That's Med!ocre

Mired currently in career crisis, it is good to get out now and then and remember why one should be glad that one is not a Graphic Designer™. Toiling on the outer edges of the design field, it’s easy to go weeks without using the terms “sub-branding” or “stakeholder.” It’s possible to forget that designers are as much to blame for the homogenisation of our cities as media monopolies, big box stores or Starbucks. Out in the design periphery, the exclamation point is still on the far edge of the type case; in corporate design, ! has come to embody all the hyberbolic aspirations of consumerist culture.



Saturday’s Character forum was an unsettling but welcome reminder. Much was made of the success of the That’s Me!bourne campaign, with longing reference and comparison to Milton Glaser’s I Love NY. City of Melbourne industrial designer Ian Dryden and branding expert Vincent Lazzara stayed on message, moving from A to B to C through their PowerPoint presentations, forgetting they were at a public forum and not simply pitching clients. Andrew Haig considered the subject at hand thoughtfully, but seemed resigned to the limitations of destination branding. He likes the That’s Me! Campaign, but he loves I Love NY. Which must have made New York native Jeremy Wortsman wish he’d never left home. His was the only presentation which strove to illustrate the particularities of the city, the beauty of its vernacular forms and the hope that something regional and real might come out of an examination of those elements. Despite Stephen Banham’s humorous and earnest exhortations to debate, the afternoon never took off.

Contributing to the problem, I posed an incoherent (non)question to the panel, mumbling about particularities and the off-putting, empty slickness of That’s Me!bourne. What I really should have asked was this: Why is it that the more branding we do, the more we start to look alike? Why can’t we let stories and images and intrigue attract visitors to our city? Why can’t we love our own city with the kind of passion New Yorkers show theirs? Why can’t we generate this passion from the ground up, instead of the top down? Why can’t we start looking for answers in Richmond and Northcote and Fitzroy and Heidelberg and Bayswater, not New York or London or Toronto or LA? Are we less interesting, less unique, than we once were? Are our cities? We need to look back to an era in which loyalty was something deep and true, not just a catchphrase on a credit card application or the tagline for a branding campaign. We need to stop trying to sell our souls. Design, I think, needs to be a force of good, not evil.