Hive Health

Today I shopped around D&AD New Blood with our creative director Adam. New Blood is a graduate design and advertising showcase. Adam was keen to find names for our talent database, I wanted to photograph some visual storytelling.

VS is a big thing in my mind right now, and I’m turning over what it actually means. Are paintings visual stories? Is an ad a story only when there’s no dialogue or text? I deliberately blurred my shots so that I won’t be able to read the text (if any) when I look at them later.

But I didn’t need my camera to understand more. My creative writing tutor says a story needs a beginning, middle, an end and a problem to solve. So, I spent some time with the visual stories I really liked. The first was from the celebrated young illustrator Jay Wright from UWE Bristol. His poster, The Tin Lungs You Don’t Have, showed me two lungs, each framing a day-in-the-life of (right) a non-smoker and (left) his unhappy counterpart. Each had a different lifestyle, and each ended the day on a different outcome. I am not sure I grasped everything Jay was trying to do here. But as a fresh take on the usual anti smoking brief, this was a masterpiece of a wordless story.

I loved the work for WWF by Middlesex Uni’s  Shamas Bedi. Giant pencil drawings of “cuddly” sea creatures: a turtle, a blue whale, were minutely composed of hundreds of different species. There was  plankton –  those charismatic little guys – corals, feeder fish, penguins, sharks  and seabirds. My conscience didn’t need to read “Save our coral reefs” to jiggle fragile ecosystems up a notch – although the line was there. Enough was spelt out in the drawings within drawings, all immaculately proportioned and wittily placed. Life isn’t in the big details and sometimes that can hit home like a gush of salty water up the nose.

I’m a copywriter but I want to tell my stories more visually.  Pictures take us back to being tiny kids when everything was a picture, even each letter of a word.  Visual storytelling is strong because it leads you directly to the prize. It’s vulnerable because you might not follow. It’s got real heart and I love it.

A few months back I was fortunate enough to be invited to a talk by King’s Speech set Designer Eve Stewart. Curious as hell to know how an Oscar nominated set designer goes about her work, I showed up at The Billiard Room on 33 Portland Place on the afternoon of the 6th May.

To add extra spice, The Billiard Room was the actual location where the speech therapy sessions where filmed – atmospheric distressed wall and all. On a funny note, i have since heard it is also the site of alleged “sex parties” and so-called “porn discos”.

A really insightful talk followed. Eve opened up about her inspirations and how she achieved that really distinguished wall effect using a blow torch and a canvas of water paints. However, the thing which really resonated with me was her mention of going that bit further to infuse her craft with – I can’t recall how she put it – functional emotion. Once her sets were designed, Eve would create a note or scribble that the characters may once have used – a shopping list, a letter from loved one or a reminder note about some drinks they might be hosting. She would slip this quietly into the relevant actor’s pocket. When they chanced upon it later, the realism  would absorb them further into their role and make their surroundings feel even more genuine.

Finding new ways to stretch the effectiveness of her craft seems to be another art that Eve has mastered! I guess this explains her 2 Oscar nominations.

Adam and I here are putting together a thought piece for a client to help assess a logo being developed internally for a global launch. In the midst of this fun project  I stumbled across this 1993 interview with Steve Jobs. Jobs worked with Modernist Paul Rand, and Paul certainly contributed to Jobs’ vision of design as business problem solving and not just arty, far off pretence.

A memorial to Paul’s work and approach is well worth 20 mins to browse and be inspired. Click on Paul’s picture to be taken to a collection of articles written by Paul Rand, interviews, videos and  information. A real treasure for the business design fascinated.

I found this a touching client piece on an individual designer’s impact both personally and the business world.

In an increasingly rich information environment, the format in which information is presented is becoming more and more important. Beauty = Cut Through. But will content be ignored as irrelevant if it’s ugly? Will it be received prejudicially in a positive or negative manner because of how it’s packaged? Does content, in the traditional sense, now play second fiddle to its aesthetic framing? Answering yes to these questions poses some problems . . . The internet is worshipped as heralding the democratisation of knowledge, but is this really the case when money can buy you a slick, good-looking website and potentially a more engaged and susceptible/suggestible audience? As always, we’d love to know what you think.

But, on the upside, this emphasis on impact, interaction and beauty can lend itself to a more easily navigable and digestible information environment. For example, this. It’s a visual, interactive representation of the scientific evidence for popular health supplements. 5 minutes playing with this app reveals more about the evidence base (or lack thereof) for health supplements than 5 days on PubMed. And it looks nice too. I like it.