Applied Arts - Brian Tong

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0 3 56698 85420 04 is the father of thought. I would like to think that designing and dreaming have travelled in lockstep since our species began to walk upright... Graphic design ignites passion, identifies, informs, clarifies, inspires and enables communication.... Design shapes culture and it influences societal values. ROBERT L. PETERS $8.95 | VOL 25, N O 4 | OCTOBER | 2010 [ Canada’s Visual Communications Magazine ]

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2011 3rd Year Communication Design Student, Brian Tong's Applied Arts submission

Transcript of Applied Arts - Brian Tong

Page 1: Applied Arts - Brian Tong

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is the father of thought. I would like to think that designing and dreaming have

travelled in lockstep since our species began to walk upright... Graphic design ignites passion, identifies, informs, clarifies, inspires and enables communication.... Design shapes culture and it influences societal values. —robert l. peters

$8.95 | VOL 25, NO 4 | OCTOBER | 2010 [ Canada’s Visual Communications Magazine ]

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ESSAY Designing the Future

by robert l. peters, FGDC

Designers can play a key role in creating a

blueprint for a better tomorrow.

GALLERY GDC Scholarship Awards

RGD Student Awards

ABC...

A former magazine photo editor shoots an

emotionally resonant alphabet project.

MAIN FEATURE Illusion of Movement

by kevin brooker

Animation enters a new Golden Age—but

without the gold. Canadian studios become

leaner, faster and more creative.

YOUNG BLOOD Designer John Larigakis and

photographer Ian Willms.

GALLERY Career in Motion

In stop-motion projects and ad

shoots, Simon Duhamel reveals a unique style.

PORTFOLIO Global Persuasion

by Chris Daniels

Independent Canadian agency Cundari strives

to become a world creative force.

PORTFOLIO Raring to Go

by kevin brooker

Having survived the recession, Rare Method

Interactive is prepared to soar.

PROJECT Shooting the Twilight Zone

Philip Jarmain tells the story of

an episode of a classic TV series in a single

image.

SPECIAL SECTION

Applied Arts Student Awards

Winners from our 2010 Student

Awards, covering design,

advertising, interactive, animation, photography

and illustration (Index, p. 176).

OUTER LIMITS Look in Wonder

The role of wonder in

design and imagery revealed in a new Marian

Bantjes book.

APPL IED ARTS MAGA Z INE SEP T/OCT 2010 · VOL24 · N O4

2011 STUDENT AWARDS ISSUE

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Cover DesiGn by brian tonG

DesiGn anD layout by brian tonG

Editorial

Client Side by alain leDuC

Small stamps are built on big design

ideas.

Hot Type by roD mCDonalD

New online fonts shaped by their

bitmaps.

Design Deconstruction by hans kleeFelD

Cutting through clutter is as easy as

1-2-3.

Design Rant by barry quinn

New rebels prepare to change the world.

Missing Words by DouG Dolan

Why RFPs should RIP.

Web Watch

by ryan wolman & keith prestwiCh

Advice for the graduating class of 2010.

Design Unlimited by pamela younG

Read a book. Save a tree.

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Applied Arts: 2011 Student Awards Issue0 0 3

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This year’s selection of Student Awards winners provides a glimpse into the future of our industry, reshaped by new talent and technology.

by peter GiFFen

ach year when we run the winners of our Student Awards, it’s natural to want to look ahead. Reviewing the huge vol-ume of advertising, graphic design, in-teractive, video, animation, photogra-phy and illustration entries sent from

across Canada and the United States, and from as far away as Beirut, one begins to detect the shape of the industry in years to come. To help our distinguished judging panel get the best view of emerging talent this year, we decided to let them concentrate on specific ar-eas of expertise. In the past, all judges would judge all the entries, which could make for a daunting task, given the rising volume of sub-missions. So for the 2010 Applied Arts Student Awards, the advertising judges took care of ads and photography, the design professionals looked after their field and illustration, and the interactive judges reviewed the interactive work and loaned a helping hand to advertising. For his part, judge Colin James, associate partner creative at Grip Limited, in Toronto, felt that “the work ranged from extremely pol-ished and intelligent to conceptually weak and poorly executed. Some of the video-based work really impressed me—students pushing the animation quality to very high levels. Some great exploration of style and techniques in those categories.” While finding much of the advertising work “quite clever,” James was less impressed by the Website submissions. “Schools seem to have a generalist approach to teaching bits of all the disciplines (design, writing, programming, ani-mation) and the work shows it,” he said. “I think that with interactive work, in particular, the pro-duction is so complex and time-consuming that it would benefit from having small teams of stu-

