Why the Professional Graphic Designer is not dead

Once upon a time… graphic design was a profession dominated by the dark room, vacuum frames and type setting machines. To be a designer you had to be an artist in your own right. Today, however, the dark room remains, well pretty dark, the vacuum frames lie broken and the type setting machines are lost. All have been replaced by the advent of the computer, Quark Xpress and Adobe Creative Suite.

In today’s world anyone can be a designer, provided they have a computer and the right software. And therein lies a problem. Graphic Design is about creativity, design awareness (what colours work together, how many fonts to use, which fonts not to use, what makes a good page layout, etc, etc, etc), having an eye for detail, spotting things other people don’t, and, increasingly, great computer skills. With more and more people purporting to be designers, simply because they have the right facilities, the value of the professional graphic designer has become diluted.  Too often the phrase ‘I got my brother/sister/mother/secretary/cat to put my flyer together as they’re good with computers’ is uttered. 

So where does this leave us, the professional graphic designers? Well, in short, just because everyone can do it, doesn’t mean that everyone can do it well… while others are busy using too many fonts or applying multitudes of colours we can use the same technology to highlight our skills and ability. You may find that a client chooses not to pay for your services in favour of designing their own logo, but in truth it is the clients who are willing to pay for your services that you want to attract. After all they are the ones who can clearly understand the different between good design and simple layout and they will appreciate the effort and value you put in far more.

Above all, graphic design is art; and has always been so.

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Hell, it's not Rocket Science you know!

It’s not Rocket Science!

I’m going to write three words in a second and I want you to try and stay with me. Usually when I say these words the result is a vacant stare or blind panic but it’s just the fear of the unknown, a bit like when you were a kid and you were scared of the dark.

Ok, here goes – search engine optimisation. Still with me? Good, let’s say it again, together this time – search engine optimisation. Now we’ve taken the first step you’ll need to know what it is because the phase, by itself, doesn’t mean much. In it’s 'simplest sense' it means getting your website to the top of a relevant Google search (no point being top of a Google search for Baked Beans if your site is about Hot Air Balloons... Oh hang on!).

Now, there are a lot and I mean A LOT of companies out there who claim that they can get your website to the top of Google for a fairly modest fee. Sadly if they were doing it in a way which wouldn’t eventually get your website black listed and banned by the search engines then that modest fee wouldn't be modest at all and the person calling you would probably be a fair bit nicer (and less pushy).

So, here's a little recap (and expansion) on a blog I wrote a while back about search engine optimisation.

To start, let’s be blunt - there is no silver bullet when it comes to search engine optimisation. The only way you can get you’re site higher up on Google, Bing or any of the other search engines is through hard work. Still with me? Good because it really isn't rocket science. Ok, so there are elements which require HTML coding but if you have a decent website designer then this is something they can handle for you. The key things you need to be concerned about are:

1.     Keeping your website’s copy fresh and up-to-date. This can be done using a simple, low cost, content management system like the one AnsteyDesign offers.

2.     Utilising social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In. If you use a web browser such as Firefox you can run all of your social networking accounts through one application called ‘Yoonoo’ making this aspect of SEO much easier to manage.

3.     Writing monthly blogs. If you set up a blogger account (like this one) it’s possible to bespoke the design to make it more relevant to you, it is also possible to make money from your blog account...

4.     Visiting online forums and posting comments. The online forums you visit need to be relevant to your industry and you need to have something useful to say. Some sites will require you to ‘login’ before you can comment and others won’t let you post links until you have made a certain number of comments.

5.     Issuing online PR statements. There are several useful free websites on the Internet that let you select the industry you are in and then target your PR statement at your preferred individual type. It’s a great way of getting your message across!

6.     Creating linking agreements with relevant websites. As with the online forums, the best links are the ones that are relevant to your industry. It’s also good to have lots of internal links throughout your website so that the search engines know that your site is being properly utilised.

7.     Asking your clients to rate your business on review sites. The latest belief is that search engines are putting a lot of stock into online business ratings as it shows which are good businesses and which are bad. However, I’m told that they can tell which ratings are ‘fakes’, so there’s no point writing ten 5 star ratings yourself!

8.     Getting journalists to write articles about you. Perhaps the trickiest as journalists are not easy to get hold of. Your best bet, perhaps, is to call them up and make advertising deal with them.

Now, this might all sound like a lot of work and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t (some companies employ people to do it full time!). But it needn’t be a burden, not if you do a little every day. It’s possible for you to focus on just a few key areas such as keeping your website copy up-to-date, social networking and writing monthly blogs although, of course, the results won’t be as good as if you did everything consistently.

