Is it legal? AI, design and the law

The use of AI in design and photography has exploded recently, bringing new legal considerations into our work. Everyone is doing it, from Pentagram to Hugo Boss.

Thankfully, freelance technical writer Kathryn Kerby can help to demystify the issues for design clients, agencies and freelancers.

This article summarises a conversation which I had with Kathryn over LinkedIn messaging over the past couple of weeks. Kathryn is very knowledgeable about AI, and kindly answered a few of the questions I’ve had around legal issues in AI-generated content.

And in case you’re wondering, this article was not generated by AI. Here’s what I’ve learned from Kathryn:

Steve: I've heard that it's difficult or not possible to claim copyright on materials which were created solely with AI. So how much would a design need to be adapted by hand so that it is eligible for copyright protection?

Kathryn: In general, most major countries (including the UK) are handling AI-generated content and images as being eligible for either copyright or trademark protection, as long as they meet certain criteria.

The first and most important criteria is that any AI-generated text or image also have "significant" human involvement or modification, before it can be copyright or trademark protected. For instance, if you tried to copyright the raw output from an AI prompt, or the raw image generated by an AI-powered image generation tool, you would be turned down. On the other hand, if you used AI tools to create a "first draft" of either, and then you or another human being modified that content or image enough to show a noticeable difference between first and second versions, then yes you can copyright or trademark that content or image, respectively.

The real question is how much change is required. In my research so far, I couldn't get a nailed-down answer on either percentage changed, or hours involved in making the change, which are the two most common metrics for measuring such things. Also keep in mind that for the UK (and most other countries), this notion of rights regarding AI-generated anything, is really still up for grabs. So whatever I say today might change tomorrow.

That being said, any future developments will almost certainly include the requirement for human modification. If you can show solid proof that you took an article or an image from an AI tool, then modified it quite a bit, then yes you can copyright or trademark protect it according to both current and future legislation.

Steve: You mentioned trademark protection. Are there any additional considerations around this?

Kathryn: The trademark part has other requirements. It needs to:
1) Have human involvement, like we've already discussed
2) Must be used to describe a specific company's products or services, rather than just being a pretty picture
3) Must not duplicate or be overly similar to existing trademarked logos or symbols, and you need to really search through registered trademarks to make sure on this point. Even if that similar logo or symbol is for a company in a totally different industry, your design would probably be turned down to avoid consumer confusion.

Given the three requirements above, a company's brand new logo would be a prime example of an image that matches that definition, as long as it meets all three criteria.

I originally got in touch after seeing Kathryn’s excellent talk around the use of AI in copywriting projects. Many of her recommendations from that apply equally well to the use of AI in design:

Do not use AI-generated imagery intended to represent a real person without their permission.  Similarly, do not use an AI-generated voiceover to simulate a real person without their permission.

Be aware that AI generated images can appear very similar to well known existing copyrighted images., As part of your due-diligence research on any given project,  doing a Google image search with your generated image can help rule out accidental use of someone else’s trademarked imagery.

Be proactive: Don’t assume you’re on the same page as the client and/or the end user. Freelancers should proactively bring up the topic of AI usage, and any/all AI risk exposure, during initial negotiations with the client.

Put AI-relevant language into your own contract: Whatever your preferences and/or limits are with AI, put it in writing within your own contract so that the client knows in advance what you’re willing (and not willing) to do, and whether you use AI-generated materials in your work.

Check the client’s contract for AI-related verbiage. If you have your own “AI clause” and the client doesn’t, your working preferences are protected.  However, it’s still a good idea to proactively discuss your intended AI usage with your client in advance, to avoid any miscommunication or hard feelings.  This is now considered best practices under transparency principles. If you and the client have differing versions of what is and is not “acceptable” AI usage, you need to work that out in advance.

Keep up with AI ethics and legal issues, so that you can advise clients on how and when to use AI and how/when NOT to use AI.

For any given project, use a combination of AI-generated work PLUS your own input. This optimizes AI’s efficiency and your own unique contributions to any given work. Your contributions to any given work are what keep it “human.”

