Posts tagged "design"

Digging around for free multimedia content I found this charming little healthcare story. Produced in 1948 by Halas and Batchelor  an animation company founded by John Halas and his wife Joy Batchelor two pretty inspirational people. The company started small and grew to be the largest and most influential animation studio in Western Europe. From small beginnings in 1940, they made over 2000 films and earned an international reputation for fine animation extending the medium to explain complex ideas with clarity and humour.

8 1/2 minutes seems crazily long now given our obsession with the 30 sec TVC and the interuptive nature of much or our marketing. But watching this the charm, execution and humour grabbed me way and beyond my usual attention span. It’s pretty interesting to see that COI communications seems to have taken a backward step when it comes to explaining change to the man in the street.

Every now and then we head out to see an individual talk about some mildly relevant subject. Last night – saw us be invited to Super Contemporary and a few hours with Wayne Hemingway – talking to 50 of us about design, inspiration, and life.

The Design Museum has joined forces with Beefeater 24, to bring a series of talks and gin to celebrate the fearlessly progressive spirit of London’s greatest creative minds, past and present. We were lucky enough to be invited along. Read more about Wayne here.  

Wayne was pretty insistent that us in the creative world;

1.  Stick to our guns and hold on to our principles despite the risk of missing out on short term cash. Do what you want to do, not what you need to do. 
2. Know our customer as well as we can. Research them, be with them, and understand them. For God’s sakes don’t hide in the office. See the white of their eyes. 
3. Understand that environments need to be built that fosters creativity. Gives space to make mistakes. Let the kids do it their way. Expect anyone to be able to do anything, give them the freedom to conclude themselves.
4. Champion the evolution. Humans instinctively want something better. They know when they are making do, OK is not a natural human state. But only very few ‘intolerants’ make a difference and change it. So be one.

At no time did regulatory, PI, sales aids or brand planning feature. But the 2 hours was so valuable and a real delight. How can this be beaten? Well – the next one sees us with Paul Smith. We have a couple of tickets spare – shout if you want to come along –  beapart@hivehealth.com.

Something both exciting and unique happened to me in 1991…….

I bought my first 12 inc record album. The band was called The Prodigy and the album was called Experience and I had managed to purchase a limited edition white sleeve special. The slick minimalist style of the cover contrasted vastly with the atmospheric colouring and transient use of typography within the inner sleeve. The music was an array of cutting edge sounds and lyrics mixed with mesmerising beats and a unique series of piano keys. Fast forward 18 years and the band are once again proving that they see design as an essential ingredient in expressing their music.

The use of animated graphics in the new video for Warriors Dance  is truly magical and inspiring….

Currently doing the rounds is a bizarre document, supposedly produced by the Arnell Group during their recent redesign of the Pepsi logo. It employs complex SCIENCE to justify the logo’s redesign, including (but not limited to): the Golden Ratio, the Earth’s geodynamo, magnetic fields and magnetic dynamics, the analysis of multiple perspectives, and colour theory. Oh, and somehow the relativity of space and time are involved.

Every page of this document is more ridiculous than the last, culminating with an explanation of a process whereby Pepsi’s new logo will manifest its own gravitational pull (see above). Incredible. Some argue the document is authentic, others that it’s a hoax. I think it’s an extremely successful viral marketing campaign, run by the Arnell Group on behalf of Pepsi. Probably.

This might be a good time to mention that the new logo is basically the same as the old one, except that it now looks a bit more like a lopsided grin.

Layer Tennis is a series of live design events on Friday afternoons presented by Adobe® Creative Suite® 4.

What the hell’s layer tennis? Two competitors swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley” which is then posted that to a site live.

Way back when in the misty days – Layer Tennis was called “Photoshop Tennis”. A few old schoolers remember that to-the-death match with Derek Powazek against Heather Champ. Anyway, the match was going along well when Heather played this for volley six and then all of the sudden Derek disappeared from the backstage chat-room. In a beautifully creative move, Derek printed out volley six, crumbled it up, took it outside, stapled it to a telephone poll, took a picture of it, formatted that picture and posted it as his volley seven. So cool.

