In the past five years, the demand for print design in my practice has actually increased. Perhaps this is the result of several factors. Worldwide, universities have woken up to the value of marketing, and the academic environment has come under new competitive pressures. But print quantities for each project have plummeted as mailing lists become more highly targeted and audiences become more precisely segmented. Less of my design group’s time is devoted to collateral — brochures, newsletters, etc., and more of it is devoted to environmental print — billboards, banners, bus wraps and the like — which won’t (yet) fit economically on a screen. The trends have been clear for a while, but the pace and inexorability of their march is just coming into focus for me.

There will always be a need for print, but it will move more and more to the realm of artisans and boutiques, and when it’s used for marketing will be reserved for high end campaigns with a need for a special wow factor and a budget to support it. (I suppose on the other end there will always be direct mail, too, but it remains to be seen how the new postal realities play into that.) Right now in my field there is only one pressure slowing this trend, and that’s client skepticism.

Post is Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, two Baltimore-based MICA grads who made good by dint of clever off-kilter sensibilities and evidently tireless labor. Although nominally typographers, they generate a wide gamut of graphic products, including illustration and graphic design. I don’t remember seeing advertising. Their regular clients include The New York Times as well as Time and Metropolis magazines.

The theme, in keeping with enterprise’s current obsession with failure as a station stop on the railroad of success, was “Greatest Misses,” and they did a serviceable job of demonstrating how repeated client rejection can feed and nurture the ultimate realization of a much improved version of your initial project. In a few cases they showed dozens of iterations on the same concept as it wended its way through multiple client rejections only to be repurposed for another project and another client, through more rejections, until finally it found a home in print. I do the same thing when I’m enamored of a particular means of expression, and it was vindicating to learn that I’m not just too stubborn to let go.

But the topic of the talk was really a pretext to show the work, some of it quite strong and some less so, but all connected by a spirit of impish subversion. The progression of work followed a roughly chronological arc from the inception of their studio, and their technical growth over the years was evident, although it was also clear they started out knowing more or less what they were about.

One line that Strals threw out at the very end, almost as an afterthought while the crowd was putting on their jackets to leave: [pointing to the now-empty screen] “there’s a lot of color theory in there.” And how! I had been struck by their idiosyncratic color choices and schemes all evening and wanted to know more. Maybe next time.

For coffee shops, the problem is simplified. They have a small number of constituencies: customers, a handful of employees, suppliers, a loan officer, a landlord — that may be it. But for a large university, the mix is more complicated. We have a variety of distinct types of students, a large and varied payroll, faculty, trustees, legislators, international partnerships, you name it. Keeping track of the faces you show to all these different groups is a huge task even if you don’t intentionally prevaricate. The answer lies in spending the time and effort to get to know who you are — through a dedicated brand identity audit — and presenting that identity confidently and consistently to everyone.

For a good resource on alignment in the branding of higher education, I recommend Rex Whisman’s Brand Champions Blog.

But we were committed now, and I headed over to the arts building to meet Kevin, the pinch photographer. I wasn’t in the building for 30 seconds before he told me the only outlet near his planned setup wasn’t working, and his extension cords couldn’t reach any others. We combed the building looking for anyone who could help, but it was the end of the day and it took a while to find someone. At this point, singers were starting to filter in, clad in the brightly colored shirts I’d asked them to wear. I was beginning to get nervous as it dawned on me I didn’t really have a backup plan to go with this backup location. Kevin and I talked out different scenarios and nothing was doing it for either of us. More students showed up. It was becoming obvious that red was the dominant color of the day — in fact, easily two-thirds of the students had on red, pink, magenta, burgundy or some other similar color. Were there enough other-colored shirts to create the bright mix I had in mind? Or would it just look like some people didn’t get the red memo? Then the professor showed up — in the reddest red shirt I’ve ever seen.

After a few minutes of sizing the situation up, he took charge of the group — and the shoot. Maybe he sensed my apprehension. He started arranging the students in a way that looked to me like a youth rally in 1930s Germany, or maybe the Red Guard. They were stiff and in each other’s way of the camera. Now I was getting really nervous, but I knew better than to get into a power struggle. He ordered one kid to move to the front and the kid went into an extended goof as he did so, making the nearby students laugh. I asked the teacher if this was the kind of group that could all be gotten to play that way. 