Prime Directive: YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEST DEFENSE AGAINST GETTING CAUGHT UP IN AI LEGAL AND ETHICS ISSUES. STAY ALERT AND VERIFY ALL AI-GENERATED CONTENT.

Kathryn is based in the US, so her responses relate to US law unless specified otherwise. The information in this article should not be interpreted as formal legal advice.

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Steve McInerny has been using AI in creative and branding projects for over two years, a long time in AI! This includes developing an AI-assisted brand strategy service, with business support from London South Bank University, AI automations and AI-generated imagery and video work. He runs micro agency Sharp Sharp, which undertakes branding, creative and design work with a team of associates. Steve is also available for freelance projects.

Steve can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or the Sharp Sharp website.

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Kathryn Kerby has enjoyed a long, rewarding career as a professional writer since the early 1990s.  She has served as a staff writer and editor, contractor, freelancer and consultant for many science-oriented companies, agencies and nonprofits.  Her clients are typically working in the environmental sciences, but a few have been in the computer sciences, mental health or life sciences industries.  Most recently she has become a Subject Matter Expert on how AI content and image generation can be used efficiently and responsibly by writers, graphic artists, designers and other creatives. Kathryn enjoys a wide range of hobbies including gardening, restoring old clocks, hiking and expanding her already large library of actual physical books. You can reach her via her freelance writing website or via her LinkedIn profile.

Season's greetings from Sharp Sharp!

We hope you have a ‘smashing’ time over the holidays!

Thank you to everyone we’ve worked with over the last twelve months, we look forward to seeing you in 2025.

From Steve and the associates of Sharp Sharp.

2024 trend report roundup

Fashion, consumer products, food, social media… trends are vital for people working in many industries. And while some industries claim to avoid trends at all costs, if you want to zig while others zag, then you’ll first need to know what others are doing.

Here are our recommended reading for trend reports for 2024. Recently added reports are shown in italics.

Images to accompany this report were generated using Midjourney, in the Frutiger Aero style highlighted as a trend to watch by the Guardian.

Consumer trends

Trends don’t get any bigger than META Trending Trends. This perceptive report from Matt Klein starts out on a sobering note:

Turns out you were better off guessing 50/50 than genuinely attempting to determine if a trend was published in 2018 or 2024

Read Matt’s report for more on this, it doesn’t mean that trend reports are without merit, though it goes to show that tomorrow’s trends are here (somewhere) today.

Being human (this one has been around for a while now), new green realities and positivity in the face of uncertainty from Mintel.

Auto-tainment, catios (look it up) and plant milking (yes you read it right) from WGSN.

Business trends

Accenture highlights lack of trust, stagnating creativity (gulp) and technology which is ever more demanding of our time

“the proportion of popular movies that were sequels, spin-offs or remakes increased from 16% in 1981 to 80% in 2019”

 “Boundary-pushing creativity is being pushed aside in favor of its less talent-led cousin: design by data. Businesses are building what the data says people want, and the data tends to point towards familiarity.”

“A budget for lunacy is critical. Creativity means hands-on time for creatives—time to ideate, experiment, develop and test. Creativity is expensive, and the investment usually pays off in richness of quality in the result.”

Creativity trends

Calming rhythms, wonder, joy and nostalgia from Adobe Stock.

In our favourite trend for 2024, the Guardian recently highlighted Frutiger Aero, a look back to the style of iMacs and Windows screensavers from the 2000s.

Advertising and marketing trends

Gartner turns its all-seeing eye to marketing. It finds content authentification, a decline in social media use and AI search, all driven by the rise in generative AI.

Dentsu highlight subversive self care, joyful surrealism and kidult toys, now you’re talking!

Zendesk’s Customer Experience (CX) report heralds all things AI - generative AI, AI agents, AI transparency and more.

Sport trends

Monetising women’s sport, mega influencers and removing the social from social media with IMG.

Social media trends

TikTok highlights how consumers will be using its platform for learning (yes we’re worried too), and as a source of local culture made global.

According to Instagram, 2024 will be all about buying less new clothes, dressing modestly combined with social media-sourced beauty tips.

What they don’t tell you: the sobering downsides of children increasingly living their lives online can be found on Freya India’s blog.

