aTantalus is a one(ish!) man studio specialising in design, graphics and photography. The day job involves everything from designing a quick logo to putting together finely wrought websites or sales brochures (plus consulting, copywriting and lots of other design related services in-between!) NEW SERVER
Technology and Design are funny old games!
Design (both in-print and online) is usually about working up an idea until someone signs it off…
…and you would expect to find that it ONLY goes live when it’s being checked, proofed and approved by anyone with an interest in the thing.
Yes, you’ll find a few exceptions (and opinions!) but, by and large, a first draft isn’t thrust in front of the public with promises that this ad or website or magazine will look a ‘lot better’ in a few weeks time when, erm, we’ve actually finished it.
Now, the technology sector is a bit different (we won’t cloud things with the industrial design side of technology development) – our concern is with the way new technology is shepherded in to the mindset and ownership of consumers.
Not waiting for the gift of sound and vision
It seems that getting the latest technology advances ‘out there’ is the overiding concern of the majority of the firms in the more commoditized areas of the industry. And because you can probably update and tweak and improve things with firmware updates, it’s seen as fine by all-and-sundry.
In fact, the ‘business’ is full of people bemoaning that such-an-such technology is not used in this or that item, even when the technology is simply not ready for ‘prime-time’. New tech sells magazine and blog ads and no one seems to mind that many of the new gadgets are not up to scratch (often for their primary task). It leaves you wondering if everyone just hates accessible technology so much that they are willing to suspend critical and functional analysis just to hype a feature promise?
Too Little too LTE?
Just look at LTE phones – super fast internet connections on the move – GREAT! But they are BIG, to accommodate the new chips, and currently the batteries last only a few hours when used. Phones can even drain when plugged in and CHARGING in the car. Amazing. Not ready. And not even a firmware update will improve the fact that the underlying chips are too power hungry and the technology is NOT READY for public use.
So what do the critics do? In many cases they’ll just ignore the battery issues and pretend the very ‘bigness’ is now THE feature that matters the most. Firms even invent categories like SUPERPHONES to hide the fact that they have basically being saddled with a HUGE flat battery eating early concept phone.
Anyone buying this item will impress like minded ‘geeks’ for a few weeks (with the ‘newest’, ‘fastest’, biggest phone) before going back to dreaming about a firmware update… and then pretty soon they will focus on the next thing that basically fixes all the stupid errors on the current product. (I know this. Been there, done that, hacked the system!)
In the meantime a community will develop around the item, and they will hack and ‘root’ and mod the thing to run a webserver or flush a toilet . And they’ll also decorate the OS with a gaudy teenage-bedroom-like set of backgrounds and icons that make you want to vomit.
You say you want a revolution?
And also cast your mind back to the CD-Rom revolution.
Cartridge consoles were almost killed overnight as this great new technology appeared. We gasped at the promise of the new format that allowed you to store 650+MB of date. THINK of the possibilities? The only problem was the CD-Roms were 1x and 2x speeds (i.e REALLY SLOW) so games suddenly went from being instant-on arcade game in your house, to you sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting… for the crummy CD drive to load.
It took about 3 years for the technology to be acceptable and cheap enough for mass market, but anyone refusing to join the CD-party was technologically slaughtered.
Can we work it out?
So we have a inglorious circle of design, function and finances.
The early adopting sector of the market will cajole, fund and cheer these hapless unfinished early releases all day long. It’s enough to keep everyone in jobs and constanly waiting on the thing that will do EVERYTHING perfectly. And it is a nice bonus for firms as they keep developing the technology until it IS actually good and cheap enough to be used in ‘comsumer’ grade technology. (Think of it as someone paying extra for your early sketches and designs. You’d be delighted – but it would eventually cloud and confuse the quality of your output).
But what has this done over the years? Basically it has detroyed the ‘average’ consumers ability to trust and believe in what technology should do. Everyone is now used to the ridiculous way new technology and PCs need to be mollycoddled with updates and virus checks .They’re used to having to ask a gadget savvy kid or relation to help them set up this or do that, too. It’s certainly not the Jetsons version of an easy tech-filled future.
But there will always be some companies that benefit from ‘doing things properly’ – waiting a bit to release a fully working product (even if some functions are missing in a bid to make the product more ‘useable’ straight out of the door).
