Jost Hochuli: In Conversation

Jost Hochuli

Jost Hochuli, the renowned book designer, graphic designer, typographer, printer and author of Designing Books, and Detail in Typography has had a slow but steady impact on modern book design and typography. First, through his work, especially that for VGS and Typotron; then through his teaching at the Schüle für Gestaltung in St. Gallen; and more widely through his publications on typography and book design.

Through these books, especially the English language edition of Designing Books, he has become probably the most influential theorist of book design since Jan Tschichold.

Jost’s belief is that book design is not just concerned with beautiful objects, but rather it is about making useful tools for reading.

Apprenticed to Rudolf Hostettler at Zollikofer Verlag (publishing company) in the 1950’s, anecdotally only two typefaces were permitted in the works – Akzidenz Grotesk and Times New Roman. Working in the modernist style known as Swiss or International school, the goal of the apprentice typographer was to simplify page design and layout so that there was no typographic ‘noise’.

Although we think of the Swiss school as being the dominant style in Europe in the fifties and sixties, in fact it was largely confined to Holland, Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Even within Switzerland, designers in the French-speaking cantons looked to France and Didot, designers in the Italian-speaking cantons to Milan and Bodoni.

Nevertheless, the Swiss school, following the path laid down by the Bauhaus architect, industrial designer and typographer Max Bill won worldwide recognition in the decades following the Second World War

“We were simply louder” said Hochuli.

Bill urged Swiss designers to follow modernist “‘asymmetric’ or organically formed typography”, to reject “the conventional text-image of axial symmetry”.

In response, contemporary designer Jan Tschichold defended the need to design some books “in the manner of traditional typography” while allowing that others might be more suitable done in Bill’s ‘functional’ typography.

As Hochuli developed his style, he was influenced by Tschichold’s plea for “the right to work in the way that I find best”, whether ‘newly revived traditional typography’ or ‘functional typography’.

Although Tschichold never visited the Zollikofer works, Hostettler considering him “A traitor to modernism”, Hochuli followed a middle path between the modernism of the Bauhaus and die neue typographie and traditional book design, before ultimately rejecting the rigidity of the grid.

Preferring to use consistent channels of white space between elements to create harmony on the page, Hochuli’s graphic design practice aimed to capture the feeling of the work through typographic layout that created “adventures on a page”.

Thus echoing the principle ‘form follows function’, Hochuli’s preference is for content to come before design, although, as Hochuli has reiterated on several occasions, the designer must not follow dogma.

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Jost Hochuli was in conversation with Tony Pritchard, LCC senior lecturer and ISTD board member.

In association with International Society of Typographic Designers, London College of Communication, Presence Switzerland and the Swiss Cultural Fund.

1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days

1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days: America's gun crisis – in one chart

The attack at a country music festival in Las Vegas on Monday 2 October 2017 that left at least 58 people dead is the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history – but there were six other mass shootings in America in the previous week alone.

Data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive reveals a shocking human toll: there is a mass shooting – defined as four or more people shot in one incident, not including the shooter – every nine out of 10 days on average.

The graphic, produced by The Guardian US interactive team, a small group of designers, interactive developers and journalists working alongside the editorial team, is horrifying in it's simplicity.

A simple but effective idea demonstrating the power of information graphics to tell a story. As you scroll down, the enormity of the carnage over the last four years becomes apparent, leaving you slack-jawed at the seemingly never-ending toll - an infinite scroll of injury and death.

Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?

And so to the Wellcome Collection, and their exploration of the relationship between graphic design and health Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?.

The exhibition highlights the widespread and yet subliminal nature of graphic design in constructing and communicating healthcare messages; words and images, signs and symbols, colour, scale and format, all carefully structured to communicate, and in doing so shaping our environment, society and personal health.

Creating a health message that an individual is willing to self-identify with, and consequently inspire action or change their behavior, requires a range of design interventions. Surprisingly, sometimes a small structural change can create the greatest impact.

For example, ‘nudge’ theory suggests that presenting people with a mandated choice or opt-out question makes it significantly more likely that they would choose to carry an organ Donor card.

