Mike Higham

Designer • Wellington, NZ

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Constant strain of thought.

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Not the smartest cookie in the shed.

M vB

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I just kicked myself in the foot.

M vB

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And the constellation prize goes to...

C C

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I wouldn’t touch it with a bar of soap.

M vB

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Off the cuff of my head.

R. Blake

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To bring some cohesion to my colours, I chose to make each section or chapter its own colour. Each section began in the same way on: body copy on the recto page with a chapter title, headline and a solid block of colour on the verso.

It became apparent that some things needed changing, like the tongue slips on the purple section. I managed to re-write my copy to move it to the following spread. I also found that I only used orange to complement the purple, whereas yellow was used with pink, blue and green. In the end, I ditched the orange so there were four primary colours and yellow as a supporting colour to them all.

This colour system really helped bring it all together near the end.

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This particular spread was hard to get right. Lots of changes to how dominant the quotes where and where the body copy lived (eventually it was moved to the preceding page to help this one feel less busy).

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Evolution of the cover (the top one is the chosen one, including the spine and back cover)

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Progression of the glossary

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Earlier iterations of the quote pages. Some of the pages speak negatively of mistakes, saying they happen because of ignorance and vanity. Earlier, I played around with using a dark colour as a way of symbolising this dark tone. This got dropped and I found by making my chapters clearer and using the copy was able to make this change in tone and pace without using the ugly dark colours I tried.

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These quote pages were particularly troublesome.

I felt they really added to the content in an important way by giving various opinions on what a slip of the tongue or a mistake means. I particularly like the Paul McCartney quote where he said Ringo's slips of the tongue were "always wonderful, very lyrical...sort of magic."

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Evolution of certain spreads (oldest top left, most recent bottom right). Did a lot of exploring of when and where to appy colour, how to create new 'chapters' and placement of objects. So many iterations...so many trees...!

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Testing colours, paper stocks and clear ink.

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Similar to the website, the app's design came together relatively quickly as it borrowed its aesthetics from the posters, stickers and website. The idea of the app was really what makes it interesting and unique; the rest is mostly functional and is simply about facilitating an offline experience. The sooner we can people off of this app and into a cafe with one of their friends (but which one??), the better!

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A super important part of this campaign was to get people to become advocates for the message by sharing content (online versions of the posters) and selfies taken on their "blind date". This would help spread the message even further, and best of all, keep the message going around and around people's social media accounts.

This cycle of messaging is hugely important, much better than a single, limited-time-only installation or a series of posters that are only up for a week.

Think about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge — it went around the world and is estimated to have helped raise $US100m dollars for ALS charities, partly because there was always fresh content getting uploaded to social media (new videos of people throwing ice on themselves). In a similar way, new content is being generated by users/the audience in the form of selfies with their "blind date".

So it might not look too pretty being on social media, but it's hugely important and cannot be underrated!

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A feature of the website was to have a phone with text animated inside it. The text would continually change, spelling out different ways of expressing laughter to mock how ridiculous some of these acronyms are and how far short they fall from actually laughing!