Hasta La Ideas

Visitors to Showroom, the University of the Arts London’s gallery space, are now safely guided into the site thanks to a painterly neon sign created by Alphabetical studio…

Last year UAL converted the ground floor of its Holborn headquarters into a new exhibition space but soon after its launch, says Alphabetical’s Tommy Taylor, the gallery realised visitors were having trouble locating the entrance.

Alphabetical’s brief was to create a piece of signage that was also a piece of art. “Something that could appear in the window functioning as a directional aid but also be a creative piece in its own right,” says Taylor.

“Taking inspiration from the themes and artistic mediums regularly appearing in the arts space, we had the idea of bringing paint to life,” he says. “We fabricated a glowing neon paint drip to spell out the way to the gallery entrance to all who passed by.”

See alphabeticalstudio.com and arts.ac.uk/about-ual/ual-showroom.

The 2013 national Doodle 4 Google winner was 17-year-old Sabrina Brady from Wisconsin.

Put on your inventor’s helmets and break out the fancy Prismacolors, kids, because the Doodle 4 Google contest is back with a new doodling prompt: “If I Could Invent One Thing to Make the World a Better Place…” (Magical video glasses is probably too on the nose).

“Our theme this year is all about curiosity, possibility, and imagination,” notes Google, which has run the annual competition since 2008. Students in kindergarten through twelfth grade in U.S. schools are invited to complete that sentence in the form of a redesign of the Google logo. The winning doodle will be animated and featured, for one glorious day, on the search giant’s homepage, and the lucky doodler receives a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school. Among this year’s illustrious guest judges are artist, designer, and author Christoph Niemann (pictured) and Rhode Island School of Design interim president Rosanne Somerson, who are joined by the likes of Lemony Snicket, LEGO robotics designer Lee Magpili, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of The Lego Movie. Start dreaming and doodling now, because all entries must be received by March 20.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Design Museum has announced the nominations for Designs of the Year 2014. The diverse line-up includes life-saving inventions, experimental architecture and some intriguing graphics and digital work…

Seventy six projects have been shortlisted by industry figures and entries are divided into six categories: product, digital, fashion, architecture, graphics and transport. As always, this includes designs chosen for their beauty, orginality or unusual approach – entries include a floating school in a Nigerian lagoon, a watch that allows users to feel the time as well as read it and the ABC Syringe (below), which changes colour when exposed to air thus alerting users to its pre-use or potential exposure to infection.

Digital

In the digital category, the screen-based aspects of McCann Melbourne’s multi-award-winning Dumb Ways to Die rail safety campaign has been shortlisted alongside Bristol studio PAN’s Hello Lamp Post – a platform that allows residents to converse with street furniture using the text function on their mobile phones. (Read our blog post on the project here). Bare Conductive’s Touchboard project also offered an ingenious take on interactivity, turning almost any surface into an interface using electrodes.

As well as immersive gaming experiences such as the Oculus Rift headset, the digital category contains some potentially life-saving  inventions. The Aerosee (above) is a crowdsourced search and rescue drone that enables smartphone, desktop or tablet users to search mountains in the Lake District for people in danger, and the Portable Eye Examination Kit enables eye exams to be carried out in remote or low-income areas where traditional eye exams aren’t possible.

Nominations such as Vitamins’ Lego Calendar (above), the allowing studio to visualise how much time they spend on different projects using different coloured bricks (when you take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings are synchronised to an online calendar), and City Mapper (below) an app that helps users navigate large and complicated cities on foot and public transport, simply make life easier.

Graphics

Nominees in the graphics category include Experimental Jetset’s ‘Responsive W’ identity for the Whitney Museum (above, which we covered back in July), Marina Willer and Brian Boylan’s identity for the Serpentine Galleries (below), and the M to M of M/M Paris: a 528-page book on graphic designers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustiniak, designed by Graphic Thought Facility (featured in CR Nov 12 issue, read our piece here).

Also featured is the Art Directors Club Annual 91 with illustrations poking gentle fun at the industry (see our post here).

Chris Ware’s amazing Building Stories graphic novel (see review by Jimmy Stamp here) in the form of a a boxed set, consisting of 14 distinct printed works-cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books.

Stephen Jones’ issue of A Magazine Curated By, which was dedicated to Anna Piaggi and the art of illustration

Jean-Marie Courant, Marie Proyart, Olivier Vadrot’s identity system for the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur

An identity for the Escuyer underwear brand by Modern Practice

Chineasy, a Chinese language learning system created by entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh and illustrated by Noma Bar:

James Bridles’ Drone Shadows, a series of installations depicting an outline of an unmanned military aerial vehicle promoting Jeremy Scahill’s investigative documentary Dirty Wars:

Grand-Central by Thibault Brevet, an open internet platform that lets people express themselves freely through a tangible output device (see top an above). Users can submit text via their smartphones which is then ‘written’ in marker pen by a mechanical printer – creating a physical embodiment of a digital message.