dents [from different disciplines] work on single Websites together.” James concluded: “There were some real standout projects from super-talented individ-uals. The very best students are already bet-ter than at least half the creatives working in the industry.” In Victoria, B.C., judge Darren Warner, of dwarner6.com, thought, “The photog-raphy series were very strong, so I judged them as if they were ‘professional work’ ver-sus ‘student work.’” As far as advertising, he explains, “it’s not always good enough to hope your work ‘sells itself.’ With a little panache an idea can be elevated in competi-tion. The video presentations of several cam-paign ideas really helped showcase the thought and creativity that went in. Of course a medio-cre idea is still mediocre no matter how much flash you dress it up with.” Joanne Beauregard, CD of Sudler & Hennessey, in Montreal, was “left with the impression that many of the ad assignments were for low-prob-ability, low-profitability/high-impact advertisers, such as the WWF. It would be a far better mea-sure of their maturity and creativity to give them assignments closer to what could be called ‘real life’—the kind of projects agencies require to pay the bills.” She added: “On the whole, how well pre-pared the students are for the working life will depend more on their own qualities, like te-nacity, stamina and drive, rather than talent alone.… And then again, how many of us were really prepared for the working life?” The idea of fresh talent and enthusiasm creating a new future is also raised in a cou-ple of ways in the issue’s regular content. In his extended essay, “Designing the Future”

(p. 24), Robert L. Peters, principle of Circle Design in Winnipeg, argues that the design-ers with long-term vision, who embrace glo-balism and deploy sustainable practices, will play a key role in creating a blueprint for a better tomorrow. “Design shapes culture and it influences societal values,” writes Peters. “Designers act variously as surrogate dreamers, initiators, in-seminators, creators of desire, propagators and propagandists. Never has there been a greater need for our design professions to dig deep, to exercise whole-brain (lateral) thinking skills, to understand channels of influence and patterns of interconnectivity, to join peer networks, to collaborate with other experts and to leverage the multi-perspective advantages of teamwork.” Writing a guest column, “The Next Van-guard” (p. 14), Barry Quinn, executive creative director, brand design at Juniper Park in Toron-to, feels that the new crop of graduating visual communications students will ride the flux of changing technology and culture to transform the industry. The importance of design will shift from creating artifacts to developing ideas that “must be able to morph to accommodate dif-ferent media, operating systems, devices, envi-ronments, cultures, etc.… Design thinking will become more important than design doing. As technology makes the act of creation easier and the base level of aesthetics higher, the effec-tiveness of items will be measured not by how they look but how they work. The design pro-cess and the designer’s mind will be the part that can’t be replicated.”

To see some fine examples of new creative thinking in

action, turn to our Student Awards starting on p.105.

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Design should be a thoughtful, engaging and two-way process. The designer and client must work hand in hand to come up with solutions that are built on strong ideas.

by alain leDuC

While designers are excited about having their favourite fonts online, they have to realize that bitmaps can ruin the look of the letters they love.

by roD mCDonalD

he year 2010 will undoubtedly be remembered as the year designers finally got to use their favourite type-faces on the Web. More importantly they will know that anyone who vis-its their site will also see the same

typefaces. Good typography on screen has at times seemed an elusive goal and the use of ‘real’ typefaces is a big step in the right direc-tion. Up to now designers really only had two choices when it came to type online. They could use one of the ‘Web safe’ fonts, such as Georgia or Verdana, that come with most operating sys-tems, or they could convert the type to outline and treat it as a graphic image. Now at last de-signers can render HTML text in almost any typeface with Web fonts that don’t need to be installed on the viewer’s computer. Of course the underlying assumption is that things are go-ing to be better now that we are no longer lim-ited to a few default web-safe fonts. Now I’m as excited as anyone, and, as some-one who actually has fonts that may benefit from this emerging new market, I’m hardly a disinterested party. But I can’t help but wonder just what people think is going to happen when all these typefaces hit their screens. We’ve been adapting old designs to new technologies from day one. Gutenberg adapted the German black letter of the scribes to make his famous 42-line Bible type. A little later punch-cutters such as Nicolas Jenson adapted the Carolingian miniscule (lowercase) to harmo-nize with the Roman capital letters to create the serif typefaces we’re still reading today. But it