Apple (obviously!) and Nintendo (now and again) are the best examples of running assymetrically with the above thinking. Even things like Sky+, XBox360 and PS3 show the benefit of constantly improving a platform. Often these companines may take a bit of a price hit early on to allow them to get something that is better than ‘good enough’ (but expensive) to market. And then they stick with a few models to make sure there is a larger market and unfragmented ecosystem for the future.
And we can only hope that the success of some of these companies will drive players like Samsung, HTC and LG to up their game and look to innovate and polish rather than copying, hyping and shoving it out the door.
Well, I just had to say something about the SMiLE box set!
First, it pretty much goes without saying that it’s fantastic, utterly beguiling and presented in as good a sound quality as we could ever possibly expect, and now I’ve now spent a few magnificent hours listening, it’s just amazing how ‘otherworldly’ it still sounds. (and not in the all-to-easy to prescribe narrative of chemically induced near-madness or deliberate ‘childishness’)
To me, it feels like music from a parallel universe to what ‘pop’ and rock music have become and it’s still as unique and ‘out of place’ today as it was in its mid-sixties birth.
SMiLE could be described as taking cues from American, European and Oriental folk tales – from the Brothers Grim and Hans Christian Anderson – from classical music – from romantic and gothic poetry. (“It’s Red Riding Hood, Mark Twain, Twilight and Mozart, Jim, but not as we know it”) and, although it’s obviously unfinished, the music still manages to present such a powerful and magical half-remembered journey through everything that made America…
..and then it coats a dollop of humour and eccentricity to make what is surely the perfect American fairytale.
What struck me is how other talented (or not!) ‘western’ artists and even dedicated ‘copyists’ have never approached the true feel and scope of SMiLE. All those people who have tried to copy it, to use the same sounds, write in the same style… they have missed the spirit of SMILE by light years. Nothing FEELS like SMiLE, nothing transports you to the places where SMiLE goes.
Sure there was and still is lots of great experimental and interesting crossovers of music around… (and there hopefully always will be!) But when I go back and listen to a lot of music that tries to mix blues, country, r&b, pop, classical, Indian (or whatever) it’s starting to feel a bit like ‘cheating’. What is actually going on in these trendy genre-mixing conceits? Are we not just seeing self-proclaimed boundaries of race/culture/taste and class being deliberately built and then crossed by a relatively privileged bunch of people in an effort to appear ‘cool’ or gain popularity?
And SMiLE doesn’t do that. SMiLE genuinely does things that has not been tried before or since in popular western music. It’s classical in scope but does not sound like baroque-pop – it uses ‘country’ and folk instrumentation, but is certainly not country or folk rock. It’s sometimes wordy, but it never overstays it’s lyrical welcome. It dares to think that ‘Pop’ Music could have a scope beyond the deliberate and fleeting manifestation of ‘cool’ or ‘popular’ and that it can be both beautifully childlike and crushingly wise and battered by the wisdom of human existence. And it was still supposed to sell a million copies in January ’67!
And so…
Music has plateued now for several years with a crowd of shallow hipsters bemoaning how ‘I want you to help me but you can’t help me and that’s really sad’. Ughhh! So it’s with a little sadness when you realise how utterly bankrupt our popular culture has become.
But SMiLE does indeed still make me smile… and cry …and wonder.
Thanks Brian and the boys.
I like this idea about the differences between the generations and their relationship with privacy, design and technology…
Generation X and the Baby-boomers (basically the over 30′s) see privacy in a different way to the under 30′s (Generation Y, ‘millenials’ or other such nonsense!)
The life of the younger generation almost depends on being seen, tracked and just generally noticed online… and they couldn’t care less if they are being used as ‘product‘ for the real customers (ie. the advertisers) of Google, Yahoo and Facebook etc.
The older generations, while still very much embracing all kinds of web and social gubbins, still have an inbuilt fear of giving away too much information just to be ‘advertised at‘ (very probably justifiably). Ironically, the older generation is also the one that the advertisers really want a piece of – but the blighters are playing hard to get!
Another great divide is surely how people appreciate tech products. The over 30′s are more likely to like the design, support and thorough understandingly of the ‘human element’ found in Apple products, while the under 30′s (or ‘young’ at heart!) can be sold any old sh!t if they think it will be ‘free-ish’ or ‘faster’ or ‘open’ or other such meaningless hyperbole.
All this goes a long way to explain Google’s general dis-interest in doing many things ‘elegantly’ (in a design sense) …at least at first. It’s the ‘advertiser-customers’ who they really need to please at first, and the ‘product-users’ only becomes more important if they are not selling as well as they should!