The players may be designers, animators, illustrators or pretty much anything else, and they can use any tool or application they like. The match progresses volley by volley. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action as it happens.

The match lasts for ten volleys and when it’s complete, Season Ticket Holders sound off and we declare a winner. Its brilliant and a design joy.

Today sees an All-UK Layer Tennis match featuring Simon Cook vs.Rex Crowle with commentary by Anne Ward.  First serve at 4pm. Get your tickets here.

When trading becomes challenging, businesses of all sizes generally have two choices. First, cut cost in line with reduced revenue and wait for better times to come (and hope they do before the money runs out). Second, invest to become more competitive and attractive under the new market conditions. Design provides limited advantage in the first scenario, but is essential to the second, as are foresight and bravery.

Change is a good thing! I can’t deny that I enjoy a certain comfort zone within my professional and non-professional lives. Doing something I know and the sense of familiarity I get from that gives me a security which I find both appealing and comforting. However the problem is that security and comfort generally become boring with a significant lack of enthusiasm.

I guess this is the reason that I chose to live and study out of London for 3 years and thereafter set off travelling for 15 months. Exciting these adventures certainly were but they brought challenges too. I learnt that being able to adapt and adjust to new environments/situations (broadening one’s horizons, etc) is one of the most important skills a person can posses. Big rewards often carry an element of risk – and let’s face it, risk is never boring!

Design can be risky when there is time and money at stake. But in today’s world, it is only through creativity and exploration that people can better themselves and their work. So don’t be afraid to bring brand new ideas to the table -if you want to get better than you’ve already got.

Recently we have been working on a brief to improve the provision of information to people with massive mobility and dexterity challenges. We needed to communicate the product, how to use it in a way that is really useful, and most importantly why the choice has been made for them to be on this therapy.

Our initial discussions revealed that beyond who they might be and what they have been diagnosed with, little solid research in terms of their feelings or how they live with the disease was known. As a consequence we needed to get to grips with the patients, not only in terms of information requirements but also their idiosyncrasies and physical disabilities.

We wanted to use an approach that we have come to know as ‘Accessible Design’. This approach is huge with car designers in Japan, who need to feel how the rapidly aging population of Japan experience their cars. As young, progressive designers, they don’t have a problem getting into a car, adjusting seats, twiddling knobs – but the end user might. To combat this mismatch between audience and output Nissan invented the old-suit, an outfit which simulates the effects of aging. Strap it on and you’ll immediately feel stiffer, heavier, less able to balance, and the included goggles will make it harder to see. And its works – their design teams know, empathise and design better for an audience they do not relate to physically.

It’s obvious how this relates to the work we do. Patient materials are too often overlooked as bits of collateral that ticks the patient communication box but mean little to the actual user. While we create more relevant content for our audiences, really getting to grips with the problems they face and the questions they have, it’s essential to package this content appropriately. While product manufacturers make sure their goods are easily accessed, we must produce healthcare information in such a way as to be easily consumed.

Our conversations with patients and professionals unearthed difficulties we’d never have dreamed of (door knobs, envelopes, ring pulls, Velcro, shiny surfaces, stockings etc). Following an accessible design approach proved hilarious and humbling. With no Nissan suit budget in place, we had to get creative and find ways of ‘restricting ourselves’ based on the patient insights we had. Enter ski gloves, mittens, industrial strength elastic bands, bags on hands and training weights on arms. We played, we learned, we were astounded. The result is a range of materials that have been thoroughly tested as ‘end usable’. Alongside a better understanding of what they need and want to know we have solved the problems of this audience in a more relevant way, for a brand that can only benefit from this approach.

This project has been a real learning curve for us. We have looked at real end user requirements, translated this into design and content objectives, and injected these into our tactical material briefs. We have also gained useful insight into what it’s like to live a tiny period of time with a disability that impacts so much.

As far as we are aware this is the first time an accessible design approach has been used by a communications agency and that makes us totally happy. It’s an approach that is now an intrinsic part of our materials generation process.