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Branding Politics.

Since my last political post was such a success, (thanks to all 3 of you who read it), I’ve decided to take this in a direction that I know about – branding. All my comments are based on my personal opinions (duh) and do not reflect the policies or action of any of the mentioned political parties. </end disclaimer>

So, it’s election time in Singapore and we all know what that means. Our normal, carefully-landscaped towns will be plastered with party logos and faces. Much like this:

Good lord. There’s only so much a designer’s heart can take before I rip off the poster screaming, “No more drop shadow!!” (Dear po-po, please don’t arrest me, I’m not going to remove these posters. It’s just cynical wit) I have no idea why every political party in Singapore have the same damn posters – one with all the faces of their representatives, and another of their logo. And that’s it. In every town, every political party uses the same damn formula. You’d think that with the directive to move into a first world parliament, we’d at least try to look smart about it.

Needless to say, the ruling People’s Action Party goes for the same look at every print run – blurry background of the city/people with a tagline on the front. Thankfully, this time they have dropped the ridiculous 80’s photoshopping of feathered multi-racial faces. Oh, I’m not kidding about the feathering. To their credit, this has been their look and feel for years and they’re running with it. I genuinely wish someone would advise them on how to use their logo properly on a coloured background, without that feathering.

Then, there’s the contesting opposition party in my town, Singapore Democratic Alliance. This is their website.

Talk about a visual rock and a hard place. This website pains me. The complete lack of cohesion between the logo and the look and the feel is unsettling. I’m assuming this is obviously a template, which makes me feel bad for them but at the same time – a plain white blogpress with black fonts would have elevated their brand value 100 times over. This is not a simple case of “is this pretty?” or “would I pay $2 for this product?”. This question you ask yourself is “Do I want them in my government?” A political party is a product like any other – from your first point of contact with them, you need to know what they do, what they believe and if they’re good at it. After that, everything falls into place. The best branding is often the simplest because it gives the individual room to place themselves within your personality. This website makes me want to play World Warcraft or something. Horrendous.

This is a photo of a Worker’s Party team after Nomination Day, 27th April 2011. This is the perfect example of when an brilliantly simple idea transcends the visual appeal. They gave out umbrellas. Whoever thought of that idea should pat themselves on the back. 1. They’re lighter than carrying flags. 2. Your logo (which is imperative for Singapore voting) is ever-present 3. It offers the intangible feeling of protection 4. It was fucking hot, so they made sense.

So far, the party leading the way in political branding has to be Singapore Democratic Party. I’m pretty sure they have a professional designer/advisor working with them. I know this because nobody else would think of doing a favicon for a website. Not only that, they have actually used Facebook tabs to help expand their fan page. They’re also made excellent videos, have teaser lead-ins to all their videos, are consistent with their clothes. Perhaps the one area that they’re missing is response to comments on Facebook. That would definitely elevate their value because people don’t just want personality, they want personal too.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxqMltjX-Ek]

And now it’s time for the juggernaut. When Barack Obama was running for the 2008 election, his team came out with such a beautiful logo. It makes you feel so tender, hopeful and patriotic and I’m not even American! I loved that they employed such cohesive branding tactics – it made their campaign feel so elegant, so put-together and tight. Beyond the printed materials, he even had theme songs. Talk about a well-rounded campaign. Here’s a great article on the development of the 08 logo.

I think a lot of people would feel that the PAP has more money – thus equating more presence but that shouldn’t be the case. It’s the smallest budgets that inspires big ideas. I wish that in the last 5 years, these opposition parties would have incorporated solid design that moves by itself – that people want to use as a car decal, or a t-shirt or put in their storefont. The product is obviously the most important part but so’s the wrapping.

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We Don’t Need Another Logo.

(Yes, the title of this post is set to that Tina Turner song)

As a designer, one of my most disliked pieces to create, is definitely the logo. Some designers and agencies do no more than indulge their passion for logo and identity design – for me, I am not a fan. And this is not because it’s something I’m incapable of doing, but I’m a fan of branding beyond the logo. If you’re looking to start a business, and want to create an identity, the logo should ultimately take up about 10% of your vision, and the other 90% going into their branding. Yet, a lot of people I interact with, place about 80% of their time and vision into their logo and the remaining 20% into their branding.

Here’s where I see the problem.

