Bryan’s Blog

Form letters have a purpose. When you need to send the same information to many people, most will reach for the form letter and let a word processing program complete fields based on a database. Many won’t bother with the database and a good, neutral greeting will be used instead. Sometimes form letters are acceptable. Most of the time they’re not.

In a world where it has become increasingly easy to send mundane and inconsequential items through email, shouldn’t your organization try to rise above the clutter by sending purposeful correspondence? Say you have a new opening in your firm. You conduct the typical job interview process. Say there are 200+ applicants. Will you custom-tailor a response for each individual? Probably not. The majority of the 200 applicants will be fairly served with your form letter.

Once you get to the final interviews, say your top three, however, the game changes. Now you’re not serving your self image by sending a form letter, especially through email. In this instance, you could take the time to call those interviewers, or barring that at least generate a custom, thoughtful message detailing what happened. How long would it take for those two letters? (Remember: the third interviewee was hired so no “thanks anyway” is necessary!) Perhaps half an hour?

What does it say about your brand, your image and your company when you don’t take that half hour? Is it what you want to say? What will those two recipients say to their friends, family and colleagues? Is it what you want them saying? The time to decide is now—before you send those letters.

In an interesting twist, Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima hired 10,000 anonymous artists to recreate a small portion of the US$100 bill. The artists were each paid one US penny. Called Ten Thousand Cents (found via swissmiss), the project took advantage of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. None of the artists knew what they were helping to recreate and some decided to forego the replication and insert their own interesting designs.

The project is definitely worth a look, if nothing else than to see the flash file on the home page that draws each section simultaneously. There is also a section within the site that displays certain pieces, large-scale, as they are drawn.

The Ministry of Type has a small article about the new currency being deployed in the United Kingdom. (Found by way of Andy Rutledge.)

I don’t have much to say about it, aside from the fact that the coinage was developed through an open contest that received 4000 entries from 500 people. The winner? A 26-year-old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. (There’s a Times Online article about the competition available, too.) If that isn’t inspiration, I don’t know what is. The coins are beautiful to see and the shapes themselves make me wish I lived in Britain so I could spend these post-haste. Instead I live in a country that honestly believes one and two-dollar bills are acceptable. (Though I suppose we haven’t printed two-dollar bills in a number of years.)

The end of the linked article also has a link to a quip comparing the new coinage to the US reconfiguration of the five-dollar bill. It’s as obvious as the bureaucratic conglomeration it represents. Sad.

If you’re shopping early for my birthday, the Royal Mint offers some nice commemorative packages in affordable (and not so affordable) price ranges.

Eric Karjaluoto has an interesting take that makes perfect sense. He says that style is not design. To quote:

Design is such a multi-layered practice that it’s often difficult to define. That being said, I believe that the word “design” is increasingly confused with “style”. For example, to most “I like the way it’s designed” means that they like the way that something looks.

The visual aspect of what we do is highly important, and style has a place in that. For example, if we want to connect with a particular audience, employing a style can sometimes be helpful. That being said, it seems that style often leads efforts. We have to break this habit.

He’s absolutely right. There is more to design than making something “pretty.” Throughout his article he talks about things he believes should be happening in design. Design is too prone to trends and fashions and not on results. Ultimately, as designers, we should strive to solve a problem or create a solution. It may look pretty, or it may look simple and straightforward. The only issue is whether it accomplishes what our client needs (or more importantly, what our client’s clients/customers/audience/whomever needs). There are uses for every tool we have. Are we finding the appropriate ones? Do we do the research? Or are we following trends and dating ourselves before our work is even done? The choice is ours and the choice is easy: design to serve the need and use style as just another tool.

This video speaks for itself. (From the AtypI mailing list by way of John Boardley and iLoveTypography) The bad language is all bleeped, so don’t worry. I think it especially moving at the end. The next time someone says anything about me and my typography and printing addictions, I’m sending them to that video.