You have created a piece of distressed lettering, an enduring and deathless visual trope. It is a manifestation of distressing—the general term for the effect created by the recipe—a broader phenomenon, straddling fashion, furniture and more. Its deep design deserves a look not just because of its ubiquity and vigour, but because design reflects culture—and life.

In the grammar of design, distressing is technique, style and a source of meaning all at once.  But like many approaches to lettering, (stencil letters and brush drawn ones) it amplifies the value of words without having a fixed meaning of its own. It demands, and gets, attention again and again; we seem to not tire of it.    

In the grammar of design, distressing is technique, style and a source of meaning all at once.  But like many approaches to lettering, (stencil letters and brush drawn ones) it amplifies the value of words without having a fixed meaning of its own.

In the materialist view, distressing’s power originates in its purely optical properties. Cultural associations necessarily lie downstream. Distressing belongs to a category of visual artefacts that we have labelled biomotive: we are hardwired to react. We helplessly perceive rounded shapes as soft, and pointy cusps as sharp. We ‘feel’ them as sensations, rather than read them like words or pictures. As with colour, odour or sound, the process of interpretation follows later. 

Over time, interpretations crystallise into tropes or conventions, stored in the well of culture. Subsequent observers learn them, so that distressed means “grungy” in this context and “suffering” in another. But the durability of the sign’s signifying power across eras and continents is underwritten by what we have termed as its physique.

But culture is more than a passive reservoir of memory. Culture sustains the distressed surface like a sugar solution sustains bacteria in a dish (as in a type of blood test known as a culture). It is the theatre of action, and a patron, recruiting distressing for a wealth of roles. 

Given its broad sweep across space, time and material, distressing might deserve a larger title than technique or style. Yet the term movement seems an overreach. Movements seem to need champions, and to be theorised as resisting or proposing a great cultural, political or economic shift. But being versatile and promiscuous, distressing has been pressed—or rubbed— into service for several causes, more like a mercenary soldier than a serving nationalist.

Distressed surfaces, whether in buildings, jeans or lettering can be read as opposing a sterile modernist aesthetic and a fatigue with its neutrality and avoidance of surface ornament. Distressing allows a way of perturbing the continuity of the surface without resorting to ornament. 

By eroding the exterior of things, distressing can reveal structure. Wood is made of grains, and fabric of fibres. Paradoxically, this is an agenda of modernism, like exposed brick or buildings with exposed services, also cliches in the interior design of casual dining restaurants. 

But each of these practices are not mere visual strategies with aesthetic agendas, reacting to an excess of one attribute with another, or ways to relieve the fatigue of plainness. Brickwork and exposed ducts also signal a modest, non-monumental stance towards architecture’s relation with the citizen. 

Several themes explore the same emotional or ideological spaces as the distressed surface. Grunge fashion is one, and grunge typography too. The mega phenomenon of denim is another which is a century old. The tradition of lovingly faded, worn jeans one wore as a teenager has been recast in industrial form, precisely damaged and built to last. Gritty industrial interiors are yet another.  

Underlying these visual trends is the idea-canvas on which they appear. They are global moods or themes that are an amalgam of political and economic shifts, with their attendant social and cultural anxieties. They provoke and support the visible movements. 

Distressing is supported by the idea of underplaying one’s wealth, underlining a lower social status, or stating one’s protest against the economic order. It can be an act of ironic identification. It can be read as an attack on cool, studied rationality. It’s also a cry, a shout of emotional insistence with a suggestion of pain: notice me, and feel what I feel. It’s a neurotic gesture that’s positioned as a survival mechanism. 

Distressing is supported by the idea of underplaying one’s wealth, underlining a lower social status, or stating one’s protest against the economic order. It can be an act of ironic identification. 

The gestures of an underclass are often tamed and co-opted by an overclass. Inside a tony restaurant, we can sit aside a chic distressed wall with plaster scraped off the brickwork, and signal not an identification with poverty but its opposite. Rebels and rulers are both welcome. 

Inside a tony restaurant, we can sit aside a chic distressed wall with plaster scraped off the brickwork, and signal not an identification with poverty but its opposite. Rebels and rulers are both welcome. 

Alongside the co-opting of underclass gestures by the rich sits guilt, best characterised by growth of  anti-corporate sentiment around the world. Guilt can be worn to signal virtue, creating a sort of market for ethical positions. When a flagrantly rich white woman wears a badge that reads “White privilege is real” you know that society’s genius and madness have collided and merged. 

Ironically, the western tradition of the distressed surface has its roots in England’s stately homes of  the 9th century, in ‘antiquing’, a treatment of furniture to create an artificial image of age. Once considered cosy, elegant and feminine,  It has jumped out of its container and cloned itself multiply: gone viral in the truest sense. Given the social and upheavals that are in play around the world, distressed surfaces and their ilke seem set for a very long stay.

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Design is practical futurism. It is fundamentally about creating a future state that is preferable to the present. In the everyday sense, the future in question may be very short range, and its impact may be incremental. But at the highest levels of practice, long range problems are in its scope.

The advanced designer’s task in addressing the Future is to scan the present for phenomena (such as technologies) that are driving change, and extrapolate their implications. These coalesce into scenarios, and those judged plausible, or better, profitable, are targeted by a physical product or an intangible system. 

The advanced designer’s task in addressing the Future is to scan the present for phenomena (such as technologies) that are driving change, and extrapolate their implications. 

This product, which is also usually a system, can connect with the present, forcing a rearrangement of existing practice. This is a disruption, the beloved of venture capitalists, who are also practical futurists. 

Like the electric light bulb, Uber is a product-system disruption. New, but existing, technologies and practices (aggregating individuals into businesses) are mated to an old system (taxis).The app and its infrastructure manifest it. It is rearranging, or disrupting, taxi services, but also public transport and possibly even the private ownership of cars.  

Seeing the Deep Design of the future, starts, in Peter Drucker’s phrase, with ‘the future that is already happening’, and a look at the past. Strikingly, the industrial age we are climbing out of may well be the first time in history when we see the future entirely in terms of progress—and  view it as a certainty. 

Also strikingly, we view it wholly in technological terms, rather than social or cultural or otherwise human ways. Ask most people about the Future, and you hear the familiar marching band of  AI, machine learning, and IoT, with robotics and additive printing bringing up the rear. Those most exposed to sci-fi offer dystopian alternatives, where, for example, hi-tech and poverty coexist but the mood is generally optimistic.

