BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Marcin Wichary’s fascination with the relationship between humans and machines began at an early age. As a boy in Poland, he was mesmerized by the interaction between arcade patrons and the video games they played. Years later, Marcin would help shape the way that millions of computer users interact with some of the world’s most popular websites. He would even recreate one of those arcade games for the Web.

Marcin is Senior User Experience Designer at Google, but his numerous roles and broad influence at the company are not conveniently definable. His fingerprints are on the code of Google products ranging from Search to Chrome. He gained publicity for his work on the Google Pac-Man Doodle, which he co-created with fellow Googler Ryan Germick. According to Ryan, “Marcin is a genius. He’s a UX designer but he’s also maybe one of the best front-end programmers on the planet.�

Marcin joined Smashing Magazine author Dan Redding for a conversation regarding his professional career, his interest in photography and a curious creation known as the Crushinator.

The Interview

Question: Hi, Marcin! I understand that you’re involved in a variety of departments and projects at Google. Can you summarize your professional roles at the company?

Marcin Wichary: Sure. So, I’ve been at Google for the past five and a half years, and I’ve always been kind of a weird mix of a user experience designer and a developer. I guess I kinda grew more comfortable with it as time went by. I started working on the Internal Tools team, working on our Internet — or the experience of our Internet — and some of the tools that Googlers use that you can’t really show to anybody outside, programs that you can’t tell your Mom, “Hey, this is what I did this week!â€� I’d been doing that for about two and a half years, and then I moved to kind of the proper User Experience team, the global team that works on products that actually people can use. I’ve been on Search for, well, two and a half years as well, I think.

Question: And you also work on the Doodles, for example, right?

Marcin: Yeah! So, that has always been kind of on the side. And then I just joined the Chrome team this year. So, that is kind of my second or third big change within Google. Google is great because it allows you to do a number of things, kind of as your twenty percent project, and one of mine has always been this ongoing collaboration with the Doodle team, as a… I don’t even know what to call it… a “technology consultant� collaborator! [Laughs]

Video of Google’s Martha Graham doodle in action. Art by Ryan Woodward. A fan recreated the original doodle.

Question: What was your involvement in the Martha Graham doodle?

Marcin: I developed a technique to animate it. The proper visuals had been done elsewhere. There’s a number of technologies that you could think of if you wanted to put something on the Google home page that’s animated, right? There’s an animated GIF. It could maybe be a YouTube video, and we’ve done that. It could be a number of other techniques. But all of them have pros and cons.

For this particular doodle, none of the ones we knew of were good enough. Especially on the home page, we have a number of constraints. You know, we need to serve it to the user as fast as possible. We really care a lot about speed. And we also wanna make sure that it’s gonna work on every possible platform. So, for example, that would exclude Flash animation, just because a number of touch-based devices wouldn’t support that.

When I look at Web development, a lot of what’s necessary is weird ingenuity, where you look at the limited number of tools at your disposal and try to put them together in a funny way. Eventually, I developed this technique to create this big sprite. Instead of just having hundreds of frames and sending them down the wire and possibly costing a lot of bandwidth, you would just construct a sprite with the smallest possible rectangle that contains the difference between two frames. It would be kind of like you had a first frame and then every other frame would be the delta. And there was this little mechanism to construct it and then play it back. It worked pretty well, so we were happy. I’m not an illustrator: I’m a designer, but I cannot draw. I’m the worst Pictionary player ever. So, I won’t ever be allowed to draw anything on the home page, for the good of humanity.

As a designer, in many cases, I’m invisible. I can help with technology, but the technology is ultimately invisible. Many people really did enjoy the Martha Graham doodle, and I’ve got the quiet satisfaction that I helped make it possible.

Marcin says, “This is from the San Diego Zoo, 2009. I don’t photograph living creatures often, but when I do, it’s usually a lot of fun.� (Image: Marcin Wichary)

Question: What is the Crushinator?

Marcin: [Laughs] Okay, so that’s actually the [name of the animation] technique that I just described. I’m trying to convince the Doodle team to set up a proper blog where they can talk about stuff like this, both as artists and technologists. The great thing about the Web is that you can always right-click, “View source� or “Inspect element� and try to figure it out. And, as a matter of fact, I do recall there being a blog post somewhere on the day that the Martha Graham doodle came out, where somebody reverse-engineered the whole thing to figure out how it works. They didn’t know that the technique was called Crushinator because that’s my stupid Futurama reference.

Question: I think that the Crushinator, as you call it, and this style of JavaScript-powered sprite animation are actually a very innovative animation style that is lightweight and available cross-browser, as you’ve said. Do you see the potential for that technique to become a widely adopted tool for animation on the Web?

Marcin: I don’t think about it that way, because it’s kind of what I do. I’ve been doing Web development for many, many years. A lot of Web development is, as I mentioned, putting [technologies] together and seeing what happens. After a while, I developed an attitude that pretty much nothing’s impossible. You know that with HTML5 around and all of these cool things happening in the browser, something’s probably gonna help you. So, I do a lot of putting things together, and they actually don’t seem like that big a deal to me because that’s what I do. And sometimes you just throw [your experiment] at random people inside Google, and some of them become more popular, and others nobody cares about. So, I don’t think I’m the right person to talk about whether anything that I hack together has more utility than anything else. A lot of what I’m hoping to do with this kind of random hackery is figuring out, how can we push HTML5 further this week? You know, just hoping to inspire some people.

Question: Well, I think you should give yourself some credit. Some of the work you guys are doing is very innovative. And it’s also very visible; it gets a lot of attention. There’s potential there for you to be a real influencer of these kinds of technologies.

Marcin: I’m kind of recognizing that, for better or worse, people sometimes come to me and treat me as if I know something about what I’m doing. [Laughter] And maybe I do. Sometimes I feel like it’s my first day with a new video game, and I’m just randomly pressing buttons and things happen on the screen and I don’t know exactly why, but it’s cool, right? Because HTML5 is cool.

“This is a photo a friend and I took of me against a Cylon replica. This is a dramatic recreation of my typical day.� (Image: Marcin Wichary)

Question: What is the most useful usability or user experience finding you have learned recently?

Marcin: There are a number of those, but unfortunately, I can’t really talk about them because they are internal.

But… this is going to sound funny. A while back, there was this report that came out — from Princeton University, I think — that said using Comic Sans will make your material easier to remember. The harder your typeface is to read, the better the chance that people will remember what you wrote. And everybody I know perversely sends me links to this study, even literally last week, because they know how much I hate Comic Sans… [Laughter] … with passion. And people are sending this study to me, saying “You were wrong, and we were right.â€� You know, tongue in cheek.

