Simian Design, by Tony Stephens

How to create Advertising the really Sells.

38 things that Ogilvy & Mather have found that helps when creating Advertising that just flat-out SELLS.  Ogilvy & Mather have been giants in the advertising world for a while, and they know what they are talking about.  David Ogilvy has written us this gem of an article that articulates these 38 things.  It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in advertising.  Highlights are listed below.

1. How should you position your product?  This is by far the most important decision.
2. Create a large promise, a benefit for the customer.
3. Brand image.
4. Big Ideas.  Big ideas are usually simple ideas.  “THe problem, when solved, will be simple”.
5. First-class Ticket.
6. Don’t be a bore.
7. Innovate.
8. Be suspicious of awards.
9. Psychological segmentation.
10. Don’t bury news.
11. Go the whole hog.  This is a great point.  Don’t attempt too many things, you’ll achieve nothing.  Boil your strategy down to one simple promise, and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.

They also have 12 points in what works well in television, and 13 for print. It’s a great list, and I’m just loving digging through this genius.

32. Yes, people read long copy.  Readership falls off rapidly up to fifty words, but drops very little between fifty and five hundred words.(!)  “The more your tell, the more you sell”.  This is fascinating.  That’s a HUGE number, fifty and five hundred with a minor drop-off.

OH GOD NO.

Xerox, another classic logo destroyed.  That’s right, Xerox recently had it’s classic logo redesigned.

Horrific, isn’t it?  They changed the color, the shape, added 3-D.  BLEECCCH.

I’m putting a fair amount of blame at the feet of Intrabrand, who designed this monstronsity.

“The new Xerox logo is now a lowercase treatment of the Xerox name — in a vibrant red — alongside a sphere-shaped symbol sketched with lines that link to form an illustrative “X,” representing Xerox’s connections to its customers, partners, industry and innovation, and designed to be more effectively animated for use in multi-media platforms.”  -Official Press Release

Words just fail me.  This is full of fail.  You suck Xerox, and you suck Intrabrand.

Okay, rather than end it on this awful note, I’ll leave you with a utterly fantastic logo I ran across yesterday in my surfing.

It’s for a recycling center in Taiwan.  I _love_ the use of negative space here. Note the lack of 3-D, X’s, animation or other useless crap.

Great color schemes.

GenoPal Online is a pretty nice online tool to help you determine a color palette.  I really like the example squares they provide as the swatch sample.

I ran across two other decent color pickers the other day, but have since lost the URL’s, so nuts to you.

Garamond vs Garamond

Ok, sorry this is all in French.  But it’s fantastic. Really, if you’re familiar at all with type, you should go check this out. It’s a complete and thorough comparison of all the various Garamond typefaces.  The graphics alone spell out the differences, which are much more pronounced that I’d have initially realized.

I’ve always thought of Adobe Garamond as the “pure” Garamond, as it looked most like Garamond to me.   ITC always looked off.  Now I know why.

Say “What” again. I dare you.

Say What Again is a short design exercise from Jarratt Moody that uses a sound clip from a movie (Pulp Fiction in Jarratts case) and uses only type to illustrate this scene.

He pulls it off with ease.  Granted I think his scene was an easy one, but the type nicely pulls you along.  Worth checking out.  My only real gripe was the use of the color blue.  I’d have preferred red.

The 100 Best Fonts

The top 100 fonts have been ranked. And the ranking is good.

The top 10 are:

1. Helvetica

2. Garamond

3. Frutiger (I might have put Frutiger up at number 2, but this high up is subjective.)

4. Bodoni

5. Futura

6. Times (I loathe Times because it’s overused.)

7. Akzidenz Grotesk. (I love Akzidenz)

8. Officina

9. Gill Sans

10. Univers

What is interesting is that only 2 of these fonts are serif fonts.

Fantastic Magic Posters.

Superb vintage magic posters and related items from the golden age of magic, 1890 - 1930.

Polish Movie Posters

Apparantly Poland has fantastic artistic license in creating new movie posters.  I mean, just look at The Muppet Movie, Star Wars, The Terminator (which looks like a book cover), The Birds (a great use of type), Trading Places (which now looks like either a horror movie or a heavy drama), Weekend at Bernies (which definitely is a horror movie poster), The Empire Strikes Back, Ghandi or Apocaplypse Now, just to name a few.

Words and images must be used responsibly.

The National Design Awards are a serious deal. The program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.” It’s a big enough deal that the winners are invited to the White House.

This year, however, five Communication Design honorees decided to decline the invitation.

That’s right, they turned down going to the White House. In a letter they sent to the White House, they stated (emphasis mine):

Graphic designers are intimately engaged in the construction of language, both visual and verbal. And while our work often dissects, rearranges, rethinks, questions and plays with language, it is our fundamental belief, and a central tenet of “good” design, that words and images must be used responsibly, especially when the matters articulated are of vital importance to the life of our nation.

We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.

While we have diverse political beliefs, we are united in our rejection of these policies. Through the wide-scale distortion of words (from “Healthy Forests” to “Mission Accomplished”) and both the manipulation of media (the photo op) and its suppression (the hidden war casualties), the Bush administration has demonstrated disdain for the responsible use of mass media, language and the intelligence of the American people.

Chipp Kidd was also invited to sign this document. His response, via email: “…But as graphic designers, we rightly complain that those talents are too often uncredited and taken for granted. Personally, in this case, I think it accomplishes more to stand up and be counted than to stay away.”

I’m somewhat on the fence here. I agree strongly with what these designers (Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, Georgie Stout, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister) are saying.
Design does have power, and Good Design should be used responsibly.  Propaganda is an example of this gone wrong. (and yet I still adore propaganda.  Maybe for this reason alone.)  But Chipp is dead on in saying that it’s important for design to be recognized, because people just don’t realize how important design can be.

Maybe the thing to have done is publish this letter condoning the design actions, and yet still go accept the award.  Use it as a soapbox?

Goodbye Absolut Ads

Okay. I’m a litte sad about this. [Absolut is retiring it's world-famous print ads][1]. It’s been 25 years, and about 1,500 different versions of the ads. I think it’s safe to say the ads were iconic.

Now there are two parts to this post. One is the new ads. They’re done by TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York. So they know what they’re doing. But __they now are using the spelling Absolute__. They’ve added an e to the ads. That just screams WRONG to me. The format of the ads I’m somewhat okay with, as they seem a natural growth to the original. It’s taking the phrase aspect of before, and using the photos to support that phrase. That’s fine with me. Simple, elegant, and extending upon their established brand. __With the exeception of the extra e__.

[1]: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_steps_to_typesetting_on_the_web_the_right_glyph_for_the_job/
[via]: http://www.designobserver.com/
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