Designing The World's Biggest Brands | Bruce Duckworth | Modern Wisdom Podcast 167

Bruce Duckworth is a designer and the Co-Founder & Co-Chairman of Turner Duckworth Design Company. Amazon's smile logo, Coca Cola's rebrand, Samsung, Elemis and Metallica are just some of the companies who owe their branding success to Bruce Duckworth. Expect to learn what it's like to sit in a briefing with Jeff Bezos, the full creative process behind generating the world's biggest brands, why packaging truly is the essence of a brand, how to have better meetings, how to monetise your creative passion and much more. Find new clients and raise your profile as a Fitness Professional by signing up to FitBook at https://www.fitbook.co.uk (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Check out Turner Duckworth's website - https://turnerduckworth.com/ Follow Turner Duckworth on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TurnerDuckworth Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #design #graphics #branding - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, hello friends. That's right, it is podcast time. So get ready for this one. Bruce Duckworth is a designer. He's the co-founder and co-chairman of Turner Duckworth. It's an award-winning international brand identity design firm. That is a complex way of saying that Bruce and the people that work for him build the biggest brands on the planet. And when I say the biggest, I mean Amazon's Smile logo, which you'll have seen on every box you've ever had delivered, was designed by him. And they do Coca-Cola and Samsung and Elamis and Metallica.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  So I just had to sit down with him and ask, what's it like to work for Jeff Bezos? You know, to sit down in a briefing and have Jeff Bezos sat opposite you, or to be charged with doing the rebrand for Coca-Cola? It's just so cool. So many awesome stories. There's some great tips in here. If you are a burgeoning graphic designer, or just someone who has an artistic tendency, there's some really nice takeaways from Bruce about how you can monetize your passion and some principles that you can follow. I'm pretty confident that if you couple this episode with a couple from Richard Shotten and one from Rory Sutherland, you've probably got the beginnings of a world-beating branding, design,

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  advertising and marketing company. So there you go. Some free gains for you there. Credit Modern Wisdom, feel free to pay me 10%.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online. Only if it is October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Bruce Duckworth.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  First things first, did you come up with the Amazon box smile design?

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  How many, how many people do you think have seen that? Everyone that's listening, think about the last Amazon parcel you got. It was probably this morning. The fact that underneath Amazon, there's a little smiley face, but it didn't used to be like that. Apparently I went on your website, didn't used to be like that. It used to be the other way, like a frown, like a frowny face. Let's talk, just tell us about that.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that's how many people is, is an interesting question. I think that somebody had worked it out that just the logo printed on packaging had been printed on packaging about 100 billion times. And I've just never, you know, that's just extraordinary, isn't that? That's just packaging, that's let alone not on side of aeroplanes or lorries or on websites. We're seeing gift cards or the rest of it. So that's just an extraordinary thing, isn't it? When you, when you design something and you're responsible for drawing it, and then it's repeated so many hundreds of billions of times. It's just unbelievable, isn't it? I suppose we didn't think it was ever going to be as big as that. Obviously, you know, I mean, who could have imagined? I'm sure even Jeff Bezos didn't realise it was quite as big as he's got now.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  It was, I think it was about 20 years ago. Amazon were, they, they were the biggest bookseller, online bookseller, if you remember. And that's all they did, just book selling. And, and they, it was the, we have an office in San Francisco and we were working on a lot of dot com boom and the subsequent bust kind of companies around the kind of 98 type time. And, and, and Amazon wanted to change their business model from being just an online bookseller to sell everything on the internet. And so the meeting with Jeff Bezos was, we need to, the brief from him was,

• 4:19Speaker 04

  we need to tell everybody that we're now selling everything on the internet. Not just books. And we also need to tell everybody that we are the most consumer friendly. We want to be the most consumer friendly company on the internet. Because at the time, although that seems like everybody does that now, at the time, that was quite a big deal. And so those are the two things we had to communicate. And you know, logo design is about communication. And so you have to try and find the unique thing that is to do with their name and what they're trying to communicate. So Amazon, we were lucky, or we looked hard, I guess. There's an A and a Z in Amazon, if you think of the name. And so so an arrow that went from A to Z means everything, right?

• 5:02Speaker 04

  So we thought if we could link the A to the Z with a smile, which was a sort of, you know, looks a bit like an arrow, but is also a smile, it goes from A to Z and it's sort of consumer friendly. Which is a sort of, you know, that's, you know, that's the answer, right, to the to the brief. As it as it turned out, the logo before had a sort of an underline, which was a sort of like a like a sort of frown. Smile, like an upside down smile. So actually, just by inverting that and adding the arrowhead to the end, we managed to move it, sort of manipulate it from being one look of a logo into the new logo with meaning. And that, and I think that sort of has has done as well. I mean, wherever I go in the world, there is a piece of my work on someone's desk.

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  So who did who did the actual piece? Was it you that drew the thing? You specifically, or was it someone in your team?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  I, in my team, it was a guy called Anthony Byers. Smiles Byers, we called him after that.

• 5:58Chris Williamson?

  No way. That's cool. Congratulations, Anthony. Your work's been seen by billions and billions of people. Am I right in saying Jeff Bezos said, anyone who doesn't like this logo doesn't like puppies?

• 6:10Speaker 04

  That's that's exactly what he said. I mean, it was a response to somebody, somebody in his team. You know, you have these, there weren't that many people in his team. It was very kind of, you know, talk to the main man and the key people. But there was somebody in Consumer Insights who said, shouldn't we at least test this with consumers? And he was like, really? If you don't like smiles, you don't like puppies? And so, yes, that is a true. And actually, the sort of, you know, you try and capture a little bit of the personality of the company in the logo. It's obviously just a symbol, it can't do everything. But actually, he had, Jeff Bezos has a very sort of guffawing laugh. And somehow, when I see that smile, it reminds me of him.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  Jeff Bezos encapsulated in type.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Yes, but it is amazing when you, you know, and I think that's part of the joy of graphic design, you know, and what I love so much about design is that, that, you know, when you do create something which has, you know, something good about it, that literally billions of people could see it, you know, it's not a one off, it's, it's designed to be published many, many, many times.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Legacy, right? It really is very transcendent. I mean, hearing the richest man on the planet behind probably the single most popular consumer company on the planet, likening the logo that you made to puppies. There's not many higher accolades that you can get than that, right? I mean, where do you go from there?

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. Is there anything better than a puppy?

• 7:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, that's it. I challenge anyone listening to tell us anything that's better than a puppy. So we've kind of skirted around it. What do you do? What is Turner Duckworth?