But of course, that really isn’t what the study is about. First of all, you don’t have to use Comic Sans. Second of all, it’s just one factor, the same way there’s typically always a battle between usability and security, right? In order to make things more secure, sometimes it means you have to make them less usable. Like the simple fact that whenever you type a password, you can’t see it. It’s asterisks or dots or whatever, because it makes it harder for other people to eavesdrop on you. But it also makes it easier for you to mistype. So there’s a ton of these kind of choices that you have to make. You have to find a nice medium between security and usability. Those decisions are really, really hard and require a lot of thought. So, the same thing with Comic Sans and that study. You could use another font. Or use Comic Sans — it will make the learning easier. That‘s cool. But if your students develop an intense hatred for typography in general or design or, I don’t know, the universe, [Laughter] I don’t think you’ve won much. I‘m kind of tongue in cheek now, too. But not really.

Question: When did your interest in code and computer programming begin?

Marcin: It actually all kind of ties together in a number of funny ways. When I was very little, my dad had the best job ever… for a nerd like me. His job was fixing arcade games and pinball machines. So, I could follow him to all of these little arcade parlours in Poland, where I’m from. I could play for free, first of all, which was awesome. But actually, I much preferred watching other people play games. Of course, I would play games — I loved games and still do. But I could also get a little sneak peek — if you opened the arcade game, what happens there? If you went into debug mode or testing mode, which many of the arcade games had, there were a number of tools, if you had access to them, to see the graphic elements in the video game, the sound effects and all of the settings. And I was fascinated! It was like looking under the hood of a car — except, you know, a much cooler car. Maybe that’s what got me into computers.

As I was finishing my computer science degree in Poland, working on my Masters, I discovered this whole area of human-computer interaction — which people work on for a living, and it’s important, and it matters, and you can make a career out of it. That was a revelation to me. Suddenly, the past God-knows-how-many years that I was doing [amateur computer programming] were cast in a very different light.

Marcin says that photos like this one are an attempt to “anthropomorphize machines.� (Image: Marcin Wichary)

Question: Do you think that when you were in that arcade in Poland, when you were a kid, and you were watching a patron play Space Invaders, that you were monitoring the user experience by watching that person play?

Marcin: Maybe! It’s an interesting thing. I used to be fascinated by books by the Polish author StanisÅ‚aw Lem. Probably my favorite book of his is called Tales of Pirx the Pilot. I was fascinated by it because it’s about space and aliens and the future — it was awesome for a kid. But reading this book today, the whole theme is Pirx interacting with machines. The machines are robots, or spaceship A.I., but it really is about human-computer interaction. And the question now is whether I was already interested in that when I was very little. Or maybe the books actually shaped me. Or maybe it was both. And the same maybe with the arcades. Maybe I was watching people play and kind of thinking about what it meant. Or maybe I was so inspired by how much fun you could have with technology and how much delight that I started trying to do it myself in whatever way I could — and today it happens to be HTML5. And who knows what’s gonna happen ten years from now.

Question: What do you think the Internet might look like at that time?

Marcin: That’s always pretty tricky! I actually make a point of not trying to predict the future because I’m really terrible at that. But I can tell you one thing I’m excited about. A number of things are happening right now that get me really excited about the idea of computer-user interfaces that for the first time don’t feel like they’re coming out of a computer. One idea is that the retina display and other technologies that will probably arrive make it very easy to put something on the screen that mimics the imperfections of the real world. Maybe the typography doesn’t have to be so perfect, because it’s never so perfect in books. Maybe there’s gonna be something with interfaces being actually broken in some way — broken to mimic real life, not broken because we’re bad at developing things.

I’m especially excited about the implication of this in relation to typography. Over the course of hundreds of years, we built up [a typographic practice] with total nuance, with a lot of history, and we arrived at this very rich era where typography is amazing, right? It can do so much. There’s so much history there and so much beauty. And then the computer came around in the nineteen eighties and took all that away! [Laughter] You got monospace fonts and “underlineâ€�… Now we’ve got Unicode, and HTML5/CSS3 allow you to use different typefaces, and maybe, slowly, we’re gonna get all of this back again — and maybe even more. Maybe we’ll get all of the things we love in books and all of the things we love in computers combined.

Question: Can you give me an example of a day in the life of Google’s UX design team?

Marcin: There’s really no template for a day. Probably the most important part of my day, and the one I treasure most, is just talking to other designers. Either ranting like we do about everything that has to do with design, [Laughter] or showing them something I’m working on and getting feedback. We have so many amazing kinds of designers here.

For me, a lot of the day is spent staring at a computer. In my case, it’s a lot of HTML5, so some kind of text editor is in front of me — or, in some cases, Photoshop. I’ve spent so much time in HTML5 that it’s actually easy for me to just treat it as a design tool.

Question: What else can you tell me about your set-up and workflow at Google?

Marcin: I’ve always had a kind of low-level, old-school approach. I coded one site in FrontPage many, many years ago. [Laughter] But ever since then, I’ve pretty much coded everything by hand, from scratch, in a very simple text editor. These days it happens to be TextMate, although I don’t actually use any of the advanced TextMate features. I feel that gives me more control.

I actually make a point of starting things from scratch, even if they have been written elsewhere, or even by me before, because it allows me — you know, in a fast-moving environment where HTML5 and CSS3 change a lot — it allows me to learn all of those new things, to try a different approach, to think about how I did it the last time and try to do it differently, just for the sake of doing it differently. And that always feels really great. That approach probably only works for, like, little projects, little goofy experiments that I do. I don’t know… you can’t really rewrite Gmail every single month from scratch. [Laughter] But it’s kind of been working for me.

Other than that, it’s really very simple. Browser in one window, TextMate in another window, and a lot of Command-Tab’ing and a lot of Command-R’ing. You know, simple old habits. Muscle memory.

I have a couple of little tools that I made for myself and others at Google that I should open source, and I feel really bad for not having done that. One of them has another funny name. It’s called Transmogrifier, which is a nod to Calvin and Hobbes, which I love a lot. It’s a little tool that allows me to very easily test different types, or different parameters of my prototypes. You know, JavaScript is not very good at CGI parameters, so Transmogrifier gives me this nice UI, and I don’t have to worry about the innards and switching and hiding the options panel. I just plug in one line of JavaScript, and the tool takes care of most of that for me.

A number of other tools are floating around at Google that are pretty great, and I helped with some of those. And writing tools is actually a cool experience, too. You can learn a lot. Like, for example, writing a tool that you can embed in another page and it doesn’t ever break that page. This should be super-easy, but it’s not, with cascading styles just waiting for you to trip up. So, you can learn a lot of different skills.

Question: Google has a reputation for reliance on data and intensive testing of products and design. How does this affect the user’s experience of Google websites?

Marcin: We’ve historically been very focused on the efficiency of user experiences. For a lot of the products we have, including Google Search, our main consideration was the efficiency of getting to the proper response as fast as possible, and the answer being as precise as possible. We’ve gotten a lot of different comments over the years, with people suggesting that we don’t design our interfaces, that they kind of just are — they just exist. In most cases, the most deliberate design decision on our part is for our interfaces not to feel like they’re designed. They will seem more objective. Less editorialized. Relying on data is a very important part of this.

