Today in class, Prof. Goffredo has shared something undeniably important that I believe, we all should care.
“Stay relevant to the world”
– Goffredo Puccetti –
Donald Duck:
What does it mean to stay relevant to the world? Does it mean we need to follow all the new trends?
While this sentence may have been interpreted differently for Donald Duck, how I understood Goffredo’s passing comment was extremely important and relevant that I wanted to write a blog post about it.
We all know that the world we live in is constantly evolving. From the way we communicate, do grocery shoppings, to even how we go out on a date – a lot of the practices and tools we use have become obsolete, discarded, and replaced with the new ones.
Image Source: NYU Albert
For example, every semester we do a course registration on Albert. We log-in to the service, view the available courses and its description, save them to our virtual shopping cart, and click enroll button on enroll.
Image Source: College Admissions at Loyola
As much as we complain about the difficulties in using Albert, before the internet, registering for classes could take hours. According to the Loyola University Chicago Admissions page, back in the 90s, students had to run around the gym to navigate a chaotic maze of lines to sign up for the courses. With the introduction of technology, the convention of course registration has changed completely.
Another example is the self-checkout system. In Korea, there are now many convenient stores and gas statations without a staff. Customers are left with the screens to complete their transaction from a retailer without a staff helping them to checkout.
Donald Duck:
Okay cool. But how are course registration and grocery shopping relevant to the logo design?
Just as how the new technology has changed the way we shop and how we enroll in the courses, the new design tools and softwares are shifting the way we practice design as well as the expected outcome of the design.
Image Source: Ilya Lavrov, Medium
Back in the 1880s when Heineken first designed its emblem, the focus was to create a logo that would be applied for their products, or on the posters. However, with the introduction of internet, especially with the rise of the use of smartphone, its logo had to be scalable.
If the Heineken has inisted that they are the alchochol company, hence there is no need for them design responsive logo design, its brand identity would simply become invisible in the world of interent, where most of the people now access the information from. Granted, logo should continue to speak volumes about a brand, it should also be responsive enough to follow the contextual principles.
Furthermore, Logo in essence is all about capturing value in a simple image. Therefore, understanding what people value and how people signify things is important.
Image Source:TikTok
This is proved by how the new mobile-generaiton children have a totally different sign for phone: while adults, including myself, use pinky and thumb action to visualize calling, kids nowadays use a flat hand.
Donald Duck:
Wow, I feel so old 🙁 Is there anyway that can I stay relevant to the changing world?
There is no simple formula to stay relevant to the ever-evolving world. However, here are some things you can do:
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- Be Hungry to Learn
As Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher famously quoted: “The only thing that is constant is change“, it is inevitable for us to constantly adapt to the changing world. While we can’t stop the world from changing, we can always improve on our skills to learn new skills quickly.
Being able to adopt skills quickly means that you will have mobility to work on different projects when you find an opportunity. For instance, two summers ago, I was creating a marketing video for Labocine, the science film streaming platform. I saw the opportunity in elevating the project by adding the animation but I have never used Adobe After Effect before. Instead of shying away, I quickly learnt the new skills, and I was able to produce a marketing video with some nice animations. Although it was my first time using the software, with a curiosity and willingness to learn new skills, I was able to capture the opportunity.
2. Stay updated with the latest news
It is important that we care about and understand local, national, and international affairs happening around us. We don’t need to be an expert on each topic. However, we need to learn enough to make more informed and empathetic decisions. Visual design communicates a lot. This means that it can easily offend people or project political messages without an intention. Therefore, it is important that we design mindfully.
Staying updated to the latest news doesn’t only mean you need to read newspapers. Sometimes, going out on a nice dinner with your friends, or talk to new group of people can teach you a lot about what is happening around us. We get inspirations from all different sorts of experiences and network can be an excellent source of new perspectives and ideas to advance your design skills.
3. Keep up with the latest technology
Professor Goffredo mentioned how when he was a Junior designer one could be a successful designer if he/she was good at making GIFs. Now the bar for a designer is much higher. It is expected that the Junior designer not only knows how to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, but also to have a profound understanding of the web/app interfaces, motion graphics, and more. The process of designing logo and the expected skills are changing dramatically. It is important that we develop our niche skills, but also to keep up with the ever-developing technology, so that we keep up with the cultures at the workplace and meet the diverse clients’ needs.
