Tag Archives: media coverage

Shooting furniture designers

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Fusion by Jonas Pedersen, ready for sale in 2013

“Skud på stammen” (shoots on the tree trunk) is a Danish four week workshop each summer where designers and cabinetmaker apprentices create brand new furniture prototypes. The experience is obviously very enjoyable and worth-while for the participants, and often result in sellable products that can move the Danish furniture industry forward. But how can the communication and branding effort be taken to the next level?

Solid communication
The webpage and accompanying press release is solid communication, and the story was picked up by the Danish technical journal Ingeniøren. Strangely it wasn’t mentioned in neither Danish Design Centre or Danish Design Association’s newsletters.
The description of how the workshop was executed is rather limited, but this is probably a good idea to avoid competitors copying the concept.
Each participant has been asked 3-4 standard questions, which has resulted in some very good quotes from especially cabinmaker apprentices, while the designers are more brief.

Has the initial communication goals been reached?
Looking at the standard questions, the career counselling aspect is rather obvious: Designers are asked about their educational background (role model), while the apprentices are asked why they wish to become cabinet makers, and dreams for the future.

Both groups are asked why they decided to participate, which indicate that recruitment is (or has been), an important communicative goal. Judging by the replies from apprentices, most have heard about the workshop via word of mouth, and they are already sold to the idea. The designers seem more practical and less enthusiastic when replying to the questions.

So how could the designers be engaged more?
Since the workshop is hosted by Copenhagen Technical College for educational reasons, there is a limit to how many communication ressources can be spent on promoting the designers.
However, it ought to be possible to engage the designers more by making them talk more about themselves: How do you usually work with design (+ link to portfolio page)? How does this workshop influence the way you work as a designer?

Other initiatives could be

  • Extending the promotion by keeping the pages from previous years (it’s a big plus that books from previous years are available on the page, but since you can’t zoom in, it’s impossible to read the text on smaller screens).
  • Assemble design picture, designer and apprentice information in one convenient page, instead of spreading it over three different pages, where you often have to scroll down quite far, looking for a particular designer or apprentice.
  • Newspage spotlighting and following up on designs that have succesfully made it into production and links to external media coverage.
  • Live coverage of the workshop itself (pictures of the process, possibly on Facebook, blogs by designers or apprentices, or communication person walking around asking questions and finding the good stories).

Why all the fuss about typefaces?

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I recently started on “Just my type” by Simon Garfield. It is a very enoyable book about typefaces, and I’m planning to start on a small series of posts on the subject, because this particular part of the design world has been nagging me for a while: Why can people get so angry about Comic Sans, and why can’t you use the powdery frailness of Papyrus without being hit by the chilly winds of dissaproving silence?

First a little provocation:

Because I’m a social constructivist my first reaction is to whip out Bourdieu, arguing that it is completely arbitrary what is considered “good” typefaces and typography. It is just defined as good by people that have achieved a position within the pecking-order of this particular sub-field of design. A sub-field that isn’t fundamentally different from any other nerdy hobby with an established jargon, creative productivity, and an ongoing debate… Except that they have managed to convince the general public that typefaces and typography is somehow more important than other things like designing LEGO spaceships or cosplay costumes?
And one final provocation: Couldn’t we just use something like Helvetica for everything and be done with it?

Personally, I have a tendency to agree with Beatrice Wardes’ Cristal Goblet-argument, that printing should be invisible without disturbing the mental images created by the words of the text. Because my love of writing makes me focus on which emotion, mental images, and insights the words create – instead of how the letters happen to look on the page.
However, typefaces can add something extra to a text, and if you want to sell stuff, everything from content to appearance counts.

This makes typefaces obviously important from an economic standpoint. We live in an industrialized society with participation of labour, where the continuous battle for attention and desire means that everything is being more thoroughly designed from the product itself to visual identity and training of sales personnel.  It’s natural that type designers and graphical designers get their share of this development, and well known companies can often get a surprising amount of media coverage by making slight changes in their visual identity or logo, while a few companies like IKEA has even attracted a lot of critisism by simply changing their standard typeface.

So from a tactical perspective, playing the typeface-game is not only necessary to keep up with competitors, but can also occasionally create attention and brand visbility.
But typefaces is also a lot about feelings, and feelings are very important for developing an attractive brand personality, more on this topic next time!

Danish Design Award 2012

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Oticon Intiga, winner of both Danish Design Award Industrial Design B2C and -People’s Choice

The annual Danish Design Award yesterday introduced two new excellent initiatives: People’s Choice Award and a Talent Award for promising design students. But could the award presentation be turned into a red carpet style media event?

Designers are notoriously bad at getting out there and promote themselves as media personalities, and will generally prefer being picked by a respected curator rather than promoting themselves. The new Talent Award could be a great way to increase media awareness among design students, and give the selected few a starting push toward building their personal brand. That is, if they’re willing to start cooperating with the media.

The People’s Choice Award is another great way to increase awareness of the importance of design and the design industry. The concept is well known from many other types of contests that try to involve the audience more than being mere spectators to the judgement of experts. But success obviously relies on whether anybody is actually voting or paying attention to the results. And that takes media coverage.

Media coverage

Minister of Culture Uffe Elbæk spreading glamour at the award presentation

In line with the little investigation I made of ‘design’ on Infomedia a few posts back, most mainstream newspapers seem to have dutifully reported the results of the design awards (industry news). Judging by the pictures, however, the award presentation seemed like a relatively small and private event in the café at Danish Design Centre, and the journalists may not have done much more than rework the story from available press releases.

Judging by an article in the Danish national newspaper Politiken, the shutting down of commercial activities and focus on core business at DDC may have a lot to do with a substantial loss of government funding and a less than sympathetic stakeholder satisfaction analysis.

This makes it doubtful that DDC will be able to lure in the press with a big red carpet style award show in the foreseeable future. But something needs to be done because without genuine press interest, the two other components: designer branding and public participation simply doesn’t work.