Colour trends

Pantone announced the 2024 colour of the year back in July 2023. Anyone for a nurturing Peach Fuzz?

And if 2024 trends are already old hat, here and here are some from WGSN taking us through to 2026.

Fashion

While much of their research is behind a paywall, WGSN share useful snippets in their blog.

Branding trends

Tall logos, paper and watercolour effects and Geometry, simplification and more Art Deco from Merehead and DesignMantic.

Going beyond logos, Shakuro look ahead to voice, sonic, experiential and interactive branding for 2024.

Inc. highlights branding with a human touch, nostalgia and a rare thing in the branding world, humour.

Graphic Design trends

Collage, and folk design contrast with the up to the minute and sure to be influential Apple Vision Pro in Envato’s reports here and here.

Street art, weird type and core wave from The Drum.

Typography trends

3d, antique and motion are given shout outs by Creative Bloq.

Characterful sans, funky, chunky and massive x-heights are on the radar of Creative Boom.

Website design trends

Webflow has developed a website trend report for designers and another for marketers, take your pick! We’re excited about the kinetic typography and micro-interaction trends from the design report.

"AI: More Than Just a Tool, It's Your New Best Friend" - headline generated by AI

Our director Steve McInerny contributed to this article about the use of AI tools within design and marketing. We reproduce it with permission from our friends at White Camino. Steve also created the accompanying images using AI image generation tool Midjourney.

While Nick Cave was more than scathing of ChatGPTs ability to write a song in his own inimitable style, we thought it would be interesting to get this blog written for us quick sharp. Sadly ChatGPT was at capacity when we started this post so we’ll have to go back to the analogue ways of taking the time to chat to some brilliant, human brains to get their views.

An imaginary AI machine, generated using Midjourney by Steve McInerny

Our founder Melissa Fretwell caught up with tech writer and co-founder of LaserCue LLP, Natasha Serafimovska and designer and director of Sharp Sharp, Steve McInerny to get the skinny on their use of AI and have compiled a top 10 of AI essentials. What you need to know about and why:

1. Help - our tip is to embrace it as your fresh faced assistant who doesn’t need tea and biscuits to function. Perfectionists look away now. It’s about delegating the jobs that just need to be done, those that don’t need your award winning creative attention.

2. Research assistant - you can see where we’re going here. As a research tool Natasha can ask an AI tool to give her specific examples to get things going in seconds, like: “give me a real-life example of a concise USP”.

3. When you hit the proverbial wall, she uses it as an ideation tool - ChatGpt is great at throwing out ideas and angles on a topic to get you back on track.

4. Skip to the good part - Natasha writes a lot of notes and works with transcripts and these tools can summarise a mass of words and even create outlines.

5. Elimination tool - if you want to write something interesting and unique see what a tool spits out and try NOT to cover that because those are the most obvious answers.

6. If you’re all about originality and want to sniff out the AI writers and content producers you can always use Originality which scans for plagiarism. No hiding from the bots.

7. Personalised content based on preferences set by humans sounds interesting right? However it’s only as good as the prompts you feed it. Creative prompts yield creative outputs. DALL-E has an 82 page prompt book in case you need some inspiration.

8. Over to Steve for his musing on AI graphics, he reckons it is great for concepting new creative routes and perfect for producing content for social campaigns. Quality and resolution are improving fast so levering it to produce all aspects of campaign creative may well soon be achievable.

9. Boost your image library - creating imagery for stock libraries using AI is a no brainer, Adobe Stock for example is already accepting some AI content

10. Steve’s journey through erm midjourney and Stable Diffusion has been nothing short of eventful. He has created a set of slightly satirical product concepts for use as a conversation-starter ahead of Toy Fair in January, which generated a strong level of interest. And for this very article Steve has created some bespoke artwork, cos he’s nice like that. The giant mysterious and slightly surreal AI machines play to Midjourney’s strengths – it’s excellent at creating fantastical images in this 3D style.

An imaginary AI machine, generated using Midjourney by Steve McInerny

Then bringing this back to marketing planning, how can we use AI to de-risk marketing campaigns. Our pals at Kantar seem to know a thing or two about this topic as they up their AI ante on their own tools.

