that pitches are actually the best way for design work to be commissioned?
What are the conditions needed for a good pitch process? After all, in our Top 20 Logos issue last year, the vast majority of the great marks featured came about through some form of competition.
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
Since launching our iPad edition earlier this month, we’ve continued to add plenty of new CR iPad-only content, including a feature on photographer Roger Ballen, a new short film soundtracked by Radium Audio, a closer look at the work of Pick Me Up illustrators Kristjana Williams, and Michael Kirkham, and an intricate animation, inspired by a 16th century Dutch painting.
Amongst our new additions to the April iPad edition, we take a look inside the pages of Woodcut, a new publication collecting together the large-scale prints of Bryan Nash Gill.
Short film, Micro Empire, visits the world of the microscopic, soundtracked by sound design studio Radium Audio.
Rob and Nick Carter bring a 16th century Dutch painting to life in painstaking detail, in an animation that took almost 4,000 hours to complete.
Quayola and Memo have created an intricate, generative animation for the Cultural Olympiad programme at the National Media Museum.
Colin Buttimer looks at the latest release from Second Language, which includes a CD, cassette and a beautifully illustrated accompanying book. Colin will be contributing to the iPad each month, and you can read more from him over at Hard Format, a site dedicated to exploring music design and packaging.
Illustrator Michael Kirkham talks us through some of his most significant pieces of work to date, including a pop-up forest book.
And in an iPad-only feature, we catch up with Roger Ballen by phone from Johannesburg, to discuss his first major UK exhibition, and his work in general.
We also preview some of the original works from Andy Rementer’s solo exhibition, at the Ship of Fools gallery in the Netherlands.
And we look in detail at Russell Bell’s meticulous technical illustrations and maps.
The app can be downloaded from here, and includes a free sample issue. Expect more updates throughout April, and a brand new issue of the iPad app in May.
Fans of the nation’s most divisive savoury spread will be able to “toast” the Queen’s 60th year at the helm by buying a special edition jar of the brown stuff…
The limited edition Marmite packaging eschews the brand’s usual yellow white and red label in favour of the red white and blue colours of the Union Jack. The illustration of a marmite and spoon on the front of the label has been replaced by a crown and brand name itself has been changed to Ma’amite. The jar also features a red, rather than the usual yellow, lid.
“We wanted to pay a fitting tribute to the Queen – from one British institution to another,” explains Unilever’s marketing manager Nicola Waymark of the limited edition packaging.
Ma’amite is on sale at all good high street retailers including Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose. It will also be available from marmiteshop.co.uk from next Monday (April 30).
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
In the third of our series of extracts from new book, 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, the authors look at ‘the vernacular’…
#92 The vernacular
The Italian Renaissance was prompted by a rediscovery of the art of Greek and Roman antiquity. Ever since, artists have been mining the past for sources of inspiration. One genre is often overlooked: ubiquitous artefacts, done by local artists, that are so modest they do not attract attention. Impervious to nostalgia, they remain practically invisible until someone begins to collect them.
In the early 1970s, architect Robert Venturi took his Yale University students to Las Vegas to study the urban forms of that typically American phenomenon, the strip mall. They discovered the ‘forgotten symbolism’ of the commercial structures along the main highway, and introduced in the process the idea that vernacular designs can be beautiful – even the marquees and signposts advertising cheap motels and gambling halls. His 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas, turned the study of vernacular forms into a trendy academic topic.
Spread from Learning from Las Vegas showing casinos, from the Contemporary Art Consortium @ the IFA website (not featured in 100 Ideas)
From then on, in the United States, vernacular designs were no longer safe from the scrutiny of graduate students, social anthropologists and collectors. Treasure hunters prowled flea markets looking for once-commonplace objects, from gas-station enamel signs to cardboard store mannequins. The distinctive typographical features and design particularities of these humble commercial articles eventually found their way into the mainstream visual vocabulary.
