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Circle, line, and plane—an ongoing love affair
by Alex | January 12th, 2012
Inspired by my colleague Joerg’s retrospection, I decided to take a peek back at some of my own ‘visual history.’ I found clear evidence of a long-standing love of and affinity for circles activated by, and connected with elements of line and plane.
Take, for example, these spreads from some of my first forays into (self-conscious) graphic design: editorial layouts for student publications, circa 1998. A motif is established; an aesthetic proclivity begins:
A year later, working on another publication, the circle as dynamic element reappears:
The women’s heads in the photograph (one of my first and only forays into photojournalism) act as a dynamic triad of circles:
In this last example, I’ve subconsciously integrated a dominant circle into the layout through photography (and yes, these photographs are of my own making):
As I stared down graduation and entry into the ‘real world,’ my use of circles grew more rigid, less free:
Fast forward eleven years. I’m still in love with circles; albeit more openly and consciously. Consider my earlier post about my ‘personal brand,’ or my post ‘For the Band‘:
Certainly—as my clients can attest—my design exploration regularly moves beyond the approaches and tendencies identified here. That said, it’s important to have the capacity to be self-reflexive, to embrace natural proclivities, and to control them in the service of clients and their communications. For designers striving to harness the basic, universal principles of design in infinite contexts, ‘aesthetic self-knowlege’ is critical.
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
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A year’s worth of favorites
by Meg | January 11th, 2012
2011 was a tremendously busy year at Sametz Blackstone — and 2012 is shaping up to be another year of compelling projects, fantastic clients, and much time spent exploring opportunities and tackling challenges as a team. We’re thrilled to be embarking on some new collaborations, and to have some fresh projects ramping up with old friends.
This is a tremendously exciting time to be doing what we do: never before has there been such a diverse range of communication tools and venues available to help organizations tell their stories, and build a “mosaic brand.”
Blog posts around New Year’s often focus on reflections on the year behind us, or predictions for the year ahead. We’re going to land somewhere in the middle, and share a few favorite posts from our blog over the last 12 months. Technically, that’s reflective, I suppose — but some of them had predictions, too!
We’ll be sharing more of our thinking in the months ahead, and celebrating some great achievements by our friends and partners.
Stay tuned.. and the very happiest of New Year’s to you and yours.
Sage thoughts from Roger on when “logo drama” is unwarranted (starring corporate titans Starbucks and the Gap)
Our New Year’s video from last year — a labor of love
What happens when great design and great music come together
A favorite identity from the past year — and a project we’re proud to be a part of
Everyone gets a turn with the markers and whiteboard around here
“Adopsters”… the hipsters of social media
Sametz Blackstone 101: so is it an actual “cup of tea”, or?
Director of Design, Joerg, looks back in time… and finds that it flies
A can by any other color would not taste as sweet?
Thanks for coming by today — and join us for more in 2012!
Categories: Branding, Design, Digital Media, Nonprofits, Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
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Making a connection with color
by Alex | January 3rd, 2012
Subtle and spectacular: two words that describe the colors of the Arizona landscape. The daytime palette is dominated by blue skies and red earth, punctuated by the soft green of cacti and desert scrub and the mellow beige, gold, and brown of dry grass.
As evening approaches, the blues transition to lavender and purple; the reds shift to crimson and maroon. The once-saturated colors wash together to produce a gradient of extreme subtlety.
Somehow, Southwest Airlines has managed to capture that palette in their livery. The airline’s palette isn’t subtle or sophisticated, mind you. In fact, until I visited Arizona, I thought of Southwest’s as one of the uglier liveries on the nation’s runways.
But now I understand that it works. They’ve managed to evoke a palette that would be impossible to replicate on aluminum (and, indeed, is impossible to replicate photographically.)
Now, when I see their planes, I’m reminded of, and transported to the transcendent moments of extreme beauty we experienced driving and hiking through the Arizona landscape. Their brand uses color as a reference or reminder of something much more powerful than could ever be designed or distributed.
Southwest (their aircraft and their brand) becomes both the literal and metaphorical connection between customer and place.
Categories: Branding, Design, Outside the Square
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“Ghost signs” in the neighborhood
by alyssa | December 13th, 2011
There is something romantic about old signs.
Ghost signs, fading away over time.
