There is a strange condition for the curious.
The need to understand something in depth, and to spend hours and hours reading and listening about the most varied subjects. In this relationship of always looking for the answer to things, we come across scientific thinking, a process that mainly leads to a ‘no, that’s not how it is’. There are those who think of this method of observing life as somewhat pessimistic, everything needs an explanation; but for me, there is no greater magic than a negative can generate, opening up an infinity of new possibilities. As Carl Sagan would say, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a deep source of spirituality.”
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I found myself in design. Questioning is a continuous part of the development process, I’m talking mainly about the methodological moment, understanding the problem and mapping out everything that needs to be understood. Anyone who really listens will receive a few “no’s” along the way. By interacting with our client, user, consumer, we can understand that “we’re not so bold, we’re XYZ. But that’s not all we are either”.
The very way we question things changes everything. “No” can be a door that opens up to possibilities, guiding us down a less common path in search of new solutions. I’ve never said that it’s easy to be curious, but there’s more than a handful of curiosities up your sleeve, you also gain the ability to imagine beyond, and that’s what I want to talk about.
No Prince Charming
Even to tell a story, we use ‘no’ as the common thread in its development. “Don’t go through the forest, little hat”; or, as in the case of Pixar, which may sound cliché, but being a designer, the history of my profession begins with a cliché, so let’s get to it.
Pixar emerged with the proposal to bring 3D to the world of animation. Born under the name Graphics Group, the company had already been surprising the cinema market since the Star Wars films in the 70s. The challenge was huge; the animation market had been monopolized by Disney since its adaptation of Snow White in 1937. Coming from the opposite direction and after the explosion with Steve Jobs’ investment, Pixar came up with a new proposal: its characters didn’t sing; the stories didn’t revolve around a romantic plot or the climax of the plot; there wasn’t a supreme villain, at least not initially. You may disagree, but Andy’s neighbor was a very creative child with toys, certainly very rebellious, but still very creative.
Undoubtedly, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’ can feel like a creative bottleneck, sometimes even a hopeless one, but it forces the process to work around these issues, coming up with solutions that are unexpected to say the least. But I’m still rambling on about the main subject of this text, a project that, like Pixar, starts with ‘no’ in its name and how this guided the decision-making that followed.
Non-conformity and creation
In 2023 we came across a daring project: a startup that promised to be non-conformist, disruptive and innovative – you’ve probably heard that a million times, haven’t you? But it seemed like something really different, the project arrived in our hands with a consolidated plan and a name that reflected their indignation with the telecoms segment, as Ozzy Osbourne would say: No More Tears (the ‘tears’ weren’t included, but it made perfect sense to me, have you ever tried to cancel your cell phone plan?). Nomo came from this desire to break away from what other brands in the segment do badly, understanding what the biggest complaints were among mobile device users.
But even then, a name doesn’t build itself, it needs to reflect all the material that has already been consolidated. By the way, if you don’t know what I’m talking about yet, take a look at the full project and then come back here, it’s complete on our Behance.
Getting back to the subject, Nomo needed to embody all that indignation that made it so unique, and starting with a name that flexes No More was just the first step of many. With a handful of ideas in our heads and plenty of paper to hand, we started testing. From the most obvious experiments, to the balance of the meeting of gestural movement, the animated curves, all human fluidity seemed clear for that moment: to say no was to propose a new path, a new way of doing things, and to keep that path constantly expanding. But – and there’s always a but – the bridge that connected, or in this case, that didn’t connect, the change to something that others don’t have, was missing.
And there went sheets and sheets of sketches, hours in front of the blackboard, drawings and more drawings of an N that would capture the whole proposition of the new thing we were looking for. And this was feeding our repertoire, from our broad market analysis, we looked at telecoms from all over Latin America, trying to understand what would make us different. One of the ‘no’s’ was to get away from the much-used ‘light painting’, the speeding lights photographed in high exposure that you’ve probably seen in some telecom ad (Hello marketing agencies, nothing personal!).
But when we also understood our presence in the absence of competitors in the simplest possible way, something changed. That’s where the pink you saw in the semantic panel above comes from, that pretty shade. Observing the international telecom market, it became clear that no major brand relied predominantly or solely on it.
This is happening in various industries, and you can see it in this survey that the Canva team mapped, where you can see that no Fortune 500 company is opting for pink. In fact, a similar process happened with purple, which here in Brazil has already become “roxinho”, and is now more commonly used. In this section, it is starting to appear more timidly.
Color psychology: The logo color tricks used by top companies—and how to design your own – via Canva.
Unfortunately, we didn’t invent pink, but from these analyses, pink gained strength from a strategic point of view, as an area with little predominance of relevant brands. From there, our repertoire began to gain new layers and we understood this opportunity from other points of view.
Ghost of change
Dear reader, I ask you not to abandon me with this statement which may sound strange, but pink doesn’t even really exist – A pause for you to question everything I’ve said so far based on this unexpected fact, it may take up your time.
Again, from the simplest RGB to the latest OLED screen, pink is completely visible. But as a physical property, as a part of the wave spectrum of visible light, pink isn’t there. Even if you have a pink and a yellow flower in your hands, the yellow that is absorbed by you is not received in the same way as we understand pink.
Fonte: Elena Pimukova e Wikipedia
You looked at the color wheel and thought: “Pink is there, between purple and red.” But, like everything else that permeates design, pink is the result of our perception of the world. It almost bypasses what we understand from physics, mixing human biology with the superimposition of electromagnetic waves that give us this. As Cézanne once said: “Color is the place where our brain meets the universe”, and in this case, neither the universe nor pink care whether we can measure it or not.
Once again, as the curious person that I am, I tried to understand the relationship between vision and colors, and how perception varies from animal to animal, with a huge variety of factors affecting perception. In fact, not only pink, but probably all colors are merely an interpretation of mind and reality, but that’s a subject for another discussion, one thing at a time.
Well, as a society, what matters are the meanings and interpretations we place on colors, in the case of the use of pink, its perception has changed a lot in a few centuries, it has undergone significant changes in use for Western culture.
From being considered, during the 19th century, a light shade of red always linked to boys, in a reinforcement of gender and maturity by increasing the saturation of the color until it reached red, the meaning changed in a short time. At the beginning of the 20th century, during the Great War, concentration camps used the color pink to identify homosexuals and sex offenders, gaining new layers of connotation. A few years later, the beauty industry, which was consolidating in the post-war period and looking for a new niche to exploit, seized on pink as a sign of femininity.
Most of the associations we have with pink today come from the 1980s, when it was claimed as a color of struggle, of pride, especially among queer communities and AIDS prevention and awareness movements – I don’t even need to mention P!nk, right? Today, pink, loaded with signs so recent in its history, has become a symbol of revolution and non-conformity.
What are we looking for?
We are complex beings in living and dynamic environments, and design makes possible a way of looking at our surroundings that few other professions allow.
You can call me emotional, or even crazy. But just the act of telling this story makes me excited. Searching for the answers that some ‘no’s’ gave us in this project was to dive beyond conventional design research.
It was looking at how we understand the reality around us.
