Jyske Bank or…?  

This afternoon Frank Pedersen, Director of Jyske Bank held a speech on service design at 1508. Jyske Bank has recently gone through an encompassing change concerning costumer service, involving communication style, products, interior and employee behaviour. 

The impressing results reminded me however about the Umpqua Bank . Umpqua Bank is despite a rather  odd name a true succes story one of the first banks to introduce ’slow banking’. The concept reminds more of an internet cafe or Starbucks than a bank. 

The company behind the concept, Ziba Design helped Umpqua grow from a $120M to a $8B business. They got rewarded at this year’s IDEA awards for best design strategy (and best research in 2004).

Check out this basic case study (443k PDF)  or download more fact sheets from Ziba Design. 

Or why not just buy the book Leading for Growth: How Umpqua Bank Got Cool and Created a Culture of Greatness by Raymond P. Davis and Alan Shrader

Tak til alle perlevenner for en super fest!

Kreativiteten flød fra perlebaren og der kom mange søde, sjove, frække og fantastiske perleplader ud af det :-)

Der kommer flere billeder på flickr inden længe…

Here you will find a short aticle with a few inspiring examples of creative communication in public spaces. But be warned – it’s in Danish!

The national identity of countries can shift radically and at a speed that leaves their inhabitants gasping. As the United States continues to suffer from low approval ratings all over the world, Paula Scher, one of the world’s leading graphic designers and a principal at Pentagram in New York, talks to Monocle editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé about how the US needs to overhaul its image, brand promise, name and messaging.

Watch it here

Fantasy worlds are known in many forms (and have existed long before secondlife.com). In many a basement around the globe, countless hours are spent fitting tracks and mounting trees to create miniature paradises in the shape of model railroads. Safe from everyday frustration and failure, the little fake worlds offer their creators a unique, soothing control.

Escaped from the basement - with 900 sq meters, 700 trains, 4000 cars and 150.000 inhabitants Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg can easily call itself the world’s largest model railroad. 800.000 visitors a year enjoy train rides, football matches, fire fighting, weddings, crime scenes and even sneak views through steamy windows in the adult area - making it one of Hamburg’s top tourist attractions.

And as the many visitors stick their giant heads into the busy streets of mini-hamburg or mini-Scandinavia they might discover a Mercedes Smart on the move, or featured on a billboard or being the star of a car show. With the help of BBDO Mercedes has chosen to launch a miniature campaign in Miniatur Wunderland, which some may call clever guerrilla marketing - and appropriate for a car that prides itself of being different and small(!). To the inhabitants of Miniatur Wunderland it is completely conventional and a part of every day fantasy life.

Cleo

When designers are working with text, they are often working with types and not as much with the form of the text. Many modern writers, on the other hand, are working intensively with the text form, though they are not concerned with types – and neither with visual aesthetics. So, perhaps there is a room for mutual inspiration?

One example is the author Per Højholt. This weekend I fell over the collected poems of Højholt. Actually, it was published a year ago, but this weekend was the first time I noticed it.

One of Højholts famous poems looks like this:

Each line in the poem says: ”solen se dens vældige horn mælken fryser i sin karton” (the sun see its immense horn the milk is freezing in its box), but the letters are placed on top of each other in a staggered arrangement. Hereby the text is a form which depth changes depending on how you view it. Hereby Højholt violates a central writing rule, i.e. that letters must follow each other successively, and by deforming the language this way the poem is actually emphasizing that rule.

The poems of Højholt made me think of another author, Simon Grotrian. He has written the peculiar and concretistic poem “Svaner set gennem tårer” (Swans seen through tears):

Well, admitted! Neither Højholt nor Grotrians solutions are very pretty, and as writers they are probably more interested in literature than in visual aesthetics.

But perhaps one or two of their ideas can be applicated for some design solutions?

Below is a small example, where I think it is done carefully and with success.

The stage play Kærlighedshistorier (Love stories) on the theatre Aveny-T is presented on this site. On the screen shot above the (red coloured) title Kærlighedshistorier forms a rectangular box. The box ends out in/behind the red shirt of the female artist on the bottom of the site.

The theatre name and logo to the left is placed in a 90-degree angle, and the lower arms of the female artist are rotated the same way, while the upper arms are positioned perpendicular to this general line.

And furthermore the text AVENY-T forms an arrow as a part of the company logo to the left.

This way the text angle and form is in harmony with the overall layout - without the text just being placed in squared boxes.

As seen below, this is a general design-line on the theatres website.

And on the front page it gets even better. Here the text in the coloured hearts is rotated and stresses the somewhat “nervous” layout.