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Turner Duckworth, we're graphic designers. We design logos and the packaging and the visual identity for brands. So how would you know things that we've done? If you walk into any supermarket and you pick up a piece of packaging, somebody has designed that packaging. And what I mean by that is they've designed the logo, the colors, the typography, the illustration, the photography has all been created by somebody like me. And so that's what we do. We create the look, the visual identity of a brand. And the way that sort of starts is often on packaging design, because that is the one piece that everybody gets to see and has to, it's really the closest thing you get to the product itself. So for

• 8:33Speaker 04

  example, we redesigned everything for Coca-Cola about 10 years ago, probably now. And when you think about a bottle of Coca-Cola, you know, the closest you come to the liquid itself is the packaging. I mean, it has to, and it becomes something-

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Until it's inside you, yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yes, exactly. So the packaging becomes a truly sort of truly iconic thing. And, and yeah, so that's what we've designed for all sorts of different people. And I have a company that is, has about 120 people and about 80 of those are other graphic designers and the rest are support team that make all of that work.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that's so cool. Were you guys, anything to do with the names on the Coke cans? Was that part of your-

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, you had to bring that up, didn't you?

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, Bruce. Of course.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  The brand at the same time. But no, that was done by an Australian team in Coca-Cola.

• 9:33Chris Williamson?

  The designs look lovely anyway, even the ones without the names on, they look lovely as well.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Well, it's a sort of interesting, you know, when you have a company, you know, we started by working for lots of little tiny little brands. So, you know, it wouldn't be unusual to have seen our work for startups. So for example, Innocent Smoothies, when they first started, we did the original bottle, the shape of the bottle design. And that would have been a typical kind of client of ours back in the day. And then as we got more successful and the bigger guys came to see us, and ultimately the biggest brand in the world was Coca-Cola, consumer brand. And so to design that was an amazing thing.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  But of course, what they loved about our work, which is the reason that we got the job in the first place, was that we were able to get across a kind of interesting looking design across all different sort of touch points, which is every time you sort of see or touch the brand for small companies. And they wanted to do the same for a big company like Coca-Cola, which can, Coca-Cola and those kind of companies can come across as the kind of enormous corporate giants. And who wants to, you know, to have any kind of consumer relationship with those kind of companies? They seem austere and, you know, like a big system.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  And so, you know, although we designed the packaging to start with, then we designed everything else and the way and guidelines for the way everything looks. And our idea with Coca-Cola was to stop it looking just like a big corporate giant, but to give it some kind of friendliness and, you know, humanity, like there are actual humans in the Coca-Cola company.

• 11:13Chris Williamson?

  There must be some.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Yes, there are, I'm sure there are, we are, know there are, rather than just a sort of big old corporate giant.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  Bizarrely, with the small company. You already have that brand communication just naturally. You know the size of the company. Everyone knows that Coca-Cola is big, so it makes sense that oddly, from a signaling perspective, the small company wants to potentially look more corporate because it signals that they have gravitas and they're established within the market. And then you get to the point where you have gravitas and are established within the market and you're desperately trying to look like John down the road, who's just started his little company.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's exactly, that's exactly true. There's a, there must be a sweet spot for the type of brand and the right, exactly the right moment. And, but you know, when you've got a brand that's 125 years old, like Coca-Cola, it's constantly reinventing itself. Yeah, so exactly, that's exactly the, and you know, and the, I guess, consumers are also looking for new things. And, you know, they don't want to just be buying the same old stuff all the time. And certainly if a brand like Coca-Cola starts to look old fashioned, it's been around for a long time, you know, you, you, you can see sales drift off. So what we do is, you know, keep them up to date. You know, people say to me, oh, what, you really, you didn't really, can't really have designed the Coca-Cola logo because that's been around for 125 years, which is true. Interestingly, that,

• 12:38Speaker 04

  that Coca-Cola script, it's called the Spencerian script, was actually, was taken from the original of that, was actually taken from the handwriting of the accountant at Coca-Cola, who had, you know, accountants back in the day when they had those big ledgers had the most amazing calligraphic scripts. And so, yeah, that's where it originally came from. And, and over the years, that has been slightly tweaked and slightly tweaked to make a little bit more legible and a little bit more beautiful. And, and although consumers and consumers and customers and people, I mean, I don't know, I don't really like the term consumers, but that's what they, that's what we all are, right? You don't notice the difference necessarily all the time, but it stops the brand, what we do, stops that kind of brand becoming old fashioned.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it must be, it must be a challenge. There's so many doorways I could go down here. It's like, I finally get to speak to Santa Claus and ask him how all of the toys are made. This is kind of how it, how it feels a little bit, but.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you, if you ask the right question.

• 13:37Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying, I'm desperately trying, I promise. It's certainly one thing that I think there is reinventing brands that don't need to be done. This goes out to my business partner, Darren, who insists every year on us updating the artwork for our club nights, whether they're performing well or whether they're performing badly. And I'm like, man, there has to be a point. And the reason that I don't like it, or that I have an aversion to it, is that the market changes by exactly one third or more every year, because the students leave. I'm like, look, at least one third of the people see this as brand new artwork. And because we tend toward younger students in any case, I'm like, the ones that were our market last year, they've already

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  pissed off. They don't care. But with the Coca-Cola thing, there could be a potential where you try and reinvent something that actually is fine. And I can imagine there'll be a lot of meetings where people sit around and say, we need a new design, we need to inject some more new newness into this thing. And you're like, ah, maybe that's not quite right. I wonder how many brands overshoot on refreshing their look.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Well, I think, yes, I think some do. But they're actually more likely to not even try, not to go anywhere near overshooting, because they're often so cautious. I mean, these are billion dollar brands, you know, they really are selling an enormous amount of product, and they really don't want to get it wrong. Because there are sort of channels of promotion and communication, which people hardly ever see, or half your audience never see. But packaging is one of those things that everybody sees. So it's an incredibly intense process of getting exactly, exactly, exactly right, exactly the right color red, exactly the

• 15:22Chris Williamson?

  Only imagine how specific your guys have to be.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And you and I think over the years, you know, you I mean, I'm an art student. I mean, that's what I You know, I started by drawing at school and things and you end up doing this. And what I suppose we've done is we've become sort of enormous specialists in we can, you know, the skill we have of choosing the right typefaces, choosing the right colors, the right, the way the lettering is drawn, illustration, photography, all that kind of thing. It, I can make things these days. If, if you say I want it to be a little bit, look a little bit more classy, I know exactly what to do. So I want to make it a little bit less.

• 16:02Chris Williamson?

  You are a dream, Bruce.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Because it's like a, you know, it's like a kind of, it's like a mixing desk. Right. And you just pull things up and push things down. And because we have a, all graphic designers have this sort of, you know, we see in, you know, we see in, we would, you know, we're not in words or numbers like some of your guests have been. But we see, we just work in pictures the whole time. Yeah, yeah. In, in my mind, I sometimes feel like I, you know, I can remember so many visual things. And I can't remember the last thing I read, even if I read it two minutes ago. But I can remember things I've seen.

