Life is essentially our fight against decay. Both in ourselves and our environments. Nature rusts, washes and frays at the edges of the perfect worlds we strive to create. A fresh lick of paint, an intense jogging pattern or a freshly mowed lawn. Temporary barriers against the inevitable demise and disappearance of everything as a new season starts and the memory fades.
There’s an evolutionary hypothesis called The Red Queen which states that we have to constantly run just to survive, organisms must constantly adapt, evolve and proliferate in our ever changing environment. The phenomenon’s name is derived from a statement that the Red Queen made to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in her explanation of the nature of Looking-Glass Land:
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”
As designers we’re at the forefront of this fight and in a way I see it as our driving force, we have to run to stay relevant. We work with companies, individuals and organisations to create, rebrand and engage. We love fresh ink, new bold colours, disruptive thinking, digital platforms and that which interrupts and delights. We have blogs full of new work, people playing with century old pallets an ideas, twisting them to make new in the process, celebrated by our peers and looked on a new, by the public audiences we work for.
Where this is most interesting is at the intersection of heritage and novelty. We love brands that stand for something, heritage is seen as a marque of trust, yet we still lust after that new feeling of new, that relevance for the digital generation, even in the nostalgia soaked age we live in. Every day the business pages are full of articles about the company that didn’t move with the times. Kodak, invented the digital camera and then left it to others to push it forward whilst the grass grew around them. Creative, invented the MP3 player and then watched Apple sell it as a lifestyle to the tune of 350million units and counting.
For me it’s in my make up to help companies see this decay and work on it before it’s too late, regardless of whenever they come to our studio in their rust cycle. Branding has been recently criticised in some parts by some well respected designers. They see the post it notes and thinking systems on websites and mistake it for a replacement for good design. A very wrong assumption. It’s the ideas, the thinking, the pictures, these take the people we work with on the journey they need to understand the nuances of the often abstract design process. It’s no different than the much celebrated Paul Rand Steve Jobs NeXT logo collaboration. Just Paul used his voice, power of personality and charisma to convince. Plus all those photos are for the next client as the current one if on the bus already.
Those that reject this as a stand point? This is their decay, their inability to change, their rusting and they can’t see it. They are stood in knee length grass looking in the distance, when looking at their feet would show a very different picture. It’s my belief that design is essentially a game for the young, that magic moment balance between novelty and heritage, the sweet spot brands look for where they know they need to reinvent or get washed away. As a Creative Director I like to think I am there right now, seen enough to know, but not enough to jade, but I imagine I’ve had my best days already.
So ultimately everything ends and fades and if we are lucky we will have the odd bit of digital litter to be remembered by, the best logo we did, that poster, that Flash toy, but tomorrow belongs to someone else and that should be embraced. To stay relevant for as long as possible our industry needs to look beyond their egos, fonts and paper stocks. There’s too much ignorance about the businesses we work with, waiting for the arrival of content we should be making ourselves. Too much celebrating of a modernism that never really delivered as it forgot people, mess and decay are the day to day.
My advice? Go outside, brush that rust off, hire some new people, change what your doing. Or moan about it all on Twitter, that thing you initially hated, as the anger speeds your decay. Here’s to the new, to youth culture, to change, to me being gone and someone else taking my place, fuck knows the world needs change.
Thanks to Josh Baker for filling the gaps in this post over breakfast one day.
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