These Great British Fashion stamps are launched today in the UK. Following the success of the Great British Design stamps of 2009 (which looked at a cross-section of design and featured Mary Quant’s mini-dress), the brief was to find a way to sum up 60-odd years of fashion alone.

The main challenge with this subject matter is that it’s hard to make clothes look interesting if no one’s wearing them - on a tailor’s dummy they seem flat and lifeless. On the other hand, we didn’t want models or celebrities to distract from the designs. For example, there’s a great photo of Ringo Starr wearing a classic Tommy Nutter suit in the 1970s, but you just think, ‘there’s a great photo of Ringo’ and don’t look at the suit.

The compromise was to shoot the clothes being modelled for real, but then digitally remove the faces and hands. First, we had to get hold of the precious artefacts, which meant a long process of persuading the designers or their estates to loan them out for a few days or sourcing them from obliging vintage specailsts (a task that took over three months). A two-day photo shoot took place at photographer Sølve Sundsbø’s London studio, then judicious cropping and retouching was used to bring out the lines, textures and movement of the garments.

Here are the 10 ten stamps in more detail.

Hardy Amies


Sir Edwin Hardy Amies KCVO  (1909-2003) was born in Maida Vale. He became managing director of Mayfair couture house Lachesse in 1934. After World War II he opened his own fashion business in Savile Row. Amies was the first major European fashion designer to venture into ready-to-wear and in 1955 received a royal warrant as dressmaker to the Queen. Other commissions have included clothing for the 1966 England World Cup squad and the 1972 GB Olympic squad and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The outfit shown on the stamp dates from the late 1940s.




Norman Hartnell


Sir Norman Hartnell KCVO (1901-1979) was born in Streatham. He opened his first couture house at 10 Bruton Street, Mayfair in 1923. In 1940 he received a royal warrant as Dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth, then subsequently as dressmaker to HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

The stamp shows an outfit created by Hartnell in the 1950s.




Granny Takes a Trip

Granny Takes a Trip was a boutique opened in February 1965 at 488 Kings Road in London’s Chelsea, by Nigel Waymouth, his girlfriend Sheila Cohen and John Pearse. The shop, which was acquired by Freddie Hornik in 1969, remained open until the mid-70s and has been called the ‘first psychedelic boutique in Groovy London of the 1960s.’

The jacket shown on the stamp was designed by John Pearse using a Morris & Co. furniture fabric print called Golden Lily (1899).




Ossie Clark, print by Celia Birtwell


‘Ossie’ Clark (1942-1996) was born in Warrington, Lancashire. He was a major figure in the Swinging Sixties scene in London and the fashion industry in that era. Clark is now renowned for his vintage designs by present-day designers and compared to the 1960s fashion greats Mary Quant and Biba. He has influenced many other designers, including Yves Saint Laurent, Anna Sui and Tom Ford.

The outfit shown on the stamp here dates from the late 1960s and features a print by Celia Birtwell. 




Tommy Nutter 


Tommy Nutter (1943-1992) was born in Barmouth, Merionethshire. He recreated the Savile Row suit in the 1960s. In 1969, he joined up with Edward Sexton, to open Nutters of Savile Row. Nutter combined traditional tailoring skills with innovative design. His clients included Mick Jagger and Elton John. Nutter was most proud of the fact that he dressed three out of the four Beatles on the cover of the LP Abbey Road.

The suit featured on the stamp was originally designed for Ringo Starr and was recreated especially for the photo shoot.

Jean Muir


Jean Muir, CBE, FCSD (1928-1995) was born in London. She worked briefly in a solicitor's office before taking a stockroom job at Liberty & Co in 1950. Despite her lack of formal art college training, she was given the opportunity to sketch in Liberty's ready-to-wear department, which led to her gaining a job as designer for Jaeger in 1956. Her own label Jean and Jane was launched in 1962 followed by Jean Muir Ltd in 1966. Famous clients include former Muir model Joanna Lumley, Charlotte Rampling and Maggie Smith.

The outfit featured here dates from the late 70s/early 80s.




Zandra Rhodes


Zandra Rhodes CBE (1940-) was born in Chatham, Kent. She was one of the new wave of British designers who put London at the forefront of the international fashion scene in the 1970s. Her designs are considered clear, creative statements, dramatic but graceful, bold but feminine. Rhodes’ inspiration has been from organic material and nature. Her approach to the construction of garments can be seen in her use of reversed exposed seams and in her use of jewelled safety pins and tears during the punk era.
 


With her bright green hair (later pink and sometimes red or other colours), theatrical makeup and art jewellery, she stamped her own clear identity on the international world of fashion. Rhodes designed for Diana, Princess of Wales, and continues to design for royalty and celebrities. She notably designed several outfits for Freddie Mercury.

The early 80s gold ‘Royal’ dress shown here comes from Zandra Rhodes’s personal collection.




Vivienne Westwood

Dame Vivienne Westwood DBE RDI (1941-) is largely responsible for bringing punk fashion into the mainstream. In the mid-1970s with Malcolm McLaren, Westwood created clothes drawing inspiration from bikers, fetishists and prostitutes, which McLaren sold from his Kings Road boutique. When McLaren became manager of the Sex Pistols, the band wore Westwood and McLaren's designs. The ‘punk style’ included bondage gear, safety pins, razor blades, bicycle or lavatory chains on clothing and spiked dog collars for jewellery.



Westwood’s work includes the adoption of traditional elements of Scottish design, such as tartan fabric, and the reinterpretation of 17th-and 18th-century cloth cutting principles.

 Her first catwalk show was presented in 1981, featuring the collaboration of Westwood and McLaren. The first major retrospective of her work was shown in 2004–05 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The 1993 Harlequin dress shown here was famously modelled by Naomi Campbell.




Paul Smith


Sir Paul Smith RDI (1946 -) was born in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. He left school at 15 with the ambition of becoming a racing cyclist. A cycling accident put an end to his cycling hopes, and during the six-month hospital stay that followed Smith made some new friends. After leaving hospital he arranged to meet them at a local pub that was popular with art students. It was then that he realised he wanted to be a designer.

Smith took evening tailoring classes with Gordon Valentine Tipton, who showed him how to cut cloth as well as teaching him all the basics. Later Smith joined Lincroft Kilgour in Savile Row, where his designs were worn by celebrities, including George Best. He opened his first shop in 1970. In 1976 Smith’s first menswear collection was shown in Paris, under the Paul Smith label. In 1998, he showed his first women’s collection at London Fashion Week.



Paul Smith remains fully involved in the business, designing clothes, choosing fabrics, approving the shop locations and overseeing every development within the company. He has showrooms in London, Paris, Milan, New York and Tokyo.



The suit on the stamp dates from around 2003.
 


Alexander McQueen


Lee Alexander McQueen CBE (1969 – 2010) was born in Lewisham, London. He was a fashion designer and couturier best known for his in-depth knowledge of bespoke British tailoring, his tendency to juxtapose strength with fragility in his collections, as well as the emotional power and raw energy of his provocative fashion shows. He worked as chief designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001 and founded his own label under the name Alexander McQueen. His achievements have earned four British Designer of the Year awards (1996, 1997, 2001 and 2003), as well as the CFDA’s International Designer of the Year award in 2003.



The piece shown on the stamp is ‘Black Raven’ from McQueen’s Horn of Plenty 2009 collection.

You should be able to buy them in a British Post Office from today. You can buy stamps and presentation packs online here. There’s also a slideshow from Saturday’s Guardian here.

We’re putting together a Pecha Kucha for Japan, which will take place in 2 weeks time on the 23rd of May. Just over a year after the tsunami sent shockwaves through a country and around the world, in conjunction with D&AD we’re gathering a collection of the design and communication world’s greatest stars to share stories about Japan.

The idea is that we’ll hear about their visits, their projects, the influence of Japan on their work, and why it’s a place like no other.

Some of them may talk about their work, some of them about how to find the best tempura. Some of them may talk about Tokyo taxi drivers or show their collection of treasures from Tokyu Hands (a famous and frankly bonkers Japanese department store). Some speakers will talk about how the tsunami has affected or is influencing their work. Who knows. But the star of the evening is already decided - Japan, and the special place it holds in so many creatives’ hearts.

The format is the now world-famous 20x20 Pecha Kucha, invented by Tokyo-based architects Klein Dytham. Each speaker has 20 slides, each slide lasts 20 seconds. 6 minutes, 40 seconds, then it’s over. The ultimate presentation level playing field (well, in theory at least).

Our confirmed speakers so far include:

Andy Altmann (Why Not Associates)
Jonathan Barnbrook (Barnbrook)
Fred Deakin (Airside and Lemon Jelly)
Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham)
Kathryn Findlay (Ushida Findlay)
Ryohei Kawanishi (fashion designer) 
David Keech (Keech Design)
Michael Marriott (Michael Marrriott)
Michael C Place (Build)
Timon Screech (Professor of History of Art & Archaeology, SOAS)

and we’ll be announcing more names in the next few days.


Host and additional speaker for the evening will be D&AD past-president Michael Johnson (johnson banks), and the location is the Logan Hall in Bloomsbury, London. Through Creatives Unite for Japan, all profits from the evening will be donated to the ASHINAGA organisation to help provide Japanese orphans with educational and emotional support.

As well as updating on the final speakers, we’re going to showcase some of the speakers over the next few days. So it seems best to start with Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham, the man who hatched the idea of the Pecha Kucha format (it means ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese) in order to stop his architecture students from droning on for too long. (To be fair, most creative types can take a while to get to their point, not just architects).

This is what his web-site tells us:
‘A child of the 1960s but ever a man of the contemporary moment, Mark Dytham was born on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, a postwar British ‘new town’. A fascination with the potential of building “the new” was instilled in him from an early age, and he pursued an education in architecture to the level of a Masters at the Royal College of Art (where he met Astrid). 

In the late 1980s, Japan was the country furthest in the future. Mark was determined to see what it looked like. The urban energy and willingness to experiment that he and Astrid found in Tokyo convinced them to base their practice there, despite hard economic times.

Mark’s entrepreneurial energy kept things afloat during the early years, and his services to British design in Japan was honored by the Queen with the MBE (Member of the British Empire) medal in 2000. Mark is a sought-after speaker, and has participated in numerous design- related events around the world. He has also taught at a number of universities within and beyond Japan.’

What the blurb doesn’t tell is that go anywhere with him in Tokyo and about three hundred gaijin will stop to say ‘konnichiwa’, and if you ever have the pleasure of doing a Pecha Kucha at the home of it all, Superdeluxe in Roppongi, you’ll quickly learn that he’s a rapid-fire MC as well. Anyway, here’s some more stand-out projects in case you didn’t know the work.

Watch this space for more info on the event. You can find out a bit more here, and most importantly book those tickets here with prices from £5 to £15 depending on membership/student-ness, etc.

If you’ve read this and have a sensational idea for a speaker, tweet us @johnsonbanks, #LondonPKJapan.

If you’re a sensational speaker who already fits the bill and can’t believe we haven’t yet emailed, email info (at) johnsonbanks (dot) co (dot) uk and put us straight. There’s still time to fill those last slots…

Just a brief thought to say: we’re working on some more logo mash-ups.

Here’s a little taster: what happens when a retro skate brand decides to become a social network.

Full set to come next week (with luck).

These are older examples, in case you’re wondering what we’re on about - this is the original set, this was the follow-up

This week we learned that Osama Bin Laden, even whilst laying low in his Abbottabad compound, liked to make use of ‘Just for Men’ hair dye to keep up appearances on the occasional video to the troops.

That follows on from the bizarre and widely covered story recently in the British Press of an MI6 officer found dead inside a red North Face holdall and the equally odd news that mass murderer Anders Breivik has a preference for logo-specific sportswear, specifically Lacoste sweaters and t-shirts (as ‘modelled’ at the top of this post).

From a purely branding perspective, it’s hard to see that this can transfer into good news or increased sales for these products. Do middle aged and slightly vain men really want to see Bin Laden looking back at them in the mirror? Does Lacoste truly want the kind of column inches Breivik is keen to supply them?

At a stretch, you could spin the North Face story into something that matches the North Face brand – going into dangerous territory/adventure/pushing yourself to your limits... Well, perhaps not.

The ‘all publicity is good publicity' argument surely breaks down in the face of this kind of endorsement. Burberry may not have been too overjoyed at C-list British celebrity and alleged coke fiend Daniella Westbrook being seen constantly in public in head-to-toe-to-buggy-to-baby Burberry.

Abercrombie & Fitch were (allegedly) so aghast at Jersey Shore ‘star’ The Situation (real name Michael Sorrentino) constantly wearing their overpriced trackies that they started paying him NOT to wear their stuff and go to Hollister* instead.

In an ever-present environment of product placement, brands jostling for the public eye and ‘spun’ stories, you can’t help but grimace at some of these unintentional gaffes. With overpriced consumer goods constantly chasing our attention and eyeballs and pursuing positive celebrity endorsement, perhaps it’s no surprise that sharp-eyed journalists are going to chase these negative stories, when they get the chance.

*Joke: also owned by Abercrombie & Fitch

During a recent trip to Margate to visit the Turner Contemporary and check out Tracy Emin’s old stomping ground, one of the johnson banks team happened upon the far more intriguing shell grotto.

Tucked away down the appropriately named Grotto Hill, in the sloping streets set back from the sandy beach, is what seems like a café with gift shop. This however fronts a small museum and the entrance to an amazing underground grotto, covered in sea shells, forming mysterious patterns and pictures.

Covered in 4.6 million shells (to be more precise), this Grade I-listed structure has an enigmatic history. Discovered by a family in 1835, while allegedly digging a duck pond on their land, and opened to the public a few years later, nobody has ever been able to say when, why, or by whom the grotto was built.

Difficult to carbon date due to the shells being lit by gas lamps during the Victorian times (which is also why they have a monochrome appearance now) there is no mention of it in any document pre-dating the grotto’s discovery.

There are various theories surrounding the grotto’s origin ranging from the Romans, through the Tudors, to the Victorian family who ‘discovered’ it themselves. But one of the most convincing arguments is that the Phoenicians, way back in the first millennium BC, created this shell extravaganza, which appears to depict the journey from birth to death.

Whoever created these winding passageways and for whatever reason, the art on show here is as much worth a visit as the Turners in the gallery by the harbour.

The shell grotto is open everyday 10am-5pm in the summer season, and at weekends during winter (November to March). Find out more here.

A great piece on this morning’s Today programme about Test Card music (and of course, the graphics). So pleased to hear that someone else was taping the radio with a cassette machine.

If you’re really interested, the Test Card Circle can give you more information. Hard to believe, but true.

There’s more information here about a talk by Bob Stanley (on exactly this) of St. Étienne at the ICA tonight

A quick note to say that our Arkitypo project is featured on the Wired UK site today, along with a short interview with Michael Johnson:

‘The first dozen or so came quickly. Some were much harder - either to find an interesting alphabet beginning with 'X' (say), or to find an idea that looked as good in 3D as it did in our heads! We were initially simply drawn to the idea of doing type in three dimensions, and our first experiments were aesthetically driven. But then we became more interested in each letter telling the 'story' of its alphabet - so the Courier 'C' is built from typewriter keys, the 'D' is built from DIN, often used for city signage, and so on.’

The project is written up here and there’s a full slideshow of the alphabet as well.

Formula One’s powers that be are notoriously litigious and protective of their brand assets.

Even the designers of the F1 logo, Carter Wong, couldn’t display it on their own website for the best part of twenty years because of over-zealous application of the copyright laws.

So there’s a wry sense of ‘justice’ about these modifications and graffiti versions. 

How Carter Wong feel about this week’s ‘versions’ of the logo in light of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix, and the parallel protests isn’t clear. Perhaps they are secretly enjoying them too?

(The real logo is below).

Send us more links and examples on Twitter @johnsonbanks

It’s the time of the year when emails fly around town (and the world). Messages of congratulation and condolence, notes of disbelief and high drama. Because this has been D&AD’s judging week, and as ever the results make for perplexing reading.
 
But, stop there.

This isn’t an overview of what got in and what didn’t. This isn’t an examination of how one jury managed to get from 21 long-listed pieces to, er, five (you can read that here). This isn’t a piece wondering and asking how we all eventually end up with projects in our portfolio that never quite make the cut, for a multitude of reasons too complex to list. Nope. None of that.
 
This is just a simple piece to flag that one of my favourite design projects of the decade (perhaps even the millennium) this week didn’t make it into ‘the annual’ (in theory the definitive survey of the world’s best design and advertising of each particular year).

Now, you may think that a 2,200 square metre typographic ‘carpet’ devoted to comedian’s quotes is not your cup of tea. You might not be impressed at how they embedded 160,000 granite letters into concrete. You may not give two hoots that a North England council was somehow persuaded to go for this extraordinary idea (and may in fact think that all northern councils are in fact a push over, once they have been bought enough pints of mild at the hotel bar). Fair enough.

But, seriously, I think that for hand picked jury of graphic designers from all over the world to give out 21 nominations, award at least of them three yellow pencils yet look at The Comedy Carpet and NOT conclude that this is genius is, well, astonishing.

There. I’ve said it. It has happened before - another jury in recent years decided that The Gherkin, as a building was worthy of being in the book, but nothing further. Imagine the conversation – ‘yes, it’s OK but not just iconic enough for me’.
 
It will happen again.
 
As regards the carpet, Patrick Burgoyne, editor of Creative Review this evening admitted that ‘it is a shame that what, for me, was one of the outstanding projects of last year, will not be recognised at all by D&AD’. Indeed. If I’d sat at the awards this evening (as I did) and watched Rosie Arnold give it multiple Yellow Pencils it wouldn’t have surprised me – in fact I’d then be tipping it for Gold.
 
For a certain, sceptical generation of designer, this will be further proof of the scheme’s fallibility. Some of us will wonder why Why Not Associates didn’t ‘cover themselves’ by entering into various categories – others will counter that needing to assume a jury will ignore your work 2 times out of 3 is indeed a truly cynical move. But I can’t help feeling justice wasn’t done here.
 
