JKR

You might have seen this Corona billboard this week. It drew a crowd in Manhattan and is a good example of visual wit. (If you can’t see it, the lime is made from the real moon, aligned with the position of the billboard.) I’m working on a brand right now who want to be seen as ‘witty’. As someone who has been trying to produce witty work off and on across a career, I subscribe to the adage; ‘don’t tell me you’re funny, tell me a joke.’ However, I thought it might be worth figuring out what the mechanics of wit are. For me, the standard text is A Smile in the Mind. It’s a great book and here I break down what its brilliant introduction tells us. I found it really useful, perhaps you will too…

The piece begins with a couple of great Dorothy Parker lines: ‘Brevity is the soul of lingerie’ and ‘One more drink and I’d have been under the host’. What Parker is doing here is taking a familiar phrase and playing with it to offer a surprising new slant. That’s wit. And essentially it is the same methodology that creates visual puns. They take something we know, give it a playful twist and let us see something familiar through fresh eyes. It’s that simple (like all the best design principles).

Having absorbed this ‘nuts and bolts of wit’ definition yesterday, I then saw the above – one of a new set of posters going up on Buenos Aires street corners from the Argentine Prostitutes’ Association. They highlight the reality that 87% of the countries sex workers are single mothers. The aim is to raise awareness of marginalised people and work towards getting them better rights and conditions. They get their message across with wit – we are familiar with the cliché of women on street corners and here it is being playfully subverted. Just as we are familiar with the concept of a slice of lime in a Corona, which again has been playfully subverted. It’s a great rule of thumb, but of course it has some intricate mechanisms: it’s about finding the right balance of the familiar and the unexpected – the relationship between recognition and surprise. It’s about not telegraphing the answer, but leaving something to be discovered. This can sometimes be a challenge with clients who want it ‘all spelt out’ with no risk of ambiguity.

Whimsy aside, what are the commercial benefits of using visual wit? Well, in a busy world it can make us pause for a moment, intriguing us as we figure out the gag. Time we typically don’t give messaging. It invites participation, beginning a dialogue the audience completes. Which can make the otherwise forgettable memorable. It gives pleasure in the decoding and can make the otherwise functional into something charming. All hard nosed reasons why sometimes design playfulness can be very good for business. That’s why a bunch of people gathered around the Corona poster and it’s gone viral. That’s why I won’t forget the statistic about single mothers working a harsh job in Argentina.

A few years into my working life, I walked into the office with a copy of The Economist under my arm. With a wry smile a colleague asked whether I was ‘trying to get a promotion?’ Having resisted the urge to convince him that I had actually been reading it and not just carrying it, it struck me that very few brands could spontaneously evoke that response. The Economist’s intellectual associations are immediate and unrivalled.
 These associations have no doubt been secured and deepened through truly great advertising. Since it launched in the late 1980s, AMV’s campaign has reinforced the belief among readers that The Economist gives them a competitive edge and membership of an exclusive club.Beyond advertising, The Economist harnesses the power of design across the magazine. Every week its front cover manages to distil the world’s leading story into a simple image that’s as distinctive as it is disruptive.

The Economist is even more economical with words than it is pictures. It tackles the biggest, most complex subjects and makes them accessible and meaningful within a strict word count. Moreover it does so with a clearly defined and consistent tone of voice. Although many hands write The Economist, each article shares the same precision and understated, dry wit.

The Economist preserves the anonymity of its writers because it believes that what is written is more important than who writes it. Consequently, the editor’s only signed article is written on their departure from the position – a healthy reminder that the brand is bigger than the individual.

By James Joice, client director, jkr

Is it art or design? That’s the question D&AD judges debated, first rejecting Sagmeister & Walsh’s film Now is better for being art, then reinstating it and awarding it a Yellow Pencil for typography. Creative Review has the full story.

Does it matter? For judges and winners, probably. For the rest of us, perhaps less so. One could argue that D&AD gives out so many awards these days that it’s not quite the Everest it once was. Neither is Everest mind you and many of us have not climbed that either.

For the judges the debate turned on their definition of a valid entry which must be: ‘a work of advertising or design, produced in response to a genuine brief composed in the ordinary course of a legal entity’s activities for the purpose of seeking an advertising or design solution.’ This piece answered those criteria it seems.

Meanwhile, things generally seem to be loosening up. There has been some chatter over David Shrigley, for some a ‘mere’ cartoonist, being nominated for a Turner prize (above and below). Here I guess the traffic is heading in the other direction, finding some are still keen on erecting barriers.

I think what defines design is pretty easy to pin down – flip open the Oxford English Dictionary and it’s pretty much there. What defines art is a bit more debatable. Here are a couple of lines of thought from the fantastic Brain Pickings site…

Perhaps weighing in for Sagmeister is Charles Eames: ‘Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.’