Signs for businesses — often no longer in existence — that we walk or drive by each day. They were fabricated in the era when signs were hand-lettered, painted on the sides of buildings, and sometimes burnished with gold leaf. They were posted prior to the days of characterless, generic awning signs, or box signs with fluorescent lights illuminating cut vinyl from the rear.
(And clearly also before the days of spell check, and signage regulations!)
These signs have a vernacular aesthetic that has evolved over time to reflect the environmental, cultural, and historical context in which they exist — much like vernacular architecture. Often they are just text with an occasional graphic element; all caps with sans-serif type seems to be the most ubiquitous treatment.
What follows is a sample of signs I see in my daily travels. Some have already been taken down since the photos were snapped, or will soon disappear as the buildings they grace are “rehabbed”. Once in a while, you may see a new sign made to look like a ghost sign… but they are far from standard.
So tell me, where are some of your favorite fading beauties?
Categories: Outside the Square, Photography
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Wait… White Coke?
by Venus | December 2nd, 2011
If you’re a loyal Coke drinker, you’re likely feeling a little confused these days.
Recently, when you scanned the soda aisle at the grocery store looking for your familiar red and white can, you may have wondered if you’d accidentally landed in the wrong section. But, wait… all the other soda is here. So where’s the Coke? They can’t be out of Coke.
Then, after another scan and a squint: “Wait, is THAT what I’m looking for?!”
And you’re not alone: many loyal fans have been greeting the new white Coke can pictured above in a similar way. The new design, complete with silver polar bears, was a cause marketing effort recently introduced by Coca-Cola Company, in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund.
In a statement to their confused fan base, Coke explained that the campaign was launched to highlight the threat global warming poses to the Arctic habitat of the polar bear. They designed the white can to be bold and attention-grabbing –and most importantly, to “reinforce” the campaign theme.
However, most customers didn’t buy it — literally.
Some buyers wondered if the cans actually contained the Coke they knew and loved, and as a result, were reluctant to put them in their grocery baskets. Another — likely foreseeable — complaint arose from the similarity of the polar bear design and the Diet Coke can: many consumers purchased the non-diet formula in the polar bear can, and didn’t realize they were getting more than one calorie until they took a swig.
And with the most subjective response of them all — though potentially the most damaging — some longtime Coke drinkers said the new can had an impact on the taste.
I think it’s a beautiful design, actually – but does the aesthetic value of the design really have anything to do with the buzz? Personally, I don’t think so. It’s more of a failure of expectation, and a failure to respect their own brand equity.
Coke’s customers have developed a solid brand loyalty over the years to the company’s iconic visual system — a system that both drives and relies on their emotional attachments to a certain look and feel.
A red can = Classic Coca Cola.
A silver and white can = Diet Coke.
They also sell Coke Zero in distinctive black cans that were introduced in 2005 — but the design clearly signaled “new product!” when they launched the formula.
The system is internationally recognizable, and has sustained value over time, even through the New Coke debacle and various successful and unsuccessful product extensions. That’s why the new holiday design was not simply a swapping of brand colors, but a risky muddling of a well-established system… and in the end, it failed to engage their loyal customers.
Another example: imagine waking up one day to discover that the colors on the ubiquitous McDonald’s logo had switched. Now the arches are red, and name is yellow. The shock would be instant… and understandable. Visual systems give us something to connect to, both consciously and subconsciously. While adding a little dissonance to a design can be a positive kind of disruption, flipping the whole system on its ear is a dangerous decision for a major brand to make.
In response to the wave of negative reactions, Coke announced a recall of the white cans from the shelves, and introduced a seasonal red can of a similar design “to maintain the excitement” of the campaign.
I think that’s a smart move; not only because customers will find what they’re looking for in the soda aisle more easily, but because Coke decided to reward brand allegiance, and make a truly customer-responsive change. Hopefully the polar bears will benefit, too!
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
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Messin’ with mobile: a new way to serve visitors on the go
by Jeff | November 29th, 2011
Recently, we had the pleasure of working with Brandeis High School Programs to develop some digital collateral for their recruiting and marketing season. Among them was a rich PDF of the program’s viewbook (a viewbook we designed initially for print): an image-heavy look at their students in action, complete with some interactive navigation and features.
But in order to provide materials for the widest range of digital users, we decided that the print and PDF viewbooks required a mobile counterpart — an option that could be used in conjunction with strategically distributed QR codes on print postcards, or simply be accessed via a link. This counterpart needed to be done expediently and efficiently… without, of course, sacrificing quality.
