WHAT IS GOOD?// Branding and Identity at the London Design Museum

On my most recent trip back home I popped into the London Design Museum to check out any of the new exhibitions running at the moment. The first one was for slightly older industrial design icons, but I had a few bits about the British transport systems visual Identity, complete with the British Rail visual identity handbook. This was all out on display and it was interesting to see how the booklets are laid out and designed for such a high end user. What I was surprised to find was that even here there is very little in the way of text, the whole thing was mostly images and illustrations of how the visual identity should be used. This was a great example of primary research and I have really found this to be an important piece to have seen. Other than that they had some information about British road signs and how they were designed as well as an awards presentation gallery which contained a good number of examples of visual identity in a wide range of contexts. This was also great stuff but is still feel that being able to see and photograph the British Rail stuff was the most helpful and professional work .

DOS VECES RESPONSIVE// Visual Research

This poster was made in France in 69, criticising Nixon and his stance on stamping out communism in countries like Vietnam and Cuba. Cuba and America hold the same national colours so a nice vectorised poster like this with the simple use of red white and blue is one route I could go down. I also like the roughed up nature of this poster, it adds a lot of character and emotion.

Venceremos means 'We Will Overcome'. This is a propaganda style poster with a great spot colour applied the Che's jacket.

A film of a similar nature set in Chile. This poster is too colourful for what we need but is impressive nonetheless. I like hoe the NO is painted onto the watercolour, It gives the poster a hand made touch but at the same time is very modernist in its shape and construction.

Simple use of colour for quick and easy reproduction whist enforcing Red as the colour of the revolution. Again, French and not Cuban

Visual Identity to avoid, overly colourful or overly patriotic design. The breif is to set a melancholic tone so any of this should be avoided.  

WHAT IS GOOD?// Other Space Agency Logos

The current official UK Space Agency logo is a mess in my own opinion. Firstly the whole thing is a horrible mix of misguided nationalism and poorly constructed design. For example why is UK SPACE so large, why is agency just shoved into the corner and why has the designer used Gill Sans to brand an agency which needs to promote forward thinking, high tech, humanist principles. At the moment I think the logo says 'we are just another branch of the governments plan to bureaucratically waste money with our poor judgement and lazy decisions.' whereas I want the logo for the UKSA to promote the organisation in the exciting and respectful way that it deserves. Saying that the other space agencies visual identities aren't up to much either and range from bland to terrible in my opinion, with the exception of the old NASA worm logo which I think really looked the part. However the UKSA has so much potential, so as part of this project I would love to do a redesign to see how I think they compare.

Euro Space Agency

India

Japan

70s-80s Nasa

Russian

Canadian

Current and Old Nasa

Ukrainian

STUDIO BRIEF 2// The Cult Logo

The Cult Logo is going to be the main identifier for the Cult. The cult will be based on panopticism and consumerism so will have to reflect these principles. I also need the cult to look fairly crazy and need some cult-like identifiers to make sure the audience sees it this way. My plan is to incorporate the 'all seeing eye' that was discussed in my essay with a shape and structure associated with the architecture of the Panopticon. I want to cult to praise a God of Screens, who controls advertisement and media and believes that it is a vision of heaven.

 Here I have taken a still from the re-education scene in A Clockwork Orange and traced over it in Illustrator. I wanted to get the biceps forcing the eye open to be at the centre of the logo, to reflect the philosophy of the religion. The eye should represent the individual followers eye as he or she is forced to watch and ingest the cults beliefs as well as representing the never-ending surveillance from God. The cult will also be about watching lots of screens so the logos focus on the gaze is important.

 The logo will be a mono-tonal seal. The text around the circumference means "The greatest Good For the Greatest Number" which is a utilitarian world-view that the minority are not important as long as an idea is beneficial to a larger number. This will reflect the cults consumerist side, as the aim of the cult it to create a perfect world were everybody is docile and normality is celebrated.  

 The logo also describes the Panopticon. The eye in the centre represents the guard tower, or God, constantly watching a ring of cells around the perimeter. I have added a small dot to each of these cells and this will represent the individual.

 I thought the logo needed to look more crazy and dominating so have been messing around with some 'rays'. This is something I have picked up from other cults and religions visual identity. The rays often represent the outreaching power (glory?) of Gods message. Or they will illuminate a path or idea. Here the rays continue and expand the eyes gaze outward into the wider world.

The final design for this first logo concept draws the rays back to a more subtle position and size.

SODALIRIOUS RESPONSIVE// Contextual Stuff

This is a 50's retro design for a record sleeve. Today this sort of design is fairly popular in a post-modern context so it would be acceptable to produce something distinctly post-modern for the branding. At the same time this doesn't really work for logos as it does for other products as clarity is key.

Pip-Boy is part of the universe created by Bethseda for their massive game Fallout 3. He is an animated character who appears on your menu screens as a sort of AI helper. The tone here is post-nuclear wasteland however a 50's inspired character like this would be an interesting thing to develop for a drinks brand.

This is another screen shot from Fallout 3 showing the sort of device that PipBoy appears on.

TGI Fridays uses 50's Americana style branding and its doing terribly. Although the 50's is still popular to niche markets, like in design and high fashion, its not doing so well in mass culture.  

