Journal

Caution: Can Contains Stupid

Dec 15 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment

About 5 years ago, I spoke at the HOW Design Conference in Orlando on the topic of “Good Examples of Bad Design.” It was a gratifying experience to be speaking at the same conference that in it’s history featured such luminaries as Glaser, Carson and Mok, and from the reaction of the crowd, my endless chattering onstage about lousy design clocking in at somewhere around 50 minutes, was well-received. So, apparently I’m an “expert” at sniffing this kind of stuff out.

I occasionally indulge in energy drinks — usually as a nectareous reward for my jaunty morning runs around Prospect Park in Brooklyn — and my racing heart and instant case of the jitters on the subway is hardly a pleasing after-effect of my eager slurpage of this caffeinated nectar of the hyperactive gods. I passionately search for alternatives to Red Bull because if they still can’t manage to pull their package branding together with their cartoonish television ads, I refuse to support them. It’s my “creative civic duty”, or so I’ve convinced myself anyway…

This morning, as I was browsing the available energy gulps behind the frosty glass at the bodega — skimming past several fiendish looking, yet interestingly designed cans of mighty “Crunk Energy Drink” — my eye-googlers spied one of the most undesirable energy drink can designs I’ve seen.

This performance potion, disguised to be what resembles a health elixir and a death tonic at the same time, intrigued me enough to buy it simply so I could have a rant.

Now, why some nice tea company would try to make their performance drink look like capital punishment in a can by featuring the word “Caution” in the most visible section above the logo is a shock — but I’m sure that there were several marketing geniuses who fought the owners of Arizona drinks — eventually getting their way, in a vicious battle to preserve “creative irony.”

You can decree that it worked — that it intrigued and seduced me to purchase it — but I’d say the reasons for my cash acquisition hinged somewhere between terror, amusement and simply doing my civic duty to keep a drink, openly disguised as a poison, out of the hands of some maniac high school kid looking for a morning rush. The hearty fluid inside the “Caution Can” met its untimely demise by way of the sewer drain on the corner of Fulton and Clinton Ave — to likely mutate and fuel a generation of super rats to wreak unholy havoc on the city sometime before the shopping season is mercifully over and the real nasty snow begins to fall — slathering Brooklyn with a coat of fresh slush and preventing me from taking my morning park runs until the global warming-induced thaw, sometime in July.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He finished two cans of blissful Crunk Energy Drink in preparation for this rant and has been repeatedly clutching at his heart like Fred Sanford since the second paragraph.

The Computer Giveth…

Dec 10 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment

Design is a profession that has been embraced by everyone with a computer. They may not even refer to what they do as “design.” The introduction of the computer as a tool to produce collateral for companies — from general letterheads and brochures, to interactive experiences — drastically modified the industry in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

From an interface of a software application, to the design of the keyboard and the actual computer that creative people use to ultimately solve a problem, the machine has become more than simply a tool to fledgling and sometimes fleeting designers, and this fact must be recognized.

If we examine the effect of tools on our society throughout written and unwritten history from the embrace of fire, to primitive writing instruments; from the wheel to weaponry, the fact that every one of these advances in society was in every respect “designed” by someone — must be accepted to understand design in the first place. When we fast forward through centuries of design to the dawn of the computer, we can make a good argument that the speed a computer allows graphic design to be produced, has in many ways, become a detriment to the profession in general. When rubylith and typographers were left in the cold in the early 90’s by studios that employed a new crop of young professionals brought up on Atari games and arcades, equipped with quicker decision making powers, the industry changed. But only now are these “jacks-of-all trades” beginning to realize the importance of looking at the concept of “idea generation” as premier to any solution enhanced by the speed of a processor. Certainly, the Macintosh, a well designed machine and GUI with a friendly demeanor, enticed creative-minded people into the world of design because it was part of a new wave. The “Age of Machines”, to quote Alvin Toffler, unlocked a principle of business that design traditionally avoided.

The designer, before the computer, was a careful thinker and a large-scale problem solver. Glaser, Rand and Chwast, in their wisdom and naivety realized and defined the advertiser/designer as a Sage — a person who when given time, could solve a problem. Later, when the computer became a means of producing design, the “thinking” was given a back-seat to efficiency and gave birth to a new type of graphic designer who mastered the techniques, but in many respects avoided the time factor required to produce truly immersive, intelligent solutions. Business owners became attracted to this new form of “mass production” design because it fit efficiently with the business mind. No more was there a “genius” who was summoned and given the time (and budget) to think about and resolve a solution.

Microsoft, the business to end all businesses, appeared and began to advertise that corporations did not require this “additional expense” of a designer to bog down the means to produce a solution. They ran an advertising campaign in the early 90’s that annouced: “The business owner with Microsoft-supplied tools could now make their collateral themselves, print them out on company printers and save the money involved with hiring an advertising agency and printer”. As more design — “mediocre” at best — came from the corporations, the expectations and money for hiring a design agency became less and less important to the bottom line.

