THIS SEMESTER I MADE

Work by @J_mieSutherl_nd, @NYUAbuDhabi student and part of Graphic Design Studio led by @goffredodotcom

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a poster for a program I co-organised. 

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a poster for our university’s 24-Hour Film Race, which I organised. 

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a poster for our university’s Open Mic Night, which I organise. 

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a poster letting students know how to prevent mold. 

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a poster for our university’s Open Mic Night, which I organise.

[thissemesterimade]

(Applying with design)

If there's anything I've learnt over the past few months, it's not only that design is all around us, but also that everyone around us is a designer. Design doesn't mean 'proficiency in a certain piece of software' or 'good at drawing'. Design is a way of thinking about the world, a way of approaching problems, a way of dealing with the world around us.

As part of a recent selection process for a competitive position at a leading advertising agency, I worked with many other applicants across a day's worth of activities. These ranged from the deceptively simple (presenting an ad in two minutes) to the more obviously challenging (producing a campaign for a real brand in four hours). 

I'm not a technological expert. I've pretty good with computers, as they say, but I've never thought of myself as a real tech whiz. But I have had a lot of experience working with technology under pressure, and I felt confident preparing slides and mock-ups of print and online ads under time pressure. Ideas, often, are too easy; delivery is the difficult part.

Delivery doesn't just always just mean sending everything over as an attachment to an email. We were also required to present our ideas, explaining our process and our insight. Skill at public speaking isn't rare, and many people, especially at a competitive stage like this, aren't nervous in front of a crowd. But delivery your ideas not just confidently, but also clearly, is more of a challenge. 

As Denzel Washington's character says repeatedly in Philadelphia, 'Explain it to me like I'm a four-year old.' That's my mantra for any presentation. It doesn't mean that things need to be simplified; only that they need to be clear. It's crucial to walk people through your processes, and it's easy to get lost when someone's been talking for anything more than a few minutes. Clarity, not simplicity, is key. 

Clarity is at the heart of design. Throughout that assessment day, I was designing. Not just the creative work I produced, but also my introductions, my presentations, my entire presence. It's not duplicitous: it's simply about working out what you're there to achieve. Sometimes, it's just about being the most casual, everyday version of yourself, and then five minutes later, it can be about being professional and clear –it's about being a designer. 

[thissemesterimade]

a poster for our university’s Open Mic Night, which I organise. 

[thissemesterimade]

(Ubiquity in design)

For some time now, I've been partial to the Lobster font. I first used it in spring 2013, in a birthday video for a friend, and since then it's cropped up in various projects I've worked on. Last week, as part of a hypothetical brief from Massimiliano Sagrati from Humus Design, I was asked to design a logo for a pizza shop and restaurant in Rome. 

After some initial research, I saw that many similar restaurants around the world use branding that relies not so much on a graphic logo as a typographical logo:

I set out to create something similar for this hypothetical brand, and quickly hit upon my insight into its identity: it combines both the new and the traditional. 

Many Italian restaurants seek to bring together their culinary heritage and a contemporary style. The Nonna Lina Pastificio brand takes this to an extreme: named after the grandmother of its owners, it is  family history embodied in a brand new restaurant, and it needed a logo design, typography based or otherwise, to match. 

I wanted to combine typefaces that represented this heritage and this newness. The former was easy: Bodoni. It is a classic Italian typeface with an illustrious yet familiar history, which easily captured the tradition of the pastificio. But choosing something modern was more difficult. I was looking for something friendly, almost a script. A sense of fun. 

Enter Lobster. As I said, I knew Lobster quite well. It captured all that I wanted to portray with this logo. But while searching to download it on the computer I was working on, I found this site: Lobster Is The New Comic Sans. That statement is easy to refute quickly on some level. Lobster is a far better designed typeface than Comic Sans, but the site does have a point. Lobster is become ubiquitous. 

Does that actually matter? As some of the site's critics have pointed out, there's a vast difference between ubiquity in the eyes of a graphic designer and ubiquity in the eyes of the market; most people never realise Helvetica is all around them all the time. With that in mind, I went ahead with the typeface and included it in the logo. 

Time will tell whether Lobster will reach the point of over-saturation that Comic Sans is now lumped with. For now, I like it as font with attractive ligatures and a simple style. It captures the friendliness of Nonna Lina, I hope, and gives this brand the two sides that I think make it unique. 

