As preface, i know ads are highly sophisticated bits of manipulation and not typically among the most benign and humane manifestations of design, but...
Would some one share their design knowledge and tell me how this design holds together and fascinates (at least me). I get the black and white scheme, but what i can't figure out is how this color scheme makes the two very different chairs fit together and allows the blue table to fit in as well. this seems a rather sophisticated visual trick and i can't see through the magician's illusion. further, a magician's illusion seems an interesting organic metaphor for the present: opposites and asymmetries held in balance with partly apparent and partly hidden forces (aesthetics) that produce a tricky illusion. where once we had such dicta as "form follows function" and "externalized structure" and "inverted massing" and "complexity and contradiction" perhaps at least one small tributary of design is moving toward "form follows inscrutable illusion." 🙂
Maybe it's just a visual metaphor
What I see in that ad is a visual method for displaying the Mars/Venus male/female thing. So many couples have this issue in their homes. I have business as an organizer and I am forever banging headlong into this fact of the genders. Men and women are very very different in how they use space. And surprisingly it stays pretty much consistent regardless of personality. Many homes are like this photo, dicotymous {sp?} styles in one space with varying degrees of harmony.
Also, look at the photo in the ad, the couple is intentionally shot to appear as if they are at loggerheads over design, but if you look more closely, her hair blends into his shirt, her arm follows the line of his. They are obviously a team, working together, which is just what the room design is intended to tell you.
And I guess it doesn't hurt that the two chairs, while different fill up about the same amount of visual space and compliment the striped sideboard. The point of the ad, the windows some how seem superfluous, don't they?
Thanks, Olive...That helped alot...Pt.1
You brought it into focus for me when you hinged it all on the picture; that's it exactly. Differing male and female POVs fused in a tensional and cooperative visual metaphor with interlocking black and white colors and interlocking forms (like the chairs). Nifty. Quite a complex conceit when you lay it out for me this way.
I would suggest, however, that whomever conceived the ad needs more years of marriage to understand the truly byzantine ways in which husbands and wives, or romantically involved couples, actually coexist. In my marriage, we both get to have our opinions and then she wins; so, her white would have to occupy vastly more space in the advertising image for me to identify with it deeply (as it is, it comes off for me as kind of a subliminally appealing, but hopelessly unattainable ideal of design and so not effective in hitting my buy button) My parents were the opposite of me and my wife. And I have seen other couples where no one wins, it is just war of attrition bargaining. And still others have a magnificient harmony getting to yes, or no. Very tough to find a transcendant program for marital interplay and then capture it graphically. Perhaps the powers that be can begin to invest massive amounts of money in R&D and systems implementation aimed at producing males and females with essentially similar world views in order to streamline marketing. 🙂
And, of course, you make the point that the ad kind of overwhelms the product and I agree totally. I already can't remember what the product was. Was it a door, or paint? Paint I believe. But I have no recollection whatever of the company name. Perhaps that's okay if you're a paint conglomerate that owns all the brands, but not if you are not.
Now if I may contemplate out loud a moment: One of the things consumers and designers must contend with is the technology of human manipulation that has been developed over the last century in psychology, funded by media corps. and military/intel, then applied in mass media (an increasingly customizable for small, targeted runs mass media) for commercial, political, and military/intel ends. I kind of thought this stuff would stay at the higher levels of application...multinationals selling cars and soap, political strategists electing candidates, selling wars, promoting regime change, CFR types promoting international trade regimes, etc. I mean Vance Packard and the Hidden Persuaders was published back in the early 60s, I recall. But it seems to have trickled down to paint and trash bags and lawn mowers rather quickly.
Thanks, Olive...That helped alot...Pt.2
I read Science magazine, which I highly recommend to all designers, to limber their minds up and see what's REALLY on the horizon. They've got a digest at the front now for we none scientists to help us and its wonderful. Anyway, reading Science, or other more brain focused journals, makes this much clear quickly: The brain modelling/analysing science has progressed so far, and the digitization of that knowledge and of related technologies of creation and dissemination of images and plastic forms (who will be the first nano designer with serious market cachet I wonder?) based on that knowledge, have combined to make it so cheap to use, that basically, our current cultural millieu is one of fantastically heightened, nearly constant sensory triggering and manipulation using very sophisticated levers.
I mean this ad in question is so cognitively tweaking that I can't help discussing it here at some length and yet I already can't recall what the product was that it was trying to sell. This baroqueness of technique at such a richly sophisticated level of application to do such an ineffectual job of selling a product seems ubiquituous in media.
God help us if they ever really figure out how to focus these ads. The information will inform us (i.e., shape our internal thoughts) and then outform us (i.e., shape our external acts) to a point that we will be little different from the borg on Star Trek.
Oh, wait a minute, I sound like my Dad! Let me self correct.
Humanity and life generally are much too fraught with complexity, uncertainty and just plain contrariness to ever get trapped in any one unchanging psycho-harness indefinitely. I mean the technology of religion has had a very long run. And the technology of violence seems never to leave us. And the techology of romance continues to overlay and shape mating and reproduction. And so this technology of psychological manipulation (kind of a secular variant on religion I suppose) will have a long run, but all these long lived technologies do keep morphing and merging and diverging.
And as long as ads like the one we are discussing keep missing the mark, there will always be a demand for designers to hit the mark beautifully, elegantly and intuitively through the use of their craft skills and their sensibilities.
To every season turn, turn, turn..
dcw,
you are either a madman or a genius, I've not quite decided which! 😉 Seriously, if you find that ad so intriguing I suggest you do some reading about the psychology of marketing, it will both fascinate and disgust you. The endless attempt to shamelessly manipulate the truth, skew people's response mechanisms or else make everyone a hardened skeptic is what drove me away from marketing after 15 years of it. I'd be happy to point you towards some books if you are truly interested.
do point...
I was just appalled reading a Rolling Stone story about how Rendon, the PR firm in DC, was hired to prepare America for the Iraq war. War prep. via advertising/PR is not new of course. World War I was systematically pitched to America by Madison Avenue. And Hitler was so impressed with the mesmerizing hold of American propaganda on the American public (when he was a corporal in the Great War) that he insisted Goebbels adopt most of the techniques used by America in World War I to prep Germans for his great pre-emptive wars. And we all know how that went. And of course Hollywood was turned into a vast assembly line of war propaganda movies for WWII. And so on down to the present.
So yes I'd love to read some of the nitty gritty of psy-ops manipulation being applied to the civilian population for commercial, intel, and war aims.
I'll get back to ya on this
I'm off for the requisite holiday weekend of gluttony in homage to a founding father's festival that, of course, didn't happen anything like we now see it. Marketing played a huge role in the development of this holiday, read about Sarah Hale some time.
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