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OPINION
Strokes Of Genius
May 3, 2024
A multifaceted selfie of the multitalented, LA-based Iranian calligrapher, designer and artist Kourosh Beigpour By Aria Novosedlik Calligraphy in Iran is held as one of the most highly esteemed forms of art. Its long and rich history predates I ...
My Pen Is My Kalashnikov
March 28, 2024
Ukrainian expat designer Mykola Kovalenko. Photo courtesy alex2foto.sk. By Aria Novosedlik It's pretty easy as a graphic designer to feel like the work you do is frivolous. It's also easy to feel like all you are ever asked do is make stu ...
Luxury Is For Losers
February 29, 2024
By Aria Novosedlik Americans seek luxury goods more during times of greater income inequality. And the lower their income, the more they'll spend. In a recent Vox article, it was pointed out that Americans with a household income of less than ...
Dressed For Virtual Success
February 1, 2024
Dressx customer @keiabeia wearing the digital drop by metaverse artist @awacazo by Aria Novosedlik A year ago, a company called DressX crossed my radar after appearing in a video by one of YouTube’s bigger creators, Safiya ...
From Matchbooks To Masterworks
January 4, 2024
By Will Novosedlik Prague tourist transit pass, ©Pavel Fuksa 2023. These geometric forms are very reminiscent of Ladislav Sutnar’s designs for children’s building blocks (below) from 100 years ago. Twenty year ...
The Happy Antithesis Of Operational Efficiency
December 7, 2023
By Will Novosedlik Graphic design is sometimes referred to as a problem-solving discipline. The business model is simple: a client comes to you with a message that needs to be communicated in as compelling and convincing a way as possible. Y ...
As It Is, As It Was, As It Could Be
October 26, 2023
The decommissioned stair tower of the Ontario Place waterslide. | ©Steven Evans By Aria Novosedlik The Portuguese have a word for it: ‘saudade’. Derived from the Latin word for solitude, ‘saudade’ r ...
COMING OUT OF THE CONSERVATIVE CLOSET, GUNS BLAZING
September 28, 2023
By Will and Aria Novosedlik Illustration: Will Novosedlik/Midjourney. The American far-right’s conflation of Jesus Christ, the stars and stripes, and automatic weaponry typifies the contradictions that contaminate the core of what passes fo ...
NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS
August 24, 2023
John Heartfield’s famous 1930s critique of press censorship in Nazi Germany By Will Novosedlik In a recent interview on CBC radio, science fiction writer and digital activist Cory Doctorow defined the internet as “5 giant websites f ...
Brandless
July 27, 2023
Remember ‘brand x’? One of the oldest devices in the advertising playbook, it used to be the perennial stand-in for ‘other leading brands’. It was a way of elevating your brand above the messy middle of competitors by i ...
TRANS AND BRANDS – PART 2
July 3, 2023
By Will and Aria Novosedlik Back in the ‘90s, it used to be fashionable among marketing wonks to say that brands did not belong to their owners; they belonged to their customers. It was a way of promoting the notion of customer centr ...
TRANS AND BRANDS: THE FINAL FRONTIER
June 1, 2023
By Will and Aria Novosedlik Brands, like myths, tell us what we want to hear. Their success is not measured by the real fulfillment of what they promise, but by how well that promise lines up with the fantasies we have about ourselves. Take beer, ...
From Land Theft To Brand Theft
April 27, 2023
The World Monuments Fund is a global non-profit dedicated to preserving humanity’s greatest architectural monuments. According to its website, The Fund “provides a critical platform to raise awareness of and support for heritage sites of ...
PROPAGANDA: From Conflict To Commerce
March 23, 2023
Illustration: Will Novosedlik They say the first victim of war is the truth. No one understood this better than wartime president Woodrow Wilson, who can rightly be credited as one of the fathers of propaganda. The biggest plank in Wilson&# ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Karolina Loboda
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Paulina Van Vliet
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Devon Williamson
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity)we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Antonia Goga
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography & ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Monique Gamache
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Zoe Kim
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Lisa Lebedovich
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Claudia Mark
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Jane Jin
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography & ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge VANESSA IDDON
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day (#EmbraceEquity) we wanted to celebrate all the talented hard-working women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography & ...
