A fellow typographer has created a great series of postcards that show the subliminal messages sent out when using different typefaces.

With tongue firmly in cheek, some of the postcards are absolutely spot on. Who can doubt that Comic Sans isn’t the hand of God or that the typeface Stencil isn’t Rambo 4?

However, I was intrigued by the choice of subliminal message for Gill Sans: I am the son of a stonecutter. This is surprising, not least because there are so many things you could hold up against Eric Gill that being a son of a stonecutter is a bit of a cop out, but mainly because to many Gill Sans cries out “I am English”.

The typeface has a long history of being used for organizations that have a national prominence or by companies that are uniquely identified as having British heritage. From the LNER to the Ministry of Information, from Jan Tschichold’s iconic designs for Penguin to the BBC.

It was this heritage that we experimented using when we started the design phase of Metrotwin, the social utility for Nylonistas. One of the first ideas we discussed was signposting the different cities through colour and type:

The choice of Gill Sans for London was clearly cut, as was the choice of Helvetica Medium for New York. Used (in a roundabout route) by Massimo Veignelli and Bob Noorda for their signage plan for the NYC subway system, it’s now a ubiquitous part of the city’s identity, found on virtually every street corner.

Our colour choice was also to be found on every corner: yellow for New York cabs and black for London taxis. (We also had a secondary palette which didn’t get developed which used red British telephone boxes and blue American post boxes.)

In the end, we decided that the 2 colours (especially when reinforced by images of taxis as on the Metrotwin home page) had such a strong meaning that having city specific fonts was over kill.

However, it’s undoubtedly true that both colours and fonts have the power to create associations and send out messages of their own accord. Which reminds me, with Obama surging ahead in the polls there’s a really obvious one that Lars left out:

Lorem ipsum sucks. There, I’ve said it. I’ve come out against the designer’s fall back. Need a block of copy, none available from the client? Lorem ipsum will do. Need some sample user comments? Lorem ipsum. Need a headline to fill that space at top of the page? Want people to focus on the presentation and not the content? Whack in some latin. It’s the catch all filler copy, the designer’s best friend. Yet is lorem ipsum actually a friend to clients and, ultimately, a site’s users?

Our work at Made by Many falls into two distinct phases, strategy and production design. We don’t use lorem ipsum for either.

In the early phases of a project, we use design as a visual tool to help our clients understand the services we create. We often focus on a user’s key interactions, presented to the client as a series of highly polished screen designs. Whilst the visual nature of these designs helps translate our thinking into something that looks and feels real, it’s often the content that makes the service believable.

In fact, the service is only made real by showing the relationship between form, content and interaction. Taking away any one of those elements (by falling back on latin copy for example) immediately makes the idea less tangible.

As a project moves into production, there’s often the temptation to use latin as a design element - the idea has been signed off, what does it matter if the design becomes progressively less real? However, the most successful sites are those where the user has been considered at every step of the project. How do you do this? By creating designs that mirror the experience real users will have of the site as closely as possible.

Real users don’t see a site with latin headlines or where every comment is the same 50 word fake entry that has been repeated using cut and paste. By taking the time to use real copy, the designer is asked to consider each element from the user’s perspective. Does this form need any instructional copy? Is it as simple and as short as possible? Does the formating for comments work for both entries of 1 word and 100 words? What happens if a headline splits over 2 lines? Without considering these real elements, there’s a strong danger that design just becomes decoration.

Made by Many is the first company that I’ve worked at that is solely focused on social media. This has come with its own opportunities and challenges, not least of which is knowing how to successfully design for sites that are built around user generated content and not brochure-ware or dynamic information.

This particularly came home on a recent project when we started researching our client’s competition: review and recommendation sites. One of the most interesting parts of this process was noticing how everyone is broadly dealing with the same information, yet with varying degrees of success.

A user comment can be considered the atomic unit of a social review site - it allows people to share their own experience of a place (or purchase). It’s a part of the site that works hard, and the designer has to work hard too. For example, the user can be presented as a name, or a name and avatar image. This could be surrounded by profile details that give other users context. For example, this user has done 15 reviews and is therefore a busy member of the community. Or even some form of dynamic icon that shows how closely the reviewer matches the user’s own personality. Read the rest of this entry

How do you create a distinctive look and feel for a website that helps set it apart from the rest of the marketplace? Type, font, colour, image choice? Where does the inspiration come from for creating the best solution at the right time for the right client?

I recently found myself asking just that after finishing a project. Before I started designing I knew that one of my key tasks was to find a typographic style that would not only unify the site’s content but also make the site feel different from its well established competition.

Here’s an example of the typographic style we put together for the site: (I’ve used a background image and font colour a mile away from the content of the original site so as not to cloud the issue)

The idea for using type in this way — at an angle on a white background — seemingly came fully formed. However, when I step back, I’ve found it very intriguing to ask myself where the inspiration for this part of the design came from.
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Notes from an internal review meeting. It’s possible that the design may need more work.

I’ve been amazed by these photos ever since I first saw them a couple of years ago.

They’re of an art installation in San Francisco called ‘There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole World’. Chris Cobb, a local artist, rearranged every single one of the 20,000 books in the Adobe Book shop by colour.

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