“The power of AI is already being used to quickly predict the likely efficacy of digital content. Until now, however, pre-screening was limited to predictions of viewers' attitudes towards the creative and their likely behavioural interaction with the ad. Brand lift metrics still needed to be captured post-campaign. But now that has all changed. Link AI for Digital on Kantar Marketplace can now test content at scale to indicate which ads will best drive brand lift, in addition to providing behavioural and attitudinal response insights.”

An imaginary AI machine, generated using Midjourney by Steve McInerny

While we’d always recommend test and learn based on your own campaigns, this does indeed sound fancy. So whether you need to speed up your creative process or unlock more ideas or simply need an assistant who takes direction brilliantly, there really is something for everyone.

Side note: We’ll give Jasper a whirl to see how interesting the copy for the LinkedIn post for this blog will be.

An imaginary AI machine, generated using Midjourney by Steve McInerny

It's a cracker! How we used AI to create jokes for our Christmas cards

The mention of designing company Christmas cards can cause groans among designers as the end of the year approaches. We avoid this by using ours as a chance to experiment. For 2022 we harnessed the power of Stable Diffusion and the Lex AI chat tool to create imagery and personalised jokes for our Christmas card list.

The idea

We wanted to bring an old Christmas tradition up to date with the use of AI tools. The tone is intended to be tongue in cheek, so we imagined what a virtual Christmas cracker joke would look like inside a Sharp Sharp supercomputer. The styling and typography is intentionally slightly retro sci-fi, a nod to the fact that AI tools are less than perfect at present.

How we did it

The Lex interface looks like a simple word processor. However if you tap the ‘Ask Lex’ icon, a chat window pops up where you can interact with the AI and ask for its input. We fed it some information from our contacts’ websites, and instructed it to write a selection of Christmas-themed jokes, and included details of the job type and industry sectors of our contacts in order to personalise them.

The results were mixed to say the least, though we believe this added to their charm, as Christmas cracker jokes are traditionally so corny anyway.

We then used Stable Diffusion to generate a background image for the cracker joke to be placed onto.

Finally, we used Photoshop to write the jokes onto the background images before emailing them to our contacts.

The response? We got a few groans and a few more chuckles, and there was a general appreciation at our personalised approach. We look forward to putting AI tools to more serious (and silly) uses on future projects - please get in touch if you’d like to hear more.

Brand Licensing Europe top 3 takeaways

Brand Licensing Europe felt bigger and livelier than last year. Hats off to all who made it happen in spite of the last-minute rearrangements due to the Queen's funeral. Here are some quick takeaways from the show:

• Gaming, automotive and sports brands were all very prominent.

• Excel may not be Vegas, but there was a big presence from the big studios and agencies, and the new catwalk area helped to create a buzz.

• And reflecting changes in the industry, NFTs (Bored Ape Yacht Club featured on one stand), the metaverse (thanks to an enlightening talk from WGSN), and brand purpose (a topic close to our hearts) are being talked about.

Fun as it is to get selfies with all of the costume characters and admire the stands, BLE is all about real people. Friends, contacts and colleagues are always happy to have a chat in a free moments as well as in more formal meetings.

It’s art, but not as we know it: AI-generated images for entertainment and licensing

Next time you search for an image on Google, imagine Google actually making the image for you, to your search specifications.

Text-to-image models are pieces of AI-driven software which will do exactly this for you. In the last few months the latest releases have improved vastly in quality, resolution and usability, and the resulting imagery is all over social media and beyond. This brings huge opportunities, as well as significant threats, across the creative industries.

As with every genie, you need to be careful what you wish for, or more precisely how you describe your wish. Results can be unpredictable, though this is what makes the process so exciting.

Text-to-image in action

The best way to explain text-to-image systems is to show some examples of what they can do. I’m going to focus on two areas I know, entertainment and brand licensing.