Ask most people about the Future, and you hear the familiar marching band of  AI, machine learning, and IoT, with robotics and additive printing bringing up the rear.

But the arch-concept of the technology-driven future is, by a distance, the unified digital grid. This is an extension of the digital world we are already seeing. Understanding it rests on the two following realisations. First, that the central benefit of machine-augmented human activity is best realised by networking both machine and user to other devices and users. The value is in the network, not the thing. An ordinary taxi, connected to a network, is instantly far more valuable, for driver, passenger and the organisation that supports it. 

From this follows the next, that the networks themselves are at their most effective when they, too, are networked. Toaster, car, bank or blood type can all be joined up. Autonomous cars remain stuck less for technological reasons but due to how machine-to-machine and man-to-machine interaction (collisions, to name one) are handled. It would be a lot easier if all cars were autonomous, and even better if they were being driven by the same system. Paradise or dystopia?

A logical conclusion is the perfect traceability of all human activity. This is exactly what is being resisted, as an example, by opponents of the horizontal reach of the Aadhar identity system, with its promise of service delivery on the one hand and privacy concerns on the other. Likewise, all-digital money. It may well all work, with the correct compromises reached. 

But design must concern itself with the ways in which this ongoing revolution interacts with the social structure that hosts it. For both good and bad, innovation proceeds at the rate subject to social permission, and it looks like society is in charge. This does not imply that all is well; corporations and governments are also social actors who cannot always be trusted.

design must concern itself with the ways in which this ongoing revolution interacts with the social structure that hosts it.

Less obviously, a technological revolution, while subject to cultural and societal control, also creates and affects the way we think. For example. the present status of science, and capitalism, is a creation of the industrial revolution, as well as a necessary condition for it. 

Indeed, the fallouts of this Future are several. Digital unification demands uniformity, and threatens an over-organised world. For example, the web is organised by search, a mechanism whose design rewards conformity and punishes the reverse by making it less findable.  

Even less obviously, the digital grid promotes a culture of objectivity (good) that is  unbounded or unqualified (not so good). It treats human instincts and emotions as biases (which they sometimes are). Flowing from this is the notion that statistics can capture reality; that algorithms are perfect. That Google is the truth. That popular is right. 

It is also promoting a world where we are ever more connected, but ever more private. We listen to music on headphones, watch our ‘own’ TV, and speak to social networks, while being less social in a genuine sense. We can mistake our private world for public reality.  

Design will hopefully play its usual role role as an intelligent, thoughtful maker of products and systems and it may do so by favorably negotiating the potential for bad and maximising utility. This is speeding the system as referred to in the opening paragraph. But more crucial may be its ability to provide intelligent friction. 

Design can argue for a culture of experimentation, of trying out the unproven, even the unprovable. It can resist the idea of a single right answer to any question, which is a tendency when the question is turned into a search for a number. It can argue for the apparently illogical; for the value of subjective experiences alongside objective benefits. A full exploration of this subject will follow. 

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Design and the Future’ in Business Standard, 3 August in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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This is typical of the scorn for specialisation shown humanists. They romance generalism, specialisation’s antithetical shadow, extolling its unbounded roaming, its quest for wisdom, universality, and a life better lived. Specialisation argues back, albeit a touch defensively, stressing its efficacy and focus.

Neither side is vanquished in the argument, in much of which the sides talk past each other. Further, the labels are relative, and overlap and/or interlock.

A business owner looking to create packaging for his latest product might favour a well known packaging specialist with product-specific experience. Or he may be tempted by a brilliant team known to propel brands, with relatively less packaging experience and no product-specific chops. Deep Design looks at the nature of specialisation in design, its cause, course and consequences.

Professions continuously specialise into new varieties—more kinds of potters or carpenters— based on a special circumstance or market. But new professions are also born of de-specialisation— joining up bits of other professions to address a commonality that individual trades do not. As an example, modern business education is a distinctively late-20th-century synthesis of finance, economics, sociology, psychology, law and business experience. The product, an MBA, is a broadly employable generalist, even if she specialises in Human Resources or Marketing (themselves products of synthesis). Modern specialisations are underwritten by educational institutes who label them and build cultures of knowledge around them.

Design is a specialisation, but viewing it properly requires going back a couple of centuries. In its earliest sense, it connoted a decorative pattern on a teapot, or a plaster moulding on a building. The ‘designer’, yet to be named as such, was an applied artist (in Indian universities, ‘applied art’ was the term for design). In the book making trades, the publisher, printer were one, and did the design. He was the worker, craftsman, artist, the maker.

Specialisations became necessary because of the potential of multiplicative technologies—printing and manufacture—to cut costs, create consistent, if ‘inferior’ quality, and earn great profits. Now the craftsman’s wisdom, separated from his physical skill, could be embodied in a mould, die, or matrix (typography’s equivalent of a mould) and used to multiply objects. Getting the mould, die or matrix right mattered most. Cost, efficiency, ease of manufacture and even transportation were to be weighed carefully. Profits—or losses—depended on them.

Specialisations became necessary because of the potential of multiplicative technologies

It is at this point that the designer diverges from the craftsman-artist; indeed the designer could employ one and embed his art in the mould. The designer’s specialisation is complementary to the craftsman’s. He could know less about the craft than the craftsman, and yet be in control. Another specialist, an engineer, would further undercut the craftsman, mastering process, materials and production. Working in a team, the duo would sell its products or skill to a businessman—retailer, trader or owner. Yes, the designer is unthinkable without modern capitalism.

The separation of the designer’s visual, artistic, technological ability from the physical circumstances of creation—the parting of the mind and the hand—allied to scale are essential to the design specialisation. But this same separation has the seeds of generalism in it, as we shall see.

Perhaps the freedom from labouring over manufacture gradually allowed the cleverest designer of china ware to cross over to metal products, or later, plastics, and demonstrate a feel for product quality generally, beyond the particulars of his parent craft. From there, a designer could eventually cross domains

Famously, Micheal Graves, an architect, created an iconic, best-selling kettle for the Italian household goods company Alessi. Graves was selected for his cultural intuition, not for his expertise in aluminium or hot water. It is common for fashion designers to direct the creation of eyewear, perfumes and advertising, because fashion houses see themselves as addressing a notion of style, not garments. The glamorous Philippe Starck is a versatile design brand by himself.