By Michael Johnson

 
For more information on the shortlisted projects and winners, go here. For more information on The Comedy Carpet go here. For complete transparency, johnson banks entered four projects into this year’s D&AD, of which one, Arkitypo, got into the annual.

Follow johnson banks on Twitter @johnsonbanks

We’ve just returned from New York where we were present at the launch of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, a project we’ve been working on throughout the winter with our project partners, Jane Wentworth Associates.

Our task was to help position, name and brand this ground-breaking initiative, which is an ambitious, five-year collaboration to chart creative activity and contemporary art from across the world.

The initiative will identify and support a network of art, artists and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa in a comprehensive programme involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities.

The first exhibition, focusing on South and Southeast Asia, will travel to two venues following the opening exhibition in New York in winter 2013. Both Singapore and Hong Kong are target cities where discussions are underway. In total, three exhibitions will travel to three venues each for a total of nine presentations.
 
After an extensive and far reaching trawl for a name (looking at nearly a thousand options), the project team decided on MAP - a suitably global and easily understood word that would sum up the journeying and charting aspect of the project, whilst acting as a noun and a verb in the process.

Our design task was then to create a design system that would accommodate both the world-famous museum brand and its equally famous sponsor, without being able to use any actual art, since the curation process is only just beginning.

Central to the scheme is a flexible logotype that can expand and allow MAP to function as an acronym, as shown above and by the animation below used at the launch.

We’ve also developed a palette of ever-moving land masses that expand and contract, to visualise the three regions that will be explored over the project’s duration. Shown below are ambient animations that were featured at the Museum last week, on both horizontal and vertical plasma screens.

The first design aspects are mainly in electronic and social media, but more applications and a comprehensive manual will follow swiftly.

Here’s a look at the initial design directions of the scheme, and more animation. As the project will span a five year period, we’re anticipating a wider palette of applications will follow over the coming months.

Below is a vertical version of the expanding logotype, again formatted for vertical plasmas.

There’s more information here on the scheme on the Guggenheim’s website.

Thanks to our project partners on this, Jane Wentworth Associates who led on the strategic research and brand narrative and partnered with us on the naming, and to the Guggenheim and UBS project teams for their support throughout the project.

Send us your comments, thoughts via twitter @johnsonbanks, follow the initiative with #GuggUBSMAP

Just a quick link for Friday: our Arkitypo project is featured in the recent issue (number 11) of Kyoorius Magazine. Here are a few 400 pixel pages.

Thanks to Bindu for sending the pdf proof. Looking forward to seeing the real thing.

Last week we were at the opening of the V&A’s new survey of British Design. We couldn’t immediately write it up, because we couldn’t quite work out what we thought. We still haven’t.

First of all the hard facts: hundreds of objects and artefacts from 1948 onwards are gathered together in 3 rooms (and one shop) - this is a major exhibition and surveys of British Design are rare, so that’s got to be celebrated.

If you’re just vaguely interested in design, this is the perfect show for you, supplying an easy-to-browse skip through a multitude of styles, themes and genres. Lots of things to point at, admire and desire.

It could be the sense of ‘something for everyone’ that’s troubling us. Entire categories have to be dealt with in a matter of a few metres. British computers? Just Mr Ive’s iMac and a Spectrum.

Stamps? Well, it's great to see Machin’s original 1960s plaster portrait full size and in the flesh, as it were, but there’s not much else.

Advertising and design? Well that’s dealt with with one wall that jumps from ‘pregnant man’ to the olympic logo in a matter of metres. Obviously not really lobbying for a comprehensive survey of any of these, but some of the sections did seem a little cursory.

Conversely, if you’re studying for a ‘patterning’ MPhil, well there’s a lot here to take in.

Easy to criticise of course, and outside of your own specialism (whatever it may be) it’s great to see some of the pieces that have been unearthed.

An early section devoted to the Festival of Britain and the Piper/Sutherland period is especially interesting.

Classic cultural references abound: Blow-up posters and original Bowie prints, for example.

Then there are some forgotten or obvious classics...

...and some early landmarks (here’s a welded Tom Dixon chair from the mid-eighties).

And this Equus poster still looks excellent.

Some of the set pieces seem to almost lapse into ‘theme-park’. Perhaps that’s harsh? But the ‘signage bit’ at the top of this post is soon followed by the ‘punk bit’ and the ‘Hacienda bit’ complete with now obligatory ‘Saville wall’.

These are all set pieces that make sense, and are suitably nostalgic for a long-past eras, or those visiting from afar and keen to sample that essential ‘British style’ (whatever that may mean).

But oddly, it seems to make more sense when you get to the shop, where you can buy a whole raft of Britain™ products, like this BR t-shirt. Perhaps once commoditised, what we do is more palatable?

Still, the book of the show is great, comprehensive, and echoed by a series of parallel publications.

Well worth seeing overall, of course, but take someone who’s not that into design, wear rose-tinted post-war spectacles, don’t expect to learn from any actual designers, don’t expect to think about where this goes next then go retro-chic splurging in the shop.

British Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age is on until 12th August. Apologies for the shaky camera-phone pics - as ever taken whilst avoiding the V&A goons.

More details here.

A week or so ago we managed to wangle our way into the New York opening of a great new show at the Guggenheim, a career (and life) retrospective of John Chamberlain.

Here’s a snapshot of the work on display: as ever the reinterpretation of the artwork by the building’s famous ramps is quite something (and we’ve been to a fair few that didn’t survive the curatorial test) but this is a triumph. Chamberlain’s pieces are hung chronologically, so a gentle amble upwards walks you through his life and works, including some never before displayed, and most within touching distance.

Chamberlain’s first retrospective was also at the Guggenheim, 40 years ago, so this is a touching tribute only a few months after his death in 2011.

Early assemblages soon give way to his trademark mangled car parts and industrial detritus, upcycling industrial cast-offs into new and more elegant forms.

The colour is so overwhelming that this amazing study (below) in galvanised steel makes quite an impact. It’s also a massive piece of mangled steel that seems to balances precariously, so that could be a contributing factor...

In later life, Chamberlain tended towards more linear collections in his junk-yard searches, and also gravitated to the (now antique) cars of his earlier work.

We especially loved these - they tower over you like metallic anemones.

Anyway, highly recommended, on until the 13th of May and there’s more information here, and here.

We wanted to write about this a week ago but were too stressed that a design-blog-reading burglar (well, you never know) would see it and try and break in.

This is a Greenfield G4 acoustic guitar that has been made for the European market by Canadian luthier Michael Greenfield. It’s made of African Blackwood and Adirondack spruce, has a total of three bevels and in case you’re wondering if your screen has gone wonky, don’t - those frets are intentionally fanned.

The reason why we didn’t want to write about it until it left the studio? It’s price. Somewhere north of £20,000 ($32,000).

Anyway, the photos are taken, the guitar has left the building without any cracks, bumps or need to check the contents insurance.

Here’s a Greenfield G4 in the hands of the rather talented Mr Andy McKee. Strangely he seems to be able to play his a little better then we can. More practice needed.

Thanks to Tal Silverman for the shots.

We’ve been doing various projects, collaborations and indeed small gigs with a start-up company, The North American Guitar (symbol shown above).

This has resulted in various events across London, including members’ nights at Soho House and an evening at Abbey Road. A week or so ago saw their first anniversary at Mosimann’s restaurant and the chance to hear and play with one of the UK’s greatest guitarists, Clive Carroll.

He is is playing a recent tune, Eliza’s Eye’s. That’s just two hands and one guitar, but you’d swear it was more.

If that’s not enough for you, here he is playing Mississipi Blues. You can understand why we couldn’t play for a couple of days afterwards. Must try harder.

The issue of Blueprint magazine that hit the streets this week contains a long article dedicated to the 50th anniversary of D&AD, and a specially designed cover by johnson banks.

After a brief design stage, we concentrated on doing a completely pencil-drawn cover. This idea made it to the final round...

...showing the start date (1962) rubbed out and redrawn as 2012.

But the winner was D&AD’s now ubiquitous hexagons (the shape of the base of the famous wooden pencils), seen here in close-up.

And, below, the final cover.

The article itself is an extensive ten-page look at D&AD’s history, with examples from each decade and commentary from past and future presidents such as Martin Lambie-Nairn, Michael Johnson and Neville Brody. Thanks to Blueprint and D&AD for the invite

Last night we were at a ‘Penguin Pool’ event at Arup London’s headquarters which included displays, speakers and the opening of a short exhibition dedicated to the Arkitypo project.

Arup’s have very kindly helped out on the construction of dedicated plinths for the pieces that allow them to stand, or be suspended, and have lent their exhibition space for a week.

Great to see all the pieces together. Sadly too frail to be on display without a perspex cover, but a lot of very interested visitors and interesting questions about the project.

It was also great to be able to get ‘up close’ to some of the pieces again (most were finished a couple of months ago).

This eight minute ambient animation is projected onto one of the exhibition space’s walls and explains the background to each piece in more detail.

Speaking at the event was Matt Webb from Berg - a great snapshot of the state of art in data visualisation that touched on fascinating subjects such as Chernoff Faces and their recent Little Printer project.

Michael Johnson from johnson banks then took the crowd on a 12 minute journey though the thinking behind the Arkitypo project.

Then we believe, there may well have been some drinks. A great evening.

The exhibition itself is only on for a short amount of time - it's open today (Friday) then until the 8th next week, 9.00am to 6.00pm daily. We’re told out of hours visits are possible, but have to be arranged in advance, by appointment by emailing Sarah (dot) Maddison (at) Arup (dot) com.

Thanks again to Tom, Jennifer, Sarah and the Arup's team for arranging, the Ravensbourne team and Creative Review.

There’s been a lot of great feedback and twitterage about our Arkitypo project, so we thought readers might be interested in these 360 degree ‘spins’ of the final letters, both as stills and a Vimeo movie.

The rotations help you see that some of the letters have truly extraordinary forms in 3D, such as Lubalin Graph...

...or Wilhelm.

There’s a really extensive piece on Design Boom as well, if you want to see other pics and working ideas.

News about the exhibition at Arup London to follow soon - but in brief the mini-exhibition of all the letters opens Thursday night then is only open for a short period, until the 8th of February.

Just a brief note to mourn the passing of Bob the Burmese, a mainstay of the Johnson household for 17 years, and occasional star of Design Observer.

Much missed.

The Arkitypo project came about when one of our clients, Ravensbourne, asked if we were interested in developing a research project to test and showcase the in-house 3d prototyping skills and technology at their site in Greenwich.
 
We suggested they do something typographic – just the briefest period of research revealed very few examples of prototyping merged with graphic design. So we set ourselves the brief to develop a 3d alphabet of alphabets. Each letterform is different, each in turn interprets its own alphabet.
 
For each letter we carried out extensive research, made drawings, built maquettes and did simple 3d visuals on our machines, before handing the ideas over to Ravensbourne’s team.

There was a period of ‘virtual proofing’ where we examined the ideas as rendered files, and when all parties were happy, we began the printing (which for some letters took as long as eight hours). Some of the ideas worked straight away, some needed refining. Some fell apart, some were perfect, but after about six months solid work by December last year the ‘alphabet’ was ready for the photography you see here.

Akzidenz Grotesk (shown above)
Originally designed in 1896, and forerunner to Helvetica, Akzidenz was part of a family of early sans-serifs called ‘grotesques’. It comes in a range of weights and styles: for this design a condensed weight is ‘fractalised’, turning a grotesque into a thing of beauty.

Bodoni
Baskerville and Bodoni are usually judged as two separate typefaces, but Giambattista Bodoni modelled his famous font on John Baskerville’s, at first. The key difference is that the thicks and thins are in turn thicker, and thinner.

Courier
Courier was originally commissioned for 1950s IBM typewriters, but soon became the standard font throughout the then-emerging industry. As a nod to the torturous days of jammed machinery, this ‘C’ is built from a small forest of typewriter keys.

DIN
DIN is the acronym of Deutsches Institut für Normung. Type design DIN 1451 was selected in 1936 as the standard German typeface across areas such as engineering, technology and traffic signs. As its popularity grows internationally, it has become one of the key symbols of cities and technology across the world.

Engravers
This was typical of a style of font originally designed for engraving into metals, especially gold and silver.

Fraktur
This classic ‘blackletter’ style of fonts is umbilically linked to Germany’s history, being the predominant style for centuries in pre-war Germany. For most of the 20th century it proved controversial, eventually being banned by the Nazis in 1941. Post-war adoption of sans-serif typefaces effectively killed it off as the nation’s style of script.

Gill Sans
This is the famous lowercase ‘g’ from Eric Gill’s 1933 typeface, Gill Sans. He is quoted as saying, “A pair of spectacles is rather like a ‘g’; I will make a ‘g’ rather like a pair of spectacles.”

Helvetica
Originally designed in 1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk, its 1960 version was renamed Helvetica. Given that its name was based on ‘Helvetia’ (Latin for Switzerland) it was no surprise that it became the vanguard of the Swiss style, and the typeface of choice for corporations across the world for the last fifty years.

Industria
Originally designed for The Face in 1984 by Neville Brody, Industria was released publically as a font in 1989. It has a mechanical structure of straight strokes, rounded corners and square inner spaces that refer back to Art Deco and design pioneers such as Ladislav Sutnar.

Johnston
This face is one of the earliest 20th century sans-serif typefaces, designed for London Transport by Edward Johnston in 1916. Originally called ‘Underground’, we now know it as Johnston, and it remains in use a century later. It was a key influence on Gill Sans and has several unique features, including its diagonal square dots.

Kabel
Released in 1927, Kabel was a geometric sans-serif typeface that was named in honour of the then newly completed transatlantic telephone cable.

Lubalin Graph
Herb Lubalin designed this font by initially basing it on its predecessor, Avant Garde. It filled a need for a slab-serif alphabet for the emerging phototypesetting industry.

Machine
This infamous ITC typeface of the seventies took its inspiration from the American Midwest a century before. Now a classically brutal font perfect for all things industrial, it is interpreted here with a system of interlocking cogs.

New Alphabet
This typeface was a radical experimental font proposed by Dutch design legend Wim Crouwel in 1967. He simplified characters down to their absolute minimum, and only utilised vertical, horizontal or 45-degree strokes.

OCR-A
One of the original computer fonts, OCR became omnipresent in banking and on cheques. It was often printed in magnetic ink and was widely adopted in industry, despite the fact that many of its letterforms (designed to be uniquely different) were in fact uniquely odd.

Perpetua
Another Eric Gill font from the 1920s, Perpetua hints at Gill’s skill as a calligrapher and stone-cutter, especially in its capitals. Here it is set to perpetuate in an endless, Möbius strip of uppercase letters.

Quadrate
Many of the characters within this grid-based typeface from 2002 have the impression of having 3D form whilst only 2D. So this adaptation imagines what its 3D shape ‘could’ have been.

Retina
This typeface began as a typeface for the sections of the The Wall Street Journal printed in very small sizes. At large sizes it seems to feature crude ‘notches’ cut into the letterforms but these are there to compensate for the way blobs of ink blur type at tiny sizes.

Serifa
Adrian Frutiger designed Serifa in 1966. Technically a ‘slab-serif’ design, Frutiger based his first designs on his well known sans-serif font, Univers, and simply added the serifs.

Trajan
This was a 1989 adaptation of the famous Roman capitals inscribed on the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome. These letterforms have been influential for centuries, but this was the first design to directly emulate the carvings. The column itself can be climbed via an internal spiral staircase.

Univers
This typeface family was famous for its broad appeal and was one of the first attempts to create a classification across its many weights, widths and styles. Since its introduction in 1957 it has become one of the world’s most ubiquitous typefaces.

Verdana
A font specially designed for use on screen: after being bundled into Windows software from the mid-nineties onwards it has become one of the pre-eminent typefaces on the worldwide web.

Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch
Rudolf Koch, who designed this font in the 1920s, drew heavily on the shapes and curves learnt during his training as a calligrapher, as he developed this ‘blackletter’ design.

Xheighter
Introduced at the turn of the millennium, Xheighter is a tall, condensed sans-serif that becomes even taller and more condensed when stacked on top of itself.

DFP Yuan
Yuan in Chinese literally means a ‘round object’ or ‘round coin’. Intersecting ¥ symbols have been spun in a circle to create an endless circle of Chinese money.

Zig Zag
This is an inline, Art Deco style typeface that, in 3D, becomes an interlocking, zig-zagging puzzle.

The alphabet is also featured in the February issue of Creative Review in their ‘Monograph’ which is sent to all their subscribers. It will be exhibited for a short period in Arup London’s exhibition space from this Friday for a week (there's more information here) and in a set of limited edition posters (more details later this week).

Project credits:
Design: johnson banks
Client: Ravensbourne
3d imaging and prototyping: Jon Fidler
Photography: Andy Morgan
Project client: Jill Hogan
Project advisor: Ben Caspersz

A recent week spent in New York for meetings, and a cross section of art ‘seen’, either on purpose, or by chance.

The most designery of the week was a journey down town to a small show of Paula Scher ‘map’ paintings. It’s great to see these for real, life size, and just enjoy their sheer wit and complexity.

Unless you’ve recently won the lottery though, forget about investing in one of these for the kitchen wall. Even the prints are eye-wateringly expensive, so perhaps invest in the book instead.

Then on to ‘All’ by Maurizio Cattelan at the Guggenheim (now sadly closed, sorry). Bringing together pretty much everything he has done since 1989, Cattelan and Chief Curator Nancy Spector elected to not use those famous curving walls at all (which are left bare), but hang the entire show from the ceiling.

Apologies: close to impossible to do this justice with shaky cameraphone pics, but you get the idea.

Quite extraordinary.

Then, out of the blue, there are other examples of art in the oddest of places. This Upper East side car park seems innocuous enough...

...until you venture inside and realise that an art-loving owner has regularly pasted exhibition posters on the entrance wall for what looks like decades. 

Then, in the more austere surroundings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you’re surrounded by so much ‘perfection’, it’s a rather striking example of imperfection that takes your eye - in this case a fragmentary bust of co-emperor Lucius Verus from the second century AD.