• 16:38Chris Williamson?

  When you have.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Definition retention in my eyes.

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. When you guys are working at the, it's Premier League design level, right? Biggest companies in the world, most important projects in the world. You need someone who in the nicest way possible has a freakish side to one particular domain of their competence, right? You need someone who literally can only see in pictures, can just can take the word. And you've touched on that there. I want to get into a couple of things. One of them being entrepreneurs and how, how we, me as a good example, can communicate with other versions of you more effectively. And you've touched on it there about that. I want it just a little bit more sort of classy.

• 17:27Chris Williamson?

  Or can we have it a bit more kind of, you know, like edgy? And what people do, what I'm trying to say is I'm using a word, which is the closest proxy for an impression of something I want to see. And like, that's so inefficient, like it's so many steps removed, you know? But the fact you guys being able to take that and then have the skills to deploy it.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's where... I think the skill is, particularly when you come to do things like a logo, for example. I mean, Amazon is just, it's only prints in one colour. You can't, I mean, there's nothing you can do really with colour particularly. It's only got, you know, just a few letters. And how do you communicate all these things? And so we spend a lot of time when we've got a design, figuring out the reason why that design is the correct design for the client. And so we would use a lot of the words they've used, the edgy, the classy, all those kind of words. And explain how that manifests itself as a visual. So if it's classy, what does classy mean visually?

• 18:35Speaker 04

  I mean, I know what it means, you know, in your head is it the same as in my head? And so you could, by going through every single kind of personality trait that they're trying to communicate, you can, you can sort of narrow it all down graphically to something that makes sense at the end. And you can, you can sort of see in a, in a typical presentation, in a good presentation, you can see clients kind of nodding along and nodding along and you go, so this is the answer. And they nod. And they go, thanks very much. Did it? That was great. How did you do that? So you often only show people, clients, you know, probably a maximum of three solutions. Why? You know, because actually it's much easier, like it's much, much easier.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  If I were to give my team designing a logo, you know, they go off and they come back and show me the logos that they've worked on for a few days. And there's maybe 50 logos there. Now, I could take that to a client and I could say, we've done 50 logos for you. Which one do you like? But then actually they're, they're then put in a position where they're, they're becoming me, a creative director. Because my job is to take but the best and only show the very best to the client and hone them until they're perfect. And, and I think it's a kind of lazy to show more than three. In fact, the hardest thing would be to show them one solution. Because then it would have to be absolutely spot on.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  It tends to be that you should have to show clients more than one. Because the way they describe what they want has slight different nuances.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  So you have to just tease out from them which one they really mean.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  This is a bit more classy, this is a bit more edgy, this is a bit more whatever it might be. Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  But the principle and what you're trying to communicate through the symbolism is exactly the same.

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that paradox of choice is a real thing. You know, when you have you have the entire world of shapes and colors at your disposal to to make something from. It's going to be challenging. So you design, you said, like packaging, the way that products look and stuff like that. I mean, if you want to put wings on a McNuggets box, can you do it? Like, can you just say, oh, we really think that the wings would look good? You mentioned about something having movement in it.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure you can. I mean, it's it's all possible, right? The you have to, I think, consumers are very, you know, they think long and hard these days about recyclability and sustainability. And if the wings you put on a McNuggets box are completely frivolous and superfluous, then they probably will think that's exactly, they're not stupid. That's exactly what they'll think it is. Frivolous and superfluous. So I think, you know, we have to, we have to think like consumers. I mean, in the last 10 years, our our relationship with those kind of brands has changed

• 21:35Speaker 04

  because we do, particularly with food brands, because of course we deal with the aftermath of the product. You know, the packaging is litter and, you know, whether it's recyclable or it's not recyclable. You know, we have to deal with that much more than we used to. We used to just throw it in the bin and forget about it. And these days, we, you know, we have to sort it out and we're very aware of what's good for the environment and bad. And so I think, and brands that are, you know, excessive, you know, consumers don't like them, which is fair enough.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay, it's I find it so fascinating that you start with the packaging and then and then work from there. I think it's so interesting.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Because it's so close, so close, isn't it? So we designed the visual identity for Levi Strauss, the jeans, you know, and they're on the back of, and they have kind of packaging, you know, they have a logo on, which is a little red tab that goes in, sewn into the back pocket. They have another logo that is across the back, back pocket, which is too sort of curved, it's like, almost like a seagull, a flying seagull, kind of in very simple terms, called the Arcuate, which has always been a trademark of theirs. And then they have that leather patch that you stick on the back of the jean. All of those become their packaging. Now that, now, the denim trousers without those elements are not Levi's.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  But with them, and the buttons as well, with them and all the trademarks that go around those, that's a pair of Levi's. So the packaging is sort of absolutely essential to the product in a lot of cases.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  I love the way that you said about the packaging being the closest that you get to the product, especially with stuff that you consume.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, and where, you know, I mean, if you're, you know, the logos that you're wearing on your t-shirt, you know, that's, that's, you know, that's another form of branding and another form of packaging.

• 23:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what does love the unmistakable mean?

• 23:34Speaker 04

  What you're trying to do is to, all the time with every brand that we work on, is find the thing that is truly unique about them, and then communicate that in their packaging and their logos and everything else that we end up designing. And unique is one thing, and unique is, we call that being, try and be unmistakable. And what we mean by that is that, like, when I go on the tube and I go to the office, I don't take any notice of the adverts in the tube, right? I don't, really don't, I've got my head down and I'm doing other things. But as I go to the escalators, these adverts flick past me at the corners of my eye.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  And they are, I am registering some kind of communication from them, although I'm not looking directly at them. And I think that if a visual identity, the things that we do, if it's truly effective, even that little peripheral vision... Actually registers that that's the brand and because it is completely unmistakable. You know, so there's a good reason that Coca Cola is red and Pepsi Cola is blue. You know, I mean, they're very, they're very different, right? And they're completely unmistakable. And, and, and yeah, so that's what we're always striving for is to be so unique that you're unmistakable.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  You're right as well. It's, it does more of the work for you, having a brand image which is

• 25:03Chris Williamson?

  unique and is unmistakable. It scales itself beyond the communication, right? You're right, you can just catch it out the corner of your eye. I know a McDonald's when I see a McDonald's, even if I'm looking in like 5% of my vision is able to see it. I'm like, it's a McDonald's over there.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 25:21Chris Williamson?

  Same with Starbucks, same with whatever.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  It's exactly the combination of yellow and red that do that. You know, those are design elements now, you know, it's become very interesting in the last sort of 10. Exactly. In fact, it's almost exactly 10. It may even be nearly 11 years because our design world was, was transformed when Apple produced the iPhone. Because Apple, which I've always sort of thought is a company where they've taken design principles to their absolute perfection. I think some, the products are beautifully designed, the user interface is beautifully designed. The, how they use their iconography of their Apple, you know?

