"In-NO-vation requires listening to more than one NO"
John Maeda (Twitter)
John Maeda (Twitter)
Taken from DANDAD Blog 19 January 2010:
Greg Quinton is Creative Partner at branding and design agency The Partners. He’s also D&AD’s education chairman. Quinton has been well and truly charmed by the redesign of the reverse side (tails, if you’re flipping one) of UK coins in circulation these days.
“In these tough economic times we’ve all have to watch our pennies. The Royal Mint has turned it into a small pleasure,’ says Quinton.
The first redesign in almost 40 years, the Royal Mint says they’re “the biggest change in coinage history since decimalisation” – no mean feat. They used to make rare appearances in our wallets but are everywhere now.
Each coin between the penny and the fifty pence piece features part of an image. They can be put together like a puzzle to create the Shield of the Royal Arms. The pound coin completes the set with the full shield. The innovative design by Matt Dent was awarded a D&AD Black Pencil last year.
Dent wanted to create something that people could participate with if they want to. “I could imagine the appeal for kids messing with them in school as much as for folks in a pub,’ he says. Quinton points out that coins tend look the same all over the world, because they’re designed as a single circular image. “Matt has bravely bucked this trend by designing them as a total entity,’ he adds. “The challenge is remembering to keep hold of the ones you’ve got to create the full, wonderfully detailed, picture.”
Dent jumped through more hoops than most to get his designs approved. He first entered the work into a Royal Mint competition. His winning idea was chosen by the Royal Mint’s Advisory Committee from 4,000 entries. It even had to be approved by The Chancellor (then Gordon Brown) and the Queen.
As Dent hoped, the new look coins have made a big impression. He was even sent drawings by 30 Cambridgeshire primary school students shortly after they launched. The class seven children wanted him to see their own takes on coin design.
Quinton thinks that great design is often perceived as expensive, flashy or pretentious. “Matt has shown that for the cost of one penny anyone can own a design classic,” he says.
“As for me,’ adds Dent. “I’m still as excited as ever when one turns up in my change.”
Article about the new definition of brand from Wolff Olins Blog:
Creating a definition of the word brand seems to be both the easiest and perhaps the hardest thing to do. The challenge is not that the existing definitions aren’t correct (or more accurately weren’t correct). The challenge is that the environment in which brands live is inherently Darwinian.
As the environment changes brands must adapt. Once brands have adapted enough then what you get are effectively new species - entities unlike what have gone before and that must now be defined in completely new ways.
This has been a constant process over time, but I think we could now define ourselves as being in the third age of brand.
The first age was the product age. The environment was post war baby boom America and the defining factor was the rapid growth of the middle class.
In this age brands were built from functional attributes of the product, which spawned the concept of the Unique Selling Proposition or USP.
The technology that enabled this age of brand was television and the platform was television advertising.
In this age the Creative Director was invented and their role was to find creative ways to communicate this USP to the consuming public at large.
The second age was the marketing age. The environment was one of 1980’s excess and the growing demands of Generation X.
In this age the realization was that functional attributes were not enough. It spawned the concept of the Emotional Selling Proposition or ESP, which was defined through the mechanism of Brand Positioning - the technique of identifying and then owning an emotional territory for the brand.
The technology that enabled this age of brand was the desktop PC and the platform was consumer research.
In this age the Account Planner was invented, and their role was to more deeply understand consumer wants and needs in order to understand which emotions to manipulate for each of the brands audiences.
The second age represented a logical progression from the first. Marketing followed product. The connective tissue was that brand owners retained an information advantage relative to brand consumers. In both these ages an information asymmetry benefited the brand owner at the expense of the brand consumer.
Today we are in the third age, the experience age. The environment is one of unprecedented choice and transparency and the defining factor is a fickle Gen Y audience who demand more from less.
In this age brands must be built around their Experiential Selling Proposition (XSP). Unlike the simplicity of USP’s and ESP’s, the transparency of the third age demands that brands manage complex systems of value - understanding how all of the actions of the brand owner (product/service, societal, environmental, technological, marketing) interrelate to create the experience.
The technology that enables this age is the Internet and the platform is Social Media.
The definitive role that this age will invent is not yet clear, but so far we see Innovation leaders, Engagement leaders, Digital leaders, Social Media leaders and Experience leaders.
The fundamental and exciting shift is that the third age represents a sea change from the other two.
The brand owner no longer benefits from an information asymettry over the consumer. Instead this relationship has been reversed. As such, the old rules and indeed the very definition of how brands must behave in order to succeed has also changed.
The tools of brand positioning and advertising that have held such strength for so many years must now be replaced by both new tools and new rules.
XSP demands integration of product, service, social, environmental and marketing layers. It demands the creation of value across the system of the brand. And fundamentally it is built from a trust that brand owners will have to earn from their consumers on a daily basis.
The implications of this change for many brand advisers are potentially dire. Entire industries optimized for the more effective communication of a brands ESP now find themselves facing a systemic decline in efficacy and indeed value.
This will mean one of two things:
Brand advisers will need to focus less effort on how a brand communicates its ESP through marketing communications, instead focusing their efforts on helping brands to innovate across the entire system of the brand in order to generate revenue driving XSP.
Brand advisers who choose to remain focused on marketing communications will need to find ways of innovating and re-engineering their business model and offer for a lower value, lower fee world. Seeking structural change to create value both for themselves and the brand owner.
Wolff Olins have chosen to follow the first path: Our focus is increasingly on helping brands create new revenues and new value across the entire system of the experience.
Victors and Spoils on the other hand appears to represents an innovative new model designed to deliver the second.
Whichever model wins, whoever defines the new role(s) that will represent the third age, there is no doubt that this is an incredibly exciting time to play.
We may even get a new definition of what a brand is.
(Paul Worthington)
I’d found my way. I’m inspired and moving on.
Went to the Peter Saville talk today.
Being a legend himself, Peter Saville is rather down to earth.
The man covered his development as an art student who’s interested in Pop culture to becoming a professional graphic designer, to his recent involvement in politics and culture.
Being asked about what is his inspiration apart from money and ego, he answer is “what matters”, it seems how things look is not what he’s interested in now, it’s the meaning behind things that he has always been interested in. It seems he’d never run out of inspiration this way.
He described his profession as a “communication designer”. The word “graphic” is not specific enough for him. He thought of himself as the shaper of the commication process between the client and the target audience. He’d position the profession of graphic design onto the public service platform, as graphic designers are offering service to the public in the end. And it was due to the same reason and the public nature of graphic design industry that had made him the mythical Peter Saville today. In the end, he’s just always doing what he’s interested in and shaping only the message that he think matters.
He’s currently busy being the “creative director” of the city Manchester. He’s in charged of the whole branding of the city and his role is to push innovation.
I enjoyed the way that he moved away from being a cool pop album cover designer into a designer who’s interested in public issues and things that matters. This might be the natural course of things as he needs to live on anyways. But taking in things that “matters” as the source of inspiration is inpiring for me.
By the way, the most interesting part of a design brief he found is the budget part…
That’s it for my first tumblr post
