Brawn GP: The Brilliant Brand

I aren't a "brand manager" or a "branding consultant" but I am interested in brands. I've always been a brand designer, in a sense. I like logos and colour schemes. Every band and musical project I've been in has been subjected to my own flavour of branding; one single often black and white logo to be used on all promotional material. Whether or not this approach was suitable was highly questionable but gigs were often well attended.

I admit I am a brand fascist in many ways; I love uniformity within an organisation and I know how it can make a difference not only to the "bottom line" of a business but also to the morale and happiness of their employees and their customers.

I will get to Brawn GP in a minute.

Throughout my teenage years I would have described myself as a fairly extreme leftist (as most teenagers who become politically aware usually are). Interesting then how my secret love of branding sat side-by-side with my unmitigated hatred of the corporation! I just dug out an old sketchbook this morning from my school days the subject of which is simply "icons". Flicking through the pages of slurring the likes of Coca Cola and Nike I realise now how I hated what these corporations did but I loved how they looked. Even now when I see a cold can of Coca Cola, alluring red all covered in condensation I feel the urge to buy in to that experience, but I don't even like Coke!

What makes these brands attractive is of course the design behind them.

Usually a successful brand is composed of something like a good product or service coupled with good behaviour, good communication, good customer service, and explaining how to improve a brand to people can sometimes be easy and sometimes very difficult indeed. The best brands are often successful because they have spent huge amounts of time, effort, money (all synonymous) on getting there.

Then along came Brawn GP. If you don't know who they are then you definitely won't be interested in what I have to say.

Last year Honda were perhaps the most dismal team in F1. The car was simply not quick enough. After an atrocious season, Honda decided to pull out and it looked as though Jenson Button would be sat on his sofa watching this year's season unfold.

Fortunately Ross Brawn acted quickly enough and arranged a management buy-out of the old Honda team and brought forward the Honda car that had been in development. It turned out to be by far the best car at Melbourne and Sepang and looks fairly dominant in practice at Shanghai as I write.

What is fascinating about the Brawn GP story is that the brand is almost non-existant, and yet it is so powerful. They started the season without any major sponsors on the car, it was plain white with black and flourescent yellow stripes. Ditto on the driver's suits and all other racing paraphernalia.

The popularity of Brawn GP (apart from what I call the "Man Utd phenomenon" whereby people simply ally themselves with the most successful team) is based around the story of their conception, which has already become a modern legend. A last minute take-over saves the team from complete destruction, and gives a great British driver the opportunity to make up for the nightmare of Honda. No bullshit, no posturing or manipulation, no dogma, just likeable and exemplary people doing a bloody good job.

What I Remembered

When I was a young child I buried a plastic bag full of sycamore seeds at the bottom of our garden. They captivated me, the way they spun through the cold air above the school playground. At the time they were the most precious objects I possessed.

"Whatever" and the problem of Creative Inertia.

We are one week into our second semester of graphic art in our new building the Liverpool Art & Design Academy, which rather shockingly has been left to suffer the current horrendous LJMU brand. I think the building itself is fabulous. There is a palpable sense of positivity humming through our new studios and I have to say I feel quite proud walking in and out of it every day, saying to strangers and passers-by in my head: "Yes, I study here. How ace am I?"

I'm currently working on a group project which is proving to be a good balance of interesting, challenging, and fun. The breif is particularly open, a situation in which historically I flounder and often run aground. But why? I think I may have come closer to an explanation today.

As I was developing some ideas in a sketchbook I got to a point where I stopped dead and put my pen down. I had been collecting ideas, developing them, coming up with names, thinking about concepts, contexts, meaning, relevance and other such intangible efforts that seem to surreptitiously drain your energy.

I am a big fan of the Maltese philosopher Edward de Bono (once again, Teddy if you're reading this, please contact me re: website redesign!). In his book "Thinking Course" he taught me that a search for alternatives is a cornerstone of creative thinking. This is of course obvious but what this really means is that we must never settle for the adequate, we should always be on the look-out for something better.

Let me get more to-the-point. I have been in the idea generation stage of the creative process for a couple of days and I have harvested a bunch of pretty decent ideas, a couple of which might be great solutions. I sit down with my sketchbook and what I realize is that I need to stop thinking and start doing. I need a threshold at which I have to sit back choose the best idea and run solely in that direction. This takes me back to the problems I usually have with an open brief: there are so many different avenues to explore, I have the entire universe with which to play, or so it seems, and this has led to pages and pages of great ideas but no movement towards a solution to the initial problem.

