World War 1 lecture videos

These are the videos I used in the lecture on 19 November

British War Posters

This video shows a selection of recruiting and other morale-boosting posters from the British. Compared with the German and Russian selection shown in the lecture, they are less aesthetically accomplished. However, it could be argued that because they used a visual language that was entirely familiar to its audience, borrowed from advertising imagery at the time (and largely produced by the same people who created commercial advertising) the posters were far more successful than some of their ‘better’ designed European counterparts.

Music: Pack Up Your Troubles

British War Artists

The British armed forces have a long history of official artists, what we would now call ‘embedded’ (nothing’s new, it seems).
They were commissioned to capture the atmosphere and story of battles and other engagements for regimental histories. Hundreds (thousands) of paintings and drawings were made which have rarely, if ever, been seen.
Many are kept in the archives of the Imperial War Museum but are now available to view online.

This video, a mood setter for the lecture, shows a small selection but they are much more impressive when viewed ‘properly’ on the IWM website. Some of the images are quite horrific and seem to bring home the true extent of the conflict much more than photography or film could do.

The music is the Agnus Dei, from Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ composed in the 1960s.
The work combines the Catholic requiem mass with the poetry of Wilfred Owen.
In this movement the tenor sings the poem ‘At A Calvary Near The Ancre’ while the choir sings ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserer nobis/ Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserer nobis/ Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem’ (Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace).

The words of the poem, together with an explanation, are below:

One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.

Near Golgotha strolls many a priest,
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ’s denied

The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate

The poem describes a ‘Calvary’, a crucifixion scene that was often placed at crossroads in France (examples still exist today). Owen uses the fact that the figure of Christ has lost a limb to describe some of the absurdities of religious attitudes to war.
“Near Golgotha strolls many a priest” refers to the chaplains who accompanied troops to the Front and who claimed that wounds gained in the fighting were things of which to be proud. “Flesh-marked by the Beast” refers to the Devil and to the enemy, the claim being that the war was a righteous one, and that God was on ‘our’ side (the same of course being claimed by all combatants).

“The scribes on all the people shove/And bawl allegiance to the state” is a description of how the pulpit is used to denounce those who object to the war.
The last two lines are ambiguous, and in his setting of the poem to music Britten appears to read them as saying that those who are willingly laying down their lives are doing so for love of their friends and family, and strangers back home – this is not a time for hate. This would be typical of Owen, who often used irony in his poems; he is saying that the priests are advocating hatred, which is exactly the opposite of the message embodied in the crucifixion scene that sparked the poem.

Wilfred Owen was killed at the age of 25, a few days before the end of the war. He had originally been sent back to Britain suffering from shellshock. Posted first to a hospital in Scarborough, and then to Ripon (scene of Britain’s biggest army camp) he chose to return to the Front, despite his opposition to the war, rather than accept a safer posting back home.

Being too literal in logo design

In one of my lectures, on visual communication, I use a little exercise to illustrate an aspect of semiotics.

I give the students a brief: they are to design a logo for a law firm that specialises in family law, dealing with families who are facing some form of legal entanglement. I tell them they have two minutes to come up with an idea.
Two minutes later I stop them and ask them all to stand up. I then start eliminating them by saying things like “sit down if you drew a police badge”. That usually gets rid of about half. A gavel gets rid of several more, as do jail bars, a law book, a police light and so on.
Before long we’re down to the last few students and I can usually get rid of them too with ‘hands’ or ‘cut out people’. I also eliminate anyone who used just words or initials (words aren’t so bad of course, I’m just being mean, but initials for firms always bemuse me – IBM and a few others aside, of course).

If there’s anyone left standing it’s either because I’ve missed a really obvious one (last year it was a bird, this year it was a court house) or because they’ve done something quite abstract – this year it was a square with four circles around it. Nice one. We have a winner.

