Ten years ago, recycled paper  was all the rage; the trouble was that it simply wasn’t ‘green’ - or at least it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was expensive, it cost more electricity to clean and recycle and it wasn’t necessarily environmentally sound, either in the processes used to produce it or the methods used to print on it. Ironically, the paper industry itself was always reasonably environmentally sound - virgin papers have nearly always been made from sustainable crops; it was the rest of the process that didn’t marry up.

These days, it’s much more joined up - accreditation like FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) have ensured that the process, as well as the paper itself, is ‘green’ - whether the paper is virgin, recycled or somewhere in between. It also means that to wear the badge you must be doing more than buying environmentally friendly paper, you must be joined up in the way you print. So many factors contribute to this approval process - the use of vegetable based inks, computer-to-plate (no film, no wasted silver), biodegradable laminating, water-based varnishes and - of course - environmentally friendly papers.

It’s interesting that the focus of attention has been on the forests, the printers and the print process itself rather than on the specifier which in this industry is more often than not the designer. It is we who recommend to our clients which paper stock to use and then specify that stock to the printer of choice. Often the client demands that the FSC logo be printed on their literature - sometimes to be part of the box ticking that is CSR, sometimes a genuine attempt to be green. But what is interesting is that little thought is given to the waste factor.

For instance, how often do we print more copies than we need, ‘because the run-on price is so cheap’? What do we do with all those unwanted brochures, magazines, newsletters - return them to the printers? No way, I can’t remember the last time someone asked us to dispose of their surplus unwanted print - so where does it go? Hopefully it is recycled.

Digital printing has allowed short run printing, in full colour, to become accessible to, and affordable by, everyone. As the price goes down, the quality goes up in line with technological improvements. We certainly are not litho printing the volumes we once were (who do you know who uses conventional letterheads any more, apart from IFAs and solicitors?). So in theory we are using less paper, though I know plenty of people who print out their emails to read later.

As graphic designers, we have a social responsibility to advise our clients to think green - to wait until they have six or eight people who want business cards rather than print one name at a time, to think about how many copies they actually need rather than order reams more than necessary. To even advise against printing at all if the better solution is to distribute the message electronically. However, even this can backfire - when I bought a new TV lately I had to print the 48pp instruction manual myself which cost me more in ink than the printer is worth.

With the current media attention on global warming, deforestation, sustainability, the acidity of the oceans, the melting of the ice caps, the storms, floods and the imbalance between what we use and what we produce, our focus on going green in the design and print business may seem a little over the top. But it is relevant, when you come to think of it.

Bonjour, je suis la nouvelle recrue de Cradduck Design Company!

Je suis une jeune française de 20 ans  étudiante en 1ère année de BTS Commerce International, qui est venue découvrir le marketing dans une entreprise anglaise au cours d’un stage de 2 mois. J’ai quitté la banlieue parisienne pour les cottages anglais près de Winchester dans le comté d’Hampshire.

L’objectif de mon stage est d’exercer une activité de prospection de clientèle et d’identifier des pratiques culturelles typiques au Royaume-Uni. Je me suis faite à l’idée qu’il fallait que j’oublie mon traditionnel goûter de 16h jusqu’à mon retour en France! Bien sûr, vous vous douterez que je n’ai pas choisi un pays anglophone par hasard : mon accent franchouillard laisse tant à désirer qu’il est condamné à disparaître après deux mois d’efforts intenses !

Evidemment, je me suis demandée comment mon “trip” allait se passer. Aucune  inquiétude à avoir : j’ai été accueillie par David Cradduck, le directeur de l’entreprise, qui m’a vraiment rassurée et mise en confiance. Toute l’équipe de Cradduck Design est très sympathique et, heureusement pour moi, se montre compréhensive en parlant lentement (!!!). Mes journées de travail sont bien occupées et se déroulent dans une ambiance très agréable, et je reste impressionnée par cette performance typiquement anglaise qui est de boire en moyenne 5 a 6 tasses de thé ou de café dans la journée!

Faites-moi part des vos expériences, peut-être similaire à la mienne!

This blog was written by Anaelle Castelbou, a student from Lycée Jean-Pierre Vernant, Sevres, Paris, on internship with Cradduck Design Co. May-July 2009. An English translation of this blog is available on request!