Thus the ‘star’ designer transcends her specialisation to absorb and respond to a set of related values that unite a group of products, often bound by a brand. This is a form of generalism that is beyond what the multi-disciplinary designer enjoyed when he emerged from the manufacturing or publishing trade. But it is not the last word.

‘star’ designer transcends her specialisation to absorb and respond to a set of related values that unite a group of products, often bound by a brand.

The emergence of design thinking, as a claimed thinking style, has been championed by firms such as IDEO and taught by Stanford’s d.school. Here, the separation of the designer is not just from his original craft but from the objects themselves.

Emergence of design thinking, as a claimed thinking style…here the separation of the designer is not just from his original craft but from the objects themselves.

The creative director of a fashion house governs style, via objects and experiences, and their sensory aspects, imprinting them through his special subjectivity. In contrast, this new type of designer is an objective type, for whom such intangibles are secondary. She studies, and ‘intervenes’ in, systems, or the web of interactions between people, products and services. She dreams up or accelerates an Uber or an Amazon, companies which typify this role for design. These are an entirely new kind of business financed by an entirely new kind of capital that trades risk for equity. Again, capitalism fashions a new design.

So complete is the separation of mind, from the senses and the hand that its practitioners would have been unrecognisable as designers in the 20th century. They are not necessarily trained at design schools and may have no feel for a craft. In theory they can tackle anything—dental hygiene or mid-city parking are all systemic problems. These ultra-specialised designers are also, then, the ultimate generalists.

Good teams will seek generalists for their versatility and broad ability to abstract problems from the tangled mess of real world. They will need to team them with the specialist craftsmen, those narrow, often anonymous magicians who actually deliver the concrete objects of delight to you.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Generalists versus Specialists’ in Business Standard, 15 September, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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business is getting very, very attracted to design

Let’s start by looking at the shapes this movement has taken. According to a survey of 400+ companies, startups are very likely to have CEOs or CXOs to influence design decisions, and those businesses appear to quantifiably benefit from design.

But top management can go further than being involved in design, and actually invest in it. In 2016, General Electric, an icon of US industry, announced a new headquarters, three-fourths of whose employees would be “digital industrial product managers, designers, and developers”. For a corporate office, that number shows an unprecedented proportion for the design function, broadly defined, and its unusual proximity to the power centre of an industrial company.

Or it could actually invite designers to the top. Most of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 2016 list of most innovative firms has designers and design in positions of power: the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla, Samsung regularly feature on it. Several have designers in the founder group (Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Pinterest’s Evan Sharp) or as CEOs. Yet other companies have designations like Chief Design Officer (3M, Apple, PepsiCo, Philips) or Executive Creative Officer, or just Chief Creative.

But good businesses have always used design, if not its language. IBM was a design leader decades before today’s design darling, Apple was born. What has changed? An accelerated rise in design consciousness, and concomitantly, its visibility. One can speculate on the causes and the period of this change.

Design has countered commoditisation since at least the 18th century: consider Wedgwood’s famous china ware, a manufactured product carefully designed to meet a series of precise design objectives. To be sure, the same forces of commoditisation keep pace with the thousands of products that appear, washing over them, and making innovation the most prized attribute of modern business. No industry typifies this like information technology.

The top ten of BCG’s innovation list concentrates these prodigies in a tight cluster. These companies either make the tools, like Apple or Google, or embed them into their services so completely that firms like Amazon or Uber may be better seen as technology companies than as supermarket or taxi businesses.

Deep Design’s speculation is that this digital breed has given design this status by employing it in a manner that other industries seek to imitate. Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation. (While there are overlaps, design and innovation are not identical, but more another time).

Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation.

In this hypothesis, the digital breed was driven to develop an explicit vocabulary for design to enable its minting as a currency of business, which is now cashable in the boardroom. The vocabulary comes from the field now called user experience or UX. Of course that is, in some sense, what designers have always done. But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result. The new label expands, and makes more tangible, the older rubrics, ‘usability’ and ‘human computer interface’.

But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result.

Of course, it’s not wordsmithing alone. UX lays out its methods like a recipe. It makes the tacit knowledge of designers explicit, and re-frames designers’ instincts as a series of steps. It commandeers research from psychology’s cognitive sides. (Both the NASDAQ and Apple’s market cap have more than doubled since Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast, and Slow, which made cognitive biases part of every executive’s gab book. And since Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel, Apple’s worth has grown 180 times).

This totally rational emphasis made UX, read design, acceptable to engineers, who actually build the stuff, and may see designers as exotic anarchists. It gave business managers (a good many of them from engineering backgrounds) faith in the predictability of the design outcomes and a means to participate in the process. Design’s mystical ‘black box’ has been broken open, and made to serve new masters. Further this association with technology and business confers approval in a uniquely modern way. This all may apply only to the digital domain, but to business, what else has mattered more in the last two decades?

Increasingly, businesses become more and more virtual, less physical. This makes experience, which is at heart a messy, psychological concept, easy to contain in the palm of your hand, viewed as episodes, each leaving a data trail amenable to analysis.

Design and business have followed the suits. In current design speak, UX defines customer journeys that map how a user (previously: consumer) interacts with a brand. Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing. PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, exemplifies the new argot: people “don’t buy, actually, products anymore, they buy experiences”.

Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing.

Boardrooms have adopted design in two ways. The first is to improve design buying, making the company’s investments in, say, product design or communication, more effective. The second is to spread design culture across the company, in the role of a new approach to solving problems or seeing opportunities. To do either, designers will have to face a boardroom, peopled by stalwarts of an ancient regime, so to speak. The qualities they will need in these waters and their experiences thus far will make for a fascinating study.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Visionary Position: Design on Top’ in Business Standard, 25 November, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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If you are looking for ways to use psychology to boost the value of your design rupee, go elsewhere. Try one of several excellent web pages on the topic or the tens of shallow ones. You will find them absorbing, but ultimately disappointing. Incorporating formal knowledge into practice is an act of deep learning that designers (should) do.

Yet scarcely a season goes by when some senior designer or other doesn’t have this epiphany: why, why, don’t my junior colleagues understand psychology—it ought to be taught in design school! Resisting the impulse to ask, never mind the juniors, do you get psychology, where did you study it (and can you teach me some?) uncovers this intriguing question. Is psychology’s place in design all important, either as deep background or penetrating insight? Or is it just a source of thumb-rules to be opportunistically summoned to justify a design decision, or simply a curiosity?