In New York, Tibor Kalman was their enlightened champion. In Minneapolis, Charles S. Anderson embraced the working-class aesthetic of naive industrial logotypes and made it his own. In the middle of Delaware, House Industries, a type foundry, has gathered an impressive collection of calligraphic fonts from labels, posters, cans, boxes and architectural renderings of yore.
Outside the United States, vernacular designs are just beginning to be exploited. Until now, innovations and new technologies, not cultural archaeology, were engines of creativity for young designers. But recently, avant-garde practitioners in France, Belgium and Germany have discovered homespun treasures, some hiding in plain sight. Police badges, artless crests, naive logos and industrial signs are favourite visual references of the award-winning Flanders team Randoald Sabbe and Jan W. Heespel. Their posters promoting cultural events make provocative use of forgotten graphic artefacts.
Also trendy today are two-colour posters and flyers in basic red and blue, their typographical signature reminiscent of cheap playbills from the 1940s. Florian Lamm in Leipzig, Germany, and Vincent Perrottet in Chaumont, France, are turning vernacular reproduction techniques, such as Ben-Day dots (enlarged screened patterns), blurry halftone reproductions, split fountain colour printing, and new artworks inked on top of recycled posters, into sophisticated aesthetic statements.
Infatuation with arcane forms of advertising art is no longer restricted to a few connoisseurs. But French cheese labels, Irish road signs, cigarette packs from the USSR, German candy wrappers, Greek restaurant menus and cigar boxes from Spain have yet to release the forgotten symbolism of their graphic codes.
This essay is taken from 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, published by Laurence King; £19.95 and available from laurenceking.com. Two other extracts from the book have also been published on the CR blog – the chapter on the Big Book Look of the 1950s (here) and the use of ‘shadow play’ (here).
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement
The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.
Last week I was a judge on the Magazine and Newspaper Design category for this year’s D&AD awards. Our jury gave out one Yellow Pencil, to Bloomberg Businessweek’s special issue marking the death of Steve Jobs. Here’s why I thought it deserved the award.
When the death of Steve Jobs was announced, an issue of US news weekly Bloomberg Businessweek was, reportedly, hours from going to press. Recognising what a major story this was, and setting aside the daunting ramifications for all involved, the magazine pulled its planned issue and decided instead to devote an entire issue to Jobs. If you want a convincing argument for why printed magazines still have a role, the resulting issue provides it. Quite simply, this was a superb piece of publishing.
Since former Guardian G2 art director Richard Turley took over design duties, Bloomberg Businessweek has utterly reinvented itself. It has been picking up awards steadily over the past two years but this issue may be its finest to date.
The cover uses a straightforward shot of Jobs, but the crop and the silver metallic background gives it a twist. The back cover features a Mac Classic with the word ‘goodbye’ on its screen.
Inside, the issue begins with a series of DPS images, overlaid with quotes. Deceptively simple, but very powerful. The Steve Jobs issue of Bloomberg’s rival publication Newsweek was also entered into D&AD providing a direct comparison. It too began with DPS images and quotes, but Bloomberg’s treatment of both was far more impactful.
There then follows a series of pieces telling the Jobs life story, movie style, in three acts, from initial success through the wilderness years, to triumphant return.
These are followed by a look at the products that brought Jobs to the world’s attention.
It was just an all-round, brilliant combination of text and image, perfectly judged. If I had a criticism it was that there was little that was critical of Jobs and his impact on the world, save for a piece on Apple’s relentless stoking of consumerism, but perhaps this was not the time or place.
Granted, Jobs’ ill-health was not exactly a secret so much of this material could conceivably have been prepared beforehand, but nonetheless, to produce such an issue on such a tight deadline was a huge achievement. And here’s the clincher – the magazine contains not one advert.