It will be interesting to see in the coming years if getting older and wiser makes the young pups more likely to think about privacy and humanist design… or are they stuck forever in this ‘shouty’ devil-may-care fling with Google’s servers?
or a return to that degree-show-seat-of-the-pants-20-hour-day feeling
When you get on a bit, and further away from the panacea of the University degree course, design seems to be more and more about deadlines and ’process’ rather than free-spirited creativity. This is particularly true if you’ve settled in to a straightforward corporate design world of ‘no alarms and no suprises.’
It’s a world where deadlines can sometimes get the creative juices flowing and provide a fantastic focus for a team; and other times, well, other times deadlines can panic that entire process in to some HORRENDOUS decisions! And you could also say that a large percentage of ‘Design’ is just about getting the appropriate number of people to sign-off the work and, crucially, to understand what they’ve signed off (so no one throws their toys later on!) Joy…
But this isn’t what this post is about.
This post is just about keeping that starry eyed designer from years ago a little bit ‘satisfied’. It’s about keeping the design ‘spirit’ alive rather than always surrendering to the corporate void of ‘design is all about opinions’ and ‘everyone has an opinion’ hum-drum drudgery that so many designers will eventually succumb.
So how do you keep the spirit alive?
A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to do quick website design for a golf club. “Great but rather run-of-the-mill” you might say…
BUT, the brief was nicely open ended, sign-off was simple, and time was tight!
Great stuff, I thought, let’s get us a piece of that degree-show-seat-of-the-pants feeling on a normal ‘vanilla’ project and do the bulk of it in a day!
So… 24 hours later we had a nice clear, functional and extendible website live on the web! Each element was tightly controlled, fiddled with, output and published by just one person – me! (plus some additional proof checking and an exhausted supply of tea, cake and chocolate , but that’s half the fun!)
So to keep sane and regain that feeling of being ‘in control’ (at least a tiny bit of the time) my advice is:
and then…
It doesn’t have to be tremendously creative or a complicated project, but it does need to be completely creatively controlled by YOU from start to finish – with a gloriously published result!
Yes you, the designer, just needs to feel back in control of a normal day-to-day project for a brief moment… before returning to the smoke-and-mirrors world of corporate ladders and sign-off. Do it!
The myth of Photoshop... a magical artefact with the power to change the very colour of a jumper or move things a bit to the left.
A Kind of Magic
As designers, we probably spend an awful lot of time trying to explain what is and isn’t possible in this or that given timeframe. It’s an occupational hazard – and a by-product of the speed and response times enabled by this brave new-ish digital age.
It can often be something really quite positive, with clients amazed at the speed and variety of things that are now possible with print or web based ‘magic’…
BUT there’s one huge wave of misconception that seems set to throw grit in the gears of the freelance and small studio design ecosystems… and it could trickle down, like a champagne flute fountain of sewage, on other aspects of projects that do actually require considerable time and effort to complete.
It was the myth of Photoshop
Possiby the one and only design program most people have heard of is Adobe ‘Photoshop’ – and it seems to provide a new and exciting verb for a semi-informed blagger to throw in to conversations.
How many times has ‘That’s been Photoshopped’ been used in the papers, on the TV, in the office cafeteria or down the pub as a catch-all way to describe some sort of image manipulation (good, or bad).
The problem is that there’s a misconception about Adobe’s loveable-but-bloated cash cow that has started to firmly take hold. It’s the belief that this ‘new’ technology means a capability to make instant one touch changes to any image in the time it takes someone to think of that change. Just like the misunderstanding of synthesizers in music in the 80′s, there is an expectation that it is easy, instant and limitless in how it can be used.
Fixing a hole
Popular beliefs about Photoshop certainly aren’t all positive spin. An awareness of the ‘bad photoshop’ school of image manipulation has raised its head in popular culture. Through a torrent of stupid and crass photo edits on magazine covers, to the over use of blur, airbrush and other features; the ‘magic’ view of Photoshop is now balanced with the idea that it just makes things look fake and rubbish.
Now you would think that the bad photoshop examples would make people a little more thoughtful when approaching the feedback and sign off for design projects… hmmmmm. (and once more… hmmmm)
You Just May Be the One (but can we have red hair, a blue jumper, be holding an umbrella, in front of the Eiffel Tower… and look the other way?)
