Mirror MIrror on the wall

Carrying on with more How Magazine bashing...I looked through a couple more of their emails.

They say (well I am just saying) that you can tell a lot about a group of people by the advertisers sell to them. You could also say that advertising also picks up on the way the group views themselves.

Well, if that's the case, then this latest bit of email marketing, brought to us from How (soon to be renamed 'US Artworker') says a lot about this profession.

If these toothless check wearing twats are what designers are supposed to look like, then things are really that bad. Honestly, if designers or young designers in particulr, think that dressing like that makes you a designer, well...they're probably right and deserve to be made unemployed by istockphoto's new logo division. If toothless stupid grins are di reigeur then you deserve not to be taken seriously. If you think that 'being creative' excludes you from say having a brain and being able to run a business (I'm creative, i don't do numbers or insurance[the ad btw, is for insurance]) or say (in the digital arena) not knowing how to program a computer, then you deserve to be at the end of the soup kitchen line.

Honestly, with all this furore about How publishing an ad for a stock logo library, and how its effects standards of professionalism within the industry, I bet there wasnt a peep about the patronising (not to mention inbred) image of desingers used in this campaign. Even though Gary Lynch assures us in his istock logo backpeddle:

"It is not my place to pass judgment on the products and services promoted by our advertisers; however it is my responsibility to determine whether or not we should deliver the message"

Sergeant Major Cock up

There has been a bit of a firestorm over at How, a 'design' magazine that really isn't that much about design at all. In fact, if they called it 'US Artworker' then that would be a more accurate reflection of its process obsessed and 'inspiration devoid' publication.

Like most magazines, they like to have healthy dialogue with their subscribers, and bombard them with emails all week, usually to try and flog of a few places in some "webinar" on such indispensable topics like "10 freelancing tips you must know!" or 'how to control the money situation with clients". Something where the advice 'dont bullshit them' and engage in "plain talking about money and stop being a whimp about what you charge" would suffice.

Anyway, in some major stuff up, they decide to run an email campaign from one of their advertisers, iStockPhoto, the photo library that clients love (because they're cheap) but designers hate because you have to wade through a lot of crap and their watermarks are a bugger to get rid of for your mockups.

Istock, are now looking at crowd sourcing logos. Originally they crowd sourced photos, before account managers had even dreamt up their latest wank-term. People would upload their images and would receive a payment for each one sold. Now they're asking for designers to send in logo designs and they'll flog them as stock. This is great for Clients, who now have a choice between dealing with some flannel shirted poser with a trucker cap and surly attitude..or dealing with a stock company and getting their new identity within the hour. This is also better than the clients usual choice 'nephew with a pirate copy of photoshop'.

Now this sort of 'farmed out' design work really gets up designers noses. They hate seeing their 'work' devalued to the point where they think they'll going to be replaced by a stock library (or a clients nephew with a pirate version of photoshop). They also hate crowdsourcing and sites like crowdspring, a site poor clients and shysters from an MBA course try to get really poor design work done for not much money.

With all this animosity towards what designers feel as threats to their profession. How magazine, in a genius bit foot-shooting, decided to send out an email...too all their designer subscribers, advertising iStocks new logo service with a call to action

"Starting in 2010 iStockphoto will start selling a whole new type of file: logos. But before we start selling, we're looking for designs from creatives like you. As a designer, you've probably created hundreds of different logos over the course of your career and now you can sell them to the world's largest community of creative buyers..."

Cue designer outrage and then a hastily worded reply trying to back peddle. As I write this, F+W medias website has gone down due to technical difficulties.

Social Media - the easy guide to choosing an agency.

Venturing out of Hoxton for the moment..

One of the modus operandi of this blog seems to be as a panacea bullshit. By documenting the travails of a working digital designer in London, i hope to shed some light on some of the insidious and potentially unethical practices that pop up.

I hope that perhaps by actually showing how full of hot air a some of this stuff is, it might go away and we can concentrate on producing good work. The result will hopefully be a re-valuing of priorities so that authorship is now more important than messaging. That a site that does something is more important than a site that can only talk about something.

Most clients are thoroughly unaware of this. They simply choose their agency through a flawed pitch process or by sheer inertia. The incumbent agency stays that we because its easier to keep them. Their goals may be wrong to start with, they think they need a marketing campaign, and go to a marketing agency but the marketing agency is too spineless and greedy to send them to someone who can help them. They are also bamboozled by language and seduced by the sales pitch. They have lost their objective criteria for assessing which agency to choose.

Now we get onto the point of the post, and it is the buzzword du jour of 'social media'. This is the buzzword of the year and ready to spring into action are a burgeoning number of 'social media' agencies that are popping up. They're everywhere, some good, the rest are absolutely hopeless. Its understandable, its a new field and most people see this field as the new gold rush frontier. Agencies quickly try to reinvent themselves to try and stay relevant to their clients. Others will simply buy in that which they cant do. The result is, with all this bullshit flying about, its impossible to tell who is good and who isn't.

Well this guide hopefully will make it easy for you by splitting the agencies in two sorts.