A lot of focus goes into the trying to make the logo define the business – the directive is usually, for the logo to represent the business activities, its business motto, its ambitions and value. For goodness sake, it’s a logo, not a holographic personality. To illustrate my point, here’s a couple of logos where the brand recall (see, it’s “brand recall”, not “logo recall”) is infinitely more powerful than just its logo.

Good ol’ Coke. Who the hell even cares about their logo? All I care about is that it ain’t blue (Pepsi). When I think about Coke, I don’t think about it’s font-patented logo. I think about its bubbly, gassy, deep brown, refreshing goodness. I think about it on a hot day. I think about my teeth rotting sometimes. When someone asks me if I want a Coke, its logo is the furthest thing from my mind. It’s branding and extension of personality have far exceeded the limitations of a “logo”.

Everyone’s favourite brand to bring up, when branding is discussed. Nike. A brand more powerful than it’s swoosh. Ok, in the late 80’s and 90’s, the “swoosh” was a huge thing – mostly because it was a great experiment in branding. Nike released products with only the swoosh, and left out the “Nike” word. Brilliant. The brand survived. Turns out – they made something so good, they didn’t need to get by on just their name. They built a brand based on endurance, perseverance, and sportsmanship. And what survived from all this? Their tagline. Do I even have to say it?

Look at the Ikea logo. Really look at it. You could put this logo on anything and it would still make sense, or no sense at all. And yet, when the word “Ikea” is mentioned, your brain conjures up: Modular, Swedish, meatballs, the scent of inexpensive pine, allen keys, seemingly simple assembly and the inexplicable reason why you never leave Ikea empty handed.

If asked what’s the first thing I think about when someone mentions “Singapore Airlines” – it’s definitely not the bird logo (you mean you didn’t realise it was a bird?). 9 times of out 10, it’s the Singapore Girl that’s envisioned, followed by service and quality. I honestly do not think anyone thinks of the logo.

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Moral of the story: The logo is not your business’ glory point. Look at it this way: Your logo is equivalent to your name. And yet, there’s more to you than your name. There’s your personality, how you handle bad times, how you laugh, the friends you keep, the tv shows you watch, the shoes you wear. All these parts exceed the sum of your name, and by extension, your logo. Think of your business as your child. You spend at most a couple of months deciding its name and, then the next 18 years shaping its person. Look at that in relation to your time spent on the brand. Stop worrying about the font – and worry about what the sentence is. Stop worrying about the colours – and worry about the vibrancy of its personality. Once you have all this set in place, find the designer that understands how translate your branding language, visually, and you’re on the right track.

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Good Client, Bad Client.

As a designer, you tend to blame everyone else for your problems. You blame the clients, the boss, the creative briefs, the junior designers, the printers, the accounts execs (ok, it’s usually their fault), the budget, the content, the photography, etc… It’s never your fault. If all these things were in order, you would be able to produce the most beautiful work ever. But that’s the Catch-22 of design. It’s about creating something beautiful in spite of all these problems – the moment when your target audience falls in love with the product, and has no idea of all the problems and antacid it took to get that piece of work done. I believe in The Idea. A genuinely good idea rises above the follies of everything else.

So, I am now in the situation where I can’t blame the client (hey, I picked them), the boss (ok, a little self-loathing every now and then) or the account execs (I come to realise, accept and appreciate the amount of work they do) and yet, that ol’ devil called Negativity comes knocking. I have come across, what I believe to be, the Holy Grail of Clients. The appreciative client. The compliant client. The trusting client. The approving client. The paying client. In all my years of designing, I have never come across this in person. Designers, used to huddle around each other, shivering from adrenaline at 2am, whispering in fevered tones about The Perfect Client. The myth, the legend, the mirage. Could it be…? So, here’s my brief list of How to Be A Good Client and How To Recognise If You’re A Dick Client.


  1. You organise all your content into separate folders, with images labelled and captioned (Good Client)
  2. You don’t know what you want, but you know what you don’t want when you see it. (Dick Client)
  3. You choose to work with your designer on picking fonts, instead of focusing on your content. (Dick Client)
  4. You embed images into Word documents. (Dick Client) (The Devil)
  5. You appreciate your designer’s previous work and trust the direction she/he takes it to (Good Client)
  6. You need to see and be convinced that the design is going to work. (Dick Client)
  7. You don’t micro manage. (Good Client)
  8. You keep saying, “Final round of changes”. (Dick Client)
  9. You lie when you tell your designer, “It’s up to you”. (Dick Client)
  10. You pay on time. (Good Client)

(My biggest gripes are No.3 and No.4. Start writing your content instead of wasting your time with font selection. No-one’s going to give a damn about whether it’s written in Helvetica or Verdana – if there’s nothing to typeset to begin with. Let your designer design. You just stick to what you’re doing. And please stop sending me Word files that have anything except body copy in it. Embedding images in Word files wastes your time and more importantly, mine.)