We’ve been looking at this in more detail recently. We’ve been thinking that, maybe for some of our projects that we’re working on currently, we should approach design a little bit differently. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens.

Question: How did your interest in photography come about?

Marcin: I’ve always dabbled in photography. Back when I was in Poland, we had one of the first digital cameras — you know, a very primitive one with half a megapixel or whatever. But I never really considered myself a photographer. Really, it was kind of an impulse buy in late 2007, as I was heading out on a trip to New York. I started chatting with a friend of mine who is a photographer, and I ended up overnighting my first DLSR with my first lens, and I kind of fell in love with it.

“I am sure no one played [this piano] seriously for a long, long time, so I did. I just sat down and started playing — the sonatas I’ve learned, the things I’ve put together myself. I had to be a bit creative, since some of the keys no longer worked.â€� (Image: Marcin Wichary)

I play piano occasionally, and I’m terrible at it. I think I’m good at being terrible at it, trying to figure it out on my own. When playing piano, the most interesting part to me is emotion. Can I learn to play things that mean a lot to me? Or can I compose something in which I evoke a certain emotion in other people — or even in myself? It’s less to do with technical proficiency.

In photography, what I realized is that the technology is the driver for me. A big part of me is fascinated with the technology of photography. I know that’s not true for other people. Maybe other people are interested in emotion or some other things.

Photography has been around for much, much longer [than computers], and it’s great to realize that there’s so much to photography that you could pretty much learn something new forever. Not only is there already so much that’s happened, but it’s also still happening right now. We’re at this really, really amazing time when digital photography is becoming commonplace — it’s already commonplace. What that means is that first of all, we have photographers everywhere, which is great. It’s gonna be exciting to see what happens in the next couple years, or ten years, or twenty years. And that’s another thing that gets me excited about photography in the same way I’m excited about HTML5 — because the best is yet to come.

More Information

• Marcin’s website
• Marcin and Ryan’s Google Pac-Man I/O presentation
• Ryan Germick explains the Crushinator
• Marcin’s Pac-Man bug story
• HTML5 Presentation created by Marcin and Google Chrome team
• Marcin talks Pac-Man, HTML5 and more

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Poll: Would you like to see more interviews on Smashing Magazine in the future?

© Dan Redding for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

The Web is a galaxy of information that is rapidly expanding. Blogs and online magazines are helping shape the future of this Information Age that we live in. Those of us who read, write and design blogs and online magazines possess extraordinary power and potential. How will we choose to use it?

If you use your website to publish news, events, opinions or interviews, you should familiarize yourself with the basics of journalism. These tools can help us develop and share information that is exciting, intelligent, and responsible. They can provide guidance and support as you pursue a career or hobby writing online.

This article is accompanied by examples of photojournalism, which is the practice of communicating news through photographs. The above photo of a 1940′s newsstand in New York City was taken by photojournalist Ruth Orkin

We, designers, go on all day about the usability of our WordPress layouts and the readability of our typography, but all of those things have been considered in vain if our writing is poorly spelled, riddled with inaccuracies, or based on second-hand assumptions that will leave our audience misled, confused, or worse. Even if you’re just casually writing about why you personally love/hate the iPad (for example), you can do so in a truthful way (truthful to your own opinions and truthful to the information you are discussing).

Whether or not you strive to produce writing that you consider journalism is not all that important. What is important is that no matter what writing genre you specialize in, you have a responsibility to your readers to publish high quality writing that is truthful, accurate, and readable. Oh, and this applies to your professional Twitter stream and Facebook updates, too. All of these elements have a reflection on you and your brand.

Trained professional journalists spend years studying the complex techniques and thorny philosophical values that define the trade of journalism, so don’t expect to receive a Master’s degree from Columbia by the end of this article. What this piece can serve as is a crash course designed to introduce concepts that will improve your writing, pique your interest, and instill a sense of respect for the fundamentals of a noble profession.

What is Journalism?

The most familiar function of journalism is ‘hard news’ reporting you’ll see on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post. But journalistic writing also extends to editorial writing, cultural reviews, interviews, and more.

According to The Elements of Journalism (written by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel), “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.� Journalism is the pursuit of truth, accuracy and fairness in the telling of a story. Journalists serve and inform their audience by investigating and reporting on news, trends, issues, and events. Much like designers, journalists pride themselves on a duty provide their audience with useful, high-quality content.

What’s the difference between Journalism and Blogging?

CNN.com delivers journalism. Your cousin’s homemade Twilight fan fiction site, on the other hand, is a blog. However, somewhere in between lies a hotly debated grey area.

So can blogs be journalism? According to NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, “They can be, sometimes.�  How can you tell the difference? Depends on who you ask. Rosen himself is both journalist and blogger (he runs PressThink, a weblog about journalism and the press). In his essay ‘Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over’, Rosen decides that the sometimes indiscernible difference between these two forms of writing is less important than the implications of massive shifts of power in the media. Rosen acknowledges what Tom Curley (Chief Executive of the Associated Press) called “a huge shift in the ‘balance of power’ in our world, from the content providers to the content consumers.� What does that mean for those of us in a position to take advantage of our newfound power?

It means we should move forward with a spirit of responsibility and immense excitement. We live in a revolutionary time when just about anyone with access to a computer can make his or her writing available to an enormous international audience with the click of a button. As Web designers and online writers who are experienced with the Web, the potential of our medium is tremendous.

Journalistic Tools for Bloggers

This photo comes from a series chronicling Paris street dancers practicing dance styles including breakdancing and capoeira. This photo, by Denis Darcazq, was acknowledged by photojournalism foundation World Press Photo in 2007

Write Compelling Leads

A ‘lead’ is the first sentence of an article. The lead is your first and best chance to compel the reader to stick around and read more. A sentence that is humorous, provocative, or curious can be extremely engaging.

To learn more about captiving leads, you can’t beat the literary titans of fiction. One classic first sentence comes from Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis: “Gregor Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug.” Who wouldn’t want to know what happens next?

Use the Active Voice

The active voice is much more compelling than the passive voice.  To say ‘I am designing the website’ is a clearer and more powerful statement than ‘the website is being designed by me.’ According to The Elements of Style, “The habitual use of the active voice… makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative concerned principally with action but in writing of any kind.�

Twins are held up to watch Princess Margaret pass by in London on Armistice Day, 1951. Photo by Ruth Orkin

Write in Positive Terms

Describe things in terms of what they are instead of what they aren’t. Instead of saying that a painter ‘doesn’t use a lot of color,’ say that she ‘uses a limited palette.’

Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar

It should go without saying, but it doesn’t: proper spelling and grammar are necessary if you want to be taken seriously. Writing that is descriptive, informative, and properly written speaks volumes about credibility and professionalism. It can be a baffling experience to visit a popular design blog and read a post that’s riddled with spelling errors and awkward, incomplete sentences.