Enter JQuery Mobile, a framework designed to replicate the aesthetic and functionality of stand-alone mobile apps, but within the convenient environment of the mobile browser. We leveraged its broad platform support to create a product that could serve as many mobile or tablet-based viewers as possible.
Utilizing the framework’s collapsible blocks, we created a responsive, concise version of the viewbook. Users could use common touch-based behavior to navigate through a series of blocks containing streamlined text, mobile-optimized images, YouTube videos, and links. Some links were tailored specifically for mobile, allowing viewers to call the school with a simple press of a button.
Our team then developed a custom skin for the “app”, creating a singular aesthetic that fit the mobile viewbook into the client’s brand system with natural ease. The end result was an efficiently produced yet polished product that served the client’s needs without costing a fortune. It maintains its aesthetic and functional integrity on mobile phones, tablets, and desktop browsers.
With JQuery Mobile’s help, web developers now have a new window in to mobile optimization.
Categories: Digital Media
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Time flies: digital collages illustrating observations about “psychological time”
by Joerg | November 23rd, 2011
Flashback 1993: As part of my Masters thesis at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany, I created a set of digital collages, which I recently came across while looking for some papers. Rediscovering these illustrations made me realize how much has changed in the world of technology for designers over the past 18 years.
I also realized how very much the idea of ‘time’ still resonates with me. We can’t turn back the hands of time, which is in opposition to our inner experience of time. How we perceive time is very much based on our current situation, and our way of seeing the world around us.
Obvious phenomena of the subjectivity of how we perceive time—like “how time flies”—are juxtaposed against the phenomenon of melancholia, where time often seem to move very slowly. Or how experiences from a week ago might slip our mind, while others—good or bad—linger seemingly forever.
Illustrating those observations was a challenge, but also lot of fun—and yes, the trying times are almost forgotten. Equipped with my own Apple Macintosh Performa (now vintage!), a scanner, and an inkjet color printer, I was experimenting and discovering all the features early Photoshop had to offer. I quickly learned how to use the program to create the image I envisioned. I researched and collected anything and everything that might have made good source material: various books, magazines, fabrics, papers; even objects set on my scanner (this was, of course, long before your everyday household owned a digital camera). So I scanned and scanned and scanned… one could say I actually became kind of a “digital hoarder”.
Unfortunately my Bernoullis became obsolete, which is why I no longer possess the digital source files for these collages.
What I do still own is my final bound theses with 22 illustrations that accompany the written part of my thesis. Here are some of my favorites…
“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”—Bertrand Russell
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered—the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls— bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory”—Marcel Proust
“Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.”—Neil Armstrong
“At times everyone must go through a place where everything is temporarily called into question (the reason for all of our depression), the passage over the swinging mountain bridge. The new is not yet, the old is no more; you pass over an abyss between two walls of rock. Solid was the rock behind you and secure once again will be the new. But now emptiness lies under your feet.”—Ludwig Hohl
“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”—William James
all illustrations copyright Joerg Dressler
Categories: Design, Digital Media, Outside the Square
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Living messages and Living Walls
by Alex | November 16th, 2011
One of the challenges we are called upon to tackle most often is helping large organizations with diverse activities (and equally diverse constituent groups) to coalesce around a unified and mutually reinforcing set of messages that can live within all of their communications.
Earlier this year, Roger and I traveled to Atlanta for an on-site messaging workshop with a diverse cross section of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra staff. Working with representatives from the performing and presenting sides of the house, their community and education programs, and their institutional advancement team, we conducted a series of exercises designed to identify the unifying messages across the organization — messages that also have the power to speak to multiple constituent groups.
Our day-long workshop produced great conversations, and, more importantly, a host of great ideas we’re now helping the Orchestra bring to life throughout their organization.
Fortunately, I had a little time around the workshop schedule to do a little exploring around the art scene in one of my favorite cities. (Full disclosure: I went to Emory University for my undergraduate degree).
One of the ‘sites’ my friend and former roommate, Josh Phillipson of the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund showed me was a series of street art installations.
Part of the multiple-city Living Walls Conference, these installations are scattered around the city, transforming and punctuating otherwise nondescript or abandoned walls.
Some of the installations we saw were still in progress; I’m looking forward to returning to Atlanta to discover more of these extraordinary works. And perhaps, one day, Living Walls might just come to Boston.
I can certainly hope!
Categories: Design, Nonprofits, Outside the Square
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