If you haven’t worked in publishing you may not appreciate quite what this means. Here was, quite possibly, what would be the biggest selling issue of the year. Ads would have already have been booked for that week, many of them important long-term clients. Someone plucked up the courage to suggest that this issue would be far better, far more fitting, if all those ads were pulled, foregoing a huge amount of revenue for a title that was already losing money. And the powers that be – perhaps a decision made by Bloomberg himself? – agreed. That, when printed publications are struggling for every penny, is a heck of a decision. The magazine should probably have won an award for that alone.
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
The Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition explores not what brains do to us but what we do to them – preserving, studying and collecting. The show’s design takes it cues from the materials used to do just those things
looks at the way in which scientists use brains formedical intervention, scientific enquiry, cultural meaning and technological change. Designers LucienneRoberts+ (Lucinne Roberts and John McGill) took “slicing, cutting, collecting and classifying as our starting point”, to develop a graphic system informed by both brain preservation and categorisation. To research this, they visited the Royal College of Surgeons where the cases used to preserve specimens (such as the one below) provided a reference point.
Working with Capital Models, the designers ‘preserved’ the show’s title in similar fashion.
“Each letter is made of ‘slices’ of acrylic, contained in a bespoke acrylic box filled with a solution of glycerin and water,” they explain. “The refractive index matches that of real specimens so that each sliced letter appears in multiples when viewed at different angles, while the colour palette references both ‘grey matter’ and the energetic activity of the brain.”
The show’s graphics, set in typeface Bureau Grot, allude to diagrams and labels.
Brains: the Mind as Matter is at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London NW1 until June 17.
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
Design studio Powell Allen has created a new identity for Transform Coaching, the commercial offshoot of charity Youth at Risk which works with society’s most disaffected young people in the UK…
“Participants are introduced to a new way of thinking, a new way of connecting with other people and a new way of coaching,” say Powell Allen of the work of Transform Coaching. The studio was approached to create a logo (above) and also a direct mail brochure (below) for the company.
“The brief was to communicate transformation,” say Powell Allen. “We created a stylised T that represents the Transform Coaching process. The exit marker signifies the end of a successful journey of transformation.” The idea is that the journey through the maze within the T represents the courage and perserverance required to go through a transformative process.
Find out more about the work of Transform Coaching at transformcoaching.org
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
New York-based designer and filmmaker Hillman Curtis, whose series of documentaries profiled leading figures in the creative industries, has died aged just 51.
Curtis passed away on April 18 after a long battle with colon cancer. His Artist Series of short films on the likes of MIlton Glaser, Paula Scher and Danile Libeskind delighted many.
In 2010 he directed Ride, Rise, Roar a documentary of David Byrne’s tour of that year. More recently he had been working with Stefan Sagmeister on The Happy Film in which Sagmeister undertakes a series of tasks, “from the sublime to the ridiculous”, designed to promote happiness.
<object width=”560″ height=”315″><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=26038742&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0″ /><embed src=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=26038742&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”560″ height=”315″></embed></object>
Thank You Hillman for everything you have done to help CR and others.
The D&AD Award winners were announced last night in a new-look ceremony at London’s IMAX cinema. Well, some of them were, we’ll have to wait until September for the Black Pencils
It’s D&AD’s 50th anniversary which means that the charity will be holding a big bash in September at which it will look back over its five decades honouring creative work and announce this year’s Black Pencil winners. Last night, however, the Yellow Pencils were announced, almost as soon as judging had finished.
In advertising, BETC’s wonderful Bear for Canal+ (our story on it here) and BBH’s Life Story for Barnardo’s (more here) won in TV and cinema.
In Mobile, AKQA won for its Star Player app for Heineken (read our story here) which introduces a gaming element to watching Champions League games on TV, while JWT Melbourne won for its Wi-Fiction app for the Melbourne Writers Festival.
There were three Yellow Pencils for Music Video: Is Tropical, The Greeks by Megaforce
No Brain by Etienne de Crecyby Fleur & Manu
and Manchester Orchestra’s Simple Math by Daniels
And one in Spatial Design for Leo Burnett Shanghai for the Distance Between Mother and Child for QingCongQua Training Centre.
