The publishing yo-yo: tonight in Durham

Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

I’m really curious about this since I just moved back to Durham from Seattle, where we lost one of our daily newspapers (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

My Rise and Fall: Roger Hodge on the State of Magazines”
Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium
Roger Hodge, until recently the editor of Harper’s Magazine, will discuss the prospects of long-form journalism into the future as he recounts his experiences working with writers and offers his perspectives on the shifting landscape in the publishing industry.

Hodge began his journalism career as a freelance writer in 1989. After a lengthy detour through the thickets of academic philosophy, Hodge was hired by Harper’s Magazine as a fact checker in 1996. He joined the magazine’s acclaimed Readings section in 1997 and edited the section from 1999 to 2003.

Events at the Center for Documentary Studies

I’m curious what Hodge will say, especially in light of the fact that the Independent Weekly has changed drastically since 1999, when it seemed to have more gravitas. Can anybody tell me what happened?

Who’s going? I am.

Singapore film festival designer talks to DK

A Design Film Festival in Singapore

DK just discovered Silnt, a really intriguing design studio in Singapore.

We corresponded wtih Singapore designer Felix Ng, one of the co-founders of Silnt, whose design for a film festival they’re organizing there really caught our eye.

Check out the website for the film festival. It’s beautiful. Nice to use. Lovely interface, and very appealing.

DK really likes happening on things that are modern and engaging in a contemporary art spaces. Olafur Eliasson at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Copenhagen—all of it. The Kenzo Tange buildings in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The Venice Biennale. The Seattle Art Museum expansion. And of course, the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas, whose name peeks out of the corner in this image:

Interview about design and film with Singapore designer Felix Ng of Silnt and Anonymous
Felix Ng of Silnt and Anonymous

This is a still from an interview by a group called Commonpeople. The video clip is embedded below.

Here’s our correspondence with Felix:

DK: Both Akira and I have been to Singapore for travel/work and, like Vancouver, we admired the cultural diversity.

But, I wonder if we were missing the real picture as we were just passing through.

Do you find you have full creative freedom?

FN: I think the reason why we chose to be designers rather than artists is because we enjoy the challenge and ‘boundaries’ that are ubiquitous with a client.

of course, when the client is open-minded and trusts our ideas, will there be more creative freedom - but rarely 100%. fortunately, most of our clients are in one way or the other related to the creative industry, so that helps.

DK: Are your clients ready to take risks with you?

FN: well, it depends. most of the time, the better and clearer we can put across how the idea will be successful, the more willing the client is open to trying them.

DK: Have you had a chance to work with foreigners outside of Asia?

FN: yes, we do actually. we work with a few companies in tokyo, new york, kuala lumpur and berlin.

DK: How did that feel comparatively?

so far it’s been good - most of the time the budgets are much much more realistic then there are in singapore.

More about Felix and how he thinks about design

This is a clip where you can see some of the thinking behind the design for the film festival, and more importantly, the reason for creating a non-sponsored film festival at all.


Felix Ng, Silnt|Anonymous from commonpeople on Vimeo.

How four generations built a 90 years strong brand

Cheley Colorado Camps

Building a solid brand takes more than hiring a great designer. It takes more than just an owner’s blood, sweat and tears. And way more than just launching a spiffy online presence.

Brand building takes time. It takes attention. Constant revisiting, adjustment, and recalibration.

And, according to what I learned yesterday from a very successful camp’s director, more than anything, brand-building lies squarely on the shoulders of the people you trust to propel your message.

Interviewing Cheley

Nine years ago DK journeyed west to Colorado by Greyhound from Durham NC, where we’re now based once again, to become part of the summer staff at Cheley Colorado Camps.

Then, a few years ago, I ran into someone I met at Cheley Colorado Camps on the streets of Seattle. It was like reconnecting with a grade school friend, and we immediately went for drinks to catch up. Both of us were camp counselors in 2000. The summer program is for children of all ages in the blue-and-purple mountaintops of Rocky Mountain National Park. Sound amazing? It is. The setting is absolutely impeccable.

