Businesses always want a quick fix to their Visual Communication needs, and end up spending unnecessary cash on a temporary solution. The result? Their business culture is poorly defined, or in the case of established businesses, their culture is diluted.
Great work is the result of a relationship built from one day to the next. It would seem that people in the industry so often miss this point. How often do agencies work around the clock to provide the best service that they can in a restricted amount of time, and in doing so, sacrifice integrity and relationship building? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the same is true of your own business empire.
All too often, businesses decide to follow a trend set by someone else – and so by the time that a trend has been incorporated into a visual communication, it is already outdated and time to change. This ensures that corporations are endlessly engaged in a futile game of catch up with all their visual communications.
Due to the fact that so many businesses over-rely on trend, budgets are wasted on re-branding as and when a new trend emerges. Furthermore, these limited and overstretched budgets are expected to create powerful, unique, and successful brands. Strange how no one has ever asked why the very trend that they believed would set their business apart has actually rendered them exactly the same as their competition.
It always astounds me how an ad agency will convince a client that simplicity, white space, and minimal design applications are exactly what your business needs… and a year later the same guys are pushing you to rework your identity. Better still, once you have received your flashy new identity, you might just find that it has been copied straight out of a branding bible, or that it poorly mimics some international trend. Something you thought was so unique and specific to you is in fact common, cheap design.
So why not question your business; question your employees and ascertain what sort of impact your business makes on its environment. And look at who you are, and what impact you have made in your business – I doubt that you would allow an ad agency trend guru in Pumas and skinny jeans to dress you just before a big meeting, so why allow such a person to dress your business.
One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we put our heads down and work – we don’t enter competitions and we aren’t particularly concerned with awards. The only accolade that we hope for is that our clients turn around and let us now that the work we have done for them is as effective and artful as originally promised.
That being said, we are highly appreciative of people who recognise us for the artwork which we produce.
As such, we would like to thank Dion and Sarah of Flux Trends for their recent article on Glyphic Evolutions, published on the Standard Bank Achiever website. http://achiever.standardbank.co.za/Foyer.aspx
We are in the process of finishing up the impasto enhancements to the “Journey of the Prospector” series so that each original can set the precedent for the interior of the firms Sandton offices. In order to complement the character’s progress through each vista and to incorporate the series into a gift calendar, we paired each piece with an acknowledgement to the recipients:
January & February
With you, we have unearthed a wealth of brave new possibilities. We have seen beyond the furthest horizons, and laid a path to the greatest of futures…
March & April Our perseverance has defined the course of future development, and our joint wisdom has grown as profound as it is immeasurable.
May & June Our journey together has unlocked an infinity of potential; we have chartered new and courageous paths to development solutions.
July & August Our combined strength has secured prosperity in the unlikeliest of places, and our efforts stand as a landmark in African development.
September & October Together, we have rendered the African landscape a vast expanse of opportunity; we have laid the foundation for a new world of harmonious development and prosperous livelihoods.
November & December
Thank you for helping us to set in motion developments far greater than ourselves. Together, we have etched our names into the epic that is Africa, and stand colossal at the forefront of African development.
It seems that Green is the new Black, as we enter a season where “going green”, “doing your bit” and “sustainability” have gone beyond being good karma to becoming fashionably good business. Is it a mark of positive change, that these types of phrases enter into our boardrooms? A sign that we can actually turn this planet around? Or is it a testament to the fact that we can capitalise on anything – rebranding and reselling our old ways in a shiny new package that comes with a guilt free guarantee*
* if you: buy two//upgrade//phone within the next hour! Tm. reg. patent pending, terms and conditions apply, *no refunds
It would be a sick irony if we made a trend out of sustainability. Are we so superficial that we would parade our ‘greenware’ for a single season, pretending to be down with the notion of preservation even while we let it go out of fashion. It would be a sad and pathetic indictment of our species, if we find that our decline is due to mere fickleness.
There is no doubt that this has to become completely entrenched in our thinking and into our popular culture. This is where peeps like us come in, and in my view, are the most responsible for exacting and maintaining this kind of global change. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions you can bet that it’s been signposted, billboarded and posterized by advertising agencies!
Anyone involved in commercial art is, in one way or another, responsible for manifesting a culture or concept into a brand. We should recognise this for the powerful thing that it is, and take responsibility.
