In the ongoing series on how to employ contrast when using type, I will look at Contrast of Structure today.
Contrast of structure is a very easy tool to use when using type. It refers to the structure of the letters themselves. Mixing type with different structure is the objective.
The best example of this is when you use a san serif face for a heading and a serif face for the body copy / text below it.
Give this is a try in your own projects. Try adding other types of contrast as well such as using a very bold typeface against a lighter face of a different structure, or a larger typeface of one structure with a smaller face of another. Below is an example of what I mean.
A large study was conducted for the National Endowment for the Arts that indicated that the web audience was growing for many arts groups while the live audience, especially for performing arts was dwindling.
I’m aware that many small performing arts presenters are having a hard time in communities throughout my home province of British Columbia, Canada. I know this because I coordinate a program for the BC Arts Council that gives $280,000 to these presenters for artist fees and many of them show in their anecdotal and actual statistics that they are struggling or holding their own, at best.
The question is: would better marketing make a difference or is it time to look at different ways of presenting the performing arts in their communities and if so, what are the things they could do?
There are certainly some doing well (Kicking Horse Culture, Poetry Gabriola, Lakes District Arts Council to name a few), but many are struggling. It seems the ones doing well are connected and more active in their community. They are creative in how they sell their shows but at the same time, they expend much effort to make things happen.
Beyond that however, I wonder if it’s time for presenters to alter what they book and how it is presented? This approach is not promising given the lack of resources and the costs and expertise to try new and different things.
I think we are on a slow, downward slide of touring the arts, and that unless more engagement happens in different ways, it will soon be “over” for most small touring artists in the soft-seater circuit.
Who the hell am I to say this?
I’m no longer a touring artist and I’m not a presenter. It’s almost illegal to utter such words when you work in the non-profit arts world. It just that it seems to me people are so stuck in “this is how we’ve always done it” mode.
Oh, and I don’t think this problem is really a funding one (even though I do believe in increased arts funding). The problem is a changed world.
I don’t know the answers, but in a world of the Internet (Digital), simply doing the same thing—booking a show and hoping people show up—isn’t working very well any more and all the marketing in the world won’t make people buy things they don’t already want.
Any thoughts?
This week, I’ve made simplicity my main theme. I’ve been trying to find ways to simplify the “stuff” around me. “Stuff” can be anything from physical clutter to all the projects on the go or even clients.
I just read the following snippet on Seth Godin’s blog and it really struck me as one great way to simplify:
“Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.” Seth Godin
When it comes to firing customers, I’ve only had a few in the last ten years. It’s best to avoid clients that I think will lead to this situation, but sometimes it’s unavoidable and stars collide.
Recently, I had one where it was more of a mutual firing and last year I had a new client who I fired because they were unrealistically demanding for a tiny project but what really did it was when she screamed at me for doing what her assistant had instructed me to do and then didn’t even apologize when she saw she’d been wrong. I don’t work for rude people.
In both these cases, the feeling of unease had grown and it was a relief to loosen the chains that had built up.
Thank you to some of my favourite regular clients who are a joy to work with such as:
AMSSA (Lynn Moran and team)
Kicking Horse Culture (Bill Usher)
Creative City Network of Canada (Katherine Clark and Kelsey Hicks)
BC Touring Council (Joanna Maratta).
I certainly have other clients I love working with too, but the ones I mentioned give me regular and consistent work over time, they communicate easily, repay me with referrals, applause and best of all, loyalty. Thank you for helping make things simple.
Do you have clients you’ve fired?
Get brutally honest and ask yourself what “really” needs to be included in your graphic design. Strip out as much as you possibly can.
Covers designed by John McLachlan for Pacific Contact Marketing Conference
Concerning text, choose only that which is essential for the message. Also, just highlight the most important text by using contrast (size or weight) and leave the rest secondary and out of the way.
With images let your message be heard with one strong image instead of many. It’s very easy to think you have to show everything when only one thing will create a bigger impact.
