Memetic Engineering Explained
Here are some emails to friends I thought may be of interest and worth publishing.
————— Forwarded message —————
Anyway, currently been thinking a lot about design - how certain designs express certain “feelings” (prestige, class, fun, cheapness, etc) through various elements (colour, positioning of elements, typography, etc) and realising I have no idea how this stuff works. Visual identity?
Don’t suppose you’ve studied any of this stuff?
That’s precisely what I’ve been studying :-)
Have flicked through a couple of sourcebook type things which are little more than expensively printed books of screenshots… very little discussion on how to reproduce the effects. Guess it’s aimed at those damn visually-oriented arty types ;)
Yeah there’s LOADS of wankery like that that, all being very expensive ecause of needless frills in the print production like embossed plastic cover material and such.
However, pillage a local design college’s library after reading the HOWTO style stuff below, because once you know the HOWTO stuff, these books are useful to ‘grok’ graphics, by firehosing your mind with ‘great’ design styles that (at least for me) aren’t retained consciously, but subtly inform your design decisions afterwards.
I also pick up old ones that are dirt cheap for the RAS thing mentioned below.
Have you come across anything which gives a nice wordy deconstruction of visual identity design?
The #1 best ever graphic design textbook that isn’t wankery is
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805075755
Don’t be deceived by the ‘Reading level: Ages 4-8’ listing :-)
Then both of ‘The Non Designers [Design|Type] Book’ by Robin Williams are next.
After that you need to know about colour and the grid. Although this is high on my to-read list - on my desk right here in fact - I’ve still not read it (bought it after doing a www.drawright.com/gallery.htm workshop a couple of weeks ago, results up on http://dave.lab6.com/acid/gallery/drawright06 :-) but this seems the best colour book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1585422193
For the grid, I can’t recommend any one ‘great’ book, but I browsed a lot of mediocre books’ ‘grid’ sections at my Uni library and found that the ‘alignment’ advice in Williams’ book is a much better explanation of why to use one.
Further into typography, ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’ is also good, although typo-centric and very theoretical in comparison to the rest.
And graphic design always sits in a usabilty context, and “Don’t Make Me Think” by Krug and “Elements of User Experience” bu Jesse James Garrett are gems.
Also “Understanding Comics” by Scott McLoud is awesome; it has the best description of the ‘how ‘natural’ designers learn design’ process I’ve seen, and its not ‘just comics’, its widely applicable to all visual design.
Past that, its about knowing how to get results out of the software.
Also note that ‘good borrow, genius steals’; exploit your Reticular Activation System by thinking about visual identity when out and about, and you’ll start to see it all over the place because graphic design is everywhere.
RAS is mentioned in Getting Things Done; basically you know when you get some random gadget, and then you start noticing LOADS of people with that thing - that’s your RAS system finding relevant stuff for you. ————— End of message —————
————— Forwarded message ————— Here’s bit of information overload for you, some book & paper suggestions about understanding propaganda :-)
(These days I tend to use the term ‘propaganda’ as pre-explained umbrella term for “communications strategy” or “psyops” or “information design” or “marketing” or “public relations”, although these are individual areas of practice in themselves, with varying levels of decency, its all about the same thing: modifying public behavior.)
“Please Understand Me II” - A sound theory of personality is a critical concept for clear thinking about audiences quite different to ourselves. Although all models move towards the same result, PUM2 is the best introduction I’ve found; Socionics, Enneagram, MBTI are other common ones. I’m very unsure about the model of personality this paper uses, their methodology is exemplary of how to put personality theory into practice: http://campaignstrategy.org/newsletters/campaignstrategy_newsletter_33.pdf (introduction) http://www.campaignstrategy.org/articles/usingvaluemodes.pdf (full paper) . Also, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9059265454566485886 has some really excellent points about gender roles in relation to technology that is in a similar vein and demonstrates how professionals conceive of this issue.
Psyops is something I haven’t delved too deeply into, but has a lot of beef. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Psyops etc and my recommend introduction to it is from the guy today behind http://www.metatempo.com/ who has some ‘unpublished’ papers I keep a copy of at http://dave.lab6.com/acid/dump/2003/application_of_memetics.html (introduction) http://dave.lab6.com/acid/dump/2003/memetic_engineering.html (full paper).
“Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug and “The non-designers design book” by Robin Williams are good introductions to graphic information design, and are punchy and short :-)
“Made to stick” - nicely introduced by excellent blogger Guy Kawasaki at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_stickiness_.html is a very recently published ‘pop science’ style book that distills the above ‘hard’ psyops stuff into ‘softer’ marketing.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is a nice intro to PR, and one of the links is long but nice, now only in the archive - http://web.archive.org/web/20051026114109/http://zpedia.org/A_Sell-Out’s_Tale - and I also have “The Century of the Self” documentary series, that goes into Edward Bernays and the history of the PR industry, you can find the torrent in the usual places. ————— End of message —————
The Memetic Engineering Explained by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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