Brand Hijacking
What is brand hijacking? For a start, it’s the name of a business-manual type book recently published by Portfolio and written by one Alex Wipperfurth
Archive for November, 2005
the bastard child of Christmas
Graphic design could be the bastard child of Christmas – the modern day festivity is made up of a sack full of graphic information – whether it is the digital design which creates non-repeating motif patterns on wrapping paper or the simple message, inlaid in gold, spelling out happy holidays in a pre-digital font which follows its own eccentric spacing. For many designers, the one personal project a year which anyone gets to see is the studio Christmas card – suitably ironic and unintentionally kitsch or vice versa – it is the thing that manifestos are made of!
Work Ethics
When we leaf through graphic design directories, we seldom wonder whether the work we see was paid or credited, or whether the designer was ethically, politically or religiously coerced in any way. Designers somehow manage to keep themselves above the harsher realities of their own society in a plane of abstract, neutral mediation – the very presence of graphic design in any given society may be presented as an index of freedom of expression – yet few people look into the subtle modes of restraint and control that permeate the magazine-lined white cubes of the design studios.