Some aspects of design are relatively cut and dried. Design a brochure? Client approves, it’s printed, it’s delivered. Websites are tweaked and proofed in pixels, then finally published. Product design endures countless variations and redraws but finally factories ‘tool up’ and we grab real things with real hands and make real choices.
But identity design is much less straightforward. For as long as any of us can remember, getting an idea approved has stood a far greater chance of acceptance if accompanied by visuals ‘imagining’ how that new symbol or logo might look in real life. Once they were drawn, often painfully, with magic markers. Then hastily cobbled together from stats and customised ‘rub-downs’ (a kind of letraset). But, for two decades, the computer has increasingly helped designers of all persuasions realise their ideas, then proof, test and tweak in a virtual universe.
Great computer visuals help ‘sell’ an idea, there’s no doubt. The Powerpoint looks excellent, the route seems, well, seamless. You begin to dream – ‘if they really went for this, it could be really great’, you start to think.
Then reality hits. The tweakers begin their trade, boardroom battles are fought, research re-invents.
Sometimes an idea goes through, and applications turn out as planned, if not better. But equally often an idea is compromised. That presentation that looked so seamless becomes an unwelcome reminder of what could have been.
Often the core identity is approved but applications are thwarted – that ace brochure never gets done, the signs remain unchanged, the website re-skinned rather than re-imagined. The Powerpoint? Well, it might reflect the changes - but – it might not. It remains as a moment in time, a great ‘Powerpoint scheme’ that never becomes real. It might be shown to other clients, but never dwelt upon – awkward questions might reveal how little of it ever saw the light of day.
But in the era of the digital portfolio, the lines have blurred. It’s not unusual now for companies to include on their websites some or all of these ‘visuals’. Sometimes companies might decide that hypotheticals (such as this scheme for London by Venture Three) should be in the public domain.
Some might choose to show what they really intentioned with a scheme, knowing that once it left them it was compromised (such as this work on the London brand).
Experimenting digitally, can be useful but controversial. The design for the London Olympics logo was of course presented with computer visuals future-gazing five years to 2012. But when entered into design competitions, judges were faced with a wall of presentation boards containing an agreed logo surrounded by a dozen ‘what-if’s’, perhaps prompting the question, ‘what now?’
A few years ago, in idle moments at johnson banks we used this blog (then followed on Creative Review) to air, in public, our thoughts on how you could simply improve some of the mundane logos that surround us everyday. It seemed innocent, but raised the hackles of many – we’d ‘crossed a line’ and promptly stopped that series dead in its tracks.
Now the line has blurred again with this week’s ‘launch’ of what, on the surface, seems like a brave new identity for Hewlett Packard. But read a little closer and it only seem to half exist. Critically whilst some of the ideas (typefaces, angles) have been partially adopted, the key one – a change of logo, hasn’t. But by placing the theoretical case study into the public domain, the space has been ‘claimed’, for something only currently virtual.
Now this isn’t the place to debate the precise details of this approach (see here and here for the forensics) but it’s certainly a step into the unknown. We have no idea if the scheme will ever see the light. We may never know where it went wrong or why.
How a company as large and litigious as HP was prepared for this work to be shown without sign-off is a mystery, but subsequent 'blocking' of the video aspects of the case study and HP’s statement that ‘the logo was a working draft that did not get adopted by HP’ seem pretty damning.
As Alan Fletcher once memorably pointed out, ‘experience informs me that getting a good idea means dick, but getting it realised separates design sheep from design goats’. A bit harsh, perhaps, but you can see what he meant. Fletcher came from a generation that only truly judged work that saw the light of day. Now, it seems, the light of day can be entirely virtual.
By Michael Johnson
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