MA Communication Design and Creative Strategies @ HMKW Berlin
Design and Research with Prof. Dr. Jan-Henning Raff • Winter semester 2021/2022
After my third…maybe fourth (?) attempt to start writing this report, I remember that Jan-Henning allows us to write in any kind of language style. So…the second submission of this report will have a completely different way of blabbering reporting. I hope this style will motivate me better. 😃
If this sentence stays here, it means that this style is approved.
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One day, when I was on my way somewhere, I found this poster in a S-Bahn in Berlin. I still find it interesting up until now, because I |
In this stage of seeing, we are not even seeing something. We don’t pay attention and not giving a s---. Everything is blurred…and not having a certain shape. Something is just there. These objects are perceived automatically, instinctively and cannot be undone consciously.
A realistic scenario where we would meet our poster is:
We learned that our brain perceives objects visually in the first stage by mapping. We don’t look at an object for the first time in the highest definition our eyes can do, but more of a perceiving overall…impression.
Still don’t get it? Alles gut, I will explain it in a more visually acceptable approach.
We can somehow visualise how our brain comprehends the shapes of the thing that we haven’t seen. Blur and colours… and kind of something. Our brain processes are going to sound like,“Oh, there’s something here. Oh, there’s something there.” This is how a picture assumably be seen in this stage.
| Blurs… and colours… | and simple shapes… |
|---|---|
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It’s more like, our brain maps out something in the simplest way, just to grasp the existence of something.
Through gestalt principles we understand how we perceive objects through its basic elements before we understand what objects they are. At this stage we only see a clump of things in squares and circles and process them by clustering.
Our ability in clustering shapes can be divided into six principles, which shows that we can automatically know the correlation between objects.
Aaaaand let’s start with the hardest part of doing this analysis: resetting our brain. Let’s think that we haven’t seen the poster. 🙂internal painz🙂
How did the Gestalt principles be applied in my lovely Mehr poster?
1. Good Gestalt (As if there is Bad Gestalt, heh-)
I found 3 examples out of this poster, and all three are shapes covered in text. Obviously we can still comprehend the circle and two squares as a whole object eventhough they are all covered with texts.
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2. Figure-ground
In this poster, the background is very distinguishable with its light gradient plain blue colour and the objects are very in contrast with it.
3. Proximity
There are two big groups of objects in this poster that can be recognized through its positions. The ziggy objects on the top left and the bright jiggly object on the bottom right.
4. Closure & Continuity
I am putting closure and continuity together, which still a legal move 😃. Both principles in my case are similar. I am focusing on the woman. From left to right: (1) We can see that the body continues eventhough it is covered with the circle and (2) We can see that the shoulder the cream coloured square is continued from left to right.
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5. Similarity
Grouping of shapes based on their shapes or colours, which in this case there are (1) ziggy white thing, (2) red squares and (3) cream stuffs.
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Cool tool can be found here(and cool website FYI 🙂). Tachistoscope helps us to reenact the split second process of…environment mapping. When we map our environment visually, we don’t pay attention to the details, but we gather split second clips of objects and make interpretations of it. Since there are so many things happening around us, detailed observations wouldn’t be possible.
Task to do:
I have shown the poster to my flatmates and ask them to write down as detailed as possible of what they see. No pressure at all, believe me. Here are the results:
| Participant | Statement |
|---|---|
| P1 | Blonde woman in a red swimsuit at a beach. Blue skies and sunny. |
| P2 | Blonde woman with casual and I guess red top. Light blue background. The woman points at owns picture. |
| P3 | Blue. Blonde woman. White frame. Something red. |
| P4 | Old poster, maybe from the 60s or 70s. The woman is looking at the name (text) of the poster. |
| P5 | A poster for a film. A lot of blue on the left side. At the right side, there is a person who is looking at the upper side, which has lighter colour. |
Let’s just transform the statements into something more data friendly.
