Here’s our roundup of what we’ve been talking about this week. Our brew of choice this week was Café Quindío, coffee straight from the heart of Colombia.
Sian, Creative Artworker at F6 Agency Ltd:
When will designers become obsolete?
The humans of the design industry survived the first wave of machines, albeit with some casualties. Desktop publishing not only democratised design but also packaged the workload and traditional skill set of a team into a single program for one designer.
But what about the next wave? While generative design is still considered to be avant-garde, programmes that use developments in machine learning and AI, whilst still pretty bad at design, are starting discussions on whether our skills really will be irreplaceable in the future.
Prototype sites like MarkMaker are at the forefront of a designerless workflow.
The site generates logos using a genetic algorithm. Starting with a gene pool of logos, new logos are generated from user feedback and preferences, which reinforces some visual ‘genes’ while dismissing others. Through this process the program learns the user’s preferences and even attempts to understand the visual languages required for different kinds of industries.
You can try out a designerless life here: http://emblemmatic.org/markmaker/#/
What can designers learn from how people buy Pizza?
This week JKR gave us all a lesson in how the research process can be invaluable in informing and developing visual languages.
They found 96% of all pizzas Domino’s sold in the UK were sold as pairs, mainly due to the amount of 2-for-1 deals the company offers. Based on this information and the company’s existing visual vernacular, the redesigned pizza boxes have had all their graphic clutter removed, and are now designed to sit in pairs forming the two sides of a domino.
The result is a playful, bold, recognisable, and shareable design based on concrete user behaviour that champions the logo as the hero.
Elena, Account Executive at F6 Agency Ltd:
Millennials are not superheros
This topic has been upsetting me for over a year now, and I’ll probably write a blog post about it at some point. There are many articles about millennials, from how to market to them to how you need to adapt the workplace to them, changing the structure of your company. I don’t think I’ve read a single article that makes a valid point about the difference between millennials and other generations.
There are many incredible titles out there such as:
- 10 things productive millennials do every morning
- What millennials tweet about
- How to market your products to millennial parents
But what is the real issue here? I’d say content marketing. Although content marketing was born to solve the problem of brands spitting promotional content to their audiences and giving them the opportunity to create useful content that makes people come back to your site for more tips and information, the tool, as it often happens, is being used to create content for the sake of it. Find a buzz word that is trending right now and write anything about it. And the word right now is: millennials.
And this brings another problem to the table, because then people start treating millennials differently and there is high expectations of what millennials can deliver in the workplace. I’ve heard so many times “millennials are in every social platform so we want to hire millennials ‘cause they will know how to create social media strategies”. This is not true for many of my millennial friends. I’ve often asked my millennial friends after reading such articles to see if I was the only odd millennial out there.
I think the point I want to make across is, people and agencies need to market to people. It has been proven many times that age segmentation is not effective. Millennials are not all the same, millennials won’t save your company, millennials are not superheroes.
Adblockers are not the antichrist
I saw this image from ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ yesterday surfing the web and it reminded me of adblockers.
I work in the advertising industry and I’m not against adblockers. I think people thought that overcrowding the web with flashing banners and pop-up banners that jump at your face when trying to read an article so you sign in for a newsletter or buy a product is a good way of funding a platform. I agree, ads were where most of the revenue came from for newspapers, but that was decades ago, and times have changed. When the internet became a commodity, publishers thought they could use the same method. But again, this has been overused and over crowded, and people are tired. I think the industry needs to reinvent itself and find new ways of funding. Some suggestions have already been made such as only placing ads that meet certain standards to try to be less intrusive to the user. I still think there’s a lot to be done. But then, I’m just a millennial.
Candice, Managing Director at F6 Agency Ltd:
Brands using digital platforms
Despite so much evidence in favour of using social media as an effective marketing platform, many companies are still not using it to its full potential. Here are some brands using digital platforms in a creative and innovative way to engage with their audience.
Bupa UK – using interactive online music video to help raise awareness of it’s new health assessment
http://www.bupa.co.uk/health-information/bodyasaband
Audi – using Snapchat to run a campaign around people’ second-screen viewing habits when watching TV
Results
5,500 new Snapchat followers on the day of the game.
More than 100,000 snap views.
2,400 campaign mentions on Twitter totalling 37m impressions.
2,500 new Twitter followers and 9,000 new Facebook fans.
Mercedes – using Instagram to create a virtual custom shop to build your own Mercedes-Benz GLA
The campaign included hundreds of Instagram profiles and thousands of images to create the experience in which the final photo presents the user with their customised vehicle and the price tag to match.
Still one of my favourites… Honda – using an interactive online video switching to a parallel storyline
http://digitalsynopsis.com/advertising/honda-civic-type-r-the-other-side/
The original video featuring the Civic switches to a parallel storyline featuring the Type R when you press and hold ’ on the keyboard.