It’s amazing what you see if you look at things a little differently.

One of the oddest projects we did last year and already rocketing up the best-seller lists came out over the break - a manual for sorting your life out in 2012 called Instructions for happiness and success*.

Taking its visual cues from car manuals, mind maps, 1960s diagraphics and airport signage, we’ve created a fold-out, open out, flip flapping extravaganza. Just at the first spread, you’re invited to mind-map your life.

Here are some other spreads and sections.

This is a deeply disturbing chart, that we've also turned into a poster. Some of us have discovered we’re distinctly ‘low vibration’.

More customisable checklists.

And ways to affirm, then expand.

Here's the lead poster for an underground campaign running in London.

instructions for happiness and success* (100% guaranteed) by Susie Pearl, is out now through Quadrille. A manual for creating the life you choose? How could you not buy that.

In a year of riots, uprisings, famous deaths, that wedding, phone hacking revelations and a double-dip recession in everything but name, it seems a bit superfluous to sit down and write a normal review of the year, from a design and communications perspective. Staying in business or keeping/getting a job has been most people’s main aim of the year rather than pushing the envelope. So this year’s review is a bit less celebratory and a bit more grounded than normal.
 
You could argue that designers and technologists were instrumental in many of the key moments of the year. Twitter and BBM fuelled riots and uprisings, then helped reconvene troops for the next wave. Lulzsec hacked their way into the history books. Smartphones recorded Gaddafi’s last hours whilst headsets equipped with live-streaming video let Obama and his generals observe Bin Laden’s downfall from the safety of their White House sofas.

But the technology was just the delivery mechanism: we watched the tsunami in Japan unfold in real time on our computer screens then tracked the quake on blogs. (Sadly, all that some designers seemed to be able to do was design posters to mark the event - the increasingly common phenomenon of ‘Disaster = Poster’).
 
Thankfully Mark Dytham’s wonderful Pecha Kucha network was able to immediately respond with its series of Japan themed events and plans for a ‘one-year after’ PK in London remain (hopefully) on the table.

Someone, somewhere designed the amazing cathedral-like space that is the Hadron Collider, and we’re all cramming frantically about Higgs Bosons whilst also worrying that Einstein might have been wrong about neutrinos and the speed of light (obviously). But it’s what the collider hints at and discovers that amazes and astounds, not its uncelebrated architect. Amazingly, our other favourite cathedral of last year, Thomas Heatherwick’s celebration of all things seed-like, was passed over by many design juries (more of that later).

Of course a million column inches (and one of the images of the year, above) have been devoted to Steve Jobs’ passing – his death was a seminal moment and leaves a gaping hole in that category marked ‘worldwide chief executives who we really look up to and admire’.

It raises interesting questions for the newly knighted Jonathan Ive – perhaps we will now begin to see Apple break away from it’s Braun-inspired design roots and show us what he wanted to try all along.

Unfortunately timed quote of the year has to go to Ken Grange who, when interviewed earlier in the year as part of his own excellent career retrospective at the Design Museum, suggested that ‘they're a bit up their own arse, to be honest. Their things are overdesigned’. Grange may be even grumpier still when he considers that Ive is now newly knighted for designing beautiful objects in California, rather than the portfolio of functional/useful objects that Grange can offer.

All the rioting, hacking and hoo-hah rather took away from the passing of one of our favourite polymaths and artists, Richard Hamilton, beautifully remembered in this piece by Rick Poynor. Hamilton’s influence, we would argue, has yet to be truly tracked and celebrated - perhaps his passing will finally inspire someone to curate what would be an amazing show of his work and influences across both art and design.

The year’s doom and gloom is echoed by the best TV of the year: the continued mystery of how anyone can make that jumper look that good  (The Killing, of course, from Denmark) and the magnetically disturbing family drama The Slap (from Australia). If you missed them both, it’s box-set time in the sales. Hypnotic, geeky, and with a slightly grating voiceover, yes, but The Story of Film, an Odyssey has us entranced as we continue to work though all 15 episodes. Strangely forgotten in other people’s thoughts seems to be The Hours – great British drama set in the slightly forgotten era of late-fifties Britain and the Suez crisis.

The most talked about exhibitions of the year? Top has to be the Leonardo at the National Gallery in London, but close was Talk to Me at MoMA. The V&A once again pulled off a couple of crackers with The Power of Making and their much-discussed and post-rationalised show on Postmodernism. Earlier in the year, graphic designers got to get all griddy at the Wim Crouwel show at the Design Museum, another great retrospective.

It seemed to be the year when logos were discussed constantly, perhaps to time with what seemed like weekly releases of collections of logo compilations in the world’s creative bookstores. Here's Creative Review’s first round-up of ‘The Best’ (as compiled from many different sources, including ours).

In terms of brand of the year, it seems to be fashionable in a kind of ‘no-logo’-esque way to discuss the Occupy movement – and yes it seems to have become a prefix brand that can become whatever it wants (Occupy London, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy My Front Room etc). And now it even has a designer logo to boot, courtesy of Jonathan Barnbrook.

The truth is, it’s pretty hard to pinpoint breakthrough identity projects for 2011, apart from perhaps several education projects that continued to push the definition of flexible identity along (for Design Academy Eindhoven, MIT and OCAD).
 
There’s no doubting the most controversial of the year – a rebrand for Eurostar that seemed to polarise the design community, and a ‘will-they-won’t-they?’ project for HP that never made it into the public domain for more than 36 hours.

Picture of the year? So many to choose from but let’s try and lighten the mood a little with Obama, Hilary et al wearing Beatrice’s famous fashion faux-pas.
 
If you sit and think about movies of the year, the best came early (King’s Speech, Black Swan). The breakthrough film of the year proved that girl-ettes in the cinema were actually viable, with Bridesmaids. Most polarising movies of the year: We need to talk about Kevin and of course, The Tree of Life. If you stayed the course, it was worth it, honestly. Maybe have two triple expressos and watch the DVD.

In publishing terms, following on from the demise a year before of ID magazine in the USA, British trade mag Design Week was axed. Whilst some of its content may have irritated regular readers, it was the world’s only weekly Design magazine and hence deserved its status as the ‘voice’ of the industry. Its demise leaves just its sister publication (Creative Review) to track communications in general in print and online.
 
DW's website is reinventing itself as ‘design news’, but as for where you can go for pithy, considered design writing other than Eye, and occasionally Design Observer? It’s a little bleak. Since writing over 400 words on any blog is asking for trouble (this is word number 1,139 of over 2,000 and many of you will have linked out by now) the answer is that original, objective design writing is getting harder and harder to find.

Grafik magazine closed, then relaunched, then closed again, prompting more discussion about the role of design criticism, the unfortunate topic of the last shelved edition. ‘Design criticism – yes/no’ has bubbled under all year (see here and here). Whilst it may have sometimes ebbed and flowed, Matt Judge’s design blog Design Assembly sadly closed its CMS after three years, marked by a ‘best-of’ publication.

Back to easy and more familiar musical territory, PJ Harvey stormed the musical barricades again with this year’s album that certainly got hammered at johnson banks towers (although at least one of us thinks it sounds like a wailing banshee attempting to sound like The Unthanks whilst attacking an autoharp). Our other ‘most-played’ albums of the year have to be James Blake, more falsetto wailing from Wild Beasts, Sbtrkt, the Kings of Limbs remix album and Bon Iver’s 2011 offering, apart from the last track which sounds suspiciously like Phil Collins.

Design Group of the year? Well, we think that accolade should go to GBH in Chiswick in London for brilliantly winning three (count them) yellow pencils at D&AD for various Puma projects, and very well deserved they were. If time permitted it would be interesting to get the annuals down and see how many eons it is since a design company other than Apple won three yellow pencils in the same year?

The obligatory D&AD hoo-hah of the year has to be their decision to publicise running shortlists of work that was still to be edited and removed, swiftly described by Creative Review as ‘the shortlist where nobody wins’. Ex-president Mike Dempsey also caused a bit of a stir later in the year when he queried the sense of sending out ‘slices’ of pencils to commemorate ‘in-book’ projects, amongst other things.

The equally obligatory Olympic debate has to be the release of its ‘artist’ posters that seemed to annoy everyone (although the swimming one is great). Kingston University promptly followed up with a nice set from just one year at one course in one university which made us all wonder what could have happened to this brief had designers been involved.

Our Favourite Opera of the year? Had to be The Damnation of Faust (and we can’t wait for the 2012 performance of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer. Gig of the year? A toss-up between the Penguin Café Orchestra/Portico Quartet at the Barbican  and Andy McKee at Union Chapel (but that’s a pretty subjective list, it’s fair to say).

The most interesting website of the year helps us deal with two categories at once, since Designers and Books.com also has a great list of the finest design books of 2011 which saves us from having to compile it (we’d go for the Saul Bass tome if we had to vote for just one). Fiction-wise we’re (slightly predictably) going for the excellent recent Murakami, IQ84.
 
Mention in website dispatches has to also go to Gurafiku, dedicated to Japanese graphic design, and Clients from Hell continues to delight. From the twittersphere, there’s so much going on at any one time it’s tough to single out any one feed but you’ve got to admire the way Adrian Shaughnessy (@AJWShaughnessy) cranks out those thoughts and links, very impressive. Mention must go to Jamie Wieck, he of 50 things fame who managed to produce something genuinely useful across multiple platforms. (Here’s to the top 100 Jamie…)

Ad campaign of the year? We’re going to give it to Cravendale’s Cats with thumbs, and en passant give a little nod of respect to W+K London’s Neil Christie for writing one of the most, if THE most, honest appraisals of an agency year, ever.

We also loved this Converse Wall from Perfect Fools...

The design project of the year we wished we’d done: has to be the Why Not’s comedy carpet in Blackpool. Awesome.

Our list of challenges in 2012?
Thinking of ways to get computer science taken seriously again in British schools (not just reserved for spotty geeks). Also in schools: what’s to be done about the threat to take DT out of the core curriculum?

Here’s a nice big issue: making design relevant as a creative business tool, not just the bit ring-fenced for prettification and decoration. Related to this, we’re watching and hoping that the Design Council is going to roll up its sleeves and get stuck in this year.
 
Here’s another thought – is it just us or has design become something that’s only mentioned when something goes wrong (as in ‘the design of the airplane’s wing was at fault’ or the ‘design of RIM’s European server was to blame for loss of BBM for three days?’). Clearly the fact that businessmen and teenage girls were a bit put out for a few days is actually quietly funny, but Design = something invisible = something you take to task is a worrying trend.
 
We’re hoping for some actual great design for the Olympics (more than just these) – let’s face it things have been pretty thin on the ground so far. Perhaps the actual event itself will be a blast and no-one will care about the graphics anymore? Perhaps.
 
We’re watching out for the much discussed next phase of Twitter, to easily include images (so, we guess, functioning a little like China’s Weibo?) and wondering if true micro-blogging will further hasten the demise of macro-blogging?

To end, #1, the weirdest mash-up of music and design this year was this ‘city as score’ from the ever-readable City of Sound.

To end, #2, finally proof that design can influence at the highest levels – one time Labour minister Chris Smith who abolished museum charges reveals he was inspired by a 40-year-old poster. (via Mr Asbury).

To end, #3, this is our loveliest example of ‘that is truly great but we’re not really sure why’ of the year, via DesignBoom.
 

Thank you for following Thought for the Week as it enters its seventh year of publishing.

Here’s to a happier, more prosperous, more employable New Year for all. Fingers crossed. We will follow soon with our own set of Designer resolutions – in the meantime these are a pretty good start.

Let us know what we forgot, or what you think, as ever on Twitter @johnsonbanks.

Merry Xmas everyone, with a few letters and prototypes from our Arkitypo project. Early in the New Year we'll have interesting news on this project (a publication, posters and a possible exhibition).

As a reminder, this is  a project we’re doing with Ravensbourne, looking to push their MSc prototyping machinery to its limits. If you’re interested in seeing more, take a visit to the department’s blog.

There's more on this project here, here and here.

For the type geeks out there, the featured typefaces are: Machine; Engravers; Retina; Yuan; X-heighter; Machine (again); Akzidenz Grotesk Condensed and Serifa.

So, after favourite blogs and tweets, music, film and favourite design, its time to cast your votes for everything else. The categories are usually pretty fluid, but here are some from last year as a guide.

The design stories of the year

The picture of the year

The kind of thing that gives graphic designers a bad name

The kind of thing you may live to regret…

The trend that just won’t go away

Rebrand of the year (best/worst)

Book of the year

Ad of the year

Phrase of the year

Best TV

Exhibition of the year

Gig of the year

We don’t really need one, but we’d like…

If you’re wondering what we’re on about see here and here for previous examples of Review of The Year.

You can send us emails direct to info [at] johnsonbanks [dot] co [dot] uk, or tweet us @johnsonbanks and use the hashtag #jbROTY. Results will be mashed with our views and the whole thing will be stuck together over the break and presented in the new year.

Ok today is your chance to vote for your favourite Music, Film and Design of the year.

So if we’re anything to go by, this year’s most played have been James Blake, the Tron Soundtrack, Bon Iver and Sbtrk t- you may of course differ.

Film? Black Swan - best or worst? Tree of Life? We need to talk about Kevin?

What about Design of the Year? (That's a tough one isn’t it?)

It's that time of the year again when we start compiling everyone's comments for our review of the year. If you’re wondering what we’re on about see here and here for previous examples.

This year we’re going to do it it little, short stages and ask you for your thoughts day by day this week.

So, to start us off, please send us your nominations for best and worst Blogs of the year, and best and worst Twitter feeds.

You can send us emails direct to info [at] johnsonbanks [dot] co [dot] uk, or tweet us @johnsonbanks and use the hashtag #jbROTY. Results will be mashed with our views and the whole thing will be lovingly crafted over the break and presented for your delectation in the new year.

Some aspects of design are relatively cut and dried. Design a brochure? Client approves, it’s printed, it’s delivered. Websites are tweaked and proofed in pixels, then finally published. Product design endures countless variations and redraws but finally factories ‘tool up’ and we grab real things with real hands and make real choices.

But identity design is much less straightforward. For as long as any of us can remember, getting an idea approved has stood a far greater chance of acceptance if accompanied by visuals ‘imagining’ how that new symbol or logo might look in real life. Once they were drawn, often painfully, with magic markers. Then hastily cobbled together from stats and customised ‘rub-downs’ (a kind of letraset). But, for two decades, the computer has increasingly helped designers of all persuasions realise their ideas, then proof, test and tweak in a virtual universe.

Great computer visuals help ‘sell’ an idea, there’s no doubt. The Powerpoint looks excellent, the route seems, well, seamless. You begin to dream – ‘if they really went for this, it could be really great’, you start to think.

Then reality hits. The tweakers begin their trade, boardroom battles are fought, research re-invents.

Sometimes an idea goes through, and applications turn out as planned, if not better. But equally often an idea is compromised. That presentation that looked so seamless becomes an unwelcome reminder of what could have been.

Often the core identity is approved but applications are thwarted – that ace brochure never gets done, the signs remain unchanged, the website re-skinned rather than re-imagined. The Powerpoint? Well, it might reflect the changes - but – it might not. It remains as a moment in time, a great ‘Powerpoint scheme’ that never becomes real. It might be shown to other clients, but never dwelt upon – awkward questions might reveal how little of it ever saw the light of day.

But in the era of the digital portfolio, the lines have blurred. It’s not unusual now for companies to include on their websites some or all of these ‘visuals’. Sometimes companies might decide that hypotheticals (such as this scheme for London by Venture Three) should be in the public domain.

Some might choose to show what they really intentioned with a scheme, knowing that once it left them it was compromised (such as this work on the London brand).

Experimenting digitally, can be useful but controversial. The design for the London Olympics logo was of course presented with computer visuals future-gazing five years to 2012. But when entered into design competitions, judges were faced with a wall of presentation boards containing an agreed logo surrounded by a dozen ‘what-if’s’, perhaps prompting the question, ‘what now?’

A few years ago, in idle moments at johnson banks we used this blog (then followed on Creative Review) to air, in public, our thoughts on how you could simply improve some of the mundane logos that surround us everyday. It seemed innocent, but raised the hackles of many – we’d ‘crossed a line’ and promptly stopped that series dead in its tracks.

Now the line has blurred again with this week’s ‘launch’ of what, on the surface, seems like a brave new identity for Hewlett Packard. But read a little closer and it only seem to half exist. Critically whilst some of the ideas (typefaces, angles) have been partially adopted, the key one – a change of logo, hasn’t. But by placing the theoretical case study into the public domain, the space has been ‘claimed’, for something only currently virtual.

Now this isn’t the place to debate the precise details of this approach (see here and here for the forensics) but it’s certainly a step into the unknown. We have no idea if the scheme will ever see the light. We may never know where it went wrong or why.

How a company as large and litigious as HP was prepared for this work to be shown without sign-off is a mystery, but subsequent 'blocking' of the video aspects of the case study and HP’s statement that ‘the logo was a working draft that did not get adopted by HP’ seem pretty damning.

As Alan Fletcher once memorably pointed out, ‘experience informs me that getting a good idea means dick, but getting it realised separates design sheep from design goats’. A bit harsh, perhaps, but you can see what he meant. Fletcher came from a generation that only truly judged work that saw the light of day. Now, it seems, the light of day can be entirely virtual.

By Michael Johnson

Let us know your thoughts/comments on this via twitter @johnsonbanks

It’s only three years since the ‘World’s first museum of Graphic Design’ opened in Breda, in the southern part of Holland. Their accompanying blurb was pretty highfalutin, but wouldn’t you if you had a design history like the Dutch?

‘The Graphic Design Museum is the first museum in the world for graphic design. The Graphic Design Museum places current graphic design in an historical and cultural context, open to the world and technology. It represents all forms of media, from printed material to interactive web design. Graphic design has been around for about 100 years and has built up a rich tradition in the Netherlands with internationally renowned designers.’ Absolutely.

