Lovely Lunch at WOLO
Michael Wolff: Don’t Trust Your Experience
At Design Indaba, Michael Wolff spoke about how to exercise your idea-creating capacity by first getting rid of your ideas. He also told great stories from his time with Wolff Olins and after, about the importance of language in design and some of the “little creatures” that have made their way into much of his work. Here are some of our favorite lines, though we encourage you to watch and choose your own.
On editorial design:
“When I hear the word ‘copy’ I always shudder, because it has implicit in it that language is just something you have to make a shape of. But language is a critical part of what we do.”
On simplicity in language:
In one scenario, there were “thousands of forms that were like the top one: ‘GIVE DETAILS OF ALL OTHER PERSONS RESIDING IN THE RENTED ACCOMMODATION WHICH YOU ACTUALLY OCCUPY OTHER THAN YOURSELF AND YOUR HUSBAND’ we asked 10 people ‘What does it mean?’ and they said ‘they’re trying to get us out of our accommodation.’ So, we changed it to ‘Who else lives with you?’
On the Shell logo:
“The colors had drifted off into bloodclot red and lemon orange and so we just warmed the colors up. Sometimes that’s all you have to do. Leave something alone. Then I started the conversation with the chairman of Shell saying ‘why do you say Shell on shell?’ and he said ‘You’re right, do you know how long it’s going to take me to get the word Shell off the shell?’ I said ‘no’ and he said ‘five years.’”
On other things:
“The wheel has existed for 8,000 years. How come we only put it on a suitcase 30 years ago?”
“What you must do with a great idea is immediately throw it away because otherwise you won’t exercise your idea-creating capacity. Just keep throwing them away because you’re going to get more and more of them.”
“I mistrust my experience in terms of using my imagination; it’s going to miscolor it, try to dominate it.”
Click on the image for a high-res version.
Recently, we created a little chart to help a client understand the role of design and information hierarchy in product packaging.
To keep it simple, we used a milk carton.
We used only three pieces of basic information: the manufacturer (Smith), the product identifier (Milk) and the milk fat content modifier (1%, 2% or Vitamin D Milk). It’s what Americans see everyday in the dairy aisle.
We then explored how design decisions affect the product – the basics like information hierarchy or the use of type (e.g. a script type to emphasize “freshness”), the use of language (e.g. cheerful “Mooo Milk)”, color (to reinforce differences in fat content), illustrations (to tell a provenance story) and even form factors (e.g. glass bottles for “premium”). You can see the complete exploration on the chart, especially when you zoom in.
On the bottom of the chart, there are two examples of how it all came together: ”Good, better, best” shows how design influences quality perception, emotional product narrative and differentiates products. ”Shelf Blocking” then proves the power of design to aid shopability and create shelf presence.
In the end, we were amazed what the humble milk carton taught us about the AWESOME POWER™ of design. Design affects product, and what affects the product affects sales.
Designing As/For Kids
I’ve always said that if you design with kids in mind you just might end up designing something that everyone can understand and relate to.
This doesn’t mean dumbing down a design, but rather coming up with a strong concept, and then using all your design elements to emphasize that one idea.
Anything that doesn’t help the idea goes away!
In the end, you should have arrived at a design that either is self explanatory or explainable in one sentence that makes sense to both CEOs and kids.
Cincinnati, Ohio-based designer Adam Ladd put this theory to a test. These are his 5-year-old daughter’s first impressions of some popular logos.
via Brand New
On Type, On Line
Chad Mazzola of hellohappy.org has inspired us this morning. Click the image below to see his showcase of the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory. 
More examples will be added over time. Watch his repo on Github or follow him on Twitter.
2 Abbreviations to Watch: 3D and 4G
By Robert Jones
Two abbreviations to watch this year: 3D and 4G.
They encapsulate two technologies that are just starting to go mainstream. These technologies won’t reach everyone straight away, but by the end of the decade they’ll be shaping our lives. They’ll be changing the game for thousands of businesses. And they pose some big questions about the future of branding.
Designing Whtespace
In this post, guest blogger and creative director Malcolm Buick shares his thoughts on Whtespace, our internal startup project that lets you create curated email newsletters.
In a world of content being shifted, moved, tweeted, socialized, and last but not least emailed, the creative process is relegated to being second fiddle, and productivity within the workplace takes a sharp decline. However, there is a need for sharing, and as the old saying goes “sharing is caring.”
Whtespace was born out of necessity. As a creative, my mind drifts, and distractions are many. We created Whtespace to allow for ‘whitespace’ – free to think, free to create. Whtespace lets you feel safe in the knowledge that you can be informed on your own terms – in your inbox, curated and elegantly designed.
So what does this mean for design?
Branding is for cows, stories are for people
That was one of the real gems from the Brand New conference in SFO last week, a thought from Bruce Mau’s studio shared by Paddy Harrington. I love their thinking, their philosophy, their design and their modesty.
Marina Willer speaks at the Typographic Circle
Wolff Olins creative director Marina Willer will talk at the Typographic Circle tonight.
The poster design is by Wolff Olins’ superstar Geetika Alok.