Generic imagery of what Soda bars look like. The aim of the bars was to provide a place for young adults to go drinking at night in the US when they still couldn't drink alcohol. The theme is very much coca cola red, black and 50's drag racing inspired.

Ads I do like from the 50s are always of big American cars these were products that were sold to the masses for the first time in really great numbers in the 50s to the development in terms of advertising was rapid.

Examples of posters I do not like from the 50's, things to avoid.

FEDRIGONI RESPONSIVE// Library Research Part 2

We had a look at a few more books over the last few weeks for this brief and a few have really informed the decisions we make as we get closer to finalising our ideas and design.

 This is the older Paperwork book, the first in the series that I looked at before. Its layout and content is very similar to the first book with a pretty minimalist design as to not detract from the content.

 Perforated edges would allow readers of our own book to take leaves out for reference or to keep. If information was printed on the back of each one of these leaves the pull out pages would turn into Fedrigoni business or greeting cards. It may be interesting to see our landscape to slowly be pulled away by the removal of paper, although someone might think this is symbolic of the paper industries destruction of rainforests. Besides the destruction of the book may leave it looking like a piece of rubbish, to be thrown away. A better idea would be if you could just pull out a tiny portion of each page, stamp sized, with a tiny amount of stock information on it and keep that for reference.

A promotional book constructed out of torn pages built out of many different stocks. Its basically a rough version of our own idea with perhaps a bit more artistic style and less refined processing. The book here looks a lot more personal for the creator, but probably wouldn't be for the end user who receives it.

An interesting idea which we could adapt into our own book is the use of small pictogram related to the principles and products of Fedrigoni. These could theoretically provide and interesting way to mark chapters, topics or page numbers alongside the larger cut out scene. The advantage of this is that no ink is needed to express ideas and communicate. If a company wanted to be super green they could cut a whole book of well designed pictograms or text communicating a message and recycle the leftovers to make more books.

The idea we have to build a fish-bowl world could benefit from an idea like this, when its not only the paper which is creating the shape but its also the content, like text or images that add in fine detail. Another idea which could come off the back of this is that we could construct a space of seemingly random crafted paper which would produce a beautiful shadow, much like the trees shadow above. The major problem with this design is that it could never be sent in the post, unless it is photographed, however just from doing this some of the magic of receiving a crafted item is lost.

FEDRIGONI RESPONSIVE// Library Research Part 1

To help come up with our initial ideas for the Fedrigoni book, as well as the fish bowl and other ideas we have been using a few books from the library.

 More Paperwork is the second part of a book series called Paperwork. The cover is horrendous however the work inside is probably impressing and refined in a way that some of the other books couldn't offer.

 This work is for a diary design. The pattern is visible right through the book thanks to die cut holes in every page. This makes the book remarkably dynamic as the pattern chops and changes as the viewer flicks through. This is something that we should be working into our own designs as we are challenged by a similar principle.

The book also features several interesting folds within its own pages, this one is still intact, the others are not. In some way its a testament to the fact that interactivity like this could always backfire on your own design by the way it encourages people to mess with it.   However we could incorporate this fold or something similar to create the landscape, we would loose some detail but gain an extra aspect of crafting.

This idea is similar to the calendar, here the circles are a result of badge making leading to this form of recycled artwork. This poses a question to weather we could use the cut-outs from our book to make a negative copy of the same landscape for a poster or piece of promotional material perhaps.

 The second book that Ste and Myself looked at was Paper Engineering. The content was to a similar quality as the book above however the tone of the book was more friendly and creative with a few more examples of taking paper out of books and applying it to street art or 3D sculpture.

 This is a book we should really be aware of, produced for GF Smith its a colour swatch book with a wooden box containing the stock as well as securing the binding. The colourplan text looks fairly retro now, especially against the wood, however the crafting involved in mass producing something of this quality for many clients is impressive. A problem I think we have with 'selling' our idea to Fedrigoni in reality would be convincing them to actually spend money on producing such intricate books. To produce our idea in any real quantity would be extremely expensive.

 Something we were interested in was this fold out booklet, especially if we could traslate this into a three dimensional poster, something that could hand off a wall or simply give some gradient to a poster could be quite interesting or at least something to experiment with.

Translating this card idea into our brief would not be a hard task, an old Italian paper mill or grand country house could replace this one shown here. The card could be built out of different stocks and arrive in a pack which printers could open to reveal different scenes of northern Italy. This would be both interactive and informative and information on any cards stock could also be printed on the inside.

A conceptual yearly report for surgeons. Two holes are cut straight through the book from front to back cover to celebrate the effectiveness of key-hole surgery. Interestingly although the process is similar to what we are doing the design is less decorative, but has a more reasoning and purpose.

I found this in the paper engineering book and it instantly reminded me of an older Fedrigoni brief from 2012. The concept is very similar but through the different crafting process and target audience the results are very different. This could relate back to our own ideas, as cutting a scene out of a wad of paper isn't the most original idea by itself so its on us to craft an old idea in a new and more impressive way to win opinion in our favour.

One book I did have a flick through was this one, it was a catalogue of everything we shouldn't do; happy flowers, love hearts, garish colours, repeated patterns and heavy handed cut-outs.