didn’t take very long before those early punch-cutters realized that letters carved in metal had quite different qualities than letters written with a broad-edged pen. The type cutters soon stopped trying to duplicate the written letter-forms of the scribes and began to develop their own forms that were truer to the material they used—metal. When in the mid-20th century those same metal typefaces had to be adapted to phototypesetting, the first manufacturers used their old metal patterns to create the new photo fonts. But, just like the early punch-cut-ters, they could see that letters made by flash-ing light through film onto photographic paper behaved differently than letters printed from a piece of metal pressed into paper. Once again we’re dealing with a new technol-ogy, only this one is radically different from the previous ones. Like our predecessors we also began by simply recreating our existing font li-braries. Then the development of the PostScript language in the early 1980’s made it a little easier to create computer fonts because now we could emulate traditional drawing techniques. But that still left one major difference between the previous technologies and the new digital one. Designers could draw letters as they al-ways had but they had to be rendered as jagged, pixellized bitmaps on-screen. With the previous technologies, what you drew was what you got. In the digital world, if the bitmaps don’t work it really doesn’t mat-ter how good your drawings are. That’s why when Matthew Carter designed Verdana and Georgia he reversed the usual design order. He

reasoned that if the bitmaps are that important then they should govern the design, so he drew them first and then ‘wrapped’ the outline around them. He must have been on to something be-cause Verdana and Georgia are still among the few typefaces that really work on-screen. The world of type design hasn’t changed as much as people think it has, in fact most of us are still designing typefaces for print. But once we can see those typefaces on screen I don’t think it will be very long before we realize that most of them don’t really work that well. That’s when we’ll start to see typefaces that will be de-signed for the new technology—typefaces with the bitmaps designed first. So by all means enjoy the new Web fonts, but I suggest you resist the temptation to fall in love with any of these typefaces—because there’s a good chance your favourite typeface hasn’t been designed yet.

xperience has taught me that success-ful design is more than what meets the eye. It begins with rigorous exploration and thinking. As stamp design manager at Canada Post, I work with graphic designers,

artists, illustrators, photographers and creative professionals from all parts of the country. The designs I commission, nurture and criticize all have a very specific set of goals to meet. A postage stamp reflects the culture and ac-complishments of a country and its people. It plays an important ambassadorial role as part and parcel of our national heritage. As impor-tantly, it reflects the creativity of our designers. A stamp merits the same painstaking attention paid to any design project, not to mention im-portant consideration for its unique format and international exposure. The “thinking” behind the birth of any project is key. Creating a stamp is an exciting process—or it can be—when the visual content is properly chosen and the cre-ative approach embraces those choices. A suc-cessful conclusion will depend on reducing the complexity of the topic into miniature works of eye-catching simplicity. Renowned Swiss design educator Armin Hoffmann taught me years ago “the power of

simple things to create real impact, convey-ing the message in advance of reading a sin-gle word.” I admit to looking at design from a unique perspective. Prior to my current job, I was a practising graphic designer for 30 years. Like the designers I now hire, my time was split between seeking out clients who would provide the creative challenges I craved and doing what I hoped was good, intelligent design. I know the kinds of constraints and pressure that irri-tate designers, particularly the scarcity of time, which affects quality. I’m finding, too often, the creative process has become the production of endless piles of sketches. With too much rush to design, and without sufficient value given to thinking, the resulting work is unsatisfactory and the discus-sions that follow are superficial. I want to know how and why you think you’ve met the objective. Some designers have lost the understanding that design is not the result itself. What matters is the thinking that takes you to the result. My frustration mounts when I see little or no prior analysis of the subject matter, absence of intel-lectual focus and designers not keeping in close touch with me. We, in the client world, know there is a problem when designers are too quick to cast their raw ideas into stone. Too many design at-tempts end up as showcases for hollow stylistic approaches. Another aspect of the problem is some designers’ thinking about the work is not clearly articulated, resulting in confusion. The client can be at fault here, too. So client and designer must constantly check with each other