• 26:04Speaker 04

  If you, if you're an alien and you landed on this planet and you saw an Apple store, you'd think we worshipped apples. I mean, it's that, it's that strong.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  The church of Apple, you are right.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah. And, and what the iPhone did was it, it, it made everybody, everybody realize what good design was. And it put the standard way higher than it was before, and particularly for these very large brands and the kind of the Coca Colas, the McDonald's, who I think had fallen out of step with good design and had spent all their money in other areas of communication.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  They realised that then, and certainly when we did our work on Coca-Cola, that we want to be as good as Apple are. We need to be as good as Apple because our consumers are seeing Apple every single day. Using it's in their hand, it's in their pocket, they're seeing it every single day. Remember that beautiful box that your Apple iPhone comes in? You know, those kind of experiences are pure design experiences. And they communicate to the consumer about quality that everything's been thought of. You know, and so, you know, by considering the design, if they feel like everything, consumers think then that everything that Apple produces has been carefully considered, which it has. You know, a friend of mine works for Apple and said to me, you know, we don't send an email to anybody unless it's been through the design department.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Because, you know, if we send one email to our Apple iPhone customers, that's how many hundreds of thousands of millions of whatever it is of people is that? You know, you get the design wrong there and it kind of, the whole, the whole, you know, everything...

• 27:41Chris Williamson?

  Cohesive, yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, everything's so cohesive. And so I'd like to personally thank Steve Jobs for, you know, for promoting design in a way that other brands at that scale hadn't done. It used to be a much more elitist thing, you know, where, you know, good design was seen in opera, for posters for operas and, you know, beautiful, you know, expensive luxury products and spirits and wines and that kind of thing. And now I think that the good design is actually much, much more for everybody, which is a much better thing.

• 28:19Chris Williamson?

  An inflection point of that was Apple releasing the iPhone. That's so incredible that a whole, you know, it's not as if what you're doing is new media, you know, people have been designing stuff for ages.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  And you can just...

• 28:35Speaker 04

  I mean, you look at the, look at the great logos of our time. You know, the probably the greatest logo is, I mean, it depends on your religion, but I mean, you know, the Christian cross is a logo. It's a representation of the Bible and, you know, and a great, not a great...

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Example maybe, but I mean, the swastika is also a fantastic piece of design, graphic design. I mean, it's based on, I think, the Hindu symbol for peace, I think, oddly enough. And actually, you know, but it was an incredibly powerful piece of draft design. Not sure I believe exactly what the company stood for in that case.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, you don't need to, do you? It can stand alone as a good piece of art.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  As a good piece of design, yeah.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I remember, I don't know whether the listeners will be able to, but I remember buying phones, like maybe like a BlackBerry in 2008 type time, 2009. And I remember getting that out of the box and it would be wrapped in cellophane and there'd be like a huge piece of documentation that came with it and a big warranty guide and all this other stuff. And you are right, like when you now purchase, especially Apple are the elite minimalists when it comes to this stuff, right? Like, and you're correct, opening it is one of the most joyous experiences of using it, which is again, very transcendent, very, very interesting.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  And really, you know, every point that you touch a brand, whatever that brand is, should have the equivalent of that, should be as good in whatever worship. I mean, it's unlikely to be as expensive and as beautifully produced. But I remember we did something for Coca-Cola, which was, they had these little, so we did the packaging and we did the, and all these executions all over the world were being done by local agencies. But one of these executions came back and it was, and they said, we always have a little drinks mat that goes when you're on an airplane and you order a drink, it comes, Coca-Cola

• 30:43Speaker 04

  provide the little circular drink mat that goes on your tray table. And, and, you know, I mean, it's a tiny little thing, right? But they, and they said, oh, we said, how many, how many do you produce of these? And they said, oh, we have a, we do roughly about half a billion of those. Because of course, the scale, the amount of drinks you have. So it's like, if you don't design that properly, then you're missing out on the opportunity of, you know, half a billion pieces of good communication. You know what I mean? So these small, tiny things can, should be treated with, you know, with care and attention.

• 31:24Chris Williamson?

  Is this integrated cohesive and unified movement? This unified front like a war troops moving in battle type thing. They all go at the right time, at the right pace. I think definitely seeing, and you are right. Like I notice a change in the way that brands communicated pre iPhone and post iPhone. And it definitely does feel like that was an inflection point. There might be some people listening that think, well, this is, this is interesting from a consumer perspective. I don't really know how communicating with someone like yourself or creative director or a graphic designer or whatever, is that interesting or that important for me?

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  I suppose in my, in my life, but I challenge anyone to not have a problem with a graphic designer at some point in their life. Like everybody, you, you've got your mum's 50th coming up and you've got to make a Facebook cover photo, a banner for Facebook or you, you brothers started a dog grooming service. So you post, you post recommendations on, on, online saying, does anyone know any good local graphic designers? And you get a million different things that come back. So I want to, I want to ask how as a client and also as a graphic designer, I know that our designer, Johnny will be listening. Shout out Johnny, you're awesome. And a bunch of other graphic designers, creatives and stuff like that.

• 32:51Chris Williamson?

  How can you ensure from both the graphic designer's perspective and from the client's perspective, that the brief and the communication between the two is as smooth as possible? There's no superfluous stuff in there. It's as efficient, but as thorough as it needs to be. Have you got some, some strategies of how you do that?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  You, you mean between the client and the graphic designer?

• 33:13Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Well, how does it become... I mean, I, you know, I think back in the, in the original kind of graphic designers who were originally, like graphic designer used to be called commercial artist, right? You know, that's what it was called before we were all called graphic designers. And, and that kind of tells you a little bit about, actually it's more descriptive what we do. You know, it is a sort of art, but it's for other people, right? It's the commercial part. We do it for money and we do it for other people.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  And there were always stories of how these kind of iconic, you know, spearheading graphic designers would stand on the windowsill of a 10-story building saying, "Buy my idea because it's so brilliant and I'll throw myself off if you don't buy it. It's that good." We don't do that anymore, you know? We don't need to do that anymore, right? You know, and so I think the, uh, the communication is just, it has to be, um, what we're always looking, what is a graphic designer you're always looking for is that, you know, as I say, we think in pictures. So whatever you say to me that I need to translate into something that becomes a piece of graphic design, I have to be able to put that into pictures, right?

