The steamroller of branding (extract)
by Nick Bell
One of the great attractions of graphic design is how it can bring you into contact with so many other fields of practice, areas of expertise and interesting subjects. As it is a staple ingredient in most forms of visual communication – whether for global superpower government, corporate multinational, campaigning NGO, art gallery, orchestra or travelling salesperson – it’s not unusual for studios of only four or five designers to be wrestling with at least twenty different subjects spread across half as many projects at any one time. Art, architecture, film, theatre, music, history, science, politics and literature, are just some of the subjects a culturally orientated design practice might be immersed in for clients such as museums, galleries and publishers. While in the corporate sector, designers become familiar with business practice in fields such as banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, retail, the automotive industry, sport and government – to name but a few.
Rising to the challenge of doing justice to the materials piled up in front of you is another reason why graphic design is so interesting – to design in a way appropriate to the specifics and particularities of the unique context that every project confronts you with. Not that every task is completely new, but the aim of a designer is to develop a repeatable way of working that is recognisable and lasting, whilst being versatile and of-its-time for as long as possible. The balance between repeatable method and specific response, between style and content, is hard to maintain. The desire for notoriety tips us in favour of repeatable methods as we tend to spend more time honing the formal attributes of our style than we do learning about what our work says and means. The pressure for economic efficiency leads us to devising ingenious systems that organise and simplify our work because it takes less time to fit content into pre-ordained arrangements than it does to redefine a system under new conditions. The danger in going the other way, of making all our responses specific, is that no-one will recognise that we did it and that it will take us so long that no client will foot the bill.
The power of a simple image
That point leads us to another great thing about graphic design. It is very satisfying to reduce a pile of pictures and text (or a complex knot of issues, say) down to a singularly simple piece of design without rendering it simplistic. How good it feels to make something accessible without making it stupid: this is perhaps the greatest challenge. Yet most of us are not in control of how low we should go (more about that later). The best pieces of graphic design manage to present the big picture while keeping the detail sharp, acknowledging peculiarities while recognising the need for immediacy. The very best manages to elevate mere words and images to a level where the ensemble becomes emblematic, inextricably linked to a thing, a place, person, event or idea. Sometimes a good piece becomes literally iconic: a powerfully simple image that carries a set of (sometimes) quite complex ideas and associations.
Unfortunately, such images sometimes elicit quite different responses from different people and cultures. By their very nature, images are open to interpretation. At a time when organisations are told that the secret of success is to take full control of their visual messaging, this can be inconvenient. Out of the desire within organisations and companies to fix or control their message came the principle of corporate identity. Some corporate identities help to promote or sell what a company or organisation produces by accurately reflecting what it does. Other corporate identities exist in spite of what a company or organisation produces, and in direct contradiction to the way it behaves…
