Hello. This is Nick. I made this web-site. Here is my story:
Sub Specie Design is my Master of Arts project from the trenches of Nottingham Trent University. If it doesn't look too much like the typical work of a student, it is because the typical student doesn't have the kind of background I was bringing along, for example having taught Art, Design and Advertising at colleges and primary schools.
After fifteen years of academic and professional experience in Graphic Design and Illustration, I found myself trapped in that tight corner which every independent designer eventually falls into. I was organizing the business profiles of my clients, to make their corporate identities articulate, analysable and re-design-able, so that it would become possible to produce any coherent design work for them whatsoever. In the process I was helping them (as well as their audiences) to understand their own enterprises and identify their strengths and weaknesses, even to redefine what they stood for.
This was some times welcomed and some times not. It isn't exactly what you expect to get from the designer you hire to make you a brochure. Some clients got defensive. Some others loved it, but they weren't prepared to pay the extra costs.
So, I was offering them free branding and communications design consultation and business mentoring and creative direction and production supervision... and of course, besides the graphic design I was actually getting paid for, all the preliminary roughs, the mock-ups and the proof-checks and the print ready files, plus the delivery of small circulation products. Just to have the edge over my competition.
That was great fun but terrible business. I tried to re-brand myself and shift my position, but then the 2008 crisis arrived and the fun run out, too. It was time to leave behind some of the craft and move on to more of the art. So I took a major step and went back to school for a Masters degree in Branding and Identity Design. That's where Sub Specie Design was created.
Initially I set out to create a brand that would be completely self-referencing and pretty vaccuous, a badge of honour sort of thing, like Fair Trade and Creative Commons, for branding quality. Soon the all paralyzing academic matter of Ethics got in the way and I had to define branding quality in accord to the contemporary ethical trends of mainstream business, and parallel to the First Things First Manifesto of the last two generations of Designers, neither of which had had me convinced.
And then the grandest obstacle arose, that branding neither had a theory (ontological or epistemological) nor was an easy thing to discuss in the open. It was some kind of taboo, shrouded in mystical innuendo and semantic ambiguity, even amongst the learned people of the academy. So I had to compile a set of ethics from scratch, and articulate the standards by which branding quality could be evaluated. But that was too much philosophy for the disciplinary context I was in. The local norm was a bit of packaging, a bit of typography and a bit of academic writing skills. Questioning the rules, although encouraged in principle, was beyond the set course.
Eventually I abandoned the self-referencing, self-righteous 'badge-of-honour' brand idea, because it was making the university too queasy and the academics too uncomfortable to support such a project. I turned to creating a map for a theory of branding instead. A branded beginning for a brand of branding - a piece from a larger body of work that was yet to come. This would be adapted and presented in this website as a calmination of the research. Which is what Sub Specie Design is, at the end of the day - a tool for education, debate and further research.
In effect, there are three points that need to be clear in branding according to my project:
1, effective communications and adaptive personality traits that penetrate face theatricals and cut through cross-cultural barriers, straight to the core values behind the factors and coefficients peculiar to the job at hand;
2, extensive theoretical knowledge on the network of Human Science subjects that holds Business, Philosophy, Art, Medicine and Computers on the same universe, combined with practical knowledge on Branding gained empirically from activity in the field of Mass Communications and the Visual Arts;
3, critical, analytical and synthetical sharpness and flexible micro, macro and cross analytical consciousness for confident decisions, leadership and problem-solving, along with genuine care for the immediate and the general socio-environmental welfare.
On reflection a year on, the project wasn't very successful. It got me my MA degree but it wasn't much understood. I haven't managed to lift the shroud from branding, I just stirred it enough for me to get under it. The average designer whom I had in mind as my target audience, is still suspended in darkness and probably even more perplexed after exploring this site.
I've gained vast amounts of knowledge and expertise that can be used professionally, and even the confidence that after more research and field practice, one day, the mystique and vagueness of my field will be cleared away. But the reductionism and the re-encoding necessary to present it back to an audience legibly, is the kind of work that must be taken up by a larger community of practitioners and theoreticians exchanging views openly between them and with a public that is not as contemptuous towards design economics as contemporary designers. At the time of Sub Specie Design, that is not possible.
The benefit of this presentation, is its simplicity of models for guiding cognition towards ordering the load of associated concepts, when dealing with such a vast subject as branding and identity is, so that we find it easier to recognise them as items of focus. With a holistic gestalt under the aspect of a specific point of view in our minds (under the aspect of design), it gives us starting grounds for communication, criticism and improvement that may as well be defunct in a very short time and distance, but such are the properties of all information we have to live with. So I've succeeded in creating a dish of food for thought, and little else. However the dish is quite nutritious.
Underlying the portfolio work showcased in the animated GIF on the left (52 frames), is my self criticism on the work I had been doing before this project, with my present hindsight. My experience with fantasy illustration is my most advantageous trait in branding.