Only snag is, they’ve just changed the museum’s name. ‘The Image’ has now superseded ‘Graphic Design’. So welcome to MOTI - the Museum Of The Image.

Here’s the new home page and what appears to be a dodgy comp of the building’s fascia.

Confusingly, MOTI still seems to talk a lot about graphic design: ‘MOTI places current graphic design in an historical and cultural context, open to the world and technology. It represents all forms of media, from printed material to interactive web design.’ And their URL? Well, www.graphicdesignmuseum.nl.

It strikes us as a completely bizarre thing to do. And to stop curating Graphic Design, and curate The Image instead? Weird.

Let us know what you think on twitter @johnsonbanks

Apologies, a bit too tied up for proper thoughts this week, but here's a sneak preview of the star of our up-and-coming Christmas campaign for the Science Museum.

For some time we’ve been working on some animations of the Science Museum logo as part of our ongoing work for the Museum.

The first three are now ready to share: we’ve been looking at ways to animate the mark and allude to the different aspects of the collection.

The first one, called ‘Babbage’, takes its inspiration from the acres of cogs, counting machines and early computers scattered throughout the Museum.

As a contrast, ‘Wood’ is much more child friendly and imagines the logo elements as a set of walking/clomping wooden pieces.

The final one (for now) channels Hollywood, Tron and the search for home as the ‘dot’ on the ‘I’ journeys through the logo’s maze. Obviously.

Our thanks to our collaborators on this project: Framestore for their animation skills and A Man Called Adam for their music.

Other johnson banks videos can be viewed on our Vimeo page here.

Here’s an update on our Arkitypo project where we’re designing and producing a three-dimensional alphabet where each letter somehow expresses 26 different typefaces.

Above and below, for ‘O’ we've been researching into the history of the typeface OCR - it was designed to aid magnetic recognition technology so we’re experimenting with building it in iron filings.

For ‘K’ we're looking into Kabel, which was designed to commemorate the laying of the first transatlantic phone cables. This is proving very difficult to output without it, er, falling apart, but this is where we are.

For ‘R’ we've been using Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Retina typeface, originally developed for very small sizes to help deal with ‘ink-fill’ and the type distorting. We’ve been trying to build it out of ink bubbles. Tricky.

For ‘N’ we’ve been using all of Wim Crouwel’s Neu Alphabet as our building blocks. This is where we’ve got to.

As a reminder, this is  a project we’re doing with Ravensbourne, looking to push their MSc prototyping machinery to its limits. If you’re interested in seeing more, take a visit to the department’s blog.

This is part three in a series, part one is here, part two is here.

I was in Hong Kong earlier this week helping to judge the Hong Kong Designers Association (HKDA) awards, together with a clutch of judges gathered from across the globe.

I’ll admit I didn’t know entirely what to expect, but the standard of a series of entries drawn mainly from Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Taiwan and Japan was remarkably high.

I took the occasional camera-phone snap of things that took my eye. But, if you entered, don’t get too excited and start thinking this is a sneak preview of winners – there wasn’t any real correlation between my happy snaps and the things that won. Sometimes things I liked didn’t even make it through the first round.

So this is a collection of things that caught my eye, in no particular order.

As with the image at the top of this post (a wry comment on the brandification of China), China’s recent past is still much in evidence, but usually warped, twisted or commoditised in some way...

...along with some interesting commentary on the West as well.

There was social commentary too: this designer used black plastic bin bags to create these ‘SAVE’ posters.

These are two takes on the rather unusual housing situtation on Hong Kong: a photographic study of ‘corner houses’ and graphic commentary on the super-thin, super-small high-rise dwellings.

There was the customary sprinkle of cartooning and characters: loved this mad space baby, but not sure why...

...and giggled at the assumptions from this English teaching brochure (kids with glasses are clever you see, brunettes naughty and heaven help the fat kid).

Obviously with a track record of studying and working with typography from the region, my phone is now stuffed with great new examples.

Here’s an interesting typographic bird basket. As you do.

And part of a series building letters up out of Taekwondo shapes and moves (this is an ‘E’).

This caught my eye: an idea for making empty billboard posters actually say something nice (in this case, ‘LOVE’)...

...and this, possibly the last word in held-up typographic posters (this time transparent and screen-printed).

And in a kind of echo of the layout above...

So, as I say, a camera-phone collection only and you’ll have to wait until Spring next year to see if any of my favourites made it into the annual. But great brain food for a European Laowai* and a timely reminder that there’s some really great work being done in the region.

By Michael Johnson

Thanks to the HKDA team for their help and hospitality, especially James and Eric, and to my fellow judges Michel de Boer, Kjell Ekhorn, Carin Blidholm Svensson and Yee Chung Man. There’s more information on the award scheme here if you want to start planning next year’s entries.

*foreigner

Did you know that the humble paper clip has been around since 1899, when machines which could cut and bend steel wire were first invented?

Or that it was the Hungarian-born inventor László József Bíro, most famous for introducing the ball to the point of a pen, who also registered the patent for what became the roll-on deodorant?

Or that by the turn of the 20th century there were over 150 patents registered for different types of clothes peg?

The paper clip, the ballpoint pen and the clothes peg are the stars of our new campaign for the Science Museum’s latest show Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things, which is opening in London next week.

The exhibition showcases 30 or so everyday objects (from ballpoint pens to bubble-wrap, umbrellas to egg boxes) and reveals the stories behind them.

Hidden Heroes opens at the Science Museum next wednesday (9th November) and continues until 5th June next year.

For more information on the exhibition visit www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/hiddenheroes.  

Also check out the Hidden Heroes online exhibition where you can customise your digital experience to the objects you are most interested in.

Campaign photography by Tal Silverman.

A week or so ago I was in Luxembourg for the first time on the invitation of an organisation called Design Friends.

There were probably four main reasons for going: they (well, Silvano) asked very nicely; I've never been to Luxembourg before; you get to design the poster, and in a really interesting twist, they print a dedicated 24 page brochure on each speaker. That’s pretty much unheard of.

There’s my gift set of the ten catalogues at the top of this post, including one on a personal hero of mine, Niklaus Troxler. Marvellous.

And one on Christoph Niemann.

Our catalogue, number 10, is also very nice, a great memento of the trip and in lieu of an actual johnson banks brochure could be very useful.

The talk itself was at the swanky new Mudam museum, was well attended and many of the Design Friends themselves took me for a very nice Italian dinner afterwards.

I then managed to get the three or four languages they regularly use even more confused (five if you count Luxembourgish), and perhaps made too many jokes at the expense of the ‘Friends’ who had trained in Norwich. Sorry.

Anyway. Design Friends struck me as a really great organisation set up to enjoy design, each others’ company and raise the awareness of design in Luxembourg (with a really unique unusual publishing model added for good measure). It made me yearn for something similar at home, if I’m honest.

By Michael Johnson

You can learn more about Design Friends here and look at and buy more catalogues here. There’s a rather neat interactive page about the talk here (try clicking on the images). Thanks again to Silvano and the team and Mudam for their hospitality. The poster for the talk, called ‘Zig Zag’, is below.

We got sent these this week - some slightly bonkers (in a good way) sets of quiz cards for you to geek out, design and typographically speaking.

The first three sets are compiled by Kevin Finn (the project’s initiator), Stefan Sagmeister, Steven Heller and Lita Talarico, and the company’s called DESIGNerd 100+.

Here are some examples. Now, that’s going to be a geeky dinner party.

You can find more info and order sets here. Funny.

A few weeks ago we revealed the beginnings of a project we're doing where we're creating a three-dimensional alphabet.

Here’s an update on the work in progress. Shown above and below are some views of Lubalin Graph, which we've interpreted into a linear graph design. These are just camera-phone pics of the actual powder coated 3d prints.

For ‘G’ we’re pursuing an idea about what are known as ‘spectacle g’s’ (the name given to those style of lower case ‘g’s’ which slightly resemble glasses). Our ‘g’ of choice is of course Gill Sans.

We’re in planning with the rest. For example, we’re experimenting with a kind of 21st century version of Engravers (here’s a computer render).

And we’re waiting to take some shots of the 3d print of this idea, a Helvetica ‘H’ built out of a couple of dozen logos based around our ubiquitous friend.

Along the way, it’s become quicker to prototype a few things at smaller sizes, so here are some test prints of the Akzidenz Condensed ‘A’. They are only about 20mm high.

As a reminder, this is  a project we’re doing with Ravensbourne, looking to push their MSc prototyping machinery to its limits. If you’re interested in seeing more, take a visit to the department’s blog.

Just a small selection from our vast 25-year collection of hoarded, impossible-to-throw-away Apple ‘stuff’, starting with an 1986 SE, and going upwards.

One of our summer projects has hit the streets this week in the form of a set of images for Beijing Design Week, titled What design can do. They’ve been designed to celebrate the power of design through Chinese and British collaborations, and were co-curated with Kingston University’s MA Design Curation course.

They’ll appear on postcards and posters in both the UK and China, but the most visible application so far is this set of six huge banners that have just been hung in the 751 district of Beijing, one of the hubs for the current Design Week. Formerly the power generator for the original 1950s industrial complex, 751 is now the designated design zone situated next to the world famous 798 Art District.

A series of slogans headlining international design ideas and theories were developed by the UK and Chinese project teams, designed to echo the passion for sloganeering which has formed a distinctive role in Chinese culture and society. These headlines include New from Old, Shared Design History, Collaborative Practice and the Power of Making. Two final themes focus on Design Process and The Next Generation.

The images were created in a close collaboration with 3d animators to create a bizarre world of real and imagined images which were then rendered out in pieces and reconstructed (to provide large enough images for the banners).

The monochrome approach was chosen to sit harmoniously with the industrial setting for the banners.

New from Old uses the development of the keyboard and typewriter to illustrate the impact of the past on our future. Shared Design History contrasts Chinese and British porcelain to illustrate how our shared influences date back centuries.

Collaborative Practice imagines the world of fashion and architecture intertwined, and The Power of Making takes traditional Chinese knots to create the new.

Design Process attempts to illustrate the stages that we might follow in our pursuit of an idea.

One of the most complex ideas, The Next Generation, tackles the not entirely minor history of writing and typography.

What Design Can Do was curated by Professor Catherine McDermott Kingston University and Tingting Xu, a Beijing curator and graduate of MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University in partnership with the Design Museum.

Our thanks to Norra, Ben and all at Realise Studio for their stoical and patient work producing the images, to John Short for shooting the banners in situ in Beijing, and to Aric and his team for remaining enthusiastic throughout.

Let me say, from the off, that I was left more than a little disturbed by the V&A’s latest blockbuster.

At first I was fine – seeing early Sotsass, Tadanori Yokoo and Rem Koolhaas was a great little trip down memory lane.

I then expected impossible teapots, bizarre chairs, stools and wardrobes aplenty and that was what I got.

I enjoyed a raised section that began with Bladerunner then merrily clumped Grace Jones together with Leigh Bowery: all fine. I wondered a little about Laurie Anderson (who doesn’t) whilst puzzling over Barbara Krueger and Martin Amis. But that was OK.

Where the voices started to get louder in my head was where I got (in theory) to home turf – a little section dedicated to graphics and here there was no escaping it. The V&A has decreed that a few of my favourite things are officially post-modern and there and then the debate started that’s still running in my head.

Wolfgang Weingart’s trailblazing followed by April Greiman’s pixelated perfectionism makes a lot of sense when you see the wiggles, blips and zips displayed on a gallery wall. (That’s if you read the dots from a decorative point of view rather than, at least in Greiman’s case, the early practicalities of embracing the computer).

And I guess a wall of Peter Saville also makes sense since the pieces chosen showcased his ‘high appropriation’ period, where ideas and solutions were culled directly from historical sources, a definingly ‘post-modern’ approach.

If we agree that Post-Modernism questioned all that had preceded it, then Barney Bubbles’ work and Hipgnosis’ XTC sleeve (that itself examines the role of the album sleeve) kind of fit. Kind of.

What confused me, in truth, was seeing Malcolm Garrett and Linder Sterling’s brutalist sleeve for The Buzzcocks, Orgasm Addict. To me this is a symbol of punk, of rebellion and of 1977. Even more so when viewed the right way up (which is, er, upside down ). ‘I am not a post-modernist!’ spluttered Garrett in the lobby in between discussing the nature of that 180 degree rotation and no, I didn’t think he was either.

It’s fantastically post-modern that I (and others) are even bothering to try and define it, of course. Can you define an ‘ism’ which is only two and a bit decades old with any kind of clarity? Probably not. So my eighties life (Blitz, The Face, Koyaanisqatsi, not getting into the right clubs, etc etc) curated into darkened rooms at the V&A felt more surreal than post-modern.
 
But after all that, and despite the mental debate, I enjoyed it. In fact it was a bit of a memory lane, early-then-discarded influences blast. I’ve already been twice. But if you can work out what this ’ism is for, do let me know.

By Michael Johnson

The V&A's Postmodernism show is on until early January. More information here. Apologies for the dodgy angled photography, one again banned by the powers that be (why?), so all pics taken whilst avoiding goons

Last year, as part of the London Design Festival we designed 10 ‘designer maps’ which let visitors to the V&A tour the museum through the eyes and choices of a selection of actors, writers, theatre and culture types.

We’ve just done five more which will be on display as part of this year’s festival. The maps follow a unique pattern which allow the viewer to see parts of the map’s interiors because they are folded in a particular way, all from one A2 piece of paper.

This year’s tour guides are actress Judi Dench, writer AS Byatt, designer Tom Dixon, singer/activist Annie Lennox and fashion accessories designer Lulu Guiness. There are some shots below of how their maps have come together.

Here’s Annie Lennox’s trail of piano keys.

AS Byatt’s route is made of typewriter keys.

Our map for Lulu Guinness uses her trademark lips.

Tom Dixon’s (below) concentrates more on his favourite views of the museum than objects, whilst Judi Dench’s uses theatre floodlights as the ‘map’.

The five maps will be available for free, for a week, but the print run was limited to 1,000 of each map, so you’d better get a move on if you’d like to collect the set. Look out for two of these white sheet metal stands in the museum which were specially designed to display them.

There’s more info on the London Design Festival here, and the V&A’s events and installations here. There are some great pieces to see this year, including this timber wave from award-winning architects AL_A, a collaboration with über-engineers Arup in red American oak. Great stuff.

This weekend’s Kyoorius DesignYatra in Goa was the 7th edition, in 6 years, of what has become South Asia’s premier design conference.
 
Billed primarily as a design conference, DesignYatra has carefully broadened its scope over the years to bring in speakers from all aspects of the communications, branding and the 3d fields, so this year’s twenty or so speakers and panellists across the two days veered from more traditional pursuits such as book design, to cutting edge advertising and installation design.
 
Nominally grouped under a theme of ‘Next’, the presentations of course varied hugely in content and style – there’s never a guarantee that even the finest creative minds in the world will be captivating speakers - so there was often a vast difference in speaking styles. But, overall, there weren’t that many moments where your head slumped and thoughts turned to the poolside and beach only minutes away.
 
Overall, there wasn’t that much ‘traditional’ design. Unable to travel due to his wife’s ill-health, Massimo Vignelli was represented by two separate films and would have taken the slot previous occupied by grandees such as Wally Olins (who spoke four years ago). One film came late on day one when most had retreated to the bar – a shame really because the preview of Design is one: The Vignellis was a delight and gave a genuine insight into their lives as designers over 50 years.

The second film had been specially filmed by Hillman Curtis for the conference and contained Massimo’s ‘advice’ for the Indian designers present (which seemed to be that they should have vision and courage and re-embrace modernism, I think). Paradoxically, the closest we got to ‘tradition’ after that was the husband and wife team of Sandeep and Tania Singh Khosla who showed how they were fusing traditional Indian design approaches with more modernist tinges.

Early on day one, Adrian Shaughnessy urged the crowd to be more selfish and egotistical, lie and cheat more, and to work on their verbal skills as much as their visual ones. These semi-tongue-in-cheek pointers came as part of an entertaining ten-step ‘what good designers do’ segment which the morning’s crowd happily lapped up and it was apt that Irma Boom swiftly followed. Her phenomenal book design portfolio is a perfect example of a designer sticking to their aesthetic guns and being prepared to ‘tough it out’ with clients when things get sticky, even if it means being fired or suspended from projects.

The perfect example of Shaughnessy’s thesis, David Carson, had gone one further by not even turning up, presumably a disappointment to the local designer who had decorated a surf board in his honour but of no surprise to the rest of us who have heard the ‘Carson-no-show’ story a little too often.

A great example of the ‘follow what you enjoy doing and worry about the money later’ school was Donald Beekman and Liza Enebeis’s speech on their 7 year-old radio project dedicated to type and design, Typeradio. Even though Beekman is a well-known designer and typographer, and Enebeis Creative Director of Studio Dumbar in Rotterdam, they had travelled halfway across the world to patiently explain, on a stage, how they talk about design, on the radio. Sounds bonkers but you can’t argue with a database of 400 episodes and 5,000 listeners daily.

Another part of the substantial Dutch contingent was Jeroen van Erp, who stood in at the last minute and showed some very interesting work and approaches from his studio, Fabrique.

Another running theme was the new broadmindedness of the invitees from the digital and advertising industries. Nathan Cooper from Anomaly and Mark Chalmers of Perfect Fools showed a series of events and projects that leveraged every pixelated ounce of available social media and were usually measured in terms of unique visits, YouTube hits and Facebook links. I loved Cooper’s simplest ideas, such as asking Vaccines fans to tag their Instagrams as #vaccinesvideo then mashing the pics into the cheapest band video ever made.

Chalmers arguably stole the show with their phenomenal ‘pixelated Converse’ shoe-wall-installation which gathered incredulous questioning about budgets and timings. He himself admitted that they had invested 3 days in a prototype at their own cost before racing through the work in 6 weeks - but there seemed to be a feeling the room that was a step too far for many current Indian clients, even though he pointed out a 50% increase in sales for every Converse store that hosts the piece.

