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The Wisdom of Lord Puttnam. (Very long, sorry - but don't worry, it's my last day.)

I almost gave up trying to get to London for the talk last night. (I live in leafy Surrey.) I was running late anyway, and then the train was delayed. I wasn’t sure I’d make it. But I’m glad I persevered, because it was terrific. I hope you won’t mind a bit of a ramblog abut it.

I only missed the first few minutes, and arrived to find Lord Puttnam in the midst of an argument about the role cinema can play in shaping people’s understanding of the world. By the time he got to the issue of climate change, he’d created a forceful theme about personal responsibility. He also drew what I thought was a brilliant analogy with the slave trade. Indulge me while I pass it on, won't you?

Until it was abolished in 1807, slavery was a key economic driver - just as traditional energy sources are now. So, just as now, plenty of business people were up in arms about any suggestion of change. But in just the same way, the true cost - the human cost - was deferred onto people who didn’t have the power to speak up. Today, that's people in places like Bangladesh, Africa and Central America already feeling the devastating effects of climate change. As long as we’re not paying the price, we look away.

The positive side of the story was that, according to Puttnam, abolishing slavery actually created enormous growth in the economy. It turned out slavery was actually holding the economy back. Getting rid of it unleashed huge ingenuity, creativity and innovation. The parallels with today’s energy situation are striking indeed.

As you can tell, it was a broad-ranging talk, but the theme of communication ran through it all, which is why I’m telling you about it. Puttnam regards climate change with the sort of grave concern it very obviously deserves. And he spoke passionately about the need to communicate the urgency of the message to all. Naturally, he focused on TV and cinema, but the single example of a great communication he actually quoted was a strapline. It was the slogan of the MIT team working on the carbon neutral car (which I'm guessing is this one). Their slogan is:

We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

That got a warm, delighted ripple of laughter and nodding from the audience, and quite right: it’s brilliant, isn’t it? No doom and gloom. No hand-wringing. Just a thoroughly positive - dare I say empowering? - line that says a great deal in eight simple words.* It’s kind of the antithesis of the Neilson poster. (Google informs me it's a quote from a poet and activist called June Jordan.)

There was another moment in the evening that highlighted the power of words. Someone in the audience suggested that the phrase "the environment" was unhelpful. "The environment" feels like something separate from us, something "over there". Instead, this chap suggested, we should call it "our environment", making it immediate and personal for everyone.

That, too, got a little round of applause – and a pledge from both Lord Puttnam and the President of the RSA that they would henceforth always refer to "our environment". I liked the idea too, so I’ll be trying to stick to that construction in future. Of such tiny changes are revolutions made.

It’s moments like this that remind you how much power we have in the communications business. Not just with words, but with all the tools we use - visual, verbal, strategic, conceptual - to get big ideas across to big audiences. Most of us put most of our energy into getting clients’ ideas across, and there’s no shame in that. But when you imagine what we could achieve on an absolutely critical issue like climate change, just by turning our guns in that direction, you wonder why we’re not doing a very great deal more of it already. (All credit to initiatives like Green Thing, Applied Green, and so forth.)

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* Quite separately, my favourite one-great-headline story is told in Robert Evans’ autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Evans, like Puttnam, was a movie producer (The Godfather and Chinatown, not a bad record). In 1969, he was struggling to sell the film Goodbye, Columbus to distributors. It was the story of a middle-class Jewish family, and this was the counter-culture 1960s: no one wanted to know. Evans had no marketing budget, so he cut a deal with Steve Frankfurt, then the young firebrand creative head of Y&R.

Frankfurt said he’d write them a poster for nothing. But if Evans decided to run it, he wanted $100,000. This is in 1969, remember. The poster Frankfurt presented carried the line, Every father’s daughter is a virgin. It resonated hugely with Sixties parents. Like the MIT line, it says a lot in very few words. And it worked – although it must be said, it worked very small on a very big image of Ali McGraw. (Words and design together again.) The picture was a hit. And Steve K got his $100K. Not bad for a poster.