#EmbraceEquity with judge Nathalie Cusson
March 8, 2023
In recognition of this year's International Women's Day #EmbraceEquity we wanted to celebrate all the talented hardworking women in our industry and so, we approached the women jurors of our three 2023 Awards competitions – Photography & Il ...
The Only One in the Room
February 23, 2023
Call to action for BIPOC creatives to participate in Michael Sinanan’s documentary project All Colour Is When Michael Sinanan graduated from the graphic design program at Durham College back in the mid 90s, there were 27 of the original 90 s ...
A Q&A with Applied Arts Photography Awards winner Hubert Kang & Amy Jones
February 10, 2023
19 Crimes X Snoop Dogg X Chairman Ting, Kindred & Scout, 2021 Applied Arts Photography Awards, Cinematography short category Hubert Kang is no stranger to Applied Arts. His photography has graced the pages of Applied Arts magazines for more th ...
Optimize me, Baby
January 26, 2023
Arseny Togulev for Unsplash By now you’ve heard the story about the Russian design studio, art.lebedev, that used AI technology on several of its accounts before revealing to its clients that the designer they thought was working on their lo ...
DESIGNING FOR REVISION AND RESISTANCE
December 22, 2022
THERE ARE BOOKS YOU BUY FOR THE WRITING. THERE ARE BOOKS YOU BUY FOR THE DESIGN. THEN THERE ARE BOOKS YOU BUY FOR BOTH. THIS IS ONE OF THEM. Underline Studio’s design for the cover of ‘Revision and Resistance’ uses a die-cut slee ...
Design on Fire
November 24, 2022
Left: David King’s Poster for a 1980 theatre production of the play A Short Sharp Shock. Right: cover of Rick Poynor’s comprehensive biography of the designer David King, published 40 years later. Talk about a short, sharp shock. The s ...
Two-eyed Seeing
October 6, 2022
Spread from the brand standards guide for Indigenous Tourism Ontario Last year in this column I wrote about Indigenous-owned design firm Animikii and the influence of Indigenous values – in this case, the seven sacred teachings (lo ...
The Artist as Outlaw
August 18, 2022
Image courtesy: Mr. Fish It’s tough enough to make a living as a commercial illustrator. For a political cartoonist with an uncompromising commitment to speak truth to power, it’s nearly impossible. I first came across the work of ...
Digging the Data with Will Novosedlik
May 26, 2022
Photo: Clay Banks Back in the early noughts, I taught the history of graphic design at OCAD. I used to say to my students, as a graphic designer you only have four tools to work with: shape, type, colour and image. The internet was still young, the ...
Color, by the Book
April 26, 2022
Until very recently, I have had in my personal library three books about color. One is Johannes Itten’s classic text, The Elements of Color. First published in German in 1961 under the original title Kunst der Farbe (the Art of Col ...
The Public Studio: Design as Activism
March 31, 2022
Design is a practical art, and as most of us embark on our careers we don’t give a second thought to the fact that we are on a path to commercial servitude. That may seem cynical, but most of us spend our working lives toiling ...
Digital Dialects
February 10, 2022
Opening frame of The Syllabics Project video, Typotheque, 2022 My last entry in this space celebrated the latest type specimen book from Dutch type foundry Typotheque. While the story focused on the ingenious design concept of the book, it also to ...
Typography, Diversified
January 3, 2022
Cover of Typotheque’s Specimen #18, a 560-page tome of verbal and visual poetry in 21 different scripts and 162 languages. Latin is probably the world’s most ubiquitous script. It is employed by hundreds of languages. It is not only us ...
Wes World
October 7, 2021
If it is the task of the designer and the visual artist to re-imagine the world, take it apart and put it back together again in ways that others would never have imagined possible, few artists have done so as beguilingly as Wes Anderson. Let̵ ...
The Best Election Ad? Unifor Gets My Vote
August 26, 2021
Frame from Unifor’s anti-Conservative Party ad: a very effective send-up of a very tired trope Some months ago this columnist commented on the tired old trope most often used in automotive advertising: that of the shiny new car or truck drivi ...
Buzz Bombs and Brand Boners
July 29, 2021
For years, I’ve been looking for an excuse to reread Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, and now I think I’ve found it. What’s my excuse? Well, as you’ve no doubt noticed, the space race has been hijacked by a trio of brand o ...
