e-Types

When a design doesn't work - go old school. Forget hype, think craftsmanship. Heavy skills prove over and over to be the best tool to overcome the creative crises we all encounter at least five times a week. Creativity is nourished by structure.

Do not focus on the logo. Identity should not be a nail for you to hang your coat on, but a landscape in which you can move around. Since a company's identity is increasingly malleable, the design programme must be able to change with it. The best corporate identity programmes allow their users to turn the volume up and down with regard to concepts, colours, grid, style and logo, depending on the situation they are in - but always with a clearly defined core that makes the feel of the identity manifest.

Miles Davis reinvented himself and his music over and over again, striding into new, unexplored universes. From be-bop to cool jazz to electronic fusion to hip-hop. Every day we strive to drive our design to the limit in pursuit of the most concentrated sediment of style. All great designers have been driven by this urge, and we want to follow up their work where they left off. Not as a style. But as an endeavour and an urge.

Allow yourself to be shameless. It sets you free.

Architects talk about "programming first": How will a building affect its surroundings, its users and the idea of architecture? Only when such questions are answered form becomes relevant. Where architects talk about programming, we talk about strategy and absorption; go back to zero and define the real problem.

We prefer design with no ideas compared to design with weak, superficial ideas. Pure form has a legitimate place in the experimental toolbox of every designer. But the strongest approach to design is to dive in deep. To let one radical idea drive the whole design, forget about form for a while and let yourself be absorbed by pure thought. Then form will become a visualisation of an intellectual approach to things.

Try to make things simpler than they are. Tight design with an almost malicious coolness often turns out to be the best solution, especially for clients who imagined something mellow and organic.

If you want to be creative, be organised.

The A line of the New York subway takes you from the most upscale part of Manhattan's West Side to the darkest dens of Brooklyn. Many of our clients come to us with a wish for "nice" design of good taste and morals. But the best results always arise when we mess with our clients, when we take them to aesthetic suburbs.

Everybody is in the business of making sense. Acknowledge that identity is equally about self-knowledge and positioning. Design is more than ever before about strategy. And strategy is increasingly dependent upon identity and aesthetic awareness.