But the camp’s marketing materials did a lot of the selling, too.

How to build a brand

I remember receiving the application package, and getting excited with its sheer weight and size. Now I know that the brand was there, strong and clear and evocative right there. Standing on the front porch of our apartment on Ninth Street, the sale was made right then.

When I look back over the decade intervening, I realize I’ve never seen a better sewn-up package for marketing a brand experience. Cheley did a good job delivering on the promise, too. The friend I reconnected with in Seattle and I shared a long leisurely evening talking about the camp, the rituals, the scenic beauty, and the people. All of that was part of the brand promise, right from the start.

Clearly, Cheley has done a lot of work to build its organization.

Yesterday I asked Jeff Cheley, the director of the summer camp that’s been in his family for four generations, how they did it.

He said: staff, strategy, and quality.

“We have two people who just hire staff, all year,” said Jeff. Identifying the right people to share enthusiasm and push energy forward to create a brand experience is that important.

“Some people will just work for a paycheck,” he said. “They don’t really care where a company’s going.”

But real leadership means people can rally their people around a clear and well-articulated vision. They can infuse a sense of enthusiasm into everyone who works for them. Cheley employs 12 people year-round, and expands by the dozens during the summer season.

Leadership and vision

Without leaders who communicate confidently what it is their company is about, staff won’t buy in to their ideas. The meaning of the Cheley camp experience—that nugget that I got a sense of when I got my application packet—runs deep through generations of the Cheley family. “It’s in our blood,” Jeff said.

High-quality marketing materials are another key to their success, he said. From the time the camp began in 1921, “everything sent out was very high quality, from brochures to bills to letters.” Now things are done more often by e-mail, but the idea is the same: communicate quality.

Take the time to recalibrate

Cheley revisits its strategy plan several times a year. The idea is to stay in touch with the vision and mission. It’s worth paying for an outside consultant to come in and ask the right questions. They’ve worked with a group of strategy consultants on different occasions, including Cathy Sunshine of Sunshine Consultancy in Denver.

“Most of the smartest people out there realize they’re not the best at what they do,” Jeff said. Hiring an experienced person or team makes the time spent thinking about big-picture questions more focused, more productive, and well worth the money spent. “I’d rather spend more and work with someone who knows the right questions to ask.”

World’s major earthquakes

UPDATE:

Given the recent earthquake in Chile, one of the largest in history, this graphic we created about the history of the world’s major earthquakes becomes especially relevant. Note the clustering that occurs in waves over time. —DK

GOOD magazine features an illustration by Design Kompany, an infographic about the earthquake in Haiti:

Haiti earthquake in context of major world earthquakes

About our design

People are too busy to look at busy graphics.

We wanted to put the size of the Haiti earthquake—7.0 on the Richter scale—in context. How many other earthquakes have there been that were bigger? How big was the biggest? When did these happen?

It really helped that I’ve worked on deadline at a daily newspaper: our task was to find story ideas that answer the question “Why should a reader care?” quickly and in a compelling way. Writing solid copy means knowing what you want to get across. Then you can be clear and concise. For brand design, this can be really important—especially if you blog. Have you heard of content marketing? More on that in a blog post soon.

Back to our story about designing an infographic.

To focus just on size and date, we eliminated a lot of other information you might otherwise see in an infographic. Like maps. Our style of design is all about clarity and eliminating clutter, so we wanted to zero in on exactly what to highlight and make that an obvious focus.

More about the contest

GOOD asked designers to highlight the scope of the Haiti earthquake, as well as the aid given to help recover from the disaster.

Create an infographic that explores some or all of the following: the toll of the earthquake, why the earthquake was so devastating, the recovery efforts, and the world’s donations of money and aid.” Judging by Perry-Zucker and the editors of GOOD. —GOOD

What isotopes can tell us about anxiety

This is going to reveal some nerdiness, but I can’t stop thinking about halflifes.

