yearning - by William Steig

For the past few months, I’ve been exploring a powerful tool that has exerted a subtle but profound influence on my professional life. Google Insights has become a backdrop for our strategic work, and truth be told, a bit of a fascinating toy as well.

On a technical level, Insights is a free search engine analysis tool, and it’s extremely easy to use. It breaks down search engine results by time and location; it also provides feedback about trends related to the terms you query.

In terms of my own use, I think of Insights as a window into the desires of the Internet’s hive mind. Its obvious uses are powerful indeed. One client, for example, provides a service available from multiple sources in our community but with limited availability in BC, just north of their location. Insights pinpointed one community – Surrey – in which this particular service saw over 5,000% growth. Wow.

I challenge you to invest 30 minutes exploring terms related to your own business or occupation without experiencing a shift of perspective. In time, you can sculpt your queries to ask very nuanced questions. I recommend paying particular attention to the related terms that appear on the bottom of the search.

Its less obvious uses are even more fascinating to me – particularly as they relate to the viral quality certain ideas, words, and behaviors have. I’ve been exploring slang, jargon, pop culture, and misinformation of all kinds. Climate change vs. global warming vs. global warming hoax? Even our collective shift from coughing into our hands to coughing into our elbows play out in interesting ways in Insights.

Where even I wouldn’t claim that this information is always useful, I can’t help but think that use of this tool has given me a new perspective on marketing and a new insight into the ideas that are top of mind, both today and yesterday. If you’re in the business of capturing minds at any level, I think you’ll find that it’s an indispensable tool.

Doing research is a huge part of my professional life, and for the most part I love doing it – thanks in no small part to the amazing tools available today.  Below are some of my favorites, all of which are free.

Google Reader

This application lets you efficiently monitor any number of blogs, which can be conveniently categorized by topic. Blogs are a great way of researching specific industries, technologies, or people. As an online tool, it can be available from any computer or mobile device.  Other than a search engine, it is the most powerful research tool I use.

Media Monkey

iTunes is great in many ways, but it suffers from significant flaws.  It’s a resource hog, filled with ads, uses a proprietary format, and surreptitiously  imposes a lot of controls  about who owns the media you’ve purchased.  Media Monkey  has none of these issues and it works great – particularly for having a single media library be accessible from multiple machines via a small network.  It is also compatible with mobile devices, including iPods.  I use it for listening to audio podcasts, audio books, and music.

Miro

Miro is a great tool for monitoring video podcasts.  It runs in the background, gradually downloading content. I use it for learning about drawing, technology, and social issues.  Without a doubt, my favorite podcast is TED — an amazing and inspirational series of lectures about a variety of social, technological, artistic, and cultural issues.  Also free.

I think no other aspect of a designer’s work is more telling than their use of type.   It shows their understanding of culture,  the subject matter, and the audience in very subtle but important ways.

For the rest of us, type doesn’t have to be complicated.  A few simple “common sense” rules can help you create more attractive, easy to read documents. Here is one such rule.

Years ago, the Apple II had a very simple game in which you thought of an animal, and it tried to guess what it was. The opening question was always “does it swim in the water or live in the land.” The corresponding rule with type is simply: “was it created by a human hand or by a machine?”

“Made by hand” means part of a typographic tradition closely aligned with handwriting. In most cases, this means type with serifs and with a stress. Take an “O” and make it huge. Does it look like a circle made by a machine or does it lean slightly to the left? Does it  have a stroke that gets thinner or thicker as if it  was written by a right handed person? This one observation can tell you a lot about a font, and how to use it.

According to this approach, Times New Roman is by hand; Arial is made by machine.

time and arial - machine vs. person

If it was created by hand, then simply treat it as  handwriting… meaning: used mixed  caps, be very sparing with bold and underline, and colors, and don’t reverse it (meaning white text on a black background), and don’t justify or letterspace it.  Basically,  just keep it simple and use default settings.

If  the type was created by a machine, then it will be much more accommodating of the permutations listed above. The type is designed for flexibility. Think of it as putty that can be stretched and molded.