So I put my pen down and I reach this moment. If I carry on like this I'm never going to get anywhere. How can I begin to narrow down my seemingly infinite options? Then I start to understand: this is where my own personality comes in. This is where the artist comes out of me and yells "hey, this is what I think". But it doesn't. At least not in a very loud voice. It pops its head round my corner and says "whatever".

I have identified a serious weakness. I wouldn't say it is a lack of personality because to be fair I know a few people who make me look like Jonny Rotten. What it might be is a lack of direction. An unwillingness to move in a predictable way. A kind of creative inertia. The art school student in me wants to be positive (and horrendously post-modern) and say "it's just me refusing to conform to a traditional model of the art school student as a person with a strong social and political volition" but his head is way too far up his own arse.

I need to bring this back down to earth. What I think I have realised is that if I had a more forceful, opinionated personality then I would intuitively and autonomously remove some of the options, hence making it easier for me to act and break the inertia.

What is to be done? I can remember coming up against this problem a while back and it is truly an absurd one. I need to understand my personality and my own feelings in order to act, and I really invest a lot of energy in that very pursuit, (this blog being evidence) but it is obviously fruitless.

This only raises deeper questions about the nature of personality. Is personality only the intuitive, emotional side of our behaviour? In which case trying to intellectualize personality is pointless.

I decided to try and find out more about myself. I didn't book any tickets to Australia but I did go upstairs and asked my girlfriend if she could describe my personality in five words. First word was "huggable", not a good start. Second was "relaxed", I suppose that can't be bad. After this it was a real struggle, as I suspected. "You think too much" she said, finally. Hmmm...

I Googled "personality test" and clicked on one of the first links. It took me to Human Metrics where I filled out a simple questionnaire. Eventually it told me that I am an INFJ.

INFJ stands for Introverted iNtuition Feeling & Judging, with a big emphasis on judgement (89%) and is one of sixteen personality types originally observed by the legend of analytical psychology C G Jung. As it turns out INFJ is an excellent description of me, or at least I think so. Aimée is an INFJ also, which means that we are two of the rarest personality types in the world (c. 1.5%).

I found myself reading the personality descriptions with amazement. Below is the Wikipedia description in full:

INFJs are conscientious and value-driven. They seek meaning in relationships, ideas, and events, with an eye toward better understanding themselves and others. Using their intuitive skills, they develop a clear vision, which they then execute decisively to better the lives of others. Like their INTJ counterparts, INFJs regard problems as opportunities to design and implement creative solutions.

INFJs are quiet, private individuals who prefer to exercise their influence behind the scenes. Although very independent, INFJs are intensely interested in the well-being of others. INFJs prefer one-on-one relationships to large groups. Sensitive and complex, they are adept at understanding complicated issues and driven to resolve differences in a cooperative and creative manner.

Accounting for 1–3% of the population, INFJs have a rich, vivid inner life, which they may be reluctant to share with those around them. Nevertheless, they are congenial in their interactions, and perceptive of the emotions of others. Generally well-liked by their peers, they may often be considered close friends and confidants by most other types. However, they are guarded in expressing their own feelings, especially to new people, and so tend to establish close relationships slowly. INFJs tend to be easily hurt, though they may not reveal this except to their closest companions. INFJs may "silently withdraw as a way of setting limits," rather than expressing their wounded feelings. This behavior may leave others confused and upset.

INFJs tend to be sensitive, quiet leaders with a great depth of personality. They are intricately and deeply woven, mysterious, and highly complex, sometimes puzzling even to themselves. They have an orderly view toward the world, but are internally arranged in a complex way that only they could understand. Abstract in communicating, they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities. With a natural affinity for art, INFJs tend to be creative and easily inspired. Yet they may also do well in the sciences, aided by their intuition.

It reads like my autobiography! Having said that I begin to doubt this dodgy internet questionnaire. On a lot of the questions I was kind of on the fence and there was no middle option. One of the questions read "you like to stand firmly by your principles" and I thought "I would if I knew what they were"! I take another unrelated test and it comes out with the exact same result.

N.B. if you take this test and are diagnosed "ESTP" then I guess you are my polar opposite and therefore my arch-nemesis.

Another description of INFJ:

The Counselor (INFJ) is a more private person than the Teacher. They, too, can be found in the field of education as a professor , teacher, counselor, or educational consultant. Sometimes they feel a strong calling toward the religious life as clergy, nun, or director of religious education. Social service jobs, such as social worker, social scientist, or mediator can fit their needs. Some Counselors work in human services, marketing, or as a job analyst. Others are drawn to the arts as a novelist, designer, or artist.

Seems like I have a few options available but how strange! I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how I would like to go into teaching! (Its actually a pretty good idea: one of my tutors recently told me about how a friend of his who runs a big international graphic design company had recently gone into liquidation and had to lay off two of our graduates, "but you're still getting paid" I thought).

