GIF shenanigans

Welcome back to another designer's soup. We recorded this edition at the PW studio in Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka. Below I'll be discussing the GIF. Particularly three attributes: its potential to evoke strong emotions, opportunities to strengthen common ties within a group, and add meaning to a message.

Welcome to another designer's soup; on this episode, we are talking about GIFs.

I'm going to refer to it as a GIF (...as opposed to a JIF).

They take an emotion that you're trying to communicate and it can stretch it, exaggerate it, and make it more complex. It allows for more sophisticated forms of communication with just one image; if you're like me, and think in imagery, you might find (writing) time-consuming or even difficult to articulate in words.

An image like this (GIF example) allows us to communicate strong feelings without having to use any words. When you consider visuals or messaging in terms of evocative emotion, (GIFs) can add a layer, and sophistication (like the gift does in this case) by contextualizing and reinforcing the meaning of the message.

GIFs also reference other stories. They are in fact a citation or simply a clip from an existing story. They are a form of meme; by definition an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users. Because of its viral quality, it can also illustrate popular ideas and trends. (for example...) When you open up WhatsApp or any messaging application with built-in GIFs; look at what GIFs are trending. Usually, these are the GIFs that appear first when the tool is selected. These trending GIFs illustrate the general emotional state or the ideas that are most popular at that time. So if you use a popular GIF, you are referencing a popular thought. And I think that connects you with others. When shared, they can demonstrate similar views, shared perceptions, and common interests. They become symbols of a stronger connection within a group. If your objective is to grow loyalty within a group, for example, if a business is attempting to connect with a customer segment, an appropriate GIF can tap into a general idea of a group of people.

A third attribute of the GIF is its scope for meaning. I've used GIFs to inform a client that we (PW Studio) haven't received their payment. As a text-based message, there are often misinterpretations and in my case, it can be difficult to draft a syntax in a way that is appropriate. Finding the right words and tone of voice that is on brand with my business's way of articulating, while also being sensitive to the client or customer is time-consuming for me.

A lot of how we communicate involves body language, eye contact, or other facial features; we pick up on these signals when we're talking face-to-face with someone either subconsciously or consciously. If someone is sitting a certain way or leaning forward, we have a tendency to lean back or we might lean forward in order to create more intimacy. These are helpful signs are not present in a conversation that entirely text-based; GIFs supplement this dialogue through these three attributes: emotional tone, commonality, and contextual meaning.

Food thought…

Alain Parizeau

Director, Public Works

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How to disappear

Artistic voice is probably the only thing we creators treasure more than the tools of our craft or access points to our muse. Artistic voice is very connected to our creative egos. But, when it comes to making brand stories, the creator’s artistic voice is not always a good idea. It could compromise quality and make the story less responsive to the audience.

When I first started writing for different brands about ten years ago, I had clients whose brand voices more-or-less aligned with my writer’s voice. Looking back, now I also think that they clearly hired me as a writer because they ‘liked’ my artistic voice, whether it was right for their brand or not. But, when they started recommending me to others, I started getting clients whose brands didn’t quite speak like me. I remember back then, getting the first client whose brand had a specific sense of humor; my mind went uh-oh.

This is when Public Works had to create a disappearing trick. We had to avoid subjectivity and defaulting into our personal artistic voices when producing commissioned stories. The challenge was to figure out how to make our artistic personalities temporarily disappear, leaving behind our expertise in making stories. This is how we ended up creating our Brand Articulation Framework.

The Brand Articulation Framework is a document used as a tool to unify ideas concerning a business's values, identity, and personality. Although best created through a workshop with the brand custodians, we also created a more economical interview-based document version so that more clients could afford it. It basically aligns all decision-makers of a project. The Brand Articulation Framework documents a brand’s desires, values, key personality traits, strategies and audience. It’s a work tool that sets the narrative voice and even themes for our stories for clients. It gathers and streamlines consensus as to ‘who’ a brand persona is, using near-universal symbols and emotional spectrums. This makes the brand persona easily translatable to creative productions from writing, photography, and films to interiors and customer experiences.

Public Works Brand Articulation Framework is a tool that helps us keep stories true to clients’ brand personas consistent while creating. It allows us to quiet our personal egos as creatives, and incorporate the persona of the brand we’re currently creating for, along with our expertise. It retains the intended persona, and gives the story its form through our skills in creating stories.

The Brand Articulation Framework is such a fundamental part of our storytelling now, and we’ve nicknamed them BAFs. Now, I begin each commissioned story with the BAF, making room for the brand persona and making a part of myself disappear for the time being. It works like magic.

BAFs are not just for writing; it’s a tool that can be used by all kinds of creators from designers, visual artists, interior designers, and filmmakers to content creators. Alain, my other half in life and at Public Works, also uses the BAF similarly when creating stories; his process involves mood boards, brand playlists which lends to constructing more abstract narratives using visuals.

We also use BAFs to help business founders to view the brand as a persona external to their own personality despite natural parallels. This removed room for subjective feedback based on personal preferences and moods, allowing the brand to maintain a consistent face and voice in the public eye. It was a win-win from all directions.

After we incorporated BAFs into our storytelling process, the stories were always written from the voice that was clearly identified and outlined with the involvement of the business founders. Our clients like it because hearing their stories being told from a voice they’ve only fleetingly heard in their head before is something of a trip. Even beyond working with us, our clients use BAFs as a guide to create briefs for other creatives and remind themselves of the motives and values that their brand stands for. We are sometimes commissioned by clients to brief and help new creatives joining their team to use the framework effectively.