(Just remembered, Orlando Weeks now of The Maccabees, “won” this a few years ago when he did a logo of “a unicorn jumping over a rainbow”. Mmm…)

The point I’m trying to make in that exercise, other than it being a bit of a break from them listening to me drone on, is that when faced with a quick challenge like that, students (everyone) tend to to think not in cliches (I happen to think cliches are good things – they’re how we communicate) but in too literal a sense. The last thing, I say, someone who is facing juvenile court on a shoplifting charge wants to see is a logo for a lawyer that screams “you’re going to jail!”.
Look at supermarkets – how many of them have logos that show a basket of shopping? (I seem to be the only one who thinks the Lidl logo looks like someone pushing a trolley)

I came up with this little game (which makes more sense in the context of the lecture than it does here) a few years ago when some graphic design students at a previous job were asked by a local law firm to come up with a logo for a similar brief. The winner was a half open door with light coming through it. The tutor loved it, the clients loved it. I hated it. They thought it said “there is hope”. I thought it said “you’re doomed”. But then, that’s me for you.
It did, however, make me look anew at logos to try to find the overly literal. And while there are a few, they’re pretty rare and almost universally poor. I won’t link to any here – look for yourself you lazy git.

All of which brings me to something that amused me. A couple of years ago, after I’d done this exercise with them, some students came in to my office with something they’d found in the Yellow Pages. An ad for a law firm which fell in to exactly the trap I’d laid for them (click on the image for a larger version). I think this is a pretty amazing/bad piece of advertising – I’ll have to add prison tattoos to my list for next year’s lecture.

How to sell chocolate

Naresh Ramchandani writes in The Guardian:

Call me a choco-Luddite, but isn’t a Twix essentially a Mars with shortbread in the shape of a KitKat? A Nestlé Crunch essentially an Aero with the chewy bits from a Picnic? But if a standard chocolate bar is relatively indistinguishable from other brands, cheap and easy to produce, how on earth do you sell one? Simple. By wrapping it in something that’s more distinct, more valuable and more important than the chocolate bar itself.

1. Wrap it in sex

This is what Cadbury’s Flake has done for years: beautiful women lie in baths or sit thoughtfully on the back of caravans and bite dreamingly and somewhat sexually into their Flakes in silent statements about a loveless world …

Flake advertising is a heady mixture of innuendo, broken hearts, chocolate and, as of last week, fame – as Joss Stone became the first famous Flake girl. Stone is beautiful, has already sung about pesky men in songs like You Had Me plus, like any true Flake girl, it seems she can eat chocolate and stay stick-thin. The ad shows her alone in the studio, singing the words of the famous Flake jingle as if it were a heartbreak anthem.

2. Wrap it in self-sacrifice

Think of the Creme Eggs campaign, where various eggs find ways to top themselves and release their inner goo to the world. The posters are OK, the games on the website are OK too, but the really funny part of the campaign is the television executions – where animated Creme Eggs use everyday objects like egg slicers and garlic crushers to commit goo-liberating hari-kari.

And am I overinterpreting a bit when I say that the ads are very timely? The eggs are here for Easter – according to my old RE teacher Easter is a time when, like the eggs, a famous historical figure gave his life to release goodness into the world. Is Cadbury’s using its new multimedia campaign not just to spread the word – but the word? Let’s see if it resurrects the campaign next year.

3. Wrap it in stimulation

Thanks to one of the country’s longest-lasting jingles, I grew up thinking that ‘a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’. It is of course a total overclaim – if all these things could be experienced in some time-release sequence, Mars would be sold in capsules over the counter. If they could be experienced simultaneously, why would anyone bother with illegal drugs?

The old jingle is back – albeit with some judicious editing. A balanced diet ruling means that Mars cannot say ‘a Mars a day’ anymore – which may not be a bad thing.

4. Wrap it in nod and a wink

If the choc bar ad formula is to make a chocolate bar mean far more than it does, the perfect subversion of the formula is to mock that. Enter a man playing drums in a gorilla suit in by far the best chocolate bar ad of recent times.

