Design DriveThru

Gay Marriage Campaign Emulates Mac vs PC Ads

Apple’s “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ad campaign is receiving more of the sincerest form of flattery: imitation. Earlier we showed you Greenpeace’s clever “Think Green” campaign, encouraging Apple to adopt more eco-friendly manufacturing practices.

This time the issue is gay marriage: political blog Blue Jersey recently launched the "Think Equal" media campaign to support marriage equality for all couples. The video ads and grassroots lobbying campaign focuses on the differences between civil unions and marriage as the New Jersey legislature takes up the issue.

"We were dismayed that the state Supreme Court put off the decision on marriage equality to the legislature, where the political pressure could result in the passage of a civil unions law instead of real marriage equality," said Juan Melli, the lead blogger on Blue Jersey. "We needed to find a way to demonstrate to our legislators that full marriage rights for all couples are the only way to go."

"We've seen legal constructs like civil unions fail in the past, giving the appearance of equality but not the reality," said Jack Bohrer, a Blue Jersey blogger who co-wrote the scripts with Melli and produced the spots. "These ads are intended to demonstrate that civil unions look nice on paper, but they don't work in the real world."

Blue Jersey was able to film the ads with professional production, actors and musicians for less than $5,000 thanks to many people volunteering their talents and time for the project.

Madonna's Disco Mash-Up

Is Madonna a musician or a designer? Her synthesis of disparate styles and pop-culture references make her both, invigorating her exceptionally-long career with artistic freshness and repeated “reinvention.”

Madonna’s 2006 concert tour “Confessions” has just been released on DVD. One of the most electric segments is her song “Music,” which has been remixed with elements of the 1976 dance hit Disco Inferno, and re-visualized as an homage to the movie Saturday Night Fever.

Gender role-defying Madonna casts herself in the John Travolta role, complete with the iconic white leisure suit, macho Brooklyn attitude, and dance moves lifted from the film.

By singing her own lyrics to the music track of a 30-year old song by another artist, Madonna is bringing the previously underground concept of “mashup” into the mainstream. The mashup phenomenon (also called “bootleg”) began in the mid-1990s in the UK, when DJs started combining vocal tracks from recognizable hits with instrumental tracks from other songs... often of entirely different genres. The jarring effect of hearing Eminem combined with AC/DC, or Michael Jackson singing with Nirvana, made mashups wildly popular among young music fans who used inexpensive new audio editing software to create their own remixes and trade them on the interent. (The mashup concept differs from sampling, where only a brief segment of a song is lifted and repeated. Mashups typically utilize entire songs from beginning to end, and both songs being mixed remain recognizable.)

The amateur, “do-it-yourself” nature of early mashups meant most artists didn’t secure permission to use the copyrighted music, meaning their creations were technically illegal and couldn’t be sold through legitimate channels. As mashup popularity grew, however, record companies realized there was money to be made in the creative re-compositions, and started providing the funds to secure permissions and make the new songs legal.

One of the first legitimate mashups was titled Freak Like Me (video below) grafting new lyrics onto the 1980s Gary Neuman song Are Friends Electric? The song became a number one hit in the U.K.

A more recent release is Ray of Gob (video below), which splices together Madonna's Ray of Light and the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save The Queen". The single, which was voted "Bootleg of the Year" in 2003, was cleared by the representatives of both parties and the track even earned praise from the Pistols' guitarist Steve Jones.

Reagan "Cries" on Time Magazine Cover: Solid Design, Iffy Ethics

The new issue of Time magazine has a cover story titled “How the Right Went Wrong,” and it describes the Republican party’s difficulties in the wake of an unpopular war and a general drift from the party’s core principles of smaller government and fiscal responsibility. This fairly complex set of ideas is described visually on the magazine’s cover with elegant simplicity and emotional power: the cover features a photograph of conservative icon Ronald Reagan "crying" -- in reality, a photoshopped composite with the tear added to an existing file photograph.