Take care,

FB

Great graphic designers

Walter Gropius

Admit it, how many of you are scratching your heads in bemusement? Walter Gropius? Whose he? What's he got to do with graphic design? Well (and I'm being honest here) he's strictly speaking an architect and therefore shouldn't be included on the list of top ten graphic designers. However his contribution to the world of Graphic Design is so great that it would be a travesty if he were not featured. His position at number six reflects not just own skills but also the power and influence of his movement. For those of you who haven't guessed (or don't know) Walter Gropius founded the German Design School - The Bauhaus in 1919. The legacy this institution left behind is all around us today in the form of Modernisim. Students still learn about it in University and are taught to mimic it's styles and techniques. 

Without Walter Gropius The Bauhaus wouldn't have existed and Graphic Design would be a paler shade of honeysuckle (this year's pantone colour). But who was Gropius? 

Well, Walter Gropius was born in Berlin on the 18^th May 1883. Like his father and great-uncle before him he became an architect. This was despite the fact that he could not draw... he was therefore reliant on collaborators throughout his working life. When Gropius left school he went to work for Peter Behrens (who later joined him at The Bauhaus). It was while he was working for Behrens that he met Adolf Meyer and in 1910 Gropius and Meyer decided to leave Behrens’ company and set up their own practice. Gropius's career was interrupted in 1914 thanks to the outbreak of World War One. He was called up almost at once and served as a sergeant major on the Western Front.

Once the war was over Gropius was able to continue to progress his career. In 1915, however, his life changed forever. Henry vande Velde (master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts – Weimar) stepped down because of his Belgian nationality. It was on Velde’s recommendation that Gropius was offered the opportunity to succeed him. Gropius took up the appointment as master of the school in 1919 and began rapidly changing it into the Bauhaus.

Many famous students (and tutors) passed through the doors of the Bauhaus; Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky.

The Bauhaus ran until 1933 when Hitler rose to power and objected to how Gropius ran the institute. Gropius sensed that the time was near when he would need to leave Germany. This happened in 1934, when, with the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany. He stayed on in Britain until 1937 when he left for America where he formed the Architect’s Collaborative.

Walter Gropius was a truly influential figure and even though he wasn't strictly a graphic designer the movement he led was one of the most powerful design movements this world has wittnessed.


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Great graphic designers

Paul Rand – ‘eye – bee – m’

In a way this statement, by Louis Danziger, best sums up Paul Rand:

“He almost singlehandedly convinced business that design was an effective tool. Anyone designing in the 1950s and 1960s owed much to Rand, who largely made it possible for us to work. He, more than anyone else, made the profession reputable. We went from being commercial artists to being graphic designers largely on his merits.”

 

That’s some praise indeed for the man who was forbidden, from an early age, to create images that could be worshipped as idols. Taking this into consideration Rand’s career of creating corporate icons for the likes of IBM, ABC and UPS seems highly unlikely. But that is exactly where he ended up – have you ever seen the eye – bee –m logo he created? The identity he created for IBM was, without a doubt, his defining corporate identity. It became not so much a piece of design but a basic design philosophy that permeated corporate consciousness and public awareness. Rand developed the IBM logo over three decades and the latest version is still in use today – as is several of his over corporate designs for ABC, Cummins Engine, and Westinghouse. Even UPS only changed their original Rand identity recently (controversially).

The core ideology that drove Rand’s career, and his lasting influence, was the modernist philosophy he so admired. He celebrated the works of artists from Paul Cézanne to Jan Tschichold, and constantly attempted to draw the connections between their creative output and significant applications in graphic design.

Rand believed so strongly in the modernist ideal that during his later career he became increasingly agitated by the rise of postmodernism. This came to ahead when, in 1992, he resigned from a position he held at Yale in protest at the appointment of postmodern and feminist designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. He then encouraged his colleague, Armin Hofmann to do the same.

Paul Rand will always be known for his modernist approach to design and the major impact he had on making the design profession reputable. 

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Great graphic designers

Saul Bass - Film Sequence revolutionary  

You could be forgiven for asking the question: 

“Saul Bass, whose he?” 

The chances are, however, that if you’ve ever watched an Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger or Martin Scorsese film then you have already seen some of his work.

Saul Bass is not only one of the greatest graphic designers of the mid 20th Century (therefore securing his eighth position in the AnsteyDesign top ten) but he is also the undisputed master of film title design. 