And now let’s retransform the table again into more…chart-y-er.
Hmm…this table-slash-chart could be prettier…
Olllrighty, let’s now discuss about the tachistoscope result, which I would firstly write down the findings in bullet points:
Hmm… from this result we can be sure that the existence of a person in this poster is clearly eye-catching, not only that everyone recognizes a human in the poster, but also what the person does. Even though colour doesn't get as much points as the human, we can also say that colour is percepted as clear as human. Colour can be percepted directly in this case.
Now we talk about something physical. It is nice to know how our body works, then we can understand what is really happening! The world of seeing, the thing that happens between our eyes(hardware)and brain(software), can be divided into two sections: the jump and the plan.
The focused area of seeing.
Our eyes don’t look at…scenery all at once. Our eyes only focuses on 1-2 degrees span of view from our pupil. So by doing this “jumps”, our brain collects fractures of pictures and sew them together. This collecting action is a combination of two eye movement: the saccade and the fixation. The saccade is jumping and the fixation is focusing.
How do we know where to look at? Where to jump afterwards? That’s where we do the plan.
The not focused area of seeing.
The perception of the objects in this area is blurred out, but that’s all what we need actually. Three points about this peripheral vision:
This informations let us know what’s interesting.
Eye tracking result is the hard proof for UI/UX designer to understand how viewers direct their eyes and understanding a layout/design. By recording what people actually see in a short time, second wise, we can proof and learn how people map visually: what they observe at the first moment, the most, the movement, what they avoid to see and many other things.
This is my first time seeing eye tracking process and even more it’s for this poster! The poster that I hate have interest in.
In taking the records, all of the students will see poster from the others for 4 seconds each. There was like…12-ish students, I guess. Here is the eye tracking result:
I will try to break the eye movements down:
What we can learn from this 4 seconds video:
There’s another result for the eye tracking in picture format.
| Focus Map | Heat Map |
|---|---|
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I would say, both pictures confirm four points above. But, it is really distinct to recognize that the woman’s face got the most attention and then followed by the title. I am not sure whether people understand and read the text or just recognizing that there is text. In the end, we can say that people ended up sensing that the text and the human hold the most important information of the poster, which help them understanding what it is about.
This is the other version of the poster in a…more primal way 😃. This is how the poster understood in this stage.
Now that I’ve learned about pre-attentive perception, we as designers can’t do as much to control what people perceived from a design. Even themselves also cannot control what their first impression would be. But then, it is now getting interesting to know, how design actualy gives us, human, an impact.
We, the students, were told by Jan-Henning that this second chapter will be hard. It’s about emotions…well…sometimes I don’t even understand what and how I feel☹️. But, thankfully this chapter is not about my feelings…maybe?
Interesting new knowledge for me is that the word “emotion” is just founded in 1579. Were the people before 1579 emotionless??? The word emotion describes this…energy/empowerment/movement inside us. We will study emotions in graphic design in this order:
Affect is a direct short-term emotion that we have by the influence of other thing. This function is then exploited in graphic design for most cases, because in graphic design, we have to influence people in an instant. There are two categories of perception: exteroception and interception.
Exteroception, perception of external things outside our body:
Interception, perception of the situation or activity inside our body:
From all the perception methods of ours, graphic design only use our vision. How can something far away from our physical body, something that we only see, can affect us?
When we are talking about vision, it only consists of colour and brightness. These two physical features of graphic design can affect people to feel something, which is divided into two groups: negative/pain and positive/lust.