The first sort, we'll call "The Consultants" actually have no one who can produce anything within their immediate group, or at least the people you are dealing with. They may have a design 'arm' they can use, and they may even be part of a larger organisation. However, what you are after are practitioners not talkers. This is key. The "Consultants" are high on talking about it and can suggest 'strategy' and approach but will fail on implementation. They may point to things they do, they may have a blog, they may have some wacky pics they've taken for movember, they're, no doubt, on twitter and they've got a facebook page. Well, they're operating in the field, they must be experts in it? Well..no.

Why aren't they? Well, the reason is clear when we look at the 2nd sort of agency, the good sort:

These are called "The roll year sleeves up and get on with it' mob.

These are the people that actually make the things they are talking about. These are the people who are simply not just active in the social space (anyone can blog...hell, I'm blogging here!) but are actually making THINGS that live in the social space. They make applications, they make stuff that has lasting significance.

The key here is, if the person you are dealing with can produce original content, then he's worth continuing the conversation with. You need people, who not only can talk but can do. Ask the question, "the MD of the company, was he a programmer before he started running this business?" "Was she a designer that actually designed and built things?"

In short, is he/she a practitioner?

These people, and only those people have the intimate knowledge of the medium to make ideas work in this field. These are the people that know how to tell the narratives of social media, and what works, because they've actually done it before. They've actually made web applications, they've built social games and deployed and monetised them on Facebook. They focus on authorship of original content. They can give you a road map and build the road to get you there. Not talk to you about it and suggest a bus to take.

Didn't Sun Tzu say something about 'all warfare being based in deception' - well that's what Charlie Sheen said in Wallstreet!
Well with social media agencies, its a pretty big deception.

Starting next week, I shall scour the internets and find websites of companies who offer 'social media' and shine the harsh "hoxton prophet' light of truth and see how they measure up.

Already in the clients briefs.

All about bud puns this morning after a very enjoyable client meeting yesterday afternoon. The brief is a goodun': Initally we're looking at the 'holistic brand development' of fashion retailer followed by 'a cross channel rollout of digital livery' . What this means is we'll being a corporate ID, they're too cheap to spend time (and money) on us coming up with a Visual language (read: Brand assets). So we're going to shoe-horn that into an actual project, that being a a Website.

What it also means is they will require, outside of scope, quite a few other things that will either, 1) they wont have any money for or 2) (most likely) the account manager, being spineless and clueless, will simply agree too do for no extra cost. They do this because they never have to deliver on the promises they make. They do this with impunity because they use the well worn line of 'trying to keep the client happy' which is a great way to defend the fact you know nothing about what anyone else does in the company.

Anyway, There was a lot of talk, a lot of hand flapping and people getting passionate about the "Brand". Notes were taken, account managers were there to agree with bloody everything the client had to say, and in the end, through all that, a brief was actually taken.

Now language is something that most professions use for, what i can tell, is for two main reasons. The first one is efficiency of communication. Talking amongst ourselves, designers use their own lexicon because of the improved efficiency in communication that accompanies words used that are specific to that industry. The other reason is that it excludes others and creates a cache of prestige that, inevitable, improves credibility to an outside audience, and by extension, means we can charge more. People tend to pay more for things they don't understand. In effect, they're paying you because you know things they don't. I wonder what Orwell would say about this.

However, design, well, its a pretty big church. And if you asked most people to define 'design' you would get a lot of different answers. Ask a designer, next time you see them, to define design. I can assure you they may struggle, unless of course they are any good, in which case they will say 'let me get back to you' and return with a proper response that that question deserves.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is back to this language issue again. The word most otfen chucked around the meeting room yesterday was the word 'BRAND".Hot on the heels of "Aol.'s" new branding exercise, this was topic-du-jour at this organisation. Now, this word is misued all the time, not only by clients (they dont need to know it anyway) but also by designers. Can I point out, that your corporate Identity is NOT your brand. I dont think I can make it any clearer than that. If you want more info, and primer on 'branding' then head on over to here

Looking fwd to this one. I love the smell of optimism that accompanies a new project. Ask me again what this project smells like when the many hands of account managers have had a chance to fuck things up.

Oh my god, its so true!!!

No doubt a lot of fellow designers will be getting pretty hot under the collar about this 'comedic exposé' on the creative process....done by that bastion of corporate subversion...YAHOO! Well I snagged this from Adscam, the 'well intentioned' Advertising rant of George Parker.

Well, regardless if its true, or even funny. Which is, to some degree. What i find somewhat recidivist, is that I can almost see the desinger whinge-fest in the comments already. There are none so far, so I may take the bait and post a 'OMG, its so true', one of the many you will no doubt see.




Finally meeting the new client this afternoon. A bit worried that its wednesday, 3 solid days of outlandish promises from the "Account manager" to try and reign in.

I'm SuperDry!!!!

The 'designers dress code'- a statement of beautiful uniformity. The heady mix of quirky and contempory style, a statement of 'arms-length conservatism', "I need to appear creative, but not so crazy as you wont hire me, but not boring as you'll think I'm not creative!'. Its the couture tightrope we walk every day.