And then something magical happened: he said, “Well, if you’re going to do that, you might as well have them sing.” Sing. It’s not that I hadn’t thought of that, I just thought I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. And I couldn’t have. But it didn’t occur to me that he could. And from that moment the whole exercise began to come together. With a succinct order, he got the students to reposition themselves in a way that looked natural, as if they were on stage, but in this awkward, non-stage space. He then led them through a stunningly beautiful hymn and, one by one, I could see their faces animate, their bodies relax; the professor became a conductor, with all the expressiveness that job requires. I heard the clicking of the camera begin to accelerate as Kevin started moving around the room in his own choreography. I didn’t need to look at the screen to know that this was working. The shoot had come alive. They were able to squeeze in two more choral pieces before  the event in the auditorium was scheduled to begin and we had to end the shoot.

I haven’t seen the photos yet, but I don’t have to. They’ll be better than I could have planned them to be. Once again, I’ve learned the most valuable lesson an art director can: let go of things and they’ll take care of themselves.

Marty Neumeier: The Brand Gap* and Zag*

David Aaker: Managing Brand Equity

David Ogilvy: Confessions of An Advertising Man

Peter Mayle: Up the Agency: The Funny Business of Advertising

Tom Kelley: The Art of Innovation*

Michael Schrage: Serious Play*

Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart: A Smile in the Mind*

Roger Enrico: The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars

Sergio Zyman: Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not be the Right Thing

Martin Lindstrom: Brand Sense

Nicholas Ind: Great Advertising Campaigns: Goals and accomplishments

Martin Roll: Asian Brand Strategy*

I’m currently in the middle of How Brands Become Icons* by Douglas Holt (it already gets an asterisk — I’m only on page 50 and I can tell — and Universal Principles of Design (very Sprockets), as well as the second installment of Philippe Djian’s Doggy Bag series — but that’s another story.

Not bad for a slow reader.

The benefits of a well-written brief are twofold: First, it gives you a touchstone against which to measure every choice you make in the course of writing, editing, design and production, and to evaluate the results of those choices. Second, it keeps everyone’s expectations firmly grounded in reality. It’s a great tool for avoiding fisticuffs with your client when, later, it becomes clear that you’ve both been approaching the project from very different perspectives.

What constitutes a good brief? Well, (1) it should cover all the bases discussed in the initial meeting(s) and (2) it should be — what else? — brief. So in a page or (hopefully) less, you might want to include a one-sentence description of the project, a quick overview of the qualitative data on which your solution will be based, the intended audience, the budget and the timetable, if not the particulars of the production schedule. Designate someone on your team to write and distribute a brief, as soon after the initial meeting as possible. Invite questions, comments and challenges from your clients. If there are any discrepancies between your understanding of the job and theirs, this is the best time to find out. Then keep it handy as a reference document while you work on the job.

It beats putting on boxing gloves.

Alright, I’m kidding. Convention rules in my office, just like it does in every other publications office at every other such institution. And maybe a sandbox would be a little over the top for the academic culture. But what simple, inexpensive idea can you think of that would boost creativity — and productivity — in your department without threatening its established culture (too much)? Here’s just one: Meet regularly for crits, like you did in school. No, really. Your work can only benefit. Bring food.

I chose the name A4 for lack of anything better, but I think it can provide an organizing motif for a range of topics and viewpoints that will I’m sure prove hard to rein in to a cohesive discourse. A4, as most of you already know, is the paper size most commonly used for letterhead in the European Union, and is based on the proportion known as the golden rectangle, a ratio of width to height that has been advanced for centuries in the art and design world as a standard of classical beauty. This proportion is one of the few “universal principles” of design (whatever that means) that we have stuck with throughout the course of civilization and across cultures. It’s as appropriate for an i-pod as it is for a Japanese tatami mat or the Parthenon. Every graphic designer has at least a passing familiarity with it, and those who work for universities probably milk it more than others because of its classical and dignified associations. Beyond that, it provides a basic unit for modular assembly, and thus a good metaphor for the way a blog — and indeed the blogosphere as a whole — is built.

But don’t let me spin too far off in a philosophical direction. This is at least as much about the day-to-day nuts and bolts of giving form — visual and otherwise — to the various messages of the academic world.