Or perhaps, you say, the question is unfair. Design, like all the arts and humanities, is inherently and implicitly psychological; its practice itself carries all the psychology it needs, and designers learn the psychology as they go. It’s just, you add, that psychology has formed itself into a university discipline, and a new profession, at around the same time that, say, economics and design did, all relatively recently. And take a look at this overlapped view of the historical frequencies of these three words from the computational search engine Wolfram Alpha.

Design, like all the arts and humanities, is inherently and implicitly psychological

This may have led many disciplines to feel the want of a more explicit understanding of psychology, Some more than others: economics, conspicuously. Never mind those Viennese economists who see their discipline as a branch of psychology, the mind-business empire struck back by whipping up behavioural economics, rescuing economics from the improbably rational thing it is. Since Daniel Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel win, his best selling book has become required reading, spawning a flood of others. Every professional has a pet ‘Cognitive bias’ she loves to quote. Airport bookshop shelves creak with the stuff.

Perhaps design’s greater age as a word-concept (see graph of Wolfram data) reflects its protection against this particular insecurity. Even while suffering from the odd bout of insecurity about a lack of formal knowledge, designers themselves tend to believe the ‘implicit knowledge’ defence (see the second paragraph). Art, for another, expresses no desire to learn psychology.

And there’s the rub. The daily practice of a highly psychological art leads to an illusion of familiarity and command; and soon the design practice becomes the insight and the psychological principle it embodies appears to be a pedantic codification. Ironically, there’s a cognitive bias for that: deformation professionelle, when a professional believes that his trade gives him a total, rather than a very partial views of the mind—and the world.

Scan a typical ‘how to use psychology in design’ page and you realise that psychological principles are either too broad to apply, or too specific to be of more than very occasional use, or obvious. Designers, and you, will likely be underwhelmed by, say, the von Restorff Effect which reminds us that a single red umbrella will stand out in a row of otherwise identical white ones. Or Hick’s Law, which agrees that people take much (logarithmically) longer to choose with every additional choice presented to them.

Incorporating formal knowledge, with nuance, into one’s own insights and observation becomes crucial to whether they will find use in practice. The trick is to use psychology, but not as a yes-no heuristic, or as a trump card to settle an argument.

Incorporating formal knowledge, with nuance, into one’s own insights and observation becomes crucial to whether they will find use in practice.

Instead, make its mental models (a rough mechanism of how the mind works), a part of your toolkit. Refine them with your own experience, recognising that the real-world scenario before you is much more complex than the idealised conditions under which the experimental theory was hypothesised and tested.

Their value lies in using psychological models to question the validity of your work in what knowledge experts call the ‘forced scan’, using deliberate, slow and systematic thinking (a concept made popular by the aforementioned best seller “Thinking, Fast and Slow”) to pick up what intuition, common sense or over-confidence can miss.

That’s partly why the digital technology world, the most rational of rational communities, has made a fetish of these principles. User experience or UI/UX was born when cognitive psychology met engineering. The term ‘mental models’ owes to the foundational book on usability, “The Psychology of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman (who wet met in the last Deep Design) which was renamed to replace “psychology” with “design”. It’s a close link.

How many items in a menu can the mind take in and act on? (six, most likely, but there are caveats) and the precise placement or colour of a ‘buy’ button are all matters of interest. As are psychology of waiting (how my journey through an app can feel shorter and easier, and therefore likely to be repeated). And errors: why an ATM appears to have eaten your card. (It hasn’t: you left it in the machine, because it paid cash before returning the card; the sigh of cash fired an “end of transaction” signal in your brain. A classic mismatch of mental models.)

Designers also seek to influence users to take certain actions, and the field Persuasive Design attempts to do just that. The IT industry is its biggest client, with ‘conversion’ as its goal (think ‘buy’ or agree’ buttons). Its oldest success story, though: the image of a fly printed on the bowls of the men’s urinals at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. Men, like boys, like to idly aim their pee at it, improving ‘spillage rates’ dramatically.

Governments are in the persuasion design business, too. The UK experimented with a Behavioural insights Unit, affectionately the ‘Ministry of Nudges’, (named for the book ‘Nudge’ by Thaler and Sunstein which argues for benign trickery to get citizens to eat better or save more, for instance). In the early 2000s, Delhi adopted traffic light countdown timers to ease drivers’ nerves (yes, the psychology of waiting). Drive around the Central Hexagon and you see the zebra signs painted to look, from the viewpoint of an approaching driver, like solid blocks installed on the road. Psychology becomes street wisdom.

This world of nudges is the work of supreme tacticians, not grand communicators. It feels like a cognitive trick, done to smooth an interaction, or to get and direct attention. While these are worthy goals, design has a wider canvas. We also want to get liked, to bond; to inspire or defend; to be remembered. This will require looking beyond the cognitive, into the worlds of affect, emotion and instinct; and the highter cognitive functions of associations. It’s a world that Deep Design has often looked at. But those are areas where literature and the human story may be a better guide than the study of psychology.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Good design: It’s all in the mind’ in Business Standard, 16 September, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make objects and symbols, for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined situations. So an invitation to ‘share a fresh perspective’ at a consumer summit, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Marketers and designers want to work together more closely, but they lack a common view of the humanscape. Wherever the marketer can speak for the consumer, he has the mike, so to speak.

Design, to use the current argot of the trade, is centred on users, or humans—a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a mother manoeuvring her toddler into a high chair. It addresses the unchanging human system: the body and its limbs; a sensory apparatus dominated by sight; a logical tendency, subject to a fickle attention and the twitches of the lizard brain; perhaps some rudimentary notions of pride.

Finally, design’s problem-solving orientation focuses on the user’s behaviour in the context of interacting with the designed solution, not an inner drive. We care about a score of things: from whether her task got done, to whether our work left society better in some way. But not whether this user was insecure about her future, socially constrained, or struggling with being modern: a user is a user.

Joy to the world, the consumer is born

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products. Human ingenuity responded by creating new needs, (like the ability to impress friends at a party) and fears, (like the failure to be a good mum). Not much design here; and while the human traits assumed here are fairly universal, it does introduce psychology into the mix.

More sophisticated efforts from the time of Cheskin’s sensory marketing have co-opted design, realising that a product’s visual imprint can transcend its function. These marketers were not just after simple beauty, but saw form as whispering to a consumer psyche, per the psychological fashions of the day. So Bernays’ stunt of getting suffragettes to simultaneously light up cigarettes, during a march down a Manhattan avenue, was meant to convince women to overcome their unconscious (Freudian) fear of the cigarette’s ‘phallic’ shape. Post-war American cars were endlessly re-designed, to engineer their appearance to work with the consumer’s hidden mental apparatus, arguably to appeal to masculinity and power.