The exhibition is divided into zones; persuasion, education, hospitalisation, medication, contagion and provocation.

Each of which explain one aspect of design in health, from national public awareness campaigns such as those for AIDS (TBWA) and the Samaritans (BBDO), to design research such as the NPSA’s findings on improving pharmaceutical packaging design and patient safety (RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design).

I enjoyed seeing Dr. John Snow’s historic map of cholera deaths around the Broad street pump, and Florence Nightingale’s ‘rose’ charts to illustrate deaths from disease in the Crimea, classics of information design.

On a larger scale, the sympathetic A&E information and wayfinding system for the NHS (Pearson Lloyd) and the now ubiquitous emergency service ‘battenburg’ patterns (PSDB) are reminders of how effective design ideas quickly spread and become an accepted part of the environment.

Whether taking the correct tablet, deciding to donate an organ or to practice safe sex, graphic design influences our health and wellbeing. Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? considers just how vital graphic design can be.

Type talks

We know that typefaces convey emotion as well as information.

Sarah Hyndman’s talk at the Museum of Packaging set out to explore the connections between social change, popular sentiment and typography.

In a time of increased industrialisation and globalisation, where jobs and livelihoods are threatened, where an influx of labour from elsewhere depresses wages, where old certainties are stripped away as financial systems, social order, and country borders are threatened. New leaders articulate a radical vision of the future, whilst those outside of the elite look on powerless and in search of a voice.

Sound familiar?

In 1970 the raw anger of a generation that felt excluded, marginalised and ignored found their voice in Punk. Expressed through attitude, music, style and typography, Punk’s anti-establishment stance found its visual expression through the work of Jamie Reid.

The stylistic conventions of Punk included mixing type styles and weights, overprinting, cluttered pages, deliberate mistakes, cultural references, blurred photography and an embrace of general messiness. All elements that rejected the rules and structure of the international style, took the typographic grids of modernism, a visual shorthand for the corporate industrial complex, and tore them apart.

Treating type as if it was a photograph freed designers from the restrictions of typesetting within a structured grid. Cut-out, photocopied and hand-drawn type also had the advantage of being able to bypass expensive printers, the rawness of the layouts on labels, flyers and zines perfectly matching the urgency and language of the authors.

 Ironically, the vibrancy of the look led to it becoming co-opted by the very establishment that Punk aimed to subvert. First ignored and feared, then embraced and tamed.

Kellog’s Squares anyone?

The creation of an expressive style that symbolises opposition to the establishment has historical precedent, and the inevitable co-option of anti-establishment typography into the mainstream follows a similar pattern. First World War Germany saw the appearance of Dadism. 1960’s America brought us psychedelia and pop art against the backdrop of the Vietnam war. The industrial decline of The UK in the 1970’s gave rise to Punk, whilst the 1980’s brought New wave and the postmodern typographic design of Brody, Saville, 8vo and Tomato (amongst others).

And so to 2016, and the rise of the Snapchat generation. With one typeface, limited tools and only a 10 second viewing window, Snapchat is the latest medium for millennials to share the moments that matter to them. it’s really immediate and ugly. You’re not designing, it’s just Times New Roman or Ariel and then it’s gone. It’s the closest thing now to how Punk looked like then.

Unstructured information and emotion that is explicitly short-lived and self-deleting, so it can’t be filtered, searched, indexed or saved, but provides today's authentic voice.

Noto

Photo: Andy Dunn

Noto, Google’s multi-language font family from Monotype is designed to work over a wide range of different languages and on any device.
 
Noto covers more than 800 languages and 100 written scripts, and includes serif and sans serif fonts across eight weights as well as numbers, emoji, symbols, and musical notation.
 
The result of a five-year collaboration between Google and Monotype, one of the main aims for the typeface is to allow cultures to communicate digitally and help enable global communications across borders, languages and cultures.
 
Monotype has researched and digitally designed the characters, writing systems and alphabets for each Noto typeface, applying the rules and idiosyncrasies for individual languages to the fonts, based on the Unicode standard – a character coding system that defines the characters and languages that can be displayed and used within a computer system.
 