We could be negatively affected by:
| 1. Very bright stuff | |
| 2. Fast flickering stuff | |
| 3. Figure-ground-flicker | |
| 4. Sideways movement | as in reading in a car |
I don’t find examples of negative affects in my poster because the visual elements in it are more on the positive side. Now, what will affect us positively?
| 1. Smooth gradients | The background  |
| 2. Monochromatic surfaces | Well the poster is not monochrome, so… no example But, I question this point if it actually means monotone instead of monochrome? If yes then it could be like this: |
| 3. Smooth roundish shapes | The wave  |
| 4. One simple shape | The circle  |
Altough the poster has more visual elements on the positive side, I still consider the poster as not affecting us emotionally, because in looking for these examples I had to search for it too hard. The elements fulfill the positiveness, but it feels like it is not actively made and designed to be so. The wave, for example, of course wave would be roundish instead of spikey. 🙄
Emotion is hard to define in a singular word. This affect grid could help us show and understand in which emotional state are we.
The class experimented a lil to see whether our emotion can be really affected by a poster or not, and as we can see below:
The overall result showed that the emotions of my classmates were changed/affected, but there could be a possiblity, where the emotions were not affected because we didn’t log who had which emotion. The diagram on the right shows two groups: people who are more excited, top right, and someone who are more on the bottom left.
I decided not to do this experiment with my poster, because I don’t expect any emotional affection coming from my poster.
Often we are not directly affected but just consider the graphic design emotionally: what does it express to us?
Visual elements can show human expressions. Not by showing a human directly 
, but by recreating some important elements just like this: 
. Which in my case with the Mehr poster, there are no visual elements that contains human expression other than the woman herself.
By the eye alone
We use our eyes, when looking at a poster, to scan/walk/search through the images. By looking at the Mehr poster, we connect the tension between the woman and the title. Our eyes jumping back and forth from the woman and the title as how suggested by the woman. We follow through.
Eye and mouth
There is a famous expression,“We eat with our eyes.” And also, we all agree that when we see someone eating lemon directly, we automatically show body reactions by producing too much saliva. Realism plays a big role in addressing taste, in which my poster fails to address. One possibility to show eye and mouth connection is by exploiting the taste of the sea: salt or coconut water. Salt??? Maybe the designer here tried to visualize sea by the wave vector??? Maybe??? Whatever it is, the wave is not working. I have a suggestion for this:
It triggers you to feel the freshness of coconut water on the beach. ✨ Oh so refreshing! ✨ Why do I feel, that this poster seems so Berlin. The intimacy, the expression, the freedom of sexual expression or a thin line between sexual freedom and sexism. 🙂
Eye and nose
It is like when we watch a cartoon when the character farts and there’s this green smoke coming out...we that it smells, haha. Sadly, again in my poster this corellation doesn’t exist, which actually could’ve exist! Sea has a strong aromatic memory for people. There’s also sea breeze or tropical fragance in beauty products. But it has to be triggered with a more realistic visualisation. Nice vector wave, not a good job. I have a suggestion for this:
A bit different from the previous one, the coconut is still green and has this freshly cut coconut smell with additional more obvious background, which shows that the woman is laying on a beach. The beach itself also delivers smell.
Eye and ear
These typical comic expressions 
. This poster had its chance to provide the sound of wave. That splash is so memorable especially for people who love the sea, that splash is something to remember and to long for. Nice vector wave, not a good job, again. I have a suggestion for this:
I choose a picture with a person walking towards the sea and it will suggest us the sound of water splashing on our legs 
also the sound of the wave itself from afar.
Eye and hand (touch)
When we see a picture of a baby skin, we can directly imagine how soft it is. Maybe some viewers of my poster have the urge to feel the woman’s skin, which seems soft. 
Other case, if we look at the QR-code–by forgetting the function of it–we can image that the surface is ragged, it’s not at all soft. 
But once again, the goal of this poster is to awaken the lust of the viewers to think about beach/vacation. I have one last suggestion that can be used also for the next two points:
If we want to take the softness of the skin and make it as a highlight, then my version can deliver a stronger impression towards that. More skin! Plus, I chose a photo of a woman laying on the sand so that the viewers can imagine their skin touches sand.
| I used woman models in the examples to stick with the original version. Now I feel politically incorrect for sexualizing woman! Okay fine, I present you one more example that is less sexualizing! |  |
Eye and nose: Smell of the sea.
