Idiologie / branding & everything else

6 books that will not change your life

Books don’t change us. So if you’re one of those people secretly hoping that all this time lavishly spent reading did not go in vain, well, acceptance is the first step. As Hemingway once expressed it: never confuse action with movement. Books may entertain, inform or even inspire us to do something but sadly, they themselves are rather on the action side.

On the positive side, this tiny drawback might be the only thing preventing excessive exposure to brainwashed hordes of sociopaths. Obviously, this is precisely what would happen if all those avid students of “The Art of War” (supposedly all time bestseller on Amazon self-help books list) started actually living according to the “Lure them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion” maxim. As for now we only have to put up with it during elections.

The following books will neither change you, nor your beliefs (unfortunately, hardly nothing can change the latter), but I’ve found them interesting or useful enough to recommend each to someone at least once. Not to mention that I’d rather keep my self-delusions nourished and nurtured; writing about what I’ve read provides a good excuse for reading on.

Twyla Tharp: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life & The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together

Being creative for some time takes a lot of work and passion. Staying creative for years takes an awful lot of discipline and really hard work; there’s little romantic about it. As for collaboration, I’ve always thought that was what Beckett had been thinking of when he famously said: ‘Fail, fail again, fail better’.
Don’t let the titles mislead you; neither of these books is a traditional self-help book. Still, the Habits are one of the wisest and most pragmatic books on the subject I’ve ever read. I cannot recommend them enough.

James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Books that are thorough rarely are gripping (unless you’re a nerd). In either case: it’s an excellent read.

Sándor Márai

I love Sándor Márai. With all my heart. His most popular ‘Embers’ is a masterpiece that kept me mesmerized to the very last page and that does not happen often (over-read, blasé and proud of it). His Diaries are the only book I’ve bought recently in paper (!) and decided not to give away after reading. So on and so forth.

Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language and Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

To my best guess pairing psycholinguistics with neuroscience is like coupling css and product design just because in some general sense they both do with design. Regrettably, these volumes are too nerdy and geeky to put them separately and they don’t exactly fit smoothly into ‘easy summer reading’ category. Just as a sum up of both: “The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will contain With ease, and you beside.”

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Instapapers (would have fallen under tl;dr tag unless they hadn’t been actually worth reading):

The Local-Global Flip, or, “The Lanier Effect” Somebody should have invented ‘too good for web’ tag. This interview would utterly fit.

How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More. I truly abhor so-called ‘gamification‘, nonetheless this is how a relevant approach to this trend looks like or how posts would have been written if blogging as a genre had not signified “substance watered down to a week of posts”.

Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action, best read with: Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs).

The Possibilian: What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain. Rather unfortunate title for quite interesting article on our perception of time.

Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance On unfotunate titles again, still worth a few minutes.

If you’ve read up to this point, it may indicate that you’re seriously procrastinating. So last but not least: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield is a rather short (and consequently procrastinate friendly) book that will help you get out of your own way and just do it. With just a few more pages:)

Is individuality lost?

Remember the Old Spice commercial? If so, open your facebook page. Pick the third person of the same gender as yours on the newsfeed and open his feed in a separate tab. Look at his last 8 wall posts. Now, back at yours. Now, back at what his posts are about. Now, back at yours. Chances are they don’t differ much. Yet, you do. Sadly, it’s barely visible through your web presence.

Statistically speaking, depending on your age, gender and friend count likeness, you use similar structures, words and write about corresponding subjects at corresponding times. In case of my facebook friends, there’s at least one niche music video link, at least one ‘funny picture’, at least one thankful post and at least one slightly ironic rant on — in general terms — state of the culture. Which makes 50% of the rather small sample entirely predictable. The question that follows is: are we entering the age of mass unification that reshapes us into rather amorphic and impersonal shells or simply are we that similar?

There are a few things to consider:

1 The medium is the message

Trivial as it has become, McLuhan’s notion of the medium affecting the content is still valid. If you ever had doubts on the extent of its relevance, consider the impact of a slight redesign of FB’s status update box on the use of pronouns:

‘Until March of 2009, the status update box appeared next to the person’s name. So, up until March of 2009, the most common status update motif was to state what you were doing or how you were feeling with a status update like “is happy,” which would show up as “Lars is happy”. When this changed, the usage of “is” dropped off dramatically and usage of “I” doubled almost overnight. After March, people started updating with “I am happy” instead of “is happy” to achieve the same message.’

