Back to the drawing board

20 Jan 2010

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.

reader comments

I remember back in the 80's in the UK when I worked as an ad sales rep, selling space in a free newspaper in Newcastle Upon Tyne. We had a little section of the room where our graphic guy sat, with volumes of clipart books and a scalpel. He would first sketech the visual which we would show to the client, then he would create the ad, ready to be made into a bromide (remember them?) and off we would go to print - happy days. PCs and Macs have unleashed an awesome amount of power in the hands of graphic artists and fresh new Uni students, but I can't help feel the same way, it starts with a sktech and a scribble, then move into the pixel palace to release the designer within. Just go and see the art at deviantart.com and you'll see the creative side of right brained Photoshop and Illustrator fanatics, awesome work, but can it be used to effect in traditional advertising - yes!
John Miles on 30-Mar-10 12:23 PM
Agree Ian, the craft has been lost somewhat by the advent of computers. Gone are the days when an art director and copywriter team would pencil out the idea and then discuss exactly how many words to write in a block of copy, what font, what leading and so on. With computers it's all too easy to just trial and error it until it kinda looks OK.
Arun on 05-Feb-10 01:52 PM
Brody isn’t a hero. So you are wrong Mark. Try another pull down menu.
Ian Brown on 27-Jan-10 12:04 PM
Surely you can't say 'it was designed in Illustrator rather than by a brain'? After-all at the end of illustrator there is someone with a brain, so the brain is still to blame. If you want to blame someone, blame the people who teach our emerging talent, perhaps they may wish to place more emphasis on teaching thought process rather than mac skills. Illustrator and it's sibling applications allow us to produce designs which we would have not thought possible back in the day, it allows those who can actually creatively think to turn their thoughts into reality. Sometimes I jump straight to the mac, it doesn't make me a bad person and certainly doesn't make for a bad design, I simply have the ability to create and rationalize my thoughts without putting pencil to paper first. So leave the poor old filter effects alone it's not their fault, and it's actually been the launching platform for many striking trends in the industry that otherwise would have not emerged. If all design still looked liked it had been designed by Neville Brody (i'm guessing he's a hero of yours) what a black and white place it would be would be.
Mark on 27-Jan-10 09:58 AM
I totally agree! It really makes you wonder if designers these days actually have talent, or if they've just been taught photoshop and illustrator really well.
Pete on 22-Jan-10 09:34 AM
I reckon so!
Jules on 20-Jan-10 03:56 PM