Branding vs. Publishing

Notes on Branding and Publishing from the recent Brand Perfect event.

Brand Perfect is an offshoot of Monotype.  They’ve been around for about 18 mos. and hold rotating events in a handful of major cities around the world.  Last week, they came through Manhattan for the second time and had two seperate events: an evening of talks and a day of presentations with a workshop at Conde Nast.  The subject was the crisis of branding and publishing.

To follow are some notes for my own record keeping.  Happy to answer questions if you have them.
* Brand Perfect expects to roll out their website in the coming months as a portal for branding professionals to have dialogue.  Free for all, at: http://brandperfect.org/
* I really should start publishing.  Time to hit the to do list and get some of that stuff out the front door and into the mean streets of the mobile/tablet arena.

Mario Garcia –  The most animated man of the two days.  A sort of impish, Spanish proselytizer for media’s move into portable from print.  Excellent choice of avatars to hold the keynote.

* MG: Branding in the age of the iPad is the college major that doesn’t exist yet.
* Todays designer needs Type; Marketing; Advertising; and Storytelling.
* MG: you can’t afford to devote yourself to just one platform.
* MG’s Media Quartet: Phone; Print; Web; Tablet.  The first two are Lean Forward devices; The second two are Lean Back devices.

* MG: each platform has a latency.  exploit each strength rather than expecting to duplicate it.
* MG: in five years we will have recovered from the Radio Days of mobile/tablet devices.
* MG: there is no school/education program for today’s media.***

*** A point reiterated by most of the other speakers in one form or the other.  With citations about what the NYT and Conde Nast publications are getting right and wrong as the clamber to figure out what the evolving field means.

* MG: Typography is THE unifier.  Have a Serif, a Sans, and an accent face.
[The Dutch Magazine: Fedra/Fedra Sans; Monocle: Plantin/Helvetica…]

* MG: You always fear you’re going to fail.  Get used to it or retire.
* MG: Headlines have to send you into the future rather than tell you about the past.
* MG: You have to have a web OVER print mentality.
* MG: Storytelling in Advertising is totally untapped.
* MG: Whitespace is even more important in mobile devices (ed. because the framework is fluid.)
* MG: photos at full frame or not at all.  miniature photos cameo’ed are radio days.
* MG: Scandinavian countries and Japan are 5-7 years ahead of most of the Western Market.
* MG: the general mentality of editors/publishers is that they are dormant and waiting for print to die.

Steve Matteson of Monotype –
* E Text typefaces are here to save us from digital readers.  ref. BaskervilleE, BemboE
* Typefaces are the clothes that words wear.
* Nimrod Classified was created for 4-5pnt classified ads.

Chris Liu –
* CL: Design and Tech used to be very intertwined.  At some point designers became lazy.
* Designer. Technologist. Storyteller.
* CL: very soon, mobile development will move in-house.
* CL: things are only going to get more complicated.
* check: Adobe Edge Tools, and Appcelerator.
*CL: Don’t wait until technology destroys your business.  Understand where tech is headed.
* CL: JPG. R.I.P.  jpg is on the way out.  Rasterized images are so 20th century. [I would have loved
to have heard more about this from him.]

Notes from Day 2 –
* look up findings.com
* Clay Shirkey: Publishing used to be an industry; now it’s a button.
* Media is no longer competing amongst peers but against all platforms.
* “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.  – Charles Mingus.
* NYT’s Snow Fall heavily referenced.  Also, Glitter in the Dark via Pitchfork.
* Content providers are now media companies.
* Digital laggarts.
* Kogan.com charged customer a surcharge if they ordered via IE browser.
* Ikea: 208m. catalogues.  285 ft employees working on photo shoots all year.
* New Yorker needs 950 pieces of art a year.

Big thanks to Julie Strawson for the invitation and for rebooking after Hurricane Irene only to find her conference in the eye of Snowmaggedon 2013.  Quite a trooper.