As you will probably know, the 2010 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, including two semifinals and a grand final, was held last week in Oslo, Norway. The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC for short) is not just a simple TV program, but the single biggest event created on purpose for television worldwide, and a great deal of production effort is spent to meet an extremely detailed planning and, of course, to offer European audiences the best show.
Besides any musical or political consideration (I could talk about these for hours, but will only do if you request me to do so in the comments), I would like to comment on a very important aspect of the ESC which is usually overlooked, but nevertheless crucial to its success: the signification of the festival as a showcase of design, mainly for the organizing country, which has to provide a complete framework for the show, but also for the participating countries, which must prepare the most appealing performance if they want to win the contest.
But this effort that I was mentioning requires a great amount of resources, basically money, and when there is a lack of it -say, because of a global systemic economical slump- the quality of the show becomes affected. Many people, particularly fellow loyal fans of the festival, will agree that this year's ESC could be dubbed the crisis edition. In the following article I will compare some design issues of last year's edition (which is the best one to date, IMHO) and this year's one, in order to find out how much those economic difficulties have influenced the show -which should provide us an insight to know how things will evolve in the near future, by the way.
First of all, one should note that the production of the show has kept becoming bigger and more complex every year since it was revamped around a decade ago (televoting, yearly slogans, new permanent branding and semifinals since 2004). This has translated in enormous expenses. According to several sources, the overall budget for the 2007 edition in Finland exceeded 17M€, whereas Russia expended more than 30M€ in organizing the festival, with far more than 3 million euro spent in the stage alone.
The Russian stage, installed at the Olimpisky Stadium in Moscow, featured LED screens almost everywhere; on the walls, on the huge 1000 sqm floor space and also with some gigantic, spectacular floating panels which could move to the scenographer's will in order to create different ambiances. This extravanza offered almost limitless possibilities for every delegation to design graphic elements to boost the effectiveness of their performance; some countries, such as Portugal, Armenia or Moldova made a good use of this resource to make their singers appear like floating in a virtual world of light and colour, not to mention the clever use of video footage by host Russia. All this can be seen on the following recap video which includes an extract of every act in the final:
On the other hand, the Norwegian organization had a smaller budget to work with (according to sources, there was a first assignment of 18M€, but the final budget has risen to 24M€). The event was held at the Telenor Arena, which is a venue large enough to host the show, but the stage appeared rather small. Organizers had to cut expenses, and it is obvious that the stage was greatly affected by this operational need. For the first time in many years, there was no hint of LED screens on the stage. A combination of traditional lighting techniques and staging elements (a fixed set of movable backdrops, for every delegation to choose from) was used instead. Given this fact and that many countries did not bring any prop elements at all -the winning entry being the best example- one can not help but to think this edition looked a bit poor and empty, compared to what had become standard fare in recent times. Here you can see the recap video for 2010 and compare for yourself:
Many fans are happy that the lack of those gorgeous visual elements has put more strength on performers themselves, and the strictly musical aspects of their acts. But I personally think this is a bit of a back step, like five or six years back, on the evolution of the ESC as a TV show.
Another important aspect which of course has to be dealt with in this blog is the overall graphic design, the visual identity of the event. Every edition of the ESC uses both a generic logo, introduced in 2004 (and which closely ressembles the logo used for Euro Soccer Cup of that year), where the flag of the host country fills a heart-shaped figure in place of letter V, and an exclusive logo which usually features a slogan. This year the slogan "Share the moment" became the logo itself; a simple design where the letters composed in plain Helvetica appear outlined by a series of tiny pink, white and golden balls.
At first I thought this design was too simple and poor, and was unhappy about the choice of Helvetica; it usually is the font of choice when there is no time or money to spend in finding better options. The impression I had when looking at it for the first time is that crisis had effectively landed at the festival, prompting the use of quick and cheap design solutions, and it was reinforced at the beginning of the first semifinal, where there was no introduction act as in previous years, and the first postcard appeared.