But consumer theory is a braid with two strands. One strand is empirical, quantitative and cognitive. It aims to tease out the best approach to (for example) segmenting markets, studying things like demographics, spending power, geography, and physical constraints to buying. Rather like applied economics, it deals with the consumer’s rational side, offering benefits like efficacy or economy that are universal. Complexity notwithstanding, a great deal can be made out by careful statistics and reason working hand in hand, to some degree of certainty.

I have a feeling

The other strand hypothesises the consumer as an emotional being who is an actor in a social, cultural and economic drama, to explain or identify her deep motivations and anxieties. It uses data, but interpretively, and also pays heed to trained impressions. Its findings are qualitative and uncertain. It seeks validity, postponing the need for certainty.

Of particular interest are the consumer’s values and culture. This is an attempt to extend our knowledge of the consumer including but beyond his observed behaviour in the context of our product or brand, but a deep orientation that influences his actions, at various if not all times. The idea is that a brand’s values can resonate with that of a group of consumers, and make them loyalists. (Go back to paragraph 3 and appreciate the contrast).

These groupings offer a kind of alternate market segmentation, cutting across income classes, social class lines (defined by entitlements like access and status) or communal ones (such as religious, ethnic or national). For example: the multitudes that see in a Trump or a Modi a corrective to a historical power grab by a mealy-mouthed elite. Or others who belatedly learn ritualism from a previous generation to compensate for the Indian-ness they see evaporating from their lives. Each grouping, united by attitude, offers multiple predictions, not for a single, narrow product or context, but with multiple economic, social, cultural and political possibilities, with lasting implications.

Design speaks up

It is in this second strand that designers can come into their own, not in their accustomed role as downstream providers of expression, who take their cues from marketers. Instead, as intelligent observers and interpreters of culture, especially the visual. They are uniquely placed because they pour products into the stream of culture, as well as fish in it for reference and inspiration.

Designers can observe how people express themselves visually: the fashions and codes their choices seem to converge on. How we decorate our homes (why is a comic book style print of Meena Kumari doing on that cushion cover?), and how the groom’s niece dances at a sangeet function, why not? And yes, how they buy. Then, they need to join the dots: what does this say about people and their responses the forces shaping their life? The anthropologist Grant McCracken, who studies culture and commerce, sees this as the source of design’s power in the boardroom.

Alessi is more

Or take the Italian household appliances maker Alessi, which commissions famous designers for its products, and has several iconic products among them. The business scholar Roberto Verganti, who has studied the methods of innovative Italian businesses, points out that these icons are not merely awards-circuit darlings but broad commercial successes. They command significant price premiums and disproportionate volumes, for years together. That last criterion implies deep attachment, not an acute social contagion with a brief, steep peak.

Alessi’s method relies on trusted interpreters, who identify large cultural swells (a fatigue with a joyless modernity, for example) and select a designer based on the likelihood that his temperament can speak to that mood. Their choices may be surprising: Alessi’s best known classic, a kettle, came out of a collaboration with the American architect Michael Graves.

The challenge for marketers with this type of thinking is to tolerate the uncertainty of a payoff, in exchange for its size and longevity. Innovative products or market strategies need more than a jaap of the Steve Jobs naam. Designers need to be able to not just observe and imagine, but to convincingly interpret and act. They can start by convincing themselves.

So, I accepted the invitation. Will you?

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“The 20th century was the Age of advertising,“ said the Undisputed Strategic Panjandrum, known with awe as USP, “right up to the Great Shift or the digitisation of everything.”

Digital advertising? I asked. Not quite, said the USP kindly.

We sat in his penthouse, piled high with books standing in counterpoint to the housing towers outside. On one pile sat our glasses: whisky for me, sparkling water for the famously teetotal advertising-marketing legend from the late Age. He took a slow sip and began.

In the Age, USP intoned, great brands were built by advertising. It delivered a consistent message, dramatised by an emotional connect, ideally with a claim of product difference. It created a personality you could ‘sense’, and also registered a distinct brand identity—logos, taglines, colours—and packaging, so consumers could recall it at the shop, and ka-Ching!, said USP, dropping an ice-cube into his glass.

In the Age, great brands were built by advertising. It delivered a consistent message, dramatised by an emotional connect.

A certain resistance to, and even distrust of advertising, said the USP, is putting the focus back on the product or service itself. But for some, it was always thus. Take banks, whose brand rests more on the quality of its customer relationships and the service than anything else.

Remember those nationalised banks with their dreary offices? Gandhiji, on the wall, saying “the customer is the purpose of our business”, while account holders queued up before officious, unhelpful staff. Though the odd genial branch manager did help, if you knew one.

A certain resistance and even distrust of advertising, is putting the focus back on the product or service itself.

The Great Shift wasn’t so much the crawling ‘computerisation’ of banks from the 1980s but the entry of private banks after 1994. The new big bank brands of today were built on polite service and pleasant branches, but crucially, on the convenience and empowerment offered by better technology (account statements on demand!), which changed consumer banking.

The biggest of these, web-based banking, has made for many more satisfied customers, at the cost of a reduced relationship with the human and physical elements that make up a brand.

web-based banking, has made for many more satisfied customers, at the cost of a reduced relationship with the human and physical elements that make up a brand.

So much so that many customers find dealing with people less desirable (and some remember old bank staff fondly). In part, it’s because your ‘relationship manager’ also pushes ‘products’, and so seems less of a banker. The mobile app has accelerated the shift, forcing extreme simplicity and giving the ultimate in granular, transactional satisfaction—human-free.

There’s a science to this, called user experience, or UX, a white-hot profession at the moment. These people build journey maps, and study how people figure out what to do, in very fine detail. How to invisibly lead them to their goals, while keeping them informed, re-assured—and thus, happy. Less is better; and anticipating what the user will want next, is best. And to do it all with a certain charm.

What this means, said USP, is that this software driven experience, is the vehicle of service, and thus the relationship that we have with it. One can say that UX is the brand. Branding? Now there’s an app for that.

One can say that UX is the brand. Branding? Now there’s an app for that.