• 34:29Speaker 04

  So you could, you could give me some words and say, "Bruce, I need it to be exactly like this." And you give me all these sort of, you know, quality, you know, high-end, um, whatever it is.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  But if I can't actually make it into a picture, you know, if I can't draw it, if I can't, if it just, some things you just can't draw because it's a feeling and it's an emotion, you just can't do it. And so I think the communication has to be, like the designer has to speak to the client and explain that kind of thing to them. So that whatever they say, they could give them a 200-page marketing report and say, "Now I need a logo. Can you do it from that?" And you say, "Well, there's no way I can condense all of that into a logo. You've only got one color and four letters," whatever it is. There's no way that can happen. So I need to, um, I need to tease out, that conversation between the client and the, and the designer has to be teasing out of the really, really important bits of information. What do you really want to say?

• 35:27Speaker 04

  You know, what do you really want to communicate? And then when you've all agreed that that's the right thing, then go away and work at it. And then come back with solutions that really do answer those four or five words, whatever it is. That has to, and so there's no room for, um, getting it wrong.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  Should you always do your first briefing in person?

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Oh, always, yeah. Because how do you know Jeff Bezos has got a guffawing laugh if you've never met him? Why do you know that that smile is right for him? You know, I mean, that's not the reason we did it, but it nevertheless is part of the personality of the company. So absolutely, you know, there's a, whenever you design a, for example, a beer, like a brand of beer, you know, and you design a new beer, if you go to the brewery, there's always, you'll see things in the, despite what the client will talk to you about, you know, you'll also be observing all these different things, the way they brewed the beer, the way the hops come in, the way, you know, the shape of the, whatever it is, the stills or the

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  The type of people that are brewing there, or the pigeons that rest on those things outside.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. And there's always, and there'll be a weather vane on top of the brewery, and you'll go, oh, that's interesting, you know, or the brewery gates will have a bit of curly metal that'll inspire you. So yeah, you have to really immerse yourself in it and

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I think that's very, very sort of holistic, artistic, all encompassing view. I think that's a really cool way to do it. I guess as well, the implication is, as a client, if you have an agenda, and if you're desperate for your designer to not come up with something, you're going to have to strap blinkers to the sides of their eyes, so that they walk through the brewer or your particular premises and don't, no, don't look at the pigeon over there, that weather vane's not for you, and this isn't a thing, and blah, blah, blah, don't look at the gates.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. I think that there's, you know, some clients would definitely make a mistake of saying, this is what I want, now can you go away and do it? And really, what you're trying to say is, this is what I need to communicate, how best would you bring it to life?

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  I like that. I like that a lot. So, one of the things that we touched on before we started, which I think is a really fascinating topic, is how creatives can commercialize their ability. Now, I know one of the guys that works for us at the moment, Ben, who will also be listening, fine art student in his final year of his masters at Newcastle University, just an amazing display, which unfortunately he never actually got to do, because coronavirus kind of killed that, but unbelievable, like phenomenal stuff that he did.

• 38:06Chris Williamson?

  How can he, as a fine art student, someone who's good at drawing, someone who's got an interest in graphic design, or anyone else that's listening, who has a passion like you had, how do they go from just being considered to be the guy that gets watercolor, or the girl that gets watercolors out in her conservatory three times a year when she's bored, to someone that can actually, you know, make a living out of it? How do you make that jump?

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Well, I think, you know, in terms of graphic design, and I can't, I don't really know how you do it with fine art. I mean, obviously, there are, you know, there are some amazingly successful and rich and, you know, fantastic artists, fine artists. But in graphic design world, you know, what we do is, is we do work for, if someone's got a problem, a commercial, usually a commercial problem, or an opportunity that they need a graphic design to help them with in order to make them more successful. And so what we do is provide part of the solution that makes them more successful. So we do have a value. What we produce actually has a value, you know, you know, that Amazon, I wish I,

• 39:14Speaker 04

  just thinking about it now, I wish we had charged for the amount of times it had been used.

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  That was what I was thinking. If you'd got it per impression, you could have charged, you could have charged an unbelievably lower price.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. Yes, I should have, yeah, we should have done that. That's a, that would have been a great 2020 hindsight there. But now what we do is, we do things that improve people's businesses. And there is a, there's a genuine commercial benefit in us getting it right. So therefore, you know, we get paid for doing it. And the higher up you get in the kind of, in, you know, if you're the best in the world at it, you'll get, should get paid the best in the world for doing it. And so you can, you know, I think what's, what's amazing, because you're absolutely right, you know, I started off as just being good at art at school. And then went to art college. And so what future is there for that?

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  I know loads of people that would just go like my mum was just good at art, but she's not. She's not ruined Amazon's new logo campaign.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  No, no, that's right. So, you know, it's just, you just have to do something where there is a there is a proper financial benefit to a client for using you, you know, if you get it done properly and you get it done well. I mean, you know, we did that Amazon logo 20 something years ago, you know, and, and it's still being used. That's, that wasn't, I mean, it was expensive at the time. I'm sure someone said it was too expensive at the time, but now, looking back on it, it was cheap.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  Bloody Jeff Bezos, driving that price down, getting himself a good deal.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and also I think that something to be very aware of as a designer is that often it is your, you know, some people will think being a designer is a kind of gift. It's also kind of a curse at the same time, because you can draw things and visualize things and you think in a different way to a lot of other people in business. But also you can't kind of turn that off either. So, you know, wherever you go, you'll look at your friend's house and say, well, I wouldn't have painted it that well.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  But also it's sometimes they're prepared to do the work for, for not much money. Because they just want to do it, because it's just, that's just what they just need to be producing. In them. And so, and you have to be very careful of that, because what we do is produce something that is, that does have a commercial value and a benefit. And so you need to charge the right amount of money for it. And so in my business, we have people who talk to the clients about money, which is, who is not me. So I can be as enthusiastic and love, from a pure design point of view, love the opportunity that's about to present itself and truly genuinely love it. And then, and then I leave the room and they go, Bruce, you need to go now. And we need to talk about money.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  The parents are talking now type thing. Yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  If somebody else needs to talk about the money, who isn't the person who is going to be creating the design? Because I think that then there's a, it's just such a conflict, because you're so desperate to do the opportunity. But, you know, I remember years and years ago, my, there was a recession, probably.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Middle of the 90s sometime and 1990s and we're working for Schweppes, the soft drink company and they had decided that they needed to pitch out the design for a new soft drink they were producing and they had a maximum fee. It was going to be £5,000 to pitch because we would never do, we'd never do any free pitching. We always get paid for it in our, in our industry. And I said to my dad, I said, you know, we just started this business. And I said, I don't know if I can do that. I said, I know it costs me £8,000 to do the work. And, and, and they're only going to pay me 5,000. The other agencies have said they'll do it for 5,000.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  But I don't think we can do that. And, and he, and he said to me, you know, he said, what the worst, what you're trying to do is service your clients. And he said, the worst service you could ever give your client would be to go bust in the halfway through the process of designing, because literally nobody would have anything and nowhere to go. And he said, and if truthfully you believe that it costs you £8,000 to do this work, then you must go back to your client and say, actually it's going to cost, I'm sorry, but it's going to have to cost £8,000. Otherwise the danger is we'll go bust and we'll leave you in the lurch, you know, if we were to win the job. So I did go back and I said that and we won the pitch and they paid us £8,000. Because it was, it was truthful. It's no, it wasn't a con. I wasn't trying to con them out of any money.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  I actually really want an up, I just need to upgrade my vehicle and petrol's currently like 120 a gallon and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I am, I really like the, the idea of using, breaking the fourth wall in business communications, especially in meetings. I think that the days of very stodgy business meetings where the elephant in the room isn't addressed to me seem to be very, very dead and buried. And perhaps that's just my preclivity. I'm sure, yeah, I can't imagine that in. Civil engineering, there's many like jokes that get cracked. But when you're talking about trying to uncover everyone's biases and elicit the responses