Product concepts

Superhero inspired trainers

Character concepts

Impossible Villains: 50 Character Concepts Illustrated With Midjourney book by Andrea Ciulu

Marketing concepts

Movie poster concept using Midjourney, by Paul Parsons

Storyboarding

AI-generated storyboard frame by @rufflemuffin

Fashion

Frida Kahlo fashion concept by Carlos Paboudjian

…And the plain weird

AI Mario character illustration by Matt Reid

How to do it yourself

It all looks so easy! You may be keen to try it our yourself. The most-used systems at the moment are Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL·E 2. I’ve been using Stable Diffusion UI up until now, as it’s free to use if you install it on your computer, and is fairly straightforward to set up.

If you don’t want to go to this trouble, there are now browser-based interfaces which allow you to dive straight in to Stable Diffusion and start generating images. Dream Studio is a popular one.

As I found through experience, the text prompts which you use are all-important. I find the The DALL·E 2 prompt book and Promptomania very useful.

How worried should creatives be?

The software is still very new. There are issues with resolution, quality and unpredictability; though these are all improving fast.

Having been being trained on images found on the web, the systems come with many racial, cultural and gender biases baked in.

Artists with distinctive visual styles are already complaining about their work being ripped off. Brands will need to keep a close eye on developments, though it’s unclear how they will be able to police this explosion of content.

The law has some catching up to do, and legal judgments differ on whether AI-generated images can be copyrighted. On top of this, each piece of AI image generation software has its own terms and conditions.

And who knows how the algorithms will be effected, once they start learning from AI-generated images as well as human-generated ones?

Where’s it going next?

We know how Instagram has influenced food, fashion, and holidays. It’s very conceivable that AI-generated images will do the same for product design, architecture, fashion and more.

While it seems to mainly be creatives and tech-folk using these tools, this will surely change very soon. Users generating their own content based on their favourite brands, either with or without the brands’ blessing, is likely to take off.

Right now it seems inevitable that text-to-image models are going to quickly become an essential creative tool. Like other tools which lower the barrier to entry to a specialism, image generation is going to likely mean reduced costs, new people entering the world of creatives, and potentially a threat to the work of various specialisms. However, right now I believe that the and the democratisation of image-making combined with the cross-pollination of ideas and techniques make for exciting times to come.

New uses are being tried out daily at the moment. Some obvious areas are text-to-video which is already in development, as well as 3D graphics and models and combining text-to-image with text generation systems.

I hope to have some text-to-image results which are worthy of sharing soon. I’d love to see what others come up with and hear about what ideas you might have, find me on Twitter or LinkedIn and let’s learn together!

By Steve McInerny, Director of Sharp Sharp

COVID, brand licensing and how Tessa, Val and Steve can help

The one constant since the COVID pandemic struck in March has been change, and the licensing industry has been no exception to this.

For licensees, while most categories have suffered, a few areas are doing well, such as e-commerce, digital entertainment, toys and games, sports equipment and food. Entertainment licensors will inevitably suffer from live action TV and movie productions being postponed, though productions on animations and games is continuing remotely.

The way that the brand licensing industry operates has changed too. Licensing Expo in Las Vegas was replaced by Virtual Licensing Week, it was a brave effort to create a virtual conference but it suffered from technical glitches, limited attendance from the larger licensees and brand owners and a distinctly dated look. Given the huge expense of exhibiting at and attending a global licensing event, there is a real opportunity for a strong annual virtual event to complement physical events in the future.

Julia Redman writes in Licensing Source that we should ‘Focus on Innovation, creativity and flexibility’.

With this in mind, I’ve teamed up with two ex-colleagues, Tessa Moore and Val Taylor. We have a wealth of global brand licensing experience, and provide nimble solutions to marketing, PR and creative challenges in brand licensing.

Tessa is a brand strategist and hands-on creative marketer with global brand leadership experience gained at Disney and FremantleMedia. Val creates compelling and creative PR strategies that generate coverage and deliver ROI across broadcast, licensing and consumer products. And I provided creative development for licensing brands including Danger Mouse, Baywatch and The X Factor while at FremantleMedia, and have since continued to work for entertainment clients, including Warner Bros, Entertainment One and All3Media.

We have a network of collaborators who we can call upon for larger or specialist projects, and were working on remote team projects long before lockdowns began.

Like the Thunderbirds, we can swing into action on our own if needed but are even more effective when we combine forces! If you have a challenge that you’d like to discuss then please get in touch or book in a virtual coffee.

