Big design

gov.uk

When the award-winning gov.uk site launched in 2012, it marked the moment ‘big design’ entered the mainstream.

Driven partly by the need to be accessible, and partly by the requirement to work on mobile devices, the launch of gov.uk also coincided with the design industry moving from skeuomorphic design towards the flat aesthetic seen in Microsoft’s Windows 8 ‘Metro’ interface, Apples iOS8 and Google’s Materials Design.

This combination of HTML5 dynamic backgrounds, overlayed with large type and control icons on flat colour panels has created a youthful ‘flat’ UI design meme that references the Bauhaus and Swiss Design schools and provides a single underlying system providing a unified experience across platforms and device sizes.

The new BBC responsive website, now in beta testing, follows the same principles.

BBC Beta

Every week, the BBC News website gets around 115 million visits, and the number coming from mobiles and tablets is increasing all the time to the point that these devices now account for 43% of unique browsers.

Looking at device usage, it seems clear that the increased take up of tablet and mobile devices, with their requirement for larger button target areas, is driving the move towards ‘big design’.

Apple iOS7

For any organisation, maintaining different versions of websites for desktop, tablet and mobile (as well as accounting for different screen sizes, different browsers and legacy systems) is unsustainable. Designing simpler responsive sites, optimised for different screen sizes, is the most efficient structure, but it means that control areas designed for display on mobile devices take up a proportionally larger area of screen when displayed on a desktop device.

Microsoft Metro/Windows8

Google Material Design

This also represents a shift in the way websites are designed. In the early days of the web, websites were merely ‘brochureware’ extensions of printed publications. (The first web page I designed for the DTI just had a telephone number on it.) Then came sites that replicated the (sometimes labyrinthine) internal structure of an organisation. In the third wave these sites were turned around to be more user-centric.

Now we are seeing the rise of more focused task-centric sites, and enabling users to carry out these tasks (often on the move) using a simple graphic UI that stands out from the background visual noise is a major driver in big design.

But in deploying large blocks within your content, the challenge now for a designer is how to develop the visual structure without losing a sense of style.

The resolution of mobile screens means that good typography, tracked and spaced with as much precision as print, is now achievable. Icons and other UI elements don’t need candy stripes or glossy reflections to make them look better at low resolutions.

So while it’s good to know what best-practice is, it’s possible for designers to push the boundaries, because we can.

In These Stones Horizons Sing

Continuing the theme of a visual language being structured by an overarching idea, graphic design can learn a lot from looking at architecture.

Wales Millennium Centre

The Wales Millennium Centre was designed and built in Wales. The brief to the architects, Percy Thomas, was that it had to be unmistakably Welsh and internationally outstanding.

Wales’ identity is conveyed through the materials used to build the Centre. They connect to Wales’ culture, landscape, and history.

The exterior walls are clad in horizontal layers of welsh slate, inspired by the architects’ memories of the stratified cliffs along Wales’ Glamorgan coastline around Ogmore and Southerndown.

This visual language ties the building to the Welsh landscape, and the structure of the fascia and colonnades also echoes the tunnels and galleries of the mines that once dominated Welsh industry.

You can see the clear line of thought that developed from the architect’s sketch books through the design drawings to the finished building. The success of translating the architects vision into a structure with a coherent visual language has produced a powerful statement of Welsh identity.

Just what was it about Richard Hamilton?

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different,
so appealing?

Visiting the retrospective of Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern, I was struck by the way he constantly embraced new ideas in his art, and experimented with different drawing, painting, collage and printmaking methods and latterly digital techniques.

Hamilton took a very experimental approach to art, exploring the boundary between figurative and abstract images and the interface between organic and industrial forms.

In 1951, for his exhibition Growth and Form at the ICA, Hamilton used grid-based structures to look at form in nature and explore their influence on design trends in contemporary architecture and design.

In the seminal 1955 Man, Machine and Motion exhibition at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle and then at the ICA, Hamilton arranged around 200 images in a modular steel grid. The viewer was encouraged to explore the installation and see images around, above and below them.

His developing interest in popular culture led to the creation of the collage seen as the first Pop art work, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Hamilton listed the characteristics of Pop art;

• designed for a mass audience
• transient
• expendable
• low cost
• mass produced
• young
• witty
• sexy
• gimmicky
• glamorous
• big business

Effectively he was describing the next 50 years of modern advertising.

Heartbleed

It's a simple logo for a complex bug. But creating an identity to raise awareness is entirely the point.

You’ve probably never heard of CVE-2014-0160. But you probably have heard of the Heartbleed bug, the security hole in some implementations of the OpenSSL protocol that provides secure communication between servers.

The two are one and the same, except that CVE-2014-0160 is the name assigned under the Standard for Information Security Vulnerability Names protocol, wheras Heartbleed is a catchy, scary name with a catchy, scary logo depicting a red heart. Bleeding.

The power of the Heartbleed logo is in its sheer, bold literalness, and in that regard it’s perfect for its purpose.

Heartbleed was given its identity by the international security company Codenomicon, which independently discovered the CVE-2014-0160 OpenSSL exploit on the same day as Google researcher Neel Mehta.

