The Sochi Camel

When a few weeks ago I was asked to write another post for the Fuzion blog the Winter Olympic Games 2014 in Sochi were just about to kick off.

As an avid winter sports enthusiast (I grew up in a town in southern Poland that is surrounded by mountains and where the snow usually stays on the slopes for the better part of 6 months) I was looking forward to watching the broadcasts of the various events and competitions and rooting for the Polish athletes, two of whom I actually know personally.

As a designer, however, there was another element of the games that sparked my interest long before the Games even started – namely the Sochi2014.ru identity, which I unfortunately found to be quite bland, rather dated (Soviet?) looking and lacking the usual flair and expressiveness traits that are traditionally associated with Olympic logos.

Judging by the amount of commentary on this topic, I wasn’t the only one who was, let’s say, “disappointed” by the Sochi identity.

All the hype around the Sochi logo got me thinking – what must have happened behind the scenes that directed a no doubt amazingly creative, talented and experienced team of designers to produce an identity for one of the most prestigious and important sporting events in the world that was just “meh”?

In an article for the New York Times, Jonathan Kolatch gave a very interesting summary of the design process for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics Logo and gave me the fuel to write this post.

According to the article “the design team from the Interbrand Agency originally had a much more sophisticated idea in mind”

However, this design approach was not what the Olympics Organizing Committee had in mind. What they favoured was a “more future-oriented” logo, and thus began what appears to have been a frustrating period of compromise with the various layers of Olympic bureaucracy, including the local Russian government, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Organizing Committee, marketing specialists, famous athletes, and probably many more… 

Having read that, everything started to make sense!

What I realized was that, in short, what the team from Interbrand were faced with was a classic example of “Design by Committee”, which also happens to be synonymous with a “Designer’s Worst Nightmare”…

Design by committee is a phrase coined to describe a collaborative approach to design and, as I have experienced way too many times in my not-so-long career, is bound to produce suboptimal results.

It is also best described by the maxim “A camel looks like a horse that was planned by a committee”, although I think my favourite phrase is “a committee is a cul-de-sac into which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled”. All of these statements are, of course, saying the same thing: When there are too many cooks in the kitchen all you get is a mess!

As you can imagine, design-by-committee is one of the most frustrating and annoying aspects of a designer’s job because opinions can range widely, even within the smallest of groups and, usually, clients give way to personal preference instead of logical business, marketing, or design principles.

With so many people flashing thumbs up or thumbs down on a design, it often becomes impossible to trace the original rationale for a finished design and we end up with just a pretty picture with no soul.

Although it is the designer’s job to take the needs and goals of the customer into consideration, the opinions/beliefs of the “committee” are actually what get in the way of that. More often than not, the “committee” takes over the design process and believes that the “thinking” is their part and the designer’s only responsibility is execution.

I could probably go on about this for a very long time, however, what I have also learned in my not-so-long design career, is that there is no definitive solution to this problem and the best possible and most sensible answer is to listen, absorb, discuss, be able to defend any design decision with clarity and reason and, most importantly, know when to pick your battles and know when to let go.

Design-by-committee might be frustrating but it is also something that brings a new story and a new experience every day…isn’t that one of the great things about this business?

Basia 

Basia Kozlik is a Graphic Designer with Fuzion

Fuzion offer a full range of Graphic Design services from our Cork and Dublin office in Ireland including Branding, Logo Design, Marketing Materials and design for all digital channels.

Like the rest of you the Fuzion crew ended up ducking out of work early and headed to Sober Lane (great name for a bar!) to watch Katie Taylor’s Gold Medal Winning Olympic Fight.

I must admit that I had never seen her box before these Olympics but my heart was in my mouth for that really close, nerve racking match as we all watched on the edge of our seats.

Of course it was fabulous for Ireland to win a Gold medal and it was extra special that such a special young girl did it for us, but I did feel there was an extra dimensiongoing on.

To me it felt as if the whole country had funnelled all of our hope, our depression about the recession, our frustration about the lousy weather and even our disappointment about the Euro Championships onto the shoulders of this girl and really “needed” her to do something great – we really, really needed her to do this, maybe in a disproportionate way? After the fight was over I saw a tweet by someone who declared the “recession to be officially over” – I knew what she meant!

The match was really strange with both boxers being very cagey and slow to engage – it had all of us quietly biting our nails but then I listened to the Irish crowd in the stadium and they were literally in a “frenzy” lifting the roof off with their sheer noise. I wondered were they even watching the match? – if they were as nervous as we were, they would have been in near silence. I worried at one point that they might pressurise Katie into launching right in there too quickly, but she kept her focus and did her job.

Were we watching more than a contest for an Irish gold medal – I wonder?

Well done Katie & thank you! 

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Blaming Twitter – Tom Daley

An insensitive fool sends a tweet to British Olympian Tom Daley telling him “he let his dad down” , after Tom and his synchronised swimming partner, Peter Waterfield narrowly missed out on medals at the Olympics yesterday.

Tom’s dad Rob passed away in 2011 from Brain cancer. How dumb was that tweet? ….then again, how often do we hear people saying dumb things?

The tweet is dominating the Sky Sports News headlines this morning and authorities are going to “conduct an investigation“. On the way into work I heard they have the tweeter tracked down and he is going to be called in for questioning …for a dumb tweet, now that is also fairly dumb!

This whole incident will open up the debate and the inevitable conclusion by many, will be that Twitter is to blame.

This story reminds me of a debate I have regularly with a friend of mine who was a very prominent broadcaster a while back. She gives out about social media, doesn’t see the point of it and is generally very sceptical about its whole existence.

I remember one particular day she rang me all enthusiastic as she finally had great evidence that would prove her point of view. The famous singer Sinead O’Connor had just tweeted that “she was looking for a big hairy man“!

I just pointed out to her that Sinead O’Connor has always had a tendency for saying strange things – now she just has another place to say them!

Twitter is an open platform (you can control this with your personal settings but most users leave their profiles open) where everyone can tweet whatever they have to say – Yep, often this does include quite dumb stuff!

Celebs, sports personalities and even politicians use it to boost their profiles, to make a point, to promote events or products. They can get a huge benefit from it if they use it properly. Mere mortals like ourselves and that dumb tweeter can also jump in there, lap it up and punch away at our keyboards pushing our own little messages out there, whatever those might be.

Like everything else in life if it’s interesting I’ll listen and if it’s not I won’t – if that person is an insensitive fool or I just don’t like them I can simply block them.

Tom Daley did the right thing and retweeted what that fool had said and easily exposed his “dumbness” – that was the very best way of dealing with the situation. As I write Tom Daley has 783,041 followers on twitter – I would call that job done!

So, forget the further action by the authorities, forget the twitter bashing, embrace that we do live in a free society where we are free to speak.

But remember if you say something dumb, a lot of people can get to see it …

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion with offices in Cork and Dublin provide social media training and consultancy