top of page
Search
    • 3 min read

How to disappear

Updated: Jun 28, 2023

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.


 

Want to know more about our storytelling process?






    • 4 min read

Technology is a graphic designer's magic trick

Updated: Jun 29, 2023

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


 

Want to know more about our storytelling process?






    • 3 min read

Reading List, May 2023

Updated: Jun 6, 2023

-

Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists share music, ideas, events and research that connect to our stories.

-

 


Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green


-


Archetype → Ruler

-


In local lore, the talipot palm is the monarch of the plant world. It dwarfs everything in its vicinity with enormous leaves bringing birds, beasts and even humans looking to the talipot for shelter. The flowering of the talipot is something of a phenomenon—a point of transcendence from impressive to incredible. The talipot flower is the largest in the world, made up of over twenty million minuscule flowers. It shoots up at the sky from the tree’s pinnacle, drawing comparisons to thunderbolts and flaming crowns by artists and poets. The talipot bears only one flower, taking over sixty years to mature. Its multimillion seeds, each carrying the genetic code of the talipot's biological mission, are dispersed into the surroundings. Following this spectacular unfolding, the talipot dies, having completed its task. But, its seeds live on, carrying new possibilities for life to take shape.


This month, we bring you the Ruler archetype and the wonder rasa. Like the talipot, the Ruler archetype stands for the ability to influence, germinate the world with its will and offer stability and shelter under its ambit.




May 2023


  • 2019, The good ruler. Prof. Maxwell A. Cameron, Philosophy Now: The idea that rulers must be wiser and more virtuous than ordinary citizens is alien to our understanding of politics. We do not regard elected officials as exemplary citizens. Let’s question why politics and leadership has become so debased in our view.


  • 1924, The Gregarious Flowering of the Talipot Palm, Corypha umbraculifera, at Peradeniya, Ceylon. William Seifriz. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, Vol. 51: The flowering of the talipot palm is one of the rare examples of gregarious flowering where plants of similar age tend to flower at the same time despite their geographical location. Botanists who recorded this phenomenon of synchronicity in the early twentieth century studied the talipot palms at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Peradeniya.



  • 2015, High fidelity mixtape rules. Marjolinjn2. Youtube: Making great mixtapes is not about how legendary each song is, but about knowing who you are making it for and what you want to bring out for them.


  • 2007, The Devil Wears Prada (film adaptation). David Frankel, Wendy Finerman, and Aline Brosh McKenna based off Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel. Miranda Priestly, a powerful fashion magazine editor, embodies the ruler archetype as a formidable woman at the top, who plays by her own rules and nothing else.


  • For people with the ability to observe life and its patterns, the temptation to set rules and systems is natural. This selection of systems, rules and guides for living are by some the world’s sharpest minds as authors, anthropologists, and psychologists.

    1. 2018, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Jordan Peterson. Random House Canada, Penguin Allen Lane UK: A story-based, stern yet entertaining self-help manual laying out a set of simple rules to become more disciplined, behave better, act with integrity, and balance lives while enjoying them.

    2. 2018, Revisionist History; Malcolm Gladwell’s 12 Rules for Life. Season 3. Malcolm Gladwell.Pushkin: Crucial life lessons from the end of hockey games, Idris Elba, and some Wall Street guys with a lot of time on their hands. Revisionist History wades into the crowded self-help marketplace, with some help from a band of math whizzes and Hollywood screenwriters.


  • 2020, Toshio Shibata - capturing light. Eihwaz. Youtube: Toshio Shibata is a Japanese photographer known for his large-format photographs of large-scale works of civil engineering in unpopulated landscapes. His photographs achieve a unique harmony by focusing on the interweaving of natural forces with man-made structures, identifying the line between opposing sides. Shibata's work blends landscape painting with documentary realism, allowing it to move beyond mere description to something greater.


  • Retrieved 2023, May 31. The history of law. Wikipedia: The evolution of law as systems of rule keeping. Understanding legal institutions as complex systems of rules, players and symbols and how these elements interact with society to change, adapt, resist or promote certain aspects of humanity.


bottom of page