Most security holes like CVE-2014-0160 would be posted on messageboards read only by the coding and hacking community, but in this case Heartbleed was so serious that everyone who uses OpenSSL in applications such as web, email and instant messaging was at potential risk of having their passwords compromised.

A Codenomicon engineer came up with the name Heartbleed, inspired by a tangentially related piece of software called Heartbeat, and in a brilliantly inspired piece of marketing, Codenomicon registered Heartbleed.com, designed an FAQ explaining the bug, and accompanied it with a logo by Codenomicon designer Leena Snidate.

The logo went viral and the Heartbleed brand was born.

Don’t be surprised if the next major bug also gets its own name and logo™ and probably a clothing range.

A structured identity for the Brecon Beacons

The Brecon Beacons is an area famed for its exceptional natural beauty, wide open hillsides and natural light. It is also designated as a ‘dark sky’ area with little or no light pollution.

In 2010 Visit Wales designated the Brecon Beacons as a national park, and Small Back Room were asked to create a new brand for the Brecon Beacons, basing the designs around the ideas of light and the thought ‘Our National Park’.

Taking the idea of light as central to the branding, the logo contains two intersecting lines that create a triangle or cone of light, which creates an underlying structure that influences the visual language of the brand. For example, the cone can be used as a supergraphic.

I like the idea of supergraphics that stem from the core brand. I first became aware of this when working with the Department of Health (DH) brand, where a segment of the DH arc is used as a container for images.

But supergraphics are not limited to print.

Taken to an extreme, the shard-like visual language developed by FutureBrand from the construction lines for the 2012 London Olympic logo, were used to create environmental graphics that could be expressed on a huge scale, for example as seating patterns in the Olympic stadium and pool.

You can imagine the same principles being used to influence the environmental design for visitor centres, signage and events like Brecon Jazz.

The Brecon Beacons brand is designed to be bilingual, and the brand colour palette is extended to enable the brand to be used as flexibly as possible.

The website will launch in April, and stakeholders will be able to download digital assets to apply the brand locally. I hope they're able to imagine the possibilities and to use it well.

Investing in design

Design Council research has shown that for every £1 that businesses invest in design, they gain on average over £4 net operating profit, over £20 net turnover and over £5 net exports.

And there is increasingly widespread awareness in industry that when the remit for design is widened beyond the traditional focus on products or graphics to provide benefits such as improved strategic thinking, morale and productivity, then design can add significant value to organisations.

A new report, Leading Business by Design, suggests that rather than being a method solely for creating desirable objects, design can be fundamental to businesses in helping them innovate and define strategy.

The report was commissioned from Warwick Business School by the Design Council, and came up with three main findings;

1. Design is customer-centred – Benefit is greatest when design is intimately related to solving customers’ problems.
2. Design is most powerful when culturally embedded – It works best when it has strong support from senior management in the commissioning organisation, and is integrated into product / service development from beginning to end.
3. Design can add value to any organisation – Design can benefit small, medium or large manufacturing and service-based organisations by driving innovation and opening up uncontested market spaces, differentiating products and services to attract customers, and improving recognition by strengthening branding to embody a company’s values.

Using case studies, the report provides practical examples of how these three design themes have benefited a range of organisations, and provides clear evidence that structured design thinking offers a set of widely applicable principles that can be of huge benefit to all businesses.

Essentially, it suggests that rather than being a method solely for creating desirable objects, design can be fundamental to businesses in helping them innovate and to define strategy.

Less than one second

Paul Butt / Section Design

Structuring and visualising data is a discipline that always appeals to me, so it was with a sense of anticipation that I took a trip to Shoreditch to see a two-day exhibiton of information and data design curated by London based information design agency, Signal Noise.

Signal Noise commissioned a series of print-based data visualisations that explored the theme of “less than one second”, based on the premise that time is of the essence now more than ever before.

We now access enormous reams of data in ‘less than a second’, thanks to technologies such as cameras that captures the movement of light in slow motion, or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that observes sub-atomic activity happening in millionths of a second.

Technology enables a vast number of data points and events to be read and understood across a variety of fields - from automated trades to F1 analytics - but filtering and making sense of the data so that it provides a useful insight is the job of the information graphic designer.

Despite the wide range of subjects used as source material for the exhibition, including athletics, cinematography, F1, GPS, the LHC and stock trading, I found it significant that the base structure of the majority of the visualisations was circular.

Mapping the data - Josh Gowen

The visualisations that eschewed circles were, I thought, less intuitive and less visually attractive, even though timelines are traditionally depicted as, well, a line.

Imposing a clock face metaphor seemed to provide a familiar ‘carrier’ structure for the message, enabling the viewer to quickly interpret the information.

The most successful visualisation seemed to me to be Josh Gowen’s ‘Mapping the data’, combining the clock metaphor with the shape of the LHC and a graphic that showed how the volume of data crunched by the LHC is filtered and then delivered to 151 research centres worldwide.

Telling the story by combining seven pieces of information in one graphic, plus some cool stats. What's not to like?