When I design the covers of the Pacific Contact program each year, I always try to choose one evocative image of a performing artist versus having several. It’s true, that it may not explicitly explain the entire range of artists who will showcase, but at least an overall feeling is expressed.
If you don’t make harsh decisions about images and text, you will end up with too much with simply waters down the overall message.
ENTROPY: As a physical system becomes more disordered, and its energy becomes more evenly distributed, that energy becomes less able to do work.
Ever feel overloaded? Too much going on?
I’m on a mission to simplify how I work. It’s difficult but I think it’s worthwhile. I’ve noticed myself in the past getting my fingers into more pies as time goes on, more activities, more projects until everything is very complex and the energy that I have is dispersed..
The East Coast expression “Busy as a fart in a mitten” comes to mind.
The problem is, the Universe seems to like entropy which makes fighting it so difficult. Here’s what I’m doing:
- Reducing from many email addresses to one (this cuts down the checking of so many emails, with so many passwords with so many connection points on both my laptop and my iPhone)
- Resisting the urge to add bells and whistles to my website (this cuts down on maintenance and time spent troubleshooting)
- Refining where I spend my time online by choosing only the most effective tools (this will mean dropping some or drastically changing how I use them)
- Radically thinking of the ramifications before I say “yes” to people or projects.
In general, it’s about letting go of things and taking a breath and realizing that the world will not end if I don’t do “everything.”
We bring this on ourselves and then wonder why we have no time for important things. I’m tired of rushing through activities because there’s a laundry list of items still left.
Wish me well on the war with entropy.
“Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Entropy has got to go.”
Contrasting two weights of a typeface can be very effective. You just need to make sure you make the contrast truly remarkable.
Below is an example where I’ve used a face called Gotham Ultra against Gotham Thin:
Below is an example of what not to do — use two weights of type that are almost the same:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
- Albert Einstein
Getting things to be simple can be very difficult. This is true of marketing messages.
How often do you see a message that is so convoluted that you don’t know what it is about?
Having attended dozens of performing arts booking conferences since 1986, I’ve seen a lot of marketing materials of performing artists and the “pitches” made by them or their representatives to say what they do and why they are so wonderful, delivered in such a convoluted way that it was difficult to get any sense of what they really did.
I’ve seen hundreds of applications to showcase at the annual marketing conference, Pacific Contact. The ones that were clear in their message, in both their written description and the supporting materials were rare.
More recently, I’ve been on the advisory panel and administered some arts granting programs where I see “pitches” made by arts groups for money. It’s very rare to read the “brief” description and come away with a sense of what the actual proposal is.
The challenge for any of us making a pitch to a prospective buyer or funder is to simplify our message so that the intended audience can easily grasp what it is you are selling.
There are many ways of doing this depending on who the audience is and what you are “selling.” It’s not easy to make something that’s abstract, simple, but we have to try.
I’ll take a stab at it for my own business. Let’s say I run into someone who I think may be able to hire me (no point pitching to people who aren’t interested in what you’re selling).
I’d say, “I am a graphic designer working in print and online media for small to midsize arts organizations and artists.”
If I think I’d have time for one more sentence I would add “I also consult in the area of effective marketing in the non-profit sector.”
I know this is really brief, but having to reduce it to this short a description made me focus on what it is I really do and what the core is. Just doing the exercise is helpful.
I highly recommend trying to reduce your message to something this short. The core message you come up with will become the kernel for a more extensive message when you have the time and attention of your audience.
Can you explain in two sentences what you or your organization offers or does?
Author Daniel Pink in a recent interview said humans have three “drives.” One is biological, another is by being rewarded for actions and the third, according to Pink is the drive “to direct our own lives, to get better at stuff, to make a contribution.”
This third drive goes beyond needing to mate (first drive) or make money (second drive) and instead gets into doing things that we find meaningful and where the act itself is the reward.