Eye and ear: Sound of the wind hitting trees and wave from afar.
Eye and hand (touch): The pressure of the hammock on our skin.
Eye and body: It is laying on the hammock.
Eye and skin: The warmth from the sun.
| Let’s get back to out original poster. What if I replace the vector wave with real beach background? At least by having a real beach as the background, the viewer can relate to the situation and imagination more correct. |  |
Eye alone: We walk through the bridge behind the woman with our eyes.
Eye and nose: The smell of the sea and the wooden cottage.
Eye and ear: Water splashing softly.
Eye and hand (touch)
The feel of sand on our hand.
We talk in terms of mood, atmosphere, overall impression before thinking too much into a design. One of the most typical but then easy to…feel is dividing images into warm or cold. For example, the students clustered the posters that we study in the class based on four directions: warm, gloomy, cold and open. There is no right or wrong, but it is very wrong to clasify mood based on generic clasification of colours. Red is hot, blue is cold. It is not always the case.
We now try to assess all the aspects of emotions in the poster. The following categories seem appropriate to describe the poster:
A semantic differential will help us to prove and be assured how a design will affect the viewer emotionally.
In choosing which emotional quality represents our design, we can start with staring at it, try to feel it, but stop before we try to process it with logic. We start asking ourselves with:
(2.1) Are we affected?
Which in my case, I didn’t feel anything in particular about my poster. There’s no emotional spikes. It only gave the an,“Okay.”(2.2) Do we feel with it?
- I looked at the woman and then questioned…does she seem curious??? and then the opposite in this case is bored.
- Continued with the woman, which is our center of attention here, I would assume that because she got the most attention from our eye tracking test, she is attractive and the opposite is repelling.
- If I imagine myself trying to touch the objects, it would give the impression of softness, then I choose smooth versus edgy.
- Back to basic and typical, is it warm or cold?
(2.3) Which mood is conveyed?
- Then I questioned myself, the objects feel so ~ ~ ~ loooose ~ ~ ~, so I chose relaxed and the opposite is stiff
- Okay, I cheated a lil bit by using my brain more. It is an advertisement for a job opening. It should feel welcoming righttt??? Then I chose open versus closed.
Let’s experiment this with a bigger circle of my friendship, because…I feel like it’s so wrong just to experiment with the same group of people who saw my poster for so many times already ☹️ I posted it on my Instagram so we got freshhh eyesss. 🙂
I have successfully asked 21 people in my life to:
I have then arranged the result with the most prominent result at the top also left for negative emotions and right for positive emotions.
Now I understand that design can affect our emotion, which makes it to be a powerful tool to move people, to make people desire and willingly agree to our suggestion. The visual elements in a design have to be considered carefully to achieve the desired emotion. I feel like I am a director of a still movie planting clues inside people’s head. It reminds me of one poster in a U-Bahn station.
Like whut dude? You want me to sing the Katy Perry’s song Hot N Cold? It confuses me, it confuses my soft feeling, senpai ~
The format of the poster is portrait, which suggests a vertical order e.g. from top to bottom. In my poster, the designer don’t completely follow the suggestion, because we can see that there’s two sides of left and right. The direction is not solely and not directly from top to bottom.
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My poster has an axis on the left that is shown by the title, even though the text at the bottom is centered, the weigh of the title is heavier. I put another axis in the middle but in dashed line, because it is not a main axis for the poster but also we can see that the woman doesn’t stand there out of nowhere. |
We can also consider the aspects of colours in contrast.
There’s contrast of hue that makes this the woman in this poster popped out more that other elements. There’s also simultaneous contrast from the red shirt and orange circle that makes the orange less recognizeable because the red is fiercer. 