Enter the Arpanet to the Internet. While initially a means for government agencies to share information, this information pipe was generously given to the university system as a means for doing the same thing on a college level. Businesses tapped into the internet when information sharing companies such as AOL, demystified this magical system and brought it to the home user in the early 90’s.

Truthfully, the “dot-com” world was the opportunity for the design profession to redeem itself after a major shift in the attitudes and needs of creatives. New tools and a language (Hypertext Markup Language or “html” at first) was introduced and created a “super-designer” — a programmer/creative type that could produce a solution that solved a problem that Microsoft could not initially deal with. However, in time, Microsoft eventually produced Home Page, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program, allowing the business-person to once again take expensive reigns from the designer, and make a web site experience that looked like it was produced by a “real web agency.” The mistake is that where the advertising world had years to define itself before the computer began to change the landscape, this new dot-com world only had a short life-span before the corporations figured it out. The “dot-com” became the “dot-comedy” and the investment community turned a cold shoulder to the industry quicker than you could spout: “Change the world!”

The computer gave new powers to the graphic designer, and the software manufacturer took it away.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. Things certainly are not as “grave” as he makes them out to be in this rant, written in 2002 as the dust settled from the dot com bubble burst. But it’s worth a revisit since he sounded like such a smarty-pants back then.

Design is Decision

Dec 8 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment

I read a book published by Metropolis Magazine called Design is…. It features a series of essays related to graphics, architecture, writing, criticism and print, and tries to get to the bottom of what makes design such a compelling force. It prompted an internal desire to get to the bottom; the minutia; the “crux” if you will — of what design is — all in a single word if possible.

If there is one thing that is present in the graphic design field, it’s the understanding that design is about a decision. A decision made by a professional “creative-type”, which either results in good design (positive audience reaction and good will transacted around and through the idea) or bad design (a forgotten idea, concept or product launch). It is the one certainty in all of the subjectiveness related to design criticism, admiration and worship.

Design is a decision. A single opportunity for a creative mind to resolve a problem (reach a decision) and produce results which apply to the problem at hand. Yet, this decision is based on external factors such as a client’s motive, the climate in the industry (both graphic and industry specific), and finally, the internal motives of the designer. Artistic expression, on the other hand, is a largely internally focused decision, solving a problem posed by the artist themselves.

There is an ongoing debate (mainly propagated by non-designers) that the graphic design profession is not about interjecting one’s personality into a creative endeavor; that this approach undermines the final solution, taints the profession and ultimately, the worlds’ view on the profession into thinking that graphic design is purely driven by the quest for fame within the industry.

Well, part of this is true.

To examine the upward mobility and acceptance of “superstars” such as David Carson, Carlos Segura, Stefan Sagmeister and Matt Owens in their respective categories of graphic design, you can say that it was their specific personal approaches that gained an initial audience. It was a style that enticed the “gravy” projects: music, movies, and/or television to approach them for a specific style. However, from the historical perspective, it is obvious that the only style that should be held on to in graphic design is an intelligence of decision and the ability to convey the message that will add success to a client’s endeavor.

Personal style is something, that over time, becomes outdated. That is the only certainty in the profession.

If you examine MTV, a network that has defined and brainwashed youth and pop-culture style since it’s inception, you notice that it changes it’s logo to suit it’s style at the moment. This factor may be the understated brilliance of the entire concept.

Getting back to the idea that design is a decision…

If you look at anything organic or inorganic in our universe, there are decisions that have been made either by evolution, a “higher power”, if you believe in it, or the hand of man. These individual decisions effect us in certain ways, and either it is embraced as a good idea and flourishes or it is forgotten. Good design relates to creative output that transcends a good decision. A bad decision, whether it be a bad typographic, interface, photographic, manufacturing or paper choice, will result in a flaw to the audience it intends to influence. Flawed design is not remembered, and injures or confuses people. The decision is what results in turmoil or positivity. If design is a decision in its purest sense, inversely is every decision a design? If you agree that design results in an experience whether tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory or through taste, then we are all designers in a very basic sense. There is the professional side of this idea — that we must have separation between the “real” designers and the “non” designers, but if you look closely at the motives of many designers, it is far removed from decision-oriented thinkers and closer to those who think that this profession is a way to push a personal objective.

Design is not politics, yet is in many respects, a very political organization, depending on your chosen camp. Good Design is a good decision, and anyone is entitled to a good decision. That is why the graphic design Muse may visit a myriad of people, resulting in a wide variety of solutions, some embraced by groups of people (e.g. viral marketing: the use of guerilla tactics to ultimately, and unintentionally reach a huge audience).

It is only, however, a talented designer that can train themselves to repeatedly make good decisions which result in myriad client success stories.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He hasn’t read Design is… for several years and found this unfinished essay loose on his hard drive while cleaning up some space. With this understanding, he realized that Design is not only “Decision”, but it is also understanding that Design can also benefit from finding stuff that you did in the past and repurposing it for the present.