Rebranding in lockdown

Having created branding for a number of marketing agency Chief Nation’s products in the past, it’s been a real honour to get to rebrand Chief Nation itself. Doing so amidst the upheavals of global lockdowns meant that this was my first remote rebrand, an unexpected challenge!

I have huge respect for the team at Chief Nation, for whom lockdown meant having to create, launch and sell a new virtual product in less than four weeks. At the same time, they continued to work on the rebrand project with me almost if this were all perfectly normal.

In many ways it was a really good time to rebrand, as it was a chance to position the business at the forefront of the new ways we communicate, and the new brand positioning is already being fed into pitch writing and is directly helping to drive new business.

The existing branding was functional but wasn’t memorable enough, and it didn’t fully reflect the company’s emphasis on innovative ways of reaching people and in building human relationships.

After mapping out the project with the directors, I organised a workshop shortly before lockdown started in the UK, with staff from across the business in order to get their insights on competitors, where they perceived the brand was at that point and where they wanted to see it go.

This fed into an in depth session which I led with the directors to decide upon the core brand positioning. This was honed into a central brand purpose statement, which reflects Chief Nation’s emphasis on building human connections through live and virtual events.

Further details of the brand positioning and the visual branding itself will be revealed soon once the new brand goes live, watch this space!

Freelancing in the time of coronavirus

This post is brought to you with an extra squirt of hand sanitiser.

It’s been really heartening to see people supporting one another during the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, and adapting at speed to this new isolated way of living. I’ve spoken to some of my clients this week, and am mightily impressed with Chief Wine Officer’s new Virtual Wine Tasting events, as well as my friends at Field & Hawken who are keeping things running and their customers updated, despite all of the difficulties.

I will be operating at a slightly reduced capacity as I juggle childcare with my wife, but remain very much open for business. The freelancing world, mine included, has been hit heavily by coronavirus disruption as businesses seek to cut costs.I will be operating at a slightly reduced capacity as I juggle childcare with my wife, but remain very much open for business. As people move from face to face communications to digital, I can create email campaigns, social media assets and websites, as well as materials incorporating video and animation.

I’ll do my best to help at this difficult time, whether it’s through developing strategies on how to adapt, revising payment options or sharing your new project.

Steve

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How you can take action

The world is awash with well-meaning coronavirus initiatives at the moment, here are a few which I think are particularly worth a look:

• There are some useful pointers on how businesses can adapt in this Trendwatching report.

• If you are healthy and can spare some time, I recommend signing up to or even starting a local group supporting people in your community, Covid Mutual Aid or your local council website are good places to find out more.

• And please spare a thought for those in less well off parts of the world. As Chair of small educational charity Think Malawi, I’d really appreciate it if you could follow us and share our news as the situation develops - Malawi has just 25 ICU beds in public hospitals, serving 17 million people. Stay up to date via email, Twitter or Facebook.

For my latest news and insights, please sign up to receive my occasional newsletter.

Learning from technology

I’ve enjoyed working  for a variety of tech industry businesses this year. These include creative and marketing agencies Chief Nation, Direction Group Unlimited and Revere as well as for a selection of startups. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way, which I hope is useful whether you work in tech or not.

Remember you’re talking to humans

Still from Nintendo Switch ad

It’s easy to get carried away presenting flashy product images or showing off a product’s ultra fast performance. At the end of the day, the aim of marketing communications is to persuade human beings. Make sure to tell human stories which your technology product plays a part in, show people using your product and aim for an emotional reaction from your campaign. This idea is well established in other industries, and the tech world could do better. IBM and Nintendo are examples of tech businesses who are getting this right.

Simplify and clarify

Tech industry literature and presentations can be very, well, technical. Complex concepts can be made comprehensible by breaking them down into smaller chunks, or through visually explaining them with an infographic. And even B2B communications should be written for human beings rather than robots, so it’s out with acronyms and jargon.

Avoid colour clichées

Every industry seems to have its go-to colour palette. The girls’ toy industry suffers from a surfeit of pink, the charity sector has way more than its fair share of red logos and tech has become mired in blue. The problem with using yet more blue is that you aren’t going to replace people’s associations between blue and Microsoft or IBM and blue in people’s minds with blue and your brand. With over 60% of technology company logos featuring blue, it’s time to differentiate by trying something new.

