3. My girlfriend just started a model career – could you shoot the fotos with her?

2. Nice, but why don’t you use Comic Sans?

1. My daughter likes to paint, too.

While reviewing several corporate designs we did at FAZIT:DESIGN (Wiesbaden, Germany) during the last years, I found a subtle regularity concerning the colouring. It’s not too obvious and it isn’t visible in every design, so that one doesn’t immediately come to realize it. But it’s definetely there: a correlation between the colours of the clients physical appearance (skin, eyes, hair) and the colours he prefers to see used in his corporate design.

The correlation seems to fall apart where there have been several people involved in the decision process, but as long as there has been only one person deciding upon which design should be used, it occurs in some cases.

A similar phenomenon has been observed before, though in different context. I rembered a passage in “Kunst der Farbe” by Johannes Itten (ISBN-10: 3363009798, Page 23). In the book Itten describes how he tried to teach a class of students, that the combinations or “accords” of colours should be objectively chosen. His students protested and he gave in to let them test an alternative approach: they would paint colour accords based upon their individual tastes. The result was a very subjective outcome, where the colourings resembled the colours of the students faces.

What could one make of this?

Well, with the psychological part being the source for the most time consuming obstacles during the development of a corporate design, it would perhaps be tempting to “generate” the colour range from the clients looks.

Coming from a strictly conceptional based approach to corporate design, my first impulse is, that this would be utterly wrong, since the appearance of anything concerning the business needs to be tuned to fit the market.

However, there may be businesses where this might be applied and work well for the client. Imagine a corporate design for a freelancing consultant. The “product” his clients are buying, is his time and his expertise. For the classical one-man-show this means that they are meeting him in person and thus get “exposed” to his looks anyway. Thus, if the corporate design makes use of some of his colours, the overall customer experience could be even more consistent.

For the internal psychological part it could make it easier for him to identify himself with the appearance of his business. Thus his behaviour could be positively influenced in terms of self-confidence and he could be more positively remembered.

What do you think?

Cersei is a character from G. R. R. Martins splendid novels of the “Song of Ice and Fire” series. If you haven’t read them, do it. These books are brillant (and a highly addictive read).

Martin describes Cersei as a beautiful, blond woman with light green eyes and a slender statue. Plus she is extremely ambitious and ethically misguided. See the wiki of ice and fire for details.

Thinking about the character design of this tough queen, a slightly feline physiognomy comes to my mind. To achieve this, we need her to have wide cheekbones and a rather short nose. The eyes are especially important for this: we need to draw them farther apart than usual and give them a slight tilt, so that the inner corners are a bit deeper than the outer ones.

With these features, we’d already get a feline look, but that’s not enough – we need a wicked kitty. Hooded eyelids will do fine to improve the tough and challenging look and as a diabolic extra we’ll draw slightly pointed eyebrows.

And with a hairstyle which befits a Lady of Lannister (think: lion), that’s one possibility of what she could look like (roughly drawn):

Nightly Sketch Nr. 206

… just in case you wondered: Yes, I do think Tricia Helfer would be a splendid Cersei

The briefings and strategic information supplied at the start of a design project define the aim for the “look and feel” to be developed. Thus it’s initially defined what the viewer should sense while being exposed to the product, but not how these sensations will be generated. It’s defined how the appearance shall be “aesthetically read”, but not how it is “written”.

I found the best way for me to start developing a fitting design is by finding combinations of colours generating a target mood. Not being a pure synaesthetic by nature I am using language as a means to describe the recepted-aesthetic-to-be in terms like dry, cold, traditional, technical, etc. Next, I am “going back” in the perceptional process, looking for colours and colour combinations which trigger these sensations.
A similar approach can be used to find shapes, but I found the the emotional impact of colour being much stronger and thus working better for this purpose.

Still, colour itself has its limitations, since the number of colours is finite, whereas the number of shapes is infinite. Hence the search for combinations of colours, whose number is finite as well – but larger by far. It’s a bit like using colours as letters or words while “writing” the design.

Some years ago I wrote a little Perl program to support this development process. It’s a tool to generate random combinations of colours, written to keep from getting stuck in the same combinations over and over again. It’s primitive on a technical level, but still useful:
colourcombiner.pl

Feel free to download, use and modify the source code:
colourcombiner

P.S.: There is a brillant book from Josef Albers: “Interaction of Colour”.

Eversince the dawn of the internet it has been a participative medium. The former consument gained unprecedented power over the information presented to him and with the advent of the web 2.0 technologies he himself became a publisher.

But once the web grew beyond a certain point, the convential media industry started to reach for it and, sad but true, the advertising banner came into being. In the beginning the banners mimicked system elements, tricking users into klicking on them. Though nowadays the bigger part of them is less deceiving, the advertising banner is still the manifesto of complete misunderstanding, a fully animated declaration of intellectual bankruptcy.

Peter Ogilvy once said that “you can’t bore your clients into buying your product. You can only interest them in it”.

True enough.

A Peter Ogilvy of the present day could add that you cannot annoy your clients into buying your product, either.  Why not? Because you can’t force the user to see your ad. There is, for example, a wonderful plugin for the firefox called adblock plus. It’s plain – if you want to “steal” their attention the users fight back. They win. You lose.

Again: you can’t annoy them into buying your product.

What else? Well for once: participate. As an equal. Be useful. Be creative. Listen. Speak with them, don’t shout at them until their eyes and ears bleed.

Yes, this is different.

But it’s good!

I recently stumbled upon a collection of maps in svg-format. The page and data is part of the wikipedia and the licenses of usage may vary, but some (e.g. the world map) are published under all-purpose-licenses.

The vector areas are even semantically grouped – thus if you select the area of France you’ll have French Guiana marked as well. I suppose this will be very useful for visualisation projects.

Collective intelligence is a wonderful thing.

Auch die vierte see-conference konnte wieder mit einer Reihe erstklassiger Vorträge aufwarten  (an dieser Stelle nochmal vielen Dank an die Organisatoren).

Insbesondere der Beitrag von Julian Oliver ließ noch lange nach der Veranstaltung über die weitere und “bürgernähere” Entwicklung von Augmented-Reality-Applikationen in Smartphones spekulieren.