Since its launch just over three and a half years ago, Yota has become one of the curiosities of the design world. The Russian telecoms brand has been quietly working with some of the big names in British design, putting design, architecture and creative content at the centre of its business. What is striking, if disappointing, is that almost everything it does is destined for its broadband customers back in Russia.

In St Petersburg, back in December, Yota staged a huge digital arts festival in an old, empty, Brutalist shopping centre. Yota Space featured the cream of British interactive art, from Brian Eno and Chris Levine to Onedotzero, United Visual Artists and Jason Bruges.

’For Yota Space, we wanted to work with the best talent in the world but also to touch the cultural life of St Petersburg,’ says Yota creative director Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper.

It says something that Tsentsiper is on board at all. As founder and editor-in-chief of the Afisha publishing house (Russia’s equivalent of Time Out), and part of an important architectural family, he’s not your typical company man.

’What we created was amazing, it didn’t feel like art at all,’ he says over our shaky British Skype connection. ’Yota Space was more like a circus or a church – it had community, generosity, openness.’

It was so successful that Yota Space will now be a regular fixture, and Yota has decided to make interactive art an important part of its communications work for the next few years.
’From the start, Yota wanted to do something very different,’ says Nigel Davies, managing director of 300 Million, the group behind the Yota branding and the appointment that began the UK design connection. Yota quickly set up a London office in Hatton Garden as a hub for its growing design work and a future gateway to international markets.

Heads turned in the UK last summer when Yota announced it was working with the Simon Waterfall start-up Fray, and design group All of Us. Fray directs a diverse range of Yota’s design activity, from its product design – working with Seymour Powell – to its retail design in collaboration with Hunt Haggarty. Naked has also just joined the throng, as Yota’s media partner.

The next few weeks will see the launch of the first fruits of the collaboration – a number of mobile Web hardware products created with Seymour Powell that are destined for Yota’s customers in Russia, Nicaragua and Peru.

’For Yota,’ says Fray founder Waterfall, ’it is all about brand behaviour. What they do and how they do it means absolutely everything.

’Yota is turning the tables on technology brands. We’re going to have to learn how to do 4G mobile from Russia, not the other way round. Now there is an emerging Russian brand that is setting the standard for the rest of the world.’

All of Us director Phil Gerrard is struck by the company’s hunger and ambition to ’leapfrog’ what’s happening in the West. The group has been working on content and retail projects for Yota, with help from branding consultancy Someone.

’Yota is inspiring to work with because it constantly challenges you to be more innovative and it has a very clear vision of where it wants to be,’ Gerrard says. ’We are working with Yota on a couple of major projects right now, including Yota Play – a new kind of video-on- demand service focused on the social discovery of film content, plus an interactive retail project planned for a number of its flagship stores later this year.

The company’s design interests go further and deeper too. Its creative ’branches’, as Tsentsiper calls them, touch places such as Strelka, the Institute for Media, Architecture and Design that he co-founded in Moscow.

Some are billing Yota as Russia’s answer to Google, but the comparison is a little unfair. Using design and creativity, Yota has already transformed itself from a network operator into a thriving media brand. The big question is, where will it go next?

This article was published by Design Week magazine, February 03 2011. You can find it online at http://www.designweek.co.uk/profile-yota/3023020.article

How revolutionary will the iPad actually be? There’s a suddenly a big opportunity for Apple to provide a much needed boost to publishing and media brands using enhanced digital content, music, video and social networking. But it’s by no means guaranteed. Here’s my feature as it appeared on the shelves last week, published courtesy of Design Week: (post updated 28 May 2010)

We all knew it would be big news, but just how big will the iPad turn out to be? If you work in the digital media space, the chances are you’ve had one of Apple’s new ’tablets’ knocking around the studio for weeks, while everyone else in the UK waits patiently just to find out the release date.