Canada’s Got Dirt on its Brand
June 29, 2021
Back in 2017, the year of Canada’s 150th birthday, I wrote a feature for this magazine that speculated on Canada’s brand as it was perceived then and what it might look like going into the future. Well, the future is here and the brand doesn’ ...
Where Thunderbirds Fly
March 25, 2021
As a long-time writer, designer and brand strategist operating in a trade which, like many consulting practices, is often hobbled by a glaring gap between the recommendations it makes to clients and the client’s lack of will to execute them, I thin ...
Charging Forward
February 25, 2021
My last column critiqued the uncomfortable irony of automotive advertising’s tired habit of showing off its products against the backdrop of the great outdoors, even as their emissions work to make the outdoors a more and more hostile envir ...
Climate Change versus Automobile Advertising
January 25, 2021
The most iconic consumer product of the 20th century is the automobile. In 1900, there were about 4,000 of them in the world. Now it is estimated that there are over 600 million. Based on EPA stats, a typical vehicle releases about 4.6 tons ...
Will Novosedlik reflects on the year we'll never forget
January 4, 2021
Most years end. This one will still be going until the plague stops. Covid has destroyed time by making every day the same. What year it is is almost beside the point. Still, I feel a look back is in order. So here are the 9 things I will most rememb ...
Lost at Sea
December 3, 2020
What Gericault, Michelangelo and Julian Barnes can teach us about the tone-deafness of Virgin Voyages’ current social campaign. In 1819, Théodore Gericault made the above painting, The Raft of the Medusa, long hailed by art historians as the bo ...
The Brand that Would Not Die
October 22, 2020
Left, Bauhaus Dessau, by Walter Gropius1926. Right, EU headquarters, Brussels, Samyn and Partners, 2016 As an institution, it was officially shut down by the Nazis in 1933, after only 14 short years. But as the mythical heart of modernism, the Bau ...
The Last Agency Standing
September 24, 2020
In my Linkedin feed, I recently saw a post from Andy Main, Global CEO of WPP agency Ogilvy. The post shared imagery from Ogilvy’s latest campaign for Greenpeace, #cleanairnow. It is stunningly well crafted, visually arresting and disarmingly clear ...
The Conscious Creative
August 28, 2020
Design firms and ad agencies have, with very few exceptions, historically cleaved to what Bruce Mau once called a ‘karaoke existence, always singing someone else’s song, and never saying what (they) think should be said.” It’s a model of m ...
For the Good of All
July 21, 2020
The Coronavirus has certainly knocked industry off its feet. Once fluid revenue streams have slowed to a trickle. Businesses struggle with how to reopen. And wherever they have, we’re seeing a vigorous resurgence of cases. This is going to be a ve ...
Black Lives and White Lies
June 18, 2020
CREDIT: Banksy I had a difficult conversation the other day with a hardcore American alt-right winger. He is a former high school classmate who has reappeared in my life as the result of a gathering of our class in preparation for our high school’ ...
COVID 19: A Crucible of Creativity
April 16, 2020
Lead image: The Other Guys There’s a scene in the 1984 film Starman in which an alien visitor, played by Jeff Bridges, makes an uplifting observation about humans: “You are at your best when things are at their worst.” Human history has ...
Trump’s Very Own Personal Shepard Fairey
April 2, 2020
Hard to have missed being exposed to the imagery of American artist Shepard Fairey in the last 12 years. Famous for the ‘HOPE’ poster designed to support Barack Obama during the 2008 US presidential election, Fairey has since taken on the role o ...
Don't Kick the Can
March 11, 2020
As a metaphor, the tin can has always had negative connotations. In your grandparents' day, it was something they kicked around in the street in lieu of a soccer ball. Kick the can they called it. When your parents were kids, they would take two can ...
From Bauhaus to My House
January 6, 2020
Now that 2020's here, let's talk about 2019’s most interesting, if not most well known, centenary: that of the founding of The Bauhaus, mother of all design schools. I live in a neighbourhood that was built in the late 1920s. The houses were ...
Zuckerberg’s New Clothes
November 12, 2019
It’s been over a week since facebook CMO Antonio Lucio posted an announcement entitled ‘Introducing Our New Company Brand”. I have to admit when I read that headline about 1.5% of me thought maybe the brand team was actually grappling with som ...