Right, I'm off to see David Puttnam

Tonight it's the RSA for me, and David (now Lord) Puttnam. He's going to be speaking about building a truly sustainable society "through the prism of his three principal interests: the communications industries, education, and climate change." Sounded too good to miss, especially when it's free.

On the off-chance that anyone else is going, I'm the tall, rather bookishly handsome bloke with the glasses and the long black overcoat. And if David (now Lord) says anything I think you'd find useful, I'll post about it in the morning.

(If anyone's looking for a prospect, few venerable old organisations are more in need of a new identity than the RSA.)

Yet more conversation

26 founder member Tim Rich has been writing for and about design for a long time. As a contribution to this week's blogging, he sent me some stuff he's written over the years for Design Week.

I thought the following, from a 2003 "Private View" piece, was extremely sensible and useful stuff, so I hope you don't mind me quoting quite a lot of it. Writers should listen up.

"[The] snarky truism ‘Designers can’t spell’ [is] a comment made so often it’s become a cliché. What’s particularly irritating about this barb is that spelling is far less valuable than an appreciation of writing. I’m currently working with a designer who has severe dyslexia, yet his passion for design writing is inspiring.

Another problem with the writing in design discussion is that it has been rather one-sided. The focus has been on what designers are doing wrong... But just how good are the writers working in design? And are writers doing enough to inspire designers and clients to think about written language in new and inventive ways?

...I’ve encountered excellent writers – people who can really engage the reader, who care about the look and feel of their writing, who love to collaborate with designers, who love to do fresh things with language. But there aren’t enough like them, and design agencies that recognise the commercial and creative importance of writing can be forgiven for feeling frustrated by what is effectively a skills shortage...

Writers complain about designers being virtually illiterate, but many copywriters are visually illiterate. They produce densely typed sheets of ‘copy’ (horrid word) and expect the designer to do the rest. This is peculiar, as the first wafts of meaning from a piece of writing come from how the words look, not from how they read. Surely, a writer should care passionately about every aspect of how meaning is produced? Shouldn’t we be involving ourselves in discussions about the type and images that might work with (or against) our words, for example? [Hear, hear, Tim - Mike]

And how many writers recognise the value designers bring to the writing process? Designers can be wonderful editors, adept at thinking about the entire reading experience, identifying information hierarchies, and helping ideas and messages to flow by shaping, emphasising and manipulating words. Many writers seem to resent these skills, rather than celebrate them. [An interesting echo of Richard's comments]

... Of course, there are projects where there’s no role for a writer... but when they are involved they should be central, not peripheral. Some design agencies treat writers like suppliers rather than partners, but just how hard are writers fighting to be included? I wonder."

The conversation continues

James, a studio copywriter whose full name I'm keeping secret for obvious reasons, writes in about the not-uncommon bias among many clients to see design as the "creative" bit.

"There's this cultural prejudice amongst our clients that all the really exciting ideas only come from the designers. It's even an attitude exhibited by some of the designers themselves - they jealously guard their ideas, still coming up with brilliant work, it's fair to say, but then asking me to "drop in" some great copy at the last minute to fit."

I was putting together a post on this anyway, so it's good to have my thoughts corroborated, James. If clients are reinforcing the notion that writing can simply be tacked on to the "creative", that must be another reason writers get left out of the concept stages, mustn't it? Even if a design consultancy wants to bring in a writer early, it's not very helpful if the client is saying, "No, just get them in once everything else is approved."

This isn't just sour grapes, by the way. I honestly believe you get a much stronger, more cohesive piece when writer and designer work closely together from the outset.

James didn't just want to rant, however. (Which is good, as I seem to be doing rather a lot of rant posts this week. Sorry about that.) He goes on:

"The more positive view is that there are other designers who are much more open and collaborative, and it's the work we produce together that has the legs on everything else. As you say, it's when you sit down together, share ideas and knock things back and forth that it works best. It's also this teaming approach, following the advertising model, which is slowly chipping away at the stale views held about the role of words and copywriters in general."

I hope, and believe, you're right, James.

