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Designing an International Competition Logo You are a graphic designer who has been asked to redesign the icons for an international interior design competition. You are given a pack of the promotional material from last year's competition: full colour, glossy A3 and banner posters, fold-up A5 brochures, letters, stickers, even drink coasters, in a glossy board folder, all printed with the obsolete icon. Leafing through this material, you suddenly get an impression of the sheer amount of paper and ink expended for such an ephemeral event. Paper for example is cheap and getting cheaper, but environmentally it is very expensive: the felling of unknown trees in unknown locations and transportation of logs in big-polluting trucks or ships; chipping, pulping and manufacture of paper involving huge amounts of energy and water and the exposure of workers, air and waterways to sulphuric acid, chlorine used in bleaching, dioxins and dust and other effluents such as heavy metals. There is also the manufacture of waxes, plastics, synthetic resins and formaldehyde for paper coatings and of course inks, as well as more transport, packaging, distribution and wastage. You also remember what you have heard about the increases in paper consumption due to new, cheap technologies, such as colour printers (which devalue paper at the same time), and old habits such as printing out every design modification. You realise that every decision you make, from colours, to sizing, to fonts, to formatting will have similar material implications, and start to formulate a very different way of promoting the event: with a suite of electronic icons. How will this make a difference? You are extending the life of each icon by lending them to the electronic context - making them modifiable and inherently dynamic. The idea is that each icon can be altered while remaining recognisable. You decide you need to collaborate on this and get in touch with the competition's web manager who herself has been toying with the idea of 'dematerialising' the competition's promotional material. She has also recently been involved in a project researching the possibility of re-directing marketing strategies for socially responsible ends. Through this project she has learnt that informational campaigns often fail because they lack effective 'placement' strategies. People do not generally retain 'information' until next they need it, but in fact have to be continually prompted. This situation is not resolved by materially excessive promotional campaigns. The information has to be targeted both in terms of content and timing and the content and form of the message has to be commensurable both for reasons of credibility and good design. However, the competition organisers may take some time to come around—they specifically want posters and brochures. You discover that there are still boxes and boxes full of unused ephemera from last year's competition, so using the 'integration' principle, you decide to also work on a design that reuses this material. This will send a strong message about resource conservation to the competition community including entrants and sponsors. You decide to give the competition managers more than they bargained for in the 'return brief'— a five year promotional plan with a phase out of paper-based material over the next year. You also put forward the idea that designing a suite of long-life logos could become part of the competition brief in future years. For
more to think about in relation to designing graphic products:
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