Editor’s Note: Martin Miruka is the founder, CEO and lead strategist of ATOM, the first indigenous brand strategy design firm in Kenya. Based in Nairobi, Miruka is also chairman of the Diversity Africa Foundation and KenyaOne, a nonprofit organization founded by ATOM to champion issues of diversity and the creation of a value-based national brand for Kenya. He is the author of The Passion of the Brand, a handbook distributed free to business leaders by ATOM to increase awareness and action around the fundamental role of brand strategy in building African businesses into global African brands. This interview continues our Foreign Correspondent series on the state of design in nations around the world.

How long has the design profession existed in Kenya?
Design has been around since 1967. It started with the creation of Kenyatta University, which was hived off the University of Nairobi (UON) to become a constituent college for training teachers. At that point, Design and Fine Art were created as Bachelor of Arts courses. Fine Art went to Kenyatta and Design remained at UON.

How large is the Kenyan design community?
The total design community could be estimated at about 3,000. UON has produced about 900 design graduates with another 300 coming from more recent universities such as Moi University and Maseno University (specializing in interior design). The remaining numbers have been produced by diploma colleges such as Nairobi Polytechnic and BIFA. The main design professions are graphic (the majority), interior, fashion and web.

What are typical design assignments?
Most design assignments are related to identity and communication briefs. This demand is serviced by specialized graphic design firms like Mojo (www.mojo.co.ke). brand strategy firms like ATOM (www.atom.co.ke) and Interbrand East Africa (www.interbrand.com) also offer design as an integral part of their strategic brand work. All advertising agencies, e.g. Scanad (www.scanad.com), Ogilvy (www.ogilvy.com), AY&R (yrafrica.com/yrsite_kenya), also offer design as a package with their advertising and marketing communication service.

Does the work come mainly from Kenyan companies?
The work comes both from Kenyan businesses and multinational companies doing business in Kenya. Kenya is a vibrant economy and the hub of economic activity in East and Central Africa. (Kenya is to East and Central Africa what South Africa is to Southern Africa, Nigeria is to West Africa, and Egypt is to Northern Africa.) East African countries – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi – have nearly completed the formation of an economic bloc – East African Community, or EAC – of which Kenya is and will be the de facto capital.

Does the EAC represent a sizable market?
The EAC has a population of over 100 million. As an indicator of its economic potential, mobile phone penetration in the EAC stands at well over 35 million subscribers, with Kenya alone having over 16 million of these. Multinational companies with offices/operations in Kenya include Google, Coca Cola (regional office for 27 African countries), Virgin, GE, Microsoft (African regional office), Unilever, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered, to mention a few big names. Design firms in Kenya also tend to service many companies in neighboring countries, and many have offices in those countries as well. A significant amount of design in Kenya is also consumed by small and medium enterprises, or SMEs. SMEs currently number between 1.6 million and 2 million companies in Kenya. Even though this segment does not spend much on design per project, the need is there, and they will invest in identity and communication materials for their companies as a matter of course.

You have passionately advocated the need to create exportable “Made in Africa” brands rather than simply exporting unbranded commodities and raw materials. Why is this so important?
Africa’s socioeconomic future has, in my opinion, one key pillar: the sustainable socioeconomic empowerment of her people. This empowerment depends almost solely on the ability to create jobs and industry (i.e., stable, lasting institutions), since this is the only way that economic income, hence power, for the average African can be sustainable.

The ability to create jobs and industry ceases to exist in a scenario where we export raw material and someone else in a recipient country sets up industries to add value to those materials and create jobs out of that for themselves. Of course, they also generate an exponential multiple in revenue per measure from the same material after adding value. Hence, if Africa is to create sustainable socioeconomic growth, she has no choice but to start adding value internally to her raw material and creating brands around these that can attract the same premium in supermarket and shop shelves in the West. Failure to do this will guarantee a continuous cycle of poverty and exploitation. This, in turn, has all sorts of side effects, including bad politics, since poor people care about their next meal, not democracy, and for as long as that is the situation and the poor are the majority, bad politics shall survive on the backs of the poor. Bad politics, in turn, nurture bad economic policies and on and on the cycle continues.

So, if Africa is to gain prominence in the global economy, it needs to build its own brands? Instead of exporting coffee beans, it needs to build a global preference for Kenyan coffee. It needs to develop its own labels rather than be an unnamed supplier to others.

Beyond adding value to raw materials, we must have Made-in-Africa brands from all other sectors so as to increase our ability to have sustainable institutions across sectors for reasons I stated above. This would have a double benefit of “rebranding” Africa’s image from that of a place to be only exploited and which has nothing to offer the world, to a continent that competes in and with the world on her own terms. We, Africans, have much more than raw materials to offer the world. The entrepreneurial spirit and capacity of the African people (of which there is much more than you may imagine) will never be fully unleashed without these opportunities to build institutions and compete in the world market, while sharing with and teaching the world those great innovations that can only be borne of adversity. The world probably has much more to gain than Africa herself, from a fired-up, brand-driven African economic engine.