The two Packaging Yellows went to Love for its special edition Johnnie Walker bottles illustrated by Chris Martin (which we wrote about here) and to Iris Nation for its special edition Heineken STR UV light bottle.
JWT Shanghai added D&AD to the list of award show success it has enjoyed with its Samsonite Heaven & Hell ad.
In Graphic Design there were three Yellows, for Gummo for its AR Dutch stamps
Ogilvy & Mather Malaysia for Lego posters that imagined real life scenes as if depicted in the building bricks
and for the 100 Graphics of Anatomy Chart by Nippon Design Centre for Gallery Leta.
Magazine & Newspaper Design saw one Yellow Pencil, for Bloomberg Businessweek’s brilliant Steve Jobs tribute issue (of which more anon)
Noma Bar’s Don DeLillo series won in Book Design (our story here), as did Marion Deuchars’ Let’s Make Some Great Art (which also won a Yellow in Illustration).
In Outdoor Advertising there were Yellows for the John Smith’s Commemorative Plate ad by TBWA\London (a very similar idea to KK Outlet’s Royal PLate show which we covered here), Samsonite Heaven and Hell (again) and Operation Christmas, a campaign by Lowe/SSP3 in Colombia aimed at persuading FARC guerillas to give themselves up.
TV & Cinema Communications saw Yellows for Ogilvy Johannesburg for MK, Euphrates for the Japan Broadcasting Corporation 2355-ID campaign, Blur for its Girl With The Dragon Tattoo campaign and 4Creative for Street Summer (we covered it here).
The campaign for Laura Marling’s A Creature I Don’t Know album won a Yellow Pencil in Illustration.
Digital Advertising saw Yellows for Wieden + Kennedy’s Kaiser Chiefs Bespoke Album Creation Experience (which also won in Integrated and we wrote about here), 72andSunny for K-Swis Micro Tubes
and Crispin Porter + Bogusky for American Express Open Small Business Gets an Official Day.
There was just one Yellow in Branding – to AMV BBDO for its GE Living Masterpiece installation.
The Digital Design jury was very generous, giving out seven Yellows: for Dentsu Tokyo for in Websites for Honda Internavi Dots Now
B Reel for the 3LiveShop, Tribal DDB for Philips Obsessed With Sound
and, again for Dentsu, Honda Connecting Lifelines
Plus DDB Paris won Yellow for Greenpeace A New Warrior
Mirada for the Rome music video
and Forsman & Bodenfors for the Tram Sightseeing app for Vastrafik.
Finally, Samsonite picked up another Yellow in Art Direction while Clemenger BBDO won for Ghost Chips for the NZ Transport Agency in Integrated and Earned, as did McCann Erickson Bucharest for American Rom for Kandia Dulce.
Finally, there were two Yellows in Product Design – for the Nokia N9 and Barber Osgerby’s Tip Ton chair – four in Radio Advertising – Grey Advertising for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Be Bravo for Leica (which won two) and Net#work BBDO, Johannesburg for Mercedes-Benz – and two in Direct – 303 Group (Sydney) for Ikea Rent and LOWE/SSP3 in Colombia for Ministry of Defense, PAHD and Rivers of Light.
All the results, including nominations and in-book are here.
The new format – a free cinema-style event for invited nominees and judges instead of a sit-down gala dinner – wasn’t entirely a success. It all felt a bit awkward and stilted and perhaps not quite the career highliight that winners might have imagined getting their Yellow Pencil to be, but it was a very difficult call for the organisers. They couldn’t do two big events in the same year and the old model wasn’t exactly loved by all. If you were there, let us know what you thought below.
Any glaring omissions? Well, the one that springs immediately to mind is the Comedy Carpet (see Michael Johnson’s thoughts on that here) which was entered but didn’t even get in the book. Such are the vagaries of awards juries…
CR for the iPad
Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app will also update with new content throughout each month. Try a free sample issue here
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