Don’t you just love it as a designer when you find or take a nice image, pop in some lovely copy and make it all just so. It’s great, and life is good… But then, somewhere in the shadows (and highlights) the myth of photoshop starts to have its debilitating effect.
Someone, who has heard about the myth of Photoshop, thinks it would be great if it had a slight tweak. Great you think, and tweaks are what photoshop is there for… But the tweak is tilting a head, moving an arm or generally treating the scene as a 3D tailor’s dummy. No, no, no!
Use responsibly...
So to end my ramble (with some sort of point) this is just a plea to use photoshop in a way that won’t make things terrible and obviously ‘photoshopped’…
Do – improve, tweak and lightly edit photos
Do – cut out, mask and generally enjoy the limitless creativity
BUT DON’T – try and change/cobble together the limbs and body on a simple photo (that is supposed to look like a photo!) just because someone believes in the myth of photoshop. Don’t do it. Stop. (unless your boss shouts at you, obviously… do it then, but then go away and write a blog entry.)
We've paid for this and you 'ain't seeing anything but our logo
…or how to get a headache in advertising
I know this is obvious, but one thing is bugging me when watching a large percentage of TV.
It’s something that’s come from America and it seems to be something that we now pretty much accept without thinking.
It’s this…
Sponsorship, image rights and advertising deals are leading to the near constant BLURRING of logos and products on TV.
…and it makes my head hurt!
The first tentative blurring steps were used to protect the innocent (or overly cross) but now it is pretty much everywhere. Watch any Discovery, National Geographic, UKTV or other UK satellite channel and blurring is RIFE. The make of that car, BLURRED. That road side advertising – BLURRED. The logo on that fish crate in ‘Alaska’s Last Deadliest Axe Catch’, BLURRED. Eukkk
I imagine this is pretty much how Soviet Russia felt… albeit with the one state endorsed product replacing the ‘shouty’ marketing department with a cheque book and a phone number for a good solicitor.
Back to Blighty…
Growing up in 70′s and 80′s Britain has underpinned a lot of how a generation remembers the relationship between publicly funded TV and advertising.
Back in the day, the BBC (bless ‘em) was TERRIFIED of mentioning ANY product in case another manufacturer kicked up an almighty stink leading to the sudden death of all public television. We remember how, very gradually, it became just about OK to mention a brand name in a song played on Top of the Pops or allude to a particular manufacturer in a magazine program.
And now it’s a pretty much a lovely BBC free-for-all-product-and-logo-a-go-go-fest! A goodly amount of BBC programs just show products in use, normally, with no distracting blurring (as far as my eyes can see anyway!)
This is a great thing for a designer! (see it does have SOMETHING to do with the day job!) You can see styles; brands and behaviour develop over time without distraction or censorship. And it also makes some of the most mundane and useless sitcoms just about historically interesting.
While the BBC still has to pay lip service to not favouring a certain brand, it seems to be just about post-modern and self knowing enough to make it OK (well, without being too smug, usually!)
So well done the beeb!
Doubtless the avoidance of blurring is also connected with the BBC’s tremendously all-encompassing deals for usage rights and archive footage.
This also means they can pretty much show just about anything and back it with practically any music known to man, beast or fish in the soundtrack (witness the difference between a BBC episode of Top Gear and the frankly woeful DVD versions…)
Big changes are a-foot for aTantalus!
In an effort to modernize and bring together several different sites for ‘the day job’ ,we’re making aTantalus the starting point for all the different design services that we’ve provided over the years.
It will be a bit of a project, but I think it will be more interesting to join the day-to-day design jobs of aTantalus and Badhedgehog to the other interesting design/tech/bloggy bits that make for a more rounded and interesting site (rather than yet another bland portfolio based design bore-fest that most studios produce)
Let’s see how it goes!
We’ve just completed another tremendously wet July – 125mm of rain and at least 50mm more rain than any other month in the year.
It looks like ye old icelandic blocking low has pushed the jet stream down towards the Med.
This would all be easier to take if we were STILL not in the grip of a wonderful United Utilities hosepipe ban (although the fact that July was the wettest month by far does show how dry a spring we had) …BUT we were all floating down the roads last November… remember that, United Utilities?
It was very nice to see four whole planets at once last night… Saturn, Mars, Venus and an elusive twinkling Mercury – startastic! Ashamed to say that I resorted to another iPhone app called ‘Planets’ that used the compass to make sure I was saying what I was seeing correctly!
