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Archive for the ‘Inspiration’ Category

Designing and building for the future

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

I have always been a fan of post-war architecture, and its attempts at doing things differently. I admit this is partly due to being a child of the 1970s. I grew up surrounded by these kinds of buildings in Birmingham - many of which are no longer there (most notably Birmingham’s Bull Ring).

However, looking at things objectively, as maligned as a lot of it is, I admire those who pushed it forwards, even though much of it ultimately failed in its goals.

The whole idea was to build a brave new world, and to try and wipe away memories of a Britain ravaged by war and bombings. What better way than to create buildings that looked like nothing that had come before? Concrete allowed for huge structures - towering monuments to the future. New shopping centres and social housing projects were designed to encourage community relationships and revitalise the economy.

 

Birmingham Central Library, photo by Martin Hartland

Birmingham Central Library, photo by Martin Hartland

Look at Birmingham’s Central Library. I don’t care what Prince Charles thinks of it - there’s a strength and power to its form that puts learning at the centre of the city. I haven’t been inside it since the late ’90s, but it’s equally interesting inside, where you can look down from upper floors to those below. I do hope they’ve changed the yellowy lighting since then, though!

 

Park Hill in Sheffield, photo by Paolo Margari

Park Hill in Sheffield, photo by Paolo Margari

The Park Hill development in Sheffield is staggering. Built between 1957 and 1961, it is the largest listed building in Europe. The original concept was to create ’streets in the sky’ - a noble and exciting sentiment indeed! It’s currently undergoing renovation.

Of course, it is easy for me to praise something like Park Hill - I’ve never had to live there. As a project, it inevitably failed, and the council more recently found difficulty finding tenants, due the crime rate and poor state of repair of the building.

 

Ambition + research

It is my job to ensure that the work I do is fit for its target audience, through research, testing and iterative development. Maybe that was what was lacking from the development of buildings in the ’60s. Perhaps someone might have pointed out that Park Hill could be abused by muggers due to its structure and layout.

However, what fills me with admiration for all of this is how its creators were really striving for something more - to make a better world for its inhabitants, which is something everyone working in the creative industries should be encouraged to do.

 

A New (Design) World Order?

Right now feels like a good time to think about things like this. America has a new, more liberal president, who espoused to the world the importance of making the world a better place. Miscommunication and misunderstanding are still causing wars, yet the internet allows for unparalleled global communication between people who have never even met. The global economy has put bankers and politicians to shame, but also maybe made many of us realise we really don’t need to replace our year-old iPods just yet.

Will this new-found solemnity arising from the events of the last decade drive new styles and standards in the world of design? Hard to tell right now, but it will be interesting to see where things go over the next five years.

 

Many thanks to Martin Hartland and Paolo Margari for the use of their photos in this article.

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How Super Heroes can make you a better designer

Friday, May 8th, 2009

I’ve been a fan of comics for as long as I can remember, and they have been a huge influence on my visual vocabulary. I’m sure comics have played no small part in my decision to pursue graphic design as a career, too.

I’m not a comics geek by any means - I have no real in-depth knowledge of them. I was raised on a steady diet of Beano/Dandy/Beezer/Topper as a child, with most of my exposure to American comics coming via TV shows.

However, a few American comics were in my posession as a young boy - presumably random purchases from parents or relatives. I certainly didn’t buy them myself.

American comics were supremely exciting. Full colour throughout (as opposed to the one- or two-colour print jobs the majority of British comics were at the time), they were a different shape, they were often violent, scary or sad, and were filled with ads for mythical toys, sweets and other products unavailable in the U.K. (I would have given anything as a five-year-old for a cream-filled Twinkie and a pack of Space Monkeys).

Of the assorted copies of Batman, X-Men and the like I had at my disposal, one particular edition of Green Lantern was to make an indelible imprint on me. Indeed, it was the only Green Lantern comic I owned, but I was obsessed with it.

Cover of Green Lantern comic

Cover of Green Lantern comic

This comic wasn’t about a superhero. It was about a whole army of superheroes, from across space! Look at the dramatic layout of the cover, with hordes of odd-looking good guys disappearing into the distance. I would pore over this cover and the contents within again and again.

This comic was an early lesson in thinking beyond what I understood something could or should be. The artist must have had a whale of a time coming up with crazy alien designs - giant crystals with haircuts! Tentacled eyeballs! Amorphous blobs! Something that looks like a stick of celery! As a child who grew up with ‘Star Wars’, I was accustomed to most aliens being basically humans in masks (until Jabba The Hutt turned up, but that wouldn’t be for a couple of years). Hence, when I drew aliens, they would tend to be humanoid, but with funny heads, or costumes. This comic taught me that I could do whatever I liked.

An inside frame from the Green Lantern comic

An inside frame from the Green LAntern comic

It’s something I was reminded of recently, while trying to think of the last time I saw a piece of design, or a way of interacting that made me rethink the way I approach projects myself. Of course, as we get older, and our knowledge of things widens, it’s harder and harder to find something that truly knocks one’s socks off, in the way my Green Lantern comic opened my five-year-old mind. And of course, designing (for example) a web site that is usable will have to conform to certain rules of thumb, if it is to be successful. I’m always on the look out though, and I’d be interested in knowing what has opened other people’s doors of perception.

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Is anything perfect?

Monday, March 30th, 2009

What better way to kick off the DVB&ID blog, than to discuss the notion of ‘perfection’ in design?

This is a subject I discussed when I gave a talk at this year’s Ignite UK North event, run by O’Reilly. The format for the talk is simple: 5 minutes, with 20 slides auto-timed to 15 seconds each, to keep things snappy. Take a look.

I spoke about how there are hundreds of things in the world many people describe as a ‘design classic’ - the London tube map, the Eames chair, and the ipod are just three items which fall into this category. Groundbreaking, hugely influential, often desirable they may all be, but could any one of them really be described as ‘perfect’?

How do you define perfection? Well, for the purposes of my talk, I defined it as being when there was nothing I could add or remove from something, to make it do its job any better. And as an example of such a thing, I showed Boots’ own-brand paracetamol packaging.

Boots own-brand paracetamol packaging design

Beautiful, isn’t it?

OK, maybe not, but if you take a moment to really look at it, hopefully you will see what I mean. In terms of telling a customer all the top-line information they need about a product, it’s here, with no fuss at all. It tells you:

- who makes it
- the substance
- the form and dosage
- what it’s for
- quantity
- and an actual-size image of what you will be swallowing.

I think why this design works so well is that it’s not trying to put any marketing spin on the product. So many painkillers show cross-sections of people’s heads or brains with terrifying red flashpoints, or glowing, super-stylised renders of the tablets themselves, offering super-charged, faster-than-the-speed-of-light relief.

But for Boots’ paracetamol, the designer has relied on the power of the Boots brand, and taken an approach more akin to information design. Most people know what paracetamol is for, and often buy it when not actually in pain (ie, purchasing for future use), so there is no real need to ’sell’ it. Of course, this kind of approach would never work if all packaging design adopted it, but for me, its very understatement makes it stand out.

Even the blue background of the lower portion isn’t extraneous, as it is a backdrop for the illustration of the tablet (which, I might add, doesn’t have so much as a drop-shadow behind it). Marvellous.

This is an exercise in design economy, and something that I find an inspiration. In the same way as many new web applications and widgets do a single thing very well, so does this.

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