Tag: Graphic Design

Monocle magazine: Advertising its singular view of the city

Monocle-SCCM2

A monocle is a single eyeglass kept in position by the muscles around the eye. The same can be said of Monocle magazine, a publication fixated on how cities should all be built in style and for conspicuous consumption.

Since launching in 2007, this publication by journalist-turned-media entrepreneur Tyler Brûlé has become a celebrated design bible for urban planners and the elite. Before Monocle, creating an attractive city worth living in never seemed so simple and stylish.

From its format down to design and content, Monocle smoothens over the complex subject of urbanism in a smart and attractive-looking publication. It’s Brûlé’s vision of a cross between the The Economist and GQ, a perfect status accessory for the modern executive—best displayed when one is dressed in tailored suits and leather shoes.

Monocle calls itself “A briefing on global affairs, business, culture & design”, but each issue reads more like Brûlé’s personal travel blog (he is known to travel more than 250 days in a year) printed on uncoated stock — all 300 pages of it, including booklet inserts and advertisements. A glossy spirit of optimism pervades throughout this magazine stuffed with informative blurbs, clever lists, one-page profiles, as well as question-and-answer interviews. Whether it is a survey on the world’s most livable cities, an interview with a politician or a shopkeeper, or an advertorial on Samsung’s latest phone, there is little difference. Everyone and everything on Monocle is selling their suggestions in creating a better city. Nothing seems problematic, not even the fact that almost everything Monocle features as good examples of city living are unaffordable to the rest of the 99%.

Despite its marketing stance, Monocle tries to look like it is delivering on its promise of “quality journalism” through design and art direction. Its commissioned photography borrow the visual language of objectivity, while its illustrations project a sense of simplicity. Documentary style photos of places run alongside straight-up style portraits of business owners, shops and products, creating a veneer of honesty over the fact that Monocle is promoting them to readers. Many of the magazine’s illustrations of city life display a charming LEGO-like simplicity, rendered in a uncomplicated style of elemental forms reminiscent of Isotype. Like this international picture language, Monocle’s illustrations smoothen out differences and diversity within and across cities, falling back on outmoded national costumes and stereotypes to fit a trans-national universe the magazine is building. From page to page, the images and short texts are packed into a three-column grid creating a sense of sameness regardless of who, what or where, which only encourages reader to skim rather than read seriously.

Most telling of Monocle’s journalistic aspirations is the typeface the magazine and brand has chosen to be set in: Plantin. The magazine’s creative director Richard Spencer Powell wanted a nod to “old journalistic values”, and this early 20th century typeface also gives the brand instant tradition, reinforcing why Brûlé had picked the archaic object of the monocle as its name. Despite establishing such origins, Monocle is uninterested in practicing journalism the old school way. The profession’s cardinal rule of separating editorial from advertising is discarded because Brûlé once said that “all good journalists are good salespeople too”, and Monocle’s editors often accompany ad directors to sales calls. It shows. This magazine’s advertorials are difficult to distinguish from editorial content. The only indication is a “(Brand name) X MONOCLE” tag at the bottom of the page, an ambiguous line that could also read as endorsed by Monocle.

But this magazine has no qualms about mixing the two. It is good business for Brûlé, who is also chairman of the branding and design agency, Winkreative. Monocle is a great advertising platform for the agency, as editorial subjects such as the government of Thailand have become clients too. In Monocle, Brûlé has created a marketing darling that has been recognized by Advertising Age which awarded him “Editor of the Year” in 2011, as well as, Adweek which named Monocle the “Best brand for living the good life” in 2012.

This commercial success is undoubtedly Monocle’s great achievement in a print media industry puzzling over how to survive in the digital age and has made it a model for many publications to follow since. But it comes at a cost: real quality journalism that helps us understand cities as citizens and not just consumers. Unlike those who live in Monocle city, these are ideals most of us cannot afford to buy nor lose.

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Written for Rick Poynor’s Critical Takedown workshop at D-Crit. This essay was later published on Design Observer.

The Meme: Democratizing Graphic Design and Politics

Any significant political event today is often quickly marked by the release of a meme into cyberspace. These simple graphical messages seize on an event’s most controversial moments, translating it into a digital file of less than a hundred kilobytes. In a matter of seconds after its creation, a meme is shared and read, and if effective, its message spreads like wildfire through the Internet and is received by a global audience.

Such memes, often created with just a clever juxtaposition of a tagline on an image, is an act of graphic design as its most basic—combining graphics and text to create meaning. Just as how graphic designers often tap on popular culture to create an attractive visual language for communication, these memes also appropriate images from popular films and iconography to grab attention for its messages.

One could trace political memes to political cartoons, as both take on the subject by injecting humor to create a graphical product whose goal is to make its readers laugh, and often implicitly criticize. While political cartoons have had a long history and is considered a discipline in its own right today, memes looks much more raw in comparison and are often plain ugly. Yet, it is their Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, cobbling together seemingly disparate graphic elements, that gives it legitimacy as a message that originated from the grassroots. Political memes are not the works of a professional cartoonist nor is it a slick advertisement from a politician or group with an agenda—they are the voices of the masses for the masses, an online version of the political poster.

Unlike professional graphic designers, meme creators only need to know where to Google and appropriate the image that is best suited for the message in their heads. Sometimes, it is the reverse, becoming a game of who wrote the funniest caption. The rise of memes has been aided by the emergence of simple web tools that allows anyone to quickly ‘generate’ one and share it, using a series of templates that codify how a meme works. One signature form that is characteristic of the genre starts with a lead-in text, followed by a ridiculous but somewhat relevant image, and ends with a punchline for impact. This three-step design process shows how readers often encounter memes, while scrolling in the web browser environment.

Although there are more complicated memes that allow a longer narrative to be played out, such as those based on the design of comic panels, they are mostly short and to the point. The choice of publishing memes via social media also explains its design. Clearly catered for viral transmissions that ride on platforms filled with competing messages, the design of political memes prize speed and compactness over cutting-edge aesthetics and depth.

Political memes are essentially a fragment—and at times, not even the most important—of how the masses see politics today. This is perhaps a sign of how everything in our lives today take on a certain ‘entertainment’ turn—even something as serious as politics. With so many other things in life to do, politics has to be reduced to punchlines and attention-grabbing antics in real-life and also in the form of memes.

This political form that is born from the convergence of technology, design, and society has become so popular that there are now websites dedicated to the generation, collection and distribution of such memes. Even politicians have got into the game, when during the 2012 US Presidential campaign, both candidates’ social media teams unleashed their own memes into their World Wide Web.

This new form of political expression of the times is another medium of society’s democratic conversation, adding richness to the online chatter amongst the masses, and definitely a good laugh too. But is there anything more after that? On the one hand, it can serve a vigilante function, cutting through heavy political acts by seizing on dubious messages and magnifying them through humor, but on the other, political memes often takes things out of context, mostly for the sake of entertainment.

Just as how computers made visual expression simpler for more, the simplicity and ease of creating and distributing memes is another example of how graphic design is being democratized, in this case for online communication on political matters. And like most media, memes are value-free, but entirely up to where designers — in this case, citizens — want to take them.

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This was originally written for a graduate programme application.