Day: February 21, 2011

MANIFESTO

MANIFESTO

The First Thing First 2000 is renewing the 1964 call for a change of priorities, written by Ken Garland.

This manifesto attempts to place social responsibility as a major issue of Design. The role of designer  should be to solve problems shared by people, with useful/lasting/democratic forms of communication. Thus, ‘helping’ should stand in front of its purpose, rather than ‘consumer selling’. The text key point seems to be very utopic and idealistic as it puts aside the economical demands and necessities we have to face in our 2000’s capitalistic society.

In Design beyond Commodification, Andrew Howard criticizes this Design definition since it is “impractical to live up to an everyday scale” because ot the conflict with economic and political imperatives. As he says, “this is not a moral issue, (…) it is an issue of practicality, of necessity”.

In the 66th issue of the Eye Magazine, we found an interview of Ken Garland, where he states the following:

” AOS: But if you don’t take on these jobs another designer always will. Had you designed some of these multinational companies perhaps they might not look as bad now as they do?

KG: Well, that’s flattering, but I don’t think that’s true. I wrote an article for Blueprint in 1991, ‘The rise and fall of corporate identity’, and in it I said that big organisations couldn’t produce a graphic image for themselves that was anything other than dominant and overwhelming and yet unimpressive. They manage to be ubiquitous, powerful-looking and unappetising all at the same time. It’s in the nature of the beast. ”

–> We can’t ignore the consumerism world we are living in. Therefore if we are not doing this commercial works, then somebody else will! Should we just accept it and believe in the challenge of making things better? This challenge seems to combine what we, as graphic designers, can do, and what we want to do. What are the limits of our ethical concerns? At what point do we say “No” in Design?

Leif, Sophia and Solene.

Rhetoric discussion

RHETORIC, SCREEN

By Aristos, Vera & Eunice

Our discussion with regards to branding:

• Graphic designers are providing a service to suit the style of the brand that is represented by the clients. Graphic designers can offer ideas, knowledge and skills, but at the end of the day, it is the clients who decide the outcome and direction. Just as Nick Bell points out in his article: “Graphic designers have proven themselves to be the obedient and loyal subjects of industry… “. It is therefore vital for a designer to be balanced and neutral. This is because the nature of the job depends on answering the client’s creative brief.

• Our culture background and the society is shaped with a mindset of branding. This is evident in the way we response and behave towards branding and advertising. For example, we would rather not buy a product that is not branded, because we question its credibility, the quality and the standard it offers. Also, we subconsciously brand ourselves with the introduction of new media in our lives. We brand ourselves through facebook, tweeter, youtube, blogs etc. The technological need of communication is evident. Various companies need to incorporate their marketing plans through the new media as well, to be able to target global market and reach target audiences. The cultural institutions also adopt this strategy to reach the global audience.

• The new media formed a digitalised environment that we feel the need to enter. It also allows one to publish books online easily, thus the existence of emagazine, ebooks etc. Do the new media dictate our future? Is it a matter of time before digital library exists? Is it the beginning of the end of the print? Books may become costly acquired collectors’ items. It may just be the right solution for the environment issue we are facing.

SCREEN Group Discussion

SCREEN

DESIGN DISCOURSE | SCREEN | 21st MON 2011

“Is Google Making us Stupid?”

By: Ladi, Peter, Jaron

  • The online medium is reducing the amount of quiet space we have to think and reflect
  • The author, Nicholas Carr, doesn’t seem to articulate his own position on the subject very strongly. He seems to spend a lot of time referencing other people and their opinions rather than using those opinions to support his own.
  • He asks the question of where artificial intelligence (AI) is leading, and whether we have to look to such AI in the future to create a moral compass for us since we will be completely reliant on technology. At the same time there’s an irony in what he talks about when he talks about Frederick Winslow Taylor,
  • We are relinquishing our power over our own minds and thought processes, slowly but surely, to technology. The internet is the latest incarnation of this sort of transaction which has occurred again and again throughout history. Such as in the example of the invention of the clock which ushered in a ‘new reality’. The clock now thinks for us, and we no longer need to listen to our bodies or make the mental effort to determine for ourselves when to work, sleep etc. The second example, of ‘industrial choreography’ shows how in our race for maximum speed, efficiency and output, human operators have been reduced to merely cogs in a machine. Their roles no longer leave any room for individual thought and creativity, therefore there’s nothing that would stop them from being replaced by machines.
  • Taylor’s experiments into creating a algorithm, or system, for factory production can be likened to how programmers have constantly been perfecting search engines, browsers etc all with aim of maximizing the fastest and most direct way of getting information from the internet.
  • The online medium engrains in us an expectation of immediacy, a need for information at the snap of a finger.
  • What can we do to save the ‘old way of reading, and therefore thinking’ (if it’s so valuable to our thought processes)? Well, is it even a problem given the course of our history in the light of new technologies (going all the way back to the creation of writing, the printed word, and now the online word). In truth it’s probably not possible to turn back this process, which as unstoppable as evolution. Is there any value in de-learning our current internet culture? Because if we took our nostalgia for the past to the extreme, we would be technologically and therefore mentally de-evolving.

Starbucks rebrand in hot soup in the Middle East

MANIFESTO

Starbucks did a Corporate Rebrand at the end of 2010 for their logo.

Observers expect that the coffee chain will face some opposition for the roll-out of their new brand identity in the Middle East because of the use of the siren/girl in the logo. Interestingly enough, this is not the first time that Starbucks has had to deal with this issue.

What Starbucks has done previously, was to offer up a variant of the logo for Middle Eastern markets.

http://fooyoh.com/menknowpause_lifestyle_living/5679071

There are certain visual cues with the Starbucks logo that instinctively tells the consumer that there is an outlet nearby: the distinctive green, and the very distinctive application of the brand name within the green circle.

Is there something that they could do with their logo that would be able to solidify its image across all markets?

Some history of Western Typography

TEXT

Post by Chuqiao

Western typography is durning the time between mid-15th century to late 18th century which view as craft with a long history. Tracing its origins, we can back to people using punches to make seals and currency in ancient times.

Typography began at Europe with the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg. He employed a scribe whose name is Peter Schoffer to help design and cut the letterpunches for the first typeface(the D-K type) of  202 characters which print the first book in Europe.

Rome, as the central of Renaissance, attracted the first printer known to have printed with types ranging from textur Gothic to fully-developed romans which inflenced by the earlier humanistic writing. After a few years the center of printing in Italy changed from Rome to Venice where the Roman type fully developed.

communicating with materiality

SCREEN, TEXT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Warde, typography is the window between the author’s thoughts and the reader. It should be as transparent as possible, so that the author’s message is not deviated from is direct way to the reader’s mind.

It seems obvious to Warde that a reader is , before anything else, an “understanding” being, more than a “perceiving” one. What about his feelings and senses? What if the this window she is refering to, this medium of typography, becomes the message itself? Do words always have to convey any in-depth meanings to be communicative?

Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan was able to consider that some mediums, like the electric light, could carry absolutely no content but still have a social effect. In “The Medium is the Massage”, he even states on the contrary of Warde, that “it’s only typical that the content of any medium BLINDS us to the character of the medium”.

More recently, in Designing Design and his Haptic Exhibition, Kenya Hara took into consideration how we perceive things with our senses. From this specific point of view, can our passive reading/assimilation of information turn into a real communication with materiality?

 

Solene Leblanc