Arts and culture journal, The Gourmand, Created by David Lane (Creative Director), Marina Tweed & David Lane (Founders/Editors-in-chief)

And Anthony Sheret, Edd Harrington and Rupert Dunk’s Castledown Primary School Type Family – a typeface commissioned for a primary school in Sussex that evolved into a project aiming to create a unified, dyslexic friendly type system in UK primary schools.

Because of the way it is put together (submissions from ‘industry experts’ which are then reviewed by a Design Museum-appointed panel rather than a paid-for entry system), Designs of the Year always throws up a quirkier selection than industry awards such as D&AD. That is both a strength and a weakness in that some nominations can appear a little random but there are always delightful surprises and some welcome attention for designers who may not figure in other schemes.

Makoko Floating School in Nigeria, A prototype floating structure, built for an historic water community. Designed by NLÉ, Makoko Community Building Team

Shortlisted entries will be on display at the Design Museum from March 26 to August 25 and you can view the full list of nominations here.

A visitor’s vote will be open to the public. The museum is introducing a social vote this year, too, allowing Twitter and Facebook users to choose their favourite of two exhibits from the show each day. Design of the Year is supported by Bird & Bird

Penguin Books has officially revealed a new identity for its relaunched Pelican imprint, home of many a non-fiction classic. Publishing May 1, cognitive scientist Bruce Hood’s The Domesticated Brain is one of the first titles to be released…

Earlier today @PenguinUKbooks tweeted two ‘reveals’ of the redesigned Pelican logo, which is a continuation of the bird in flight designed by Edward Young and used on the series’ covers when first launched in the late 1930s. (William Grimmond later refined the design of the logo.)

Art director Jim Stoddart says that the new logo is is part of “a much broader and in-depth project that involves the design of the books, inside and out, and a unified and a creative new web-presence.

“The new Pelican will focus the meeting point between people’s hidden interests – whatever the subject – and helping them fill the holes in their understanding with accessible writing from the very foremost experts,” he says.

The Pelican series, which became famous for its books on contemporary issues of the day – not to mention its cover design – was discontinued in 1984. Professor Hood tweeted a link to his forthcoming book on February 2 which revealed the new-look Pelican cover design in full.

Another four titles by Melissa Lane, Orlando Figes, Robin Dunbar and Ha-Joon Chang are listed at pelicanbooks.com where visitors can also sign up to a mailing list.

CR will have more details on the design behind the relaunch in the coming weeks.

Parkinson’s UK poster by Peter Crnokrak, The Luxury of Protest

A powerful poster campaign for Parkinson’s UK uses 26 imagemakers to portray the many symptoms of this debilitating disease

Ad agency The Assembly Network created the 20-poster campaign for Parkinson’s UK. The agency has a long-tern relationship with the charity, advising on communications strategy and devising campaigns such as last year’s ‘mixed up’ posters.

Parkinson’s UK head of marketing Lily Dwek says that last year’s campaign helped shift attitudes but that “our findings are that people don’t understand what Parkinson’s is at all. [With the new campaign] we are really trying to get people to understand Parkinson’s and to empathise. We wanted to explain the diversity of Parkinson’s and that everyone’s Parkinson’s is different.”

Claire Parsons

Astrid Stavro Studio

One of the particular problems is that sufferers often have a mixture of ‘motor’ and ‘non-motor’ symptoms. Dwek says that one of their challenges was “how do you portray a non-motor symptom? How do you portray not being able to sleep properly or having hallucinations?”

Assembly art director Alexandra Taylor’s solution was to recruit (with the help of designer Graham Wood) a diverse group of pro bono contributors to work with her to attempt to dramatise an array of Parkinson’s related conditions. “Each designer was given a specific condition of Parkinson’s and a headline/title and supporting body copy [written by Sean Doyle and Dean Webb] and as much information, case histories and client insights as possible,” ECD Steve Dunn explains. “Some spoke to people with the condition to glean first hand reality of their symptoms.” Others already had experience of people living with Parkinson’s due to family connections.

Jason Kedgley and Dylan Kendle, Tomato

Mark Bonner, GBH

Each contributor, Dunn says, was “encouraged to interpret this content in their own style… The only prerequisite as such, was that each ailment reflect the central theme of our communications – which was ‘Parkinson’s. A psychological horror’.”