Will Novosedlik on Clearing a Path to the Future
September 28, 2019
Standing on the subway platform the other day, I came across this creative for an organization called Pathways to Education: Immediately struck by the logic of the message – linking lifelong poverty and burden ...
Starbucks: Breaking Brand Promise, One Store at a Time
August 21, 2019
Back in 1997, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz wrote about his now-iconic brand, “The people who line up for Starbucks aren’t just there for the coffee. It’s the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get i ...
Will Novosedlik on Building the Biggest Bible since Gutenberg
July 25, 2019
I once had a colleague who joked about how graphic designers were “on a mission from God” to save the world from bad design. Aside from the Blues Brothers reference, it was a sarcastic reflection on the heroic narrative in which the designer is ...
What are niche chocolate brands doing differently?
July 3, 2019
protecting the workers and protecting the earth. I’ve recently become addicted to chocolate. I blame it entirely on work. I always liked chocolate but never made a habit of eating it. It was never on my shopping list. But since taking on some ...
Eyes on Eye on Design, by Will Novosedlik
May 16, 2019
A new publication from America’s most prestigious design organization both hits and misses the mark. For whatever reasons, publications aimed at the graphic design community are still a lot more interested in what’s fashionable than in what’s ...
Field Trip & Co. Tells an East Side Story
April 17, 2019
When it comes to hospital fundraising, the competition for eyeballs and wallets can be fierce and the market fragmented. There’s no particular reason to elevate the reputation of any hospital above that of its peers, especially in a market like To ...
When Private Equity Meets Brand Equity
April 3, 2019
Or what happens when what can’t be measured doesn’t get managed OR what can’t be measured isn’t accounted for? “Tomayo!” cried my wife. “That’s what they should have called it. Not “Mayochup”. My wife is a speech and language pa ...
The storyfire: Learning to Listen
February 14, 2019
Photo by Wenni Zhou for Unsplash What indigenous culture can teach us about storytelling As the editor of a national magazine, you get a lot of article pitches. Most of them are easily dismissed. Some of them are out-and-out PR. I never print that ...
Truth vs. Soap
November 7, 2018
Every once in a rare while you hear a brand story that is actually based on an empirical truth which, when carefully told, turns out to be far more effective than any of the fantasies conjured up by ad people to sell you whatever it is they are s ...
FIFA: From Fabergé to Football
July 9, 2018
The FIFA World Cup's graphic title cards on TSN are as rich in execution as they are in symbolism Ah, the World Cup. Like the Olympics, this quadrennial sports fest does its best to command or attention for the few weeks that it takes the ...
Living the Dreamscape
June 5, 2018
When graphic design meets fine art Larry Rossignol, The Struggle Continues While attending an event at the venerable Toronto jazz haunt Hugh’s Room last week, I found myself enchanted by a body of work hung on the walls there as part of ...
Future by Design AI, Type and Inclusivity
May 23, 2018
Panelists discuss inclusivity, communication and how designers should respond to “evil robots” at RGD’s latest Future By Design discussion THIS SECTION SPONSORED BY On April 24, RGD invited creative industry leaders Lara McCormick, ...
Advertising the Bad News
May 8, 2018
The Centre for the Study of Political Graphics stages a show of posters designed solely by women Barbara Kruger, 1989 Focused on the collection, preservation and study of political posters, The Center for the Study of Political Graphics i ...
It Takes All Types
April 4, 2018
In praise of the erudite typographer For whatever it’s worth, I’ve taken the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—better known as the standard IQ test—twice in my life, at a 20-year interval. Both times, the score was the same and was ...
Happiness is a Warm Gun
March 5, 2018
How the U.S. gun industry uses tired tropes to brand itself There is an old frontier saying in America: “God created men. But Colt made them equal.” And if that sounds like a tagline, that’s because with the possible exception of ...
In Praise of Older Women
February 6, 2018
Armed with a solid niche strategy and well-crafted design, small companies like Ralston Williams can flourish in the marketplace Photo by Chris Chapman There is something very satisfying when great design meets a great brand. Especially w ...
Beyond the Brief
January 30, 2018
Giving a client what they need should be as much a priority as giving them what they want When I was in school more than a decade ago (where does the time go?), I had an epiphany. I'd been given a poster assignment and a “client” brief, so I ...