Even so, the blaze of media coverage has been so prolific that we already know what it looks like, how it works, and that it’s sizzling on the shelves in the US – Macworld reports the iPad hit the one million sales mark in 28 days, almost three times faster than the iPhone.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is another one of ’those’ launches, yet, unusually for an Apple product, design opinion is divided about what its legacy will be. A lot of early interest in the iPad interface is coming from the media and publishing industry, which, despite some success with e-books and e-readers, could not master its content for smart phones due to screen size limitations.

Anna Rafferty, managing director of Penguin Digital, observes that some genres of book will work much better than others in an iPad format.

’We had a lot of success with our iPhone app for The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman because it was a fantasy adventure book which appealed to the youth market and it created a lot of interest online,’ she says.

Where the iPad could come into its own, says Rafferty, is in the design of interactive fiction for the young adult and children’s market, where storylines can be enhanced with touchscreen features, streaming video, animated pictures and social networking chat.

Because they can be more interactive, apps for the iPad can be bigger, better and potentially bigger money spinners than iPhone apps too, says designer Russell Quinn, who has designed iPhone apps for US publishing house McSweeney’s, as well as Creative Review.

’The simple fact that the screen is so much larger is where the revolutionary part comes in. You can now manipulate larger amounts of information in a truly immersive environment. This is what publishers are getting excited about,’ Quinn says.

If the iPad can bring about a new lease of life and new revenue streams to the world of publishing, it will also be welcome news for editorial and content designers, as well as for the brands starting to behave like publishers by ramping up their direct communications activity with consumers and businesses.

But as well as being a device for subscribing to newspapers and magazines and for testing interactive literature, some predict the iPad will be a second boost to other forms of online content as apps proliferate.

Early adopters say iPad is well suited to the home because it’s always on and easy to sit down with. Here is a device which could make streaming TV, music and new forms of rich online content very compelling, especially by integrating the social networking and digital communications features we currently only really enjoy at the PC or on our mobile phones.

Surfing the Web changes on the iPad, says Applied Information Group director Tim Fendley, who is already ditching all his Web bookmarks and replacing them with apps. ’For some forms of Web content the experience is so much better. We’re doing a lot with the mapping features of the iPhone and porting to iPad is a cinch. It’s the end of websites,’ he enthuses.

But actually it’s not that cut and dried. With all its potential, the iPad and its future rival platforms have a long way to go before they change the way most of us use the Internet. Existing Web content may not be quite so interactive, but it’s often free and there is no reason why a rival tablet platform won’t just extend existing Web features using Flash, says Poke creative director Nik Roope.

’I still have some doubts about what is painted by the media as an imminent invasion that will reach ubiquity in a matter of minutes,’ says Roope. ’The biggest issue for me is that it demands a new behaviour from consumers and it’s much harder building a new market for tablets than responding to the needs of an existing one like mobile phones. It’s not the end of the Web, by a long way. That’s just crazy talk.’

This article was published in Design Week’s supplement on Continuing Professional Development (May 6th), and can be downloaded from the DW website.

Does the design industry actually need to take training so seriously? After all, design studios are innovative and creative hothouses full of naturally inquisitive and adaptive people who never stop learning and thinking. Everything they do deepens their professional experience and quality of work. We learn on the job, that’s all there is to it.

This sounds like a nice theory but the fact is it doesn’t add up in practice. At the end of the day, all the evidence suggests design groups just aren’t doing enough to train their staff. In fact, design consultancies have consistently failed to invest in the skills of their own people and even now the situation is not improving. Over the last seven years, levels of formal training have been visibly low. What with the recession, there is renewed pressure on budgets for ‘extras’ like training time or courses. And while design studios can be great places to learn the arts of designing and doing business, it would be naïve of any team to presume they have all the skills they need inside the business.

According to the latest Labour Force Survey, published in 2008, only 13 per cent of designers had undertaken some sort of professional training in the preceding three months. It’s a modest rate by any standard, one which is not only lower than for architects and software professionals, but below that of media professionals. Even artists sign up for more training than designers.

Curiously, research interviews with UK designers reveal it’s not a question of cost or time that are at the root of it, nor is it the suitability of courses that is responsible for this low uptake. In fact, according to the latest Design Industry Research report by the Design Council, forty per cent of design groups state that there are ‘no barriers’ preventing them from investing in training their employees. So, why aren’t they doing it?

