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It’s nice to have a former client return. We created the identity for HealthCare Insight nearly six years ago and the company has been on dramatic growth curve since. The firm detects fraud and abuse in health insurance claims—an enormous problem in today’s healthcare system. In November HCI launches the next generation of its fraud prevention application: Nucleus. We’ve been working on a comprehensive array of items related to the launch, starting with the logo, together with the welcome kit, brochures, trade show displays, mailers and Web sites. We’ll keep you apprised as it’s all unveiled.
Following up on our work for the annual ACG conference this past March, we’ve been asked to help sponsor and design the communication materials for the Association for Corporate Growth program series. Over breakfast once a month, a successful corporate executive speaks on “Foundations for the Future—Building for 2011 and Beyond”. The organization meets for breakfast the second Tuesday of each month at the Little America Hotel at 8:00 a.m., and guests are welcome.
modern8 intern Derek Boman is now sticking around as a part-time employee. / Through the persistence of Tara, our office manager, we’ve got Salt Lake City picking up a recycled trash bin in front of the office every week. It’s good—nearly all of our trash can go in there. Now we just got to remember to put it out on the curb once a week. / Randall is off to NYC for “Gain”, the AIGA business conference for design firms.
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I’m reading a new book. Only through the first chapter, but when I was driving past the mall on Friday and looking at their sign, I immediately connected with something I had just read.
The book is The Language of Things by Deyan Sudjic, a treatise on the meaning of man-made things. In the intriguing first 40 pages the author connects such diverse design luminaries as William Morris, Jonathan Ive, Raymond Lowey, Dieter Rams and Philippe Starck.
The author, who is also director of the Design Museum in London, relates the following:
There is something to understand about objects beyond the obvious issue of function and purpose. It suggests that there is as much to be gained from exploring what objects mean, as from considering what they do and what they look like. Design is the language that a society uses to create objects that reflect it purposes and its values. Design is the language that helps to define, or perhaps to signal, value. It is the language of design that serves to suggest an object’s gender, often though the most unsubtle of means, through color, shape, size and visual reference. It is design that reflects a sense of authenticity, or its manipulative opposite: cynical salesmanship.
Most of the examples from the book deal with consumer products—from cars to calculators—but to make the point that even the most subtle of designed forms carry a message, Sudjic refers to the medium closest to a graphic designer’s heart: typography.
When a designer picks a typeface he chooses from a bewildering array of choices, extensively multiplied since the dawn of the digital era. Categorizing and identifying typeface selections is a full-time task at type foundries. Typeface design has been an important activity since the Roman Empire and capable designers are aware of the historical and psychological context of any particular choice.
Typefaces are primarily utilitarian—the copyright office considers them exclusively so. They are, after all, just symbols representing spoken sounds. How then, do they carry so much meaning? Why does one typeface look appropriate for a wedding invitation and another for a hair metal band?
As Sudjic says, “Partly through association and memory, partly through the emotional triggers and resonances it brings, a typeface expresses an endless range of characteristics, even wider in its scope than handwriting. But, while it takes a graphologist to decode individual signatures, typographic design can communicate on a conscious or unconscious level with everybody, whether aware of the vocabulary or not.”
The language inherent in the form of those simple 26 alphabetic symbols is remarkable. All of it beyond what the letters actually mean as words.
So it is for all man-made artifacts. All designed objects carry with them a language and meaning far beyond their utilitarian aspects. Decoding that meaning is central to understanding the man-made world in which we live. Read More...
Posted by Randall Smith | Read More »
In the parlance of educational institutions, the term “viewbook” refers to the very important brochure sent to prospective students to entice them to attend the school. We’ve created viewbooks for Neumont University in the past, but this year we co-designed the brochure with Matt Maxwell, who serves as an independent consultant to the Salt Lake-based computer science school. The 24-page brochure is full of geeky-rich content that appeals to the target market, including graffiti-like drawings, varnished on top of student photos. The middle spread has a pocket containing inserts describing each of the four majors the school offers.
  
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