If you aspire to be a really good creative or originator, your work will either be a response to trend or responsible for a trend itself. Simply put, we have the ability to hide carbon footprints with spanky new shoes, or to make a world brand out of preserving our future. We labelled ourselves “creatives”, damn it; we made a noun out of an adjective and carved a smartarse little career niche for ourselves. It’s time we started getting creative about the way we work. We are all involved with serious tech, it makes it easier for us to pave the way for paperless offices. Our giant screens are so specked you could get colour breakdowns for a black hole, why the hell are we printing so many proofs? We also get to choose our media. No-one is putting a gun to your head and demanding a toxic paper stock of you. No-one is putting a gun to your head and demanding a massive print run. Part of our unwritten protocol is to do things differently, to choose a delivery system that suits the message. It’s in our nature to challenge convention; part of our job to constantly ask: “is there a better way of communicating this?” All I am suggesting is changing the brief a little (if you are in advertising you should so be used to that).
Over and above this, we should be aware of whom we are working for. I am not saying we should limit our work to viral campaigns for green peace, but please don’t go and advertise oil barons with an ocean-life montage.
The global recession is proof of our interconnectedness, and ecologists will tell you that the recession is a great analogy for us screwing with the natural order of things. Churchill might have said “never have so few cocked it up for so many”. However, the silver lining is the emerging trend of the individuals who comprise the “many” questioning the previously affluent “few”.
So until the guys who built the Hadron Collider figure out how to bend it, time for us is like being stuck on a train: we are hurtling toward the future whether we like it or not. We can’t stop this train but I believe we can change tracks. The question is whether we get up and do something, or we stay seated like the conductor told us to.
There is no instant gratification in sustainability: the slowly matured results demand a steady hand and a lot of patience… so will you be telling your Grandchildren how you got up and did the right thing out of your own volition, or that you waited around until someone else branded it cool!
I hope you don’t mind but since our last chat you mentioned the articles you had started writing and how they in turn have effected your perceptions and evidently your artworks. So instead of me nagging you for your posts and articles I have done one better and set you up a category for you to RANT on!
In the past few years, there has been an online social networking boom, to the point that Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger have become common household names. Although these social networking utilities were developed for primarily non-commercial purposes, professional entities have rapidly engaged with social networking, having quickly realised that they had a seemingly endless supply of cheap, popular and accessible marketing opportunities at their fingertips.
One of my faculties at Glyph is to explore new developments in communication, and to determine how we could engage with these developments in a commercial environment. In line with this, Glyphic Evolutions has just launched a Twitter profile. However, in accordance with the Glyph ethos, it is also my responsibility to ensure that Glyph sets itself apart from the hoi polloi. So before you start following us on Twitter like a terrible flock of mindless zombie-sheep, we need you to understand why and how we are using Twitter.
Glyph is ceaselessly re-inventing itself and writing and re-writing its own protocols – the concepts, ideas and developments we deal with today may shape our approach to our work tomorrow. The immediacy of a micro-blog at once gives us a bird’s eye view of our progress when dealing with these spheres of business, and also forces us to communicate our ideas in a deeply intelligent, highly poetic way – to ourselves and to an interested audience.
Unlike so many social networking utility users, we are not just blogging for the sake of blogging, nor are we launching a Twitter profile to gain a huge following of observers whose minds have slowly been whittled away by the mindlessness of online social networking, to the point that they can no longer discern intelligent thought from inane gibbering.
Instead, we have recognised in Twitter the potential to map out our own evolution; it is a means by which we are able to develop new ideas, follow our own growth, and to motivate additional growth in a strategically directed manner. We are using Twitter to force ourselves to think harder, and to condense the otherwise transitory thoughts we have about business, art, and the world in general into something smart, traceable, and accessible.
Glyph creates in response to its environment, and in so doing, we impact that environment – and we are very much aware of this cyclic nature of creative origination. Thus, as a collectively conscious entity, we evolve with trend instead of stagnate. This sets us in stark contrast to so many agencies who may adopt online social networking merely because they are hoping to capitalize on a trend, and because they create in spite of themselves, unaware of their self-imposed transience or their connectedness with the world around them. And besides, no one really wants to know what stage of the digestive process some MD’s breakfast is in – it’s not just irrelevant, it’s wrong.
Ultimately, we have realised that if we are to sustain a discourse with the online community through Twitter, we will need to do so with the same integrity and foresight with which we deal with our clients. This, coupled with the idea of utilizing Twitter to track and direct our own progress, translates into an online following that is not only exposed to Glyph culture, but is also assured of the credibility of that culture. This active and intelligent approach to online social networking transcends the passive engagement of other commercial enterprises, neatly distinguishing Glyph from trend-ghouls and those who would believe that their languid musings are of common interest – so it’s not just good business; it’s not just a good idea… it’s GlyphiKarma.