Make sure your branding is authentic

It seems that every big tech business is rebranding at the moment. Yahoo is trying to remind us it’s still here, Microsoft Edge is finally reminding us that it’s not Internet Explorer and Facebook has responded to its problems with a new master logo. As with any branding project, the key is for the branding to match the ethos of the product. If you don’t do this then customers will see your brand as being less than honest. This is more important than ever, because social media has empowered the public to the point where major rebrands have been cancelled after getting a response from them.

Creative trends from Brand Licensing Europe 2019

Brand Licensing Europe 2019 was full of energy and brightly coloured costume characters as ever, despite being held way out in London’s Docklands on a particularly dismal day when I visited.

Here are some key trends from the show.

Sustainability

With the licensed consumer products industry being responsible for more than its share of plastic and fast fashion items, environmental sustainability is finally on the agenda. The seminar sessions kicked off with a panel discussing sustainability. Ojo makes sustainability its key point of difference, and does so without compromising on the look of its products. And The Natural History Museum is mulling over moving all future apparel development to sustainable fabrics.

Gaming

Gaming properties were prominent at the show, in particular at Powerstation Studios' arcade. Here a selection of retro and current games were showcased in fun ways, from a Mario-themed selfie flip book booth to a 90's-style kid's bedroom complete with Megadrive playing Sonic the Hedgehog. And it wasn’t all about e-sports and video games. Board games, card games and role-playing games such as Monopoly, Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons featured prominently too, this last one surely being helped along by being featured in nostalgia-fest Stranger Things.

International presence

International brand owners and national stands were front and centre at the show, and by this I don’t just mean those from the US. Korea Pavilion showcased a range of content creators, as did the Russian Federation's Ministry of Industry and Trade, including Masha and the Bear creators Animaccord Studio. Meanwhile China’s Fantawild Animation had its own stand again this year. This is a really useful chance to check out design styles from around the world, South Korea in particular has some very strong graphic design. Whether BLE can keep up its international prominence should Brexit go ahead remains to be seen.

The growth of experiential

One category which is growing fast in the world of brand licensing but which receives little attention at BLE is experiential. Peaky Blinders, Stranger Things and Friends, among others, are generating lots of attention with their adult-focussed experiences, and claiming their share of this half-billion pound mega-category.

With its parade of costume characters, celebrity lookalikes wandering the aisles and immersive stands, this trade show is quite an experience in itself and well worth a visit if you are interested in branding and the extremes it can be stretched to. Thank you BLE for another surreal day, I’ll be back next year!

Brand Licensing Europe stand design showcase

Brand Licensing Europe is Europe's biggest trade show focused on the world of brand licensing, and I always look forward to exploring the stands.

Excel, Brand Licensing Europe’s new venue for 2019, allows all of the stands to sit in the same space rather than being split across levels as it was in Olympia. It felt like this gave the big players, such as Universal and Viacom Nickelodeon, room to go big with their stands. However this had the effect of dwarfing the smaller stands out on the fringes of the show floor.

The more informal open conference theatre area was a welcome change, great if you want to take a peek at a session without feeling like you need to stay until the end.

With new stand footprints to work to there were lots of new stand designs, and they made the most of the cavernous exhibition hall. A JCB digger and a double decker bus were among the features which would have been tough to accommodate at Olympia, but which fitted in comfortably at Excel.

Here’s a showcase of some of the best and boldest stand design.

Six techniques for your creative toolkit from the Creative Incubator

I recently attended the first of the three-part Creative Incubator programme, run by Pi School at its lush pastoral campus in Rome. We covered a huge amount in a few days, below are six key techniques we learned to use when applying creativity to social causes.

The course was led by the school’s always energetic co-founder Jamshid Alamuti, and was guided by the hard to kill Conn Bertish (Saatchi & Saatchi, JWT and now founder of Cancer Dojo), laid back creative Rey Andrede (72 and Sunny) and the ‘dark lord’ Axel Quack (Frog Design). It turns out that Axel’s methods weren’t really so dark, he just uses numbers sometimes, which I know is anathema to most creatives.