Dennis Sherwood* poses the question: “Is creativity born or made?” If you’re born with it, does that mean that if you aren’t, you’re doomed never to be creative? I personally feel that we’re all born with creativity and then life’s course determines how or if we are able to cash in on it.  Like any skill, you have to keep practising it to get better.

I have worked in a classroom environment with preschoolers (3-4yr olds) and it always amazed me how even the most disruptive child settled down when there was a painting or ‘making’ activity going on (don’t we all get pleasure in creating or achieving something?). The industriousness and unhindered creative thinking would result in a splendid array of interpretations of a given project - even if there was an example to copy. A child’s imagination knows no boundaries, but the school curriculum kicks in and everyone has to start to conform.

When I was studying for my graphics degree I set a project for a class of 6 year olds at the school where my sister taught. It was a problem solving exercise: ‘invent a street cleaner’. I was so impressed by the creativity of these children – all of them – their cleaners did more that just clean streets, one enterprising child had a recycling unit on the back and a drinks dispenser on the side – how forward thinking was that back in 1984! I only hope later in life his lateral thinking was appreciated and rewarded. Luckily for the children at my sister’s school, creativity was nurtured as much as possible within the confines of the three Rs. It’s down to environment, nurture and personal drive to determine if the creative streak is fostered and comes to fruition.

Pablo Picasso:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

On we go into adulthood hopefully with some of our creativity and innovation skills still intact where once again, hopefully, it will be fostered and exploited in the workplace; and exactly how do you recognise creativity if you want to employ the trait? In some cases it’s pretty evident – in the arts related industries it’s generally measured by a qualification backed up by examples of work. In non-arts related industries it can be measured by past accomplishments and attitudes towards problem solving followed up with a product or service which is innovative and marketable, but if there’s not much of a track record then psychometric testing can be used – bearing in mind computer generated assessment may not capture the novelty of creative thinking when picking the perfect creative candidate for your organisation.

Once you’ve got your talent in the door, the next order of business is to do something with it; do you allow a free rein, then rein back in when the output goes beyond original? Too much harnessing of creativity defeats the object, after all that’s what you’re paying for. You have to allow some sort of freedom of expression to come up with exclusive approaches to a problem, and maybe not all solutions will work out. And here’s a thought, perhaps failure should be rewarded, not just success; reserve punishment for inaction.

Edward de Bono:
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Sustained success and growth is dependent upon the ability to innovate and exploit new ideas and new opportunities ahead of the competition, regardless of the sector you are in. But, as anyone who knows anything knows only too well, it is hard enough to get things done at all, let alone introduce a new way of doing things, no matter how good an idea may seem. A powerful concept can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognised but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action. There are a lot of creative people in business and it’s more about identifying the best ideas and implementing them rather than generating endless supplies of them. Now that’s being creative.

Albert Einstein:
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

Creativity is a process involving a mental and social process to generate new ideas or concepts, or a new association between existing ideas or concepts, and creative employees pioneer new technologies, new industries and power economic growth, but the process in which this happens tends to be chaotic and complex…

A. A. Milne:
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

… and the Brits aren’t too bad at this: Sir Tim Burners-Lee was credited for originally inventing the world wide web, Jonathan Ive was the principal designer of the iPod and has had the most impact on a company’s fortune, and 80 percent of the chips for mobile phones manufactured in the Far East are designed in the UK. Apparently, top innovators generate over 75 percent revenue from products not in existence five years ago. How creative is that?

We all seem to admire creativity as a culture, just as we admire education and goodness. We know all about the rewards (and the disorders) but too much of it and you might end up chopping off your ear or believing your own press and producing something so off the wall you’re almost certifiable. So I suggest when asked “How creative are you?”, the answer is: “Creative enough, thank you”.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

There are several websites out there measuring creativity, but here are a couple or so I found which might be of interest:

32 Traits of Creative People By Robert Alan Black.
http://www.creativity-portal.com/cca/alan-black/32-traits-creative-people.html

Dennis Sherwood – an unusual look at the uses of a rolling pin, but really it’s about a process which can be used to solve real problems, and generate new ideas in practical situations.
http://www.cul.co.uk/creative/how.htm

Creativity & Innovation (this is part of an educational assignment – who knows, I might be putting someone on a new career path (more about that in my next blog – square pegs, round holes…)
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/hs/rhim5200/htm_files/0029.htm

* Who is Dennis Sherwood? Dennis was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Yale and California, and is a Sloan Fellow, with distinction, of the London Business School. He was for 12 years a consulting partner in Deloitte Haskins + Sells, and, after their merger in the UK, Coopers & Lybrand; subsequently, he was an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and a Vice President of SRI Consulting.