However, what is often overlooked is the influence of the provided means of reaction by other people. We’re social beings, we supply content and share it to be admired, liked, to be understood, to feel accepted or solely heard. Consequently, sooner or later, consciously or not, we design our messages so that they’re more appealing to our target group. At the same time, it’s difficult to remain personal and relevant if you’re talking to 47 people at once. Besides, imagine that the person next to you is capable of only two reactions: ‘I like it’ and ‘I like it and repost’. Undoubtedly it would limit the scope and depth of a conversation, wouldn’t it?

Looking at this image, it’s hard not to draw a conclusion that we’re living in the Recommendation Age (or, to be precise, the Repost Age). Still, as much as soup.io is social, it’s a quite accurate tool for spreading memes, no less and so is the larger part of other social platforms.

2 Limits of control

Obviously, the majority of the social networking sites has some limitations to at least the length or the subject of the messages you exchange. If you ever tried writing movie summaries in 140 characters or less, you know that in most cases you inevitably end up with genre descriptions stripped of any kind of particularity that might have made a movie gripping. It becomes slightly more bearable if you apply E.M. Forster’s distinction between narrative and plot (Plot is ‘The queen died; the king died.’ Narrative is ‘The queen died; the king died of a broken heart.’). The difficulty is that if you’re not a screenwriter or currently suffering from dissociative identity disorder, you tend to think about your life expieriences in a plot rather than a narrative. Not to mention the miserably flat amplitude of real life drama compared to most of the stories we read/watch.

3 One to rule them all

Social networking sites are created as mass products, carved for the so-called average user. They are based on universal truths, universal paradigms and equally unversal models of interaction, expression and needs. At the same time they’re designed to provide means of personalization and become as transparent & technologically friction free as possible. The catch, as always, lies in between.

When considering technologically advanced, mass market tools or products, the simple rule applies: The more you try to make it universal, the more uniform the outcome is. One way of evading that is clearly through customization (e.g. NikeID), but still, does it make a product more universal or merely less uniform?

The deeper problem lies in the process of finding these universal truths. We’ve become infatuated with data, their patterns, networks and correlations. Evidently this is the age of information, since like never before we’re able to accurately compute and estimate almost every single thing. However, what we’re often missing is the difference between analysis and reasoning. Analysis is a description of a current state (think: Hans Rosling). Reasoning is taking the risk of forming judgements about the things that are not clearly visible in data. It’s the search for insight and superior understanding. We have knowledge, we need more wisdom. Without the latter we’ve created great tools for being connected rather than feeling connected.

Still, the infatuation with data and our computational capability is a mere side effect of the broader cult of staying up to date.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an average, slightly addicted social media user, clicking Like button 9 times a day, writing 25 comments and spending around 55 minutes per day, just to stay up to date. As such, I’m also inherently ‘resistant to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism’, as Georg Simmel described it.

One of the last lines of Synecdoche, NY (which I cannot recommend enough) goes as follow:
‘You realize you are not special. At some point this is everyone’s experience, every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone.’

In a deeper sense, we are the same. We live the average, encounter the same joys, tragedies or monotony. Yet, what makes us exceptional and our relations meaningful are ideas. Not some abstractly conceptualized ideas but ideas expressed through our emotions, beliefs and broader idiosyncratic context. One may call them stories, I call them personalities:)

A few thoughts on the evolution of brand identity.

Karl Gerstner wrote in his Designing Programmes:

“Instead of solutions for problems, programmes for solutions — the subtitle can also be understood in these terms: for no problem (so to speak) is there an absolute solution. Reason: the possibilities cannot be delimited absolutely. There is always a group of solutions, one of which is the best under certain conditions.”

The above paragraph was published in 1964, at the peak of the modernist crusade. The same decade Neuburg introduced his contructivist, functionally minded Neue Grafik at ICOGRADA in Zurich, and Paul Rand was working for IBM.

The 60s set the bar in corporate identity design. Modernist, focused on the ‘consistency, consistency, consistency’ mantra, helvetica and simplicity.

At the same time, the concept of brand has been evolving fundamentally. Brand as  product, organization, person and symbol — all those notions became a part of the brand identity systems. Yet, the visual identity remained more or less a slightly stretched result of the constructivist paradigm. As Paula Scher states:

“Generally, there’s a paradigm of what things look like in any arena. What you want to be able to do is find a new way to stretch that paradigm forward, to break its own mold.”