Spell-check your documents, have a friend proofread them, and take the time to do it right. It’s understandable that bloggers who write in their second language might have some inaccuracies, but over time, those inaccuracies can degrade the quality of a brand.

For an invaluable resource on the subject, pick up The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. The tips and tools you read in that book will reverberate inside your head for the rest of your writing career.

Verification

Journalism’s “essence is a discipline of verification� (The Elements of Journalism). “Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists have tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first.�

Let’s say you’re writing about breaking technology news that you read about on another blogger’s site. Unless they’ve shared their sources, you probably don’t know where that blogger received their information (and it was likely to have been copied and pasted from yet another blog). If you want to make a commitment to accuracy, you can always take the extra two minutes to pick up the phone or write an email to the company releasing the product. Ask them to verify your facts, because otherwise you can’t be sure that they’re facts at all.

The Web can be a scandalous and salacious place. False rumors of a celebrity’s death will occasionally spread like wildfire on Twitter. These kinds of events can be distasteful and even disturbing. Now that we’re all casual news reporters through social media, it’s important to verify the things we hear before passing them along. Obviously, independent bloggers don’t have the same obligations that a newspaper reporter has, but it’s beneficial to stay aware of these issues.

Hikers walk along the wildly-colored Danxia Landform at a geopark in Zhangye, China. This photo is one of Life.com’s Photos of the Year for 2009. Photo by Han Chuanhao/Xinhua/Landov

Originality

Do your own work. Be unique. Generate fresh concepts that will engage your readers. Try not to imitate the work of others more than is necessary and never steal or plagiarize. Need images, ideas, or reference for your next project? Try the library instead of Google Images and Wikipedia (an especially perilous resource due to the questionable quality of much of its contents). You’ll be helping to make the Internet a richer and more diverse place instead of recycling or regurgitating. Sharing your reputable information sources will add credibility to your work.

Interviews

The interview is a popular feature on design blogs. Interviewing is an art of its own, and when it’s done right, it can be very fun and it can yield surprising results (who doesn’t love a valuable business insight or a shocking revelation?).

“A reporter who begins an interview without the proper preparation is like a student taking a final exam without studying� (News Reporting and Writing, The Missouri Group). Before your conversation with John Q. Celebrity, you need to do thorough research and you need to write good questions. Read everything you can find about your subject and his career. When he can’t recall the title of the sculpture he made in 1997 and you remind him that it was called ‘Pretentious Masterpiece,’ it shows that you’re on the ball.

Write questions that will inspire unique answers. If you waste the entire interview asking banal questions that are easily available to the public (i.e. “Where did you go to college?�), you’re liable to walk away with an interview that’s going to put your audience to sleep. Worse yet, if your interview subject is someone who is interviewed several times a week, he or she might be irritated by the basic questions and the evidence that you didn’t do much research. Now you face the possibility of your interview subject growing cold, responding with disinterested answers, or cutting the interview short.

Once you’ve done great research and written compelling questions, you can relax and enter the interview with an inquisitive spirit. Buy a mini tape recorder and make sure you never begin an interview with dull batteries in it. Don’t be afraid to deviate from your well-researched questions if a more urgent question arises in your mind. Remember that you’re having a conversation with another human being — not just an article subject — and they want to engage with you. When the piece is completed and transcribed, the tone of your discussion will spring forth from your printed words.

Direct Quotations

Whether you’re transcribing your recorded interview or quoting an article, it is of utmost importance that every quote you write is entirely accurate. Changing a single word can change the entire meaning of a statement. In some situations, these kinds of mistakes can lead to anger, charges of libel, and even lawsuits.

A while back, a well-known Web designer expressed his displeasure over Twitter when someone re-tweeted one of his tweets, but changed part of his statement from “it’s disappointing� to “it’s pathetic.� The person on the other end of that exchange had altered the entire tone of that original tweet with the change of just one word. Pathetic is a much more severe word than disappointing, and the Web designer was irritated.

When you are writing a direct quote, make sure it is written verbatim. Verbatim means ‘in exactly the same words that were used originally.’ Punctuation can change the meaning of a statement, too.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning photo portrays aging baseball great Babe Ruth receiving thunderous applause at Yankee Stadium in 1948. An image like this is a good example of why journalism legend Dan Rather once wrote, “It’s disheartening for anyone in my line of work to be reminded that sometimes one picture is, indeed, worth ten thousand words.â€�

Ethical Writing

In journalism, the philosophical and ethical boundaries of reporting are matters of great importance and pride.

So what does ethical writing mean for bloggers? Well, if you’re writing a simple ‘how to’ tutorial, ethics might not be involved at all. But what if your tutorial passively encourages readers to use a product that’s manufactured by a company whose business practices are disreputable or inhumane? Sometimes there are ethical implications where we least expect them.

Ethics are a matter of personal opinion. These matters are complex and open to interpretation. But few things are more important to you and your brand than your standards and principles.

Is it ethical to write paid ‘sponsored’ blog posts where you’re paid to write and publish a review of a product? It’s one thing to feature advertisements like Google AdWords in your sidebar, but when advertising merges with your content in the form of an entire post that you were paid to write, that’s a different story. Some sponsorship programs don’t ‘force’ bloggers to write favorable reviews, but oddly enough, you’ll be hard pressed to find a sponsored blog post that is harshly critical of its subject. That’s because if you’re being paid, you’re biased. That’s the bottom line.

Make your money from your ideas, designs, and creativity — not sponsored blog posts. No one wants to see a glorified advertisement tucked in amongst your real content. Besides, sponsored blog posts just look tacky.

In Conclusion

Bloggers, journalists, and designers can all work together to make the future of the Web an intelligent, enjoyable, and responsible place. This post has merely scratched the surface of what the study of journalism has to offer you, so don’t let your path of learning end here.

This new digital era has sent the practice of journalism into troubled waters. Those of us who have benefited from the shift of power from content consumers to content providers find ourselves in a unique position. We now have the opportunity to help foster the welfare of that great, guiding principle: the truth.

Your average blog or independent online publication is not beholden to the corporate or governmental interests that the subsidiaries of major media conglomerates (like Viacom or Disney) might be influenced by. For that reason, some of us may find ourselves in the position to publish truths that would otherwise go ignored. Of course, we’re often likely to adapt our viewpoints from those of corporate media publications — this happens every time you retweet a New York Times article or quote a CNN report in your blog post.

Hopefully, those viewpoints are usually honest and truthful. However, if we maintain a commitment to accuracy while doing some original thinking, writing, and reporting, we may be able to make valuable, independent contributions to the legacy of the truth that lies at the heart of journalism — and at the heart of our shared societal and cultural integrity.

© Dan Redding for Smashing Magazine, 2011. | Permalink | Post a comment | Smashing Shop | Smashing Network | About Us
Post tags: business

“In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure

The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s a wild organism of sweeping cultural change — one that leaves the carcasses of dead media forms in its sizeable wake. It’s transformative: it has transformed the vast globe into a ‘global village’ and it has drawn human communication away from print-based media and into a post-Gutenberg digital era. Right now, its perils are equal to its potential. The debate over ‘net neutrality’ is at a fever pitch. There is a tug-of-war going on between an ‘open web’ and a more governed form of the web (like the Apple-approved apps on the iPad/iPhone) that has more security but less freedom.