I am the world’s most negative person. It’s like my brain has a positivity filter, that catches the littlest of positive thinking and says, “What are you doing here, you silly, silly thing?” I can’t remember the last time I was positive about something – truly, positive. And when it didn’t go away in 5 minutes.

I am, however, very positive (cautiously positive, is that allowed?) about my new lease of career. I am genuinely enjoying the work I am doing now – I absolutely love that I am in charge of calling the shots (in all fairness, I’m just calling them for myself… and one Chihuahua) but I love that instead of spending my hours whinging about clients, I get to drop them and move on to more stimulating work. I love that I’ve effectively stopped myself from being the person that is always complaining about work. I guess I’m fortunate enough to have skills (nunchuck skills) that lets me work from home. It’s really awesome, with a hint of claustrophobia on the side.

I now have the opportunity to work with a truly great client – and while they are most appreciative of my work – my negative spirit billows up and wonders if they’re just either being really nice or if design isn’t that big a deal to them – in the grand scheme of things. I just hope that they genuinely like the work I’ve done. It’s been a long time since I was the sole designer on any given project – and while I grew to doubt my design skills over the years, I guess it’s slowly coming back to me. Like riding a bike.

 

p.s. Don’t talk shit about my curtains in the picture above

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To Serif or Sans?

This would probably be the most on-going battle of every designer – the quest for the perfect font for that piece of work. Fonts can make or break a design (ok, so can a lot of things) but to me, it’s often one of the first parameters I set for myself. It’s the one luxury of time I afford myself – I can spend forever going through my font library to pick that right font. And that’s just work for myself.

Picking fonts for client work is a whole other ball of wax. Picking fonts for clients who have absolutely no clue about design is probably one of the levels in Dante’s Hells. It’s very easy to spot these people – they almost always use Comic Sans. *Shudder*. Even typing that out gave me the heebie-jeebies. Not just that – they don’t think there’s anything wrong with using Comic Sans. There’s no excuse to not know better – the world is so much more beautiful beyond your Microsoft Word window. The next time you’re walking around the supermarket, stop in front of the Waitrose stuff and look and how pretty fonts can make things. Waitrose typography makes me buy their stuff. Period.

I’d like to say that I’m not font-discrimanatory and that I love all my fonts equally, but that would be a lie. My taste for fonts changes like the seasons and all my work at that period of time would usually reflect that current font favourite. When I first started out, my favourite font was (of course) Helvetica. I then followed it up with a passionate distaste for it and very seldom use it now. I will not, however, contend that it’s not a beautiful font. Used properly, it’s still absolutely gorgeous.

I’ve recently had a struggle trying to convince a client to keep a serif font in the layout of a magazine. Ok, it wasn’t really a struggle because I gave in at the first request. At point do you argue the use of a serif font versus a sans serif font to someone whom you think might not understand it? There’s more to life than font selection, do I really want to clog up emails and client relationships? Why do serif fonts get such bad reputations by mainstream civilians as being old-fashioned and difficult to read? Most international magazines from Time to Vogue use serif fonts – and these are considered the cutting-edge publications of their fields. It makes the content always seem more distinguished, reputable and concrete.

Something about a magazine being typeset completely in sans serif fonts makes it feel more like a newsletter and amateurish. Of course, I’m sure there are many lovely designs out there that can disprove this. Regarding the magazine, we have reached a somewhat medium of the headlines and standfirsts being set in serif fonts.

When I dropped Helvetica as my favourite body copy font, I entered a brief sub-serif phase of Optima. I then found my new (and current) favourite body copy font in Avenir. It’s got reasonable amounts of weight, a nice, mildly low-anchored x-height and reads well when it’s reduced to a running 8point body copy. Just kidding – no client in this world will let body copy go at 8pt.

So, you can be certain that if you’ve got body copy and a lack of identity, you would most likely get the “summer me”. Next season, the “winter me”.