I have, however, never considered becoming a nun.

So what can I say about my artistic direction now? How can I use this to defrost my Creative Inertia and start to move in a positive direction? The overriding trait has to be the humanistic angle, trying to get the best from people, helping people basically, making people's lives better. Hopelessly idealistic and sickeningly naiive as it seems, this is INFJ and this is who I am. I should be choosing the options that I think are going to naturally benefit people the most, but what's to say I wasn't already doing just that?

Another little segway: interesting how my high judgement percentage fits in with my zodiac sign of Libra. No matter how many scientific books I read for some reason I always keep a little zodiac widget on my Google page. I don't believe in horoscopic astrology or planetary alignment but I have always been interested in how naturally libran I am and like to see how close Mystic Meg's predictions are.

Bibles & Their Owners

I found three pocket bibles over the weekend that used to belong to members of my family that have either popped their clogs or don't use them anymore. The earliest dates from 1910 and the other two are from 1934.

These palimpsests and artefacts of past lives offer me a very personal window into the past. I'm not interested in the war documentaries on the History Channel. I want to be able to get to know somebody, what their life was like, what they believed in.

When I first opened the earliest bible, covered hansomely in bright red and stowed snugly in a slipcase, I thought the owner must have been particularly devout. They had marked verses with red pen, and underlined them with black biro and drawn little pointing hand illustrations.

To my surprise this is actually a "marked" bible, supplied ready-marked by an over-zealous woman by the name of Mrs Stephen Menzies. You can read an article about her dated 24th April 1899 in the New York Times Archive.

View Flickr Set

What can I say about the people whose these books used to belong to? Little paper bookmarklets betray the reader's interest in particular verses, usually about Christmas. On the front endpaper of one of the later bibles the benefactor has written "To Mrs Best with best wishes from Steven — For Xmas 1934" in what I call "old person cursive" that puts most of my generation to shame. I think this says a lot about literacy today particularly in education. Let's not overlook the irony of contracting "Christmas" to "Xmas".

Rather hilariously at the back of their Prayer Book the Oxford press deemed it necessary to print an easy access "Table of Kindred & Affinity"; a quick-reference "Incest for Dummies". Amongst some of the women a man is not allowed to marry include his wife's grandmother and his son's son's wife. Brilliant.

Overall I think the books speak of a kind of realistic spirituality that can be found in Yorkshire people of the older generation. In many cases it seems as though the bibles were given as appropriate and convenient gifts at a time when gifts would have been expensive and fairly hard to come by in any case.

Setlists

Every year Radio 1 "present" a selection of the world's biggest bands and broadcast the gigs live. Looking through their exhaustive photo archives, some of the most interesting pictures document the band's set lists. These are the sheets of paper that are often taped to the stage next to microphone stands and monitors, often with bottles of beer stood on them, that remind the band members what song they are meant to play next.


Kings Of Leon obviously don't take a typographer on tour.


Killers in 2006 bold and readable in low-light conditions but interesting that they need to be reminded which band they are. Is this just Flowers anticipating that the list might at one point become a souvenir for one lucky audience member?


Killers 2008


Metallica literally blackened. Looks like they need to clean their jets though. So much duck tape on here they're obviously trying to make sure this never becomes a souvenir.


Hard-Fi with sound engineer's concise notation and the possibility of an encore.


Foo Fighters was spotted on eBay ten minutes after this picture.


Bloc Party obviously do take a typographer on tour.


Kaiser Chiefs even their setlist is average.


Nobody told Razorlight about the global Comic Sans ban.



Franz Ferdinand prefer Verdana.

The Four Horsemen...

When asked to select designers and studios whose work most closely matches my own from the first semester of level two of my Graphic Arts degree, and interesting internal dialogue developed regarding "style".

"Style" can be loosely defined as a manner of doing something, or a distinctive appearance. In visual communication it is pinned to a particular designer or artist and the correlation of visual elements from one piece of work to the next (e.g. David Carson's style is usually known as "grunge") but style also extends to everything outside the frame: approach, method, medium, format, practice, attitude.

First let me introduce you to the only peice of uni work I have done this semester that is worth discussing at length. It is a micronovella entitled "Joanna". The initial breif was to produce a 24-page book that moved from silence, to extreme volume, then back to silence again using type only.




The idea for this book was based upon the notion of authorship being inextricably linked with designership. Usually a designer is given the abstract intellectual content of a book (the manuscript) and he is asked to present the work in a way that vitalises the expression in a much more immediate, emotional manner.

