I was left laughing a few hours ago by an even cheaper ad and web campaign from Eircom to undermine the ‘Red Door’ advert for fixed broadband and landline’s by Vodafone. Debating the back lash from Eircom, it seems to raise more issues concerning national consumerism and ultimately the protection of the Irish markets rather then a cheap stab at Vodafone.
Archive for the ‘Advertising’ category
Vodafone Door ad gets knocked
October 16th, 2009Why not set up?
August 11th, 2009
On the 22nd of June my very welcoming internship in why not associates began. So far I’ve been here about 2 months and its always difficult to properly assess just how much I’ve learnt. When you think about how fast you assimilate into a working environment, the underlying learning amounts to infinity. Even while working on something and passively listening to a phone call or aware of a meeting your forming a collective of just how a company organises itself, the manners in which people communicate ideas and the freedom that each designer has to question a project decision or make a quick phone call to clients. Tea is offered intravenously and a game of fouzball never goes a miss. A particularly colourful yet nostalgic collection of soap boxes exists in one corner of the room, a reminder of just how far back this company goes.
From my experiences and conversations here I soon came to the realisation that the studio dynamic in why not is a huge rarity. Due to their reputation and long standing success the designers have quite a lot of freedom. Surprisingly enough, the freedom to be able to deal first hand with the client at all times, something that I assumed was always a given. Amongst other things, they’ve never had to promote themselves for work. So how did this come to be?
Visual Rhetoric, Objectivity & Irish Design
March 11th, 2009Visual rhetoric is a theoretical framework of how images communicate, as opposed to their aural or verbal messages; what the visuals implicate rather than what the content reads. There is a very tight relationship between graphic design and visual rhetoric, being aware of this is something I always try to keep in mind.
I’m currently living in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and as you’d expect the majority of everything is in dutch. As I don’t speak any dutch I depend heavily on visual rhetoric and visual associations to understand the message. For example, I was looking for some biscuits I came across a shelf full of different varieties, I found what I wanted purely based on the colours. For some reason dark chocolate is nearly always associated with the colour red and milk chocolate with blue. I’m not sure exactly why but perhaps it’s because red is usually associated with being a rich colour, a regal colour, which links back to the rich dark chocolate.
There are a lot more examples; dark blue and light blue milk cartons, full-fat milk and semi-skimmed milk respectively. Red/White combination is closely connected with ‘Sale’ or ‘Value’. These colour associations are basic, perhaps somewhat obvious but are an intrinsic part of visual rhetoric. Aside from colours, images too are reliant on their rhetorical value. This is a tricky area as different cultures and environments will have vastly different reactions to the same image. A solid understanding of the audience you are trying to communicate to is imperative to appropriate rhetoric.