Science Museum Brand and Identity

© Johnson Banks

I'm very excited by the new Science Museum brand and identity from Johnson Banks currently being rolled out throughout the museum.

'The chosen idea stemmed from research (Johnson Banks) did on codes, puzzles, patterns and basic digital typefaces, and we found a way to shorten the word science so we could create a grid-like ‘stack’ of the letterforms.'

The posters on the London Underground look great, with the distinctive typography (Font: SM Grid from The Foundry) standing out from the visual clutter around them.

Great idea, great structure, great execution.

Evolving English

© British Library

On Tuesday I went to a fascinating lunchtime gallery lecture given by the curators of the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library.

In the course of my visit, what struck me was that no sooner did individuals or institutions try to fix English within a set of rules, so the language evolved as accepted usage changed.

The first part of the exhibition gives an overview of early, middle and then old English, using documents from the permanent collection to chart the development of the language. Whilst the court and state used French, and Latin was the language of the Church, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the first widespread text seen in old English, the language of the people.

The rest of the exhibition is non-chronological, but divided into themed pairs;

• Written and spoken English
• Native and foreign English
• English at work and play

The development of English as world language is bound up in the development of England as a nation, with social class and with the literary, scientific, manufacturing and trading links forged with countries round the world.

The growth of the British Empire helped spread English around the globe, and also enabled it to absorb a vast number of new words from other countries into the language.

Structurally, everyday English continues to develop. Useful words are added whilst unnecessary words quietly fall into disuse. Today, young people mix yardie, east asian and estuary English to create a new street language that is owned by its speakers.

Concerns about the decline in the quality of English usage, never far from the headlines, have been regularly expressed since 1712 when Jonathan Swift proposed an ‘Approved English’ committee along lines of the Academie Francaise. This suggestion has never been taken up officially in Britain, so as a language English has been free to adapt, add, appropriate or coin new words as required – and in doing so has evolved into a dynamic and flexible world language.

It's a tool that too many designers ignore.

Have you got a strategy?

Strategy is one of those terms that designers love to hate. More often than not because the person hearing it doesn’t understand what it means (and ‘strategy’ only scores 10 points in buzzword bingo).

Whereas tactics are concerned with actively doing something, strategy is all about your plan for actively doing something. The key words here are ‘your plan’.

Launching straight into a piece of design without knowing why you are doing it, or what you are trying to communicate or to whom you are communicating, is, quite frankly, a waste of everybody’s time and effort.

Having a strategy is not a ticklist exercise, but a methodology for getting to where you want to be.

It can take many different forms from a simple who, what, why, where, when and how, through to a more formal PRINCE2 documented process.

The scale and depth depends on the nature of a project – a flyer will not need the same attention to detail as a campaign.

The important thing is to make your strategy work for you so that you have a solid base on which your communication is built. Each element of the framework can then be tested to make sure your design decision-making is evidence-based and sound.

You can then argue that you may not like the solution, but you can’t argue with the solution.

Plan to succeed
Start with a blank sheet of paper, and on it define a structure within which you can construct your design. By creating a pattern of decisions and actions in the present, you can guarantee success in the future.

So before you even think about words and pictures, you need to work your way through your strategy and see how it will influence the design;

• Have you a mission statement (do you know why you are doing this)?
• Do you know what your aims and objectives are (where are you now, where do you want to be and how are you going to get there)?
• What are the characteristics of the brand you are working with?
• What are the communications criteria (segmentation, positioning)?
• Do you have a communication plan (audience, medium, message, schedule, budget)?
• Do you know what the communication channels are?
• What does success look like (and how will you measure it)?

And then there are all those paper tools you can use to help inform your strategy (all with their little acronyms);

• SMART – Specific. Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timebound
• SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
• AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
• PPPP - Product, Price, Place, Promotion

Do you need to use them all? The answer (of course) is that it all depends on the nature of the project, but a partly informed strategy is better than no strategy at all. And as they say in the army, ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.’

Probability, randomness and chance

It’s not strictly on topic, but I caught a fascinating discussion on probability, randomness and chance on Radio 4’s series The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Brian Cox

Co-presented by astrophysicist Professor Brian Cox, the discussion ranged from the ‘birthday paradox’ where the probability of two people in a random group of 23 chosen people sharing the same birthday is greater than 50%, to the idea that people are predisposed to pattern recognition because we have evolved with the survival mechanism to extract patterns from not much data ie. spotting tiger stripes in the surrounding foliage.

Mind you I’ve enjoyed what Professor Cox has to say ever since I accidentally watched Danny Boyle’s Sunshine with the scientific commentary dubbed on to the action and found that it all made sense (sort of).

But one of the questions raised by the programme was to ask why people interpret a chance event as being somehow preordained, and why we seek to interpret such results with other meanings. The thought was that because people have a memory of past events, we use that as a filter to understand present events.

It reminded me of how patterns and numbers crop up all the time in design and how designers can use this knowledge to engage their audience by having them infer content structure, through the filter of previously remembered events, from the groupings and alignments in the design.

Such relationships as the golden ratio of 1 to 1.618, the rule of grouping in threes and fives, picture composition using intersecting thirds, and all manner of gestalt relationships are used to help the viewer to process information more quickly.

A practical example of this effect can be seen in website design. Most peoples experiences of the web are made elsewhere, so your site needs to conform to the expected web page layout if you want the user to be able to quickly engage with the content.

Of course, knowing that rule means that, in the case of Johnson Banks, you can break it for good effect if you want to surprise your audience.

Chunking information (Millar’s magic number seven)

How you transmit knowledge, share concepts and process information through language, and how structure and legibility affect the visualisation of messages informs the design decisions you make on a daily basis.