to validate their common understanding before going ahead, at each step of the design proj-ect. I fully expect the creative process to be a two-way relationship between the designer and myself. I encourage designers to embark on a more introspective, thoughtful and engaging process with their clients. We rely on designers’ abilities to surprise us, be intellectually challenging and artistically to the point. These are the criteria by which I choose the ones with whom I work. I think Picasso had it right when he said, “Art is knowing what to eliminate.” That’s the creative quality I expect from designers. Not simplistic design, but the ability to take com-plexity, confusion and, yes, occasionally chaos, and bring back a simple message articulated precisely, creatively, with enough depth to pro-duce a resonance that moves beyond the actual design. Good design is not a stack of sketches, not a dozen variations on a concept. It is curi-osity and intelligence. It is a thought-provoking process, generating ideas and content-based visuals. It is how we get to relevant solutions. Let’s infuse the design process with adequate thinking. Face it, if we can’t articulate such thinking prior to the creation of a project, chanc-es are the design will not communicate much. Admittedly, I have high expectations for de-signers’ creative thinking and their communica-tion abilities. Trust me, it matters!

Alain Leduc is manager of stamp design and production

at Canada Post.

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Designers with long-term vision, who embrace globalism and deploy sustainable practices, will play a key role in creating a

blueprint for a better tomorrow.

by robert l. peters, FGDC

We live in uncertain times of tu-multuous political, social, eco-logical and economic instabili-ty. We’re told that nearly 50 per cent of global wealth has been destroyed by the “global

financial crisis” within the past two years alone. Media reports of potential health pandemics trump the “normal” front-page news of the lat-est terrorist attacks, counterattacks and “un-natural” disasters seemingly triggered by a rap-idly warming planet. Information overload, an overwhelming pace of change, threatened eco-systems, and staggering social imbalances threaten our individual sense of purpose, place and well-being. Around the globe, wealth, health, knowledge and technological progress have never been shared equally—yet the aware-ness of these gaps between “haves” and “have-nots,” along with a growing discernment of the underlying causes of these global inequities, have never been more apparent. Massive data storage capabilities now out-strip our human ability to access meaningful in-formation and distill knowledge: We are drown-ing in data. Social scientists inform us that the typical “white-collar worker” now encounters more than one million words per week and the average urban citizen of the (so-called) “de-veloped” world has more than 16,000 “brand encounters” every day (if you sleep eight hours per day, that means you are subjected to about 1,000 brand impressions per hour). In addi-tion, human “targets” are subject to ever more invasive and coercive advertising—in schools, hospitals, doctors’ offices, movie theatres, air-port lounges, scenic lookouts, washrooms, el-evators, on the Internet, mobile phones, fruit, public garbage cans, on bus wraps and via e-mail. Of the 200 billion e-mails sent every day, an estimated 90 percent are spam. Are we headed for a merciless state of total

brand and advertising saturation? Will we even know if and when we’ve become overwhelmed? The communications revolution of the past decades has redefined traditional notions of time and space, just as global trade and fi-nance have dissolved international borders. Comprehension of how these rapid social and technological changes (particularly “virtualiza-tion”) influence our fundamental relationship to community, the physical environment and a “sense of place” is not well understood. It seems we may be “driving beyond the beam of our headlights” as we rush headlong into an increasingly unknowable future. An example of our increasing abstraction is vertical specialization—in ever-narrower terms of reference—a phenomenon affecting all pro-fessions, including graphic design. Sadly this tends to bring with it an erosion of the broader

“whole-brain” thinking our species has enjoyed from strategists, visionaries and luminaries in the past, as well as the wisdom and holistic perspectives that “general practitioners” have traditionally brought to the table. Technology may have (arguably) made us stronger and fast-er, but it has not made us wiser.

Corporatism vs. the Commons

More than half of the world’s top 100 econo-mies are now corporations, as opposed to na-tions. Ninety-nine of the top 100 companies are headquartered in industrialized nations. Of the nearly 70,000 transnational corporations now operating worldwide, more than three-quarters are based in North America, Europe and Japan. Although the majority of these highly successful corporations enjoy identities, brands, marketing tools, communications and information systems developed by talented de-signers, there is a growing debate within the

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worldwide design community about the dual (and often conflicting) role that the profession plays in both creating wealth and serving society through the sharing of such wealth and the nurturing of culture. A decade ago, Naomi Klein described a grow-ing backlash against unbridled consumerism in her widely read book, No Logo. “The corporate hunger to homogenize our communities and monopolize public expression is creating a wave of public re-sistance,” she wrote, documenting the reclaiming of public spaces and the revolt against corporate power. Many empathized with Klein’s attack on “the brand bullies,” and with Joel Balkan’s depiction (in his book and film The Corporation) of corporations as “soulless leviathans—uncaring, impersonal and immoral,” that are “using branding to create unique and attractive personalities for themselves.” It’s hard to dismiss the almost daily reports of small-town wars against “big-box retailers” (Wal-Mart, et al.), culture jamming, brand busting, and the growth of “hacktivism” and “digilantes,” as an ever-more informed populace joins the fight of “citizenship vs. consumerism.” Not a new topic, really. Victor Papa-nek predicted the “Coca-colonization” and “Disney-fication” of our entire planet a full generation ago.