Although the outcomes of this process seem ‘uncanny’ in our stories as some of our clients say, there’s nothing magical about it. It’s really a very rational and straightforward process that drives the BAF and how it enables us to map and maintain a brand’s persona through stories. Seeing life through the magician lens often enough, I find this concrete rationality quite magical in the same vein that chemistry is magical. This is why the Brand Articulation Framework becomes a neat disappearing trick for all creators making stories for brands.

Curious about how our Brand Articulation Framework can help your personal or business brand? You can read more about it here.

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Technology is a graphic designer's magic trick

Transcript: Welcome back to another designer's soup. This is the June edition. And this recording is done at the Public Works studio in Mount Lavinia. Sri Lanka. I'll be talking about the magician archetype. And in this case, I'll be talking about technology; this could be anything from computers to software to chat GPT.

Essentially, these are tools. What are the tools that we use to make the impossible happen?

Transcript: I find the magician archetype is particularly common amongst businesses that leverage quality and time. These are the kind of businesses that always promise to make dreams come true.

Most magician brands we've worked with have been in the hotel tourism and creative industries, and are mostly service-based. For Public Works. I spend a lot of time developing more effective ways to tell meaningful stories. And looking at ways in which technology can help us achieve, that is part of my job.

Here are three considerations to use technology to make the impossible happen.

Efficiency, in terms of time, but also in terms of output, I think technology has the ability to complete tasks with wide scopes in a relatively short time; much faster than if we did it entirely ourselves. So the tools we have available to us now allow us to complete tasks much faster than ever before.

With so much information now available to us, particularly information that's published online and shared every day; accessing that much information and extracting pertinent information is a task, I think, best suited for a computer or algorithm.

We use, for example, image aggregators to explore the semiotics of a particular idea. Obviously, there are limitations to these apps that we use. For example, Pinterest has an incredibly powerful algorithm, but what it can show you is limited to what has been uploaded. Now the interesting thing about Pinterest, for me, is its limitation. It can't synthesize any ideas and it certainly can't show something that hasn't been already made. So we use it to illustrate a visual spectrum; it’s a guide, rather than a source. In other words, it gives examples of existing graphics that have similar brand characteristics for a particular business persona. Image aggregators are getting so powerful now that they can match images to search queries, very, very well. And with a tool like that, I can create visual boards quickly and effectively. What used to take a designer, a full day at a reference library. Now, takes a couple of hours online. So technology can make it possible, for small teams and even individual designers, to consider a wider range of data.

The next consideration to talk about, Is the high fidelity of technology. We gain enormous amounts of precision, scale, and consistency with these kinds of tools. Moreover, I think it creates opportunities for us to investigate the feasibility of an idea. In terms of prototyping and testing. It can make this part of the design process more profitable for those doing the work and more cost-effective for those paying for it. I think it's a win-win.

For example, we regularly use digital mockups to test logo ideas and different situations. Not to say that the standard test prints or 3D builds are not important or obsolete, but rather, that a digital mockup is can be a cheaper testing method. Particularly for situations where a full prototyping exercise would be overkill.

For example, when you're testing a logo or any kind of graphic system; let’s say you want to test the graphics for uniforms, maybe also for a vehicle or any story that will live in a 3D space. It's good practice to make a physical mockup to test the idea, and make sure that there are no foreseeable problems. If you plan on printing these graphics on a thousand vehicles or ordering 50,000 t-shirts, then it's worth spending the extra money to make test prints and double-check in situ. But if you're doing a small order, and there will be opportunities to fix any problems in a second batch, the digital mockup is more cost-effective and appropriate. You always use a mockup with multiple perspectives to check for issues.

The high fidelity that technology gives us in terms of testing, can identify the strengths and weaknesses of an idea quite well. As a tool, the technology, we use now allows us to preview ideas with more accuracy and less production cost.

Another consideration for using technology in your practice or business is, its agility. Technology reduces the effort required to consider alternative versions of an idea. Particularly in terms of investigating different elements or parts of an idea, I think designers can try different arrangements, they can look at more shapes and sizes, and investigate textures, lines, and colours relatively more easily.

I think we underestimate the usefulness of our tools sometimes. For example, the value of just the command “Past in Place” or “Undo”. I think it's fair to say that these two commands combined have reduced more friction in the crafting of graphics than any other tool.

Come to think of it, I think it's no coincidence that the famous proverb “work smarter or not harder” was coined around the same time the first computer calculator was invented.

Now, the thing about using technology like this, particularly to move quickly and easily, is that before you can achieve that agility, it requires getting over the learning curve first.

We once used AI software to index all the footage from a shoot. We also prompted it to cut and edit alternative versions according to the criteria of the brief. After assessing the learning curve, we decided that the software was relatively easy to use, so we tried it, and it worked well. Even with the learning curve, we stayed within budget.

So reducing friction in the creative process is particularly important to us at Public Works. The technology we use is our factory and the more efficient, precise and effortless it is to make stories, we think improves our business, and increases value in our production.

I think designers and technologies have a reciprocal relationship. The way graphic designers use technology can influence the next generation of tools and those tools influence the next generation of graphic designers.

And when we use a well-built tool to solve a problem, seamlessly without friction, it’s like magic.

Food thought…

Alain Parizeau

Director, Public Works

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