HEAD BLOG

In addition to campaigns, both advertising and social, Head First is asked to flex a whole set of artistic muscles to produce some rather nifty imagery.

Namco Bandai’s Ace Combat series is getting great reviews and, actually, it’s no surprise. When briefed on what was going to make it special, we were even more determined than usual not to be the weak link when it came to promotion.

I think we do some rather good work here at Head First. We really do.

Every now and again we like to sit back and take stock of the remarkable range of super huge brands worked on at Head First. That such global companies have been trusting their IP to us for over 10 years now means that we are getting something right.

Too often, work for these brands doesn’t bring anything else to the mix. Maybe it is because with these brands comes a large and rich resource library from which to pull high quality art. It could be a simple job to align the images and add the necessary logos before handing it back to the client as “job done”.

The strategic arm of Head First always makes us go further and add whatever value we can into a job. This ad for Ben 10 Cosmic Destruction is one such example where we sought to bring a sense of the bigger picture to the page – one not found in the asset library.

I mentor at a local college. It’s a great way to see how the next generation are being taught to approach advertising and design. I learn a lot about expectations, processes and ideas.

Oh, and I suppose I’m of some help to the students.

Whatever.

Each year, without fail, I see things I don’t like. It could be that students are being given six months to explore a brief when I know one day they will have, well, one day.

This year I got to talking about a design the student had done and I asked why he’d done it, what thought processes had led to it. We discussed it in some detail because I’d got quite a different interpretation of it. Ultimately I asked how the student “sold” it into the tutor.

The answer was that designs weren’t sold in. They were given no rationale.

It made me wonder that if students weren’t required to explain, if they weren’t required to show their working out, then what would encourage them to do any working out to begin with.

And without being able to explain why a design works then what faith could I have in the message it is supposed to convey?

Moving to old man mode, I believe that part of the reason there is any kind of debate about the quality of creative at the moment (a topic being run in The Drum lately) is that very little in the way of rationale and message is actually being demanded.

Perhaps if colleges took up the challenge to be more commercial in their teaching technique then we might see this change at grassroots level. Certainly a more vocational approach to design wouldn’t hurt as students learn to better understand the demands clients will one day put upon them.

So, here’s an interesting challenge. You have a game which, as part of its key strengths, features a cast of thousands of fully animated and destructible Zombies. That’s something you might want to tell people about. It’s a pretty impressive message to relate.

It’s not enough. Of course it isn’t. Every publisher wants to create a character, an aspirational figure in whom the consumer will place all their love, affection and spare cash. Dead Rising 2 is no exception and the developers have Chuck, a biker who seems to have cracked the knack of taping objects together in order to form weapons of mad destruction. So he has to go on the pack somewhere.

It’s shaping up to be a crowded mess of a pack really. All too often, games packaging tries to tell the complete story. Look, it says, in one glance you will see that I have cars, gangs, spaceships, soldiers, cats and humour. I have streets you can walk down and buildings you can enter. Yes, all too often, the front of box seems to be unaware that there is, in fact, a back of box to inform.

So the challenge, whenever Head First designs packaging, is to balance everything and make sure the impact isn’t swamped by detail.

The sweet spot of this pack is bang on the centre, on the hero. The title isn’t lost but nor does it dominate and the thousands of zombies… well, they are carefully shepherded by the stadium lights so that they remain as detail and texture.

Above all, the pack retains clarity. The real test, of course, will be in six months when it is lying on a shelf next to twenty other packs. Will it still stand out without a marketing spend to clear away the competition?

Microsoft seem unable to commit

Now you see it, now you don’t. Microsoft released their new branding device and company tagline yesterday.

And then withdrew it.

It drew the usual polarised opinions on Twitter and then, just a few hours later, was taken down. The tagline was for real but the logos, which showed the Microsoft product family, were not, in fact, new logos. Rather, they were an example of “a standalone treatment to show the flexibility of joined brands” (Engadget).

The opinions, the polarisation, the hate, all of these are de rigeur for any new brand these days. When opinions (such as mine) can be released and propagated within seconds, it’s inevitable. What’s interesting, to me at least, is that Microsoft chose to withdraw them.

Brand design is such a personal art. You either love the logo or you don’t really care. Even the haters will continue as usual once their bile has sunk back again.

So why would Microsoft back down?

When it comes to creating logos to reflect brands, many companies, large or small, want to please everybody. They want something that (as Steve Jobs once proposed) becomes a jewel. Everybody loves jewels. They sparkle, attract our attention and are worth a fortune.

