Reimagining Design.

Design, it is all around us. Good or bad, just about everything we touch, see and use, has been imagined by a designer of some sort. Signage, products, machines, vehicles, roads, books, websites, food, clothes, this newsletter – are all products of design. Knowingly or unknowingly we interact with design at every moment of our lives. Design makes an iPod attractive. Poor design is what makes most Indian cities so complicated, confusing and difficult to live in.

Just like with everything else, design keeps changing with the times. New materials, new tools, new possibilities and indeed new thinking makes for an ever evolving design continuum.

The 4 pixel favicon has given graphic designers a new thing to worry about when they design logos and icons. Proliferation of LCD and other kinds display offer multimedia designers helped the folks at Tronic studio create these idents for Target. The availability of epaper and cheap electronics could change packaging design forever. Rapid protyping that low cost FAB machines promise will revolutionise product design just like the Macintosh and laser printing did to publishing and graphic design some two decades ago. Listen to Chris Anderson talk about 3D fabricators in this presentation.

Like with everything else in marketing, customer generated design is big these days. Brands like Jones Soda have given ordinary people the power to design their labels. Even old fashioned packaged goods brands like Heinz have yielded to user generated content by putting the tools of creation in the hands of ordinary customers.

But is design all about creation? Making more and more things and making them better looking and easier to use seems to be the only way forward. One of the criticisms leveled against design is that it often tries to do to much, when it can do less. With all the sustainability debate around there is a school of thought that is urging designers and indeed all of us to use less. In the UK organic brand Beunpackaged has done away with packaging of any kind and made it their calling card. Porsche, the design icon, is being seen in a different light these days. When the life of an average car in the US and Europe is 6 years, a Porsche, it seems, continues to run and run. According to this meme 60% of all Porsches ever built are still on the road today. In the fashion world, a new debate is raging. Why have a fashion cycle that changes twice a year when most clothes can be worn for years? Indeed Howies another UK brand designs its clothes to last. By staying away from flavour of the month design aesthetics, fashion at Howies focuses on long term wearability.

On another front design is going beyond designing. Now design thinking is a subject of study.The new Design School at Stanford being the most high profile exercise in this space. The school believes that everyone, not just designers need to be design thinkers. Simply put design thinking is about solving intangible problems. The use of design, not just as a verb, but as a way of thinking about situations. Like this IDEO case study for Kraft Foods. Where design was used to improve relationships and uncover new value at a supply chain management level.

There are other areas that design is moving into. Like designing for the bottom of the pyramid. Using design for the unwealthiest 90 percent. This Rolex Award winning idea ironically helps subsistence farmers in Sub Saharan Africa preserve to vegetables using a simple pot-in-pot fridge. Or this Malawian teenager’s home made windmill. Not pretty in a design sense but one that aims to solve problems that his ancestors have had to live with forever.

One of the things about design is that it is seen as an art form and hence mired in a lot of subjectivity. But if there is one thing that most people agree with is the fact that design is all about solving problems. Million dollar designer cars or one dollar pot-in-pot refrigerators. The attempt has to be to design for real people and now for a better world.

Logo Trends

Logo Lounge is the place to go for thinking on logos. They apparently see more than 50,000 logos a year to come up with their yearly roundup of logo trends. Here is what they have seen in the logo space in 2007.

How To Write

BBH writer and UK’s Top marketing Blogger Simon Veksner writes a how-to post every Tuesday. Here are how to write press ads. How to do posters. How to do radio.

Age Of Microcelebrity

Wired says Everyone is a little Brad Pitt. Not including Tila Tequila, she has some 2.5 million friends on MySpace.

More Discussion On Retail Banking

With all the changes happening around us, retail banking has been in the thick of many a discussion. Will branches get disintermediated? Should bank branches become the third place, a-la Starbucks? Or simply, what next? Well there is no resolution in sight just yet with people arguing for and against the branch in this story at Finextra. Scroll down into the comments section for some lively debate.

Multifactor Authentication No Worry Say Hackers.

DefCon is an annual gathering of security professionals and hackers. At their recent gathering, security researcher Brendan O’Connor presented several scenarios in which online banking security has gotten worse. Despite FFIEC guidelines that requires banks to comply with the, to provide multi-factor authentication, O’ Connor feels that despite these new safeguards, phishing sites are still operational today. Putting more walls to breach is not improving security in any big way, because attackers aren’t getting in by guessing, they’re getting in by stealing the credentials or tricking the end-user into giving away the credentials. Read more at Bankwide.