In today’s modern cinematic world we are used to seeing graphical film titles, we expect them. But in 1955 they were unheard of. In fact film titles used to be so dull that cinema projectionists would let the film titles roll whilst the curtains where down – saving the audience the boredom of viewing them.

However, this all changed with Otto Preminger’s controversial film ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’. For his film the director had employed Saul Bass to create a title sequence, which “would be integral to the film”. The film reels where then supplied to cinemas across the world with the instructions: “Projectionists – Pull curtain before titles”.  And so a revolution in film titles began and Saul Bass started what would become one of the most influential design careers of the mid 20th Century. 

By the end of his life (he died in 1996) Bass had created over 50 film title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. (Although he later claimed that he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence "a little disappointing because it was so imitated").

But even before he had started on his journey of revolutionising cinema Bass was a celebrated graphic designer.

He’d been born in New York in 1920 and, after a fairly ordinary childhood, went to study at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. It was Kepes who introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus (a modernist movement which originated in Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War) style and to Russian Constructivism.

Once he’d completed his study he went on to open his own studio in LA and worked mainly in advertising until Preminger asked him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.

There are many films that you will have seen that feature Saul Bass’s work:

Vertigo, Pyscho, North by Northwest, Grand Prix, Goodfellas, and Cape Fear to name just a few.

There are few graphic designers who can claim to have sparked an entire genre into life. Saul Bass can make that claim and for that reason he deserves his place in our list of greatest graphic designers of the 20^th Century. 

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Great graphic designers

Toulouse Lautrec – Friend to Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh and prostitutes.

Toulouse-Lautrec was part of a select group of artists who began to combine the roles of artist and graphic designer together. True, in Lautrec’s world all he was doing was creating artistic posters that featured his paintings and drawings. But the sole purpose of his posters was to advertise and promote, and if that isn’t design communication then I don’t know what is!

History has not been fair to Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. In many films and books he is often depicted as some kind of aristocratic monster who frequented the Moulin Rogue with a rather unhealthy appetite for the women who worked there  (in truth he viewed the prostitutes as his friends). The real man is very different, and his story is quite sad.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born on the 24th November 1864 and grew up enjoying an active childhood. Then at the ages of 14 and 15 he suffered two minor accidents, which changed the direction of his life for good. On both occasions he fell to the floor and fractured his left leg. This led to the discovery of a rare bone disease that would cause him pain and embarrassment for the rest of his life. It also stunted his growth and meant that he didn’t grow taller than 5 foot.

The discovery of his bone disease led to his parents taking him out of school and moving him to Paris where he devoted himself to his passion – art. Despite his obvious talent and passion, it wasn’t until he was 17 that he first received his proper education in drawing. 

During his, relatively short, lifetime Lautrec met many different iconic figures from that period. Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Vincent van Gogh to name a few.

It was in February 1886, that Toulouse Lautrec met and became friends with van Gogh. For two years they painted and exhibited works together, influencing each other. Then, in February 1888 (and on Lautrec’s advice) van Gogh moved to the south of France where, ultimately, van Gogh committed suicide.

As his artwork became better know, so too did the demand for his posters which appeared, almost daily, on the street corners, outside the brothels he frequented and various theatres. The creativity and effortless pose of his subjects within each of his drawings and paintings captured the sense of activity, and caught the imagination of the bohemian spirit that was rife in France at the time.

Like his friend, van Gogh, Lautrec died before his time. At the age of 36 his health rapidly deteriorated and after two disabiling attacks he died on the 9^th of September 1901.

Lautrec was amazingly talented and could copy a scene from a playhouse without lifting his pencil from the paper. His posters have become iconic pieces of artwork and design. 

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Great graphic designers

Abram Games – Maximum Meaning, minimum means

In the days long before Photoshop and Power Macs, even before Letraset, a popular artist technique used was the airbrush*.

During the Second World War the airbrush was put to great affect by a little known graphic designer, at that time, called Abram Games. Games had been appointed as the ‘Official War Poster Designer’ and for the 6 years that he held this position he created over 100 posters.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the messages Games was required to communicate in his posters would result in a fairly morbid crop of posters. Far from it however, as Games took each brief from the War Office and injected his own personality into it. The results are plain to see in any Abram Games poster, many of which are now considered to be museum pieces.

Once the war had finished Games went on to produce design work for the Festival of Britain, the BBC, the Financial Times, and Shell. All of his design work featured his signature wit and he continued to work right up until his death in 1996.

As any designer will tell you, we all strive to inject our own personality into our work. We don’t become graphic designers to copy what other people have done. But it takes something special to be able to produce, time and time again, designs that not only capture a message but communicate it in a strong witty fashion.

