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.