Globalism Bests Globalization

Globalization has been defined as the ever-more-rapid process by which corporations move their money, factories, products and brands around the planet in search of cheap labour, raw materials and governments willing to ignore consumer, worker and environmental protection laws. Largely unfettered by ethical or moral considerations, globalization tends to acquire and exploit the earth’s resources for private gain, concentrate and centralize decision-making power (beyond the reach of the majority of people and democratic processes), create depen-dency and impose demands of standardization or homogenization of almost everything on everybody.

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Globalism stands in dramatic contrast to globalization, taking the viewpoint that all people share a single fragile planet (Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” or what Buckmin-ster Fuller referred to as “spaceship earth”) that requires careful treatment and mutual respect by all concerned in order to survive and thrive. The concept of “Global Commons” is now used to describe the ozone layer, all land and oceans, and the earth’s rich genetic and cultural diver-sity. Like all ethical beliefs, globalism requires active practice in the day-to-day lives of the broadest possible constituency, with a view to fostering understanding, sharing resources on the basis of sustainability and equity, and com-ing together for mutual aid in times of need. Everywhere in our shrinking world we can witness increased homogenization, erosion of indigenous culture, the emergence of non-plac-es (uniform airports, generic shopping malls), and the advancement of what some theorists are calling “serial monotony.” Globalization threatens identity, the very cornerstone of cul-ture, and the key to our understanding of “self.” Culture encompasses language, traditions, be-liefs, morals, laws, social behaviour and the art of a community—understanding and protecting its inherent integrity is imperative in avoiding identity crisis and rootlessness. This shrinking world (with widened opportu-nities for designers in all disciplines) calls for extended vision, a broadened understanding of “the other” and an increased respect for our essential differences. Aware of the advancing threat of monoculture, can the world’s design-ers help conserve and revive those things that make human culture distinct and unique? Is there still time to avoid losing our sense of who we are, where we’ve come from, where we be-long and why these distinctions are so impor-tant? Designers, more than most others, are in a position to actually celebrate societal differenc-es, to embrace the vernacular and to help avoid

the unhappy melding of unique cultures into a bland global stew. In the face of globalization’s monolithic pressures to conform, I believe that designers with long-term vision, who embrace globalism and deploy sustainable practices, can truly create blueprints for a better future by becoming champions of the unique things that dignify human beings, that make our civiliza-tions meaningful and that make contemporary life worth living. We know that in an age of information and ideas, communication and experience design have incredible strength to mold societal val-ues and to influence thinking—essentially, they are the new currency in today’s virtual world. As a result, designers play an increasingly vi-tal role in empowering better decision-making, creating economic success, shaping communi-ties and forming culture. Designers today have real power. As such, we also bear considerable responsibility for how things are consumed and how change is deployed. It remains then for designers everywhere to envision worldwide solutions, to create integra-tive synergies and to give form and life to uni-versally equitable ideas. (While this may seem utopian, I envision designers as the ones ques-tioning the status quo, re-examining the practic-es of past decades to homogenize, monopolize and dominate markets, and initiating change to-ward lifestyles lived in a more holistic, inclusive, sensitive, eclectic, empowering and sustainable manner.)

Design Gives Form to Dreams

Need is the father of thought. I would like to think that designing and dreaming have trav-elled in lockstep since our species began to walk upright. In response to need and with na-scent, ascendant dreams in their heads, design-ers have since earliest times given shape to the tools, environments, messages and experiences that define human existence.