Exhibitions and art installations were represented by the measured approach of Land’s Peter Higgins (who consistently showed interactive ideas that were actually years ahead of their widespread take-up) and the absolute cutting edge represented by Conny and Eva from Troika. Talking to 1400 delegates in a vast room at the end of an afternoon is never easy, but groundbreaking work such as ‘Cloud’ and the V&A’s Palindrome signage carried the day.

They say that there’s one great speech in every designer (called ‘my work’) but the last speaker on day two, Devilfish’s Richard Holman, chose to devote barely ten of his 35 minutes to his portfolio, preferring to draw on influences as far and wide as Daniel Eatock and Dennis Potter in between. After two days of more portfolio than polemic, it made a nice change, and in the ad-hoc ‘open mic’ session soon after (where delegates could point out their favourite bits and lobby for next year) Holman rightly drew a lot of praise.
 
Outside the hall, the conferences evenings and workshops seemed to tick over nicely and the Indian hospitality was great. Many of the European visitors predictably struggled with the humidity and at least one speaker and definitely one moderator fell foul of massive oversleeping (oops) but all-in-all, a good show.

With Michael Bierut and Thomas Heatherwick already pencilled for next year, DesignYatra looks set to cement its place as one of the top ‘must-go’ conferences in the world. My main hope for next year? To see more great and adventurous work from homegrown talent to balance the quality of the famous imports. I’m sure it’s possible…
 
 

Michael Johnson was moderator at this weekend’s DesignYatra, following his visit four years ago as a speaker. Thanks to Rajesh, Sameeya, Kay and the team for the warm welcome back. There’s a speaker overview here, and a short video interview with a jet-lagged Johnson about identity and branding issues recorded over the weekend below. Follow the #kdy11 hashtag to track more conference feedback.

I recently got a very cheeky email. Its second paragraph read like this: ‘Since you've not had time recently to open any emails from us this is your chance to tell us more about your preferences….’

I was initially taken aback by the ‘you naughty boy’ tone. Especially when I realised it had come from The Design Council - an organisation I regularly try to fathom out, online.  So, apologies, but their chippy note has prompted me to write one back.

Firstly, some context. If you’re reading this from afar, they’re a UK based organisation that began as the Council for Industrial Design in 1944 and has morphed through many shapes and forms in their history.

My first experiences of them were hugely formative – every teenage trip to London from dreary Derbyshire started or ended at their Haymarket centre in Central London. I begged, borrowed or stole copies of their once seminal magazine Design. ‘The Design Council’ was probably instrumental in making me want to be ‘A Designer’.

Working regularly for them a decade later (which we did from the mid-nineties for about a decade) felt like a huge honour. But throughout that stage, we continually fielded questions about ‘what do they actually do?’ and it’s fair to say that a lot of the design community have been in the dark about the Council’s activities for some time. Some will have noted the Prince Philip Designer’s Prize along the way, and most 2d designers will have swiftly noted that prize’s preference for engineers, architects and product designers.

In the latest twist, the UK Government’s recent quango review removed their direct funding and made them a charity. The same review axed most of CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) apart from Design Review (the bit that reviews major architectural projects whilst still in planning). That’s now been shoehorned into the Design Council and appears to be a kind of sub-set. Confused? You might well be.
 
This sort-of-merger prompted a recent review of their trustees and they now have, on paper, a team of heavy hitters (including Wayne Hemingway, Deborah Meaden from ‘Dragon’s Den’ and Mark Jones, outgoing director of the V&A). Look a little closer and you start to spot a few trends. The 3d/Architecture bias is now very notable - 4 out of 12 are architect/built environment people (5 if you count Hemingway). And the whole ‘engineering’ thing isn’t going away soon – the new chairman also chairs the Engineers Employers Federation. 3 out of 12 are entrepreneurs. Only two are regularly designing. And precisely none of them are graphic designers.
 
That the Design Council doesn’t really see Graphic Designers as core doesn’t come as a great surprise (given that rumours of their requests for free pitches on projects are now legendary). Historically they’ve rarely looked to or celebrated our sector, and that seems unlikely to change. Where that leaves any coherent ‘voice’ for graphics and branding in the UK is anyone’s guess of course – with no printed Design Week, D&AD by definition spread across many disciplines (and increasingly international) and a lack of clarity around organisations such as the CSD, it’s not looking good. One can only look at US-based organisations such as the AIGA and feel just a little bit jealous.
 
But away from graphics, what are they planning next? Recently they’ve told us what they’ve done in their ‘first 100 days’ and sure enough many voices including David Cameron’s are claiming to see design as a priority (‘Our biggest ambitions have got to be for innovation’). But if this government is going to truly champion design, there’s not much evidence, yet.

So I’ve read ‘the story so far’, but I’m left frustrated. I want them to go a lot further. I think, to many, the Council has become too intangible – public-facing projects on the ground like Millennium Products and (dare I say it) the swing tag at least gave them a face. All those endless reports on skills, interdepartmental talking-shops and obscure initiatives in Cornwall? All very well, but surely only relevant to a previous life of lip service to Westminster paymasters.

Now, it has to justify itself in a different way and show what design can do. If ‘good design’ is its cause, how does it react, as a charity? Proper charities are great at this – I’m clear what Save the Children does. But is it clear what the Design Council stands for?

I think it needs to intervene, interject and interpose. It needs to engage, have opinions, spark debate. It needs to put its head above the parapet and be prepared to say what is and isn’t good design again, to ruffle feathers, to create controversy if needs be. If we are to ‘give’ to this cause, we need some very good reasons to do so, and that’s the immediate task this new Design Council faces. If it doesn’t manage to make ‘design’ understood, valued and vital, it fails, and perhaps (though I hesitate to say it), it dies.
 
This is the chance to get design back into the key ‘stem’ educational pillars of science, technology and engineering and ensure that DT stays not only in the curriculums of our schools but develops and encourages the next generation. If we don’t do this, if we don’t regain respect for design, we’ve failed an entire post-war generation of designers and educationalists who struggled very hard to get design thinking into boardrooms and universities and finally taken seriously.
 
Many of us still go dewy-eyed for The Design Council we remember – there’s a vast legacy of respect and goodwill for those memories. And there’s a huge, untapped resource out there, but the Council hasn’t really asked, or consulted them for years. The creative industries are London’s second biggest employer, a ‘global hub of creativity’ that Governments love to talk up, but hate to support with anything remotely tangible.

But if ‘design’, in the public eye remains just those toe-curling spots in The Apprentice (you know, the ones where packaging designers create awful stuff overnight and ‘Sir Alan’ puts the boot in) then heaven help us all.
 
So, since the Design Council hasn’t had time recently to ask us what we want from them, let's tell them what they should believe in, what we’d like them to do, and how they should do it. I’ve said my bit – what do you think?
 
By Michael Johnson

You can send us your thoughts @johnsonbanks and we will compile into a follow-up post, or leave comments on the We Made This blog where this piece is appearing in parallel.

It’s been almost six months since the earthquake and tsunami battered Northern Japan.
 
We last reported on a fundraising campaign that one of our designers, Miho Aishima had been working on in April where she was aiming to fold 1,000 cranes for Japan. In the end, 1422 cranes were made and £1408 was raised for the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal.

After the cranes were completed, Miho decided to collaborate with Tina Tsang from Undergrowth Design. Tina had been invited to be the first designer to take over the Hayward Gallery’s shop in its first ‘This is Not a Pop-up’, part of the up and coming London Design festival.

The result is a quirky mix of Undergrowth’s fantastical tea sets and products mixed with origami rabbits and, er, cranes. 1400 individual pieces of origami were hung together to form a giant bird, with its wings spread across the shop, hence demonstrating the power of collective action.

Each of the cranes has a small square attached to the base, displaying the initials of the donors.

On the private view evening on Thursday, each donor received a card with the location of the cranes folded in his or her honour within the installation. During the evening the fabulous Geisha manicurist Akimbo Moonchild painted nails and Japanese musician Ichi provided entertainment using handmade instruments, stilts and a ping pong ball.

‘This is Not a Pop-up’ will be on until 22 September. Opening hours are 12pm-6pm Mon to Sun.
 
A special thanks to Adam Thow of The Hayward Gallery.

For further enquiries about the 1,422 cranes (especially if you can suggest a final home) please contact info@johnsonbanks.co.uk or tweet us at @johnsonbanks

There’s been much consternation this August in the Johnson household over the arrival (finally) of a long-awaited bit of kit, the OP-1 from Swedish über-boffins Teenage Engineering.

Readers with long memories may remember we featured this product in one of our reviews of the year some years ago – now they’ve finally shipped a limited amount (rumoured to be as few as 500).

If you’re wondering what the heck it is, well it’s a miniature synth/keyboard, about the width of an 11-inch portable with a whole series of inbuilt sounds that you can customise. On top of that it’s a drum machine, has an inbuilt 4 track ‘tape’ recorder and mixer, and has a quite awesome sequencer. Oh and it samples too.

It’s also really well constructed to Apple-like or higher levels of build.

At a time when more and more music is just made with one keyboard, a Mac and access to a programme like Logic, having the control ‘back’ in the hands of the machine is quite something. It’s early days but we’re head over the hills about this one and the teenage Johnson’s dubstep experiments have never sounded weirder.

The interface through that little screen is also pretty intuitive, and everything from the product to the usability and the manual are nicely thought through (see grabs below).

This is the amazing tombola sequncer.

See it here in action as the star of this Pharell/Swedish House Mafia video.

And here are various ‘how to’ videos and online reviews if you really want to geek out.

Only snag? It’s a bit pricey and they never seem to have any stock.

But hey, when it takes over the world, the price will surely drop and you’ll be able to say ‘you were there’. Fly in the face of austerity and treat yourself.

Ps thanks very much to Teenage Engineering for shipping faster than normal for a significant birthday (and a nice bit of packaging customisation as well).

We’re just starting an unusual project where we’re creating an alphabet of three dimensional letters which explores and delves into 26 different alphabets. Our working title for this project is Arkitypo.

It came about during conversations with a current client, Ravensbourne, who have some absolutely state-of-the-art 3d prototyping machinery and skills (and even have an MSc course dedicated to it).

In discussions we agreed that whilst we’d all begun to see smart examples of 3d prototyping on the web, it all seemed to be a bit product focussed. We all wanted to try to do something that really pushed the technology to its limits.

So the task we’ve set ourselves over the next few months is to do a 3D A-to-Z of type, with johnson banks in charge of starting the 26 individual ideas and the canny team of uber-techies at Ravensbourne in charge of 3d imaging and protoyping.

We’re going to show examples and work in progress on this blog and at the end we’re hoping to produce a definitive set of photographs, posters (perhaps with luck an exhibition of the actual objects).

Here’s a few examples of some of the work so far: we took a long hard look at the famous typeface Avant Garde, because of its famous slanted ‘A’s, thinking it would ‘spin’ nicely.

But we’ve got more distracted by the thought of taking a famous ‘Grotesk’ (in this case, Akzidenz) and making it anything but grotesque via fractal technology (see visuals below and the first real prototype).

For ‘B’ we’ve been experimenting with different views of Baskerville (see below re-imagined in wave-like sections)...

...and bizarre extrusions of Bodoni.

Currently we prefer another idea for ‘B’ which explores the way typefaces such as Bembo and Baskerville led to Bodoni. By spinning one font into another we can create something we’re much happier with.

The image at the top of this post shows the first actual 3d print of this idea. (And yes, we may well be taking orders for paper weights and birthday initials by the end of this process)

‘C’ is proving a little problematic (our attempts to emulate Anish Kapoor with Cooper Black were a bit disappointing to be honest) so we’re trying to see what we can do with typewriter keys for Courier.

We thought Dot Matrix would be good food for 3d thought (see scribbles and first visuals below).

Anyway, you get the idea. More to come, as we get bits that are showable.

If you’re interested in seeing more, take a visit to the department’s blog - it has lots of links out to other examples.

If you have an overwhelming desire to see your favourite typeface enshrined in 3d, let us know which one (and why) on twitter @johnsonbanks and we’ll have a think. Remember, it has to be the initial letter of the font (so there’s no point in asking for a Baskerville ‘Q’, however lovely that may be) and there has to be a reason. 

Thought for the week is now taking an August break. Back at the end of the month.

There’s a stage in big corporate projects where a team of directors in a room have to have ‘the values discussion’.

Now, of course, brand values are useful things, most of the time, but there’s no doubt that they can turn quite quickly into corporate platitudes. You know, all that ‘big yet small, global yet local, funny yet serious, black yet sometimes white’ stuff.

So it was refreshing a few weeks ago to see someone trying something a little different.

We were invited to observe a day in the life of mega-engineering-thinking-consulting firm Buro Happold as they debated the 'essence of Happold-ness'. Whilst directors from all over the world discussed and presented their thoughts on stories that brought their company to life, an illustrator was on hand to turn those thoughts into pictures on a vast, room-length canvas. Have a look at the results.

Here’s the whole thing. Great idea, huh?

The illustrator was Hicks (otherwise know as Ed from Secret Wars), you can find out more about his agent here.

Our old website was, in its time, admired and of its time. But finally we’ve had some gaps to develop something more iPhone/iPad/iWhatevernext friendly.

So when you next get a chance, take a look at our redesigned site. On it you’ll find projects such as this new one for Trinity Laban Conservatoire of music and dance which has a very unusual identity system that turns in space to reflect the different parts of the organisation.

Here you see it applied out to the Laban part of the organisation, and to a sub-brand. The full story is here.

Because this our first major re-design for while, it gives us the chance to properly showcase large and small projects from the last couple of years. So we can dedicate proper web-space to our Virgin Atlantic project.

Or slightly passed over schemes, like this interesting one for Unit Architects. (See more in the Identity and Brand section.).

In a comprehensive section dedicated to logos, we’ve edited (or unearthed) quite a a few we’d forgotten about. There’s a bit of web-noise about logos being ‘dead’ at present. When you scroll through this list, we’re not so sure we agree.

We’ve also included sections on Imagery, Typography, Posters etc - in order to avoid a gargantuan site these are clumped together but you get a good overview. Nice to see some of these again.

This was part of a set of posters for the V&A’s Zoomorphic Exhibition in 2003.

Even older, an exhibition about WW1 at the Imperial War Museum, dating from 1998. Phenomenally difficult to photograph a knotted poppy, by the way.

Keep forgetting about this too, a D&AD winner for MerryDown cider.

The Imagery section is designed to look closer at the techniques and approaches we’ll use to create unique visual languages and approaches for clients. So these are a series of carefully photographed sculptures of artworks and objects to help blind and partially sighted people still experience art.

And this is part of a long series we were doing once for the Design Council - this to illustrate interface design (by choosing a particularly bad, made-up example).

Anyway, much more here. We’ll have a look at more sections in more detail soon.

In case you’re wondering, a couple of sections (like the shop) aren't quite finished yet. Soon. And Thought for the Week will move over into 'new style' soon, once we’ve worked out how to re-format 6 years of posts successfully.

Thanks to Matt & George for their patience throughout this process.

We recently managed to blag an invite to the opening of artist Charming Baker’s exhibition of new work, Every Thing Must Go.
 
Baker himself is a graduate of the Central Saint Martins, Graphic Design BA course and well-known in design circles for his past work as an illustrator (under his real first name Alan), collaborating with studios like Pentagram, Why Not Associates and GTF. He was also once an illustration and drawing tutor to two of the johnson banks team (at CSM a decade ago).

As an artist, the now ‘Charming’ Baker has found great success in recent years. Most of the original paintings had already moved from ‘must go’ to ‘gone’ prior to the exhibition’s private view, with price tags significantly hiked from his last London show two years ago. A sign of his rising star was the presence of the likes of Noel Gallagher and Ronnie Wood (the latter of course now established as a painter in his own right). As we celeb-spotted there was much sipping of many, varied cocktails and munching on jelly-baby-topped cupcakes, whilst admiring the artist’s latest paintings, prints and sculptures.

Baker’s dark sense of humour and sometimes grim subject matter are interestingly juxtaposed (art word alert) with decorative, repetitive patterns and traditional, figurative oil painting. Many pieces are further embellished with a signature of physical holes made in the wood or canvas with a shot gun, drill or router. He loves a long title too, with names like ‘All I Want Is To Avoid That Bridge Between Uncertainty And Outright Disappointment’.  

In this show Baker also reveals a striking series of sculptures – busts of children disguised with golden animal masks – which are both weird and beautiful. Maybe don’t take the kids or your vegetarian friend though, since the works feature the odd scrawled obscenity, frequent references to death, a bit of sex, and quite a few bleeding animals.

Collected by Damien Hirst and managed by Pat Magnarella (manager of Green Day), Baker is also the new face of Paul Smith London. So, if you’re going to buy, buy soon. All great, all very rock n roll and all in all a top show.

Every Thing Must Go is open daily until 31st of July at 16 Mercer St, Covent Garden, London

There’s more info here.

Last week we popped down to the recently renovated and now very chic Chelsea College of Art in Pimlico (darling) to check out University of the Arts London’s (UAL) first ever Artsmart.

It was a two-day curated art and design market with a series of talks on helping students and alumni learn the skills required to run a successful business in the creative industry.

It was interesting to see work from a variety of different UAL college alumni at the market (such as Tina Tsang, above). The quality was of a pretty high standard and it was reassuring to see that even after many years since graduating so many people were still doing creative work (and ‘real life’ hadn’t bashed it out of them).

To top it off, the food at the fair was like being in a gourmet market. Not that good food is a prerequisite, you understand, but it added to the ambience, naturally, as we hiccupped our way around the stalls.

These lovely wooden letters were for sale. They even had ligatures and giant bespoke corkboards, as at the top of this post (from Lina Meier studio).

 
Could this be the first card ever made for twins? (by Purpose and Worth etc).

Some classic British sayings. (With Relish)

And some amazing digital prints on silk scarves from Pig, Chicken and Cow.

One of our designers had been walking past this building in sunny East Croydon on her commute to work for six years, often thinking how great it would be to get hold of the three-dimensional brushed chrome letters which made up the signage on the building’s fascia, chiefly because one of the words was ‘JOHNSON’.