If Flake is the bar of sex, is Dairy Milk the bar of passion and potency? The first time you watch the Dairy Milk ad, you find yourself wondering. Then the gorilla pounds the drums, Phil Collins sings over-earnestly, you giggle and know it isn’t so. It’s just a tasty piece of confectionery wrapped in a playful piece of advertising, just as profound as a bar of mass-produced chocolate should be.

Social norms diverted, social connections made

What happens when you constantly change the signs on toilet doors? Watch the video below to find out…

The semiotics of soap powder packaging

Rob Walker in The New York Times offers an analysis of a branding icon (illustration by Peter Arkle):

Today will mark the first time that Tide has appeared in a Super Bowl commercial. This is a little surprising, given that Super Bowl ads are practically synonymous with mass brands and the Procter & Gamble detergent is about as mass as it gets. Indeed, the orange-and-yellow circles of its logo have that rare instant-read power that suggests not just Tide but branding in general. In a 2005 Advertising Age assessment of ‘brand endurance’ of several well-known consumer names, Tide stood out for having increased its share of the detergent market over its long life: from 31 percent in 1952 to 40 percent more than half a century later. Last year P.&G.’s top marketing executive told Fortune that Tide is ‘one of our fastest-growing’ brands.

Today’s Super Bowl ad is not for the detergent itself but for a spinoff stain-removing product called Tide to Go. And while once there was a thing called Tide, a visit to Tide.com finds 39 different kinds of Tide: Coldwater Tide, Tide With a Touch of Downy, Tide With Bleach, Tide With Bleach Alternative, Tide With Febreze, floral scents, ‘mountain’ scents and original scent. Recent eco-conscious variations include concentrated Tide and Tide for use with ‘high efficiency’ appliances. All that’s missing are sugar free-and menthol. While this responds to consumer demand for variety, it brings certain challenges to the iconic power that is one of Tide’s marketplace strengths: namely, balancing that recognizable design with the idea of a range of choices.

To assess the Tide logo in the contemporary marketplace, I consulted J. Duncan Berry of Applied Iconology, a consulting firm. Berry has a Ph.D. in art history from Brown and for a time taught there and at the Rhode Island School of Design, but these days his specialty is semiotic analysis of package design for consumer-product companies. What this means is that he applies the close-reading analytical skills you might associate with deconstructing a novel or a work of art to the breaking down of logos and packaging to their ‘constituent parts’ and ‘indexical signs.’ He seems to enjoy it.

Berry noted the effectiveness of the original Tide package, which communicated ‘cyclone in a box,’ he says. ‘There’s this great dynamic tension there. The word ‘Tide’ is bursting out of the circle, and the circle is standing out of the box. It’s almost a baroque composition; it’s like what Steven Spielberg would do if he were designing a brand.’ The idea was that Tide is ‘a force of nature — it’s a phase shift.’ After all, an effective synthetic detergent was a real innovation in 1947, a result of years of expensive research and development. The bull’s-eye look was actually borrowed from earlier P.&G. products, Dash and Oxydol. But in his memorable culture and design book, ‘The Total Package,’ Thomas Hine noted that ‘some sophisticated color research’ — involving a psychologist who specialized in such things — went into selecting a bright scheme that would suggest ‘sufficient power,’ tempered with the ‘likable’ blue that had a more ‘sensitive’ connotation. Reaching the market just as automatic washing machines were catching on, Tide was a sensation; anecdotal accounts from the time suggest people lined up to get hold of the stuff — as if it were an iPhone.

Berry’s reading suggests that it has become a lot harder to strike a visual balance in the many-Tides world. Consider Tide With Febreze, with a label that Berry compares to ‘an illusionistic landscape,’ cluttered with many signifiers: ‘You have this grass that signals freshness, and Febreze sort of in the middle ground of the landscape, and Tide is like the sunset.’ The problem, he contends, is that it doesn’t cohere into a message with instant emotional impact. The product 2X Ultra Tide HE presents ‘more of an abstract composition,’ Berry continues, with the high-efficiency washing-machine icon, standing on a sort of green ribbon, casting a shadow on a Tide logo. The most noticeable thing about this more eco-aware version of Tide is that the bottle isn’t orange but a pearly hue that suggests purity. ‘Are people going to believe,’ Berry wonders, ‘that Tide is going to be the power cleanser — and the soft, natural cleanser at the same time?’