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  that you all are hiding, and sometimes even you yourself, as someone of, you know, however many decades it is of experience in this industry, you might need some work from your client or your partners in kind of dragging that out of you. So Bruce, no, no, like, that's just before we move on. What exactly are you trying to say? You know, that collaborative, was it zero, zero sum game, like, but not, you know? It's like one plus one equals five. Like, that's what you're trying to get to, right?

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. That's what you really, because a lot of people behind, in particularly in those kind of meetings, hide behind sort of standard words, you know, the difference between, you know, some brands, honestly, I mean, they all have the same values. They all have exactly the same values. And what you're desperately trying to do to make things look, you know, unmistakably visually, you need them to have an unmistakable difference in the first place to be able to communicate that. And so you're desperately trying to uncover that. And sometimes it is literally, you've, you've done the meeting and you thought, well, okay, we'll go with the best we've got here, but we haven't really got the answer. You know, they haven't really opened up. And it's kind of almost in the elevator down to reception that you, that they say what we're really after.

• 45:43Chris Williamson?

  Go back up.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  It's this, you know, and you go, well, why didn't you say that in the first place?

• 45:48Speaker 04

  But you do need to get them in that level, you know, you need to get really deep.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  I understand. I played a game with Richard Shotten, behavioral economists, consumer behavior expert, and it was called What Words I Hate Most in Marketing? And I wondered if you've got what words you hate most in design. So you're sitting down with the client. So for instance, I could give you one from events, which is energy. It just needs to look like it's got energy, you know? It's like, it's a club night. Like, of course it's got energy in it. I, it needs to, oh, here's another one. Here's another one for you. Studenty. Looks good, but could be a bit more studenty. What do you mean? Like, I, I see. Myself writing these briefs and going, I hate me.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  Like I would, if I was Johnny, my designer, I would hate me. But somehow he's just got the patience of an absolute saint, which I'm presuming a lot of graphic designers must have to develop.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. And also an unwavering optimism that they could be something great here.

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  So this is the 20th email where the client sent me just pure shit. But this time it might be good. So are there any, are there any terms that you would, if you were

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  president of global graphic design, are there any words that would be outlawed or would be banned?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Brainstorm. Let's do a brainstorm. And the reason, it's like, you know, you do a workshop to think of ideas. And nothing ever come, good comes out of them. Nothing ever. Like as soon as I hear that word, you're going to run a brainstorm. We're going to have a brainstorm with the client. Everyone's going to get involved.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Nothing good comes out of them, you know? It really doesn't. And so that is a word that I would just, well, I'd just like to, from creative point of view, thinking of ideas, you know, you need to have thought of an idea and then go for a walk around the park or travel on the bus. And then when you finish that, come back, wake up in the morning and go, is it still a good idea now? Probably not, you know, we don't need to think of another one. Like they don't happen with 25 people in a room. All collaborating and throwing ideas that just never happen. Everyone comes away from them thinking, that was great. We all had such a great creative time, but we produced nothing from them. I think they're completely overrated.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  You have a proxy for creativity, don't you? Which is actually that the creativity is being masked under volume and just kind of velocity of, it's a this and it's a this and it's a this. It's like put 25 people in a room talking about anything and they'll say a lot of words.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. And nothing, I don't think I've ever seen anything good come out. I mean, I've seen, you know, good connections with people come out of them, but not actually any good ideas. But actually going back to that word, studenty, I sometimes think studenty, and people say that, you know, that idea is a bit studenty.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  And what they mean is it's a bit naive. But actually, sometimes I think that actually a student idea is pure. You know, it's sort of, it hasn't had the effects of thirty years in the design business, you know, lavished upon it. So actually, sometimes the student idea can be the best idea.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Unincumbent, yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Studenty to me is actually, these days, I think it's quite, it's quite a good thing.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  I get it. I think what we mean when we say student is more bottles of VK and girls in denim shorts. I think that's kind of what we're erasing. But I think from a design perspective, you're probably correct as well. So again, I'm going to ask you a challenging question. This might be like, again, I did this to Richard, choosing your favorite children. But do you have a top three designs? Or it could just be some that come to mind of all time. There could be your work, there could be other people's works, just stuff that you love.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I love logos, I love the FedEx logo. If you have had a good look at the FedEx logo.

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  Red and black?

• 49:56Speaker 04

  Red, it's sort of a purple and orange, actually.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  And what it does in between the word Fed and the word X, I think it's between the E and the X. The negative space is an arrow.

• 50:09Chris Williamson?

  I'm looking at it now, yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Can you see the little arrow in the negative space?

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I can, yeah, yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  And I just think it's a, you know, it's a delivery company and that's a great, it's strong, it's bold, it's distinctive, it's unmistakable.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  Never noticed that.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  And it's also got a little fun little idea in it, which is this, in this negative space is an arrow. Now, negative space is something which is the space in between objects. So when you go to art school, it's something that art students know about. When they, when you draw still life, I remember somebody saying to, one of my teachers saying, right, there's a jug and a glass of water. They said, now, to get the proportion of the jug and the glass of water right when you draw it, if you draw the space in between, so don't draw the glass and then draw the jug next to it, draw the space in between, look at the space in between, then that's what a negative space is, right? It's the space in between things. And that allows you to get those two things in proportion to each other. And it's a technique that graphic designers use all the time.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  And so what you're seeing in that FedEx logo is that I can see very quickly, first thing I look at is that arrow. I look for the negative space all the time. And it's a wonderful thing because it's a very, um, somebody said great design, great graphic design was, um, something that gives you a smile in your mind. Like when you see it, you go, oh God, that's great. I love that. And I think when, I think that every time I look at that, that FedEx logo, because I see the arrow and I think, oh, that's, that's pretty smart that.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, it's so smart that it, it as a two dimensional image has outsmarted me for the 32 years I've been on this planet, you know?