[thissemesterimade]

a logo for a hypothetical pasta shop and restaurant in Rome.

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(Longevity in design)

We were discussing earlier this week the recent work of Roberto Casati that proposed a new design of the multiplication table. The current model has of course been around for centuries, so you may well ask – why bother? There is, I think, something in human nature that suggests longevity = success. If something has been around for a long time, it must work. 'If it ain't broke...' etc. But, perhaps, we don't always notice this brokenness just because we're so used to seeing it. 

This means we often also resort to the same old tropes. I debated long and hard about using the moustache graphics you can see in the below images. Moustaches are everywhere now. They're hip, they're cool, they're youthful and fashionable. The Career Development Center at NYU Abu Dhabi even used one to advertise their pizza party: 

My own event is of course actually centered on moustaches. It's a party to mark the end of Movember, a movement dedicated to moustaches. What else could I use? Surely it had to be the 'stache. As you can see, I went with it, but I hope the design stands out in its visually cluttered environment. How long will the moustache stay trendy? It's certainly been a good year or two now, and these fads to tend to go as quickly as they come. 

I'd say the moustache doesn't really have longevity. It's always going to crop up as a marker of hip individuality, but the level of saturation it's at right now is untenable. Perhaps it'll be the goatee next... The longevity of a trope, an icon, a design is at the whim of the audience, but all too often the audience doesn't really it's seeing the same thing again and again and again. And that probably actually works in a designer's favour, because we all know there's nothing original left to say or do, right? 

[thissemesterimade]

a poster, ticket and Facebook post for a program I'm organising. 

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(Audience + selfies + inspiration)

Two associates from the French design firm Graines d'Octets visited this week, and gave a hypothetical brief to design a campaign advertising an exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi that would feature three hundred masterpieces from major museums across France. The most crucial aspect of the brief? The audience: students at NYU Abu Dhabi. 

Manarat al Saadiyat is a ten minute drive from the NYUAD campus, and regularly features some actually very impressive exhibitions. But do many students visit? No. Even when the Louvre Abu Dhabi opens here, and when it does it will only be about fifteen minutes away, I still doubt that many students will visit. There simply isn't an engagement with museums on the part of the majority of students here. 

So with the question of how to draw these students in, my colleague and I decided we needed to do things a little differently. From our perspective, the actual artwork to be exhibited was almost wholly irrelevant. Besides the actual 'Mona Lisa' appearing on our doorstep, these masterpieces from the likes of Matisse and Van Gogh just weren't going to cut it. 

We structured our campaign and its leading prototype poster around the digital twentysomething generation. What do we look at more than we look at art? Celebrities looking at art. We gave students the chance to see art in a new light firstly, as the very subjects/objects of the selfies they themselves like to take, as well as gave them a chance to create alongside these (sometimes literal) old masters. 

This wasn't a wholly original idea. 'Museum of Selfies' has been doing this kind of trick for a while, but I hope we upped the ante with out own Photoshop game. Over the past few weeks, I've been debating this notion of originality in design, as can be seen from the various posts below. Here, we had a clear site of inspiration, and hopefully we did enough with this flash to turn it into a purposeful campaign in its own right. 

Just waiting for the Louvre to call asking about usage rights now. 

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with Yanfei, a poster advertising a hypothetical exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi to students.

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(Timely)

I've been thinking a lot about time lately. In Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit's Graphic Design, Referenced, I learnt that the word 'deadline' stems from a line on a press used in offset printing; beyond that, text would't be printed. The Oxford Dictionary of English, however, attributes the origin of the word to prison practices: if a prisoner strayed beyond the 'deadline', they would be shot. If anything, the latter definition makes a deadline even harsher, and gives you greater reason not to cross it. 

I place great stead in punctuality. I've never understood how one cannot depend on timeliness; if I say I will be somewhere at a certain time, I will strive to make sure I will be, and I expect the same of others. If not, you're simply wasting other people's time, and, as the CEO of an advertising agency I worked for once remarked, their lives.

This of course is just as relevant for content as it is for personal interactions. The five seconds you have to watch of an ad before you can skip it on YouTube are crucial; they determine whether you're going to stay to watch or move on to what you actually wanted to watch. But while many claim that these developments in the field of advertising and new media has made us all unable to concentrate for more than six seconds at a time, I don't believe that's true. 