Time is taking a bit of a risk by doctoring photos (I’m remembering the fracas generated when the magazine darkened O.J. Simpson’s face), but there is some speculation that the magazine is deliberately inviting controversy to generate some publicity for itself. Setting aside the issue of whether this practice is fair or appropriate, from a design standpoint I commend Time for repeatedly designing covers that visually convey ideas, oftentimes complex ones, rather than simply slapping a headline onto a photograph. The difference is concept, and any working designer can tell you that the most natural-looking solutions are often the result of countless hours of idea generation and rejection.

Even in our media-saturated society, good concepts that express ideas visually are so rare that when you do see one it can be startling. Think about movie posters, newspapers, most magazine covers, packaging... are they visually expressing ideas or just combinations of text and image? The important question here is not whether it’s right or wrong to photoshop a tear onto a photograph; the important question to ask ourselves, as designers, is why we don’t see strong conceptual design like this more often.

Small Business: Office Park (In)Action Figures

Now you can recreate your office psychodramas at home — at last the soul-deadening corporate work environment of the “cubicle farm” has been captured in a play set for adults! The Cubes™ spend eight hours a day at tiny desks in tiny cubicles, trying to look busy and longing for the weekend.

Each set comes with a 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate environment:  break room, copy room, IT department, and so on. Familiar office “types” are represented, like the motivational speaker, the IT guy, the sensitivity consultant, and even the UPS delivery man.

The Cube figures' website includes fun extras like downloadable stickers to decorate your actual cubicle, and a job-title generator that produces meaningless (but familiar) corporate-speak. Sets range from $4.95–$12.95 and make a great gift on Boss’s Day.

NYC Brand Condoms: Only in New York

Sophisticated branding? Sexually witty messages? Hardly what you expect from a city governemt. Unless the city you live in is New York.

The Big Apple has become America’s first city to brand its own condom. The “NYC Condom” was launched, appropriately, on Valentine’s Day by the city’s health department, with the approval of mayor/public health crusader Michael Bloomberg. The health department was already handing out a whopping 1.5 million free condoms a month, but needed a way to track how many people were actually using them. To judge the success of the condom-distribution effort, they needed a brand memorable enough to show up on surveys of condom use.

Their solution is packaging design that mimicks New York’s subway signage system, which was developed in 1966 by Massimo Vignelli. That modernist system, consisting of multi-colored circles and sans serif type, has become an iconic symbol of the city that still looks innovative and fresh forty years after its inception. (Vignelli originally designed the colored-circle system to be used on a white base, but the black background was instituted later to minimize graffiti.)

The condoms are given away in bars, restaurants and, appropriately, in some subway stations. The condom campaign includes a flash-animated website and sly posters that proclaim, “New York, We’ve Got You Covered.”

The Sweet Minimalism of Chocolat

“God is in the details,” le Corbusier famously said. Charles Eames echoed the sentiment less grandiously when he said “the details are not the details. They make the design.”

When I visit the Netherlands I am struck by the attention to detail evident in all areas of design, from grand to utilitarian: city plazas as well as toilets; train stations as well as pay telephones. The charming designs are not fireworks of brilliance but rather small pebbles of pragmatic comfort. Combined, they create an environment of functional beauty that conveys a subliminal message of zen-like philosophy: the everyday tasks and objects are important too.

Nature is superlative in its aesthetic perfection, but we no longer live in nature. We live in a man-made envelope of buildings, graphics, clothing, video, furniture, etc. Isn’t every element within that envelope worthy of consideration and excellent design? Aren’t we worth it?

Not least among these items is food packaging. European and Asian designers excel at creating beautiful, practical designs that make grocery shopping a pleasure and add style to your kitchen. An ideal example of that is pictured here. The European company Chocolat uses African cocoa beans to make a variety of treats that are packaged in designs by the Spanish firm Ruiz & Company. The package design’s type-based minimalism is elegant and telegraphs the message that this is candy for sophisticated adults.

And speaking of details, their aluminum containers of fondue (pictured below) thoughtfully include a rubber band to hold the lid on once the package is opened, if you want use the remainder later without spilling it in your refrigerator. And the rubber band is beautifully incorporated into the label design.

Delicious.