Of course, there are many exceptions to this rule but this provides a very helpful guideline for creating documents that are attractive and easy to read.

A recent survey by ExactTarget indicated that 70% of Facebook users don’t want marketing to be incorporated in social media applications – even when they opt to become fans of a particular business.

Of course. Given the choice, few people would claim they want to be marketed to, ever – regardless of the medium. It’s a bit like asking if they want a headache or a pebble in their shoe.

Yet, Facebook is obviously filled with people cheerfully engaged in all sorts of marketing activities – downloading coupons, answering polls, signing petitions, benefiting from discounts, playing games, earning badges. Companies are providing many of these activities, and of course they are marketing themselves.

It’s a matter of how a word is perceived. “Marketing” as the hard sell, the interruption, the phony friendliness, the lackluster product with a glossy polish is clearly not what Facebook is for. This is how many people perceive marketing today.

“Marketing” as an envolving form of communication – a free resource, a clever idea, an insightful observation, and the occasional promotion, gimmick, or self congratulation – is clearly at home at Facebook.

I’m curious to see what comes next. Facebook will eventually be replaced, almost certainly because the commercial aspects of it will overwhelm the other content. Will our perception of the word  “marketing’ shift as well? I wonder if it will always have a negative ring to most people, and if it will be something whose obviousness makes it seem a thing of the past. Most importantly, I wonder what will replace it.

I think it’s an exciting trend to watch and participate in, and with Facebook’s 300 million users, the effects are going to be far reaching indeed.

I thought this little ad was brilliant in terms of ideas and execution – a nice combination of high and low tech. I especially liked the thoughtfulness of conveying technical, abstract ideas as metaphors with string, balloons, and dye.

One way to think of the job a brand must perform is to address the risks involved with making a purchasing decision.

Some people separate risks into different categories – physical, social, monetary, etc. – where others think in terms of high or low involvement.

A low involvement choice is a product like detergent, gum, or paper towers.  These sorts of decisions are quickly made on the basis of cost,  convenience, recognizability, and familiarity.  There is little risk involved.

Low involvement marketing materials don't involve a lot of trust or risk. Standing out is hugely important for the success of these products.

High involvement choices evoke  a higher decision process because of greater of risk. The decision is much more thought out, possibly more emotional, less subject to being driven by  price,  convenience, or similar considerations.  For obvious reasons, health care is almost always considered  a high involvement message.

High involvement marketing is much more reliant on trust and understanding, and a brand  functions to create a connection between the organization and the client.

When developing high involvement marketing materials, we often use inclusive language (”we,” “you,” “us,” etc.) to address a relationship, and we respect the audience by providing them with  the information they need to a make an informed choice.  We position our client as the organization that helps solves the audience’s problems , relieves an anxiety, or creates an opportunity.  Design in these circumstances is minimal and uncomplicated, created to calm and frame content without competing with it.

The excessive formatting of this ad is just one of the things about this ad that make it untrustworthy to modern eyes.

If your proposition is high involvement and  your materials are cluttered, busy, or inconsistent, you may want to consider the corrosive effects these qualities have on your audience’s ability to extend their trust.  The perceived need to “stand out” is usually the culprit, taking a potentially simple message and ornamenting  it with extraneous formatting, effects or clipart.

Better to focus on a simple message  that differentiates you, use creative concepts that speak to that message.  It’s been my experience that focusing on a message opens the door to more interesting, creative concepts because they were born out of a real need and won’t change every time there’s a new project.  Over time, these choices will make it easier for your audience to understand, value, and ultimately trust you.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
- Paul Klee

Though our eyes can distinguish millions of different shades of colors, our color vocabulary is limited in comparison –  about thirty words in all.  As a species, those  words enter vocabulary at a snail’s pace, using  a sequence that remains much the same from culture to culture.

All languages have words for black and white. Red is always the third color to have a word associated with it, followed by green (or yellow) and then yellow (or green). Blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey follow suit.

There are a few  variances to this general pattern.  One African tribe has no word for green but six for red. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue. There is no Old English word for orange.