Still, the sales figures suggest that even if the many Tides speak many graphic languages, sometimes garbled, something is managing to connect with disparate consumer desires. It may be the one thing that Berry found to be the strongest element of every niche Tide design: that screaming orange logo. Maybe it’s a legacy of another era, one that seems much less sophisticated than our own — but 60 years later, it’s the one visual element in all the Tide variations that still really works.

Three Little Pigs ‘too offensive’

BBC News reports an interesting story of race and representation:

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned by a government agency’s awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.
The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that ‘the use of pigs raises cultural issues’.

Becta, the government’s educational technology agency, is a leading partner in the annual Bett Award for schools.

The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders.

The book’s creative director, Anne Curtis, said the idea that including pigs in a story could be interpreted as racism was ‘like a slap in the face’.

The CD-Rom digital version of the traditional story of the three little pigs, called Three Little Cowboy Builders, is aimed at primary school children.

But judges at this year’s Bett Award said that they had ‘concerns about the Asian community and the use of pigs raises cultural issues’.

The Three Little Cowboy Builders has already been a prize winner at the recent Education Resource Award – but its Newcastle-based publishers, Shoo-fly, were turned down by the Bett Award panel.

The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they ‘could not recommend this product to the Muslim community’.

They also warned that the story might ‘alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)’.

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: ‘Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?’

Ms Curtis said that rather than preventing the spread of racism, such an attitude was likely to inflame ill-feeling. As another example, she says would that mean that secondary schools could not teach Animal Farm because it features pigs?

Her company is committed to an ethical approach to business and its products promote a message of mutual respect, she says – and banning such traditional stories will ‘close minds rather than open them’.

Becta, the government funded agency responsible for technology in schools and colleges, says that it is standing by the judges’ verdict.

‘Becta with its partners is responsible for the judging criteria against which the 70 independent judges, mostly practising teachers, comment. All the partners stick by the judging criteria,’ said a Becta spokesman.

The reason that this product was not shortlisted was because ‘it failed to reach the required standard across a number of criteria’, said the spokesman.

Becta runs the awards with the Besa trade association and show organisers, Emap Education.

Merlin John, author of an educational technology website which highlighted the story, warns that such rulings can undermine the credibility of the awards.

‘When benchmarks are undermined by pedestrian and pedantic tick lists, and by inflexible, unhelpful processes, it can tarnish the achievements of even the most worthy winners.

‘It’s time for a rethink, and for Becta to listen to the criticisms that have been ignored for a number of years,’ said Mr John.

Battle ahead for ‘cigarette pack’ books

The Guardian reports:

Last summer, the small British publisher and design company Tank hit on the idea of producing a range of classic books packaged like cigarettes. Abridged works and short stories by Kafka and Conrad, Tolstoy and Kipling, Hemingway and Stevenson, which looked like packs of 20 cigarettes, were duly distributed through bookshops and the Design Museum.
The books, released as Tales to Take Your Breath Away at the start of the cigarette ban in pubs and restaurants last July, were well received by the design press and have made popular Christmas presents. But now the publishers are having to inhale deeply themselves as British American Tobacco (BAT) claims that one of the packs, containing Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Undefeated, resembles its own Lucky Strike pack. Claiming that such an association could seriously damage the health of the brand, BAT is trying to have the works pulped.

Baker & McKenzie, the London law firm representing BAT, claims the ‘rectangular device, white background … circular device and a stripe across the top of the box’ are the ‘dominant and distinctive elements’ that belong to Lucky Strike. Furthermore, such packaging ‘is likely to deceive members of the public to believe that BAT has either endorsed, sponsored or is in some way connected’ with the books, a confusion ‘which can dilute the goodwill in the Lucky Strike brand’.
Masoud Golsorkhi, co-founder and creative director of Tank, which is based in London, said: ‘I had been toying with the idea of using the cigarette packs for some time. When we heard about the smoking ban it seemed like it was now or never.