This blog was written by Jackie Poate, Business Development, Cradduck Design Co.

A brand is a promise. When there is competition in the marketplace then it’s your brand that sets you apart from the rest. Your brand creates and maintains your reputation and reflects your customers’ experience of your organisation. A strong brand makes you stand out from the crowds.

Brands provoke an emotion. Take Boots for instance: when we think about Boots we think of trust; Virgin conjures up a personality – fun/innovative. Cadbury’s makes us of think of quality, the rich purple of the logo symbolises royalty (French Royalty used to use this exact shade of purple) Cadbury’s decided to trademark the colour and make it their own. Harley Davidson trademarked the sound of the deep-throated roar of the motorbike and soaking up endless miles of US blue-skied highway – companies become possessive about their brands.

Our loyalty beyond reason to brands has been neatly explained by Kevin Roberts from Saatchi and Saatchi in his book Lovemarks: “If a brand delivers the promise it earns a special place in the consumers’ hearts and minds. So whenever the market gets difficult listen to the customer and go back to the basics of branding”.

• define your brand values e.g. design excellence, trust, innovation, value for money, quality customer service.  Are you offering what your customers want? Are you matched? Once established, convey this message throughout the organisation, from your business card and website through to employee attitudes. Your employees are your brand ambassadors; do they reflect what you stand for?

• manage your brand – keep employees involved - give someone the responsibility for your brand strategy. Continually reinforce the message that what they do is important and explain why. Make sure they know that breaking the promises to customers that your brand makes - just once - can damage the brand and your business.

• review your brand – get regular feedback. Keep checking that what you promise will be delivered is. Stay relevant to your customers. Bear in mind people stay loyal to a brand, emotions are involved so any changes need to be made sensitively – think carefully about a rebrand.

• budget for your brand – a budget focuses the mind and forces you to prioritise. Budget for: design: logo, signage, business stationery or product packaging, your premises, advertising, time you’ll need to spend with employees to make sure they understand your brand, resources you’ll have to provide for employees to enable them to carry out what the brand promises, eg customer service costs, keeping your company website updated.

It’s evident then, that brand is more than the just the logo, it’s the core value of your business and what it means to your customers and suppliers and the attachment they have to it. So if anyone sees Shaun, the missing ORS sheep – please let us know.

This blog was written by Jackie Poate, Business Development, Cradduck Design Co.

OK, so here we are, teetering on the edge of the Festive Season, a New Year and a Global Recession (but not necessarily in that order) and what has 2008 brought us? Apart from 1 euro = 1 pound, the demise of Woollies, the collapse of the banking system and automotive industry as we know it, impending zero interest rates (can someone explain to me how that benefits people dependent on their savings to live?) and Doom and Gloom as Never Before.

Well it has brought us  down to earth with a bump, of course, but in spite of that there are loads of opportunities for design agencies like ours to do well in a recession. It works like this: in boom times, companies reinvent themselves and employ very expensive agencies to do it for them. It’s called rebranding. In tough times,  shrewd marketeers don’t stop spending or reinventing themselves, they just do it smarter - they use provincial agencies like Cradducks who can provide exactly the same, top quality design work but at a fraction of the cost of the big boys. They think sideways, along with us designers, to come up with leaner, meaner ideas and ways of getting more out of less.

For instance, one of our major clients has given up litho printing their 400 copies per month internal magazine and are doing it online instead, with a very limited digital print run to satisfy those who can’t cope with, or can’t access, the online version. That means a downturn in print, granted, but we continue to produce the magazine for them and have made it more interactive into the bargain.

So, is it the survival of the fittest? Yes, I guess it is and I certainly hope I won’t be sitting here in six months’ time eating my words - plenty of old, established names have already gone to the wall in this area in this industry and plenty more will go before we see Boom Time again. That means that we have to offer something they can’t, or couldn’t, and do it better. Which is where a few grey hairs come in handy: not only have we seen recession before (this is the third big one in my experience) but we have survived it and become stronger for it. We must carry on where others have left off, and we must provide what our clients want - to the brief, creatively produced, on time, on budget and with the minimum of amends.