Because new scripts are constantly being added to Unicode, when a computer is unable to display a character in a font, it displays blank boxes instead. These are colloquially known as “tofu”. The name Noto is taken from Google’s goal of having “no more tofu”.

Monotype linguistic typographer Kamal Mansour says: “The aim of the Noto project is to provide digital representation to all the scripts in the Unicode Standard. That in particular is something that many different language communities could not afford to do on their own.”

In search of the lost logo

It’s not often that I get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two of my design heroes, so thanks to Paul Mellon for posting an update to his search for the (as-yet-unknown) designer of theNeighbourhood Watch logo.

The design neighbourhood really stepped up to support our quest to locate the original designer of the NW roundel. Design journalists such as Lynda Relph-Knight and some of the UK’s pre-eminent designers from the 80’s and 90’s era, such as Mike Dempsey, Studio Dempsey and Michael Johnson, Johnson Banks joined in the search as did ex-employees of the COI in-house design studio, such as Fanny Sigler, Mike Wheeler and Rob Levison who actually put us onto our strongest lead.

Whilst the identity of the original designer remains elusive, Paul goes on to cite Creative Barcode as a method of identifying the originator of creative works that goes beyond simple copyright watermarks.

In the same way that map makers use ‘paper villages’ to identify when their work has been plagiarised, Creative Barcode is a way for creators, entrepreneurs, innovators and brand owners to use Intellectual Property (IP) tags to protect their ideas, concepts and designs.

Part of the value inherent in the value of a brand is its original instance, its history and and subsequent design journey.

By ensuring a design history is maintained, Creative Barcode records, authenticates, time-stamps and IP tags iterations of a design and its creative expression.





The designer should therefore always be identifiable and credited in the Creative Barcode time-line.

So whilst it has become easier for creatives to promote their work by putting their portfolios online, being able to timestamp work and identify yourself as the creator is increasingly important in an industry where ideas are the main currency and it is easier than ever to ‘borrow’ other designers work for creative inspiration.

UBS - asking the right questions

UBS is a global firm providing financial services to private, corporate and institutional clients.

Their new brand strategy aims to adopt a more thought-provoking and personal approach to clients with a clear tone of voice that cuts through the clutter of a busy financial marketplace.

The rebranding is a full redesign that includes all elements apart from the logo, using both sight and sound with the introduction of an audio tone developed in conjunction with Leicester University.

The first expression of the new brand is a new campaign that demonstrates the power of a simple proposition - the first step to making the right choices is focusing on the right questions.

Client insight and research into what motivates clients across countries and across all client groups identified that some questions stay pretty much the same.

Thus questions form the foundation of the creative concept.

The narrative structure poses questions from different life stages - family, our values, the impact we have on other people - and suggests that asking the right questions can make things a little clearer.

The brand film of simple black text on a while background shows hypothetical questions asked by clients, whilst press adverts, using images shot by Annie Leibovitz in a muted colour palette, present personal stories as case studies.

The questions and case studies form a powerful story arc that engages the viewer by allowing them to project their own answers into the narrative.

And of course there’s a great emotional hook at the end.

A simple concept, based on solid research, well structured, gracefully executed.

Structured thinking is a competitive advantage

The process of design calls for a combination of investigation, strategic thinking, design excellence and project management skills.

But regardless of the nature of your client and the complexity of their project, the process should remain the same.

By breaking a project down into distinct phases, each with defined beginning and endpoints, you create logical breaks for review and decision making.

Reinventing the process each time in order to cut costs can create substantial risks to the project, and negate any long-term benefits.

Larger firms may follow a controlled and documented process, such as PRINCE2, whilst smaller agencies may have a simple five-stage plan, but in either case having a structured process appropriate to the task provides competitive advantage by:

• assuring that a proven method is being used to achieve business results;
• sharing the understanding of the time/cost/quality required;
• creating trust and confidence in the project team;
• positioning project management as smart, efficient and cost-effective;
• building credibility for the proposed creative solutions; and
• setting and managing expectations for the process.