‘I thought that producing a book that was small enough to be easily carried everywhere with you, like a packet of cigarettes, could be a good alternative – and the packaging made it fun.’

Golsorkhi said the design also introduced reading to people who did not take in much literature. ‘All my professional life has been about the image, but without words thinking isn’t possible and it saddens me to be working with people in their 20s who are smart but profess to having never read a single book.’

He added he was shocked at the idea the books might be pulped. ‘I am appalled that these great and beautiful books should be destroyed. [BAT's] contention is that we are damaging their business. I suggest that the opposite is true and that they should lighten up.’

Many in the design world agree. ‘The Tank books are a really fun, great idea,’ said fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, in whose shops the books are sold, ‘and at least they don’t damage your health.’

TankBooks responded via its Brighton-based lawyers, Be., to BAT’s claims by showing that a large number of cigarette brands have a circular motif similar to that of Lucky Strike. It says members of the public are unlikely to mistake a Hemingway novel for a packet of cigarettes.

A BAT spokeswoman said it was its policy to approach anyone using a design that closely resembled its brands. ‘In the UK, we operate in an environment where any form of advertising of our product is banned. We also make it very clear that our products are for adults only and should never be marketed to children. We would therefore be concerned if anyone thought we were behind an initiative that aims to spark an interest in fiction for young people by using our brand.’ She added that BAT always tried to resolve disputes amicably and talks were continuing.

The Subjectivity of Wine

If you were interested in the experiment I did with the sweets back in week two, here’s an article that recounts some similar experiments, this time with wine and so-called ‘experts’. Interesting stuff!

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the ‘red’ wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its ‘jamminess,’ while another enjoyed its ‘crushed red fruit.’ Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was ‘agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,’ while the vin du table was ‘weak, short, light, flat and faulty’. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

What these experiments neatly demonstrate is that the taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of our inputs, and cannot be solved in a bottom-up fashion. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our simplest sensations and extrapolating upwards. When we taste a wine, we aren’t simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our ‘scheme’) and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world (‘the content’). Instead, in Davidson’s influential epistemology, the ‘organizing system and something waiting to be organized’ are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing to be subjective about. In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised that different people like different bottles of cheap wine.

(Via The Frontal Cortex : The Subjectivity of Wine.)

The trouble with CBeebies

A good overview of ‘representation’ in action:

It all started with Lola, the googly-eyed heroine of the CBeebies series Charlie and Lola. First created by the children’s writer Lauren Child, Lola is a very sweet little girl. Intelligent, funny and rather rebellious, she winds up her brother, has an incredible vocabulary and truly possesses a mind of her own. She is therefore the closest the CBeebies channel comes to having any kind of feminist icon. All good stuff, except for one fatal flaw – she just had to be given a love of pink milk.

I watch many hours of CBeebies, the BBC channel for viewers aged two to five, and the pink milk is where I started to go a bit mad.

(Via Read more.)

The hidden, the obscure and the unexplained

As promised, here’s an interesting counterpoint to the argument I made in lecture 2 for design to communicate quickly. I mentioned that sometimes a design with ‘ludic’ quality (i.e. a puzzle) was often a good idea, and there are some examples here. But there are also examples of design that has no apparently ready explanation whatsoever – the Lyle’s golden syrup is a favourite of mine from childhood.

The hidden, the obscure and the unexplained:

In the design business we’re generally trained to communicate, and quickly. It’s virtually impossible for me to think of anything I’ve designed in the last 15 years that wasn’t intended to explain itself in some way, as fast as possible.

That doesn’t mean to say that design is free from the obscure, or the unexplained. One classic example is the pack for Lyle’s golden syrup, featuring a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of bees. Apparently this is a biblical reference (obviously an allegory much discussed in the Johnson family as we drip the golden goo onto our pancakes). It’s remained on the tin for over a century, seemingly oblivious to those who would enhance it with their 3d Photoshop filters and a couple of shadows (or maybe both).