Burn the heretic!

I know this is a bit passé now, given the headlong rush that is Interwebiverse 2.6 or wherever we've got to. But I'm interested to see how many people agree with me about Poke's much-ballyhooed Good Things Should Never End website. Ben's already posted about it, of course, and he likes it.

I don't.

We should begin by acknowledging that this doesn't matter two hoots: lots and lots of people (like Ben and advertising bloggers Agency Tart and Scamp) seem to like it very much. And no piece of communication is going to please all the people all the time.

But I've heard very few dissenting voices on this one, and I wondered if there were any in our congregation.

My biggest problem with it is that it's boring (to me, anyway). The little bees took much too long filling up their honey jar for a start. Then I was cast into an increasingly familiar world of trendy illustrated characters - somewhere between Stefan's Daily Monster and Amos toys. And true to their billing, they go on and on and on. And on.

You're supposed to share the wonders of this site with others, by clipping little animations and posting them on your own site or blog, thusly:

Oooh. Bird goes round. Do it again, bird. Oooh. He did. And hey presto: Orange has free ad space on Noisy Decent Graphics.

The one bit I was intrigued by was a television thingy called Buzz, who apparently wanted to speak to me. Being neither five years old nor congenitally stupid, I knew Buzz was just a clever bit of software. But I gave him a go. Oh dear. Maybe not so clever.

This sort of content is supposed to engage you as an active participant, but the technology is still so feeble compared to your own brain, it's surely stultifyingly limited.

There's an interactive TV ad too, in case you weren't aware (by the suitably edgy-sounding Weapon 7). I'm pretty curmudgeonly about iTV too - it always seems a rather lacklustre alternative to Proper Telly. Like the online version, it's been immaculately produced. I just don't want to spend ages peering at a screen (of any kind), hunting out hidden freebies. Our lives are measured in mere decades, people.

Scamp claims the site will engage you for at least half an hour. If it does, you surely need a bit more going on in your life. If you're really desperate to fill a half-hour at the desk, why not expand your vocabulary and feed the world at Free Rice? Or you could astound yourself for real with a couple of the talks on TED. Or you could read a damn book.

God I sound old.

The bitching is back

Yesterday was all very fluffy and calm, wasn't it? Don't worry, we're back on the good stuff now.

Dave Oscroft of Neighbour wanted to let me know about a piece of copywriting that drives him mad. It's this one. And I can't say I blame him. Here's what he said:

"Sometimes I think copywriters can try and make themselves known too much, if you know what I mean. Trying to make copy sound like someone's 'thought about it' can sometimes make it sound really amateur. Not sure if you've seen an ad for a snowboard company, not sure of the brand or anything helpful like that, but it's on the tube at Tottenham Court Road, Central Line, heading east. It's a big load of copy on an ad that sounds so smug and 'copywritten' it made me want to read the London Paper just to avert my eyes... it's everything I hate about copywriting!"

I think he's absolutely right. Here's the copy close up:

On the one hand, this is easy prey, isn't it? How much of this sort of dross is there in the world of commercial communications? But still: it matters. It certainly matters to Dave. And quite right too: it's shit. It's like someone stuffed a Howies catalogue and an old Blackadder video into an Innocent blender and hoped for the best.

I don't think we need dissect it much further (tempted as I am). But I will point out that whoever wrote it clearly doesn't understand the phrase "beg to differ". Either that, or they don't know how to use their "but" properly. And the moment one finds oneself writing the line, "'All right, Smarty-Salopettes,'" is a moment to lay the keyboard aside and have a long lie down.

Easy (and fun) as it is to mock and sneer, what's nice about this story is that it proves people care about words. There's a myth that no one reads body copy any more, but Dave did. And it got a reaction. Because he does read, and he does care. He is rightly pissed off when a brand subjects him to this sort of patronising, sub-standard nonsense.

It's just a shame that it's usually the bad stuff that catches our attention. The aforementioned Howies and Innocent are both examples of brands whose writing is so good people notice and comment. But good copy, like good design, is often about getting out of the way and letting the message come through. Which means you often don't even notice how good it is. As Orwell famously said, "Good prose is like a windowpane."

