Nick Law Says You Don’t Have to Hate Advertising

“I’m dry as a nun’s nasty,” Nick Law tells the shocked audience in his opening line. “I can say that because I’m from Australia.” Huge laughs.

Nick Law is from Australia.

Growing up in Australia, Nick learned to hate advertising. He headed to the UK to work at Pentagram, and learned to hate advertising even more. Then he went to work at an advertising agency (DMB&B) and learned to hate graphic designers. And now he works at R/GA, where he’s learned that advertising and design can not only play nice, they can create rich and meaningful experiences that could never have been achieved without the other.

Because its origins are as a production company, R/GA is very good at making things, says Nick. He shows a nice chart going from make to think on the y axis, and story to system on the x-axis. Before, the advertising process would be taking a story and bringing it to life in a method like moviemaking, the work on the internet is more like building massive systems. But the internet can now be home to that conceptual storytelling told within the format of a large, scalable, global system.

He uses Nike+ as a case study because they took a little piece of technology (a chip that can go on your shoe and track your running mileage) and built real life situations around the product (huge urban races with concerts at the end) and connected them through an online platform where users can train using the Nike Plus and track their mileage, find running clubs in their city, and upload their photos. They also produced trash-talking videos with celebs like Kanye West (trash talking? Kanye?) who challenged other celebs to step up their training. It worked: 800,000 people ran in 142 countries. It was a beautiful collaboration between advertising and design; between storytelling and systems. See the whole case study on the R/GA site.

Nick Law talks about RG/A’s That’s Not Cool Campaign

Here’s a project—and a problem—that was probably news to many in the audience. R/GA worked with the Ad Council on the issue of “digital abuse,” where the proliferation of messaging technology and devices among teenagers can lead to teens verbally abusing and sometimes cyberstalking each other (how about this phrase:  “textual assault”). Thatsnotcool.com was launched so teens could start to understand what kind of behavior was appropriate. But they did it in an irreverent way, which used edgy sock puppets, notebook doodle-like ads, and these pretty hilarious commercials featuring a person in a cell phone costume. Again, check out the whole beautiful case study, explained with a perfect blend of storytelling and systems, on R/GA’s site.

Nick Law interviewed by Kurt Andersen

Memphis Nights

We can’t sit in affinity sessions all day, designers need to dance, dammit! And before dancing, we need to fuel ourselves with charred meats. A few shots from last night’s debauchery…

Chip Kidd’s Command X judging has made him so unpopular, he’s forced to dine alone, his tears dripping silently into his glass of fine chardonnay.

The “Dance Observer” party at the not-so-New Daisy Theatre.

Complimentary cocktails and appetizers at the Design Observer party.

In case you’re wondering, Michael Bierut did win this dance-off.

The wait for Stefan Sagmeister is currently five attractive female designers long.

Thanks to DJ Chroma (aka Kevin Smith) and Winterhouse’s Jade-Snow Carroll for making (and thinking) such a great party.

Be sure to tag your Flickr photos makethink and we’ll include them in our next round up; these photos all taken by Make/Think With Gelatobaby’s Official After Hours Photographer, Scott Stowell

Stefan Bucher’s Inner Monsters

We’ve had a lot of nice This is My Life montages, but Stefan Bucher‘s is pretty much the best (and you can see it online along with a bunch of other awesome videos!) From a young nerd to working at Wieden + Kennedy to becoming an adult who made a lot of professional mistakes, Stefan says there’s a common theme throughout all this madness:  “Why did I do all this? So I could stay up late and make the things I want to make.” But he’s regulated his lifestyle by staying independent, and living within a very small footprint. Of course this means he’ll never get a huge airline account, for example, but he also doesn’t have any debt.

Stefan Bucher explains a book cover design.

But you know how some people have inner demons? Well, Stefan’s could be called something more like monsters. Dueling monsters. He finds himself constantly fighting the eternal battle between his subconscious and his conscious; his sunny side and his dark side (is that also his German side vs. his American side?). Some glimpses of his double personalities…

When re-envisioning a new Super Bowl logo for a New York Times feature, he eschewed flashy, even sporty: “I wanted to make the nerdiest Super Bowl logo in existence.” He not only designed, but concepted, wrote the copy for, and assembled some amazing parody products for the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a tutoring center in Los Angeles. These back-to-the-future convenience store products include Mammoth Chunks and the Time-Freezy Hyper Slush machine (an old Slurpee machine) which is tagged with the brilliant hand-written sign: “Out of order, come back yesterday.” And Stefan’s own brand of humor is extremely apparent in his blog alter-ego, The Neologist, a special website where Stefan himself will create an impressive compound word that answers your word needs.

