As a designer, how do you navigate between idea and form? Do you only shape the content that convinces you? I've learned in twenty-five years not to make form for bad content. If I'm attracted to the content, I...
As a designer, how do you navigate between idea and form? Do you only shape the content that convinces you?
I've learned in twenty-five years not to make form for bad content. If I'm drawn to the content, I'm happy to get down to business, and these are products that work great for me. Healthy offers do not need fascinating forms and huge sums of money for their presentation. I have to believe in the content in order to convince others. When I talk about content, I don't mean perfection. Even the iPhone is not the best phone in terms of quality, but it changed the perception of the concept of a phone device among users and they fell in love with it. Which or whom we love, we also forgive him any shortcomings.
How much space do you leave to the imagination of the viewers when you design the image of a product?
As many! This is precisely the essence of invisible design, that all the ballast is reduced to form, so that as much content as possible is expressed. If you offer the observer everything on a plate, he basically does not participate in communication, because he cannot co-create with his imagination. It's a funny relationship in communication, because the more you put into a design, the less it expresses. Wannabesociety, for example, is an extreme example of no-design look, and that's exactly why the user comes to the front line when co-creating an image.
Does Wannabesociety want to be a society of "wannabes" or a society that dares to want?
It is a concept created as an invisible design experiment. I wanted to take him to the extreme. The answer to the question of what we can communicate with virtually no means, without form, is a white or black T-shirt and a bracelet on which one word from the bank is written in Helvetica typography. Every member of the network can contribute to the bank through the website.
How much can be communicated with one word?
I'd say more than two. I'm reluctant to allow fully compound words like supergirl in the WNBS word bank, as the associative field narrows. The word girl allows for more interpretations than supergirl, if it is worn by either a girl or a boy, so the experience of the wearer and the observer is more complete, as it must participate significantly in the construction of the message within a certain context.
Obama wears a BELIEVER T-shirt, Ben Affleck warms to the word CHICKEN; is WNBS the word wish-granting spell?
Of course, it's not a miracle potion, because it's a t-shirt or a bracelet made of cotton and it doesn't hide any magic. There is nothing miraculous about the thing itself, but what is miraculous is that we see a certain word so often that a wish is even fulfilled through autosuggestion. This was also confirmed by my wife, who started regularly paying bills with the ORGANIZED T-shirt.
What are our hidden desires?
Our imagination is amazing. Desires are often naughty, but also poetic...
Which company currently has the most ideas in the world of advertising?
My own rule is that you can observe your surroundings, analyze them, but when you're marketing a certain product, the concept of focusing on what you want is key. Too intense flirting with other people's successes can stop an individual from developing his own idea. Foreign patterns can "attack" you. Smart managers know that copying is business suicide. It is necessary to develop one's own model of communication while observing the surroundings. Of course, I also follow trends, because we didn't invent everything here, but I adapt this to my own model, which is not classic advertising, since it targets one person and not the crowd. In the Netherlands, certain agencies operate similarly, of course on their own models, and that's what they call it seeding – seeding.
Can you give an example?
The iPhone, for example, has never seen classic advertising. He first communicated with his closest users when Steve Jobs basically just thought of making a phone. Close associates passed it on opinion makers and the process continued until today, when the iPhone is actually no longer a telephone device, but a black box where the user loads his software. It ended up becoming a cult product that ended up on TV dailies rather than TV commercials or posters. If we see an iPhone on posters, it's touting the carriers for having it on sale, not touting the phone.