An illustration of a computer from a 1958 IBM promotional brochure titled ‘World of Numbers’

So what’s the next step in its evolution, and what’s the big picture? What does the Internet mean as an extension of human communication, of the human mind? And forget tomorrow — where will the web be in fifty years, or a hundred? Will the Internet help make the world look like something out of Blade Runner or Minority Report? Let’s just pray it doesn’t have anything to do with The Matrix sequels, because those movies really sucked.

This article will offer in-depth analysis of a range of subjects — from realistic expectations stemming from current trends to some more imaginative speculations on the distant future.

[By the way, did you know we have a free Email Newsletter? Subscribe now and get fresh short tips and tricks in your inbox!]

Security

“Death of the Open Web”?

Those words have an ominous ring for those of us who have a deep appreciation of the Internet as well as high hopes for its future. The phrase comes from the title of a recent New York Times article that struck a nerve with some readers. The article paints a disquieting picture of the web as a “haphazardly planned” digital city where “malware and spam have turned living conditions in many quarters unsafe and unsanitary.”

There is a growing sentiment that the open web is a fundamentally dangerous place. Recent waves of hacked WordPress sites revealed exploited PHP vulnerabilities and affected dozens of well-known designers and bloggers like Chris Pearson. The tools used by those with malicious intent evolve just as quickly as the rest of the web. It’s deeply saddening to hear that, according to Jonathan Zittrain, some web users have stooped so low as to set up ‘Captcha sweatshops’ where (very) low-paid people are employed to solve Captcha security technology for malicious purposes all day. This is the part where I weep for the inherent sadness of mankind.

“If we don’t do something about this,” says Jonathan Zittrain of the insecure web, “I see the end of much of the generative aspect of the technologies that we now take for granted.” Zittrain is a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and the author of The Future of the Internet: and How to Stop It; watch his riveting Google Talk on these subjects.

The Wild West: mainstream media’s favorite metaphor for today’s Internet

The result of the Internet’s vulnerability is a generation of Internet-centric products — like the iPad, the Tivo and the XBOX — that are not easily modified by anyone except their vendors and their approved partners. These products do not allow unapproved third-party code (such as the kind that could be used to install a virus) to run on them, and are therefore more reliable than some areas of the web. Increased security often means restricted or censored content — and even worse — limited freedoms that could impede the style of innovation that propels the evolution of the Internet, and therefore, our digital future.

The web of 2010 is a place where a 17 year-old high school student can have an idea for a website, program it in three days, and quickly turn it into a social networking craze used by millions (that student’s name is Andrey Ternovskiy and he invented Chatroulette). That’s innovation in a nutshell. It’s a charming story and a compelling use of the web’s creative freedoms. If the security risks of the Internet kill the ‘open web’ and turn your average web experience into one that is governed by Apple or another proprietary company, the Andrey Ternovskiys of the world may never get their chance to innovate.

Security Solutions

We champion innovation on the Internet and it’s going to require innovation to steer it in the right direction. Jonathan Zittrain says that he hopes we can come together on agreements for regulating the open web so that we don’t “feel that we have to lock down our technologies in order to save our future.â€�

According to Vint Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, “I think we’re going to end up looking for international agreements – maybe even treaties of some kind – in which certain classes of behavior are uniformly considered inappropriate.�

Perhaps the future of the Internet involves social structures of web users who collaborate on solutions to online security issues. Perhaps companies like Google and Apple will team up with international governmental bodies to form an international online security council. Or maybe the innovative spirit of the web could mean that an independent, democratic group of digital security experts, designers, and programmers will form a grassroots-level organization that rises to prominence while fighting hackers, innovating on security technology, writing manifestos for online behavior, and setting an example through positive and supportive life online.

Many people are fighting to ensure your ability to have your voice heard online — so use that voice to participate in the debate, stay informed, and demand a positive future. Concerned netizens and Smashing readers: unite!

Freedom

Net Neutrality

Some believe that the fate of the Internet has been up for grabs ever since the federal government stopped enforcing ‘network neutrality’ rules in the mid-2000’s. In a nutshell, net neutrality means equality among the information that travels to your computer: everyone has the right to build a website that is just as public, affordable, and easily accessible as any other. However, some companies like phone and internet service providers are proposing ‘pay tiers’ (web service where you need to pay premium fees in order to allow visitors to access your site quickly). These tiers of web service could kill net neutrality by allowing those who can afford premium service (particularly large media companies who don’t like sharing their audience with your blog) greater access to consumers than the average web user.

The debate over net neutrality reached a boiling point when Google and Verizon announced a ‘joint policy proposal for an open Internet’ on August 9th, 2010. Despite the proposal’s call for a “new, enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices” amongst online content, many criticized it, citing leniency and loopholes.

Net neutrality needs to be made law. If the Internet were to have a slow lane and a fast lane, your average web user could lose many of his or her freedoms and opportunities online, thereby shattering the core values that make the Internet so profoundly valuable to society. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for this thorny issue. To learn more, read the full proposal or watch the Bill Moyers episode ‘The Net @ Risk.’

The World into the Web

Browser-based Everything

Google is developing a variety of applications and programs that exist entirely within the browser. Their PAC-MAN game was a preview of what’s to come because it allowed in-browser play of a simple, lightweight video game that required no downloads and relied on pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript. At the company’s 2010 I/O conference, Google laid out its plans to develop “rich multimedia applications that operate within the browser” (according to this New York Times report on the conference). The company plans to sell in-browser web applications like photo editing software (imagine using a Photoshop equivalent entirely within the browser) that it will sell in a web applications store called the Chrome Web Store.

If our programs and applications are about to be folded into the browser, what will exist within the browser in ten years? Currency? Education? Consciousness? Personally, I’m hopeful that my browser will be able to produce piping hot cheeseburgers sometime soon.

The Internet as a Collective Consciousness

The Internet is a medium, and philosopher Marshall McLuhan believed that all media are extensions of the human senses. The engine of our collective creative efforts is the force that’s causing the web to evolve more rapidly than any biological organism ever has.

Transcendence is one of the great themes of human culture. Image of seated Buddha statue: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Internet is an extension of the collective human mind and it’s evolving into a medium of transcendence. By constructing a place where the collective human consciousness is both centralized in one location (on your computer) and globally accessible (for those with the means to reach or use a computer, that is), our human spirit is transcending the human body. Way back in 1964, McLuhan himself wondered, “might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”

With the advent of trends including social media, ‘lifecasting,’ and ‘mindcasting,’ the Internet is being used as a real-time portal for the human consciousness. Perhaps those trends will be inverted by some web users of the future: instead of bringing offline life to the web (as so-called ‘lifecasters’ do when they stream live video of their attendance at an offline event), some web users will live their entire public lives online. Imagine a pop star who conducts her entire career online: every interview, live performance, music video or album release conducted solely through a browser window or mobile screen. Or a media theorist who exploited the platform of the web while discussing the theoretical ramifications of those actions. It’d be a great gimmick.