There’s a great opportunity for brands like banks, to build themselves around superb interactions. But UX goes beyond digital and so should banks. My favourite mall is a pleasure to park in, with thoughtful, quality signage, clear visibility and all the details that let me effortlessly navigate it with assurance, convenience and even pleasure. It makes it likelier I’ll shop there.

Everything else ought to support this app-like UX, said USP, whether web sites, bank branches, staff behaviour and even advertising. While several banks have designed their web/app UX well, none has let it into the brand’s core.

While several banks have designed their web/app UX well, none has let it into the brand’s core.

Banks’ home pages still lead with advertising imagery and messaging, with interchangeable, well-worn themes. If your bank “cares for family prosperity”, let the interaction itself demonstrate it, in a few clicks. An interaction is, well, just that! You can ‘talk’ to the customer to learn and fulfil his needs. It’s salesmanship in clicks.

The best banks already have the best experiences, but there’s a lot of room for them, and follower brands, to be the fastest mover who will win in the medium term at least.

In the long run though, there are limitations. First, the logic of UX will lead to the same ‘best’ UX for all banks, which can (and should) be copied. In an ultimate, theoretical sense, UX isn’t strategic, but a moving horizon, an operational imperative that all brands must move towards.

In the long run though, there are limitations. The logic of UX will lead to the same ‘best’ UX for all banks.

Second, personality and differentiation, two pillars of the Age, are hard to own, because banking is so transactional. So where, asked USP, raising two thick eyebrows, will preference arise from, and what will you creative types do? I hid behind a raised glass.

The answer, said USP, is in the axioms of UX. Brands should sense and respond to what people want (or yearn) to do, rather than be sources of one-sided, static messaging. Interaction is about what the brand and customer can do together, not about what the brand says. The pervasiveness of the mobile is a huge gift-—not just for its reach, or to glean data. But to integrate the experience. Join up the mobile UX to the branch visit and the staff interactions.

Brands should sense and respond to what people want, rather than be sources of one-sided, static messaging. It should be about what the brand and customer can do together, not about what the brand says.

Ultimately these experiences will develop into a story, or a concept that forms through community consensus about a company’s journey and destination. Google has set out to organise, simplify (or own) the world’s information (or the world itself). Harley Davidson’s HOGs (Harley Owners Groups) license a sort of communal freedom.

These ideas are rooted in culture, in different ways. Even when they advertise! Culture means it’s back to people; just like it always was. Perhaps it’s time to bring back the genial brand manager and see where that goes?

And enough of USP, he said, draining his glass with an air of finality. I took my first sip of whisky and let it sink in.

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In India, the notion of the brand is both nascent and spreading at a gallop. States, NGOs, government bodies, spiritual leaders, cricket teams, and other once-unlikely entities are starting to receive marketing attention, so the brand is never far behind. It’s the new orthodoxy.

University brands, an oxymoron in India until the 1990s, are a fascinating example. They are numerous, often very old, and slow to change, and display, like species, many stages of evolution. This is reflected in their visual identities.

Of course, there’s much more to a brand than the logo, which is only the tip of the brand’s iceberg, so to speak. But it is a tell-tale sign of how an organisation sees itself, and the face it wants to show.

Deep Design reveals the interplay of symbol and reality and the invisible hand of evolution. We shall consider two epochs, the shift (in India) occurring in the late 20th century.

For 150 years, university identities followed an internationally prescribed code. The words seal, insignia or emblem come to mind. A circular typographic arrangement, or the ever-present shield serves as a container. The contents picture symbols of learning, or subjects of study. Shields, divided in a medieval manner, allow a set of images, rather than a unitary symbol.

For 150 years, university identities followed an internationally prescribed code

Like Olympic games symbols up to 1952, they were more traditional than the period warranted, and designed to look like authoritative insignia of learning (with Indian or other local inflections). This applied even when universities displayed modernity in other ways, like architecture. IIM Ahmedabad is housed in a famed modernist masterpiece, but its logo defers to the code: a Mughal arch and tendrils.

Privatisation is the lens through which the evolution of university identity, visual and non-visual is understood. Let’s use 1995 as a convenient year, when the first private university was notified. There are now over 200.

Privatisation is the lens through which the evolution of university identity, visual and non-visual is understood.

University identities after 1995 are visibly different from their forbears. There’s more variety and individuality, and some modernist simplification. The best attempts look more like modern logos, not insignia. Look, no privatisation! Case solved?

Not entirely. Many, like Amity (a prototypical private university) sport logos that reek strongly of the older code. And even in the previous age, there were privately funded and managed colleges and universities (BITS Pilani, for example). The name Ivy League (ivy climbing up those centuries-old stone walls), brands a club of old, influential universities that retain links to their heritage identities, a code imitated by several US universities.

So are university logos explained as effectively by period (design fashion), and imitation, as by private ownership? To gain more nuance than these hardy perennial explanations provide, we must return to the founding concept of the university, which is the archetypal ideal that we hold in our minds.

The oldest (let’s call them Classical) universities predate modern states though they enjoyed royal and religious support. A community of wise men, either proven or incipient seekers, self-governed, with their own rules, traditions and arcana, and free from excessive oversight. Often monastic in origin and spirit, joined by the pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake.

The oldest universities are often monastic in origin and spirit, joined by the pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake.

Modern states preserved the essentials of this arrangement, even for private universities in the new nation of America. These old universities approximate classical ones (and receive state support with minimal oversight).

The post-private university or PPU (a new phenomenon needs a new label) differs on many of these dimensions. It no longer lurks in the shadows of the state, but feels the harsh glare of competition, not of ideas, but for customers. Global rankings objectivise and hijack the meaning of institutional quality.

The post-private university feels the harsh glare of competition, not of ideas, but for customers.

For the first time, the university must be marketed. It is a product with a proposition for customers (students, donors, and faculty). In many PPUs, students rather than pursuing knowledge for its own sake, are buying a career. ROI calculations are openly made.

Its superboss may be an ‘edupreneur’ who exhorts a Chief Marketing Officer to achieve explicit business objectives. Annual ad spends may top Rs. 50 cr. Crucially, the PPU is managerially run, like a corporation, and thus not entirely collegially governed. (On the plus side, some academic staff may much better paid).

It’s natural then, that the university’s logo needs to maximise visibility, memorability, compactness and attractiveness, that is, more like a modern logo rather than a seal. It is an object of universal, accessible appeal, not a depiction of an immovable ideal. It’s corporate identity, and in some cases, literally so.