So, to all our loyal customers, hang on in there as we intend to, and remember that in a recession it pays to market yourself even more than before. And to anyone wondering if we really can come up with the goods, pick up the phone and call me.

Happy New Year to you all.

David

Well, for my money, yes they are. Very much so. Not only is an unsolicited testimonial worth its weight in gold because it is someone else saying something good about you, but it is so nice to have that feedback occasionally.

Not just for me and the other guv’nor, but for everyone involved (stakeholders as I believe they call them now); you get that feel-good factor when someone says something nice about you, or if you have genuinely helped another organisation do something well or look really good.

How about this one:

“Thank you for all your patience, good humour, coffee, squeezy cows and - of course - smart design work”. Is it significant that the design work comes last of all? Perhaps - after all, there are many competent design agencies out there turning out fab looking stuff. But one thing I have learned is that however smart your work is, it doesn’t work if it arrives after the event or is the product of a less than satisfactory client/supplier relationship.

But should a testimonial be accredited by name? Again, yes - otherwise, how effective is it? Surely it is better to have a name put to a comment than it to be credited to ‘Anon’ or ‘Mr P, marketing manager of BC Ltd’.

And sometimes a specific comment like ‘the website looks great’ is fine but a broader one like “we are always grateful to Cradduck Design for jobs consistently well done” or “I have thoroughly enjoyed working with your team: dynamic, hard working, inspirational and always conscious of my needs” says even more about us as a team of enthusiastic business people with our fingers on the pulse than about our ability to come up with the right visual images.

And we always encourage our clients to use them. Most of our work comes through recommendation which is really only a testimonial that someone has been kind enough to pass on to a third party. It works for us and it works for a lot of our clients too.

We’ve had a number of great testimonials arrive lately so they are all posted up on this site under What you’ve said about Cradducks (part 2)

Keep ‘em coming, folks!

We were recently invited to tender for the production of a school prospectus. Nothing unusual about that, we have done a few and although we don’t usually have to pitch for this kind of work, we didn’t mind in this case as it was a cracking one to have a go at and, after all, we had approached this school a while back as part of a direct mailing to encourage that sort of work.

So far so good, and we received a detailed brief telling us nearly everything we needed to know to do the job properly. I say nearly, because I felt a site visit was worth it to fill in a few gaps and to give me a feel for the place.

We did a thorough job - it is simply not worth doing anything other than a thorough job if you really want to win the work - but this sort of work takes a lot of man hours and resources.

As a slight digression here, it is worth making mention of the merits and morals of pitching: it has become the industry standard to ‘invite’ selected design agencies to pitch for projects along the lines of an ad agency pitching for an account. The trouble is, in an ad agency situation you may be pitching a couple of grands’ worth to win a multi-million pound account; if you are pitching for a one-off design project, exactly what is the prize?

Anyway, to get back to the subject, we assumed - as one would from being in this situation many times before - that we were one of, say, four or possibly five (at maximum) agencies pitching against each other. Why would you assume anything else? Who has the time to invite and select more than that? Perhaps I am being naïve here, but after all these years I have sort of come to know what to expect in these things.

I’ll bet you know where I’m heading with this one.

So, we put together a fab proposal, some really creative stuff with all the bells and whistles, written report and full costings to go with it, perhaps about 75 man hours in total.

No, we didn’t win - again we have been here often enough to know that in a five-horse race, there can only be one winner and four losers. And it doesn’t really matter if you come second, to be honest, because you might as well be at the bottom of the pile when it comes to end results. We’ve won some of these, and lost others; it happens. And we were happy that we had done a good job, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted to see.

What did surprise and shock me rather was to hear that we were one of 17 (yes, seventeen) agencies invited to pitch, and this to make the shortlist. I was so dumbstruck that I didn’t have time to even feel sorry for myself before experiencing every other kind of emotion, from anger to frustration and onwards to having a good laugh.

Is this really a professional way to conduct business? A colleague of ours, when told this story, reacted with the following words: “If any major PLC asked 17 agencies to pitch for an account worth millions they would be lambasted”.

I can’t help agreeing with him. Next time, I won’t be so naïve as to not ask the question: “How many are playing on this pitch?”.

To have a blog is one thing - but to have a blog that actually looks like your website is infinitely better, isn’t it? It’s taken a while but Stuart and David W got their heads together today and the result is a blog that actually fits within our brand. Well done, chaps.

