Sir Richard Branson believes recession brings opportunity

Just found this interesting video taken from the BBC news website – Click here for Video.

The video is an interview with Sir Richard Branson who believes that the global recession we are now in will provide unique opportunity for new startup business and entreprenuers. Although this isn’t specific to the Design industry it does illustrate that the recession doesn’t have to be bad news for everyone.

Perhaps this optimistic outlook can be applied to a design agency.

Design can be the way forward…

I have copied this article from the Design Council website and it offers a rather encouraging outlook into how the Design Industry can prosper in the recession. The article can be found here.

“In the middle of an economic downturn, SMEs need all the help they can get to survive the tough times. But when revenues are falling it can be tempting to cut marketing budgets, to delay new product development and to reduce research in an effort to save money. But is this the best thing to do?

But Design Council research shows that design is an important tool that can help businesses survive a recession. And we have lots of case studies that show how an investment in design can be instrumental in turning the corner to renewed growth.

Our research shows that more than half of the UK’s businesses

• … are looking to design their way out of downturn
  Over half (54%) of the firms in our survey thought design would contribute to a large or great extent in helping maintain their competitive edge in the current economic climate.
• … think design is more important now
  Similarly, 53% thought that design had become more important in helping the firm to achieve its business objectives over the last three years.
• … think design is integral to the economic performance of the UK
  The same number agreed or strongly agreed that design is integral to the country’s future economic performance.”

Beautiful Typographic Art

This is one of several typographic illustrations commisioned for the Grammy Awards this year. I was drawn to the beauty of the images and the well considered typeface selection and colours.

How quickly could the UK recover

Although no one can be certain of when the UK will climb out of recession it has become clear that it will be a long and tough process.

“During the current crisis, the government has been over-optimistic about both the depth of the downturn and the speed of recovery, and even now many independent economic forecasters are sceptical of the government’s forecast for recovery in the second half of 2009.”

This quote taken from this article here features the quote I have taken from above. This quote implies that experts believe the Government have been over-optimistic regarding the recovery time.

UK officially in recession

The UK was officially announced as being in a recession on the 23rd of January 2009. For a recession to be announced there has to have been two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

An article on the announced recession can be found here.

Double Diamond Process

I found one of the most interesting things taken from the ‘Boundaries’ workshop crit today was the ‘Double Diamond’ method of working out the process of a project. I want to try and use this to help organise my project, a lot of useful information regarding the ‘Double Diamond’ can be found on the groups blog found here – http://processgraphicdesign.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/the-double-diamond-design-process/