Additionally the logo is moved to the upper right corner, and forms a line with the head and shoulders of the female artist. And lastly it symbols an arrow through the green heart – as placed by Cupid.

/Maate

In 1913 Luigi Russolo, composer and part of the Italian futirist movement, published his manifesto “The Art of Noise”. It became a significant theoretical landmark in modern music, inspiring generations of progressive composers, musicians and artist in general. It is still today interesting and strong conceptual work. Russolo theorized a new approach to music composing, embracing noise and other sounds alien to classic composers. Traditional composing theory and practice was outliving itself creatively and was full of limitations. Instruments, orchestras, chords and music theory in general only provided a limited creative spectrum, leaving less and less room for progression, surprise and innovation. Therefore Russolo meant that modern composers should embrace noise. Noise was born with the invention of the machine in the 19th century after thousand of years of silence and now was the time to conquer that noise and use it as a tool of creating musical progression, challenging the human ear and leaving the musical world of “clean” sounds. This new world of noise contained an potentially unlimited number of new sounds, music, rhythmical structures, vibration and tonality. Russolo developed a noise classification system, dividing the different types of noise into 6 families. He created so called noise machines that was able to reproduce some of the different types of noise and play his compositions mechanically. Russolo wasn’t a very talented composer and his musical work wasn’t particularly interesting or influential, but it theorized and anticipated huge steps in modern music.
/Jonas

Colour associations are sometimes difficult to predict. Different age groups in different cultures at different times will experience colours in different ways. But many clients seem to agree upon one definite rule: Pink is for girls!

When flowers open and berries ripe, they turn red, orange, purple, yellow and pink to indicate that they are ready for pollination or consumption – a very efficient signal. Man made visual communication has a similar agenda. Go to a newsagent and notice the sea of warm coloured magazine heads yelling »pick me, pick me!« – one trying to be louder than the other.

As graphic designers we sometimes find that pink, or »magenta« as we tend to call it, would be just the right »young«, warm color to use for a certain job – red is so over used, yellow might not be dark enough, orange might be a little too »dot-com«, purple might be too cold etc. And yet – we often stop ourselves, or a project manager does so – or in the end a client. The argument being that magenta is too feminine.

But…

A succesful use of magenta was demonstrated by MetaDesign in their campaign for Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2004. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was closed down for three months and a large part of the exhibition shipped to Berlin for a visit. The first billboards were mysterious to many people. They said nothing but »MoMa kommt« and »MoMa ist der Star« in gold and black on a bright pink background. For a couple of weeks the billboards were the talk of town, turning curiosity into a regular hype when the exhibition opened. People left their houses at 6 o’clock in the morning to avoid the 4-hour queue – and they were not all pink-loving girls…

The British bank northern rock has recently introduced itself on the Danish market, with a more advantageous savings account and a series of pink billboards and adverts. Most banks would avoid the colour pink by any means. But does northern rock look girly to us? Or mayby just »refreshing«, »new«, »different« and »young« – which is apparently what they are after.

The telephone companies Telia and Deutsche Telekom both use magenta in their visual identity. As a consequence the Telekom cycling team has to wear an awful lot of pink. Occasionally one of them is lucky enough to be put in a bright yellow shirt and kissed simultaneously by two blond bimbos, thereby restoring any lost masculinity fast. But do they indeed look girly or gay in the first place, going up those mountains in sweaty pink shirts?

The gay magazine Butt is printed on pink paper, but then again - so is Financial Times.

Some may argue that the colour pink is more relevant to the world of culture as in the MoMa campaign or in these booklets for a German theatre (by heute morgen büro für gestaltung):

But this pink guide book for Naples is more about practicalities like transportation, hotels and meals. And it has obviously found its way into male hands:

Could it be that there is a certain difference between what we think of the color pink when asked to judge it, and how we experience it? And is this indeed a general rule about visual communication? Someone should look into this!

Cleo

The Moscow metro stations are famous for their ornate design. These bus shelters to match are less known - but equally charming.

As seen by canadian photographer Christoffer Herwig.

Cleo

The newest mystery game from BBC: CDX (by Preloaded)

as always the BBC and preloaded have delivered a crime story that just sucks you in. At first I thought what is this? probably something not that special! But oh I was wrong, quite wrong indeed, and the hour I spent immersed in the game, without any intention to do so, is testiment that this new game is pretty damn cool.

All from the graphics, which by the way are almost all videos, to the real cinematic feel of the of the story and the character. The only thing I can say is go try it for yourself and you be the judge of the quality of this work.

Cheers
S