All this leads on nicely to the gentle art of Consistency of Brand. In the days when a brand was a make of cornflakes or shoe polish and corporate identity was what has now become branding, it was always the inconsistency of logos, fonts, colours, styles that let most good identities down. Just because the methods have changed it doesn’t mean the problems have, though. What we now have is the same old problem - different promo items seem to have sprung from different places by different routes and with varying results.

End result - inconsistency.

Part of our job is to co-ordinate all those items - stationery, exhibition materials, literature, clothing, gifts, ads, website etc. so they all look as though they come from the same place.

It’s not really rocket science, more joined up thinking, but it does elude some people.

Next time you think ’should this flyer match that folder?’ the answer is probably ‘yes’.

Having spent 30 years running a graphic design studio, I look back on the changes in our industry in awe - how did we manage all those massive transitions, especially in the early 90s when the drawing board gave way to the Apple Mac, the Rotring pen to the mouse, the fax machine to the internet?

Is it any easier now, to take a brief and produce a piece of promotional literature, than it was in 1977? Of course it is. For a start, neither the NGA nor the repro house have a strangle hold on our industry any more. Not that either were that bad, but things have changed and we now have virtually total control over what we design. We dictate how something should appear in print or on the screen, not a third party. And that means that we can be flexible, creative and innovative.

True, many young designers seem incapable of actually drawing with a pencil and paper, but does that really matter? How many young scientists can use a slide rule?

Recently , a few of us Grumpy Old Designers got together to have a good moan about the way things have moved on and how much we miss the smell of the Pantone marker, the feel of the Cow Gum rubber as you throw it across the room and the days when you had to have a degree in maths to copyfit. We call ourselves GODS (a bit presumptuous, granted, bit it is a bit tongue in cheek) and meet occasionally for a beer and a chinwag .

In all seriousness, though, we do learn something new every day and that’s what makes this job interesting. And I get to meet new people all the time from many different industries - from cosmetics to yacht racing, from satellites to insurance, they all have one thing in common - the need for a reliable, efficient, creative studio to supply them with all their promotional items.

I am keen to understand how different businesses tick and how we should adapt to their needs. I reckon I have another ten useful years in this business before I hand over the reins to younger and wiser people. By that time this Grumpy Old Designer will be getting his bus pass and Grumpiness may be a thing of the past as I get to the stage called ‘Beyond Caring’. In the meantime, however, I welcome change as long as there’s a good reason for it and a meaningful end result.

For the first time ever I was asked by a new client the other day if we had such a thing as a template for a brief. My immediate reaction was “of course not, all projects are bespoke and so different you couldn’t possibly have a ‘one size fits all’ brief to cover any new job”.

This set me thinking, though - quite often the old joke about it being good to have tight briefs is rather true. Certainly better tight than woolly.

These days, a brief can range from a quick phone call saying “we need another one of those brochure thingies you did for us, same style, buzz you through the copy in a mo, need it for a show next Tuesday” to a full blown, pre-tender questionnaire with as much burocratic red tape attached to it as a local authority can muster and a very large envelope to return the stuff in by the due date.

Today I received a written instruction from a long-standing client who has perfected the art of writing a succinct brief and his one paragraph says it all: purpose, size, colours, production spec, when/how/where required and so on. He is in the minority in this skill. To write a good, tight brief without it being too prescriptive at one one extreme (we are creatives, after all) or open-ended at the other (resulting in “no, that’s not what we had in mind at all”) is not that easy.

So this set me thinking about how we could design a template for a brief; I’m sure this exists out there already, it’s just not something we have been asked for before. So what do we need to know?

1. Working/proper title (eg XYZ Show exhibition stand)

2. Description (eg 4 x 3 pop-up system)

3. Purpose (general text or image description, background information and so on)

4. Detailed specification (eg size, colours, typefaces, orientation, production process etc.)

5. When required by (nearly always wanted in a hurry, so important)

6. Delivery requirements (if a large consignment, can it be received on a pallet, for instance?)

7. Other information (eg similar to job no. 12345 from last May)

This is only a rough first draft so I’ve probably left something out - or perhaps put too much in. And I’m sure any marketing man or woman worth their salt will point me in the direction of the official template that has existed for years which we could adapt.

However, it is a start.

So let me know, from your point of view, what you think should go into a brief to ensure that we receive sufficient instruction to to do the job without either being bogged down in paper, or have us reaching for the phone to ask some pretty fundamental questions before we can proceed.