However it is expressed, the design process can be seen as just a more complex version of the simple ‘story hill’ that is taught in primary school.

You need a beginning, a middle and an end, and within that you need to ask what needs to happen (and in what order) and how are things resolved?

But because the process is just the process, you still need a creative spark, intuition or leap of faith to bring it to life.

Having a structure in place lessens the background ‘noise’ and creates the space in which creative thinking can thrive.

Google Mobile App UX Principles

I do like a good UX framework, and Google’sMobile App UX Principles document uses practical examples to demonstrate how to improve the user experience of apps. The effectiveness of user optimisation strategies are illustrated using metrics such as app performance and user conversion on both Android and iOS platforms.

Adopt, Use, Transact, Return

In designing an app, you need to work hard to meet the expectations of users who are becoming accustomed to high quality apps that deliver usable, robust, and sometimes delightful user experiences.

Investing time and effort in creating, testing and optimising services can have a significant effect on how ‘sticky’ your app becomes.

The basics that need to addressed include optimising conversion, and avoiding interrupting users, or forcing them to think about things that should be simple. Google expresses this as a four-stage ‘Adopt, Use, Transact, Return’ framework.

Adopt, Use, Transact, Return

Adopt - Remove roadblocks to usage  
Remove all roadblocks to usage - and adoption - of your mobile app. Get users into the content / substance as quickly as possible, so that they can use, assess and experience its value to them.

First impressions count, and a splash screen gives you a short but vital window to engage a user in your proposition. But, never make users wait.

Tips / help or an onboarding sequence should only be employed if really necessary - so as not to interrupt users - but when used appropriately at key decision points, tips/help can guide the user in their initial experience and adoption.

Use - Make conversion decisions simple  
Enable people to use your app in the way that suits their needs. A clear structure combined with an excellent search facility using a range of methods, from keyword to product scanning and image search, will help users find what they want quickly and easily, satisfy their needs and drive conversion.

Transact - Provide the ultimate in convenience
Help users progress through each checkout stage with minimal effort, and with sufficient reassurance, to convert without hesitation.

Return - Self service, engagement and delight
Be useful, to engage and delight, in order to retain customers or encourage member loyalty. Because, mobile apps are the most appropriate touchpoint for repeat interactions and frequent transactions, customers and members already loyal to a brand, and mobile first use cases (that couldn’t exist without unique smartphone services leveraging rich and contextual data; etc.), are more likely to return if an app provides an engaging experience.

What not to do

Do not mimic UI elements from other Platforms 
Design for each native mobile platform – Android and iOS - because each has unique capabilities and visual languages

Do not use underlined links 
Avoid using text with underlined links, which are part of the web / browser / page model, and not part of the app / screen model. Apps use buttons, not links.

Do not take users to the browser
Keep users in-app at all times, to maintain their spatial geography and to optimise conversion.

Do not ask users to rate your app too soon after downloading it
Avoid interrupting users by asking them to rate your app if they’ve only recently downloaded it or only used it a few times. Instead, wait until they prove to be repeat users and they’ll be more likely to rate your app favourably and provide more informed feedback

Mobile-friendly

My portfolio website at www.robertlevison.co.uk passes Google's mobile-friendly website test. Yay!

"Mobile friendliness" will affect how prominently websites appear in Google search results pages from 21 April 2015.

A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Uses text that is readable without zooming
• Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

Google provides a Mobile Friendly Test developer tool so you can see if your website is mobile-friendly.

Are Annoyingly Literal Headlines Set In Title Case Optimised For SEO?

You can find them across the web, headlines written for search engines rather than readers.

Online magazines like DesignTaxi and news aggregator sites such as BuzzFeed and Huffinton Post use strangely formulaic headlines, typically including a keyword, a proper noun, a verb, and an adjective whilst avoiding simple connectives. It’s English, but not as we know it. In SEO terms the language is optimised to add ‘value’ to each headline.

But in writing for robots, you just get robotic headlines.

It’s hard to imagine classic newspaper headlines such as the Sun’s 1992 headline ‘GOTCHA’ having the same impact as ‘Royal Navy Stealth Submarine Sinks Argentinian Cruiser in South Atlantic’.