We attendees came from right across Europe, from Estonia to Georgia and most places in between, along with an intrepid American expat who travelled from China especially to attend. I learned about Russian prison tattoos from a Romanian, about Chinese TV from the American and never to cut pasta with a knife from an Italian. Our skills were equally diverse, and included service design, behavioural design, graphic design, art direction and copywriting.

The toolkit

1. Passion and compassion
   Once a social need has been identified, Conn showed how passion and compassion for its beneficiaries are vital ingredients in any creative solution addressing a social cause. His compassion and passion came through having survived a brain tumour, and spending long periods of time with other cancer sufferers. He applied his creativity during his treatment in order to stay positive throughout it, and once again in developing the Cancer Dojo platform to help others do the same.

2. Making creative connections
   Creativity at its most basic level is about making new connections between disparate concepts. We started to use this method, to look for ways to solve problems by connecting matching needs in different parts of society. This pattern has been elegantly put into practice in Holland, where students were accommodated for free within a residential development for the elderly.

3. Human centric design and community-led solutions
   Axel Quack of Frog Design gave a masterclass on user centric design - how problems can be solved by making the user of a product the central concern in any design project. In a refreshingly ego-free approach, he went on to show examples of how users and community members themselves can develop effective, sustainable solutions to their own problems with the right guidance. The stand-out example of this for me was Frog’s work with the Red Cross in developing community-led ways to improve fire safety in Kenyan slums.

4. The five whys
   A well known technique originally developed for Toyota, but little used in creative circles. This is a way of delving down to the root cause of a problem, essential when developing an effective creative brief.

5. The Futures Wheel
   We used this tool to break down a complex issue into its component parts in order to find a specific area which can be addressed.

6. Creative critical thinking
   Rey got us all talking about how to evaluate creative projects within an organisation, especially the crucial question of whether a piece of creative is really ready to be released into the wild.

Pi School combines creatives, technologists and start ups to share ideas and drive innovation. The incubator is supported by ADCE, its aim this year is to develop methods to apply creativity to the needs of social causes, a topic close to my heart.

If you are inspired by this, there may be a few places left on the second and third modules for 2019. Apply at https://picampus-school.com/

And if you have a social cause which would benefit from some creative input, please get in touch!

A hundred billion Christmas greetings

Many a designer out there dreads December arriving because it means one thing: time to design the company Christmas card!

I’ve designed quite a few Christmas cards in my time, including corporate Christmas cards, charity cards for Ganet’s Adventure School Fund/Think Malawi and more recently Christmas-themed social media graphics.

For the first set of my Christmas cards from my own freelance business, I’ve kept it local by using photos taken around Brixton, an area I’ve lived in and around for many years. I enjoy incorporating my own photography into my work, so went out and photographed red and green patterns, signs, objects and textures around Brixton’s streets, shops and market stalls. With a US hedge fund buying Brixton Village indoor market, and Network Rail’s refurbishments forcing out many arch-dwelling businesses, so I wanted to record the colour and visual character of Brixton before it becomes further homogenised by big business.

I then selected the best shots, colour corrected them to sit well alongside one another and combined them into a grid system. My budget is small so I’m emailing the cards out to my contacts, but still wanted to make them special and personal in some way. To do this I changed the combination of photos used in my grid for every person.

I added a simple ‘Happy Holidays’ frame animation in order to give the piece some movement, and exported as animated GIFs in order for the animation to play when viewed in email software (with the exception of Outlook on the PC).

I considered writing some code in Processing in order to output the necessary number of combinations. In the end though, as I needed under a hundred combinations I decided to output them one by one from Photoshop manually. This took a few hours and avoided me getting stuck with the coding, as my Processing skills are admittedly rusty. With the right coding, over 100 billion combinations of my Christmas images are possible, which should keep me going for the next few years at least.

Using a couple of rules of thumb in order to balance the amount of red and green, I have created a set GIFs which I will now send out to my clients and contacts. I also now have a bank of imagery that can be adapted for social media, animations or print graphics, and have some ideas for how to enable people to generate their own Christmas image. Watch this space!

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