Sometimes, though, you might want to decorate the windowpane. Which is great, as long as you can write so well that people enjoy your words for the sheer joy of the words themselves. But as this poster proves, you have to really, really know what you're doing.

A few leaves out of Ben's book

Sometimes nothing beats a good old-fashioned pun, does it?

I've so enjoyed seeing Ben's many leaves in recent weeks, that I thought I'd contribute a few of my own. I don't own a book of Pantone chips, unfortunately, so you'll have to guess. These were all taken on a recent walk with my dog, Harry. Nothing beats winter sunlight.

Blake Everingham is my new best friend.

"I'd have to say as a designer I enjoy working with writers. It simply opens up creative dialogue. However, I'll be blunt: I hate not having the same capacity for beautiful wording, thus working with a writer is also frustrating. Purely from my own lacking as a writer though. Otherwise, it's fun."

Blake, you say the nicest things. And you're the only contributor (thus far) from Across The Pond. Thanks.

As always, these things go both ways. When I'm working with a designer and they come up with some perfect, elegant visual idea, there's a big part of me going, "Bastard. I wish I could do that." But I love it too - it shakes the brain out of its verbal rut, and helps me think in new ways. Which is the whole point behind this dialogue I'm hoping to encourage. So thanks, Blake.

The delights of trash

I snapped this on the way out of our hotel room yesterday. I love forgotten old paperbacks like this, which always crop up on hotel bookshelves. (It was sitting next to the inevitable out-of-sequence Len Deighton, another hotel classic.)

In both its appearance and the writing within, this is pure trash. (I meant to scribble down a juicy quote to pass on, but time and children wait for no man.) Nevertheless, if you're anything like me (and anything like as old), it sparks a gentle little pang of nostalgia. It's the sort of book you find in your granny's house, or on those squeaky revolving racks in the Sue Ryder shop. They've become imbued with a sort of gentle, whimsical melancholy, and I can't help but love them, trash as they are. Perhaps I'll begin a collection.

(Stop Press: The internet, of course, has just robbed me of the charming sense of mystery around this book. A quick Google reveals that Wikipedia has everything you never wanted to know about Taylor Caldwell, and there's even an Appreciation Society. I'm trying to maintain my aforementioned gentle, whimsical melancholy, but it's not an emotion that easily survives an onslaught of cold, hard facts.)

Wonderful

I said I'd get more positive, so here it is. This is the sort of thing the Internet was made for: bringing wonder and knowledge to everyone. (Well, everyone with broadband, but that's a separate issue.)

If you haven't already seen The Last Supper in Detail, check it out: a 16 billion pixel (count 'em) rendering of Leonardo's great work. You can get closer to it here than you can in real life. It's fabulous.

Da Vinci Code nuts will no doubt be zooming in on this bit:

It reminds me of the British Library's equally gorgeous and democratising Turning The Pages project, which makes many of the Library's greatest treasures available online. Also well worth a look.

Huh?

Please tell me it's not just writers who notice things like this.

If you can't be bothered with the whole ad, I'm talking about the endline: 'We start with solutions, not problems.'

How exactly do they manage that, then? This is the sort of line that kind of sounds right, but is completely meaningless. Gives copywriters a bad name. Boo. Tut. Etc.

I promise to post something glowingly positive very soon.

Design consultancy homepages: an emerging theme?

As you might imagine, I spend a fair bit of time trawling design consultancy websites. I think you work best with people you admire, so I deliberately find designers whose work I like and then pester them. Eventually they agree to a meeting or tell me to go away. Happily, it's usually the former: designers are lovely. (All those featured below, remember I said that.)

Anyway, during my recent rovings, I have detected what seems to be something of a theme in the design website world. Can you spot it?

NB:Studio

FourIV

Pocknell Studio

Slater Design

Teviot

Apologies for singling out the above (especially the ones I work with), but it's quite striking isn't it? I know there are others, too, but these are the ones I've remembered. Have you seen any more?

