The Brilliant creative team blog

Following the success of last year’s Brilliant email festive conundrums, we’ve created an online brainteaser advent calendar for Christmas 2010.

Here’s how it works: each day you’ll be able to open a new door on the advent calendar, and there will be a different Brilliant brainteaser for you to solve behind that day’s door.

All you have to do is Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook, and we’ll post a new link to the brainteaser advent calendar every day!

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I’ve written about Information Graphics before on this blog, some of you will know it’s a passion of mine. The BBC News website has published a great article celebrating the crucial role diagrams have in helping us to understand the world around us - read it now.

Florence Nightingale is one of my favourite Information Designers. Better known for her nursing than her graphics, for me she represents a special anomaly: the anonymity which arises from communicating ideas so well that few people notice the means by which they are communicated.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a new feature when I’ve been using Google – it’s called Streaming Search. This is breaking news on the web, and apparently I’m one of the ’lucky’ few who’ve been chosen randomly as guinea pigs for testing.

In summary, Streaming Search causes Google to start populating the page with results the moment you start typing in the search box, and continues to update as you type further. This leaked video shows how it works:


At first glance it appears that the only benefit of this feature is to remove the necessity to hit the ’enter’ key. That’s just lazy, isn’t it? But it’s a move which is in keeping with Google’s current battle to stay ahead of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which seems to be piling on the functionality in an effort to eat into Google’s market share.

The big news is that Streaming Search has got everyone in the e-marketing industry talking about how it will effect Google AdWords. There is a concern that if the search results page updates every time you make a keystroke, then hits on adverts will shoot up causing Click-Through Rates to go down. Furthermore, Streaming Search is also trying to guess what you’re searching for, and therefore limits the competition for top search results.

If this feature is rolled out, then it could result in a period of transition for marketing agencies trying to understand and capitalise on this structural change to benefit their clients.

However, it’s worth noting that Google engineers are famously encouraged to spend 20% of their working day experimenting with pet-projects that interest them, and this currently falls into that category. Many industry experts are saying it might not go anywhere. Watch this space...

Following on from Jon’s blog post about an interesting 404 Error Page, I came across this list of beautiful "Coming Soon" pages.

I think it’s fair to say that this is a neglected area of web design; but these examples show that there is a lot of potential in "Coming Soon" pages for developing interest and collecting user details before a website has even been completed.

What better way to use your dead web space? If you find any more good "Coming Soon" pages, we’d love to see them!

Napoleon Bonaparte once said "Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu’un long discours," or "A good sketch is better than a long speech". That phrase embodies the sentiment of information graphics, a branch of design which has always fascinated me and was the focus of my studies at university.

Little did Napoleon know that his disastrous march to and retreat from Moscow in 1812-1813 would be recorded in one of the best statistical graphics ever drawn (above), by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869.

The drawing communicates the story in seconds, effortlessly describing the route of the march on a map, combined with underlying statistical data about climatic conditions and the resultant separation and loss of soldiers from Napoleon’s army along the journey.

Minard’s graphic is not only enlightening, but also inspiring; and in my view, as designers we should always aspire to communicate messages as clearly and concisely as this, regardless of the medium being used.

This BBC News article about typefaces caught my eye, not only because I have a passion for typography, but also because it’s a subject which is rarely brought to the general public’s attention.

As a discipline, typography involves more than simply choosing a font for a particular purpose; amongst other things it also requires an appreciation for the subtleties of the art of typeface design, a knowledge of the history of alphabets and letterforms, and perhaps most importantly a functional understanding of legibility and readability.

But these things don’t consciously concern most people. Type is there to do a job, and when done well, it should be ’invisible’. Counter-intuitively, it’s for this very reason that typefaces really do matter.

It’s true that there are snobs who needlessly complain about the proliferation of fonts like ’Comic Sans’ and ’Papyrus’, blaming it on the wide availability of standard fonts within DTP software on affordable desktop PCs; but frivolous elitism should not be allowed to cloud the issue.

For example, using the wrong typeface for a corporate document is almost as disastrous as using the wrong company logo. Typefaces should be specified as part of any good brand identity guidelines because, as well as facilitating the readability of text, they contribute to the style, tone and personality of your communications.

Underestimate the power of typefaces at your peril!

In this article on the Guardian website, internet guru Clay Shirky shares his predictions about the future of online services.

He surmises that printed media such as newspapers will disappear in less than 50 years, and claims that "... no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds."

Whilst I too believe that the traditional channels for delivering certain content will eventually be replaced by cheaper, more convenient and environmentally friendly media; I do not think this portends the end of print in a wider sense.

Much like the survival and resurgence of vinyl due to demand from music enthusiasts, there will always be a market for high-quality printed material.

There’s nothing quite like opening a new magazine and being hit by the smell of freshly-printed ink on a special paper! And that’s the point: we mustn’t forget that with print, our senses are spontaneously engaged in a unique way. In any case, if print dies how else will we package all that lovely vinyl in the future ;-)?

I paid a visit to the Royal Society’s summer science exhibition "See Further" at the Southbank Centre on Sunday.

It was not only enjoyable, but also truly enlightening.

I’ve always found creative inspiration in nature, just as human kind has since time immemorial. Science helps us to delve deeply into the contrasting constituents of nature: symmetry and asymmetry; simplicity and complexity; order and chaos.

Sometimes taking a step back from contemporary design to consider the world around us yields valuable insights into the nature of creativity.