Its not like were all doctors wearing white coats or surgical scrubs, (practical necessity) or say, in the Armed Forces (equality and simplicity). For a creative profession that is supposed to embrace innovation, the irony is that large number of participants dress exactly the same! How quaint!

The latest designer 'Brand du jour' is currently SuperDry, a japanese clothes company..and thats all I know about them. This 'Superdry' thing isnt new, its been going on for a while, but as i was walking to work this morning, I couldn't help but notice the words 'superdry' on almost everything, and I mean almost fucking everything. Jackets made of that slightly greasy looking oilskin material (a new young mans Barbour?), bags, shoes, and most importantly, the designer staple...the t-shirt.

A few years ago, 'ironic statements' were all the rage, the staple of that fad being the "This is supposed to be the future, where is my jetpack" t-shirt. Now, you cant walk for a wall of twats wearing Superdry ,or on the days when mums doing the washing, Hollister.

So next time I am in my 'Agile Scrum' sipping my Machiato, tapping on my iPhone, you're sure to recognise me, I'm the surly one wearing "SuperDry".

Monday-fucking-morning

What do I hate about Mondays? There is a lot to detest at the start of the week.

Typcially, Mondays start with a "work in progress' meeting. Otherwise known as "The WIP" or unkindly as the "Whip" .

In some agencies, this is a great way to work out what everyone is working on,  how the project is progressing, and what other work is coming up. Nothing like being part of a team that's moving forward where you voice is heard and respected. That's a simplistic view on how a good commercial design practice is run. 

Back in the real world, things couldn't be further from that! Firstly, we tend not to do 'wips'  anymore. Especially in digital design where there is a managerial obsession with 'granularity'. Nowadays,  we are subjected to the "Stand up Meeting" -  basically another bullshit title for what should be described as "quick meeting, so tossers can't drone on about irrelevant shit too much'. And rather than doing them once a week and just getting on with the work, we do them "every fucking day" usually at a time like 10:30 because account managers are too lazy to get in before 10:00.

This is part of the fallout of 'methodology du jour' called 'Agile'  (where they are known as 'Scrums') which everone is getting a hardon over. It also goes hand in hand with marketers wet dream "Social Media" (more on that later). Agile is supposedly the panacea of all our ills, where we concentrate more on doing and less on talking about doing. One would assume that that this would result in account managers fucking leave us alone to get on with it. However, the kicker is, Agile is implemented on a company level by the people its supposed to exclude, so no matter what people say, its just another long line of 'process tools'.

Honestly, clients, if you want to "be Agile", leave the agencies alone and just hire the designer and developer directly...and stay the fuck away from advertising agencies, they're shit at it.

This week is looking like a 'good-un' though. Management are dragging my sorry arse along to a meeting with a potential client. Already, the fire-fighting will commence, where I will attempt to introduce some shred of reality into a project which has been overbloated with the hype and outlandish promises from the account managers, who, not having to actually deliver anything, are free to promise absolutely everthing with impunity.

Plenty of opportunity too for management to get me to 'output some jpegs' for his new shittastic powerpoint presentation. No doubt upload some "moody shots of my feet" I took over the weekend to my flickr page at some point  and maybe "rehash some links i found on other sites" and present them as my own on my blog.

Good times.

Fuck you Adobe Photoshop

People often ask me, "why did you start this blog?" Well, the truth is...no one has ever fucking asked me. However, if they were to ask me, the above image would be the reason. This 'spiral' is the most common motif to confront a jobbing designer every day. Its the blessed Apple "beachball" that accompanies your mac system deciding to shit itself.

Why is it called a beachball, well in some mashed up semiotic fuck-fest, its name is a hangover from the earlier version  of the 'hang icon' which was a two-bit circle with alternate quadrants filled in. Trust me, it looked like a beach ball. Before posting, I asked my programming mate "what would you shove into google image search to get a pic of that sprial thing" and being a programmer, who knows fucking absolutely everything,  he said 'beachball'. So, there it is, 'Beachball'.

Anyway, Why Fuck you Adobe Photoshop?  Well, that symbol is part and parcel of the "Save for web feature" in Adobe Photoshop. Infact, it is so entrenced it may as well be a feature. New versions of Photoshop will probably say 'featuring "save for web beachball 2.0".

Being a working designer, it is often my task to output hundreds of fucking jpegs so some bullshit-peddler can try and pull the wool over some prospective clients eyes, or we have a meeting, or we have a 'design review' meeting....infact, anything nowadays seems to need a fucking jpeg accompaniment! And why is this annoying, because its always last minute, and you're always in a rush to try and get this work outputted so someone can catch a flight to blow (or be blown by) someone and that's when the blessed 'Beachball' appears. Adobe photoshop just sits there, hangs for minutes, like a silent 'sit in' by a bunch of crusty hippies at a proposed runway site near Heathrow.

Well, fuck you Adobe Photoshop! Thanks for the wasted time, the ulcers and the lack of productivity. Shortcut to brilliant? More 'Long way round to fucking average'.