Back to the drawing board

I’ve invented a new game for myself for when I walk round the supermarket. It’s called Spot the Filter. I’ve created the game because I feel more and more packaging looks like it was designed in Illustrator rather than by a brain.

I look at a piece of packaging and spot all the Illustrator filters used on any pack. It seems that some people believe that once you have included any combination of drop shadows, gradients and a few round corners on the type then your design is good to go.

Now wait a minute, before you call me a cynical old bastard, try it. Go to the supermarket and have look at how many FMCG’s have been to the school of filters and then tell me I’m wrong. Now I don’t just think that packaging is getting lazy. I walked past a series of billboards last year and each one had a large block of colour on a white background with the headline reversed out of the colour block and the call to action in the white at the bottom.

What caught my eye was that the first ad had one round corner on the block, the second ad had two, the third one three and the final ad had four square corners. Hands up all those who are trying to work out who the ads were for.

So my question is, are computers making it too easy for us to throw layouts together, make a pack look pretty, roll out a brochure and generally give us a highly polished but not deeply conceived design and put it in front of our clients?

I remember many years ago, a client saying to me that he hated computers as design tools, because it was all too easy to draw boxes on them and all he ever saw were designs with boxes all through them. Some had blocks of colour, others had images in them, but he said it was obvious that they had been designed in Quark (see I told you it was many years ago). He lamented the time when designers presented concept sketches of ideas as he felt they had more imagination and less reliance on the computer in them.

At the time I dismissed his comments but have since seen many young designers jump straight onto the computer to produce an idea without ever visualising it first. Now I’m not saying you can’t produce good design if you don’t sketch it first, but you do see a lot of designs out there with boxes and blocks of colour that just seem to be there because they are the easy option. I know I’ve done it a thousand times. Need a call to action, get the box tool out…now do I want round corners or not?

So far all I have done is rant, and I normally don’t like to criticise without offering a solution, but I must admit, apart from trying to tell those I teach and those I work with that good design comes from your brain not a pull down menu, I don’t have an answer. But for those pupils of the school of filters … I know what you did last summer.