Then when passing one day in mid March, the seventies-style empty office block, named Amy Johnson House (we assume because the famous aviator took off on her pioneering flight to Australia in 1930 from Croydon) had been surrounded by a big wooden fence attached with demolition signs.

So we of course called the building company to ask whether it would be possible to have the letters when the building was knocked down (it took a while to get our meaning across – they thought first that we just wanted a photo!).

But after checking in with the site manager every week or so on progress for three whole months we finally acquired the letters a couple of weeks ago.

With a bit of a renovation job by Julia’s dad (see above, impressive stuff), we now have ‘JOHNSON’ at the studio, Julia has taken ‘HOME’, well, home, and the rest of the studio have been squabbling over the remaining ‘ASUY’ - ‘Y’ surprisingly being the first letter claimed.

We couldn’t resist a little photo shoot before the letters were separated. And Julia did put in a caveat that she would have to keep all the letters if there was a truly great anagram to be had…

Ooh Humanness Joy
Oh Jesus Oh No Many
Human Enjoys Oohs
Shush Enjoy A Moon
Shh, No Joyous Name
Ooh Names Shun Joy
Shh No Uneasy Mojo
Ha Sunny Mojo Shoe
Ah Enjoy Hums Soon

...so far, not, so we’re now deciding on which wall to hang ‘JOHNSON’ in the studio.

Moral of the story? If you don’t ask....

Two significant events took place in British design last week. Firstly, Habitat was sold to a holding company that owns two other UK retail brands Argos and Homebase, which almost certainly means the chain’s 30 stores outside London will disappear. Secondly, the UK’s weekly design trade magazine, Design Week, published its last issue.
 
Now that quality cheap furniture is readily available due to the rise of the likes of Ikea, Habitat’s demise was perhaps inevitable once it lost its USP. But for the industry to lose its ‘trade mag’ is a blow and leaves UK design without a significant independent voice.
 
Given that the staff were apparently only informed last Monday, a day or so before the final print run, there was little or no time to prepare a decent history of the magazine’s 25 years, other than for its long-running editor, Lynda Relph-Knight to pen a brief editorial and wish the remaining skeleton digital staff luck. It seems that the ‘magazine’ will continue to exist only in its online form, along with other closed titles such as New Media Age (part of publisher Centaur’s ‘restructuring’ of around 60 staff).
 
You’re left wondering who or what will now speak up for design in this country. The Design Council is in the midst of its own particular turmoil as it tries to re-engineer itself as a no-longer-beholden-to-government charity whilst incorporating parts of CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, scrapped in the recent quango review). D&AD has just appointed a new chief executive from the advertising industry and can never represent just the design side of the fence. And the Chartered Society of Designers (CSD)? Well, we’re still waiting for someone to explain exactly what they do.
 
So we’re writing this with heavy hearts – Relph-Knight and her team tracked the growth and development of countless design companies and trends (as did Jeremy Myerson before her). For better or for worse, UK design was reported on and discussed, and the magazine regularly found itself central to key industry debates.
 
There may be some who won’t mourn its passing. The last edition itself reveals many of its recurring tics - several pieces about not-very-interesting account wins from publicity hounds that have the fingerprints of ‘in-house PRs’ all over them. An article by an ‘industry expert’ that talks about their own work to illustrate their point (ie pretty close to self-promotion). The obligatory ad for an up-and-coming award scheme. Then, most tellingly, one single page of ads for design jobs. Without advertising, trade mags die, and with the economy stalled in the doldrums, this is probably why closure became inevitable.
 
As regards those with gripes about its content, perhaps some of it was justified, but producing a weekly magazine on one overall topic? That’s tough, and for all its flaws Design Week made a pretty decent stab at it.
 
Of course with the rise and rise of corporate and personal design blogs and the immediacy of twitter, there are just more ‘opportunities to see’ (and read) elsewhere now, and this is presumably where Centaur’s management team will hope the online version will come into its own. They will be using sister publication, Creative Review as a benchmark since CR seems to have managed to find a way for the printed and online versions to work in parallel, not fight each others’ content.
 
We’re told the awards schemes will continue, which itself is a sad indictment. It seems there’s more money to be made running awards for design than actually writing about it or analysing it. Celebration or critique? It seems Centaur has made an entirely fiscal decision on that one.
 
It’s not all bad, of course. At the top of the market, Eye magazine continues to provide an exceedingly high standard of design journalism and critique, and Grafik magazine has been reborn. But that traditional (and impressive) boast of the UK as the only country in the world with its own weekly design magazine? Well, that no longer applies.
 
By Michael Johnson

Having made a bit of a smash in Zurich, LosAngeles, New York and San Francisco, Creative Mornings, brainchild of The Queen of the Internet, Tina Roth Eisenberg (otherwise known as Swiss Miss) is about to start in London.

Here’s the blurb: CreativeMornings is a monthly morning gathering for creative types. Each event includes a 20 minute lecture, followed by a 20 minute group discussion. The gathering begins at 8:30am with the topic presentation starting at 9:00am and everyone taking off for work at 10am. CreativeMornings are free of charge!

The first London Creative Morning is being hosted by Sense Worldwide, and their speaker is johnson banks’ Michael Johnson. As a little taster, there’s a short interview with Johnson here: sample questions follow...

Do you believe in an afterlife?
Nope. Get on with your life now, not fret about what’s coming next.

Favourite LP?
If we’re doing it by ‘most played’ it would probably be a toss-up between Belly of the Sun by Cassandra Wilson, or Offramp by Pat Metheny. Otherwise, you’d probably have to go for Kind of Blue...

It’s a very bijou event (only 50 tickets) - they are free but only go on offer 4 days in advance. You can sign up from Monday the 4th July for the event on July the 8th.

Lots more detail on the event here.

A quick note to say that johnson banks’ Creative Director Michael Johnson will be moderating this year’s Kyoorius Design Yatra, 2011.

This is the spectacular conference that tours India and this September returns to Goa. Confirmed speakers so far this year include gridnik legend Massimo Vignelli, Troika and Irma Boom, with more to be announced.

Better start saving up, it’s highly recommended...

More details here.

Last night we were at Putney’s famous music venue, the Half Moon, to see master French guitar virtuoso, Pierre Bensusan.

Bensusan is famous in guitar circles for having played doggedly in one tuning, DADGAD (used to great effect by Davy Graham and Jimmy Page on Kashmir) for over thirty years. That’s a long time to go without retuning.

Apart from the odd break, he’s also played a Lowden guitar for most of that time (see here to watch one of his guitars being made).

Anyway, guitar jokes aside, the standard audience for these things is 90% white men frantically studying the guitarist’s fingers, with a few long-suffering wives and girlfriends dragged along to essentially look at their watches. The music? Well, noodling French folk really (but beautifully played noodling French folk).

So it came as a bit of a surprise to find a fan of the US thrash metal band Pantera in the audience.

And then something of a shock to discover that his left forearm tattoos were of Bensusan lyrics. Definitely NOT what you’d expect of an evening of fingerstyle guitar in South-West London.

Go here to watch some Bensusan in concert. And of course here for Pantera.

I did think twice about going to Erik Spiekermann’s retrospective at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin recently. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see it, and the archive as well, but Spiekermann himself had told me that the show was ‘really quite small’ and not that big a deal.

Typical of the man, Germany’s most famous type designer was actively encouraging one of his London visitors to spend his morning off in the German capital somewhere else.

Both the exhibition and the archive were, of course, well worth it. Career reviews of graphic designers are still so rare, in any city worldwide, that they should all be seen and this meticulously tracked the typographic journey that he has taken over a forty year career.

A career which has produced many of the typefaces that have been hugely influential in persuading so many of the world’s corporations to put Helvetica into retirement, and dabble with something altogether softer and friendlier.

Even if type isn’t necessarily your thing, it was fascinating to track a journey from the painstakingly hand drawn and marked up sheaves of paper (for the earliest projects), to more recent massive undertakings for clients such as Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s railway network).

What you didn’t get from the exhibition though was a complete sense of Erik himself - there are a few pointers, some great bow-tied snaps - but a few old bits of marked-up paper did hint at his obsessive characteristics.

Anyone who has seen Spiekermann on the lecture circuit and admired his ability to entertain, cajole, curse and ridicule in two languages and equal measures will know that he is a hugely entertaining persona, one which has been driven to create a whole series of companies under his name or his direction over a long career. Currently, he and his partners at Edenspiekermann are gradually growing a new network of companies across the globe and you wouldn’t bet against it ending up as big as his largest and most famous network, Meta Design.

You always get the impression that he doesn’t suffer fools: only a few weeks ago at the huge type conference in Berlin (that he helped to establish), he was happy to berate one of the quite senior speakers on Twitter for using Arial in his text slides. Luckily, when I first met Erik back in the late 1980s I was only just out of short trousers - but he was perfectly pleasant to me, when he could have been quite dismissive.

This was not so long after his original designs for a typeface had been suggested for Deutsche Bundespost. Luckily he realised that neither DB or his 80s partners, Sedley Place, were ever really going to make the most of a design some years ahead of its time. It was released in 1991 as one of the earliest releases of Font Shop under a new name, Meta, and promptly went on to become the Pippa Middleton of nineties typefaces.

Anyway, back to the exhibition. Overall, it had a surprisingly ‘cut-and-paste’ feel which initially took me by surprise (perhaps expecting something über-slick and teutonic) but the feel of it was great, and you could get up close and personal to a lot of the work (although photographing it nearly had me slapped in a Berlin jail for the night).

As a contrast, the Crouwel show at the Design Museum concentrates mostly on final pieces, whilst this showed a lot of work in progress, which added a human touch.
 
Sadly, it closed not long after my visit, but would tour very nicely. If anyone reading this has a medium sized space in need of a ready-made type/design exhibition, well this would be just about perfect. Just don’t ask Erik to do the PR.

More information on the Bauhaus Archive (exterior wall pictured above) can be found here.

By Michael Johnson. Thanks to Erik and Anne for the extra pics.

Just a short note to say there’s a longish interview with johnson banks’ Michael Johnson on the Mat Dolphin website here.

Sample question No5:
Who is your favourite artist or writer?
Writer? Currently David Mitchell (he of Cloud Atlas and …Autumns of Jacob de Zoet fame).

Artist? So many. I find that practically impossible to choose just one. If you’d said ‘photographer’ I would have said Robert Frank. If you’d asked ‘designer’ I would probably have gone for Tibor Kalman. If you’d said ‘guitarist’ I’d have suggested Scofield or Scott Henderson. 

Last night we were at a performance of Terry Gilliam’s Damnation of Faust (by Berlioz) for the second time.

Now you might be thinking, ‘why didn’t you write about it the first time’, and, er well that’s a good point. Anyway, just the simple fact that we’ve now seen this twice should be sign enough that this is really something extraordinary.

Obviously opera’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but in the hands of Ex-Python Terry Gilliam (and a very skilled supporting cast including set designer Hildegard Bechtler and video designer Finn Ross) Berlioz’s piece is dramatically retooled for between the wars Nazi Germany.

It moves along at breakneck speed, looks sumptuous, has great sets and dovetails in some innovative video as well. If you wondered how cinema could merge with opera and theatre, well this could be it.

There were a few slightly predictable pieces in the press beforehand wondering whether Gilliam’s slightly chequered project history (his film project of Don Quixote fell apart leaving just a bizarre ‘making-of’ documentary) would affect this, his first opera project, but they were wrong.

You’ll find a few grumbles around regarding the re-working, how close it isn’t to the original, etc, but this isn’t a show for opera buffs. It’s entertaining, is just an hour or so each half and flies along. You’ll find no-one catching a brief forty winks in this production - blink and you’ll miss a crucial scene.

Somehow it deals with some of the worst aspects of 20th century history in an almost jolly way, bizarrely slicing together a seduction scene whilst the Kristallnacht endures outside. Thankfully the heroine’s last train journey to a concentration camp is dealt with more sensitively.

From an art direction point of view Gilliam merrily clunks together references to The Vitruvian Man, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and references Otto Dix and George Grosz. But, it works.

It’s unlike most operas you’ve ever seen and has sadly nearly finished its run (sorry). 2 shows left. Beg borrow or steal a ticket, if you can.

You can see some interesting behind the scenes videos here.

Apparently it’s very common. Like a comfort blanket that designers wrap around themselves in times of stress. The trouble is, those blankets last for a few years of childhood. They don’t usually hang around for fifteen years.

I’m talking about the tendency for designers to arrive at their new job (in my case, new job and country) and immediately design their first projects in the style of their previous employer.
 
I arrived in Australia at the tender age of 22 with less than 2 years under my belt at a very well known London company, knowing nothing of this syndrome. I just knew that I’d been dispatched to a meeting with a middle ranking ad agency that wanted a logo for a middle ranking insurance company.

I was on the other side of the world, didn’t have a clue what I was doing and had recently left a design company gripped in the early stages of what we might call brushstroke fever. Whose only colour palette seemed to be grey and yellow. Or yellow and grey. Occasionally warm grey and lemon yellow. And that was about it.

After the meeting I did some research, chatted to locals about indigenous animals and started pursuing ‘animallic’ design routes, one involving a Australian ‘bower’ bird that collected everyday detritus to make unusual nests. Nice bit of boardroom rationale, eh?

Out came the trusty brushes and a few weeks later (yes, you guessed it) a yellow, grey and black brush-stroked bird that collected ‘stuff’ was chosen. Manufacturers Mutual Insurance (or MMI for short) had a new symbol.
 
That could easily have been the end of the story. Trouble is, MMI began to be successful - the bird began to fly. Even in my short time in Australia, when I admitted I’d designed it people were almost impressed (this was the eighties though, not very difficult). When the time came to travel elsewhere, then eventually return to London, I did show it for a while, until a London gripped by new ideas and approaches lost interest. I began to see that I’d designed something probably time-locked and possibly inappropriate. The slides were shelved, the project forgotten.

Occasionally I’d get letters telling me from old comrades that MMI was still growing, was on the stock exchange now, that kind of thing. They weren’t middle-ranking anymore. They were, kind of famous, as was their now-eighties-throwback symbol. But I still didn’t give it much thought.
 
Now, fast forward to 1999. You’re watching the first instalment of The Matrix at the movies. Keanu looks quite something in that jacket. The big fight scene at the end is playing out. There are tall buildings as a backdrop, and a wildly spinning helicopter (it was actually shot in Sydney, then a cheap place to shoot movies). There, right in the midst of the action was a skyscraper with a truly vast yellow and grey bird on its roof. I couldn’t believe it - I had a logo in a movie BUT why did it have to be that logo?
 
More letters arrived, then a few taunting emails. It had dawned on most people, I think, that the symbol designed in haste by a very young Pom just off the boat was a bit of a clunker. I tried to laugh it off. A few years later, MMI folded into the global giant Allianz, and I could breathe a sigh of relief. The bird had lost its brush-stroked feathers and those slides stayed in the drawer, until today.
 
But from that point on, any major identity presentation is scrutinised for all the normal reasons plus a new one – how will it look on the top of a skyscraper in twenty years time? Still great or just hopelessly, hideously naff?
 

By Michael Johnson. Part of Nick Asbury’s Creative Amnesty
Follow other clunkers (we hope!) on #creativeamnesty

Follow johnson banks on twitter @johnsonbanks

Writing up design conferences can be tricky. You never quite know whether to review the best bits or all of it, whether to be blandly polite about lectures heard, and sometimes endured, or painfully honest. Alternatively you can check all the tweets and hashtags to get a ‘sound-bite’ perspective.

But, for a change, this isn’t a normal review of this weekend’s Typo Berlin conference but a series of images from Eva-Lotte Lamm’s flickr pages, where she has posted one and two page sketches and diagrams of the talks she attended.

Here’s her notes from Martin & Thomas Poschauko’s very groovy talk segueing into April Greiman’s.

Donald Beekman & Donald Roos...

...and her notes from johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson’s.

Great stuff. Almost like being there.

Thanks to Eva-Lotte Lamm for lending the images, Erik, Manja and Jürgen and the team for the invitation and hospitality, Donald and Simone for their sassy MC’ing and about a thousand keen attendees for making it quite a weekend.

There’s a video interview with Eva (in German) here, and one with a rather bleary looking Johnson here.

We’ve been doing more work for one of our music clients, The North American Guitar, who imported very fine hand-made instruments into the UK.

Last night was their second event, held at the world-famous Abbey Road Studios in North London, scene of many famous recordings, THAT zebra crossing and, most famously, most of The Beatles’ work.

Here’s some of the graphics for the event. If you’re wondering, that’s a soundwave of ‘Blackbird’ inlaid into the wood veneer.

Apart from designing for such an interesting event, enjoying various different performances (and play rather nervously ourselves), the main event of the evening was really the building itself, crammed with amazing artifacts and priceless objects.

For example, you walk into studio two, past a funny old piano.

Then you look a bit harder...

Here are some other studio shots. Those microphones aren’t just for show, they still work.

And old tape machines like this just sit in spare corners and corridors.

Anyway, back to the event. If you’re in the market for a resonator ukelele like this, you’ll need to find 1800 Euros. A snip.

This is a grown-up, full sized resonator guitar.

And this is a hand made Telecaster style ‘Wirebird’ guitar. Very nice.

Here’s a couple of unlikely punters checking that their guitar fits together.

And a shot of the evening in progress. A great night, here’s to the next one. Have to go and practice.

Designers and typographers visiting Middle Eastern and Gulf states are often overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of Arabic scripts. Simple street signs, posters and newspapers present a level of calligraphy that we simply don’t experience in the day-to-day typographic hubbub of western cities.
 
But as the opportunities to design in Arabic slowly begin to expand, some fairly fundamental issues arise – whilst both cultures write numerals in a similar way, virtually everything else is different.
 
At the most basic level, we write in different directions. There are few shared typographic measurements and equivalents such as x-heights. In Arabic letters can be stretched or adapted with multiple ligatures, so the popular digital Arabic font Noori Nastaliq contains more than 20,000 characters, as opposed to a normal character set of less than 300 in a Latin typeface. There are multiple versions of Arabic letters depending on their being placed at the beginning, middle or end of words, so an Arabic font might only be truly judged once nearly finished – anyone developing a Latin typeface can easily concentrate on just a few letterforms to establish an initial ‘feel’.
 