What’s more, we love them instantly.

Open the box and what do you see? That’s right, treasure. And desire plays out upon our faces. It’s the reaction beloved of companies.

When that reaction is lessened, for whatever reason, a company can be thrown into turmoil. They sense a lack of love and fear that will reflect upon their business.

It’s easy to see why Microsoft would do the same.

With Apple being the… ummm… being so well loved by consumers, Microsoft feel threatened. Witness the constant faltering and self doubt over many of their product launches lately. They get buzz but then lose it through the self doubt and inaction. Apple announce a product and then release it. Apple love themselves, Microsoft don’t.

They need to realise that many people are happy with what they produce. It might not be passionate, it might not be vocal.

But they show commitment nonetheless. They should understand that self doubt is infecting their brand more than any perceived criticism.

A little self-love would inspire far more confidence than the efforts of analysts and graphic designers.

Everything in life can be boiled down to a scene within a movie. Worse still, everything can be gently steered towards a scene within a movie.

This simple, but invasive truth is colouring every move I make.

When a friend tells me about teaching English as a foreign language I immediately think of the scene in Good Morning Vietnam where – well, if you don’t know it then chances are you should probably leave this blog for now.

Similarly when I’m mid-flow in an argument I might say something straight from a film. I do. I can’t help it. If the time is right then it just has to play out that way because it felt so good when I saw it played out by Pacino or, ummm… Cage.

It doesn’t stop there.

I’ve even steered an argument towards being able to deliver a line. I haven’t yet managed the “sell crazy someplace else” line but I know exactly how I could push someone towards it.

Clearly, there’s a problem.

The thing is, life and relationships are one thing. It’s easy to start arguments just to be able to deliver a killer line. Life and relationships aren’t serious enough to take steps to prevent myself from doing it.

But creativity, dear god creativity, is.

Imagine my horror, yes, the horror, the horror, as I stare at a piece of copy I’d spent five WHOLE minutes on writing only to realise that somebody else had written it before me.

It’s embarrassing is what it is.

It’s also an area to be keenly aware of throughout the creative process. Sometimes an idea can feel so good, so reassuringly familiar, that it must have been done before. And often it has.

Death is not the end of course and our culture is filled with talented people who make use of this creative saturation and make it their own. Look at Spaced – filled with snippets of other works it remains decidedly its own creature throughout. Self-awareness, keenly expressed, is its hallmark and its creative territory.

Then there is the love-him-or-hate-him Tarantino whose oeuvre is built upon references to popular (and not so popular) culture. Again though, it’s his own spin on these things. His own experience which is brought to bear upon the subject matter that makes the difference.

And that, in the end, is key. It is experience which guides our hand in all these matters. Personal experience. And that’s something that turns a mediocre argument into a divorce settlement.

In 1983 I received a ZX Spectrum. The one my dad bought had 16k (smaller than this Word file) but could be upgraded to 48k by sending it off again.

I don’t remember why he did it this way but I remember having to be very patient around Christmas until the postman finally delivered the newly upgraded home computer.

Many people my age will have been through the same experience but what made my ZX Spectrum different to everyone else’s was the case it sat in whilst I learned the art of up, down, left, right, fire and the basics of Z80 assembler language.

The case was built by my dad and it was a beauty. It held the computer, the tape drive and had space for an armful of cassettes hidden by a lid as well as providing a neat solution for channelling the cables. It was even designed to raise the computer to a comfortable angle of 20 degrees; dad certainly was keen on me doing a fair bit of typing as well as playing games.

Twenty seven years later and a bunch of us are sat, surrounded by flat screen monitors, Apple Macs and games consoles, discussing the latest in user experiences as represented through video games. Everything around us has been designed and mass produced to fit everyone.

The ubiquity of product design is not lost on us as we consider what it is that makes for a user experience. At the heart of this is speculation over whether the new boys on the block (Microsoft and Sony) have any chance of challenging Nintendo on their home turf of motion control.

The thing about the Wii is that it was conceived and designed as a mass-market, motion controlled device. Every part of it from the way in which the Wii-motes were made to emulate an average TV remote, to the limited graphics and chunky option screens, was part of what made the Wii grandparent friendly.

It worked.

Beyond most people’s expectations, it worked.

The user experience that Microsoft and Sony now want to emulate wasn’t added on afterwards, it was built in.

