Ben's Bits

FInally got the Japan Website wrapped up into a little concept film. It’ll be part of my degree show, so make sure to come along!

Spent an hour or two in the print room today and got the first round of boxes done. They look really cool, and despite from Clas Ohlson managing to design the worlds most complicated cardboard boxes, hold together rather nicely.

The shelter information on should look really nice with all the information filled in.

Spent today trying to come up with a mark for a rather talented fashion student at Kingston who has a secret ‘fashion journalism’ streak. As a girl with a full design portfolio that has landed her great placements, but also a great collection of articles and blog posts that has lead to equally great placements (1 of 4 Graduate Fashion Week writers, for one), trying to nail an identity for two separate things was rather hard.

What do you do for the girl who can do everything?

The answer lied in the approach. What’s the best weapon against complexity? Simplicity.

I think it works rather well. It’s gotten a lot of compliments so far. Going to come up with various applications across various media before the big fashion D-Day in a few weeks time. I just finished off the site, a nice and simple Indexhibit number that will allow her to use the CMS and add projects, but to the outsider looks like a slick showcase of work. Check it out:

Hannah Hill.

I came across the swapped Campbell Soup and Marlboro packaging that’s doing the rounds on the Internet at the moment – and would just like to make it known that I did the exact same thing a few years ago. Beat you, ner ni ner ner:

Okay, mine is about swapping entire brand characteristics and the linked image is about the brand similarities, but both are interesting ideas. I might do an entire shelf of products to see how well it works across entire ranges.

The effect is rather profound, lots of people who I’ve shown this to said it made them feel rather uneasy. It just goes to show how well rooted in our minds famous brands are.

In 1781 Dr. Samuel Johnson, man of letters and compiler of the English dictionary wrote a poster announcing the auction of Thrale’s Brewery.

“We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson opined, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

This aspirational phrasing did the trick and the brewery fetched £135,000 roughly equivalent to £13M today.

With rich beyond the dreams of avarice Johnson arguably invented the benefit and became an early practitioner in the trade of advertising, an industry that centuries later would think different to him about English grammar.

Some 120 years later, in 1903 King Gillette was faced with a conundrum.

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This is one of those “Thought it for a while but never written it down, I should probably write it down” posts. So excuse the rambling.

Think back to when you were little, you know when you turn the light off in the hallway and as you climb the stairs, all the hairs on your back stand up on end and you run up the last few steps. Maybe you still do it now, I do sometimes. You do it because you don’t know whats behind you anymore and it’s scary. We have a hard wired, instinctual fear of the unknown. Even thought it’s 99.9% likely that there is nothing behind you, you think “what if” and panic.

Now if just the darkness at the bottom of the stairs in your own house can do that, imagine living in world with a very basic understanding of “how the world works”. You don’t know why people die, why people are born, why the sun and moon go up and down,what disease is and why it spreads, what earthquakes are, and floods and rain and lighting and thunder.

As humans with the “scared of the unknown” toggle in our brains, that must have been really fundamentally terrifying. In an effort to counteract the fear and explain the unknowns you would probably come to the conclusion “Well, someone must have done it”. Great, it’s instantly more comprehendible. There’s still a why there though and that’s still scary. “Well, someone must have done it to teach us x”. There, that covers it more.

So you’re now in a situation where a ‘being’ is capable of all of these massively scary but now understandable, events. To be capable of this, the being must be incredibly powerful and important, capable of being everywhere at all times and of understanding everything there is to understand. And if you can do that, you are the most incredible being known to man, and in turn be worshipped. Remind you of something?

So now, “God did it to teach us x”. The story is spread, the books are written, the teachings are taught, and everything that was ever unexplained is now explained. Religion self perpetuates and spreads, answering humanities fears.

Except that doesn’t really work anymore. We now know why people die, why people are born, that the earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits the earth, why the world floods and what thunder and lightning is. But it’s not God, it’s science. It’s taught in schools across the world. We are now capable of explaining it all.

I feel now that religion actually harbors fear, it brings the fear of living without religion. For example, it’s why groups like the Westborough Baptist Church are so extreme. They are terrified that their views no longer fit into society as a whole, and they become more over the top in a desperate attempt to maintain their little bubble of ‘normal’. (Rather relevant: Extinction Burst.) If they let go, everything would be unexplained again. I’d be bricking it. It’s a sign that religion really has no place in the modern world.