In ESC terminology, postcards are those 30+ second videos displayed to fill in the gap between actings. Some times they feature elements of local culture from the place which hosts the show (i.e. Greece selling their tourist attractions and vacation resorts) and some other times they introduce with variable level of accuracy the country which is performing next. As with other aspects of the show, Russia presented the most original and elaborate postcards to date featuring Russian-national Miss World 2008 on top of whose head appeared a series of national icons of each country animated in the likeness of 3D animated papercuts. Here you can see some of them:
On the other hand, Norway presented something which could hardly be described as the typical postcard: a superposed video of the aforementioned tiny balls floating on top of the Telenor audience, which first compose the shape of the performing country, then its national flag, after which a video of local eurofans greeting and hugging each other leads to the performance itself. Again, at first sight this appeared dull, as a way of replacing elaborate and expensive postcards with something cheaper. Still, a team of NRK (Norwegian public broadcaster) had flown to each one of the countries with the purpose of shooting the scenes, so it should have not been that cheap altogether. Maybe there was something not well explained in the semifinals, and that is what became evident when the introduction of the final in saturday was broadcast and eveything appeared to have sense out of a sudden:
The tiny balls symbolized the feelings and emotions of each of us the audience of the ESC, who are sharing the moment all through space and time, in a vibrant travel above the clouds of Europe. This little piece really touched my heart, because it is the exact way I conceive the festival: it might be camp and cheesy from time to time, but it's a joyful event that makes dozens of millions of Europeans -most of which could probably have next to nothing in common- share an unique feeling at the same time; something that really binds us together and is thus priceless.
Based on this idea, the postcards appeared to have a solid meaning: balls would not be random forms, but would be expressing the support of local audiences to their representatives; also the image of local audience watching the show at home would be used repeatedly during the show. This concept of representing the audience as being a contributing part of the festival reached its maximum expression during the interval act: singing duo Madcon make the first row of the audience stand up and dance, then the rest of the stadium, and then all over Europe in a mix of live and taped sequences:
Recent editions of ESC had featured lavish interval performances by world-class artists such as the Cirque du Soleil (others, like Riverdance had achieved fame precisely thanks to their ESC appearance), but this appearingly cheap solution has caught the attention of many fans. It ingeniously portrays the event as being 'a 2.0', as we would say using current terms, and all in the form of a participative flashmob, which is becoming another hot trend these days.
Last, but not least, it is necessary to talk of the most essential graphic design in the festival, the on-screen displays. Those include both the in-performance country ID, which this year featured bigger numbers in order to easy televoting (for the first time it was possible to vote since the beginning of the show) and the scoreboard for the last section of the program.
The design of song ID and scoreboard had reached a near-perfection in 2009: Adobe's Myriad Pro at different weights was the chosen type for all texts and signs in the show; colour scheme was mainly black on white background, with a gradient on each row for the scoreboard tables, which gave them an overall Apple-ish look. Occasional use of white text on colourful background (like when introducing the voting country) made up the rest. The inclusion of an orange progress bar to indicate the number of countries voting was also an interesting approach to the usability of computer application interfaces. All this can be seen in this video:
So I find it a bit odd that Norwegian designers opted for slightly worse design choices, seemingly ignoring what had actually worked well the previous year. To begin with, the chosen font for display is a bit too lightweight to be well readable on white against purple background. Also, the font size is a bit too small. The choice of type, size and colour all makes for a less usable scoreboard. Also I am still trying to find an explanation for the supression of the useful progress bar, and to the fact that both the name of the voting country and its number on the list appear too small, and on top of the window, since that information appears to be more readable if put at the bottom. I am sure that Norwegian designers tried to make a sleek, elegant design in contrast to the colourful stripes of last year... but utterly failed to improve any usability criteria at all. Also, I find it a funny coincidence that the colour scheme for the background exactly matches that of the default desktop theme of ubuntu 10.04. Could it be that the designers hired by NRK to create the graphic identity of this show are ubuntu users like me?
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