18.03.08
A little bit of trendwatching

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It’s fashionable to suggest that advertising is not going through its best patch. Anyone anywhere near a European TV set in the last year or two would have been met by a barrage of ads that all seemingly stem from just two places, namely Wieden + Kennedy’s ‘Cog’ film and Fallon’s ‘Balls’.

And it has got confusing – Fallon’s recent ad for Orange (on the premise of ‘unlimited’) involves a never-ending rainbow made from coloured crayons, carpets, coloured streamers, balloons and rockets, all shot in the zeitgeist style of slightly washed out Californian colourscapes with impossibly thin yet plausibly cool characters doing plausibly cool, thin stuff. An approach that currently can be used to sell everything from mobiles to TV’s to cars to, well, pretty much anything.

Wieden’s new ‘problem playground’ work for Honda is good but feels somehow related to Fallon’s Skoda ads, whilst referencing back to Cog, and so on. A recent blitz of mobile phone ads all featured the same groups of twenty-somethings making friends/flattening cars/you name it which left it impossible to differentiate one ad from the next.

Campaign (the UK advertising mag) recently lifted the lid on this here in some detail so we won’t add too much fuel to the fire, but it’s interesting to observe Wieden’s own bloggers musing on the long-term success of Cog and the knock-on effect when they try something else – the issue being that all their Honda work is constantly referred back to it’s famous predecessor, whether they like it or not.

Of course design is hardly better – every decade designers become obsessed with particular approaches, typefaces, photographers, colours, you name it.

The illustrative style led by Paul Davis and David Shrigley has been a signature ‘tic’ of the noughties, as has the revival of rounded fonts, after a nineties dominated by one font, FF Meta. More recently designers seem obsessed with counterless, blocky type, with Non-Format at the vanguard. Then there is the sub-set currently deemed the ‘new ugly’, containing few real examples other than a couple of magazines featuring heavily scaled type and the odd symbol.

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In logo design, you can go here to see an entertaining round-up of (mostly American) trends - probably as useful as much to decide what to avoid as well as what to emulate. Logo designers seem to be currently obsessed with removing ‘stem’s and ‘spurs’ from letters such as d’s, a’s, r’s. Don’t believe us? Well, here are a few examples.

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Soon the design community will move on to something new – our bets are on Alex Trochut. If the amount of times his website is bookmarked on del.icio.us is anything to go by, then this is the current and future squeeze of Mac-users worldwide. Just to give you a comparison, 365 people have bookmarked Wolff Olins’s website, 283 johnson banks but a staggering 1935 people have tagged his work for future reference, and that’s just on one bookmarking site.

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How each industry deals with these trends as they move from somewhere to everywhere is always fascinating. But advertising may have found its new direction already with Fallon’s extraordinary Gorilla ad for Cadbury’s, seemingly destined to clear-up in this years advertising gongage (along with its much discussed bunnies ad). Some reports have Cadbury’s sales up by 5%, so watch out for a whole new spate of surreal but cool ads coming soon to your TV, their main requirement being mainly to stand out and ‘be different’.

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Design trends used to be subject to a kind of trickle down effect - when record sleeve design was in its heyday, trends were set in that relatively ‘free’ environment and then found themself subsumed into corporate graphics a few years later. But more recently, the lines have become more blurred and the cycle of appropriation has seemingly sped up. Non Format and Trochut’s work will be regurgitated in this summer’s degree show work but by the time the appropriators get to apply their ideas for real the style will already be two years old.

You could argue that as the UK’s two best agencies, it’s fair enough for Fallon and Wieden to draw inspiration from themselves. After all, if you’re copying something it may as well be yourself?

But as ever the message for the rest of us is simple: either be the trend setter, or ignorer. Following will get you nowhere.

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