So any projects encouraging crossover and increased understanding of Arabic letterforms have to be applauded.

The default setting of current bilingual design schemes is to typeset in two languages, run names stacked or side by side, hope that they ‘sort of’ match and go home. Very few attempts at any genuinely intertwined schemes have been made, possibly due to pure laziness on the part of the international design groups plying their wares in the expanding Gulf market. But the lack of available inspiration, research and precedent isn’t helping either.
 
The work of the Khatt Foundation in Amsterdam is providing a unique cross-cultural bridge across this divide. The first ‘Typographic Matchmaking’ project encouraged typographic breakthroughs such as Peter Bilak’s Fedra Arabic (developed with Tarek Atrissi), and the second project, launched in February 2009 and recorded in a substantial 400 page tome, included architects and encouraged its multi-cultural teams to concentrate on urban solutions that would have three-dimensional impact.

As a ‘book on Latin and Arabic typography’, it falls in a odd middle ground, given that the first 150-odd pages are devoted to mainly typographic essays on and around the subject. Each of the five teams are then given essay space to introduce their ideas, before colour sections take us through sketches, roughs and finalised designs, as well as 3d visualisations of some of the concepts in public spaces. You could choose to criticise the quality of some of these final outputs, but I’m not – in fact I enjoyed the ‘notebook’ aspect of the illustrated sections, capturing a feel of ‘work in progress’ rather than fait accomplit. If you take the time to read the explanatory essays and carefully examine the design steps, there are some genuinely insightful verbal and visual thoughts.
 
It helps, of course, that the Khatt Foundation has a treasure trove of Dutch designers to call upon, plus financial support from two Dutch institutions. I write this in London only a few months after a new British Prime Minister has merrily played the race card about our Islamic community (again) - the chances of a UK government supporting such a scheme seem completely farcical.

Anyway, back to the designs. Unsurprisingly, several teams grapple with the issues of intertwining the two languages, and two teams led by Max Kinsman and Rene Knip respectively run scripts across or within each other, or develop parallel fonts that at least share common visual language (in Kinsman’s case above, his trademark ‘blocky’ designs, in Knip’s a dot matrix grid which nicely unifies normally opposed letterforms).

Whilst the end results don’t quite astonish, the team of Erik Van Blokland, Pascal Zoghbi and Joumana al Jabri entertained me with typographic forms made on the beach with poured wax, echoing the processes of land reclamation in Dubai and Amsterdam.

The Kufam project team (with members from Holland, Lebanon and Germany) developed a bilingual font with a variant within that picked up on urban cues by supplying a weight intentionally dissolved like graffiti. The Kashida project team (named after the linking horizontal strokes of Arabic) carried out a series of fascinating experiments in continuous typography merrily visualised with anything from fettucine to bent aluminium.

If you’re searching for a ‘how to’ pick and mix guide for designing across cultures, or an easy read on Arabic typography this probably isn’t for you (although that, as a book, would still be useful). But as record of research, processes and genuinely insightful steps towards solving a recurring and sometimes intractable issue, I found it a fascinating and inspiring read.

I’ll be using it to prove that ‘great’ really is possible in this area the next time I’m being threatened with the merely adequate.

 
This is an adaptation of a recent review for Eye Magazine by Michael Johnson.

There's another piece on Thought for the Week on Arabic typography here.

On Wednesday night we took part in an evening hosted by D&AD to corral together some of the current thinking in UK branding. Representatives from Wolff Olins, Venture Three, Landor, SomeOneElse and johnson banks briefly showed their wares or aired their views, then a panel discussion ensued.

These events are often by definition a mixed bag and this was, a bit. Billed by host Simon Manchipp as an evening looking for answers, it may have proved that a crowded bar off Brick Lane with one microphone and few seats might struggle to supply them. Having said that, debates on branding are few and far between, and we have to start somewhere, so hats off to all those concerned for rounding up the contestants.

Identity and branding is practised by many design companies, but very few of their employees did much of it at college. The chances of seeing any branding work on display at the Central Saint Martins or LCC graphics shows are virtually non-existent. Despite being a consistently ‘employable’ sector, it’s resolutely ignored by the design colleges seemingly intent on churning out designers holding up screen-printed posters until the end of time. The logo is apparently dead, at least for students.

So there was a slight sense of disbelief in the audience as it became apparent that companies like johnson banks and Wolff Olins might spend months and sometimes years discussing, finalising and clarifying a brand prior to any design work taking place (Venture Three conversely were happy to suggest that their Sky branding led with a visual identity designed first and post-rationalised later).
 
Oddly, both johnson banks and Wolff Olins (represented by Marina Willer) were the only ones to show actual examples of their work, the other three speakers choosing to talk about their philosophies or approaches.

The man who seemed to have packed his angry eyes for the evening seemed to be Landor’s representative, Jason Little, who at one point declared that ‘guidelines are the dullest part of what we do, thrown over the fence for f****d up in-house teams’. Ouch. Little also went big on his criticism of companies like The Partners for their small scale ‘sparkler’ projects for tiny/unknown companies (but that may just have been driven by his wish for Landor to do the same, who knows).
 
Some equally outrageous comments came from SomeOne Else’s Warren Hutchinson who suggested that digital was the ‘bastard ginger step son’ as far as branding was concerned.
 
As usual, the most telling comments and questions came from the audience – in theory this was a student event but the bar was populated by grown-ups – proof that there is an appetite for the kind of discussion that started to get going just as the evening drew to a close. One questioner asked if some of the panelists felt ‘more like sales people than strategists’, revealing once again the uneasy relationship between design and consultancy. Others wondered if all the big thinking was still relevant to smaller projects.

Some of the bigger topics were lightly scratched at – the relationships of brand to their logos and assets such as typefaces, for example (and the imbalance of male to female designers, as evidenced by the panel). But even though the two main design presentations were stuffed with flexible identity schemes, surprisingly little was said about them. Maybe they’re now taken as read?

We tried to make salient points – that the traditional rules and models of identity design might not cope with a newer type of organisation, that working with in-house teams could be fun, reciprocal and beneficial. That design manuals shouldn’t be long, or dull. That the emphasis on strategy first/design second wasn’t some odd Faustian pact but just a simple exercise to make sure that when the design starts, it does so in the right place.
 
Getting a group of designers in a room to agree anything is of course asking for trouble. That’s without throwing in the frisson and friction of the short presentations, the seemingly dreaded ‘strategy’ word and the plentiful supply of beer.
 
But a lack of definition for ‘Branding 2.0’ is perhaps understandable. That 200 people were interested to turn out and discuss it? Encouraging.

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Apologies but we forgot to point out that the ‘Art of Lost Words’ exhibition has been on tour at the Peninsula Art Gallery in Plymouth.

Our Habroneme piece is on display as part of a group display (it means ‘having the appearance of very fine threads’) - we constructed the letterforms out of one thread of clear plastic fibre. There’s more information on the project here.

The exhibition details are here.

Johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson is appearing at two imminent events in May.

On Saturday 21st May he will speaking at the Typo Berlin 2011 conference, now in its 16th year. Here’s a brief overview of his speech:

Forget the rules. Celebrate the mutable, the modular and the mashed-up

There are too many rules in graphic design. What happens if you start asking »what if« more often? Michael Johnson from London-based johnson banks explains his design world of identity, design and typography, a world where the best results come allowing mash-ups and mutations, a world that allows for happy accidents and solutions that fall way outside the textbook solutions.

Other speakers at the three-day conference include Peter Bil'ak, April Greiman, Javier Mariscal and Robin Kinross.

And next week Johnson is on a panel at a D&AD ‘Sharp'ner’ event about the future of branding, which is intending to ask if ‘a new wave of branding challenges are changing the way designers need to find solutions’. The blurb goes on to question ‘what is a brand anyway? Why should designers care? What happened to the new Gap logo?’

Johnson will join a panel including representatives from Wolff Olins, Venture Three and Landor, and moderator for the evening is Simon Manchipp.

Some relief here at johnson banks towers that awards season is pretty much over. Creative Review's 'Annual’ has selected our V&A maps project for inclusion, and also seemed to have shortlisted us at least for their Design Studio of the Year accolade, so thanks for that.

Meanwhile at D&AD we have three projects 'In-book' (the V&A project, Science Museum identity and a writing project for More Th>n), which isn’t bad.

We also had a further seven projects shortlisted, but no-one's very clear about what that actually means, so we’ll just move on and quietly forget all about it...

Congratulations to Browns for their accolade from Creative Review and The Chase and GBH for various D&AD nominations.

There was a flurry of articles a few weeks ago written about the ways graphic designers have reacted to the Japanese tragedy. Meanwhile, if people have felt moved to physically ‘do’ something, well, they’ve just got on with it. One good example is one of the designers here at johnson banks, Miho Aishima, who has raised £1,000 by pledging to fold 1000 paper cranes. She explains her thinking...

"Watching the events unfold in Japan after the earthquake and  tsunami, I realised that I wanted to do something to help raise money  for the people of Japan affected by the destruction and the nuclear  crisis.
 
So far, I have made 511 cranes with 1000 paper cranes to be completed by 11 June, three months  after the  earthquake and Tsunami in Japan.

In Japan, it is said that whoever folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish – my wish  is for a swift recovery in rebuilding their lives and homes in Japan. My goal is to raise £1000 (£1 for each crane).
 
Japan holds a very special place in my heart since my family are from there and I find it heartbreaking that such a huge tragedy has occurred in this great country.

The money raised will be given to the British Red Cross Japan Earthquake and Tsunami appeal. Each week, I will tag the images of the completed cranes with donors names tagged within the photo.

The completed cranes will be exhibited altogether. I am currently looking for a permanent home for them. So far, there are some plans in the works for the 1000 cranes to visit a care home to cheer up residents for a bit.

I really appreciate all of your support and thank you very much for looking. If you would like to help, please follow this link.

Editors note: the cranes will 'stay together', sorry, they can't be mailed to each individual donor

Following a hot cultural tip from a Glasgow School of Art alumna friend, one of the johnson banks team sought out the Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre in the Merchant City area of Glasgow, on a trip to Scotland last week.

Half a dozen of us were ushered in to a room full of curious sculptures for an hour-long sunday night performance. Made of old typewriters, sewing machines, lawnmowers and other scrap, the sculptures also displayed intricate carved creatures and most were adorned with bells.

The lights dimmed and the performance began: each sculpture came alive in turn, choreographed to music and light. The shadows alone they cast on the walls were amazing. Some sculptures were sad, others spooky or funny, and some just plain bonkers, but all fascinating. It was an immensely absorbing hour, where you felt like you’d lost your way in someone’s slightly sinister dream world.

Sharmanka (meaning hurdy gurdy* in Russian) was founded in St. Petersburg in 1989, and moved to Glasgow in 1996, but has had tours and commissions all over the world.  It is created by sculptor-mechanic Eduard Bersudsky, theatre director Tatyana Jakovskaya and lighting/sound designer Sergey Jakovsky.

A quote from Eduard Bersudsky on Sharmanka, ‘When I’m asked where my ideas come from, I can only say “from heaven”. I have a feeling that it is not me who makes the machines, they make themselves, I just help them’.

If you aren’t planning a visit to Glasgow any time soon, you can experience a bit of the magic, by seeing clips of some of the sculptures in action on the Sharmanka website, including our favourite piece, Time of Rats (shown below)...

...the tragic Titanic, and the amusing Nikodym (or co-operation of genders).

You can’t help but think that when the doors of the theatre are closed at night, the sculptures come alive all on their own…

* Hurdy gurdy: an unusual musical instrument with strings and a keyboard, which makes a droning sound by turning a wheel.

Reporting by Julia Woollams

We were emailed overnight with the nice news that several of our projects have been awarded at the inaugural Brand New Awards, which were judged late last week in the USA.

The awards are an offshoot of the phenomenally popular Brand New website, dedicated to publishing and discussing (and sometimes destroying) new identity projects.

Our Pew Center project has been shortlisted in both Logo and Identity Programmes, and was picked by Jennifer Kinon as one of the five ‘judges picks’.

In Identity Programmes, our recent Science Museum scheme was selected.

And, also in Identity Programmes, our Ravensbourne project was chosen.

A nice way to start a Wednesday. There’s a full list of winners here, and congratulations to Wolff Olins for winning with their Mathaf scheme.

We’ve always been supporters of D&AD, but you sometimes wonder what all those creative brains could really do, with a proper, serious problem to solve.

Just imagine if agencies took a break from selling us better cars or fresher air fresheners. Or product designers paused from creating those products we didn’t know we needed, yet. Or graphic designers had a genuine cause for their limited edition posters.

 Well, here’s the chance. A chance to do something good, achieve genuine impact on a global scale and save hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives.

In a ballsy move to time with its 50th anniversary next year, D&AD this evening launched a new award, the ‘White Pencil’, which aims to ‘harness the power of creative communities to help solve a pressing global social, environmental or health issue’. And for its first year, it’s aiming for peace.

Since 2001, for one day every September (the 21st), a global charity called Peace One Day has been trying to establish a ‘Peace Day’. The aim is to make it universally recognised; as much a part of our social fabric as Valentines’ Day or Mother’s Day. A day when all violence stops, wherever in the world: a global truce.

The first White Pencil competition is open to any creative who has a powerful idea on how to promote Peace Day and push it properly into the public consciousness, and can run that idea (large or small) in the public domain by the end of February next year.

If you’re already frowning (or smelling a rat), don’t – the entry fee is a tiny £25. Yes, we’re wondering how to get a great idea out into the public domain too (without bankrupting ourselves in the process) – perhaps the answer will be to pair up with clients and do it that way? And yes, we also hope this doesn’t turn into a ‘world network’, WPP versus Omnicom stand-off, or a series of uncoordinated initiatives…

Even with those ifs and buts, it still sounds like the brief of the century. Go here to find out more.

Here’s a background film about Peace One Day

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We have to be honest, we didn’t actually know about the Transform Awards (run by Communicate magazine, which specialises in corporate communications).

But luckily, one of our clients did (Anthony Nolan), entered and won the not-for-profit rebrand. Marvellous. In one fell swoop the pain of filling out forms and entering awards is removed and all you have to do is bask.

A full list of results is here. More info on the scheme here.

For those with their ‘awards-heads’ on, this is D&AD judging week, and they say that results will be announced on a daily basis throughout the week.

A vast amount of time at johnson banks is spent discussing just two things (well, three if you count kerning): music and food. So, last week, one of our true foodies went to the V&A for an evening talk about the past and future of food (as you do).

Following a brief introduction by Alexa Perrin of the Experimental Food Society, food historian Professor Roland Rotherham took a thorough look at food through the ages. We learned some great stuff, such as the fact that people only started eating sheep around 8,000 years ago.

Possibly more interesting than the facts themselves was that several of the gormo-geeks in the audience seemed to be pretty clued up already, many quite capable of answering obscure questions like ‘when did custard first come into existence?’*
 
The part of the evening we found most fascinating was Food Futurologists Dr Morgaine Gaye’s forecasting section. As with your usual fashion, design or style trend spotting, Dr Gaye predicts what new things we’ll be eating over the coming months. Here are some of the more unusual trends she’s predicting for the next 10 to 18 months:

The big news: sorry, but cupcakes are dead and will soon be replaced by new treats such as ice cream sandwiches or Alfajores – a South American version of the whoopee pie (you heard it here first).

Bacon is a trend in its own right and will continue going strong for some time (think air fresheners, plasters, wallets. Yes. Believe it).
 
South America is due to take over from the current Scandinavian food fad.

With ongoing CJD scares and worries about the harmful emissions created when breeding traditional livestock, insects will fast become an alternative source of sustainable protein. (Pass the ground worm salt…)
 
Ball-shaped food and food on sticks will be huge. We’ve noticed a variety of ball-shaped marshmallow, chocolate and nut covered things on wooden sticks ever since. Haven’t you?

Gelatinas will also be popular (beautiful jellies that look like floral glass paperweights).
 
Finally, when you set about re-branding your next big client, consider what the brand might smell like? Olfactory marketing is set to become a big thing. Scratch and sniff logos anyone? We’re trying to decide what Virgin Atlantic should smell like - obviously NOT cheap aftershave (well, not any more).
 
At the end of the lecture, we received (of course) a cutting edge cake ball on a stick and some very on-trend bacon flavoured chocolate. Yum.

Reporting by Miho Aishima

* we forgot to write down the exact date but it was some point during the middle ages or something

Recently johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson was interviewed about the challenges of livery and logo design for airlines for Aircraft International magazine. There’s follows a transcript of the conversation. A bit 'plane-geek’, just to warn you...

What are the key considerations and challenges for design in this area?

The key issues are a recognisable and memorable mark that will translate to a myriad of uses, from the tailfin of the plane, to typography on a fuselage right down to 50 pixel-width logo-boxes for online shopping.
 
How has logo/livery design changed over the last few decades?

In many respects the ‘blank sheet of paper’ hasn’t changed – it’s still a long, usually white, plane and a fin. Maybe the engine cowlings. Then using it off the plane at check-in and signage. Those things haven’t really changed fundamentally.
 
What’s made things more complicated is all the different uses – what looks ace writ huge down the side of a plane might look awful on-line. You might have the best idea for a fantastically unusual tailfin symbol but stitched on a badge, or a uniform, or screen-printed in one colour onto a catering pack it falls apart. So infinite flexibility is now the watchword.
 
Was there a golden age of aircraft logo design and if so, how do today’s logos compare?

I think when life was a little simpler, and applications more limited, things looked very elegant. In my head I replay old BOAC schemes and those early, beautiful American Airlines graphics, and yes they were great. Conversely, the explosion of the budget airlines also had a positive impact (for a while at least). I was actually a big fan of the early Easyjet schemes (with just that huge telephone number) or the Go identity. Nice work.
 