The Web into the World

The ‘Web of Things’

The ‘web of things’ or ‘Internet of things’ is a concept that will be a reality (at least in a rudimentary form) in the near future. The idea is that devices, appliances, and even your pets can all be tracked online. With Google Maps for iPhone, you can currently track your location on a digital map in relation to the streets and landmarks in your area. So it’s not hard to imagine a world where you can zoom in on your location and see detailed, 3D renderings of your surroundings: the cars on your block, the coffee machine in your kitchen, even Rover running around in your backyard! And it’s a good thing that you’re digitally tracking the location of poor Rover; he’s liable to hop the fence and make a run for it now that you’ve created a satellite computer out of everything you own (including his dog collar) by attaching a tracking device to it.

AT&T is betting big on the web of things. According to this Reuters article, the phone service provider is investing in tracking devices that could be installed in cars, on dog collars, and on the pallets used to move large shipments of products. The dog collar, for example, “could send text messages or emails to the owner of a pet when it strays outside a certain area, or the device could allow continuous tracking of the pet.”

Combine the concept of the ‘web of things’ with Second Life-style 3D imaging and you can imagine a web-based duplicate world — a virtual world that corresponds to the real one. But what are the implications of a world where every physical item has a corresponding digital existence online? Can we track the physical effects of climate change in the web of things? Will there be a digital avatar for every pelican carcass in the vicinity of the oil spill that’s devastating the Gulf of Mexico? It’s a tragic shame to develop a virtual world if we let the natural one go to waste in the meantime.

Interactive Landscapes

It has been said that today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s reality. Unfortunately, most good science fiction stories are cautionary tales set in dystopian nightmares.

QR codes on the façade of Japan’s N Building. Photo: Gizmodo

Simon Mainwaring reports on the N building in Japan, where “the whole building facade has been transformed into a real time dialogue between smart phones and what’s going on inside the store.” The exterior of the building is layered with QR codes (an alternate form of bar code) that can deliver real-time information to your phone. In Stephen Spielberg’s film Minority Report (adapted from a short story by mad genius Philip K. Dick), Gap ads came alive to hawk khakis to Tom Cruise. Looks like we’re about one step away from this scenario.

Mr. Mainwaring imagines a future with “billboards that watch you shop and make targeted suggestions based on your age, location and past buying habits,” and “stores will effectively be turned inside out as dialogue and personalized interaction with customers begins outside the store.”

The technology is cool, but it sounds like a pretty annoying future if you ask me. Who wants to be accosted by a holographic salesperson? The web grants us a great opportunity to use our collective voices to speak out on topics that matter to us. Because there are no regulations yet for much of this technology, it may be up to concerned citizens to make themselves heard if Internet-based technology is used in intrusive or abrasive ways.

The ‘Innerweb’

Cyborgs are among us already — humans whose physical abilities have been extended or altered by mechanical elements built into the body (people who live with pacemakers are one example). What will happen when the Internet becomes available on a device that is biologically installed in a human? What will the first internal user interfaces look like?

Here’s one speculation.

In the near future, we may be capable of installing the Internet directly into the user’s field of vision via a tiny computer chip implanted into the eye. Sound far-fetched? I doubt that it would sound far-fetched for Barbara Campbell, whose sight has been partially restored by a digital retinal implant (CNN reports on Barbara’s artificial retina).

Ms. Campbell was blind for many years until she had a small microchip surgically implanted in her eye. A rudimentary image of Ms.Campbell’s surroundings is transmitted to the device, which stimulates cells in her retina, in turn transmitting a signal to her brain. It’s a miracle that the development of a bionic eye has begun to help the blind see.

How else might doctors and scientists take advantage of the internal microchip? Perhaps the user’s vision will be augmented with an Internet-based interface with capabilities including geolocation or object identification. Imagine if technology like Google Goggles (a web-based application that identifies images from landmarks to book covers) was applied inside that interface. The act of seeing could not only be restored but augmented; a user might be capable of viewing a landscape while simultaneously identifying web-based information about it or even searching it for physical objects not visible to the naked eye. Apply the concept of augmented sight with the idea of the ‘web of things’ — an environment where physical objects have a corresponding presence on the web — and you can imagine a world where missing people are located, theft is dramatically reduced, the blind can see, and ‘seeing’ itself means something more than it used to.

If the web is an extension of our senses, it follows suit that the web may be capable of modifying those senses or even accelerating their evolution.

The Crown Jewels

“The next Bill Gates will be the deliverer of a highly technological solution to some of our climate change challenges.â€� — Lord Digby Jones of Birmingham

In preparation for this article, I considered a variety of wild ideas and fun speculations about the future. Could the Internet be used to solve the problem of climate change, generate tangible matter, or contact extraterrestrial life? Maybe those ideas sound like the stuff of imaginative fiction, but in a world where quantum teleportation has been achieved and researchers have created a living, synthetic cell, it almost seems as if the concept of science fiction is being eradicated while real technology brings our wildest fantasies to life. Here is the result of my most daring (absurd?) speculation.

Time Travel

The functionality of the Internet relies on a linear series of events. Image: Eadweard Muybridge

I called on physics teacher Mark Stratil to answer my last burning question: could the Internet ever be capable of facilitating the development of time travel? Here’s Mark’s answer:

“The Internet is still based on computers, which make linear calculations. Right now, all computers are based on binary code, which is a series of yes and no questions. You can make something that’s incredibly complex with a series of yes and no questions, but it takes a certain amount of time. The Internet still has to go through those calculations and it still physically has to make one calculation that will lead to the next calculation that will lead to the next. So no matter how fast we can get our computers – they’re making billions of calculations, trillions of calculations per second – there’s still going to be some lag time. They’re still limited by time in that way. They still need some time to make that conversation or that calculation.

In that way, they’re kind of chained to time. Their whole existence is based on a linear sequence of things that happen. In order to create something else, something that goes outside of time, you would have to make it a non-linear system — something that that’s not based on a series of yes and no questions, because those have to be answered in a precise order. It would have to be some kind of system that was answering all the questions at once.�

So Mark’s short answer to my fundamental question was basically that the Internet, in its current state, would not be capable of facilitating time travel. However, if the Internet was liberated from the linear structure of binary code and migrated onto an operating system that ‘answered all questions at once,’ then maybe it could have the potential to manipulate time or transcend the boundaries of time.

Sounds unlikely at this point, but one of the Internet’s greatest capabilities is the opportunity to share and develop ideas like these!

Conclusion

Responsible Evolution

Through technology, we hold the reins to our own evolution.