Probably the best (worst?) example is the Daily Mail Online, where the inclusion of multiple keywords in the headline means the headlines have become almost as long as the stories themselves. It's clickbait in its purest form. The logical conclusion of this process is that the headline becomes the story, just a shrieking top-line opinion seeking an instinctive knee-jerk reaction from the comment trolls.

Surely we can write better than this.

The point of SEO is to provide sufficient context for search engines to rank the story as high as possible in the search results, relative to the value of the content.

Whilst search engine algorithms are constantly being tweaked, it’s generally accepted that an editor can improve the page ranking of a story by crafting the relationship between the headline, page title and meta description.

As well as describing the story, the title needs to include a proper name and a likely keyword that the reader might be using in their search (towards the front of the headline if possible). The page title can expand on the headline, for instance using a full name when the headline just uses a shorter, well-known, shorthand (eg. Diana / Diana, Princess of Wales), whilst the meta description can include more detail for the ‘snippet’ displayed underneath the link in the search results. All three elements should aim to match the words that users are likely to use in their search, and these search-optimised keywords should also be included in the opening paragraph of the story.

Thinking more widely about the utility of the headline, fitting it within 156 characters to read fully in the search results makes it easier to circulate on social networks, and including a personal pronoun in the headline also improves the chances of readers sharing your story.

(There are of course other factors in SEO, such as unique links to the story and referring links from the story, but these are not necessarily part of the headline construction).

In 2009, usability expert Jakob Nielsen introduced the concept of writing short, snappy SEO friendly headlines that “…must be absolutely clear when taken out of context” and cited the BBC's website as a best practice example of headline-writing “…offering remarkable headline usability."

Nielsen claimed that BBC headlines have the following characteristics:

• Short, typically 5 words or less
• Information-rich
• Include keywords
• Understandable, even out of context 
• Predictable/match for reader expectations

On the other hand, headlines from viral sites are usually the complete opposite:

• Long, sometimes to the point of being rambling and incoherent
• Emotion-rich
• Few or no keywords
• Typically non-contextual
• Use shock or emotional language

And whilst there is value in using searchable terms, the results can be lost in translation.

The late advertising and copywriting genius, David Ogilvy, said that "On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”

The point of a headline is to draw the reader into a story that they might not otherwise have read. The skill of the web subeditor is in knowing their audience so well that they can add their editorial tone of voice to the headline, whilst still capturing the imagination of the reader.

And if you can turn your headline into a pun, then so much the better.

The Scottish Sun’s ‘Super Caley go ballistic Celtic are atrocious’ is held up as one of the all time classic newspaper headlines.

And, although no one knew it at the time, it’s SEO friendly.

The Power of Structure

Creating structure is one of the key tasks for designers, but if we are creators of structure, what sort of structures are we creating?

Architecture influences the way we move through physical space. We create places for reflection and zones for action within perceptual boundaries and physical constraints.

Information architecture performs the same function, creating virtual spaces – patterns - whose purpose is communicated through space, form, colour, image, typography and behaviour.

These structures define entrances and exits to spaces where we engage in actions in both real and virtual worlds. Well-designed spaces and declare their purpose and encourage us to interact, to perform and to create.

The visual structure we build into our designs affects the way people see them. Is our visual hierarchy working so that readers find what they need, and in the right order? Are elements appropriated weighted so that their relationships are clear? Do people gravitate toward the most important information on the page, or are there elements that distract? Can our audience clearly see what to do next?

We begin to nudge the user experience by developing a conceptual structure that describes a consistent visual language. Our primary goal must be clarity. Does this graphic help to illustrate the idea, or make it more confusing? Communicating through words and images influences the way we think about things, and over time, becomes part of our brand.

Social structures influence the way we interact with others and set out the opportunities for social interaction. This area is one that designers have only just begun to investigate. Can you poke people? Favorite something they did? Engage with a brand? How is reputation managed? Are you able to import or export your relationships, and (more importantly) does it make sense to do so?