* I once owned such a device – it sat in my student digs connected to a car tyre (it ran off compressed air). I’d cut out shapes from a piece of paper then spray ink from the air gun onto another sheet of paper, sealing areas I wanted to leave white with the shape I’d already cut out. It was messy, time consuming and fun!

Thanks,

AnsteyDesign's live in blogger

The Dark Art of website SEO - exposed...!

SEO… Search engine optimisation. Lets face it, most people view this as something of a dark art – black magic even. But is it really as complicated as SEO companies try to make out?

We don’t think so.

To get your site high on Google there really ten important things you need to consider:

1. Sign up to as many listing sites as possible. This takes time and is boring but it’s worth it for two reasons; the first, Google looks to see how many sites are linking into your website and secondly people use these sites to source anything from garden designers through to cake suppliers.
2. Make sure that your site is hosted through a reputable company. Find out through your hosting company what country your site is hosted in. This often plays a large role in search rankings. If your company is based in the UK then you should really use a hosting company that is also UK based. Never use the cheapest hosting! The problem is, if your designer hosts your website for you, you may feel that what you pay is a lot of money already. In reality the vast majority of what your paying is probably going straight into your designer’s pockets and only a small proportion is actually paying for the hosting service. At AnsteyDesign we don’t believe in ‘mark ups’. The only fee you pay for hosting is the cost from our provider. We feel it’s fairer that way.
3. Content. Ok this might seem obvious but it’s really important. To begin with, you need to make sure that you have text on all the key pages of your website. Then, you need to write your web text as briefly and concisely as possible. It’s proven that people don’t spend long on a website and the one thing they really don’t do is trawl through reams of text. So, if in doubt, cut it out! This in turn helps your keyword density. That’s the other important thing for content – keywords. These are the phrases that people type when they are searching for your products or services. Google has some brilliants free tools to help you determine what your keywords should be. To use them search Google for ‘Keyword generator’.
4. Internal links are something that Google (and other search engines) look for. All they are, are links to other pages inside your website. Simple!
5. While we are on the subject of links, outbound links are another great way to boost your Google rating. It’s important, though, to make sure that the site you link to are relevant to your business in someway. It’s no good selling pet food and linking to mobile phones!
6. Keep your www address clean and simple. Don’t add in random characters (even to try and make yourself look individual). Google and other search engines won’t recognise them and you’ll end up falling off of the SEO list!
7. We touched on keywords earlier but there is more to them than website content. You need to make sure that any images you use have been correctly labelled with alt tags, meta page info is supplied, robot.txt and a site map is included.
8. Make sure you build your website correctly! Google is not a fan of frames these days, it much prefers DIV tags which provide greater readability and access for all browsers…
9. Get on to Twitter, Facebook – start a blog! The way Google picks up a website is changing. It no longer looks at the website structure it also looks at how often your company’s name appears on the internet. It’s important, therefore, to start using social network to your advantage. Twitter and Facebook can really make a difference to the effectiveness of your website.
10. Keep your site up-to-date. It’s really important that you don’t let your website grow stale. Google can tell if you don’t keep your site regularly updated and it really can have an impact on where it appears on Google and other search engines.

To speak to someone about your website needs call 01420 542 671

AnsteyDesign gets political about fresh ideas and client relationships

So, election fever has swept the media once again. I say the media and not the country quite deliberately. You only have to talk to a group of individuals to see the despondency that people are feeling towards politics. But what has graphic design got to do with politics I hear you cry?! Well, on the highest level not a great deal, and in truth I did, at first, consider ignoring the whole issue of the election for this blog. But something of an old spark flared up in resistance to that idea, so here I am blogging away.

You see, when I was a student I was quite into my politics. Not in a geeky sort of way but I genuinely couldn’t understand why people didn’t vote. After all our grandparents died in two World Wars to preserve our freedom (not to mention the suffragettes) so we had the right to choose our own democracy. It didn’t clock with me until much later that it wasn’t the democratic process that people abhorred but the people who fought to represent us.

As a student everyone believes they are out to set the world aflame and I had the fancy that I’d enter political graphic design and reshape the landscape with a few clever, well thought out campaigns. My chance came when the Scottish Green Party asked me to act as a design consultant for them in my second year at University. I’d just come back to England from studying in Germany and decided to try and use some of the techniques I’d learnt there to refresh their look and give them real impact and power – totally off brief and not what they wanted. A thought that still causes me intense shame, and something I’ve taken into my adult life as a lesson well learnt. Ok I’m being a little harsh to my 20-year-old self as the designs did need a refresh but at that point in my life I really had no idea how to manage a client. Suffice to say my tenure, as a design consultant for the Scottish Green Party, didn’t last long.