Making a difference, I believe, drives the market, and it isn't about copying successful patterns onto new niches of old stereotypes, but about inventing and reinventing the environment and the self - even the wheel. My illustrations and typographic renderings, although difficult to be seen as making a difference out of their original context, have all pioneered elements of change in the markets I was competing when creating them. My 2003 exhibition was attacked and vandalised, at the private venue it was being held in, by conservative fundamentalists of the venue's district, and my 'Provocativ' brand for a Metal band, the same year, entered the national Graphic Design awards annual catalogue.
This site in its entirety is pioneering change in the usual shape of open sources, at the moment this exposition is being made, and its Referral section is a serious blow to some very sticky presuppositions made in academic Design education. I've built a career with the wonderous can-do-everything attitude of the mind-inflated art-college graduate, practicing market research, business liaising, project management, accounting, fine art, product design, illustration, fashion, staging, photography, film, narrative arts, soft pornography, copywriting, desktop/web typography/publishing, and teaching/mentoring, simultaneously, for half a living, for a decade. Despite the perverse sort of pleasure of total responsibility in every step of commercial art, from education to distribution, it's really counter economic. Such business is unsustainable. But it's an immense experience upon which I can build a sustainable future. Now I'm trying to keep into orchestrating and directing the 'branding' process, so if I work, others work too. I still save money to my clients but I don't 'steal' work from other professionals to do it. I employ my craft skills only at emergency calls, and even then, mindful of others' creative presence, I charge for it. My primary role is still to translate business ideas into creative realities and business realities into creative ideas, but it is important to me to employ talents and traits that I don't own. It helps with delivering better results in the field, too.
Identity work involves a lot more personal involvement than what typical business executives, regarding distantiated speculation as sufficient for their ends, are prepared to take on (they openly say so themselves). Disinterest and detachment are indeed very important in the professional arena, but without passion there can be no creativity and change. So this is the crux that a client of a branding agent is paying dearly to get solved. I seek to meet my clients, their staff and their clients or customers, personally; to experience their products and services personally, to hold the same stakes they hold personally and to sculpt their brand identities safe from Cognitive Dissonance and Existential phobias, with them, personally. And yet I stand outside the experience and treat it like a surgeon, knowing that my own limitations affect the work, and yet, I am not liable if anything goes wrong and I won't be able to correct it once the job is out of my hands. Which is no relief when the involvement is personal and one thinks of his designs as his children. It only suits some phallocentric fraudsters who turn branding into a bureaucratic prank of measuring brand equity, for all that matters to them is size and growth, by which they can claim their 'detached' contribution to a process that arouses passionate attachements in the hearts of individual consumers.
I value human wellness first and foremost and I don't delude myself that a linear artifice like an equity model of socio-behavioural patterns can prescribe anything beyond a historical perspective of its immediate, arbitrary, spatio-temporal moment. No two moments are identical.
But to be realistic, such is human nature that the best I can hope for, is the limiting of the extend and power of sexually disturbed cultures over our society, for size and growth matter, too.
Now, to complete this little statement, I must state my demands from the visitors of this site. My price is nil in terms of money; just a little of your time and communication support will suffice, for improving your identity and overall quality of trading life as a free person and therefore as designer. Spread the word about this site, even if you don't completely understand it first hand; someone else may do so and help you help the world.
The content of subspeciedesign.org is under my copyright ownership but I lay no claim to the origins of the individual concepts and terminology that constitute it, only to their combination into the paradigm presented and the design-work. The principles fancily presented here are my own derivations as I haven't yet found anyone else claiming, for instance, that 'consumerism' describes the total human waking state and branding is the engineering of meaning, although most of Cultural and Critical studies in English are dedicated to warding such notions off, since Derrida asserted in 1977 that there is nothing outside the text. I have kept to citing my sources where appropriate, of course, and I'm still actively researching, occasionaly updating some of the present text, but a lot of influences are there from before I systematised my research, that have not been saved on my brain-circuits in all their detail. So I permit use of this content for research, educational and training purposes, provided it is further investigated and accompanied by standard citation and if sources are indicated to me that are missing, I am gladly making the necessary changes.
None of the contents of this site is final, at any stage. Me, you, this site, branding, design, consumerism, the internet, the entire universe, are forever in the process of becoming and eternal change. It isn't meant to be unquestioned. What is on offer, essentially, here, is an introduction to a level of awareness by which English-speaking visitors can begin to surpass the common insecurity feelings of subliminal manipulation towards irrational beliefs and behaviours, and take control over their identities.
Please respect my distaste for spam promotions, but feel free to get in contact with me for remarks or questions or to discuss a job, and if you want to link with me at your professional 'social network'. I promise to respond. I love working with 'creative' people and if you decided to contact me, in defiance of possible patronising accusations, I would immediately classify you as one, regardless of the nature of our transaction.
Nottingham, UK; Haloween, 2011
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PS (2012): I've started up a limited liability company specialising in branding. For business inquiries, please visit Delta Salience.