The poster can be divided into four simple parts as seen below:
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We can see that the two big squares balancing each other out and also the small squares by standing at the opposite of the page. |
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The woman’s gaze showing that the focus of this poster is at the title, which makes this direction as the guiding principle. |
The arrangement of this poster, the woman is looking at the text curiously, suggests that the text is important and contains valuable information.
I learned that even from a poorly designed poster, the designer able to create balance out of the arrangement. This is interesting how we have the tendency to find harmony in our creation, as best as we can.
In semiosis, we learn describing/communicating something without mentioning that thing directly. 
We represent an idea through another object, through sign. This is the heart of graphic de(((sign))).
Sign = something that stands for something else.
Signs can work two ways:
I only find one element that contains rhetorical trope in my poster, which is the beautiful lovely catchy title:
It is trying too hard to joke around the title, which is even worse than dad jokes. It sounds like,“Do you want sea?! HAHA! Kidding! I mean more! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA #LOL.” Sadly, the only rhetorical trait here is not even executed nicely. Visually it is burning my eyes. #cringe #ishhhh #hissingcat
How do different “semiotic modes” play together?
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I want to highlight the main interaction in this poster, which is between the title and the woman. The woman works as the representation of ourselves. There are two ways of seeing this interaction: (1) The title is talking to the woman, or (2) The woman is considering something which is the title. For the first possiblity, there is someone else/greater being/invisible narrator/the-one-whos-name-cannot-be-called asking the woman,“Do you want more?”. The second option would be a self reflecting question from the woman to herself,“Do I want more?”. I would say that each cases affect us differently but also almost the same. My guess is that it depends on our tendencies in reading something, first person or third person. |
The poster does too much suggesting messages instead of calling people to a certain action. The suggesting message, to have more income, can work better if the representation of the sea shown bigger and fancier. The better visualization of the sea would intrigue viewer to imagine themselves having a vacation on the beach with their better income by taking this job.
Rhetoric adds more value to the poster by giving this catchy/out-of-the-ordinary-world feeling. This helps people to get the idea of the product or benefit from the product faster and easier, also to make it sticks onto your brain stronger! A combination of these semiotics should be used wisely, so people won’t get trapped in misunderstanding or a neverending consideration, as what happens in this poster.
So, we were asked to make 10 posters, 1 poster for each rhetorical tropes.
| Showing the opposite |  |
Being ironic |  |
| Using metaphor |  |
Personifying |  |
| Metonymy |  |
Synecdoche |  |
| Circumscribing |  |
Joking |  |
| Making it smaller/bigger |  |
Exaggerating |  |
Aesthetic is a word that I hear more often after Instagram exist. Everybody is racing to display their gooood visual taste 👍. Something not to forget is that aesthetic serves its function very subjectively. Beauty is perceived differently changes through time.
This realization of aesthetic subjectivity and its ever changing nature is very important as a designer who works with…of course beauty/aesthetic. Realising what owns aesthetic to help us separating ourselves from these biases.
We looked for other posters outside the ones from our peers and then ordered the posters into two extremes: I ❤️ it and I 😡 it. The posters that I cannot group into the love and hate sides left in the middle with the spectrums: to the top, I like it more, and to the bottom, I kinda hate it more.
We then rearrange all posters by adding two new poles: good or bad, as in functionality. Whether the posters are easily understood is the question.
When I arrange the good and bad from those 3 groups: love, middle and hate, I was influenced with the thought,“Do I need to know the context to understand the poster?”. On the other side, I also considered,“A good poster should’ve been able to explain without prior knowledge.” 🤔
Generally speaking, I put the bad posters on the upper side of the previous diagram. This means that for some instance, I tend to like posters that are bad in functionality.