Editor’s Note: Over the past 50 years, Diseño Shakespear has had a transformative impact on design in Argentina. Founded by Ronald Shakespear, the Buenos Aires-based consultancy has left its visual imprint on several of Argentina’s most important public facilities, including wayfinding systems for the Buenos Aires subway, hospitals, the Temaiken Zoo and sports centers. This has earned Shakespear a global reputation, recognized in design journals, exhibitions in Europe and the U.S., and induction as a Fellow in the Society of Environmental Graphic Design in 2008. Between 1985 and 1992, he served as head professor at the University of Buenos Aires Division of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, and now with his sons, Lorenzo and Juan, and daughter, Barbara, serve clients through Diseño Shakespear. Here, Shakespear acts as our “foreign correspondent,” talking about the state of design in Argentina.

What makes the history of Argentina’s design industry unique and challenging?
The history of graphic design in Argentina cannot be understood without taking into account the context, the country’s history and, more recently, its social and economic policies. Argentina is a sovereign and federal state, fully cosmopolitan, and based on two founding ethnic groups — Spain and Italy- as well as minor migration movements from countries such as Poland, Germany, Peru, England, Paraguay, Bolivia, Wales, etc. A series of de facto rulers, economic breakdowns, historically rampant inflation, have made working in Argentina difficult for everyone and particularly difficult for designers, whose work depends mostly on factors associated with a nation’s prosperity and stability.

Rampant inflation is putting it mildly. Until 1990, Argentina’s inflation rate reached breathtaking proportions, culminating in 1989 when inflation hit almost 5,000%.
Yes, my close friend Jorge Frascara [Icograda's Past President] says that when one refers to Argentina as a difficult environment, it is necessary to provide some illustrations for foreigners. For instance, in 1976, inflation was 500% per year, oscillating between 19% and 38% per month. Printers’ estimates were only good for 48 hours. Estimating the cost of jobs for clients required impossible strategic skills, political and economical knowledge, and a huge nose to assess the future. Getting paid was just as difficult.

How did that affect your design studio?
Our projects — the way they are, the way they could have been- are a reflection of those circumstances. Those circumstances have encouraged us to work harder in Argentina and led us to extend our work to other countries, particularly within the region, where business and professional procedures are very similar to those prevailing in my country, and so is the relationship with clients.

It is impressive that your consultancy survived and thrived in that environment over the past 50 years.
Shakespear Design has been constantly transforming and evolving. When I started working in the late 1950s, design was not part of Latin America’s collective memory. Some pioneering work was being done in Argentina, thanks to the efforts and talent of a number of designers and a few specialized publications, but it took many years for design to be acknowledged in our society and become part of the university curriculum. Our formation as a classic graphic design studio shaped the origin of the profession in this country and rendered the word “design” a meaningful word in a place where it had no clear meaning and inspired generations that now speak for themselves. By the standards of the day, when I initiated my studio, there was little or no information about graphic design as a professional practice. Argentina, as always, kept its eyes on Europe more than anywhere else, and I was no exception to this. Meeting Alan Fletcher, a relationship that flourished with the pass of time, in the times of Fletcher Forbes Gill, as well as seeing the work of Jock Kinneir, the German masters (Aicher, Muller Brockmann, Hoffmann et. al.), Milton Glaser, and a few more, shaped and consolidated my vision but, above all, confirmed my intuition.

Does Argentina have a graphic tone of voice?
We used to say that Argentine design provides solutions for Argentina’s problems. I’m not sure that our “tone of voice” is original. Globalization is everywhere now. If design is not good at helping people live better, then it’s no good at all.

You have been active in international design organizations, particularly Icograda and SEGD. Has this helped build your global reputation?
Icograda has placed us on the map. SEGD is my second home. They both introduced our work around the world. Being natives of the far South, it has always been difficult for us to gain recognition and these two institutions have been very kind to us doing so.

How does the client fit into your overall approach to design?

Our professional value as designers is not only about good ideas and mastery of form, but also about understanding complexities. In cases like wayfinding systems, of our many daily obsessions — vandalism, erosion, perception distances, placement, type, color or technology, to mention only a few, our relationship with the client has always remained our main concern. Building up a reasonable relationship with a client and the people involved is also an act of design, a part of the project that surely defines its future. Some clients ask me for a boat, when actually what they need is to cross a river. I cannot think of design without my client. Defining an audience involves deciphering their codes.