So does that make it any more robust? Does it make it any more likely to succeed? Where does the user experience end and the gimmick begin?

I’m not sure you can discount bolt-on solutions to user experience. Buzz and Guitar Hero were essentially exactly that and they intensified the idea of mass market gaming. The Eye-Toy back on the PlayStation 2 felt like an idea needing a market but Nintendo certainly solved that with the Wii.

And that is, perhaps, where this issue becomes more complex. Nintendo defined their own audience by knowing what it wanted to achieve with motion controlling whereas Microsoft and Sony are “lumbered” with an existing audience who are all very vocal about what they expect from gaming. I remember arguing against the flood of moans regarding the Wii name. The existing gamer base was hostile towards the very idea of “soft” gaming, an approach I feel has been behind the perception of gaming as a pursuit for the less socially able amongst us. Will they view the new user experience in a positive light?

The two companies must certainly hope so because on the flip side of that coin is a public who may already be convinced that the 360 and PlayStation 3 are for the gamers, the stereotypical gamers locked in their bedrooms screaming about Red Dead Redemption.

In such a world, the task becomes how to convince both camps that the user experience is one worth buying into because not everyone has a dad who will make that experience feel personal.

Every once in a while someone says something that makes you want to reach for the bucket. The comment is so loaded with pseudo- intellectual sugar  that overdose is instantaneous.

The headline statement here is one such comment. It carries self importance about its person like a student at a sit-in and if you’ve any sense you’ll be walking on by with a shake of your head.

But I see morbid curiosity keeps you here. Quite right too because every criticism of advertising you might have, every design bugbear you hold, all can be answered through that swollen claim.

Advertising and design goes wrong when the creatives and marketeers involved forget that they are problem solvers. Some of them appear to be brand evangelists, others appear to be artists, none of them produce anything like the commercially appropriate work they ought to whilst those millstones hang around their necks.

It’s easy to spot them too. Designs that don’t function as they ought to. Image taking precedence over usability. A complete lack of message.

Watch for them all because in their steely good looks are more bullshit statements than our claim to be problem solvers could ever make.

These says the term ‘brand’ has become a catch all for any company thinking about reaching into the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere. It can be summarized as a logo and, occasionally, a set of principles which the company tries to ring fence as being typically theirs.

It’s easy to see why they take this view of course. The super companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and… ummm… Head First occupy the places in the minds of people that can be identified as ‘brand aware’. When asked, consumers will probably be aware, not only of these companies logos, but also of their ideological standpoints.

What right thinking, emergent company wouldn’t want a piece of this action? To them, getting the brand right leads inexorably to prominence, take-up and financial success.

Allow me to tell you a little story.

A friend of mine started a company providing services to children. On a casual consultancy level, I was asked to chip in on the subject of brand.
My friend was very keen on creating a brand.

I probed a little deeper in order to ascertain what, exactly, was meant by ‘brand’ and, sure enough, the concept appeared to be linked tightly to logo.

That’s not right, I said. Brand is different to design. Think of brand as something you earn through great service and a lot of time. And even then, turning your company into a brand takes a whole lot more than making sure you maintain your logo according to a designer’s style guide.

Look at Coca Cola, I said. That’s a brand. However we may feel about it, whatever we may see in the difference between the public face they market and the reality of their business practices, they can be clearly identified alongside specific values.
And that isn’t because they have slavishly followed design guidelines down the decades. It’s because they have vigorously marketed their product alongside a very particular viewpoint. It has cost hundreds of millions and taken decades.

Even those companies for which brand status has come quicker haven’t fallen into the trap of being restricted design-wise. Their service has come before all else and that is what has shaped any design elements to their promotions.

And those elements have changed over time, adapting, as they should, to changing tastes, expectations and technologies.

So the next time a designer (or a client) insists that you must present everything in a certain colour in order to adhere to brand guidelines, do them a favour and tell them to Google ‘brand’ for a while.

Everyone at Head First, even Jeni, is a big fan of packaging. We work on enough of it to hope beyond hope that print will survive digital downloads and that even vinyl will make a substantial comeback just so we can enjoy the pleasure of owning something tangible again. Opening that iPhone box, unboxing the special edition Modern Warfare 2 – these are things that bring pleasure to the senses and it would be a shame to dismiss this as an unecessary part of the purchasing process.

So we thought it would be nice to show off the latest series of special packs we have designed, this time for Ben 10 Vilgax Attacks.

Isn’t it lovely? Don’t you just want to touch it?