This is John Lewis's annual Christmas advertisement for 2014. The company, a large-scale high-end department store, has over the past few years gained popularity with its emotive Christmas campaigns, which have become more and more of an institution with each passing year. This year, '#MontyThePenguin', has already garnered over twelve million hits, but the really impressive number is that it's 130 seconds long.

This long advert screened with much fanfare on the British TV network Channel 4 last week during primetime. While most TV spots in the UK are thirty seconds long, '#MontyThePenguin' clocked in at over four times that. And it was hugely popular. The public did not, it seems, get bored after five, fifteen, fifty seconds. They stuck around for the story.

Timing is crucial, but there are no hard and fast rules. There is such a thing as being 'fashionably late', just as there is making an unbelievably popular TV spot that's over two minutes long. Much as I always claim to stand by the conventions of time, sometimes rules are there to be broken. That doesn't mean I'm ready to excuse people showing up late just yet; just that I accept that there's a time for everything.  

[thissemesterimade]

a poster for the third chapter of a program I'm co-organising. 

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(UX in '93)

'User Experience' is a fairly new term. That's not to say that no-one was thinking about a user's experience until recently; it just hadn't been expressed in such a way. Giving this concept a name has made people think more consciously about it – no bad thing. Every year, there are more and more users of everything, not just computers, and so these experiences broaden. 

The experience isn't always digital; it could be physical, as in navigating a campus. But we associate 'User Experience' with a computer-based experience, for better or for worse. The advantages of a computer-based UX are that we can experiment far more in a digital space than in a physical one; thought you can't imagine someone building a campus that's deliberately difficult to navigate, it's easy to do so online. 

Enter Windows 93. This online project simulates what a Windows operating system might have looked like had it been planned in 1993, as well as also in hell. Its programs are deliberately frustrating, its colour scheme is off-putting and its interface is generally atrocious. But that's the point. It's an experiment in a terrible UX.

We often like to marvel at bad design. There are blogs dedicated to collecting poor formatting, poor font choices, poor colour selections. WIndows 93 takes this one step further. It considers what a terrible experience is like, and allows us to marvel at how far we've come from a world where Windows 93 might not have been acceptable, but it wouldn't have been impossible.

Bad design can often teach us just as much as good design. A poor UX can teach us how to build a better one. A joke isn't always just a joke; sometimes it can allows us to wonder whether what hold up as a great achievement will ever be the basis of a joke. What will a future project called Windows 9 look like?

[thissemesterimade]

(Fair use?)

Another week, another poster, another work-around. Last week I found myself without the time to produce something as professionally as I would like; this week I encountered the same problem, but from a different angle. My brief was to create an eye-catching poster for an information session on breast cancer that suggested the session's focus on healthy eating/living, without designing anything too explicit.

The temptation of course was to be outrageous, but considering that would both be out of line with the event and the areas in which the poster was to be displayed, finding another way into the design was necessary. In conversation with the event's organisers, we hit upon the idea of oranges as representative, not least because the information presented will encourage a diet with plenty of fruit in it. 

I set out to do some research, figuring it wouldn't be too tricky to find images of oranges that could be duplicated and arranged to resemble breasts. After a fair amount of Googling in this vein, I opened an Incognito Window and looked around for 'orange breasts' etc. to see if anyone had tried a similar approach before. Of course, someone had: 

Wonderbra, of all companies. The design was exactly what I was looking for. Who came up with it I'm not sure – I can't find an advertising agency attached to it, or a marketing department, or a graphic design studio. There is this forum, which suggests it's just an exercise. As one commenter points out, the ad would work better for almost any other lingerie brand; Wonderbra is one of the few that doesn't promise a 'natural' fit. 

But back to my own ad. I edited out the oranges, dropped them into a new format, and made my own poster. I would say I straight out stole this other designer's content, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. My own project isn't commercial; indeed, it's educational. But does that excuse what is essentially plagiarism? To counter that, I am writing this post: explaining my sources. But I'm not sure that's enough.

Almost all of the posters I've made this semester have used creative content that I don't have a right to. If this was commercial work, I'd have to structure my workflow completely differently. I look forward to learning more about that process, but for now I'm unsure how to proceed. I can't just keep stealing, can I?