The symptoms to portray were chosen by Parkinson’s UK who then tested the resultant posters with members of their community, some of whose feedback was incorporated in the final work. Dwek explains that in campaigns of this nature, charities have to engage in a lot of complementary communications work to ensure that their various constituents understand the aims of the work. “It’s crucial that we don’t offend people,” says Dwek, “but we are also very aware that we need to get the attention of the public.”

Laura Jordan Bambach and Liv Bargman. Photo: Nick Howe

Jonathan Barnbrook

Here lies one of the great problems of charity advertising – finding a balance between an approach that will cut through ‘charity fatigue’ and grab people’s attention but doing so without causing offence either to potential donors or those already affected by the cause.

Was the campaign’s emotive line ‘Parkinson’s. A psychological horror’ a particular concern here? “There are going to be mixed views,” Dwek concedes, “but we have to make the call on whether we want to make an impact or not. We want to be noticed and to put the charity on the map. We are trying to do that in an interesting way that is true to our values.”

Graham Wood

Flo Heiss. Type: Graham Wood. Studio Heiss

Another possibly contentious feature of the campaign is that none of the posters carry the Parkinson’s UK logo. Having listened to countless advertising art directors bemoan the straightjacket of corporate identity guidelines and many more creatives complain of having to work with a logo they find difficult or domineering, I find this an intriguing aspect of this campaign. Without the ‘official’ logo, there is obviously a danger that some may miss the connection with the charity. However, as pieces of communication, their power may perhaps be neutered by the presence of the charity’s corporate identity. It’s an argument that takes place in agencies and design studios every day.

As the client, Dwek’s view is interesting here. The main aim of the campaign, she stresses is “to change people’s attitudes, get them thinking about Parkinson’s and to empathise [with sufferers]… It’s not a brand campaign about the charity but about awareness of Parkinson’s – it’s a much bigger picture.” She also points out that the word Parkinson’s appears several times in each execution and that each poster carries the charity’s URL “so people can go to our website to find out more information – which is what we did in the previous campaign and we have the results to prove that worked.”

Ian Anderson, The Designers Republic

Domenic Lippa, Jeremy Kunze and Lucy Groom, Pentagram Design

Dunn argues that “In the general malaise of charity advertising, it was felt that anything that looked overtly like an ‘ad’ would make people switch off and given the charity¹s limited budgets, there is always a great need to stand out from the sea of emotional messaging we are constantly bombarded with.”

This touches on another intriguing aspect of this campaign which highlights a familiar debate: the posters don’t look like ‘ads’, they certainly don’t look like typical charity ads. Will they therefore attract more attention and engagement or will the public be confused by them or assume they are for perhaps a band or a theatre production? Perhaps the important thing to bear in mind is that these 20 posters represent just one aspect of the charity’s communications. Alongside them, the charity engages in all manner of support and awareness-generating activity.

Tom Hingston, Tom Hingston Studio

Vaughan Oliver. Illustration: Ian Pollock

Vaughan Oliver. Photo: Colin Grey

The work may also have a life beyond posters. Having so many different contributors involved, some of whom have tackled the same symptoms but in different ways has, Dwek says, provided the charity with “a great suite of creative images that we can use in different settings. I was really pleased with the way the campaign evolved with different takes on different symptoms.”

The posters had a soft launch before Christmas at 100 six-sheet sites in London train stations. The charity is now planning further bursts of activity over the coming year and looking at how to use the imagery in other media.

Vaughan Oliver. Illustrator: Marc Atkins

Graham Wood

Photo: Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Design: Graham Wood

Neville Brody, Research Studios

Tony Brook, Spin

Eddie Opara, Pentagram Design

Credits
Agency: The Assembly Network.
Executive Creative Director: Steve Dunn
Writers: Sean Doyle and Dean Webb.
Art Director: Alexandra Taylor.
Art Producer: Donna Goldberg.
Account Manager: Anneliese Wensley
Managing Director: Kate Fulford-Brown.
Client: Parkinson’s UK

Full list of collaborators; Nick Howe and Colin Grey, Ian Pollock, Marc Atkins. Jonathan Barnbrook. Graham Wood, Vaughan Oliver. Neville Brody, Jason Kedgley and Dylan Kendle at Tomato, Eddie Opara, Jeremy Kunze, Lucy Groom and Dominic Lippa at Pentagram, Tony Brook at Spin, Ian Anderson, Mark Bonner, Laura Jordan Bambach with Liv Bargman, Flo Heiss, Tom Hingston, Claire Parsons, Peter Crnokrak, Astrid Stavro, Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones.