TYPE AND LAYOUT THAT COMMUNICATES SOCIAL, HEALTH AND EDUCATIONAL ISSUES.
Jane Mitchell
Contents
Introduction -About -Public sector / Private sector Design Considerations -Concept development -Audience -Process and format Clients and identity guidlines Budgets -Approaches to budgets Interviews in full -Raw -Elaven -Rare -Human Resources -Books -Websites -Studios Contributions
Introduction
Love Creative / Love Creative / Deep / Cartlidge Levene / Cartlidge Levene / Cartlidge Levene / Sort / More Associates / D8 / Mash Creative
About Hello, This book explores the big issue. It is all based upon type and layout that communicates social, health and educational issues. As a graphic designer my interests lay mainly within this area and I have a great passion for designing for briefs that are for ‘ordinary people’ allowing me to communicate strong values and messages. I enjoy the challenge of problem solving for this area in graphic design as I feel it is sometimes overlooked as it is not known as the ‘big money making’ area within the design industry.
Public / Private Sector The public sector employs more than 25 per cent of the workforce in the UK and includes: • Central government departments and agencies • Local authorities • The NHS and its local trusts • The Ministry of Defence • The Northern Ireland Assembly, the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Executive • Universities and colleges. • Design work procured by this wide range of organisations includes marketing, graphic design, print materials, branding, publicity, information design and signage. One of the obvious benefits of selling design services to public sector organisations is the sheer volume of projects which are constantly available. They can make good customers too: they have to be fair and honest in the way they choose suppliers and pay promptly within agreed contract terms, generally 30 days from invoice. They also have to employ tendering processes that are transparent, provide essential information to potential suppliers and ensure a fair chance for small businesses. Service companies Whilst most companies and organisations are providing a service of one type or another, for some businesses customer service is the dominant part of the offer. Business to business Many businesses market their products and services directly to other businesses, not the public. But the principles of effective design apply in just the same way in the B2B sector as elsewhere. Source: Design Council
Design Considerations
Cartlidge Levene / Cartlidge Levene / Sean Freeman / Sort / Sort / Deep / Element 5 / Pentagram / Mash Creative
Concept Development Concept development is vitally important in solving any design problem. The task of creating type and layout for important issues isn’t an easy task. The designer has to get inside the audiences’ heads and really connect with them to get the clients message across and even in a lot of cases get the audience to react and make some sort of action as a result of seeing the designs.
Raw’s brief ‘Room’ is a great example of where a concept really works successfully. The brief was to generate more enquiries and increase the amount of foster carers in Wakefield. This was for their client Wakefield Council. Raw’s concept for this campaign was to focus on the literal and metaphorical ‘room’ people need in order to foster, and highlight what it can offer them, financially and emotionally and the result was...
“A 400% increase in enquiries and a minimum of 42 new foster carers to be approved by the end of the year, a staggering 1000% increase on 2008’s figures”
Source: Raw design website.
Love creative created a strong concept for the National Year of Reading 2008. The brief was to make reading more enjoyable and accessible for all ages throughout the UK within the year of 2008. The concept they ran with was to avoid bookish cliches and create an identity that would be personal to everyone. This was made possible by making use of online interactivity where the audience could go create their own logo to celebrate the event, this made the event accessible easily to the audience and raised awareness for the campaign which was supported by other promtional material making use of quotes children could relate to from popular childrens’ television programmes etc. and in turn made reading more fun and enjoyable. What aspect also strengthened the concept of this campaign was Love Creatives risk in using many different fonts and colours throught the campaign. This could have been a risk as it could have made the visual identity if the campiagn less consistent and recognisable. I feel this approach really paid of for Love Creative and looks really exciting and still consistent enough to tell it is all from the same brief.
D8 have worked for the client Greenpeace for the last three years. They developed strong concepts to get the message across to the audience for example imagery supported by clever copywriting shows how type and image are equally important within layouts to make certain concepts become successful.
“Our creativity pours into campaign strategies, so we often need help with making what we say sound and look really snappy. For example, D8 are diverse, robust, efficient, obliging, alert, attentive, understanding, committed... But you see we’d usually ask D8 how to say that better; they seem to come up trumps when it comes to cleverness and creativity. “Put simply, they give us what we need, in a way that we just didn’t know we needed it... and importantly this gives us more time and better materials with which to save the world.” Viola Sampson, Marketing Manager, Greenpeace.
The Sustainable Education Project by Ranch shows how the concept runs through the whole of the resolutions, it aims to teach school children about green issues. It takes form as a mailer, aimed at teachers, and is a single piece of 100% recycled board printed with vegetable based inks. Business cards and a bookmark are detachable from the mailer. Another concept driven project that caught my eye was ‘Concern’ by Ranch. Concern needed an identity for ‘Unheard voices’ a campaign to help poor farmers. We created a simple solution using two graphic quote marks, that we combined with very strong black and white photography. This brief shows that a simple idea can really pay of and look and work effectively for the clients needs.
“You need to fully immerse yourself in the subject. This is a great part of a designer’s life as they get to learn about all aspects of the world and hopefully do their bit to help. For example, at the moment we’re working on a breastfeeding campaign and a couple of us have attended breastfeeding support groups and interviewed several people. A client may come to you saying they’d like a poster to advertise a charity it’s really easy to design something nice and send it to print. The approach we prefer is to identify the problem and solve that. The problem isn’t that they need a poster, it’s that they need volunteers/contributions etc. Copywriting is extremely important and is often the difference from a good design and a great design. If the text can really speak to the target audience and engage with them, the rest comes easily.” Tom Heaton, Raw.
In depth research pays of when developing a concept. Clients want designs that work not just pretty pieces to look at. It is essential to really knuckle down on the problem being asked to solve and engage with the audience through a strong conept and as Tom says a good copy writer can work wonders.
Raw Design Client: NHS Barking and Dagenham
Process and Format Working
“Layout or arranging forms IS design. The forms might be letters, paragraphs, images, white space etc. Using them well is the goal. We all love print because you can interact with design in a very tactile way. The feel and smell of the paper, the processes that can be applied. It’s like when you go shopping; you can buy the exact same jacket online, see it in detail, from different angles and paraded down a catwalk. But there’s no substitute for actually walking into a shop, feeling the fabric and trying it on yourself.” Tom Heaton, Raw.
“Its probably easier to define our approach by what we don’t like - which is adding unnecessary elements and gimmicks to design. Sometimes this can involve quite a bit of hard work with clients as many of them are looking for ways to make their boring projects more interesting, but as far as possible we try and persuade them against ‘jazzing up’ a project and try and focus on what it is that makes their project worth talking about.” John Gelder, Eleven.
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Rare Design Client: Travel South Yorkshire
Eleven Design Client: St Luke’s Hospice.
Audience As graphic designers we would not have a job if the audience did not exist for us to communicate to. It is important to pin point specific audiences for each design problem to make the designs successful in delivering the message intended for them. This chapter looks through examples of where and why audience is king in the process for creating type and layout that communicates social, health and educational issues.
“Both sectors have very different audiences, with different needs and restrictions. B2B marketing is often very targeted at one narrowly identified audience, whereas Public Sector can be focused on a wide audience type and so the approach must be broader. But in essence, the need for strong communication and a desired response / call to action is important across both. For me, the ability to understand, design and create campaigns for many different audience types makes for a better designer.” Bryan White, Rare.
“The pct was different we were task with making an impression with teenage prednacy and we felt the hand hitting poster campaign did just what it said on the tin.” David Hughes, Human.
Knowing your audience is vital when designing anything for social, health sectors etc. If you don’t know your audience you are targeting, how can you get into their heads and get them to act on what they are seeing? Human’s design work for PCT campaign shows an impactful way to get in tune with the intended audience. Here they used thought provoking designs.
Human Design Client: PCT
“With these types of brief, there always has to be a strong element of inclusivity, and care not to alienate or offend anyone. Having said that, quite often there are hard hitting messages to get across to instigate changes in behaviour. So therein lies the challenge! I also feel that we are all becoming immune to many levels of message and imagery, and therefore it becomes harder to have impact without pushing things even further. One contact I can give you is www.divacreative.com in Sheffield, as they specialise in Social Marketing working on campaigns for teenage pregnancy, anti-smoking, local environmental issues, sexual health” Bryan White, Rare.
Shock tactics may get the audience’s attention for a second but do they really get them to act on what they have seen? I personally believe it is not the most effective way to communicat. Really tapping into the audience’s head can be more effective, meaning to find that key aspect that taps into their conscience, pushing for a response. It is then that the design will have been successfully executed.