Aesthetic preferences is very personal and we are barely in a position of trying to find the reasons behind it. Now is my time to find it! I only discuss 3 posters from the ❤️ side and 3 poster from the 😡 side.
| Poster | Image | Text | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
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The photo seems covered with grey-ish layer on top of it. Low contrast and a bit low saturation. It looks like pictures printed on newspaper. It gives me the vibes of city streets, full of dirt and pollution, so rough and honest, although it contradicts to how staged the photo is. 🙃 I like the slight weirdness of “grilling” sausage on a drain cover. It is so questionable and pull the WHUT?! out of me. It contains enough amount of unexpected dry humor. | The font(s) used here are straightforward and clean. I feel like they don’t try to impress anyone. It is fun and laidback. I like the amount of the text, because they don’t write too much information in it. The font and the text are both top. | I like the combination of the photo and the text in this poster for their enoughness. It teases me with minimalist amount of text combined with humorous photo. |
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I like the bravery in using this alarming-oh-so-dangerous orange that fills almost the whole poster. The decision of using this orange and that man’s pose is so quirky it’s precious. I like how they only use one main object in the middle, so direct. The picture seems packed and full because of the size of the man in the middle and they also use a not really blurred background. This actually annoys me a bit but I like how it looks amateur, but still well arranged. Hmmm. Firefighter is usually portrayed in our society as a group of people who… don’t think as much as… The Thinker. 🙃 #sorrynotsorry. It makes the picture even more intruiging with that contrast. Does it make fun of the firefighter? I like this kind of humor that plays around stereotypes. | The font they used is also clean and they keep it simple by writing only the important information. I don’t really like how they use the low opacity text box, but then I find it funny (again) because for me it correlates with early 2000 power point presentation that overused text box. #metoo I relate to the pain. | I would like to watch this play. There are so much questionable stuffs in it, I like it. |
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It is a hand drawn kid like sketch, which I like it so much. I like outline drawings because of the minimum effort of doing things. The minimalistic approach, by not giving fill colours, gives me the image of controlled recklessness. I like how it is fun light cute drawing style. It is simple yet bold. | The only text here is just the logo, which also hand drawn, which is very nice how it aligns the whole concept. We can feel the strong concept. It’s playful but don’t hurt the professionalism of the brand. | It is chaotic but also correctly placed, which also represents our real life. Seems clumsy, a bit careless but still rigid. Intended mess. |
| Poster | Image | Text | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
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The picture is too dark and I would also like to see more of the woman or more of the flamenco. I don’t think it is wise to use a picture of a woman with black costume on black background. Black on black will look mysterious but in this case I want to hear the scream of a woman dancing flamenco with red costume, like,“Hiyaaaaa!!!” This picture lacks of aggressiveness it needs. | Too much fonts and font sizes here like they have no standards. I hate how stuffed the text here, it reminds me of my previous job. There will be someone who wants to put allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll information about one thing on the poster. It destroys every aesthetic possibilities. MAYBE, if they put less text, the black on black picture would look good. The font size for the title is so extremely greedy. Another aesthetic destroyer is the text box for the date, like wt*, bruh, it smacks our eyes, takes too much space and… looks so far away from the other elements. What is that Silverster Spezial star? Why are you even there? | I hate the way they don’t want to hire proper graphic designer! The hate the amount of the text, it scares me away with all the information written in it. I feel like it tries to preach! AAAAAAAA!!! I am a visual person that get attracted to more pictures but the picture here is defeated by texts. 😑 |
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IT IS JUST WRONG! The gold #eww ornament is so busy and hectic. All objects here are stepping onto each other. Who the heck still think that this amount of ornament is elegant? It looks like the poster is carelessly handled by someone who have no proper references on taste. | The pink colour is wrong, it gives me nausea. The font of the title is actually neutral but, why oh why, the body text is confusing, it is… ruthless. I feel ashamed if this poster is produced somewhere and displayed. | I don’t know what to say to this poster. Why is it even out there? |
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Let’s take the big PAF as the image element in this poster. I feel like they know design references but uses it without reason other than, they like it. I notice that the poster has to be arranged in tile, like this:  I think the reason I hate it because it has no significance in it. The pink-gold-ornament poster was bad because of the presence of things that are ugly and in this poster, I find it ugly because of the absence of… quirkiness-statement. |
Text in this poster is the main element, since it uses Swiss design style. The font used here is okay. It is how it is in Swiss design area. They also don’t abuse us to read too much, but still it looses its chicness. So plain it’s a bad okay. |
My aesthetic reflects on how I live my life. I like to do something as enough as it is needed to reach the perfect point where everything is clearly and easily understood. I expect other people to do the same. I remember once I had a colleague who LOVES to talk so much that I cannot stand talking to him and I always tried to avoid having a conversation with him. I ended up communicating with him through e-mail eventhough we were working in the same room on the same desk row. 👌
Get a grip of your life and don’t waste other people’s time for some 🐂💩.