History seems to help some of the odder designs that surround us. Spend any time at all in Italy and you’ll spot Agip’s petrol station dog, and wonder about its meaning. What you may not spot is that said fire-breathing dog has 6 legs. True.

It apparently came about after a poster design competition in 1952 when the winning design was selected to be the symbol. It’s alleged that its real designer entered under a pseudonym and died before being discovered, never having to offer up an explanation for his creation. Popular theories are either that the dog is Wagnerian in origin, or based on Greek or African mythology. The official explanation at the time was that four of the six legs represent the car, the other two its driver. Obviously.

What’s clear is that Agip’s dog remains fantastically memorable, so hang the consequences and put those ‘fire and petrol don’t mix’ reports from health and safety back on the cupboard please. Of course if you walked into a modern design presentation with a packaging idea based around a dead lion surrounded by bees or a six-legged fire-breathing canine, you’d be swiftly shown the door, or locked up. But there was a trend some time ago towards ‘invention of tradition’, so perhaps this kind of approach will eventually come full-circle?

Some symbolic solutions remain forever a mystery to their users. How many yummy-mummy’s on the school run have ever paused to contemplate that the three prongs of the Mercedes symbol on their bonnet reflect Gottlieb Daimler’s desire to show the aptitude of his motors to land, sea or air? How long did it take the fact that NatWest’s symbol is technically a diagram of the merging of three banks (the National Provincial, the Westminster and the District) to become irrelevant? Both have become simple visual shorthand for their organisations, their true meaning almost completely irrelevant.

Do Toblerone eaters see the swiss symbol of the Bern bear when they guzzle their triangles? Do CND marchers discuss the precedents of their flags (the semaphore for the ‘N’ and ‘D’ of Nuclear and Disarmament)? I suspect not.

Modern designers still can’t resist the occasional bit of sleight of hand. The much discussed FedEx logo only reveals its hidden arrow to about half of its viewers.

I’m sure 99.9% of people see the smile, or the arrow in Amazon’s logo, but how many get the reference of ‘from A to Z’? Both of these organisations have chosen to leave these as devices to be discovered, not plastered on 96 sheets on your local highway. The designers of the Amazon logo, Turner Duckworth, have experimented in sleight of hand before – this stamp design from 1997 doesn’t give away its secret too quickly until you see the face of the Spitfire’s designer (Mitchell) in the clouds behind the plane.

Our unwillingness to unpick corporate symbolism means that some corporations can play fast and loose with their identities with no apparent change in their fortunes.

BT’s adoption of a one-footed piper ruffled a few feathers due to its hefty implementation bill (allegedly 60 million pounds) but few seemed to pick up on the idea that it symbolised one person listening and another speaking. (In fact more time seemed to be spent alleging that the red bit of the pipers body is actually a snake – look closer and you’ll see it). The ‘listening/speaking’ idea was briefly animated into end-frames but hastily shelved by the ad agencies keen to relegate the logo back to a simple end-frame.

The grandest conceit happened only recently, when the proposed logo for BT’s ill-fated international arm, Concert (a ‘C’ made up of coloured spinning discs) was simply recycled and shipped in to replace the piper. So what started as a ‘C’ logo ended us as a sort of ‘world’ blob, and the truly awful bit (that out-of-balance typography) remained unchanged. Shame.

Even trained professionals can miss some of these ideas. Many art directors would have enjoyed the historical pastiche of these recent Peeterman ads for Stella, but remained oblivious to the hidden USP, that the beer’s alcoholic strength (4%) is typographically buried into every application.

None of these designs would be seen as failures, many would be heralded as successes. The ‘aha’ factor when a consumer ‘gets’ the hidden message might well work in a design’s favour – they’ve managed to unlock the code and give themselves a psychological pat on the back by doing so.

And perhaps eat more Toblerone, send more Fedex parcels, order more books on Amazon and drink more of that beer. Yes, perhaps.

By Michael Johnson

(Via the johnson banks thought for the week.)