Of course these structures do not function in isolation. They overlap, intermingle, and co-exist. As designers we need to recognise the most appropriate patterns, and how to use them in our designs.

Build well.

Design by algorithm

Logos that change based on external variables

The tension between the desire for uniformity and the need for originality has provided a rich seam for branding agencies to exploit.

The idea that the essence of visual design can be expressed via a universal set of rules has a rich history, from the greek golden section via vetruvian man, compositional techniques, and the typographic grids of modernist typography.

But whilst brands can be monolithic or flexible, their visual expressions remained fixed until the 1980’s when the introduction of desktop publishing made it possible to produce designs that change based on external variables.

Some brands might need to show diversity of service or product, while others see flexibility as a crucial competitive advantage. So for those organisations that have evolution written into their essence, a dynamic identity provides an exciting and relevant structure for brand expression.

NAI

A radical scheme for the NAI (Netherlands Architecture Institute) by Bruce Mau provided many distorted, out of focus logos that allowed for flexibility and experimentation. Soon after, the Tate Gallery took the NAI’s lead and introduced an ever-changing logo for its ever-changing displays (courtesy of Wolff Olins).

Less successful was Abbey National’s 2003 ‘soft and fuzzy’ rebrand, ditched when Santander acquired the bank, but Wolff Olins returned to the idea of flexible brands, with a more controlled iteration in PWC’s device-friendly identity where a set of translucent rectangles flex and change depending on their usage.

PWC's flexible branding

However, logo selection is often made from a tightly controlled master set rather than from dynamically created marks.

Now, the use of the algorithm has enabled the rise of tailored design, where application of a consistent set of rules to a dynamic data set produces a unique output - design expressed as art.

A recent example of this genre is MIT Media Lab’s development of its flexible identity. Created by Pentagram, and based on the same grid as its predecessor, its aggressive pixelated letterforms create an uncompromising set of marks with echoes of Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet.

It’s not a beautiful logo, but as the visual expression of the Media Lab’s multiple research groups at the core of its academic structure, it fits.

Lockups of two characters within the grid allow for almost every possible letter combination— “an algorithm” explains Pentagram, “will generate all the possible solutions for any given group acronyms in the future.”

This visual language sets the tone for a highly flexible range of applications and future permutations of the identity that will have the same look and feel without having to be the same.

In a more sensitive use of the pixel-block style, Norwegian design studio, Snøhetta, has designed the obverse of Norges Bank new bank notes. The design, based on the boundary where sea, shore and sky met, renders images from the Norwegian coastal landscape in a Minecraft-like pixellated form, the degree of distortion related to the ‘windspeed’ that increases with each denomination.

On the 50 kroner note the wind is weak, so the boundary between sea and coast is rendered in calmer short, square shapes; while on the 1,000 kroner note the wind is strong, creating longer, stretched-out forms that allude to rolling breakers and windswept trees.

But whilst Snøhetta uses the idea of windspeed to create the pixel distortion, the execution is static. A 2010 scheme for Nordkyn from Oslo’s Neue Design Studio, also using data based on the feed from the Norwegian Meteorological Office, produces a new logo dynamically for every application.

http://horizons.dandad.org/

Although not strictly speaking a logo, D&AD’s 2013 Annual used a similar methodology to create ‘identities’ that reflected the global spread of winners at the D&AD Awards. The algorithm creates a unique composition based on longitudinal and latitudinal location data, with colours chosen by time, and meteorological data used to determine the hue

Where an entry lacks a suitable data feed to produce dynamic data, use of a picker to sample random colours from an image can provide the necessary random variable.

ITV colour picker

Similarly, ITV’s rebrand created the opportunity to tailor the colour palette of the logo using key colours and tones from the programme being promoted, so popular entertainment gets a vibrant palette, whilst the logo can take on a more sombre appearance when the programming (or news) requires it.

As well as colour, shape can have an influence. Sagmeister’s identity for Casa Da Musica needed to echo the exuberance of the architecture because ‘as we studied the structure, we realized that the building itself is a logo’.