Fuel to the fire

Oh dear. It seems 26 member John spotted a flock of pigeons gathering, and decided to chuck a cat at it. Brace yourselves, designers. (John's a freelance writer, so I've made an executive decision to save his career by protecting his identity.)

"This is generalising but I often find many designers think on the surface. They try and make things simply look better rather than communicate better. They don't get under the skin of the problem - as writers have to. This in turn leads to a feeling that some designers don't 'get' words and what they can do. Their eye is tuned into style and not content. They run scared of words. Too often they look at them as objects that clutter up a layout. I'll bet most of the designers I've worked with don't read books, or newspapers. They prefer the cosmetic lure of the eye-candy."

Blimey. John says he's generalising, and he certainly is. From my perspective, I genuinely haven't had the sort of negative experience John clearly has. I've certainly come across designers who seem to concentrate entirely on styling the surface, but I'm pretty sure even most of them picked up a book from time to time.

Indeed, one of my long-term design partners frequently turned up to the studio with imposingly hefty novels tucked under his arm - and hefty in a Tom Wolfe rather than a Tom Clancy sort of way. Mind you, he was very much an 'ideas-first' designer rather than a pure stylist. So maybe John's right.

Is he? And if he is, what's to be done about it - if anything? Maybe in some contexts style really is everything. Is it? Do you read books, designers? (Other than just the D&AD Annual and big books full of logos, of course.) I think you do. Go on, prove me right. (Or tell me why it doesn't matter anyway.)

Should designers try to write? Should writers try to design?

Richard gets the conversation off to a good start:

"Over the last few years there's been a fair about of chat about how great it is if designers can write. Only the other week, in Belfast, we heard Adrian Shaughnessy reiterate this idea. I like the idea. I'm a designer and enjoy messing about with words. I'm often heard to say, "I'm no writer, but what about this..." and confidently string words together for projects I'm working on. Problem is, when someone comes along and says, "I'm no designer but what about this..." us designers get seriously pissed off."

That last point is fascinating, and I'm sure it applies to many writers, too. But if you're any good in either capacity, why would you feel threatened by ideas from others?

Equally, I don't think we should let a lack of confidence in other disciplines stop us speaking up. My design ideas are always improved by the designers I work with - but that doesn't mean the original ideas are bad. (Not all of them, anyway.)

For example, I recently worked on a naming project, and I happened to have an idea for the logo, too. The designer liked it, and tweaked it in a way I hadn't expected, making the idea much clearer and more effective. Now it's going ahead, and it looks great.

Exactly the same happens with copy. Many times a designer or art director has said, as Richard does, 'I'm no writer, but what about...' Or, 'I know this isn't quite right, but what about...' As often as not, they're spot on. The copy itself might need a tweak, just as my logo did, but the ideas are bang on.

For me, this is one of the best bits of the job: sitting down with someone and bouncing ideas around. If they're any good, they'll come up with loads of things you'd never have thought of on your own. Some are verbal ideas, some visual. The best ones are usually a marriage of both. But they can come from either side. You can't stop people having ideas, and why on earth would you want to?

Ultimately, It's ideas that grab and persuade people - not typography and colour, or grammar and wordplay. Craft skills, used well, are the tools we use to make that idea sing. (Poor craft skills, of course, can bury an idea, often because they try too hard to be clever in themselves.) But the idea should come first. And anyone can have an idea.

Even account managers.

Morning all

I'm not quite sure why I've adopted a policeman's tone of voice for this first post - read into that what you will. But anyway - hello, and thanks for having me. I'll be here all week, as they say.

Apologies that I'm a bit late getting started, but I'm not actually at work right now. Instead, I'm in the midst of a long weekend at The Ickworth Hotel in Suffolk. That's how committed I am to this week's blogging.

Interesting room art at the Ickworth

So this Monday morning has begun, rather unusually, with a big fat Full English and a very nice massage in the spa. (There are other ways to convince young women to run their fingers through your hair and rub oil into your thighs, but they either demand a lot more effort or are considerably less legal.)