Stefan Bucher and His 100 Monsters

Finally, Stefan’s Daily Monsters, his ongoing project that began as a challenge to draw 100 monsters in 100 days and eventually led to a book. Stefan drew a monster just for us! And he’s interacting with it onstage (is this like his dark side and his bright side having a conversation?). But something truly amazing came out of the monsters project; the new version of The Electric Company signed him on to turn the monsters into letters by coloring in the negative space. Yes, typography and monsters can work together to teach children how to read. We’re learning through fear.

Stefan Bucher’s Superbowl “Logo”

But the two Stefans got to cooperate for his latest project, The Graphic Eye, a book of designers’ photographs he curated and designed. Even though it’s a beautiful book full of sumptuous photographs, he was able to arrange the images into curious narratives and juxtapositions, which tell some pretty subversive stories. It’s the one time he’s truly felt like he could be true to: “It’s a subconscious and conscious came together for a family picnic.”

Elizabeth Coleman Schools Us

Stately, elegant, eloquent Elizabeth Coleman, the president of Bennington College, is a designer of sorts. She redesigned the college 20 years ago into a radically different curriculum that focused on a more broad definition of a liberal arts education. This is an especially big issue for design, which usually has such a focus on technical skills and specialization. Her argument is that design can be a central part of this new kind of education (the other part being critical writing and rhetoric). In fact, she says, you can see evidence of design thinking in philosophers and thinkers as far back as Plato. “Lest you think that Tim Brown is the first to appreciate the value of prototyping,” she says. “If you don’t get the design right, you’re not going to get much else.”

Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College

Education in general is a mess (no surprise there). But our schools are going in such a direction that we’re too focused on specialization and skill acquisition. This means that instead of learning more and more about more, we’re learning less of less and less. The risks to society are massive: oversimplifications of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, only technical mastery and neutrality…which all can put people at risk of getting educated by the media, or as she calls it “the ‘other’ educational institution.” She encourages a broader curriculum that focuses not on teaching right and wrong, but engagement. More specifically, civic engagement, and environmentalism, health, ethics, equity and governance. “The point is not to treat these as topics of study but a course of action.” Sounds great, but where do we enroll?

Kurt Andersen interviews Elizabeth Coleman

Marissa Mayer and the Design of Google, Explained

Google’s Marissa Mayer has been the “keeper of the homepage” since its inception in 1998. And she’s going to tell us how a focus on the user, paired with a focus on simplicity, has made them, well, a verb.

Marissa Mayer explaining the first Google homepage

The site has been celebrated for its elegance and criticized for its sparseness. Google’s original homepage was actually designed by founder Sergey Brin, who was less than willing to do a fancy design (“I don’t do HTML,” he told her). In user testing, at first people didn’t know to type things in the box because they were waiting for “the rest” of the page to load.

Marissa Mayer talks about design at Google

At Google, designers’ intuition doesn’t rule. They let the data decide. For example, Google discovered they weren’t using the same blue on the search and the GMail pages. So they entered into testing to check a range of 41 shades of blue between them (this is the famous “shades of blue story” that designer Doug Bowman cited in his departure from Google). They proved that the more green you add, the lower your click-through rate and the higher your abandonment rate. Adding an image to Google Checkout slowed user response rate by 2%. “It’s interesting to see how you can change the way that people respond to the web in ways that are not intuitive,” she says. (It’s kind of the complete opposite of Roger Martin’s talk.) Recently, they expanded the search box a teeny-tiny bit, and immediately saw more effective search results.

Kurt Anderson interviews Marissa Mayer

Little known fact: Their Google language preferences were actually volunteer efforts by people from different countries who translated the terms for free. Littler known fact: There is a Swedish Chef option in the language preferences. Pick this one: “Bork Bork Bork!” But look at this, Marissa’s only been gone from Google for a day, and look what they did already to her precious design!