Despite this pressure to market and brand, the identities of many Indian PPUs, unlike their Western cousins, are ungainly vestiges of colonial codes or confused hybrids. Not for want of funds, but of vision.

Most PPUs start with a deficit of reputation. The logo (along with copious built infrastructure, in some cases) attempts to compensate by evoking antiquity. It’s an attempt to brand by association with the classical university and channel its trust, authenticity and experience.

Too few have the confidence to assert a fresh path, by conspicuous investment in wise men, or a long term program of excellence.

Two exceptions, among others, are Ashoka and Nalanda, who have made the former investment. I mention them because their names place them in ancient antiquity, rather than in the colonial past, and their identities are coherent with modernity.

It’s not inconceivable that these post-private pressures will apply to classical universities, who may compete for funds if not for students’ fees, as in the West.

University brands need to forget markers of antiquity, and express the values which make the old fellows relevant in modern times.

A university draws its credibility from research that seeks the truth on subjects of unchanging and ancient interest. That’s a philosophical standard that is universal, permanent and non-differentiable. University brands need to forget markers of antiquity, and express the values which make the old fellows relevant in modern times. Adopting a few of those values will be differentiation enough.

The post University Logos: What’s Changed And Why It Matters appeared first on ICD | Blog.

“Clutter,” said the Grandiosely Opinionated Deviant, (GOD) “is a master theme of Indian visuality.” He adjusted a pair of futuristic-looking hospital-issue dark glasses, an odd presence in the restaurant we were in. Recovering from eye surgery, he’d asked—summoned, really—my help with making notes and drafting a paper on aesthetics.

Clutter, really? I asked, thinking aloud.

“Clutter, is a master theme of Indian visuality.”

Visual clutter, said GOD, resists precise specification but there are Rules. The First, he said, counting with his fingers, is High Spatial Density, or a crowd of elements. Second, A Narrow Spectrum of Importance: elements are scattered around the ‘middle’ of the importance spectrum, not in groups of equal importance. And no single element dominates. Third, Locally Bounded Organisation: no organising principle is visible, except in a partial region. Fourth, a High Specification Density—multiple colours, sizes, shapes, lettering. Fifth, High Level Clutter involves multiple themes, and codes (that charming cluster of fridge magnets satisfies all the rules except this one).

Knowing GOD’s distaste for pseudo-mathematical formulations, I suspected satire, but his black glasses ensured an opaque expression.

Having used up all five fingers, said GOD, now for some Postulates. One, nature is never cluttered, however wild. And Two, clutter is not intentional, but a result of lack of intent.

One, nature is never cluttered, however wild. And Two, clutter is not intentional, but a result of lack of intent.

Postulate Two suggests that urban clutter reflects the absence of a civic impulse and sufficient capabilities of orchestration. Postulate One recognises clutter as essentially urban. Purely tribal or rural environments are only cluttered by urban contact, since they have been adapted to natural systems, over centuries.

So clutter, (and its nastier cousins, squalor and ugliness) may be a consequence of the fracture created by economic energy greatly exceeding the formation of social consensus or culture to manage and accommodate change. We can build cities and machines much faster than we can adapt to them socially.

Clutter, may be a consequence of the fracture created by economic energy greatly exceeding the formation of social consensus

Our visuality is shaped by our environment, which is shaped by us. It’s a cycle, he said, tracing a finger around the edge of his empty plate.

Our visuality is shaped by our environment, which is shaped by us. It’s a cycle.

That rash of a hundred signboards you see on every street, but no longer notice? They’re a result of what was imprinted on you as you grew up. And your inurement to your surroundings is a part of you.

Here, GOD went into a brooding silence. I wonder, he finally said, if we just tolerate clutter, busy-ness, noise, and its other forms, or actually like it? Do we find it useful, comforting, even enabling?

Successful TV news channels are the most cluttered, he said, gesturing to a wall-mounted TV which showed an anchor scolding a politician. Times Now, he said, has zoomed past past veteran NDTV, which responded with a low-clutter, white and red scheme. Its election graphics are clear and focused, while Times Now’s are crowded, garish and make me look for the data in the clutter.

Yet, clutter wins.  I watched a colleague, said GOD, watch an election results show who seemed baffled by the clarity of the NDTV graphic, asking, where’s the data?

Clutter seems to correlate with success, and Mario Garcia, the international news design consultant, says that Indians like their news busy. Though Fox News easily out-clutters and outsells its rivals, too.

Clutter seems to correlate with success, and Mario Garcia, the international news design consultant, says that Indians like their news busy.

Now what does that say about us?

We can mine clutter to excavate its functional, emotional and symbolic sides. News presentation in India trends towards more, shorter stories, more entry points, a larger menu—that’s a functional argument for clutter.

So is, curiously, that state election campaign poster, did you see the one outside? In a developed country it would focus  on the message and its sender. Ours are a throng: six politician’s heads, names, designations, dates, venues, party symbol, slogans floating in a steaming soup of saffron, white and green. Clutter at its best.

That poster, said GOD, isn’t meant to convey an election promise. It asserts the power that flows from local and national support: oppose at your risk. The protocol of precisely sized heads reflects both the power and how it is shared.

Clutter also promotes flexibility, avoids commitment, and keeps things moving—for today.

Clutter also promotes flexibility, avoids commitment, and keeps things moving—for today.

Next, we experience clutter as value for money; there’s always place for a third person on the two wheeler. It feels like the little extra we crave. We eat cluttered; a bit of pickle, a bite of onion, and another of green chilly chasing the food already in our mouths.

It’s reassuring; a cluttered store telegraphs economy and freedom from cunning artifice.

Symbolically, clutter is democratic! announced GOD, tapping a fork like a judge’s gavel. All citizens are equal before the (lack of) law; all are enabled when they steal a public good like visual access or order. My right to an obstructive, unsanctioned signboard is equal to yours (or more equal).

Anti-clutter, to coin a phrase, is the Western ideal. Its manner seems bare and sterile to us, like a sort of poverty. Less is a bore! Clutter is fecund and in a perverse way like our traditional art which pictures fullness and plenty. So do our old temples, which are ornate but not cluttered. But step inside, and behold the deity, cluttered with signs of love and power! No splendidly forlorn, untouchable Christ for us.

Anti-clutter, to coin a phrase, is the Western ideal. Its manner seems bare and sterile to us, like a sort of poverty. Less is a bore!