Donald Duck:
Exactly! This is why I just bought cool monkey photos! Do you think these monkies would shape our new future?
You seem to talk about NFT. NFT is one of the many exciting innovations and changes that I see happening around us. There are more changes such as the definition of workplace, the introduction of the Metaverse and the implementation of AI to everyday objects.
It is important that we grow our ability in reading these trends, so that we can find and grab on opportunities as well as better prepare ourselves for the future. With the introduction of virtual reality, people will start to shop with an immersive experience. This means that logo has to be immersive and dynamic to meet up to the standard of the shopping experience.
In decentralized world where the decisions are made at an individual level, how are we going to negotiate the value of our design with the clients? Have you even considered competing with AI equipped robots that can generate cool-looking logos every second?
These are some of the exciting and important changes that I would keep my eyes on, even if I don’t understand them inside out. As logo design is all about putting values to the things in the world, we need to stay in current with what is happening around us.
Works Cited
“REGISTERING FOR CLASSES – WHAT’S THAT LIKE?” College Admission at LOYOLA, Apr 19, 2016 http://blogs.luc.edu/uao/2016/04/19/registering-for-classes-whats-that-like/
Ilya Lavrov, Medium, “How to Make. Responsive Logo”, Feb,13,2021, https://medium.com/turbologo/how-to-make-a-responsive-logo-9d3fcc4cb1d9
Johnny Levanier, 99 Designs, “The Evolution of Design from 2010 to 2020: Looking back at a decade of design”, https://99designs.com/blog/design-history-movements/evolution-of-design-2010-2020/
“Professor Goffredo mentioned how when he was a Junior designer one could be a successful designer if he/she was good at making GIFs. Now the bar for a designer is much higher. ”
Oh dear oh dear… I MUST learn to be more precise then! 🙂
You got the gist of what I meant, anyway. My point was about having the specific skills required at the time in order to enter the job market. Not sure that the bar is higher nowadays… 😉
After reading your comment, I had an “Aha” moment. I see why my understanding could have been wrong. As a person who grew up with GIFs and new technology, I simply assumed that creating GIF is an easy task. However, as our knowledge and skills on technology grow relative to the development of the technology, the bar to enter the job market may have been consistently high. Thank you for clarifying it with me!
Wow! Your marketing video is super cool. Do you think that you could use these skills to make a video that shows our clients the overall branding package we are delivering to them (the squares?). I feel like it’s important for our “one last thing” to really pack a punch. Maybe a video could be cool? One thing to note, watch your grammar/spelling. I noticed a couple errors like leaving out “a” in front of a noun, misspelling ‘Heineken’ and ‘important’, etc. Just read through it again, and you should catch them!
I cannot agree more with your first point of being hungry to learn anything that comes in our way because I also had various similar experiences with your Labocine promotional video where I had zero idea about anything related to coding when I took my first Interactive Media course in my Freshman year. I was really terrified that I would fail the class after the first week, but after a while of convincing myself that this was an important learning experience to pave a path for myself in the future, I decided to stick with it and I eventually made it out of the class successfully! After that, I was able to proudly say that I have learned this specific skill like coding through that class and I am so glad I stuck with it because coding is such an important thing to learn if we want to stay relevant with the technological advancements in the world. Perhaps another way that we can try to stay relevant to the world is to also heed advice from peers or successful people around us, whether it being another person who has been in the same field as you for a longer time or a renowned and successful person in the same field. I think that by listening and taking their advice into consideration, it will definitely help us to constantly stay relevant with the world we live in.
Thanks for the tips, Soojin! I enjoyed working with you this semester and loved seeing how you applied all these recommendations in our teamwork when brainstorming ideas, researching, sketching, and designing the logos. Your promotional video looks awesome too!
Honestly, this was one of the most engaging blog posts I’ve read in a while. I really like how you have a conversation with Donald Duck when elaborating on your points, it adds a bit of humor which makes the content a tad more interesting as well. But coming to the main point of adapting to change, it’s great that you decided to write on this since it doesn’t only apply in the design field but basically in every field there is! (As you also showed in the post) We need to make an effort to stay updated with the changes that take place around us and around the globe. It is no longer a recommendation, it is a necessity. Once again, great blog post!