Sometimes when you have a client whose branding is a bit out of date it is difficult, as a creative professional, not to want to update it. Not for your own pleasure but because you know it isn’t doing your client any favours. Usually a simple conversation with them is enough to overcome any issues. However, if they really love their look then that’s when issues start to creep in. How can you tell a client that their branding is from the 70’s when it is a brand they adore? The simple answer is you can’t! There are, however, a few things you can do to tackle this problem:

• Work with your client and suggest amendments to the branding until it has been brought into the 20th century, without them realising.
• Create a ‘this is what the design looks like in your branding’ and ‘this is what the design could look like if we had our way’ mock up. This way your client will see exactly what they are missing out on.
• The long haul – build a proper relationship with your client and educate them. This is by far the best route as it is built on respect for your client.

At AnsteyDesign we believe the relationship route is best for all our clients – no matter what their brief – simply because it allows us to get to know them properly. How are we supposed to design an amazing campaign for our clients if we don’t feel the passion they feel for their product? Without getting to know them we stand no chance of ever feeling their passion in the first place! But it’s not enough to simply have a good professional relationship with a client, you have to deliver the right results as well.

This is the issue that has turned voters off from politics. We have built a relationship with Labour and the Conservatives for the past six decades and, because we only remember the negatives, we feel they have both consistently let us down and we are fed up with them. This has led to the decrease in numbers at the polling booths and the general apathy and anger we feel towards our politicians.

What we really want, and need, to spark our interest is a fresh approach - a complete change. This is more than just a rebrand – it’s about the fundamental way our political system works. The reaction that the Liberal Democrats have received from just one leaders debate shows just how desperate voters are for something fresh and different.

Whatever the result of May 6th, lets hope the New Government looks at the voter’s reaction to the emergence of the Liberal Democrats and realise that they need to build a fresh relationship with Britain.

www.ansteydesign.co.uk

Let me start by doing the honourable thing and blogging a bit about AnsteyDesign...

AnsteyDesign Ltd is a graphic design studio based in Alton, Hampshire. It prides itself on innovative design solutions which combine creative thinking and writing to produce the 'right' results. The creative writing aspect can be demonstrated quite clearly in the article I've included later on!

AnsteyDesign is a small studio with big ambitions, and having specialised skills in the financial services market presents it with a good platform on which to build (following a successful start to the year).

To celebrate Christmas AnsteyDesign wrote a creative article which I have included below. Light hearted and entertaining it also aimed to promote the importance of getting branding and identity right:

Who put the fizz in Santa’s style?

Christmas is always a busy time of year for Santa, but we’re pleased to say that he has taken time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his latest look and where it originated.

AnsteyDesign: So, Santa, what do you have planned for this year’s style?

Santa: Well much the same as previous years really, my red outfit is so well recognised it would be silly of me to change it! Imagine if I went back to wearing my green robes and you spotted me on your roof – you’d have me arrested before Rudolf could say ‘Mince pies’. But that’s the power of a good brand – it makes sure you’re recognised and gets you noticed.

AnsteyDesign: What do you think makes your brand so strong?

Santa: It’s because it is so recognisable. But this isn’t something that I’ve achieved over night – it’s developed over hundreds of years. Also, I’ve moved with the times, making sure I keep my style modern and up-to-date which is really important.

AnsteyDesign: You know Santa some people say that your current style, your red coat, black boots, white beard and even your round belly – they were all created for you by Coca-Cola… is that true?

Santa: Honestly I don’t know where these stories come from. I can tell you categorically, by Rudolf’s nose – no it is not true! It was my good friend Mr Thomas Nast back in 1881 who created my current look. Before then I used to wear this lovely green fur lined robe, very warm and comfortable but very tricky to keep clean. Coca-Cola saw the original drawings that Thomas had created for me and adapted them for their advertising campaigns in the 1930s to 1960s.

AnsteyDesign: Actually they still feature you in their campaigns today…

Santa: They do? I really must get my television fixed.

AnsteyDesign: Just one more question Santa as I know you are very busy. Are you ready for Christmas?

Santa: Oh I’m getting there. We always seem to make it some how, but it does seem to get a bit tighter every year!

AnsteyDesign: Santa thank you for your time and make sure you enter our Christmas competition on our website!

Santa: Oh yes, I certainly will. Thank you for inviting me into your studio, and Merry Christmas to you and all my blog readers!

Many thanks and I hope you have a very happy New Year!