Graphic design is finally coming of age. Born in the last century of mother Art and father Commerce (and therefore named “commercial art” in its infan-cy), graphic design has finally developed a sense of its own identity, along with an understanding of its role and responsibilities relative to society. No lon-ger content with being the whipping boy of marketing, graphic design has evolved into a true profession and has adopted all that comes with professionalism—best practice models, codes of ethics, certification standards and considered criticism. As the developed world has evolved from smokestacks to information-based societies and now an “age of ideas,” the role of design has moved rapidly into the forefront of market economies. Graphic design ignites passion, identifies, informs, clarifies, inspires and enables communication in our interconnected, interdependent, real-time world. De-sign shapes culture and it influences societal values. Designers act variously as surrogate dreamers, ini-tiators, inseminators, creators of desire, propagators and propagandists. Never has there been a greater need for our design professions to dig deep, to ex-ercise whole-brain (lateral) thinking skills, to under-stand channels of influence and patterns of intercon-nectivity, to join peer networks, to collaborate with other experts and to leverage the multi-perspective advantages of teamwork.

Seeing is Believing

Today is the tomorrow that our species dreamed of yesterday. Today is also the past we’ll remember in the future—perhaps with nostalgia, perhaps with remorse. Although “design” shapes most of our modern environments, inputs and experience, the design professions are really only beginning to un-derstand the significant role we play in forming the world around us (consistent with the truism that the meaning of history is rarely apparent to those who shape it). A cautionary note for those of us living in

the “developed” world is that over the past few generations we have become disconnected and separated from nature—for the first time in hu-man history we are living by clock and calendar rather than by sun and season.

We live in shared and in-creasingly interwoven sto-ries. The Maori say, “We walk backwards into the future,” recognizing that footprints we leave behind can actually inform for-ward navigation and future progress. Listening to the narratives of others helps pave paths to better under-standing. Knowing our own past (and comparing our paths with those of others)

allows us to celebrate achievements, learn from human foibles, redress omissions (often visible only through the lens of history) and correct our course. Today, seeing is believing. We’re told that 85 percent of what we know nowadays is learned through our eyes. This means that as designers of visual language, we play a crucial role in so-ciety. The world needs us—and as information designers in an information age, we find our-selves in a position of considerable responsibil-ity, whether we like it or not.

A Call for Collaboration

I have long been a believer in the value of syn-ergism, the strength of camaraderie to bridge adversity, the vitality of collective processes, and the solidarity of common goals regarding design and our planet’s mutual future. I remain convinced that our profession will continue to play a lead role in forming culture, influencing

values and shaping the world. I know we can achieve more, be more effective and act more sustainably by sharing our ideas, giving voice to collective values and integrating synergies through our professional associations and as a part of the global design community. I have no doubt that we are capable of doing much more together than separately. In this vein, I would encourage all design-ers to use creativity, voice and communication skills to make a difference. We can choose to deploy our powerful talents and propaganda tools to further understanding and build em-pathy, to nurture tolerance, to resolve conflict, to build respect for diversity and “the other,” to expose injustice, defuse violence, promote peace, break down divisive barriers, counteract patriarchies, oppose hegemonic empires, allevi-ate despair, and repudiate fanaticism and fun-damentalism of every kind. We have the power to expose the root causes of inequity, fear, de-spair and rage (the breeding grounds for terror-ism). We can visualize long-term solutions, and we can use our unique mix of analytical and generative abilities to summon a sustainable re-sponse to looming challenges. We can promote harmony, raise the bar for civilization and civil-ity, and above all, advance the characteristics that matter in making us truly “human” beings.

Isn’t that exciting?

Robert L. Peters, FGDC, is a graphic designer and the

founding principal of Circle, a design consultancy based

in Winnipeg. He is a former president of the Icograda,

a foreign feature correspondent for Communication

Arts magazine, author of the book Worldwide Identity

(Rockport), and a Fellow of the Society of Graph-

ic Designers of Canada (GDC). For the past 28

years, Peters has lived in a low-energy passive solar

house that he designed and built in the woods of

eastern Manitoba. ([email protected])

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FEATURE: DESIGNING THE FUTURE

POWER.DESIGNERS TODAY HAVE REAL

AS SUCH, WE ALSO BEAR CONSIDERABLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR HOW THINGS ARE CONSUMED AND HOW CHANGE IS DEPLOYED.