Will The Iphone Boost Mobile Banking?

iPhone, the latest innovation from Apple that has caught the fancy of the West and is making its way to the rest of the world, has banks wondering about its impact on mobile banking. At Forrester, experts Benjamin Ensor and Alexander Hesse think that the iPhone is an important evolutionary step for mobile banking. On the one hand, it raises the bar on user experience and will spark mobile Internet adoption. On the other hand, it adds complexity by introducing an additional low-cost alternative for banks to offer transactional mobile banking. In the short run, eBusiness executives should optimize their online banking services for the iPhone but reconsider further investments in current mobile banking services. In the long run, they should prepare for new — mobile — usage scenarios for compelling mobile finance applications. Buy the article here.

Priceless Christmas Calculator

Christmas is spending time, and despite all the planning and the budgeting to curb extra spends, most people find themselves going way beyond what they intended. Year after year, credit card companies, while witnessing record transactions on one hand have also seen a large number of people fall into the debt trap. To help people out of this festive woe, MasterCard has developed an online calculator for Christmas (Priceless Calculator that allows an individual to break down his spending into categories such as gifts, food, travel and decorations. All he has to do is enter in his planned purchases and watch the totaliser total up his spends to ensure that this year you have a fantastic Christmas without the credit hangover in January. Read the full article here.

Mobilephones. Time to go Beyond Advertising.

As the New Year approaches we love to get into prediction mode on what will be the hot advertising ideas of 2008. More social networking, sure! Better search marketing, perhaps. IPTV, who knows? But one area that’s getting universal attention at the moment is the mobile advertising. Some think 08 will be the year of the mobile phone. With some 3.3 billion active mobile phones in the world it’s hard to argue against the phone and its future use as a medium of advertising.

Some people think mobile phones are the cigarettes of the 21st century. James Stewart of the University of Edinburgh has compiled a nice set of similarities between phones and fags. Most young people, the most attractive yet elusive demographic, out there have phones. Technologies are already in place – SMS, GPRS, WiFi, Bluecasting mobile TV, mobile gaming. So why is mobile marketing still a prediction and not a mass reality?

Sure there are many ways to reach advertising and communication messages on to mobile phone screens. And there is a lot happening on them just now. Admoda serves ad messages on to mobile phones, via the mobile internet. Warner Brothers has set up Studio 2.0 and brought in a veteran adman, Rich Rosenthal to head the company. A service like 160 by 2 is conceived to be the ‘next step’ in mobile advertising, wherein users themselves opt-in to carry advertisements in their personal SMS.

While these efforts are laudable and need to be worked with, are they really the future of advertising on the mobile phone? Will there be a single idea, like the 30, that will make phones a viable tool for mass marketers? We think not!

We believe that there will be more than one idea that gets wide acceptance. Smaller ideas that do simple, specific tasks to provide new kinds of value to people. Some of them will be boring and unappealing that they may not qualify as an “idea” in the traditional advertising sense. Like couponing. Loyalty programs that are managed using phones rather than smart cards. QR Code, a kind of barcode that can be read using a mobile phone camera to provide people additional information on brands and services. Social tagging services like Urban Tapestries to tag physical areas with all kinds of interesting virtual information. Google’s mobile dating startup Dodgeball is evolving into a mobile social networking sort of service. Even creative ideas are beginning to appear. Where the phone becomes a tool for play, not a place to push advertsing into. Like this virtual graffiti idea from Marco Ecko.

While we are seeing new and interesting ideas all around. One of the things that we need to keep in mind going forward is that we have to give up our hangover of television and look at the phone not as a smaller TV screen but a tool that people love to be with. If we are pushing commercial messages on to phones, we need to find a way to offer value that TV or any other medium cannot provide. Sure mobile phones, or personal wireless devices will be a big thing for consumers and marketers for many, many years. You can expect a prediction for 09 in this newsletter in 12 months time. Or maybe we will do a round of all the things we didn’t do right in 08.

Screenagers. Making Content, Making Waves.

Think user generated content is still only the domain of a relatively small few? Well, a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that the next generation at least is switched on and producing content. According to the study, 59% of all American teenagers engage in at least one form of online content creation. Of those 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys however like their video, with 19% of boys posting video online vs. 10% of girls. Read More.