For the first time in history, it might be said that there are moral implications in the act of evolution. The Internet is an extension of our senses and our minds, and its progress is propelled by our own creative and intellectual efforts. The future of the Internet will be shaped by millions of choices and decisions by people from all walks of life. Designers and programmers like us have the advantage of technical skill and specialized knowledge. Given the increasing presence of the Internet in our lives, our choices can have deep reverberations in human society.

We’ll face small choices like what color to use for a button and larger choices like which platforms to endorse and which clients to support with our work. But the real questions form broad patterns behind every media trend and every mini technological revolution. Can we use technology to develop solutions to environmental problems — or will we abandon the natural world in favor of a digital one and the ‘web of things’? Have we fully considered what it means to merge biology and technology? And finally, do we really need a digital tracking device on our coffee machines?

What a thrilling time to be alive! Let’s proceed with great enthusiasm and a commitment to designing a future that is meaningful, peaceful, and staggeringly exciting.

Partial Bibliography

• New York Times Magazine: “The Death of the Open Web”
• Simon Mainwaring: “The Future of Shopping: What Happens When Walls Start Talking”
• The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Parallels Between Pre-Printing Communication and the Digital Era
• New York Times: “Google Pitches a Web-Centric Future”
• Google Talks: The Future of the Internet
• Moyers on America: ‘The Net @ Risk’ (Video)
• Pew Internet Research Poll: Future of the Internet IV
• Google I/O: The Web is Killing Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, and TV (TechChrunch reports)

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• The Evolution of the Logo
• The Dying Art Of Design
• Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design
• Art Manifestos and Their Applications in Contemporary Design

© Dan Redding for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: analysis, future, internet

Logo design has been a controversial subject in the design press lately. One branding professional recently claimed that logo design is not that hard to do and another said that logos are dead; some rebutted while others concurred. Why all the fuss?

We live in a Brand Era, where branding is in, and for some, aspiring to the Paul Rand style of logo craftsmanship is about as hip and contemporary as writing your invoices with a quill. Yes, logo design is only one facet of the powerful force that we call brand identity. Yes, a branded design environment can communicate sophisticated brand meaning without much (any?) usage of logos. But some ‘brand gurus’ or ‘brand evangelists’ (translation: ‘bastions of corporate pretension’) seem to enjoy making hyperbolic pronouncements just to sound shocking or cutting-edge. Logo design is not dead. The technological advancements and tumultuous industries of our century are causing its role in our culture to evolve.

Perhaps this clamorous debate is cause for a look at where logo design comes from, what state it’s in currently, and where it’s headed in the future. Where does a logo ultimately derive its power from? If we’re so hung up on divining what this Brand Era means for our clients, can we envision a Post-Brand Era?

[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the Smashing Book?]

Symbolism

The history of logo design begins with the roots of human expression. In fact, the fundamental power of symbols remains most important element of logo design. A logo has meaning because it draws on centuries of signs and symbols (including the alphabet) in human literary and visual language. A logo designer who uses an image of an apple, for example, is drawing on centuries of potent symbolic usage. For most Western viewers, the image of an apple summons our associations with nature, food, the ‘forbidden fruit’ in the Garden of Eden, Snow White, Apple computers, et cetera. To design a logo with symbolic resonance is to participate in the lineage of social dialogue.

Fragment of a vase, third millennium B.C. The figures on this vase bear a striking similarity to the cave paintings of Lascaux and even to contemporary imagery like the Puma logo. These similarities reveal the harmony and union of human communication over great distances of time and geographic location.

To communicate effectively with design, it’s important to view the big picture of human communication and mythology. Logo design as we know it today is a strategy that rose to popularity with brands and corporations of the twentieth century. However, people and organizations have been identifying themselves with an enormous variety of marks, signatures, and emblems for centuries. In terms of visual communication, a modern company that represents itself with a logo, color scheme, and slogan is not very different from a 15th century royal court that invoked identity and unity through the use of family crests, uniforms, and religious symbolism.

In semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation), human communication is discussed in terms of signs and signifiers. Signs can take the form of words, images, flavors, or even odors: things that have no intrinsic meaning until we invest it in them. We perceive, understand, and negotiate the world around us by investing meaning in all manner of signs and symbols. In the West, an image of a snake signifies evil. But without our Western cultural and mythological associations (many of which are rooted in the Bible), a serpent is just a serpent.

Greek signature seals, fifth century B.C. Affluent Greek citizens used these molded stamps to sign or endorse documents. Using an animal image to identify oneself has a long history predating famous animal logos like Lacoste and Penguin.

Symbols are highly subjective and dependent upon cultural reference. The swastika, for example, is a symbol that was used by various cultures across the globe for over 5,000 years to symbolize a variety of positive meanings including good luck, life, sun, power, and strength. In fact, the word swastika comes from the Sanskrit svastika, which means “good fortune” or “well-being.” Sadly, those meanings have all been usurped by the atrocities of the Nazi party. No symbol has inherent meaning of its own, but when maligned by indelible association with war and unspeakable tragedy, a simple symbol like the swastika can be transformed into a potent talisman capable of eliciting an intense reaction from the viewer. Our complex emotional responses to rudimentary images reveals the profound depth of our relationship with the visual world around us.

The meaning of a logo is often an elusive concept, and two top professionals may disagree about whether a particular logo is a masterpiece or an abomination. This subjective nature of meaning in logography is part of the beauty and wonder of the craft.

Historical Identifying Marks

A wide variety of stamps, symbols, and signatures have been used to identify people over the centuries. Here are a few.

Printer’s marks, late fifteenth century

The printer’s marks above are variations on an ‘orb and cross’ theme, symbolizing the idea that “God shall reign over Earth.”

Aldus Manutius, printer’s trademark, c.1500.

This printer’s trademark symbolizes a beautiful paradox. It was used in conjunction with an epigram reading “Make haste slowly.” Swiftness is visually represented by the speedy sea animal and stillness is represented by the anchor.

Rembrandt ‘branded’ his authorship on his paintings with a variety of signatures during the course of his career, but the distinctive ‘R’ and unique personality of the letterforms provide unity to the marks.

Corporate Identity

The industrial revolution profoundly expanded the reach and power of mass production and the marketing used to promote it. Corporations now found that a simple identifying mark was insufficient for distinguishing themselves amongst growing competition in broadening markets. “The national and multinational scope of many corporations made it difficult for them to maintain a cohesive image, but by unifying all communications from a given organization into a consistent design system, such an image could be projected, and the design system enlisted to help accomplish specific corporate goals.” (Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, by Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis).

In other words, the logo was now being used as one element in a broader system of visual elements used to identify the entire output of a corporation — many of which were becoming larger and more powerful than any had every been before.

Here are some notable developments in the evolution of identity design.

Wiener Werkstätte

The Wiener Werkstätte was a manufacturing and marketing enterprise founded in Vienna in 1903 — decades before graphic designers were doing work that was officially recognized as corporate identity. This group of craftsmen and designers were true trailblazers.