I think this drive is often dismissed as unimportant or it sits below our consciousness most of the time. In other words, we react to this drive even though we don’t name it or are aware we are experiencing it. I think this is why we have a hard time convincing politicians that supporting the arts has so much value.
To me, arts mean…
Being 5 years old where my dad would set me up at his drawing board in his studio and let me draw and paint anything I wanted. We both got a lot more out of my doing this “art” than the actual finished artwork.
Being 10 years old taking cornet lessons from my grandfather. He didn’t “get paid” for my lessons and I wasn’t in it to become a professional musician, but both of us got way more out of it than just the teaching and the learning.
That's me on the right holding the cornet
Being 15 years old singing and acting in high school musicals such as being the grandfather in Guys and Dolls.
Being 20 years old and going out with a camera to Capilano Canyon with my friends Paul and Bruce taking photographs for hours, not because anyone else would ever see them but because it felt right “inside” taking them and because I learned to see differently.
Being 25 years old enrolled in the commercial music program at Capilano College doing ear training and studying music theory which opened my ears to other dimensions of music.
Being 30 years old and discovering the music of Gustav Mahler and getting goose bumps listening to “Das Lied von der Erde” while sitting on a beach on Hornby Island in August watching the shooting stars.
Being 35 years old and coming to terms with life and death by singing a song I’d written about losing my friend (Bruce) in a plane crash.
Being 40 years old and discovering the joy of typography and its history. A new world opened up.
Being 45 years old and hearing Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in San Francisco which made my hair stand on end and was the most moving concert I’d ever been to.
Being 50 years old… well, who knows what I have to look forward to with this silly thing we call “Art.”
It’s my experiences with art that I remember.
It’s art that makes life magical and brings us together in ways we can’t even conceive of.
Today, the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics happen in Vancouver and guess what we will see? ART, ART, ART, presented by people, young and old, who were given the opportunity to live in a society that let them have time to explore the “third drive.”
Here’s to “art” and the arts.
Using repetitive elements in graphic design can be a very instrumental in tying a page (screen) together and helping to convey your message to the intended audience.
There are many ways you can achieve this. Here are some:
- Use common graphic objects such as a unique bullet for text
- Colour. Being consistent and repeating a colour can be effective
- Type faces that match throughout. For example, you could choose common headers for a newsletter and although some may be in different sizes, the face itself is the same.
- Placement of common elements over many pages to let the reader know this is the same unified piece they are viewing/reading. This could be a page footer in a longer document.
In the following example of two spreads from a publication I did, there are many repetitive features including a common colour to the headers, common fonts used, drop capitals at the beginnings of sections, footers at the bottom of each page, identical margins on all pages, and more.
Look carefully at the elements you have to work with and you will start to find ways to play up on repetitive elements. Just don’t over-do it.
Imagine turning the opacity slider on your work life all the way to zero!
Recently, I read a blog post by my favourite blogger, Julien Smith that asked “What if you were invisible?” He asked to imagine what it would be like if you knew in advance that you would never be recognized for anything you did and how that would affect what you would choose to do.
I think we try very hard “not” to be invisible because we are afraid of being unseen and we use being seen as a way of finding self-value and, quite frankly, the world seems to reward us with fame and fortune (or even just a known circle at work and a regular job). Take away visibility and we may feel like we don’t exist.
The only people I can think of that can live truly invisibly are some artists who do not require any validation for what they do. They do their art regardless of what anyone thinks or whether their work is ever seen. Most artists are not that brave.
Unless we are willing to pay the price for total abandonment of visibility we are left with at least trying to turn the slider down on the opacity scale a little sometimes. It’s a challenge.
For me, this is achieved when I cease to care whether someone likes what I do. It’s being willing to get fired from a project because what I do doesn’t fit. It’s being willing to do whatever the hell I want and not care if anyone notices, like writing on this obscure blog topic. It’s learning something for learning’s sake. It’s saying things good about other people, clients or friends where they never know you said anything.
Here’s to turning the opacity slider down occasionally.