On the other side of simplicity in talking, I have a knack on dry jokes and cheesy pick up lines. I think that’s how I compensate my serious side. Dry jokes are easy and light to process which balance out the mess of this life. 🌈🌏
I also like to mix up contradictive ideas. I feel like, it is a nice punch to give people the shock effect but no seizure because I choose one concept and twist a lil’ bit at one point.
Stef’s starter pack 👩🎨
I have gathered some judgements towards my poster and all of them are negative! Also from myself. Here is the poster once again:
My judgement and further explanations:
My first reason, why I took this poster for this report, is because I really hate it. I remember one day I discussed this poster with Jan-Henning and he said something like: This poster is in a way making a joke out of our job as a graphic designer. Then after one semester of researching this poster, I can confirm that idea because, I feel like:
This is more of a disrespect rather than pure ugliness … Or the ugliness in my case has influence from the disrespect that I sensed?
What do my colleagues think about the posters?
I think that three colleagues: Diya, Doga and Dayani, can sense the absence of design work from the poster and mentioned it(the sentences below are the original version from them):
Also they have the same hatred towards the title with wrongly treated h, the odd wave and bad colour choice.
Riccardo is the only one here who doesn’t really get pissed off. Haha. He explained, that the design is more on the casual neutral side, instead of the screaming and scaring people out, which why he didn’t put it into the hate area. But wait! I checked his hate posters, they are all the too crowded posters:
Now it makes sense, why he doesn’t hate it as much as the others and me.
Phew… How can I say it… It is now clear that, firstly, we as graphic designers feel disrespected by a badly designed poster, which we suspect, that the poster is not designed by a graphic designer. I am now questioning, whether it is a business opportunity or just simply ignorance? Sadly, we cannot solve the latter.
Would the poorly designed advertisements actually work for their target market, which why they don’t hire proper designer? One thing for sure, I have learned from this poster and my peers, that badly designed poster can trigger designers or other artistic workers personally. We feel attacked in a way.
In this chapter, we will talk about the elements outside the poster that contribute in shaping the poster. What makes the poster to be designed this way?
This poster is a job opening campaign for a telemarketing company.
I cannot find the designer of this poster, but I have researched the company that promotes this campaign: Avedo GmbH. This company is opened in 2004 and focuses on dialog marketing. They have 6 call centers in Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Köln, Leipzig, Rostock, und München with company size of 1.001-5.000 employees, as it is written on their LinkedIn page. I assume that Avedo is managed by Ströer X GmbH, part of Ströer Gruppe. The Ströer X GmbH itself has experience in dialog marketing for 40 years, 16 contact centers, 150 sales points, more than 3.000 Account Managers (Kundenberater:innen) and more than 2.500 outsourced workers in Germany and Europe. It is HUGE. Ströer X GmbH offers a third party service in: customer service, customer relation & after sales service, field sales, customer acquisition, lead generation, etc. It all has something to do with customer journey.