Marks of the Werkstätte, left to right: Werkstätte monogram, rose logo, logo for Galerie Miethke designed by Kolo Moser

Wiener Werkstätte letterhead printed in ‘Wiener Werkstätte blue,’ 1914. The group’s obsession with squares and grids is evident here.

A trademark was proposed for the Werkstätte, but designer Josef Hoffman proposed a complete graphic identity. The appearance of the group’s letters and articles was unified by four elements: the Werkstätte’s red rose symbol plus the monogram marks of the Werkstätte, the designer, and the producer. These standard elements, along with the use of the square as a decorative motif, were used to design everything from invoices to wrapping paper.

Now that’s dedication to designing an immersive brand environment: the Werkstätte logo forged into the handle of a cupboard key.

Identity Masters

Westinghouse logo and annual report designed by Paul Rand

Extraordinarily influential designers like Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, and Alan Fletcher helped shape the graphic identity of consumer culture during the second half of the twentieth century. Rand, for example, designed many ubiquitous logos and his varied identity work for IBM became a benchmark in the industry. These great designers have been covered in depth elsewhere (check out ‘The world’s best logo designers?’ by David Airey), so we won’t spend too much time on them here.

Music Television

“The move of information from the printed page to other media has changed the nature of graphic identity. The MTV logo, which emerges from an unexpected metamorphosis, is probably the ultimate in animated identity.” -The New York Times, September 1996

The MTV logo was designed by the now-defunct studio Manhattan Design in the early 1980’s. Former Manhattan Design member Frank Olinsky tells the story behind the creation of this logo here.

This logo was a revolution in corporate identity because it adapted to the language of television and shattered standing notions about the ‘rules’ of logo use. In the early 80’s, television had become a ubiquitous medium. The MTV logo adapted to the nature of this medium by exploiting the speed and motion of the moving image: it was regularly animated, shattered, decorated, erased, and reborn in the course of a brief station identification spot. This showed that logos could be adaptive vessels for graphic identity and demolished the notion that trademarks should always be presented in a consistent, static form. The logo had evolved to fit the culture of the television era.

The Brand Era

“In order to be successful multinational corporations, you need to produce brands, not products.” -Naomi Klein

Lebron James is deified in a Nike desktop wallpaper ad. The Swoosh is tiny; the brand is huge. For some, Nike epitomizes successful branding. For others, it’s the poster child for deceptive marketing, sweatshop labor, and unethical business practices.

Now that the whole world has been branded, the Twentieth Century approach to branding is old school. I’ll call our present day in age the Brand Era. The logo has evolved from a mark of quality on a product to a visual distillation of a cultural ideal — one that’s capable of accruing or asserting brand equity in a variety of marketing environments and inspiring great allegiance among consumers. “In this corporate formula,” says Naomi Klein, “the brand has little to do with the life of the product. Rather, it is a free-standing idea. The goal of the successful brand has become nothing short of transcendence from the world of things.”

In this twenty-first century brand space, Nike is no longer a shoe company — it is a concept that represents transcendence through sports. Consider the Nike ad above: Lebron James is deified in a Christ-like pose and with religious language (‘witness,’ ‘believe’), both of which imply spiritual transcendence. In the case of Michael Jordan, the star was granted superhuman powers in Nike ads (picture him achieving flight, suspended midair en route to the hoop). In the corner floats the simple, austere Swoosh. In this context, the logo is a sponge, soaking up the ‘brand equity’ created by themes of transcendence and flight as well as the basketball star’s fame/endorsement/deification.

‘Brand evangelists’ now use all kinds of lofty language to describe ‘brand worlds’ and ‘branded landscapes.’ At best, this kind of language describes creative brand strategy that can provide organizations with an innovative approach to defining themselves in today’s corporate culture — a place where tumultuous economies and rapid technological change require constant adaptation. At worst, this kind of behavior is an attempt to pull the pretentious wool over the novice client’s eyes, using ostentatious language to leverage the sale of mediocre design and commonplace brand strategy. None of us entered this field to become snake oil salesmen, so don’t pitch like them.

A Post-Brand Era?

Ask someone standing in Times Square if logo design is dead. Image: ‘Times Square Parade’ by Alexander Chen

In this era, the brand is bigger and more powerful than ever. Brands have become so big that some people have logo tattoos (physically branded with a brand) while celebrities like Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey have successfully developed themselves into personal mega brands. Brands like Nike have transformed themselves into lifestyle choices that consumers can integrate into their own identity. How much further can we go? What comes next?

Naomi Klein has noted that the many successful brands have already achieved “transcendence from the world of things,” meaning that the dissemination of a brand’s identity has become more valuable than its production of physical commodities. Technology will soon liberate brands from the visible world even further, as companies enter the fields of nanotechnology, synthetic life production, virtual space, and more. What will ‘brand identity’ mean for a person who has branded cells injected into their body to eradicate cancer? And you thought the favicon was small. Brands will occupy startling new environments (like the bloodstream) in the 21st Century.

The MTV logo famously introduced a logo that could undergo a costume change during every performance. How else can a logo break the rules to adapt? Is there a way to explode the logo, to decentralize it? What about a logo that consisted of separate elements that could be displayed on their own or joined together to create a unified whole? If branded products exist on a molecular level that’s invisible to the naked eye, could they project external holographic brand identity?

The role of brand identity in the future remains to be seen. But it appears as though — barring the apocalypse or some Naomi Klein-inspired activist revolution — brands will continue to expand into new areas. Just as most industries are dealing with abrupt transitional periods due to the disruptive effects of technology, so is ours. In fact, their transitional periods become our transitional periods, because they are our clients.

As brand identity designers, merely designing a logo for a client is not good enough. It is also unacceptable to stand on the cultural sidelines or design with our heads in the sand. We must be students of the changing cultures around us. We must take active roles in the use of design to strengthen and navigate the futures of the industries, people, and causes we believe in.

The Road Ahead

For now, brand identity design is thriving. Branded design environments (like a website with an integrated design strategy expressing brand qualities) can coexist with traditional logo design. In the future — as always — it’s creative thinking that will lead the way. One valuable asset will be the willingness to take a risk when it comes time to develop a strategy for a brand’s visual persona. The faster technology propels our culture, the more design risk-takers we’re going to need.

Whatever changes may come, one thing will remain. As graphic artists and designers, we possess the power (just as any two year-old with a crayon does) to ascribe meaning to the world around us. We put an expressive face on raw information. The fundamental desire of humans to understand the world in visual terms is a desire that we can understand and foster. Graphic design’s ability to provide meaning and useful information will prove more valuable than ever during uncertain and challenging times.

Partial Bibliography

• Typography and Graphic Design: from Antiquity to Present by Roxane Jubert
• Meggs’ History of Graphic Design by Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis
• Graphic Design: A Concise History by Richard Hollis
• No Logo by Naomi Klein
• Wiener Werkstätte: Design in Vienna 1903-1932 by Christian Brandstätter

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