Diva Creative
Clients and identity guidelines
Three Rooms / D8 / Deep / Eleven / Ranch / Ranch / Socio Design / Raw / Raw
Clients and Identity Guidelines Working with clients is an integral part of being a graphic designer, without the clients there obviously isn’t the work. How do designers deal with jobs that require them to stick within certain identity guidelines? This is very common within the areas I am interested in, I have already come across strict NHS guidelines and NBS guidelines within my work experience within a design studio. This chapter covers some studio’s experiences with clients and identity guidelines with my analysis in the orange boxes.
“With any project, it is always worth considering whether staying on-brand is the best approach or whether challenging the brief offers the best outcome. With FreeBee, the new free bus project needed a name and style and we were given existing brand guidlelines to consider. But we feel the quirky nature and character of the suggested name and design (that was outside of the restrictions of the brand) created something recognisable and that the public have bought into in their droves so worth pushing the boundaries” Bryan White, Rare. “St Lukes had a fairly recent rebrand (not done by us) that wasn’t particularly successful, we were asked to streamline the identity and develop the new print materials. We recommended that they keep their typeface and simplified the colours, we also developed the design style for printed materials” John Gelder, Eleven.
Pushing the boundaries of brand guidelines can pay off in the communication of the message intended. It is our job as designers to find that ‘spark’, that great idea that makes a design work.
I found it interesting that a recent rebrand wasn’t seen as succesful, but as a designer you have to find a way to work around this for the client.
Rare Design Client: Travel South Yorkshire
Eleven Design Client: St Luke’s Hospice.
“Public sector work can be quite strict with regards to brand guidelines and there is a real danger that you’ll produce the same thing over and over again. We’d get bored really quickly doing this so we try to approach each job uniquely. We work WITH the guidelines rather than following them.You usually find more freedom with private sector clients. Plus, it’s great working directly with the decision maker as you can strongly align visions rather than having them filtered down the chain.”
Tom describes the challenge faced by designers working for the public sector it seems the chain of command in this area slows the whole design process down.
Tom Heaton, Raw.
“We have strict guidelines when working on NHS projects with regards to typeface, colours, sizes etc. Here’s a whole site dedicated to them: http://www.nhsidentity.nhs.uk although there are discussions that we regularly have when we feel the need to bend the rules slightly. For example with the youth-targeted projects. If a teenager looks at something that looks like it’s part of the NHS they’ll immediately switch off.” Tom Heaton, Raw.
Discussing with clients seems to be the best method when it is in their best interests to bend the rules of their set guidelines.
Raw Design Client: NHS
Budgets
Sort / D8 / Creative Lynx / Love Creative / The Consult / Mash Creative / Mash Creative / Cartlidge Levene / Eleven
Approaches To Budgets Budgets are an important part of the design process.
“They have to share similar beliefs to us; this might cover ambition to create something interesting and engaging. Ideally the perfect client will want to create something fun, beautiful, interesting. They will have a healthy budget and they’ll push a project on their side as much as we will push on our side..”
The ideal client is having a healthy budget. Finding out the budget for a brief should be a first.
Tom Heaton, Raw. “The public sector doesn’t get the mega budgets that huge global brands have, but we have still been able to work on some good projects for public sector clients. Its our experience that if you can show clients interesting work you have done, they are more inclined to trust you to push their brief a little further. With this in mind, if we think we can get a good ‘portfolio’ job we will be prepared to make less money (often no money!) This applies to private sector clients also - since we are a small team we don’t really work for any big private sector companies, but some of the small businesses such as Spoilt for Choice and Sereniti have led to quite nice pieces of work.” John Gelder, Eleven.
The public sector doesn’t get the big budgets but I still feel draw to this area, design to me is not always about the money but about great ideas and great designs. I also like the prospect of the challenge of working to smaller budgets.
Eleven Design Client: Sereniti
Interviews in full
Sort / D8 / Creative Lynx / Love Creative / The Consult / Mash Creative / Mash Creative / Cartlidge Levene / Eleven
Resources
Sort / D8 / Creative Lynx / Love Creative / The Consult / Mash Creative / Mash Creative / Cartlidge Levene / Eleven
Contributions
A little word from me I would like to thank all the people who contributed towards the making of this book...