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Well, now, if you actually know about it, you'll tell all your friends.

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  I can't not see it. You can't, you cannot unsee that now.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And people who, you know, had said that about our Amazon logo, you know, the A to Z. Did you know there was a, you know, it says A to Z? I went, no, I had no idea, you know, and they've seen it.

• 51:57Chris Williamson?

  I didn't notice the arrow thing. I got the smile. I was like, oh, I got it. I got it as a smile there. And it's like, it's so much more than you knew. Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Well, and I think that's what makes a good piece of design is that, that the more you look at it, the better it gets. And that you don't want to just give, um, everybody such an obvious thing that they get it immediately. I mean, it's like a, you know, a great album cover, you know, the more you look at it, you know, the more you see. And that's what makes things great. I think depth of thought and, you know, depth of craft.

• 52:30Chris Williamson?

  Similarly as well, I suppose you have to make it sufficiently visceral or obvious, for want of a better word. It has to emerge very quickly. Um, Richard, on the most recent episode, dropped this statistic. I think it's 98% of online content is looked at for less than a second.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:53Chris Williamson?

  So you're talking about an unbelievably short amount of time. So you, you as a graphic designer, not only have to make something which is like this beautiful, timeless, legacy inducing, layers upon layers of brilliance, but also immediately gratifying and recognizable and all the rest of it. And I suppose that's why you guys get paid the big bucks.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  That's right. That's exactly right. Because you need to do both. And it's not easy to do both.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I bet it isn't. Any other, any other adverts or bits of packaging or stuff that you love that come to mind?

• 53:25Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, you can't not love the, uh, the iconic Coca-Cola bottle, can you? Um, you, because it is the curvature, you know, the.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  Who did that? Do you know?

• 53:36Speaker 04

  The contour bottle. Um, now.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  I believe, I don't know actually who did it. I know that it was designed originally by mistake in that, which is probably why it's so unique. Somebody originally thought that Coca-Cola had cocoa beans in it. And the bottle, it doesn't. And the bottle originally, the top half of it, the most curvaceous stop where the shoulders are, was in the shape of a, like a cocoa, cocoa bean. And that's why it's got this curvaceous shape. So that's where the very first bottle came from, was a mistake.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  Raymond, Raymond Loi.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, he didn't design it originally, but he, he, he sort of perfected it. And one of his, one of the ways that he was allegedly said that it wanted to be so distinctive, that if you were to drop it and pick up a shard of that glass, you'd know it was from that shape.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  Wow, how beautiful is that? That's so cool, I love that, the fact that you could take it to pieces and still from one component part be able to work out what it was.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it's so distinctive, it's so unmistakable. So that has to be probably the most iconic piece of packaging there is in the world, I would imagine. And then I think I go into other areas. I think, you know, I love, I love all sorts of other design, you know, I love car design. I think that's a, it's a weird thing at the moment, cars are a weird thing at the moment, they're not so popular. But the shape of a car and that has an enormous emotional value and a technological value. And, and I think there's some, you know, and if, you know, and these things are part of our lives. That's what I love about them so much. All those pieces I've mentioned, the Coca-Cola bottle or the car design or whatever, you know, we use them every single day, you know.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  It's not some beautiful object that you stick on a shelf and you, you look at and say, isn't that a beautiful piece of design? It's things you use every day, I think that's what I love about it, that's why I love working on. These huge brands.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  It's art, it's your, it's your art in motion, isn't it?

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is, it really is, yeah. Somebody was talking to me about when anthropologists, when they study ancient cultures, they look at the material culture, the things that were left behind by the culture. And from those things that they dig up, archaeologists dig up, they can tell the lifestyle of the, of that particular race of people. So they know the difference between Saxon and, you know, or and Norman because of the design of the pieces that they find in the ground. They've no idea, they've never met anybody from those eras because they're all dead. But they make deductions based on the material culture they leave behind. And I think that that's what we're sort of doing as designers at the moment.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  We are producing the material culture of our era. And so in thousands of years' time, they can say, oh yeah, people, you know, they loved, you know, Apple design, they love the curve and the beautiful screens and, you know, it says something about us. And, and I just think that that should be the most brilliantly designed stuff because it's part of our lives.

• 56:43Chris Williamson?

  Bruce, I love it, man. The, the implications of having a serious approach to, and on the surface of it, it's not just about consumer behaviour, because it could quite easily be seen, as you say, not once today have you talked about conversions or customer retention or, you know, margins and things like that, although that's obviously going to be a consideration, but that's not your consideration. What you're thinking about is, is something totally different to that.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about, I'm, I'm thinking that if you, that if you had a, if you're trying to sell more, we've just done Special K, right, for Kellogg's, right? When you, yeah, and it's, it looks different now and I think it looks, it looks, it's a really good job. I really like what we've done.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  You know, what I'm trying to do is, I know what they need to do, which is to sell more Special K, right? And you can do that in a, in, in a very basic way. You know, you could do it in a very basic way, you could do it in a very mediocre way.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  But I don't think that you should do it in anything in a mediocre way. I mean, you could probably get more sales by, I don't know, making a picture of the bowl of the cereal look a bit better. You could do a little bit of things, you know, those kind of things. But I think you should, you should look at that design and you should transform it into something that is truly great piece of design. And of course, by doing that, it will get you more customer sales. I mean, we're all in it for the same thing. We still want to get people to buy more Special K. We want to do it in a way that gives the client the design that will last a long time

• 58:24Speaker 04

  and that is, is stands out and is genuinely unmistakable. Because then there's so much value in that for the client, so much value. Because then when he comes to redesign it again in five years' time, you know, they can, they can build on that and make it even more unmistakable. And I think the big, sort of the enemy, everyone has to have an enemy, right? You're fighting against. And that is mediocrity. Average mediocrity has just got to be, you know, as soon as anybody does anything that you go, oh God, that wasn't all that good. It's such a wasted opportunity. And yeah, we don't want to do that.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  There's a, I'm going to rehash an idea that I've heard a number of times before, and you may have done as well, it's Rory Sutherlandism, about how people, especially in the advertising world, would much sooner fail at putting out a safe project than succeed at putting out something which is risky. Because if the risky choice ended up somehow not working, that is, the onus of that is completely on Bruce's head. He went out of his way to come up with this real left field, very unique offering. Whereas if you just follow the formula, and you're like, well, we, we followed the, we followed the sheet, like, it's just the same as the last 10 adverts. Why didn't it work? Oh, it's okay, Bruce, don't worry, mate. You know,

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  sometimes these things just don't come off. We know that the formula works. We'll get them next time. And I think it leads to a, a real homogenizing of, of the brands. And you've mentioned this with cars, like, I didn't think about it until now, but you're right. Like, I've been excited by a new car design in ages, absolutely, except for Tesla, maybe, which I look at now, and I still think, like, you see an X, especially the X, it's so big and so imposing. And you're like, oh my god, like, that's such a weird, cool, different sort of car. But it's very rare. So, yeah, I think people, people playing it safe, especially when you've got varying degrees of stakeholders involved and your, your, your firm doesn't want to be

• 1:00:29Chris Williamson?

  the firm that fucked up Coca-Cola and, you know, like, it is, it is, um, it's difficult balancing.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it would be irresponsible to fuck up Coca-Cola, really.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  I don't think we'd get many more projects if that happened.