I had been itching to write and design something simulataneously (wresign?) for a long time and I decided to indulge myself.

As the concept of wresignation suggests, the "story" would be influenced by the design, as well as the traditional vice versa.



The starting point for the project was an idealised concept: "the perfect novel"; a novel that had been designed without any economic restrictions and purely for aiding the memetic fortitude of the story (including readability, legibility, etc). From this singularity every other concept in the book would germinate.

I used a zoom in / zoom out method of micro – macrotypography to select point size, leading, tracking, etc. The typeface I chose was Joanna, by Eric Gill and since I was setting the story, which at this point did not exist, in Joanna's typographical voice (what kind of ridiculous author would choose the voice of his narrator before he has written their story!?) I had no choice but to create a protagonist named Joanna.

The rest of the book cascaded into place. Joanna's character was fleshed out by looking at her father's life and extrapolating her attitudes and afflictions (although not in any way meant to be an impression of the real Joanna). This is an example of how the design (i.e. the typeface) informed the story. On the traditional flipside, the story also informed the design in many ways. For example, the time came when I had to think about a cover or dust-jacket for Joanna. The story itself had become a dystopian vision of the near-future, influenced by Gill's own deep-seated revulsion towards modernity and industrial Britain. I tried to put a message of my own into the book, one which is directly related to graphic design. I tried to express my own dislike of "attention-seeking" design, and as a result the dust-jacket was never designed. "Never judge a book by it's cover" is a maxim that I try to live by as closely as possible, and in denying this book of any superficial material invites people into my own headspace through a process of intellectual conversation, rather than the unfortunate but unavoidable "first impression" method.

When trying to answer the initial question of this post, I first tried to figure out what "style" my work was in. This would hopefully point towards a few designers I already knew that I could write about.

I guess the "style" of Joanna is one where I have not restricted myself to the boundaries of graphic design. Even though I know that my main aim at university is to become a successful visual communicator, I am also interested in other forms of communication and I don't see why these external interests can't be allowed to colour my work.

Muggeridge Studio



The first designer who comes to mind when I try to match my style is Fraser Muggeridge. In an article in Grafik 159 he describes his own work as "nearly boring", and I can see that in my own work. It is intrinsically boring because it does not aim to be universally interesting. Boring is an opinion and obviously I find my work very engaging. Muggeridge's practice is based around esoteric, print-based work for specialised clients, usually from the art industry. Another quote from the article:

I try to be invisible as a designer. I try not to have a style.

On Muggeridge's own admission this is nonsense. Even a lack of style is a style in itself. What he means is that the final products don't have any superficial visual correlations from project to project. Added flourishes that only exist to flatter the designers ego, there are none, as both Muggeridge and I prefer to stick to more conservative modernist values that serve the purpose of the communication. One of Muggeridge's quotes that ring true with me is that "not every project has to be new and cutting edge". This is a reaction to the perception that in a post-Carson world, designers will compromise the effectiveness and humanism of design and sell their souls to neon hues, counterless type, paint splats and the endless yawn of blogging.

In a bizarre twist, what feels "fresh" to me is often particularly stale, only because freshness is so ubiquitous.

The second "person whose work is like mine" is Phil Baines, whose work appears at length in Eye 69. According to Eye "he has often noted that his influences came from written rather than visual sources" and "his work can appear eccentric until engaged with or read".



Baines at MyFonts
Public Lettering

Having already written 962 words and drunk more beer than recommended, I will keep the remainder of this post brief.

Without sounding too arrogant I think it's also fair to compare Joanna with the work of William Burroughs. It's certainly fair to say that as an experiment it was heavily influenced not necessarily by Burroughs' subjects or even his cut-up methods but by his willingness to experiment with a popular medium. Is Burroughs a graphic designer? No, but his writing has been likened to "verbal collage". I admire the way his work invites his readers into something which (if they are not already well-versed in his work) can completely alter one's perceptions and opens up new avenues of discussion. This is a kind of freshness that doesn't make me feel sick.

The fourth headless designer of the apocalypse that I would liken my work to is Jonathon Ellery. He owns and runs Browns studio in London and he does it so well that he has been able to diversify his own practice away from traditional design and into the art world. Ellery states the following in a recent interview with Paul Davis:

It's a love affair too. With books, with creativity, with all this. And good not to have to stick with one medium: graphic, photographic, sound, movement, lighting, Portland stone, brass. I'm enjoying it so much.

Ellery is an aspirational figure for me because he represents a place that I would like to be, and proves that it can be done.



His experimental book In and Out can be compared structurally with Joanna. Both books move on a journey from cover to centrefold to cover.

God Save the Environment!