Branding Abuse
January 8, 2018
The powerful branding behind movements like #TimesUp benefit the "plural sector" Watching Elisabeth Moss accept the Golden Globe last night for her lead role in The Handmaid’s Tale, you sensed the feeling of a grassroots movement catchin ...
Create What Matters
September 11, 2017
Forget demography and embrace ethnography If you work in strategy in advertising today, chances are, like mine, your family has a hard time explaining what you do for a living. That got me thinking, why is it so hard? Part of it is that the ...
Getting Real with Images
May 31, 2016
How to shoot the new "authentic" Let’s face it, the word “authenticity” has lost all meaning. More accurately it's become offensive, instilling laughter from audiences by the sheer mention of the word with the mockery ...
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Redesign It
May 17, 2016
Sometimes, the only thing that needs fixing is the brief In the pre-Internet days of advertising, there was a lament voiced whenever a client asked for a new campaign to replace one that was only a few months old: The client got tired of the ...
Makers of Things Aren't Always Makers of Sense
April 20, 2016
Just because they can doesn’t mean they should I’ve just learned that LinkedIn has 749 members who describe themselves with the title Maker of Things. A review of these members suggests that the only things some of these folks ma ...
Another Bad Week for Women in Advertising
March 22, 2016
Our industry could have learned a lot from the Neil French debacle. It chose not to As recently as 1970, female musicians made up less than 5 per cent of the top five orchestras in the United States. By 1980, that figure had crept up to the ...
Liking Isn't Buying
November 16, 2015
Technology is a powerful force in marketing. Just look how it's blinded us to reality It's been a busy few weeks for people who question the wisdom of putting technology in charge of marketing. First, the great Dave Trott took on the ambitious t ...
The 21st Century Belongs to PR
August 17, 2015
PR firms aren't just eating advertising's lunch. They're already looking forward to dinner Just last week, it was announced that Andrew Simon was leaving his role as chief creative officer at Cundari to join Edelman Canada as its executive creative ...
Writers Needed
July 21, 2015
Advertising has never been more in need of good writing. Why aren't more of us doing it? Another edition of Cannes has come and gone and, whatever its faults, it does continue to serve as a bellwether of advertising and its priorities. Consider, ...
On the Genius of Wrongheadedness
June 15, 2015
Counterintuitive thinking has built and rescued countless brands. How come we don't do more of it? Probably the single most famous story in advertising lore concerns the late-1970s pitch for British Rail by the now-defunct London agency Allen Br ...
The Problem With the $50 Logo
June 8, 2015
The Internet and its proliferation of cheap brand executions may have changed the business of graphic design, but ultimately, you get what you pay for My face went pale with fear and I didn’t know what to say. I was staring at Tailorbrands.com ...
Shooting Blanks
January 20, 2015
Taking its eye off the brand made Target’s failure in Canada inevitable It’s been less than a week since Target announced that it’s quitting Canada and taking a $7 billion loss in what CNBC’s Jim Cramer called “ ...
If Users Aren't Happy, Nobody's Happy
November 19, 2014
People online want usability more than anything else. Why can’t they count on getting it? In light of all we know about best practices in digital, it’s surprising that we still need to talk about what those best practices are. In ...
On the Mainstreaming of Scam
October 20, 2014
The old rules no longer apply, which would explain why advertising is ignoring them If you’re an ambitious advertising person, there’s a good chance you owe a vote of thanks to the late Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer s ...
Of Brand Cowards and Missed Opportunities
September 2, 2014
When the City of Toronto and Publicis recently pulled their effective anti-littering ads, they allowed brand owners to take control of the conversation Last week we noticed that the City of Toronto, in response to the negative reactions o ...
Identity Crisis
July 30, 2014
Has the web created irresponsible logo design? To say the Internet has profoundly impacted the modern graphic design industry is an understatement. No other force has so radically changed what we do and how we do it — except perhaps t ...
On Advertising's Self Esteem Issues
July 21, 2014
Last week, I got an interesting flyer from Bed Bath & Beyond. The flyer is devoted to helping university students outfit their dorm rooms for the coming school year. As such, most of its audience is too young to recognize the source fo ...