• 1:00:44Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that you have either.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  But you, you can't necessarily, there are clients who would love to go further than you think that they should go as well. You know, the opposite happens. You think that creative people always want to push clients, but actually clients sometimes always want to push designers as well. And, you know, we've had a, I had a spectacular failure, which I'm happy to tell you about.

• 1:01:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I wanted to know, I wanted to know.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's a lot to learn from it, actually. So we, we designed, redesigned Mr. Kipling cakes, maybe, this is quite a few years ago now. And it was at the time when Nigella Lawson was making cupcakes and everybody was into home baking and it, Mr. Kipling were going to relaunch as that kind of a brand. So they were going to not be there, because they're, they're sort of charming for what they are, which is a sort of, you know, everyday, you know, in plastic baked good, then everybody knows what they're like.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  They're the sweet albetas, aren't they?

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, they sort of are, you're right. But there was a lot of emphasis on making it much more of a home baked type product. And so we did this packaging that looked absolutely spectacular and looked just like a home baked Mr. Kipling would, you know, it was all, it's beautiful photography, it looked fantastic. And Nigella Lawson would have been proud of it. And then... About six weeks before everything was due to launch,

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  the factory found it very difficult to replicate the actual products, the change of product, to look as good as the actual homemade product that we had photographed. And so they said, actually, what we're going to do is we're going to launch with the old cakes and the new packaging, because the packaging loved it. Everybody who saw it in consumer research absolutely loved it and said we would just buy so much more if it looked like that. And that was a classic. So many lessons you can learn from that. So they launched it with the new packaging and the old product. And of course, everyone bought it. Spike in sales went through the roof. And then everyone opened it up and it was exactly the same as it was in the beginning, like what was on the outside.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  So you have to be truthful in everything that you do. And although they wanted to move into a new area and be really exciting, which would have been great had they been able to produce the product.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  You know, there's a real lesson that you can't, you know, you can't pretend to be something that you're not. You know, you do have to just be truthful. And what they should have done was just stalled the relaunch and got the product right and then launched the two together. That's what should have happened, but it didn't. And yeah, that's a lesson. And we've had many failures, but that's fairly spectacular.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  I can't believe that you've been flummoxed by baking. You've got everything right and then some fellow somewhere in the factory put too much butter in and now you've got to, your designs knackered.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Well, it doesn't work because what you're trying to do is be unmistakable in what you're trying to visualize. But you're also trying to get the truth of what the product is out to people so that they're under no illusion. You know, it has to be honest and truthful and decent and exciting to look at and. You know, and lying doesn't work.

• 1:04:04Chris Williamson?

  With that integration now, I think, and integrity and having virtue as a brand from top to bottom, from packaging to product to pricing, to a company ethos, to all of that stuff, especially now with always on 24/7 communication, which is seamless and happens across the globe, there's no room to pull the wool over customers' eyes anymore. You can't be the psychopath, the travelling psychopath that used to take advantage of every town and then, oh, I'm done there now, like, let's snake oil salesman my way to the next one. Like, there isn't, there's none of that anymore. You see brands, you see people say sentences, Milo Yiannopoulos, I was reminiscing about Milo Yiannopoulos' fall from grace, like, one sentence on one podcast, and that's him gone from the entire

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  public sphere, done. Are you like, oh my gosh, Sargon of Akkad, his entire Patreon gone, one sentence in some bizarre corner of the internet, you know, all of these different people, and the same is true for brands, even more so for brands, leverage through the roof, right?

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  And actually, now's an interesting time for brands. I mean, because, you know, I was noticing in my, on my essential trip to the supermarket earlier, the empty shelves. And I was thinking how interesting it was that all of the kind of funky new brands that are out there were actually on the shelf still. But the kind of older, more trusted, safe brands had all sold out, you know, the disinfectant that isn't organic and just destroys everything had sold out, you know?

• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  Mr Muscle is never going to struggle during a pandemic, is he?

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Mr Muscle with Mr Kipling and Aunt Bessie are absolutely loving it at the moment. They're all having a party around, they're not doing social distancing, they're shaking hands. Yeah, it's, I couldn't agree more.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  Interesting how they're behaving. And you see, you know, Louis Vuitton producing, yeah, and a number of others now, following the same suit, producing, you know, some kind of hand wipes or whatever, or, you know, some kind of disinfectant type products. And you think that's a, that's a really good bit of, you know, branding for them, you know, people will remember them as being, you know, a company that reacted fast, you know, someone like, you know, Louis Vuitton, you think is so sort of, so out of reach of most people. But I think the decisions they've made. As a brand at this moment are fantastic.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  They are. I wonder, I brought this up again recently, but I wonder how many brands are weaponizing goodwill at the moment. I think they are. I think a lot of them are doing something that is that is virtue signaling for the sake of it because they think someone in a meeting somewhere. And maybe this is just my skepticism about brands that have turned a corner. And again, what that would imply either it, one of two things can be correct. Either the brands are weaponizing goodwill and they're using it to further their brand equity that they can then monetize in the future, or their marketing communication in advance of that wasn't sufficiently effective to make me believe that they were the sort of company that would do this off their own back.

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. It's actually poor marketing, probably. And, and the ones that jump on the bandwagon, you can see them all jumping on the bandwagon now. You know, I think it'll have little effect on, I think, you know, your skepticism is shared by most consumers. You know, they'll go, really? You know, really?

• 1:07:32Chris Williamson?

  You know what they should do? Get Turner Duckworth involved. Get Turner Duckworth involved.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  That has been the, that is the answer to so many people's problems.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  I agree. So link will be in show notes below, of course. Look, Bruce, today's been, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much. I really loved it.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  I've really enjoyed, really enjoyed chatting and, and I just think, you know, let's, let's design everything beautifully. Let's have a wonderfully designed planet, you know, and the world will be better for it.

• 1:07:58Chris Williamson?

  That's amazing. If people want to check out what it is that you guys do, where should they go?

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  Go to turnerduckworth.com and everything's on there. Not everything's on there, but there's about 10 projects on there. And yeah, and but just look on the internet. There's plenty out there.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. Bruce, thank you so much for your time. It's been great.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  A pleasure.

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, feel free to message me @ChrisWillek on all social media. But for now, goodbye, friends.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

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