Notes, thoughts.

Opinion: I am Specialised…

A post on Mumbrella & Campaign brief, about the new branding for the National Gallery of Australia by Naked, got me thinking last night. At first I was, rightfully, repulsed by the awful logo. I knocked them for not ‘sticking to their knitting’.

But then I realised i’d used the exact same phrase Telstra’s CEO used in dismissing Apple’s iPhone - yikes. It got me thinking about specialisation - as someone who likes to think of himself as a bit of a jack of all trades, but with a grounding in good strategic thinking and ideas, I can see that there’s an immense value in specialisation.

To many people that NGA logo won’t be that bad - it ticks a few boxes - it has a kind-of-cool, of the moment geometric thing going on. It’s reasonably well composed. But any designer worth their salt will see straight away what a total disaster that logo is.

In many other fields there is a push for more generalists, as too many specialists, with their myopic focus on their own narrow field, are missing the big picture. But the flip-side is to have a jack of all trades, master of none handling an important and specialised project - then you’ll end up with ‘near enough is good enough’.  In my opinion, when you’re working at such a small, detailed scale as a logo (or for instance a valve on a pipe at the bottom of an oil well), near enough is never good enough…