From my quick scan through their LinkedIn page, Avedo doesn’t have graphic designer in their team and if I look on the “People” tab, most of the head office employees are working for Ströer X. Hmm… okay, I decided to look for designer in Ströer X’s LinkedIn page. They seem like not having a graphic designer, too! But wait! I found a working student that has background from Communication and Media Studies with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and After Effects skills! Maybe it was her work? But maybe not, because the Avedo’s website also has the same style as the poster. It’s a too big responsibility for a working student to decide a website’s visual guideline. BUT MAYBE THEY DON’T THINK IT’S A TOO BIG RESPONSIBILITY FOR WORKING STUDENT??? 🤯 Most of their workers are mostly Project Managers and Marketers. I want to assume that they outsource their design needs, but I also cannot process the fact that the poster was created by a graphic designer. Okay, I filtered their workers profile and found that there are 6 employees correlated to the keyword design but only one of them does Media and Communication, which also not directly graphic design.
This is a B2B company. I can understand that rarely a B2B company as old as this focuses on aesthetic. At least from my personal experience. I would assume that they just assign someone with some “artsy skills” inside the company to take care of the visual needs, OR a UI/UX designer that has their table full of other UI/UX tasks and just do this as how it is.
I thought they held a photoshoot for this, but Diya said that the woman is from stock photo and the wave is obviously stock image. I have nothing to say further about the technique used in this poster.
From the very first moment, when I saw this poster in S-Bahn, I spontanieously thought,“Ah, tRENdY design.” Why? It reminds me of the latest visual style of advertisement in Jakarta for the last years, especially the campaigns from e-commerce or other IT-based companies.
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Hmm…
Hmm…
It refers to website banner style, flat design. A style that exists side by side to UI/UX. It reminds me of website banner designs because of:
I found it in Berlin but I would definitely believe that this poster exists across Germany, because it is a recruiting campaign for a job position that is not tied with location. The company itself doesn’t even have an office in Berlin.
This poster proves the increasing need of telemarketer in Germany. First, e-commerce is a growing business and this field requires support in customer relation. Second, Corona forces people to reduce physical contact and purchase online.
Telemarketing is a job that doesn’t require high level specifications. It can target people from various backgrounds and also offer a very flexible working style. Maybe it’s the modern factory workers. Instead of having to target specific group of people with deep understanding of this market, they can spread the campaign aiming mass exposure. I add other posters from the same company:
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We can see how the company tries to package this job opening as easy, you can do it, for everyone, have a better life! I also get the impression that this company also accept people who are alternative, that would be rarely accepted in conservative company.
I tried to find another German company that offers telemarketing services, but no campaign for job opening from them. So, I decided to search for a broad term on Google: telemarketing werbung and something similar to that, and I found these:
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Wowwwww, the Avedo poster is now looking much more better than it used to be! I feel like, I took Avedo for granted! Except for the wide green poster, that looks more designed than Avedo, the rest are… hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, let’s just let them doing it their way.
If we compare the poster from other companies and Avedo’s.
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Avedo doesn’t use image that represent the job directly, with headphones and sitting behind desk. Avedo is trying to cover or avoid the stereotypes of telemarketing jobs that are mentally-emotionally draining and static. They use the happy energetic photo that are so lively and try to convince people that have no skills to believe that they can perform greatly here. Seeing how the other companies don’t even try to sugar coat the job makes Avedo looks much more innovative and modern as an employer. Another interesting communication from Avedo about the job from the poster with “Neue Perspektive?”, it is written below the title: Your future-proof job. This idea contradicts the actual case, which telemarketing has high turnover.
Now, I have to place myself as the poster. I will write a poem about a poster that waits to be seen and understood. It wants to attract the eyes with its best assets and influence! Between all the noise from the steel hitting steel, music from headsets, talks and announcement man or woman. People come and go, passing by…
Hover me.
My poster that is located inside a train has many chances of meeting people and go to places. It also has higher chance to be seen by the people who are bored inside a train. Maybe being the poster give me more skills to understand human behaviour and can make better design than anyone else in this world. MUHAHA!
Do I start to love the poster I used to hate? 🤨