As an atheist I have no qualms with some things being unexplained. It’s often the first retort when discussing religion “Well science can’t explain THIS”. But the thing is, 200 years ago we had no idea how birds flew and now, theists included, we all get into a metal tube and fly around the world. I have absolute confidence that the work of scientists will, one day, explain everything. They’ve managed well so far….

Sat in the park and couldn’t help noticing the brand similarities. All he’s missing is a pack of Marlboro Lights. Do Levis wearers like Red Stripe, or people who like red and white… like red and white? Or is it just coincidental? Probably the latter. Although I do find myself in the shop with a handful of items the same ‘brand colour’ rather frequently…

Patrick Burgoyne and Mark Sinclair from Creative Review came into the studio last week to have a chat to us about “what the magazine can do to help graduates”. It was a really interesting session, and a lot of interesting information was shared.

From that, Mark got in contact with our course director to ask if we could provide any input for an article he was writing about “The role of designers in disaster hit areas”. Recently there has been quite a tepid response to the Japan disaster, with ‘yet another poster’ becoming the standard response. It’s been discussed at length over at the Johnson Banks blog, as well as on the CRBlog.

Jack and I approached the problem from a more ‘strategic’ standpoint. There is a distinct lack of ‘communication’ oriented materials taken out to disaster hit areas, and with the Japan situation the systems put in place are chaotic and non-standardized.

This is perfectly understandable, I wouldn’t expect for a minute that the Red Cross would limit the amount of critical care supplies to take signposts and information boards with them. And there lies the problem, how to improve the transfer of essential ‘communications material’ whilst not affecting any of the existing supply chains.

The answer? What is always taken to disaster areas? Cardboard boxes. By printing on the outside in a fashion that makes the contents obvious, but also when unfolded turns into a sign, information boards etc, we have effectively turned the most common, but most useless, material in something of extreme importance, and removed all waste in the progress. Win win, no?

Boxes acquired from Freecycle, next stop the print room.

Saatchi & Saatchi X, a (the?) shopper marketing agency, have come up with an innovative way to conduct their graduate scheme:

Get in the lift at 80 Charlotte Street and in the 30 seconds it takes for the lift to rise, sell your little socks off and convince them to employ you.

No rules, no set themes or Q&A, just 30 seconds to do something interesting.

I had a few funny, but not very practical, initial ideas:

• Get in the lift and just not saying anything whilst idly picking my nose and playing Doodle Jump,
• Dressing up as a lift repairman,
• Jumping up and down until it broke.

But as I actually really want the job, I sat down and though about ‘what makes me… me’ and how best to portray myself as “the creative / business/ strategy / planner man”… I came up with an idea and got to work creating the masterpiece. Okay, my girlfriend did. Still need to buy the Marc Jacobs.

On the 8th April, I arrived at the Saatchi & Saatchi X offices – wearing this:

Luckily I wasn’t sectioned, and after a couple of hours queueing outside, I got my chance in the lift. Unfortunately nerves got the better of me and reduced my carefully rehearsed pitch into a stutter, but I got it back together and got my message across – albiet in a slightly ropey fashion.

After a tense 30 seconds eating a croissant (serious business), success! I was told I had been chosen to have an interview. After 5 minutes of form filling, photo taking and question asking I went through into meeting room and had a chat with Simon, the Director of Strategy, and Emma, the Executive Creative Director. As someone who’s really interested in creativity and strategy, who better to have! The nerves stayed away this time and I left feeling confident-ish.

Overall the experience was really fun, I met a lot of people and had a chat with loads of the employees who were outside talking to people in the queue. If I remember correctly, they are planning to run the scheme October time for the 2012 graduates, so definitely give it a go!

Fingers crossed I’ll get a phone call this week with good news!

I had a ZX Spectrum when I was little, and this was the first thing I was taught to do. Wikipedia puts it better than I can:

A “Hello world” program is a computer program that prints out “Hello world” on a display device. It is typically one of the simplest programs possible in most programming languages. Therefore, by tradition, it is often the first program taught in a beginning class on a particular language. It is also used to illustrate the most basic syntax of a programming language.

As the first post on the blog, probably the most fitting subject. Hello world.