* Interview quote 2

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to two very different people who have been in the field for many years. One of them is a vital part of what's happening NOW with the change in the way we watch tv and consequently of the way how networks need to look at the new "smart and mobile" behaviour of their viewers and react to it adequately. It is Lee Hunt, of Lee Hunt LLC, Razorfish; Lee Hunt Associates, MTV and so on... He has known this business for a very long time, rather than purely from the design side, he comes from creative strategy and management and at this time he is busy researching a large number of networks how they build paths into this new shift their viewers are rolling on. He asks and observes and he already draws some interesting conclusions:
"...how are they navigating people through different platforms?
How do you move people from linear television to on-demand? Or to what we call “tve" - “tv everywhere”… or to apps or to googleplay, and it’s been really interesting to see how these networks have done it. So much of it is the way they use their graphic style and manner and essentially their brand language. That brand language has to be used in dynamic and very unique ways, and when I look at a graphic – even if it hasn’t the network logo on it – because the network has been very consistent, reliable in its look and style – not necessarily dull and stodgy, but consistent: I get it! This is NBC, or it’s TLC, or whatever the network is, without even having to see the logo, just by the visual representation on the screen.
So this is the challenge and more even the opportunity right now for designers..."
THANK YOU, Lee!

* interview quote 1

...the first interview I got after arriving in the US was with Maria LoConte in Boston. She is a long-standing designer whose work has won many awards and doesn't end with broadcast design. She does all kinds of projects from editing to directing, consulting or documentary filming and adds motion design to the productions if needed. She stated clearly that, if you merely stick to graphic design, it won't take you very far in the various new and interesting applications of motion design. If you are not curious and interested in all kinds of arts and culture - be it painting, sculpting, architecture, performances of all kinds, music, dance, and staging in general, it's not going to be enough food for your creative mind and won't take you anywhere up this ladder. She put her thoughts about this as follows: "...if you’re doing motion of any kind, if you’re incorporating multi-media - in other words music and voice-over and pictures and sound and so forth and you only study graphic design, you’ll never go and create anything that has any kind of lasting value or emotion. If you don’t create an emotional moment in stuff that you do, it’s going to be disposable. And I think that when I go back to the people who influenced me the most it’s maybe the people that'd made me feel something when I saw what they did and it’s why this particular commercial by Apple with the Balloons as a most recent example of that is to me stunningly beautiful and perfect..."
THANK YOU, Maria!

* M.I.T. - where "digital" thrives into the yet unknown

I made my trip across the Atlantic ocean and arrived in Boston, or rather Cambridge, the heart of intelligence. My first day in wonderful early fall weather was dedicated to ride the bike through Harvard, then south into the huge M.I.T. Campus towards Charles river. Strange... at M.I.T., while strolling through sunny courtyards and the endless mesh of amazing architecture, reading short descriptions of what's going on inside the buildings, I feel a bit like when I encountered my first computer 30something years ago!  The founders' dedications and principles on the buildings make me shiver at the thought of endless possibilities arising with the multifold ways human intelligence works and of people who understand that their business billions are well spent here.
From visual arts to medical, biology, chemistry, mathematics, computung, learning, memory and cognition research and a lot more... this seems to be an endless field which gets continuously ploughed and explored here. I could spend days just hovering over amazing book titles at the M.I.T. press bookstore.
But I am not only here to read and study, but to collect interviews, so my US contacts will hopefully make time within the short period of my stay here. Several individuals who made a change in tv design are willing to tell me about it. This should be very interesting, as television in the US was always ahead of us. Europe had still been in war recovery mode when tv entertainment already was in full bloom here. And Americans know how sales work and that everything here has a lot to do with how the product is presented. Television, from the beginning, had to make money.  The actual beginning of television design and marketing happened here. And a lot more is happening here...
http://news.mit.edu/search?keyword=television+research&published_date_start=&published_date_end=

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*a sunny day in Zurich

A beautiful drive to Switzerland. Sunshine, blue skies, mist in the distant mountains of the already snowy Alps across the Zurich lake. And a warm welcome at Switzerland's big TV Station SRG by the chief designer there who readily sat with me, answering all my questions - in spite of workloads burning in the background.
Isn't this a weird business? We all work from nothing and when what we worked on has been aired, it is gone into nothing again. Very different from anything that can be produced from real material, can be touched and felt, and stays there... It is tempting to ask the question if whatever we "produce" in an immaterial sense always feels more stressful? As if real material, lasting across those fleeting minutes and seconds (...or even frames) we are constantly working with, would stay and last for ever. Not for ever probably, but longer than a tv moment, that's for sure.
Anyway – this interview was another really good experience! There was enough time to go through all the questions in detail and it ended with a really interesting look at what is happening at the moment with more and more people watching tv on their smart apps.
Stay tuned: soon I will offer some of that. But right now I am getting ready to travel to the US. ...excited to meet some more amahzing digital creatives and maybe quite different situations there. When it all started over here in Europe, we constantly looked across the ocean and were amazed at how far along that topic was there already. So – let's see if our colleagues in the US  have already found the ways to push tv design and branding into the next episode of media evolution...