Personally, I like the fact that red is always the first color to get a word. This reinforces a notion I have about red, white, and black being the most striking color combination there is.

Source: The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher

Imagine picking up an object and suddenly experiencing a flood of voices filling your mind, not from a physical location near you but from anyone, anywhere– perhaps even from people who lived hundreds or thousands of years before you were born.

Now imagine that the object you’ve picked up is a book.

The ability to read to oneself is a remarkable gift.  How strange to think that these little black and white scratches on white paper could carry  so much power.

In terms of the evolution of writing, design, and typography, the ability to read silently came about suddenly and changed everything. In the Western tradition, writing was previously designed to be read out loud as part of a religious ceremony. Books were rare and incredibly valuable. With the invention of the printing press,  books became much more common and inexpensive, and could be privately consumed at a tremendously faster pace.

The human eye entered into these ancient conversations with a hurricane-like force, transforming them profoundly and permanently.  Older letterforms were strongly vertical, resembling spires and steeples. They slowed the eye with their lack of contrast between letterforms and repeated verticals.  These forms were suitable for reading out loud, but were a great hindrance to those reading  silently.

The Roman forms that replaced them had  much more contrast between the different letters.  The eye could build these forms into distinct shapes without having to decipher each letter.  The vertical emphasis was replaced with a slant roughly corresponding to a right handed person holding a pen.

Almost overnight, a visual language based on the structures of authority became replaced with a visual language based on the needs of the audience and the physical  interaction between a human body and a piece of paper. This was the birth of humanist letterforms, which are still most easily read fonts in use today.

Gothics to Romans

In many ways, the progression continues today as our communications continue to cater to their audience.  Communicators who understand and act on audience preferences will have a distinct advantage over those who don’t.

Emperor Penguins

Who doesn’t like penguins? I’ve always loved them, but I hadn’t learned until very recently about how they’re camouflaged.

When swimming, their predominantly white bellies help them blend in with a reflective water surface when seen from from below by predators such as orca whales or leopard seals. When seen from above, their dark backs naturally blend with the darker water below.

I’m struck by the cleverness of this ruse, a little object lesson in thinking contextually, and how even the most high contrast combination can help something stay hidden under the right circumstances.

Spikes Bursting Through Grid, view 1 (concept and art by Michael Brill).

I think the essence of thinking about communication challenges is stepping outside one’s own skin, embracing the illusion that one can see something from someone else’s point of view and adopting their mindset and values. I believe it is the creative person’s role to be flexible by accommodating the audience’s point of view.

But what if we know next to nothing about the audience? Can such an audience be communicated with at all?

This is the challenge of marking a WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, a project also called the “10,000 year test” or the “forever problem.” This is an effort to warn future human beings about the presence of intensely toxic nuclear waste — very likely the most enduring human creation.

The site in question is near Las Vegas, set nearly half a mile underground, within caves designed to collapse within 1,000 years to seal the pollution in place. The waste will remain will remain toxic for 250 times that long.

Landscape of Thorns (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi).

The concept of communicating to people 10,000 in the future fascinates me – and not just because I’m envisioning it next to the ruins of Las Vegas.  Are we speaking to Flintstones or the Jetsons? The challenges are many. How do we create something that can last that long, that can be understood and believed and that people won’t want to steal or to explore?

I’m thinking of the Egyptian tombs and the curses their makers intended to surround them, and how violators were threatened with judgment in this life and the next. I suspect scary “keep out” burial faces are common to many cultures (and museums), and are probably more interesting than dreadful to many. A big lesson we can learn from them is: don’t be interesting, beautiful, crafted, or valuable. Don’t make something people will want to explore, study, or steal.

I’m struck by the thoughtfulness of the project concept, the physical design, and the use of communications without use of language or symbol.  To me, the solutions they present address a fundamental human condition in a way that paradoxically makes them akin great art.  However these sites are marked, I hope the WIPP project is successful.

To read more about this project, click here

Figure 4.3-15. Forbidding Blocks, view 2 (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi).