This year's Design Indaba showed how Africans are still merely spectators of the global consumer bandwagon, says Anthea Garman . Africa fitted into the bigger picture. Heated interchanges took place a number of times between speakers, with chair Lewis Blackwell trying to synthesise some meaning from it all for the hundreds of delegates whose daily bread is dictated by the body corporate. Against a backdrop of idyllic picture-perfect photographs of a white nuclear family typographer Neville Brody delivered a sustained attack on the branded world that excludes most of humanity.
Brands come at the price of diversity and at the cost of the local.
They incorporate cultures and regurgitate them. He believes in raw emotion and telling it as you feel. It seemed a very fitting summary of the schizoid period we now live in. But the international speakers were very careful about qualifying how they work around the brands both personally and politically. Michael Thibodeau of the New York company Futurebrand worked on the development of the South African Airways logo with local company Herdbuoys.