The Star of the East
There was a pub in Shoreditch…Digital Dreams pt 2 (Reality)
But in the meantime we had the pay the rent. We designed and programmed touch screen interfaces for digital information kiosk prototypes.
We discovered Information architecture [5 people, 5 black markers, one very big bit of paper, lots of arrows]. We discovered clients [never knew what they wanted, didn't understand what we were talking about]. We discovered breakdowns in communication.
We discovered the internet. Or at least we had Demon accounts, a 14.4 modem that looked like a Stylophone,
and a lot a patience.
Digital Dreams
When I started out in digital in 1992 I had no intention of getting into advertising or direct marketing or PR. I’d just left St Martins in the middle of a recession with a Graphic Design Degree nobody wanted.
But I had a mad friend from college who was into what he called hypertext. We weren’t novelists or rock stars or movie stars but we wanted to create a new 4 dimensional Art form.
A multilayered novel, a multimedia happening, or a wetware experience.
The lunatics take over the asylum
The big questions facing digital agencies now is “when you inherit the kingdom will you drop the ball”.
Yes, we will the finally get the chance to call the shots, own the marketing budgets, and deliver the kind of brand and tactical campaigns that we’ve been planning for 10 years.
The old millennium is dead. When internet connections were mind numbingly slow, software buggy, and TV advertising still eating all the cake.
We’ve been making big plans all right, but will what we make be more interesting just because we have larger production budgets?
Will our ideas be big enough to fill the void left by the implosion of the ad-funded-TV-content model?
The public still love great TV ads. It doesn’t make them buy stuff necessarily but it creates a warm feeling inside.
So, when the lunatics take over the asylum…
Will they turn into the same self indulgent and extravagant self promoters whose thunder they have stolen?
Or will they use their natural ingenuity to create campaigns that capture the imagination and the confidence of the buying public and make brand owners happy?
Social Bankruptcy
In Wells next the Sea, Larissa, who works in our shop, was dating the butcher’s apprentice [you should see the love bites on his neck]. The butcher is our next door neighbour, he appears affable but he runs the town council, so you don’t want to be on the wrong side of him. Last summer the bakery closed down suddenly for a month at the height of the season. Apparently the baker had run off with his boyfriend. The harbour master told me [in confidence of course] not to trust the chandler, John Crook, “crook by name crook by nature”. Very sociable I’d say.
Idle gossip, Lynching and witch hunts.
That’s why we all left the villages in the first place.
Social currency glues society together. Or blows it apart.
The internet is allowing us to recreate some of these old fashioned social conditions by allowing people to cooperate, gossip, share, and overhear, to tweak the curtains and peep at each other, and also to bully, intimidate and vilify.
Stars Wars kid “endures … harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large” and “will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time.” [from the lawsuit taken against his classmates who posted the clip online]. The clip is estimated to have been seen 900 million times.
See also ‘Dog Poop Girl’ in Korea who quit her university in shame after a prolonged internet hate campaign.
Meanwhile at the Bowling Club
When you grow up you’ll want to move to the country and live in a Village.
I have.
Life is better, there’s me at the village fete, winning a cup for Dad sports. Drinking with the plumber, the builder and the bloke who fixes my car in the pub. Everybody knows everybody else. Everybody helps out. There’s no vandalism, litter, no crime. There is a social currency that glues our little community together.
This idea of social currency is not new, it’s been used since the early 1900’s with the emergence of socialism and ideas about the welfare state. My version comes from Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital a 1995 essay by Robert D. Putnam. He proposes that because we no longer join clubs and societies, the glue that keeps our society together is failing. We don’t cooperate to fight crime for instance
He used an example of a bowling cub where a socially diverse group of people get together to enjoy themselves; police officers, tradesmen, professionals, blue and white collar workers. His rose tinted view of essentially 1950’s America is widely discredited, but I like him, because he sounds like a Cohen brothers film.
Ironically he blamed “technological “individualizing” of our leisure time via television, Internet and eventually “virtual reality helmets” for the death of his bowling club.
While I finish my wine…
I survey the dead duck of Gascon and the foie gras of experience washes over me. A young designer who wants it all, the cheeky fucker and why not.
Typography bible
I am a self proclaimed type bore but, having been working with the internet, and CD ROM design before that, for as long as I can remember I have all but given up on type on the web. Various so-called cutting edge designers have messed around with font design, but it’s mainly whizzy nonsense. Flash makes a pretty god job of rendering line work on screen but will bastardise anything other than very simple type designs.
But, as a relative newcomer to WordPress as a tool, I am still astounded by the typographical standards available to the mere novice at the click of a button. Most bloggers are not designers, they are just people who want a good tool to keep their thoughts organised and get them up on the net. They are not interested in the relative merits of Helvetica, Arial, Univers and Akzindenz Grotesque [don’t get me started] or in the various fascinating biographies of Caxton, Baskerville and Gill. They just want to write stuff. And they want people to read it. And that must where the answer lies. The web dude creating a cutting edge microsite for a cool new film or must have brand doesn’t want you to read boring old copy, he wants you marvel at how clever he is, how radical in his use of mash-up photography, 3D transitions, and mysterious intuitive navigation. That’s why he sets the type tiny [no more than 8pt].
But if you want people to read and take notice of what you say, you need good old fashioned typographic values. Go Gutenberg.
the bitch is back
It’s entirely my fault but the magic of Madfashionbitch has been missing from cyber space recently. She now has her own blog where she’ll be sharing her thoughts on art, film, food, gardening, and of course fashion. If you want to stay so far ahead of fashion it comes around to meet you from behind you’ll need to read this