Anti-clutter’s honoring of a central object seems egotistical and oversure [the second Rule]. We like monuments, too, but to soar above the clutter, but not address it. Agra counterbalances the Taj Mahal, Mumbai’s modest parts are an antidote to Antilla.

At this, GOD lowered his black glasses. Through red, swollen eyes he blinked painfully at the sight of the restaurant. I followed his gaze. When I turned to look at him again, there was a flash of light and he was gone. On his plate were some withering rose petals and broken marigold flowers. I swear.

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Everyone loves a new, public logo. It’s a polarising icon, and comments are free. So it is with Olympic logos. Deep Design seeks not to praise or bury them, but to discover the meaning interred into their bones.

Olympic logos support a strong, coherent brand, adapting its unchanging core to a dynamic world. The logos are only one of the brand’s elements, but crucial in a media driven world. The five rings, the flame, torch relays, Olympic villages, and the marathon all effectively emote the Greek myth romanticised by Pierre de Coubertin, the comity of nations and the ideal of human potential.

But Olympic logos have another job. A successful Olympics bid is a high stakes win, a sign of alpha-nationhood. Issues of national identity, overt or subliminal, matter. Equally, the fashions, and the design ideologies of the time leave their print on the logos.

Issues of national identity, the fashions, and the design ideologies of the time leave their print on the logos

So do other nations. Logos seems to follow their predecessor’s example, until one makes a huge change. Much like evolution’s Punctuated Equilibrium hypothesis, periods of stability and periods of rapid change alternate.  They thus fall neatly into three ages: Nationhood, Modernism, and the New Age.

Through all these, Deep Design, armed with hindsight, reveals the grand theme: the changing place of the Olympics in our lives and the logo as a sign of adaptation.

Here’s the parade; only summer games are included.

The Age of Nationhood, logos from 1924 to 1956

In an age of unprecedented acceleration in design, art, and modernity, Olympic logos are in denial. Sternly bureaucratic and monotone, they impose (quasi) national insignia upon the Games.

Sternly bureaucratic and monotone, they impose (quasi) national insignia upon the Games

By 1924, Chanel’s timelessly modern fashion and cosmetics are on the street; even the iconic Noº 5 perfume. But art’s capital city chooses its 14th C coat of arms, depicting maritime trade in Paris 1924. Vibrant USA gives us Los Angeles 1932, as if a police department had married an Ivy League college shield, whose Latin motto on scrolls reveal a yearning for antiquity. The land of Bauhaus, instead presents the Third Reich in Berlin 1936, its eagle oppressing the Olympic rings. The London 1948 Games seek to restore calm after WWII, with Westminster’s bureaucratic stiff upper lip. Helsinki 1952 at least shows off new architecture, but Melbourne 1956’s label-like logo reverts to type.

But Rome 1960 represents a thawing. It refers to culture for the first time, picturing the legend of the Rome (not Italy). Its feral snarl is oddly modern and its 3D treatment a tribute to both classical bas-reliefs and Hollywood styling (as in Ben Hur, 1959). The Roman numerals (what else?) bring a smile. Appropriately, it’s on TV for the first time.

The Age of Modernism, logos from 1960-1988

The Tokyo 1964 Rising Sun is a national symbol used as a geometric element. By doing so, it allows the the design to be read as a modernist work, rather than a patriotic symbol from the previous age. It  also shows Japan’s confidence in not projecting an overtly cultural identity. This is unlike the other Asian miracle economies of S Korea and China in the coming decades.

Abruptly, it unleashes Modernist design, as if a dam had burst. It features geometric abstraction and a minimalist ethic that mutes national symbols and history, and subtracts ornament. Also born: the age of corporate identity and design professionalism. From now, designers would be named, and ‘visual systems’ with manuals would become the norm for large projects, giving the practice a technocratic flavour. (Not coincidentally, this is also the age of Milton Glaser, whose ratings of the logos appear at the end of the article; Tokyo 1964 is his gold medalist).

Abruptly, it unleashes Modernist design. It features geometric abstraction and a minimalist ethic that mutes national symbols and history, and subtracts ornament

Mexico 1968, a modern classic, is the first Olympic wordmark. Its design grid is formed around the five rings, but also draws on early Mexican art and op-art, joining part of the 1960s zeitgeist. Munich 1972 eliminates the Olympic rings. The severe abstraction of the sun and spiral form may not, though, live up to its idea of the “Cheerful Games”. Montreal 1976 is typical too.

The cold war superpowers’ symbols appear more patriotic than others in this cohort. Moscow 1980’s shot at modernism is topped by its red star, and LA 1984 reprises a familiar theme, with its own stars, only moderately modern, with a classic touch. Star wars, surely?

In this sense Seoul 1988 is an outlier that hands over to the next age, with a vibrant, but modern depiction of a Taoist cosmology, a universe from which creation springs.

New Age Olympism, logos from 1992 to 2016

Maybe it was the tearing down  of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fade of the cold war that caused this change. But Deep Design, remembering that even causes have causes, is a cautious theoriser, and sticks to what’s observable.

Flowing free forms. human figures and hand drawn art work show a fatigue with modernism’s technological side. Equally, a fatigue with ideals, and a populist desire to bring the Games down from the heights of Mount Olympus, make them human, not godly, to be celebrated, not looked up to. Everyone’s invited.

Desire to bring the Games down from the heights of Mount Olympus, make them human, not godly, to be celebrated, not looked up to. Everyone’s invited

Barcelona 1992 takes the leap. Its designers say that.‘…the symbol could not be made with a …geometric or technological vocabulary.’ Atlanta 1996’s centennial flame, is playful, not prayerful, and the stars even twinkle. Sydney 2000 reduces the Opera House to a sketch, and rides a boomerang. Athens 2004 reintroduces the wreath in the medal ceremony, but with casual flair. Beijing 2008 visually puns the character for ‘culture’ with a human figure. London 2012’s aggressive logo pumps out a megawatt heavy-metal party, painting the Olympics magenta (not part of de Coubertin’s 1912 Olympic palette, which covered the flags of all nations ‘without exception’).   In Rio 2016 the comity of nations becomes a sophisticated carnival in an in-vogue 3D style. Does Tokyo 2020 start something new? Look up Deep Design in 2032.

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Milton Glaser, legendary Graphic designer, ranked Olympic logos. Though his marking scheme is not known, Glaser judges their success in professional terms: logos should be understandable, memorable and formalistically attractive.

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