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Canadian agencies span every kind of ownership permutation, from sole proprietors to partnerships, to inter-national conglomerates. But among them, Calgary’s Rare Method Interac-tive might have the rarest pedigree of

all. Not only is this mid-sized, Calgary-based shop the country’s smallest publicly traded agency (TSX: RAM), it even has its own satellite office in the United States. Not even its origins were commonplace. Rare Method emerged in 1997 under former president Roger Jewett, first as a shell com-pany, then a tiny agency devoted to e-mail cam-paigns. But early on Jewett devised an unusual strategy: Take the company public quickly and grow by relentless acquisition, starting with nu-merous boutique shops in Calgary. Then, three years ago, with Alberta business still soaring and revenues approaching $10 mil-lion, Rare Method went shopping for a ready-made U.S. footprint. Location-wise the agency focused on mid-tier cities like Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas. In the end, it pounced on Blain Olsen White Gurr, a respected, tech-focused shop in Salt Lake City, Utah, whose clients in-clude Telcordia Technologies, a remnant of the former U.S. Bell monopoly that now ranks as the world’s largest telecommunications soft-ware company.

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That cross-border merger yielded a number of success stories before it slammed into the 2008 recession. Total staff, once near 100, is currently at 38, two-thirds of whom work in the Calgary head office. Consider it a measure of the company’s elasticity that despite the tumult and having few employees who pre-date the 2007 merger (longtime president Tom Short left earlier this year, replaced by CEO Marty Park), Rare Method has managed to sustain continuity with a marketing culture in which interactive technologies form the bedrock, but conventional media are never ignored in the overall package. “We like to think that clients come for the interactive, but stay for the creative strategy,” says Geoff Plewes, director of client services. Whereas the mix was once around 80/20, in-teractive to traditional, it’s now around 60/40. But as time goes by, that distinction only blurs. Noting that Rare Method’s tagline is Strategic Interactive Marketing, Plewes points out that, as everywhere in the changing industry, “Our clients are becoming less concerned about their media mix and more focused on results.” And that’s something Rare Method feels uniquely equipped to de-liver. According to Cal-gary co-creative director David McKean, “Our culture definitely comes out of being a Web shop. We’re used to showing outcomes imme-

diately, like clicks and site visits. Results come first, and that approach bleeds over to the entire agency. Having the coolest creative was never our first priority.” Though Calgary remains distant from staple advertising fodder like national brands and prod-uct packaging, Rare Method services a diverse portfolio, including tourism, agriculture, oil and gas companies, and regional retail. Having been agency of record for firms as different as Bayer CropScience and Moxie’s Classic Grill, it has en-joyed particular success with a sexy rebranding of the latter, helping it morph from family diner to swank hangout for young sophisticates—and go head-to-head with well-established chains, such as Earl’s and The Keg. In Salt Lake City, chief creative officer Jeff Olsen feels the marriage has made both shops stronger. “Especially in this economy, it was great for us to bolster our interactive strengths. And merging was not as hard as you would think.” Though both offices retain a degree in-

Having survived the recession, Rare Method Interactive is poised to take off, with offices in Calgary and Utah, and a strong focus on results-oriented creative work. by kevin brooker

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CREATIVE STRATEGY.INTERACTIVE,

WE LIkE TO THINk THAT CLIENTS COME FOR THESTAY FOR THE

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dependence, he says, they are increasingly col-laborative, especially in strategy and business acquisition. “We do tons of Skype video-con-ferencing, and we shuttle a lot of work through a VPN.” Shuttling workers, alas, is not quite so straightforward, something Olsen says they’re learning to work around. Still, the two cities share much in common. “We’re both west-ern towns, fairly young, former Winter Olympic hosts, both roll-up-your-sleeves places, and it’s the same time zone,” he explains. Salt Lake City also comes with a built-in attraction for clients in the United States, especially easterners with mountain envy. With seven of America’s best ski resorts less than a half-hour from the airport, “there’s no shortage of executives who want to fly out for a meeting.” On the creative side, reports David McKean, “Americans really do bring their unique voice to the table. We recently did some work on a Banff account and they nailed it with a tagline

we would never have come up with: ‘Banff, the world’s finest national park.’” Another bright spot: The economies of both cities seemt to be rebounding. “We’re definitely seeing a resurgence,” says new CEO Park. “Com-panies are getting their marketing budgets back. We’re even growing our teams in both offices again, and that’s nice.” Add the fact that clients are more disposed than ever to think interactive-ly, and Rare Method seems poised for a return to growth. But new technologies alone won’t get the job done. “As everybody rushes to get interactive and social and all that stuff,” Olsen reminds us, “we need to make sure that Rare Method is still being interesting and engaging.”

Kevin Brooker is an Applied Arts Magazine senior writer,

based in Calgary ([email protected]).

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