I'm a bit of a rambler, I'm afraid, so apologies for that. (His Majesty Stephen Fry seems to have coined a new phrase for the rambling blog: the 'blessay'. Which is nice. Or maybe ramblog?)

Anyway. As you probably know, my Big Idea For The Week is to get writers and designers talking to each other. I work mainly in the design field, but I do a bit in advertising too. As we all know, the difference in creative approaches is marked. In the latter, creative teams are made up of writer and art director, and it's a joint effort from brief to billboard. (Yes, there are other media, but none as alliterative.)

In design, however, the standard form remains to get the document, website or whathaveyou to the point where all that remains is to replace all that cod-Latin with real English. At which point my phone rings. Or, just occasionally, someone else's.

This is changing, thank Heavens, but it's still the norm.

Is it because designers couldn't give a fiddle-dee-dee about writing? I don't think so. (A few of my compatriots might disagree, as future posts will reveal.) Pretty well all the designers I work with seem to have at least a basic appreciation for what I do, and its value.

Is it the industry's name: design? Advertising is a non-creative-specific monicker. Maybe that's why people there are called 'creative' first and 'copywriter' or 'art director' second.

Is it history? Has the history of graphic design been one that moved from a primarily visual craft into broader communications, without letting go of its visual bias? There must be something in that, but more knowledgeable minds than mine will have better answers.

Is it money? Good writers don't come cheap (just as cheap writers rarely come good). Are we simply pricing ourselves out of the early stages of projects?

I'd love to hear your views. Thanks to everyone out there, and at 26, who's already chipped in. I'll be airing some of your thoughts as the week goes on, and I hope it'll stir some rumblings in the comments. Please stick your oars, noses and two penn'orths in whenever you feel the urge. (Or email me at mike [at] reedwords.co.uk) Thanks.

Hello Mike

So that's it from me for a bit. Next week it's Mike, all week. Again, I'm looking forward to reading some decent, properly spell checked posts. Play nicely and make sure you comment. Make him feel at home.

I'll see you next week.

Spare an hour of your incredibly valuable, important time

The nice people above are all from Bournemouth Uni. They popped in to the studio yesterday to have a quick look around and ask us a few questions.

I asked them who they were going to see after us and they said no-one. They'd contacted loads of studios but no one else had said they could come and have a look around. Some people (no names mentioned) didn't even reply. That's not very nice is it?

I've heard this before (can't find where I wrote about it) and it really fucks me off. It's just so rude.

Students are always saying to us that agencies never get back to them. Whether it's a short list of questions or a request to come and have a look around, no one bothers to reply.

I know we're not the biggest or the busiest studio in town, but surely everyone (or at least someone in the agency) can spare one hour? Just one little hour.

Let's be realistic. When these guys turned up it was a bit of a surprise as didn't realise it was one o'clock. Consequently I think my first words to them were, "Fuck". I was very busy on Thursday and could have done with having that hour to myself. But you could say that about any day, in any week, in any year. There's always something to do and there's never enough time.

But we enjoyed showing them round and we enjoyed answering their questions. But most of all I enjoyed their appreciation. You could tell it meant a lot to them that someone had bothered to show them round.

And I know the big well known studios get hundreds of requests like this and I know you can't say yes to every one. But you could say yes to one a week, couldn't you?

And you could actually take the time to reply and say no to the others.

Graphic designers not offered much tea in meetings exclusive report finds.

After this grumble, I thought I'd keep a list of all the meetings I attended (externally) in one week and all the beverages I was offered. Here are the shocking results.

Number of external meetings attended: 7
Meetings where beverages were offered: 4
Meetings where that beverage was tea: 2
Meetings where a beverage was requested: 1
Meetings where that beverage was tea: 0

FFS

Vignelli's typography.

Versus David Carson's typography.

All this via Design Observer and NY Mag.

Moscow by Martin Parr

Martin Parr blogs from the 2nd Russian Millionaire's Fair. With pictures. Brilliant.