Is there a lesson that you tell your students?
There is one story I like. In the year 53 B.C., Marco Casio invaded Parthia with a 40,000-man army, and the goal of expanding the Roman Empire. It was a disaster. This was mainly due to the design of the Parthian bow, a weapon made with a laminated spring, with a range and power that made the Roman legions defenseless. Twenty thousand Romans died, 10,000 were taken prisoner. The Parthians did not prevail because they had a better general, they prevailed because they had a better designer.

Editor’s Note: The global marketplace is real. Some brands are as familiar to consumers in Rio de Janeiro and London as they are to shoppers in New York City and Mumbai. That does not mean that the world now speaks a common design language nor approaches design in a universal way. What resonates in one culture may be rejected as odd, irrelevant or ignorantly offensive in another. In some cases, consumers may find the product appropriate, but the sales pitch tone-deaf and riddled with cultural clichés. Designers working across cultures confront the challenge of understanding differences in business and social customs, technologies, and typical design assignments as well as aesthetic preferences.

In the interest of broadening our knowledge, we are launching a “foreign correspondents” feature, beginning with our dear friends, Anita Luu and Sing Lin, two American designers who opened their Affiche International Asia office in Shanghai two years ago. An innocent question about the availability of Chinese typefaces led to a fascinating discussion, which is presented here.

Foreign Correspondents: Affiche International

Why aren’t there as many typestyles available in Chinese as there are in English?
The English alphabet only has 26 letters. The Chinese language has over 8,000 individual characters, of which about 3,500 are most commonly used. So as a Chinese typographer, you not only need to design 26 alpha characters, you need to craft at least 3,500 Chinese characters and their traditional/simplified equivalent. There are some very handsome Chinese typefaces available, and we’re grateful for the few at our disposal, but it is still frustrating.

When working on English language assignments, were you really using that many different typefaces?
Like most designers, we always reverted to our top five (okay, three) favorites, but we were spoiled by the seemingly limitless choices of typefaces. It was nice to know that there were so many other options, in case we decide we wanted a change. It is not just the lack of Chinese font choices that is so annoying, working with Chinese type poses very different sets of challenges such as inputting text that we had not anticipated.

Both of you are proficient in Chinese, especially Sing who is fluent in four Chinese dialects. Why would inputting text be a problem? How does the keyboard differ?
The keyboard design is based on an alpha system, which is very convenient until you deal with pictographic text like Chinese. It’s like using a screw driver to hammer a nail. Wrong tool, but somehow, people manage to do it. How? By using a phonetic-based system called PinYin, where the writer types a Chinese word by how it sounds. The computer then pulls up a list of character choices that match that sound. That may seem easy enough until you realize that a simple word like “ni” (which means “you”) pulls up 75 different options. This is partly due to the fact that Mandarin has four tones for each word, and each of the tones can have multiple homonyms. Of course, to the proficient PinYin writer or teenage instant-text-messenger, this poses no problem at all. So, in theory, practice does make it easier, although we have yet to find this true.

Didn’t the government of the People’s Republic of China simplify the written language sometime back in the 1950s or ‘60s?
Yes, it did modify the written language in an effort to increase literacy. Simplified Chinese eventually became popular and was implemented throughout China, but many Chinese intellectuals and purists still prefer the traditional written form of Chinese. Recently, there was talk of reverting back to the “more elegant” traditional Chinese, but the outpouring of anger from the general populace pretty much ended that movement.

From a design standpoint, simplified Chinese is really not that simple. One reason is that simplified Chinese is only used within China. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, traditional Chinese is used exclusively. So, working on projects that cross political borders brings up all sorts of issues. Example: Should a Hong Kong company operating in Hong Kong and China have a simplified or traditional Chinese logotype? Socially, do traditional characters convey and represent a more “sophisticated” brand image?

Another problem is that the letterforms of simplified characters are very different from traditional ones. In our opinion, the simplified letterforms were never thought out quite as well. They look visually awkward and unbalanced. Here are examples of the graphic problems with simplified text: (top shows traditional Chinese characters, and below, the simplified characters). The negative space created by the second character is further aggravated by the extra spaces between it and the next character. Over a large block of text, this problem is even more visible because it results in lots of empty holes.

Do all type foundries in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan offer both traditional and simplified characters?
Many typefaces are designed and published by Hong Kong and Taiwan type
foundries. Since they use traditional faces that is what they design. But some of the foundries also offer a simplified Chinese version or partial simplified selection – maybe 2,000 characters or so. What’s really bad is that some typefaces offer simplified Chinese versions with a few characters missing. You’re out of luck if you choose such a typeface only to realize later that it is missing some of the characters that make up the CEO’s name.

Do you see the state of typography changing in China?
Until designers demand more and better designed typefaces and challenge the existing inputting tools, we are stuck. But we are forever hopeful that things will turn around. After all, China was able to move through four decades of development within ten years, so what are a few letterforms?

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