Casa Da Musica dynamic logos

The essence of the brand identity was to illustrate the many different kinds of music performed, through an algorithm that paired colours sampled from a composers image with different facets of the building. Depending on the music the logo changes its character and works dice-like by displaying different planes and hues.

Sound can also be used as the dynamic element.

Precedent’s work for the Leeds College of Music, using a tool created by Karsten Schmidt, allows staff and students to create their own visual identity by inputting visualisations of their own music to create their own unique sound signatures to use in graphic applications.

Arguably, those dynamic designs that incorporate a random element into the algorithm achieve a more aesthetically pleasing result, negating the principle of the application of a universal rule.
But because many audiences will only see a single iteration of a dynamic identity system, it follows that if any individual variant is weak, the overall identity suffers. For the overall brand to be successful, the pieces need to equal the whole.

So the key question to ask of any dynamic identity is whether it accurately expresses the brand in all its executions.

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.

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.

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?

New structures for corporate reporting

In 2010 the UK government ran a consultation to find out what improvements could be made to non-financial reporting, and in 2011 the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) published Future of narrative reporting where a new structure for annual reports was proposed.

Draft regulations were published in October 2012 and the changes became law on 30 September 2013.

The new format replaces the ‘business review’ with a ‘strategic report’ and UK quoted companies now have to report on:

• their strategy
• their business model
• the number of women employed at different levels in the organisation

The main areas for change are:

• The structure and content of the Strategic Report changes (and no longer forms part of the Director’s Report)
• Changes to Directors’ Report, including Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reporting
• Revised UK Corporate Governance Code disclosures
• Changes to Going Concern statement
• Revised Auditor’s Report
• New remuneration disclosures and voting

The idea behind the changes is to;

• improve the value of information contained within annual reports for investors and UK compliance authorities;
• to make it easier to make comparisons between companies; and
• to increase transparency.

Current best practice in annual report writing is to produce an integrated structure that brings together strategy, the business model, market analysis, governance, management remuneration, risk factors and key performance indicators (KPIs) in an overarching narrative.

But this method of dividing responsibility for the creation and supply of content will become more difficult, as the various elements of the document now need to knit together closer than ever before.

So whilst the new reporting framework from BIS splits the report into four parts (the Strategic Report, The Directors’ Report, the Remuneration Report and the Financial Statements and Notes), in practice, the new reporting structure might look something like this;

Strategy report

• Highlights section
• Mission statement
• At a glance
• Chairman’s statement
• CEO’s statement
• KPI’s
• Risks
• Market landscape
• Sustainability statement

Director’s report

• Governance section
• Renumeration report
• Any other statutory content
• Accounts section

The regulations came into force in October 2013. This means that companies with reporting years ending after October are now expected to prepare their Annual Report in line with the new regulations.

The consequence of this is going to be more intensive work in the run up to publishing your Annual Report; gathering and verifying the content, identifying any gaps and managing your reporting team  in a more active and integrated manner. It may mean a minor tweak to your workflow, or a complete overhaul of your reporting structure, but if you haven’t got your plans in place, maybe now is a good time to get started.

Unbuntu open source font project

Following on from Bruno Maag's presentation on fonts and branding, I wanted to find out more about Dalton Maag's Unbuntu* open source font project.

Unbuntu is a free to use open source operating system developed by Canonical.  What sets Unbuntu apart from other open source projects is the aim of creating for the user a friendly and consistent experience from code to graphical user interface (GUI) to print.

Part of Canonical’s design philosophy is to ensure that users can use programs in their own language, so the font used for the operating system (OS) needed to work across a range of character sets including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin and is designed so it can be extended to include other languages including Chinese, Indian and Thai.

Establishing the nature of a font requires a structured design framework to inform each stage. The difference with this project was the involvement of the Open Source community throughout – essential to influence the process and confer a sense of ownership. The design process had to be completely transparent with a flow of information in both directions.

As a core part of the Unbuntu brand identity, the new typeface needed to embody the Unbuntu values of clarity, lightness and simplicity, so early in the design process Dalton Maag established that a humanist sans serif was the most appropriate look and feel for the font.