For years logo was treated as a base of an identity system, augmented with graphic means only essential to make it visually coherent in multi-channel environment. Used as a stamp or badge, such identities culminated in Umberto Eco’s “closed texts” — visual systems with unequivocal, static meaning, recurrent structure & disciplined sequence.

Eco juxtaposes “closed texts” with “opera aperta” (open work): open, internally dynamic “opere in movimento”, in which the the artist (or designer) deliberately leaves the arrangement of their compontents either to public or to chance, giving them a multiplicity of possible arrangements. By definition such works are simply much more engaging to the user.

Digital media have vastly reshaped brand landscape and thus allowed to stretch the paradigm a bit further. Technical restraints that limited design for half a century are gone. Together with rising consumer awareness (cogent brand conversations, no logo movement etc.), they gave the means to think of identity as a vessel for expressing personality rather than consistency.

The recent AOL rebranding is one example of a series that shift from the “logo as a badge” strategy to the identity as a visual language flexible enough to convey a number of ideas. Others include: the controversial London 2012 Olympic, Natural History Museum, Walker Arts Center, City of Melbourne, Casa da Música, and, undoubtedly most known: MTV, changing countless times throught the last 26 years and Google.

All these identities (named “flexible identities”) have in common:

1. endless permutations of the logo itself (often designed through customized software);
2. versatile and  distinct visual language (colors, typography, imagery, etc.) allowing adaptation to different environments, executions and contexts;
3. the concept behind is a system rather than a particular design, giving the designer almost unlimited freedom (though within some contraints);
4. they empower the organization with almost complete visual and verbal laguage, open to virtually any message it may need to convey;
5. the visual differentation does not spoil the fundamental, thought-through brand personality & identity that stands as a benchmark; a signifier may (and does) fluctuate but the meaning stays fundamentally the same;

Although the flexible identity solves most of today’s brand identity problems and seems a logical development, the static brand probably is not coming to an end. A dynamic branding model obviously has some constraints, but I think that it is an evolution phase rather than a trend. Of course, like any other idea it might enter a stage of an overused fad, quickly making the static brands trendy again. Evolution by definition is a gradual process.  Maybe we’ll reach a moment, in which a simple, straightforwad and “classic” logo and identity system will seem refreshing.

Gerstner’s “boîte à musique” identity designed in 1954 in all likelihood was the first example of flexible identity, a “programme for solution”. Unless the possibilities will be delimited absolutely, the flexible identity looks like a reliable strategy.

A must-see.

Apparently Pawel Tkaczyk patted me on the back in his post. I’ve immediately felt obliged to share such a list myself. So here it is: my personal pantheon of the greats I’ve had privilege to meet in my professional life.

Andrzej Tomaszewski. The Typographer.
[pronounced as: Andrzej Tomaszewski point THE Typographer (capital T!) point].
To say that his designs are elegant, flawless, or impeccable, would be an understatement. I suppose that there’s a level of perfection and elegance, that can be only described by the word: virtuosity. I had the pleasure of meeting him during last year’s KrakTypo, and was literally blown away by his vast knowledge and commitment to share it.

Lukasz Dziedzic, type designer.
In essence, Lukasz is like lowercase “g” from Helga: slightly eccentric & rebellious, eminently agile and above all incredibly enchanting. Every single font he designs has this intangible feature commonly described (for lack of a better word) as coolness. He just told me that he’d rather be vanishingly-gray than portrayed, so I’ll keep it short: when I grow up, I hope I’ll draw at least a single glyph like he does.

Marcin Wolny, co-owner of Studio Otwarte, a graphic designer himself.
I doubt I’d be where I am today if not for the immense creative freedom and autonomy I’d received while working at SO. No matter how strong the dissent or how heated the discussion had been, as long as I could reasonably justify a concept and its execution, I had his full support, even if personally he would not agree. The most important lesson I’ve learned from him: when leading a design team, your role is to water rather than weed.

Last but definitely not least:

Karina Wieczorek, inspirer.
Karina is not a designer (although she’s got much to do with design in her job). We’ve known each other inside out for years now, so rather than elaborate on what a great friend she has been, I’ll quote her colophon: “Glenn Gould once said “The purpose of art is not the momentary ejection of adrenaline, but rather the lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” I have no ambition of being an artist, but I find the feeling, which is a cross between curiosity, joy and surprise to be the best inspiration and antidepressant.” She’s been my first reviewer and her visual intuition has prevented me from sheer ugliness several times. And one of the most joyful and inspiring of people I’ve ever met.