To help your audience understand your messaging, you need to know how they will receive and decode the information you send.

Scientific study has provided designers with a number of theoretical tools to refine and improve their messages. Among these, some of the more practical tools are chunking, perception, scanpaths, wayfinding and content structure;

Chunking information (Millar’s magic number seven)
In cognitive psychology, chunking refers to a strategy for making short-term memory more effective.

‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’ a highly cited 1954 paper from Harvard psychologist George Miller argued that the number of objects (or ‘chunks’) of information the average person can hold in short-term memory is 7 +/-2.

Capacity for short-term memory varies between individuals (and subject expertise), but generally people can process 7 +/-2 individual pieces of information at any one time. This principle can be extended to chunk more complex information. Dividing complex information into subsets that also number 7 +/-2 makes it easier to process, understand and recall.

A practical example of Millar’s Law is the conversion of telephone numbers to smaller, more memorable 4-digit chunks ie. 02079460357 converted to (020) 7946 0357.

Therefore, well considered page or interface design needs to account for the reader’s ability to process multiple information sets in short-term memory. By using layout, colour, typeface, typesize and placement you can ensure that complex information is always arranged into groups numbering 7+/-2 and is thus easier for your audience to process and to understand.

Don’t believe me? Then why do you always make a shopping list for more than five items?

In anticipation of London 2012

London 2012 stadium

For the last two years I’ve been lucky enough to find myself commuting into London past the 2012 Olympics site at Stratford.

Seeing the Olympic Stadium and Zaha Hadid designed Aquatics Centre rising from the dilapidated light industrial units and bomb sites that littered the lower Lea Valley have given me a great sense anticipation for the 2012 Games.

From the train on Friday morning I watched the zig-zag tubular superstructure of the Stadium rising above the yellow mist, and I was struck by how dramatic the repeat triangles of the main frame were in their simplicity.

The contrast with Herzog & de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Stadium in Bejing could not be more striking, but I feel the design for the London stadium is curiously appropriate. The Bejing Games announced to the world that China was a modern, complex and sophisticated nation. London’s games have been dubbed the austerity games and the main stadium structure, made from recycled gas pipes, reflects these straitened times and yet has a quiet dignity about it.

Neverthless, sripped to its essentials, the exoskeleton follows the modernist maxim ‘form follows function’ and echoes some of Britain’s most iconic architecture.

And maybe it’s appropriate that the stadium should sit back a little and allow the athletes to take centre stage.

2012 – Can’t wait.

Narrative structure

All stories operate on two levels, the action level and the narrative level.

The action level describes what happens, while the narrative level describes how it happens.

The narrative provides the structure to a story, the framework that allows the action to take place.

The structure of storytelling was set out by Aristotle, who stated that a drama should have a beginning, a middle and an end. It should be constructed according to a unity of time, place and action, with the various characters and plot elements intertwined to create a unified story.

In schools, children are taught about a five stage ‘story hill’ with an introduction or set up, a rising crisis, a turning point, the climax and the ending.

A similar structure can be seen in films, where in order to keep the audience’s attention, the screenplay uses a time based grid to change the pace and focus of a film.

Typically there is a first act that sets up the main characters, before an incident happens that disrupts their world and launches the second act. Partway through the second act something major happens to change the tone and nature of the film. This mid-point climax re-energises the narrative. At the end of the second act, a significant event signals the drawing in of all the plot strands and the third act brings the climax of the film.

Of course, it’s more complex than this. Each act is made up of scenes, each of which needs their own structure to help drive the narrative forward.

Traditional stories relied on a dramatic triangle involving a victim, a persecutor and a rescuer in a tight and closed narrative.  Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. How the story ends may not be clear at the start, but the drama is always resolved.

More contemporary stories allow for a non-dramatic journey where the audience is encouraged to make its own mind up as to the meaning of the story and the ending may be ambiguous.

In the interactive world, immersive role playing games allow the viewer to become active participants in the story. Role playing games have evolved  stoytelling from a liner narrative with a single ending, to a tree structure with multiple endings, and now a web-like structure where there is no first or last page and everything relates to everything else. The illusion of freedom is complete, even if it takes place within the limitations of the imagined world.

How then to make narrative sense of this?

To paraphrase screenwriter Robert McKee, the secret of a successful narrative is to use these principles, not to write the story, but to understand why these structures resonate with the audience and to understand how to use them at the macro and micro level to tell your story.

FAC numbers

Image: Jan Chlebik

The unveiling in Manchester the late Tony Wilson's gravestone, designed by long time Factory Records collaborator Peter Saville and Ben Kelly, was notable not only for being three years late, but also for being the only Factory 'production' not given a FAC number.

Factory Records employed a unique cataloguing system that gave a number not just to its musical releases, but to artwork and other objects (including a lawsuit).

The last ever Factory catalogue number was given to Tony Wilson's coffin (FAC 501).

I like the way that a simple identifier took on a whole life of it's own and became as much a part of the Factory brand language as the imagery and type.

For type enthusiasts, the font is Rotis and was laser-etched.

The message is now the medium

At MediaPro 2010 the main theme of the keynote speakers was how to engage with social media.

“The medium is the message”, Marshal McLuhan, 1964

McLuhan argued that the entire communication industry is underpinned by a symbiotic relationship in which the delivery medium influences how the message is perceived.

2010 - The message is now the medium.

The rise of the social web – characterised by dynamic public content that changes as a result of a many-way conversation between applications, consumer/citizens and service providers - is redefining the communications landscape.

The principles on which successful social software is built are the basics of human psychology – conversations, groups, transactions, reputation and ownership.

Get those right, your engagement becomes authentic and your messaging more effective.