Readings Part 3: Bad Designs/Silly Decisions

It’s always fun looking at bad design choices. We had the chance  in class to bring in some examples. These were my highlights:

Pretty much all the multimedia designers (including myself) had a similar example, which was any website that decided to follow no hierarchy system whatsoever.

…thoughtless advertising placement…

Self explanatory…

Harley Davidson decided one day to expand their product range to include perfume!  Unsurprisingly, no one bought it, alienating their existing fan base while not acquiring any new fans either.

My personal favourite of the day was a campaign by PepsiMax to advertise that they only have 1 calorie in their drink.  So why not show the calorie as a suicidal figure that can’t live with himself.  Confused?  Check out the ad below. Funnily enough, it looks like a great piece of lowbrow art. No traditional Pepsi branding anywhere!

Readings Part 2

Our question this week was:

What is one of the most vital aspects of visual communication.

One of the students showed us the installation ” _Visible” by IF interactive arguing that we need to embrace new media/technologies to push us forward and to better engage with our audience.

Two different ways to attack the AIDS problem.  The student argues that the less aggressive campaign has worked better according to statistics.  Similarly, the anti-cigarette campaign below takes a less graphic approach and tries to pull to a different heart string: your potency in the bedroom.

Interestingly, another student added a powerful anti-smoking ad to the discussion, suggesting that the graphic nature of this add works in that it is impossible to ignore.

Some life insurance ads showing two different ways to tackle the same type of company, in different countries.  The first three are for a life insurance add in Thailand featuring a cockroach as the main character and the second is for an Australian Health Insurance commercial in the 80’s.

Some great examples of graphic design tacking environmental and social issues.

“In this family of BMW advertisements the target audience has been researched and the message is clearly directed at the 30 to 50 year old guy who wants it all and all three ads, even when isolated, tell them they can simply have it all.” (Quoted from students posting)

A hilarious example of the Mac vs PC ads that were circulating in the 1990’s!!! How things have changed.

Similarly, smoking advertising are pretty much non existant due to its social downfall along with the legalities of such advertising in today’s world.  Either way, it is both comical and unbelievable when seeing how they were advertised in the past.

Communicating Practice: Readings Part 1

For our summer unit we had to do some web threads in response to that weeks readings and relating it back to your own design ideologies.  There were some fantastic examples shown over the three weeks and I will be posting them in 6 parts as there were 6 web postings in total, with the first question being:

“How does the article relate to your own design ideas?”

An interesting example showing how print add for the same company has changed its values over the years for a Korean casino.

Mies Van Der Rohe’s frightfully accurate renderings of buildings of the future, illustrated at the turn of the 20th century.

Semi-Permanent Highlight (for me)

Three Drunk Monkeys’ promo for Pepsi before the TV Show ‘Lost’ in New Zealand.  Genius.

The Beatles: Rock Band

It’s the 9/9/09.  You know what that means.  World wide release of Beatles Rock Band.  Woo!

EB Games was waiting for me.  They knew my arrival was imminent.  Like someone chasing heroin, the store salesman and I exchanged glances that we knew something that know one else did.  I gave him a small plastic card to swipe, he gave me a little box of delights… and then I ran home… well skipped actually.

I haven’t actually played the game yet as I’m waiting for my friends to come over tomorrow night to christen it, however I did put the disk in the 360 to make sure that it worked ok…and was then pretty much blown away by its very VERY cool introduction video.  It somehow manages to encapsulate The Beatles entire career in the space of a few minutes. Awesome!

And since I’m talking about music games…I thought I’d post the world record attempt at Guitar Hero…the big question to me when watching it was…why?