Some of you may already know that I started working at EdenSpiekermann this week. As of January 2009, Eden Design & Communication, Amsterdam merged with SpiekermannPartners, Berlin to form EdenSpiekermann. They have a serious amount of experience with a staff of about 100 strong; be sure to check the brand new website www.edenspiekermann.com for loads more. I hope to write regularly on what I’m doing at ES, what I’m learning and anything else I think is worth sharing.

Okay, so last Monday was my first day, the usual meet and greet through the three floors. So many hands to shake, I felt like a broken record, but they were very welcoming and friendly. The average age is probably about the 30–40 mark. I’ve officially being studying design for just under 2 years but when you compare that to someone who has about 20 years experience, it’s a wake-up call. Nobody can claim to know it all, but with that much experience you’re doing well.

Monday was pretty chilled, when I came in was given my own desk, a new 24″ iMac and a bright room to share along with about 15 other designers. The wooden floors, massive desks, high ceilings makes working comfortable. There’s no feeling of hierarchy or fat-cats sitting in their offices telling the pixel-pushers what tricks to perform. Everyone is working together, to improve as a unit, as a collective; in college you don’t get that as much but I think that comes with time & experience. Students aren’t the best at taking criticism or even opinion, it offends them. Sometimes it’s the system you have to thank for this, promoting ‘competitive atmospheres’, it may sound like a good approach but in practice it’s not (from a students point of view), it’s detrimental to developing a genuine love for what you do. You should naturally have ambition, and not because you’re going to win something. There is a serious difference between doing your best and trying to be the best, they sound similar but yield polar results. Having everyone in competition creates resent, traditionally to win a competition you need to be better then the rest and everyone else needs to be worse than you; so by definition in a competitive atmosphere everyone is hoping that everyone elses work is worse than theirs. Why help someone if it means they are going to beat you? Time and time again students get upset because someone gave an opinion on their work that wasn’t positive, a critique. Not everyone is going to like what you do, it’s a good thing they don’t, instead of getting upset ask why they said what they said, regardless of how they phrased it. I wonder how students would react to Gordon Ramsey as design maestro.

I digress.

The project I’m working on is from the CBS, which is the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, in english, Statistics Netherlands. They have a lot of data that needs to be presented as clear as possible. The project required us to come up with a new colour scheme that could be used in any of their graphs, forms and charts. They also required that the newly designed charts could be re-created in Excel. By the time I arrived the final colour scheme was decided upon but the implementation was still in progress. Here’s an example of a chart that needed to be reconsidered, it’s totally illegible on the left, CBS actually uses that, the right is the after. It may seem boring but what stands out for me is it’s relevance, this sort of work is essential to good design practice and awareness, it opens your eyes to reality a little more and reminds you that not all projects are like college projects. Here’s a side-by-side, before & after.

So many of the elements were unnecessary, they caused confusion and didn’t follow convention. For a statistical information like this it’s very important to keep in mind what is familiar to the reader. For instance there are 18 rows and 8 columns of numbers, most are double digits. They aren’t all related so that should be shown, it’s hard to tell if the top two rows of numbers relate to the 8th and 9th rows. By adding in some thinner rules I’ve sub-divided the chart. The thicker (6pt) rules divide page in half into two major categories at the top and bottom of the page, the thinner hairline rules (.5pt) sub-dive the two categories into more visually manageable statistics. Amongst what is already taught in college I would like to see an introduction of these ideas.

After a pretty relaxing first few days in Amsterdam I’m flying back to Ireland for the weekend for a friends birthday. I’m be back on Monday. If you’d like some further reading on my rant about students, I would suggest you read Dear Designer, You Suck. If you’d like to read more on design theory and practice or If you appreciate anything I’ve written regarding the above layout then you need to read Vignellis’ Canon, print it off, read it, then read it again, then keep it by your desk when you work. That’s the best advice I can give on it.

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For now, Auf wiedersehen, no, wait… vaarwel!