This decision was in part dictated by the required functionality of the OS; the need for the font to work on screen at small sizes meant avoiding anything too elaborate or too wide.

Humanist fonts have their roots in early round hand calligraphy, and are seen as friendly, warm and highly legible. The clean lines and large x-height of a sans serif help with on screen readability, print well and have a contemporary feel.

The initial concepts were designed using a small number of glyphs, but enough to be able to create test copy, and get a good idea of what the finished design would look and feel like. Beginning with the Latin, Dalton Maag started designing with the four letters, n o H O, and these glyphs helped to define a guide for around 80 percent of the remaining character set.  The distinctive shapes for the ‘n’ and ‘v’ and a slight curvature to the ascenders and descenders helped establish the overall personality of the font. These unique design features would be translated across all the character sets to ensure that the design was a complete and consistent family.

The final font design includes four weights from light to bold plus their italics, a monospace font and a condensed regular.

The italic versions were designed as true italics where the a,e,f and g have different shapes that add subtle emphasis and textural difference to the roman text.

The designers also needed to consider the spacing between letters, as this creates a natural rhythm in the text that helps the reader to read with ease and understand the message. Manual adjustments, including kerning pairs, were addressed to ensure that the finished look was aesthetically pleasing.
Cultural sensitivities and nuances also needed to be taken into account for the left to right reading Arabic and Hebrew fonts. Arabic glyphs are derived from one another, but change meaning with the addition of diacritics, whilst Hebrew letterforms have a squarer feel and ‘hang’ from the x-height rather then sitting on the baseline.

Dalton Maag’s engineering team then performed a complex process to ensure that the font rendered on screen correctly. This included a checking and verification process to make sure that it met TrueType specifications, the addition of Unicode system information to identify each glyph co-ordinated across all the font styles and weights, and extensive manual hinting to make the font appear faithfully at any resolution on any device.

Finally the fonts were tested in a number of different environments and applications to check that they behaved as intended before being released.

The final design is a beautiful example of typographic design. It gives shape to the Open Source philosophy of Ubuntu, whilst remaining functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Exhibited in the Design Museum, the Unbuntu font family is a practical example of how a the partnership between the Open Source community and professional type designers can use the power of design to produce something valuable for everyone to use.



*Unbuntu is named after the Southern African philosophy of ubuntu, which often is translated as “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.

‘I love Comic Sans’

And so to hear Bruno Maag speak at London Design Week’s Sound and Type lecture in the glamorous environs of the Soho Hotel Screening Room.

His opening statement, that he ‘loves Comic Sans’, drew a predictable hiss of outrage from the designers and typographers in audience, but the point Bruno made is that Comic Sans is completely appropriate for its original purpose, comic book style lettering for speech bubbles in the programs MS Bob and MovieMaker

Comic Sans has a characterful letterform that connects, perfect for supporting letter recognition in early learning (and useful for dyslexics too).

So how do you engage audiences visually and emotionally with your brand? What are the essential elements that make your brand unique? How do you create bespoke tools that set your brand apart?

The challenge presented to branding in the global marketplace is maintaining the brand look and feel across all touchpoints in all markets.

Think ‘international’, and designers reach for their tried and trusted sans serifs, but where’s the emotional connection in the international style?

Remember that the ‘modern’ typeface Helvetica was cut in the 1950’s (itself based on the grotesque faces of the late Victorian 1900’s), putting Helvetica well into middle-age.

Instead, make an informed choice of typeface, one that expresses your brand values and connects visually and emotionally with your audience, a typeface that can be placed right at the heart of your brand.

Global companies, such as HP, see investment in a bespoke typeface as a key part of supporting their brand experience worldwide.

But relying on the Western European character set no longer cuts it. Fonts need to accommodate Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Indian and Thai characters.

Designing a font for the Chinese market means creating 27,500 glyphs alone and can take up to two years.

And that’s before you take into account Hong Kong and Taiwanese Chinese.

Font design is a major investment, but the recognition value that an appropriate font brings to a brand makes it arguably worthwhile.

Just don’t use Comic Sans unless you’re designing a comic.