The fight for original material

Both American Apparel and American Airlines have very similar branding, but their separation is made through kerning, color, weight, and space variables

As Graphic Artists, our daily job and requirement is to clearly communicate (through imagery) the emotion, representation, and goals of the businesses that we create for. If Graphic Artistry is your job, you may know through experience that successful work is not just creating original artwork, but capturing and excelling the clients accumulative brand. Early stage Graphic Artists seek to create original artwork first, and find a way to make it work for the client second. The unfortunate nature of the beast is that even Graphic Artists who have years of experience still want to make original artwork. It’s not unfortunate because of this drive to create original artwork (or else we wouldn’t have a job), but the idea that a strive for original artwork in itself creates competition.

Museum of Arts and Design material created by Pentagram

In more recent news, the publication of “rips” or “copy-cat” content and work has become more frequent. My goal is to demolish this sense of competition through basic logic. While the depth of these two ideologies (original artwork and brand communication, yes, two different ideas) proceeds much more than I could write in short terms. I still want to give it a try. If you really think about it, life only has so many choices, and on a daily basis we make only a select few amount of choices (or decisions). “Should I go to the grocery store or stay home?” We turn these choices into variables, and with Print and Web, these variables are even more limited. How? The decision to match one idea to another is a choice and over time ultimately becomes a limitation. But limitations to design are not bad. Our limitations to design keep our idea’s plausible. If we didn’t have these limitations, designers would no longer need theory, and our work would no longer be valuable. If you believe that another person hasn’t matched the same two variables you did when you had that next “big idea” then your mistaken. We take one idea, match it to another execution, and try to make it equal innovation (this is the light version of this equation).

India cellular provider Tata advertisement created by
Wolff Olins

But before I go too in-depth about the idea of limited variables, I mentioned that this article isn’t about that. It’s about disproving the idea that original artwork is “good design.” Some of the biggest brands in the world use the same styling. We could look at American Apparel, and American Airlines. Both use Helvetica, roughly the same weight, and even have close to the same amount of lettering to make up their name. But the public doesn’t see it as a “copy-cat.” Why? If you have watched Helvetica the film, you would know that Helvetica was the correct type face to capture the right brand emotion, bridging the consumer gap to the corporate mentality. The goal was to make the customer feel as though the corporate identity wasn’t “above you” or “not welcoming.” One of the main reasons Helvetica became so over-used is because of this transparent and modular nature. But using the most recent public logic of “copy-cat” material, one firm would be the business who used it first. Then the designer or firm who used it next would be bombarded with brief, one or two sentence cave-man-like negative comments about their recent work.

One sentence comments feel good, like this hot tub I am in

The extremely funny thing about this type of logic, is that the more a specific style or “trend” is used in design, it becomes less innovative. Causing these “trends” to be used more frequently, and the more frequent it is used, the more chance it has of becoming a design style (it is no longer a trend — i.e: grids in design was used as a trend first, but then became a rule). This is the natural evolution of the industry. But how can we simplify this? Instead of changing the evolution, how can we change our thinking? Easy, designers need to take less focus into what is original material, and more focus into how well that material or collateral accomplished the communication the brand was seeking. From a designer to designer basis, we still judge each others talent based on how radical their material is from the rest. When in reality, that’s not successful design nor do I feel it is the best way to judge design in general.

There is no direct answer to this riddle, because if designers stated more clearly what the client or brands communication goals where, we would no longer need the visuals to express them. It’s quite the oxymoron in a way. But we can challenge these facts by thinking about another idea, that maybe it was not two designers or two firms that copied each others material. Instead, maybe it was two brands looking to emotionally and visually communicate the same message.