Remember high school science? Uranium? Isotopes? Radioactive decay?

Halflife: the time required for something to fall to half its initial value. In particular, the time for half the atoms in a radioactive substance to disintegrate.

I was thinking about how we get to our midlives, and those of us who happen to have our basic needs met quite comfortably and happen to have lots of time and means on our hands start letting our minds wander. And then we get anxious.

We start thinking about all we’ve lost, rather than what we still have.

We get all anxious about everything we could have done. We think back to jobs we had, places we lived, loves we had. We put on our rose-colored glasses and pine for the past what ifs. Or at least wonder. The less strong among us—and everyone falls into it when we’re in our slumps sometimes—compare ourselves to other people we knew way back when. There is that awful thing called Facebook (disclaimer: yes I have an account), that’s just a warped window to the person those little icons say they’ve evolved to become.

Life crises

By the time we’re in our midlives, we get to thinking, “What did I miss?”

But it’s not just those of us in our midlives who get all anxious and everything.

Enter the quarterlife crisis.

Have you heard of a “quaterlife crisis”? Hits people in their 20s and early 30s who live, most often, in urban centers. Angst, aimlessness, and anxiety are among the top symptoms.

Here’s a description of what it’s like:

You can’t make any decisions because you don’t know what you want.

And you don’t know what you want because you don’t know who you are.

And you don’t know who you are because you’re allowed to be anyone you want. —Kate Carraway , “Welcome to your Quarterlife Crisis,” Eyeweekly.com/article/55882

Pink is for Monica (2)

Pinkis4Monica Pink is for Monica in 2010, too.

Bank busts and other things

DK is in Charlotte, NC, this weekend.

Checking out the big city and bright lights of the Southeast. I’ve heard a LOT of stories about how the banks here collapsed, sort of. It’ll be interesting to see how Charlotte’s morale has recovered.

I remember enjoying the beautiful museums, lovely walkable downtown, and meeting with clients a few years ago when we designed a brand identity for Flow.

Excited.

Seeing how much Raleigh’s changed makes me really curious about Charlotte’s own evolution.

Yellow is the new black

DK is thrashing away at the labs of our rural North Carolina temporary studio address.

In a short period, we’ll unveil a fresh, beautiful new logotype and brand identity package we’re creating for a Seattle* software startup.

Here’s a sneak peek from our drawing tablet:

Sketching for a software company's branding design project.

One sketch that became an Illustrator vector file which then got colorful, fast. But this is just sketching. Playing.

Not even close to done. And nothing at all like what you’ll see in a little while when the final comes out. Stay tuned.

Jamming

Here’s how DK works. For a lot of the time, we listen to our clients. We learn about their intended audience, message, and tone. All that listening and hearing is really about 50% of the work. Only once we know exactly what a brand wants to look like do we start drawing.

We open up our notebooks, and jam. We go deep and far into the corridors of subconscious exploration—even if that means crazy colors in concentric circles—then sleep on it.

Come back to the drawing table, and clear the essence of an idea from clutter.

I love this stuff.

KIT

*Shux. Moving to the SE doesn’t mean DK doesn’t want to keep working with Seattle peeps. That is the magic of Skype!




Did you know


DK offers design services?


Brand designs:

A1A
Atlantic School of English + Active Leisure
Blitz!
Bonanzle
Case Design + Project Management
Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce
C'ODA
D+A Studio LLC
Flow
Global Village conference
Group3 Architects LLC
Gupta Insurance & Financial Services
Joji Minatogawa Architects Kikokugo
Matchbox Mobile
Miyabi
Modern Business Training Services
Northwest Asian Weekly
Real Science
Petites Fleurs
Potters Bar
Redpill
Revolt
Spaccarotelli
Durham World Beer Festival 99-00 Write with Meaning
Vibrance Nutrition + Fitness
Zenovation
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