Perhaps explaining why there was a debate at all is André Gide: ‘Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labour.’

Perhaps suggesting design is by definition not a club you want to join anyway is Steven Pressfield: ‘To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.’

For me, I think it’s becoming increasingly less relevant to make distinctions in the first place. In a ‘transmedia’ era perhaps all the best work will operate across art and the more ‘outcome orientated’ world of design. I like design that has a bit of poetry. I like art to have a bit of purpose.

I went to George Bernard Shaw’s house yesterday. Hanging on the wall was this stunning drawing by Aubrey Beardsley. Great art.

It was the original from this poster, which is pretty good design. For me this says something about the blurred lines that happily exist between the two. Unless you are a judge the question isn’t really about what something is. It’s about if it’s any good.

This week we have mostly been using a new buzzword – ‘skeuomorphic’ – as a result of Apple unveiling its new iOs 7. Much of the interest in the design world has focused on the redesign of the interface and apps.

Apple invented the bevel edged, high gloss hyper real detailing that characterised its apps; a style that quickly became absorbed by the competition and transmuted into an industry design standard. But with iOs 7, they have moved to a simpler and perhaps braver styling and in so doing, they have apparently parted ways with skeuormorphic design.

Skueomorphism is the styling of a physical ornament or design to make it resemble another material or object. Making something look like something it’s not. It’s an idea that’s as old as the hills and of course pre-dates the iPhone, but it was a notion at the heart of the Apple design philosophy; a reflection of Steve Job’s belief that technology interfaces should be intuitive enough for everyone to use. There’s a great article about it on the BBC here.

This week, however, Jonathan Ive’s team have dragged that design aesthetic into the trash can, as it were. The new interface is bolder and less fussy. Everything’s flat, not beveled. It seems like Apple’s catching up with a trend that’s already been embraced by some other big players. Coca-Cola, for instance, finally found confidence in their own brand marque when they stopped embellishing it with extra swooshes, bubbles and gradients.

I guess the benefit of skeuomorphic design is that it helps us understand things that are new to us, by borrowing a visual language we already understand. The envelope device is visual shorthand for email, our contacts app looks like a rolodex or a ring binder. A colleague pointed out that when radios were first invented, they were designed to look like elegant sideboards. Once we’d become familiar enough with the technology, they were able to evolve their own styling, unfettered by the rules of an inherited design language.

So are skeuomorphs a lazy visual shorthand, or are they a necessary bridge to transport our understanding from something familiar to something completely new? I guess that they help us make sense of something new, but after a while they outgrow their purpose, becoming as mysterious as the service or object they were designed to describe in the first place. What yoof of today is going to know where this symbol came from?

From a design perspective, Apple’s redesign seems to echo a broader design trend (‘flat design’), based on a simple distillation of elements to the functional rather than the decorative. A trend that Windows 8 got caught up in, and we know what happened then…

By Katie Ewer, Strategic Planner, jkr Singapore

No doubt the security scandal around Prism has plenty of important ramifications. But from a design point of view, what was eye opening was the sheer awfulness of the ppt document in question. Not exactly like the work of a super amazing security organisation as depicted by Hollywood is it? More like a regional sales manager’s crib notes.

There are some 500 million ppt users in the world. That’s a lot of potentially dreary presentations. But as software it gets where water can’t. Why? I guess because of its convenience – it offers users the ability to ‘bung it all on there’ rather than remembering and presenting a succinct and compelling script.

In agency land we managed very well before it. We sat down, had a chat and pulled out the work we had set up with a few choice words. But like any crutch, ppt lured us all in. Of course, the general swing now is to funkier presentation methods – giant books, or posters, or props, or once again simple conversation. Anything that can breathe life back into a room. Yet it’s a poor workman who blames his tools and at essence, ppt is a great tool. Used as a slideshow it can be inspiring and illuminating. At this level it’s simply the digital equivalent of what Don Draper pulled off pitching to Kodak.

From a design perspective it’s a case of less is more. Fewer words. Less slides. Less points. Careful not incontinent curation of the images used. And you don’t need to be Dom to pull off something memorable.

But looking at the crappy ppt done by Prism did make me wonder how far backwards we have travelled. The illuminated manuscripts of antiquity carry knowledge and beauty and intrinsic value. They come from a time when we moved at the speed of a horse, not an airliner. We need our documents designed to a far faster speed of life now. But these documents had value – they were treasured, protected, passed down. Can that be said for any of the work produced by those 500 million ppt users this Thursday?

Lets face it; it’s a stupidly impractical suggestion to propose that ppt be thrown over for benches of hard working scribes. But if images are devised to enhance and illuminate powerfully crafted words expressing a significant point, then perhaps by ‘thinking like a medieval monk’ we might reach for contemporary greatness…