It’s a good question. The business arguments for training – things like staff retention, replacement costs, succession management, productivity and general wellbeing – have been made so often they barely need explaining. Yet they still seem to do nothing to change the situation.

Laura Woodroffe, D&AD education and professional development is used to this sort of attitude. One of the arguments she frequently hears is ‘why train staff if they’re just going to move on?’” It’s a Catch 22 situation of course – if you’re not taking care of your own people they probably won’t feel inclined to stick around for long anyway.

For some reason there is less negativity towards training among advertising agencies. In Adland it is more accepted that good people need to be nurtured, are capable of performing better and will be more motivated if they have a career plan inside the agency.

Woodroffe believes lots of design groups have never quite got to grips with continuing professional development, not because they can’t afford it but because they are so client focused they often just don’t get round to it. She saysthe situation has been improving though, and that things are better now then they were nine or ten years ago.

‘It used to be the case that the creatives were given a case of beer and a dart board and told to get on with it, but things have changed a lot,’ she points out.

Some design consultancies ‘get it’ much more than others. The figures show that in-house design teams on the client side invest much more in their CPD than consultancies do. And if you’re in digital and multimedia you’re more likely to invest in training than the other disciplines. The communications fields like graphics and branding apparently do the least.

Surprisingly, the Design Council figures suggest product and industrial design consultancies do less training than average, while interiors and exhibition designers do slightly more.

Surprisingly, it makes no difference whether you’re a big or small consultancy as to how much training you invest in. If you are a Top 100 behemoth, with senior staff on six figure salaries and a network of international offices, you will be virtually no more inclined to provide your staff with training than if you’re a three man start-up struggling with your cash flow.

Entrenched attitudes to training are changing though, particularly with the arrival of new generation digital initiatives that can take advantage of social networks or build new training and talent platforms online. Alongside the established training courses from places like the Design Business Association, D&AD and the Chartered Society of Designers, we are starting to see newer initiatives like the one Hyperisland recently launched with D&AD to equip strategists and account people with digital skills. New ventures like Wieden+Kennedy’s ‘creative talent hub’ Platform also offer a model for the more progressive design groups to build their own talent communities too.

If truth be told the training and skills arena has always had a bit of an image problem in the design world. And let’s face it, CPD is never going to be sexy. But now we know the issue is not time or money, there’s really no reason to keep ignoring it.

Mike Exon

Despite predictions that this would be the first truly digital election, it really hasn’t felt like it. Facebook managed to recruit the young vote, but there was no Obama-like swelling of the ranks, nor any great campaigning moments for any party. Claims yesterday that the Conservatives had stolen the social media high ground by buying YouTube’s homepage for the day, frankly, felt pretty thin.

But today, as the country and its elected representatives sit in some sort of electoral purdah, the BBC is reporting unprecedented web traffic to its UK news site. We just can’t get enough.

As I sit typing here at 1.19pm, the country sits glued to the networks, waiting for the last 25 of the 650 parliamentary seats to be called, knowing no single party can form a majority on its own. While MPs bargain behind Whitehall’s closed doors the real digital election is happening now, on the broadcasts, posts and chat of the post-election news sites - BBC, ITV, and Sky.

Media owners understand that the race is still on to break the hottest political story since the Obama victory – that someone, we don’t quite know who, will manage to wrestle up a UK coalition government worthy of its own 24 hour news channel for the short time it must surely last.

Mike Exon

The editorial strategy has been to create something readable, conversational, visual and easy to digest, which breaks the DC style guide in two but still hits its key editorial themes. Hats off to the council for giving us completely free reign to publish our own rounded and objective content, without feeling the need to edit it or dumb it down in any way.

Thanks to Ruth Flood and her research team, to all the contributors, to Karolina Johnson’s design team at the Design Council, as well as Purpose who helped with the overall look and feel. I hope you find it useful.

Mike Exon