The congestion of planes and liveries and colours at airports now make those kind of simple statements a little harder now.

 
What has been the impact of internet and mobile marketing on aircraft logo design, including their ability to be reproduced and legible in different – and often smaller - formats?

Well, as I said above, the pressure to design for iPhone buttons and travel aggregator sites places unique pressures on logos, and not many survive these kind of tests. When we reviewed Virgin Atlantic’s logo and livery last year, we had to make sure it could work long and thin, or stacked, or square - in fact that kind of flexibility became integral to the brief. For a while there, it made things very difficult, but we managed to resolve it eventually.
 
How has technology changed what is possible in terms of finishes?

In basic terms the choices of colours and finishes are now far greater, so the deep metallic red on the new VAA planes is a good example -impossible only a few years ago. You can use less coats, because the paint is harder wearing, and use better sealants so repainting cycles can get longer and longer. These things all save time and money. Having said that, we still need paint. Transfers and decals still fall off after a few months when buffeted in the upper atmosphere, so we’re still waiting for the technology to improve there…

 
How much does it cost to change a logo/livery on a large fleet?

Repainting just one plane, depending on the specification, could be hundreds of thousands, so the decision to repaint/rebrand is never taken lightly. The design of the logos and design schemes often seem puny compared to the costs of the actual, physical changes when applied to planes.
 
What are the practical considerations beyond the cost of such change – weight, doors, maintenance, environmental factors, etc?

If you’re canny about the changes, and if (say) a fleet is new, or due for a repaint anyway, you can actually make significant savings. Working in tandem with Virgin Atlantic’s design team, it was possible to show how better paint = less coats = better durability = less repainting = cost savings. We’re also anticipating that the new paint systems should save on weight and hence fuel as well.

 
Can you give any examples of poor or muddled aircraft logo design in the last decade in your opinion and why?

I must say I haven’t really enjoyed the endless changes that Delta have put themselves through. And the Continental/United merger seems to have been handled especially poorly, in terms of identity change, saddling the United fleet with less elegant typography, and the old and rather cumbersome Continental ‘globe’ symbol.

 
Can you give any examples of great logo design in the last decade in your opinion and why?

I think there have been some great steps forward in identity design especially in the cultural sector – if you think of how Tate has used an out of focus logo across its many sites, it really makes you think how identities can flex and adapt to their environments and become ‘active’, living schemes not just logos plonked into corners.
 
Can/do/should airlines learn any best practice from other industries – hotel / automotive / yachts / product design etc?

I think airlines should be continually drawing inspiration from all elements of hospitality, yes. Anything that can take airline travel away from the grim realities of those awful dawn queues at grisly airports can only help. So airline bosses should take as much advice as they can from product designers, graphic designers, interior designers and interface designers to make the experience as seamless, luxurious and enjoyable as possible.

 
How do you think aircraft logo and livery design will differ in ten years’ time to how they look and feel today – more brash/subtle/using special new technology effects etc?

As technology advances, you can see that the paint effects applicable to planes can only get better and better. Even now, some of the one-offs done for airlines such as China Air are great. Perhaps some of these will err towards tacky, so watch out for those.
 
I’m anticipating two things really – both airlines ‘de-cluttering’ and streamlining their identities and liveries (in the way that we’ve done for Virgin), and some being a little braver in what they do. It’s a strangely conservative industry – I’d like to see someone be prepared to make a really bold statement with their fleet rather than just write a word over the first door and stick a symbol on a tailfin. The possibilities are endless, if you’re prepared to consider some slightly more unusual approaches…

Well it’s after 12.00 in both New York and London. But we’re afraid to say that our post earlier today was NOT an April Fool, although most people assumed it was, judging by a cascade of comments on blogs and the twittersphere.

So, just to re-iterate, the Think London and Visit London brands are to be replaced by London & Partners, whose new identity is based on work done by Saffron, but with the crucial addition of the ‘river/‘o’ device, done without Saffron’s knowledge, it seems.

The Think London and Visit London brands (by johnson banks and Saffron respectively) will be phased out.

The ‘river’ symbol is the addition that has caused the most furore. Just a quick scan of comments below this piece on the Creative Review blog reveals some classics: several people see sperm, a man gasping for air, a cleansed pore, a worm, a ballbag...

All in all an entertaining day. Turkey Holidays

We did once discuss with a colleague that the perfect April Fool would be to post about a real project on April 1st that seemed faintly ridiculous, hence creating a kind of double bluff. This is that project. Why they chose to launch today, we'll never know.

Incidentally a few people were annoyed by the writing style of this morning’s post - apologies - but it was, er, a joke. OK, yes, we are a little miffed to see a nice logo (in our opinion) go, we wanted to send it off in style. Our commiserations also to Saffron for what has been revealed today.

Thanks to Brian Webb for the lemon version at the top of this post. Don’t forget: follow us on Twitter @johnsonbanks

After a substantial wait, and much discussion, the wait is over and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

It seems attempting to bring the various bodies of London under one ‘logo’ has been shelved, for the time being, to make way for what we think is a pretty inspirational way forward.

The first decision is that the Think London logo has been deemed too powerful for any further use, and that extending it into a scheme across London (as above) would glue together the disparate elements too successfully.

Also it had proved too popular as a destination brand idea across the world and been emulated too well, and too often (see examples below). Turkey Holidays

Secondly, the somewhat quieter Visit London scheme (that still had some nice little touches) is retained, in part, for its key elements - its colour and German typography. The nice touches have thankfully been deemed too quirky to retain.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the most valuable visual clue to London, that of the Thames (so neatly encapsulated by the other symbols below) has been incorporated into the new London logo. After all, nothing sums up London better than the river running through it. It sets us apart from other major cities.

So here it is, the new London & Partners logo, which replaces Think London, Visit London and Study London. It’s not clear if this was done by Saffron (who designed Visit London), or elsewhere. But whoever has done it must be very proud.

It’s also not clear if this design approach will now be carried over into rebrands of the Mayor’s office and Transport for London, but we certainly hope so.

Following on from the newly launched Start-Up Britain’s innovation of recommending American firms to carry out design and branding, this is a proud day and a great example of more inspirational design thinking from the current administration.

See the old and new brands working nicely together here. Visit London will be changing very soon. The London & Partners website is here.

Update: just to clear up any confusion,this was NOT an April Fool

In contrast to the stark white Wim Crouwel show, the V&A’s new major exhibition ‘The Cult of Beauty’ is dark and moody, dripping in romance and sensual images: a panopoly of objects curated for their sheer aesthetic beauty.

With this show, it obviously helps if you’re into the whole Rossetti/Morris/Burne-Jones/Beardsley/Whistler oeuvre - just seeing the Whistlers in real life is a real treat. Sometimes it can feel a little ‘chocolate box’, but if you suspend your modernist tendencies for an hour and turn the clock back to the late nineteenth century, it’s a delight.

The V&A goons were applying a strict no photos rule, so here's some hastily snapped images that give you an oddly framed glimpse of what’s there. Turkey Holidays

See, this was meant to be a picture of the Eros statue (itself part of the Aesthetic movement). Came out a bit cropped, sorry.

Always great to see those Beardsleys...

...and those Morris books in real life.

Never been a huge fan of this period of Christoper Dresser’s work, but this was SO directional circa 1880.

Again, highly recommended. Almost the precise reverse of the Crouwel, in a way, so seeing them back-to-back is an odd sensation, but a good one.

The Cult of Beauty at the V&A opens this Saturday and is open until the 17th July.

To a whole phalanx of British and European designers Wim Crouwel is a living legend of Dutch Modernism – a life dedicated to typographic form, to grids, to layout, to alphabets. A fantastic body of work and an undeniable influence on generations of designers from the sixties onwards.
 
I’ll admit though, to a committed pluralist like myself, the thought of an entire room dedicated to the study of the grid filled me with more than a little dread. I wasn’t sure if I could handle several walls dedicated to kerning pairs.

But, happily, I was completely and utterly wrong. The new show which opened last night at the Design Museum is great. Sure, it’s an exhibition about graphic design, for graphic designers, but it pulls it off brilliantly. Yes, you can gridnik away to your heart’s content but equally just browse, graze and take it all in.

Curated by Spin’s Tony Brook, the first masterstroke is to pull down the traditional walls of the Design Museum’s shows and replace them with wide, white tables into and onto which the work is carefully arranged. A bit like the best D&AD judging you’ve ever done, where everything is perfectly curated (and everything gets in).Turkey Holidays

It’s essentially chronological, beginning with his influences (here’s some nice Müller-Brockmanns)...

...and ending with those influenced (here’s some Philippe Apeloig).

In between, there’s a vast array of Crouwel’s work, or examples of his many collaborations. Some, of course, very familiar, but still great to see in real life...

...some less familiar but equally revealing.

Here’s a great ‘poster as manifesto’ from the Total design period...

...not far away from an equally revealing but nicely human ‘Total design job log book’.

A few views of a very nice ‘logo wall’, featuring Crouwel’s work and some of his contemporaries such as Ben Bos.

Above, the Randstad logo by Ben Bos. And below, as a running theme, Crouwel the style icon, from Mad Men to 70's bowties.

Probably the best graphic design show at the Design Museum since the Alan Fletcher. A must-see, even if you’re grid-o-phobic.

By Michael Johnson.

Apologies for the shaky camera phone pics

Opening today at London’s Design Museum, until the 3rd of July.

A couple of us headed down to Somerset House this week to take a look at the second annual Pick Me Up, which is becoming the UK's pre-eminent contemporary graphic art fair.

This year’s is another eclectic mix of illustrated posters to buy, artists screenprinting, a model volcano, DIY poster making with Anthony Burrill, illustration workshops and various artist collectives to meet and mingle with.

Artist collective Jaguarshoes even has a 3D campfire to interact with. Classy.

So, how is it different from last year’s Pick Me Up?

Print Club’s Fred Higginson says, ‘Last year, we got to work with established artists to print for us, which was great but the air conditioning made it almost impossible to do. This year, we are working more with up-and-coming artists since we tend to work with them at Print Club itself. There will be daily live printing shows along with a limited edition fanzine to give away for free.’

This year’s Open studio with Anthony Burrill is more of an interactive studio with dozens of people busily cutting, pasting and creating their own Anthony Burrill-esque posters.

We asked him what it was like moving his studio into Somerset House: ‘This is my dream studio, much bigger than my studio in Kent. I have been involved with Pick Me Up from the start and wanted to it to be include the interactive DIY element. I have also invited various friends and musicians, photographers to come down to the studio to take part as well.

If some of the graphic art on sale is slightly out of your price range, Somerset House has also commissioned 24 of illustration’s rising stars to create prints specifically for the show in the ‘Take Me Home’ section, where visitors can buy an exclusive print for £20. Turkey Holidays

These include prints by a few of our favourites: Tom Gauld (cartoonist of Guardian fame)...

..Jules Julien (beautiful, but rather disturbing monotone prints)...

...and Takeru Toyokura (witty illustrations using paper and fuzzy felts).

Pick Me Up will be on until this Sunday (27 March) at Somerset House in the Embankment Galleries. Reporting by Julia Woollams and Miho Aishima

A few weeks ago, Creative Review magazine asked us to nominate a list of our favourite logos. They’ve combined ours with about 20 other lists and come up with a ‘top twenty’ for their new edition. Here follows our top 18, in no particular order.

London Underground  Frank Pick/Edward Johnston 1918
Canadian National Railways Alan Fleming 1960
British Rail  DRU 1964

We’re surrounded by mass transportation symbols every day of our lives, so it’s no great surprise that these three keep appearing on lists of the ‘greats’ of logo design. London Underground’s, as one of the oldest, didn’t look much like the finalised symbol above for a while. But it’s always involved a blue line through a red circle, which eventually became a key part of the map, and has become ingrained in our collective consciousnesses. Many people might not even ‘think’ about this as a logo, so everyday has it become. It’s without doubt the unofficial symbol of London.
 
I’ve included these two Railway symbols because they are true trailblazers. Plaudits should really go the CN symbol – the first rail symbol to simply imply travel, rail, linkage and ‘a route’, and highly influential on countless rail symbols worldwide ever since, as well as opening the door for NASA’s ‘worm’ logo a decade later. How much it influenced British Rail’s is open for debate, but there’s no doubt that the DRU design inspired many others too (including the Dutch version in 1967).
 
One little known fact about the BR symbol is that it looks painfully simple but is actually beautifully drawn: to make the outer arrows work, optically, they are drawn splayed so that they appear parallel…

CBS Bill Golden 1951
Channel 4 Robinson Lambie-Nairn  1982

There are many, many candidates for TV idents but these are the two for me. One, the CBS eye, because it has effectively ring-fenced ‘eye’ symbols for its own use (try designing one and you soon stop - it dawns very quickly that Bill Golden’s geometry steals it every time).

Martin Lambie-Nairn’s stencilled 4 may actually have looked merely ‘of its time’ had it just been presented as a multi-coloured block, but from the outset it was a moving, exploding and rebuilding device and they have managed to keep that principle in all its different forms for thirty years (and it still feels up to date). For me it’s a pre-cursor to the flexible, mutable identities that we are interested in now, across all media.

Time Warner Chermayeff + Geismar  1990

A decade later, Steff Geissbuhler’s eye/ear symbol was drawn for the merger of Time and Warner, and although it’s been shunted around the organisation a little, and recently redrawn, it’s one of the few true symbols of the recent era which has genuinely attempted to create something new in terms of its symbolism. An idea that worked fine as a scribble, legend has it that all attempts to draw it on a computer failed until eventually Geissbuhler tried painting it at home one weekend with big, fat paint brushes. Turkey Holidays

Amnesty International Diana Redhouse 1963

Designed by member and artist Diana Redhouse (and tweaked and twiddled but never changed since). Having worked for many charities and NGOs, and tried to design symbols with ‘emotional’ qualities you soon run up against brick walls. But this design, chosen for Amnesty’s first christmas card, somehow manages to encapsulate the entire organisation. Fantastic.

Tokyo Olympics Yusaku Kamekura 1964

At first sight, you might wonder why this would be hailed as a great symbol. Red dot for Japan, Olympic rings, bit of type. So what? But this is the first time that modernism and the Olympics combine – prior to this all we saw were posters of discus throwers and medal designs but no true symbolism. Kamekura stripped everything out, took the dot from his flag and locked it to the rings. So simple. So great (and you can just see his iconic posters in your head as you look at it). No Olympic symbol has even come close since.

Woolmark Francesco Saroglia 1964
 
From the same year as the Tokyo Olympics, and again familiarity should breed contempt but Saroglia’s mark is an op masterpiece, done before Bridget Riley really got into her stride and a full 4 years before Lance Wyman’s Mexico Olympics scheme.

Fedex Landor 1994
 
Of contemporary logos, this is the one that steals it for me every time. Painfully simple, the carefully worked typeforms reveal an arrow, perfect for a delivery service. But it’s not overstated, and Fedex themselves have always shied away from making a big deal of their ‘invisible’ asset. In fact, show it in a lecture and it’s always guaranteed that gasps will go up from the dozens of people only seeing it for the first time.

American Bicentennial logo Chermayeff + Geismar 1976
 
Not included for it’s typography (which I’ve judiciously removed) but for its wonderful symbol, the three American flag colours swirling beautifully around a single five pointed star. To me it’s the highpoint of post-war American modernism.

Musee d’Orsée  Bruno Monguzzi 1986
V&A Alan Fletcher 1989
 
I hadn’t meant to put these two together, but when you look at the dates, and the typography, you start to view them as a classic ‘pair’ of museum idents from the late eighties. Monguzzi’s is the forgotten classic (certainly to a transatlantic audience) but look at that typographic sleight of hand, the removal of the ‘d’ and M’O gets me every time (especially in its cropped form).

Fletcher would have known of Monguzzi’s masterpiece, for sure, but I don’t think it’s a steal (even though both share the same Bodoni/Didot lineage). Whilst Monguzzi removed the ‘d’, Fletcher removed the side of the ‘A’, and the ampersand neatly fills the gap. Both great, both timeless.

MIT Publishing Muriel Cooper early 1960s
 
I’ve included this because I think a lot of people have neatly forgotten about this great piece of reductionism from Muriel Cooper – the M,I,T and P of MIT Publishing are boiled down to seven vertical bars. Hugely influential.

ENO CDT 1990
 
It seems to be out of fashion to love this symbol but Mike Dempsey’s singing face remains one of my all-time favourites, with cap ‘E’ making a perfectly closed eye and that bold ‘O’ for a mouth. Great. Already twenty years old, and unless the English National Opera change their name, no reason to change for at least another twenty.

Bovis Wolff Olins 1971

Included more for its symbol than the type, but the sheer chutzpah it took to persuade a British construction company to adopt a hummingbird (native of tropical islands, not our windy and rainy one) takes some beating. Those with long memories insist that the original proposal was for an orange goldfish, not a hummingbird…

Tomato Bank  Shigeo Katsuoka 1989

It’s not clear if Tomato Bank is still in existence, but this is one of my favourite examples of Japanese corporate design, and their ability to look at a problem completely differently. Just for starters, ‘Tomato Bank’ is an odd name, then a tomato stuck onto the word ‘BANK’ is even odder. But you never forget it. This taught me to look across the world for inspiration, not just close to home.

Parcs Nationaux de France  Grapus France 1991

Included because, in true Grapus-style, it breaks all the apparent rules of logo design yet succeeds brilliantly. Rather than try to pick one or two of the National Park’s inhabitants for a symbol, they simply arranged hundreds of them into a twirling shape. When you see it large, you see everything, see it small and it’s a memorable spiral. Messy, ‘wrong’ but brilliantly right and a constant inspiration to try things a little differently.

By Michael Johnson

There’s a link to the edition of Creative Review here. We don’t actually know what their ‘top twenty’ includes yet, but we’ll keep you posted.

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @johnsonbanks

A few weeks ago we had the chance to take a break from the branding of culture, blue-chips and charities and mull over the problems faced by the one-time industrial powerhouse, the original motor city, Detroit.

In case you haven’t been tracking the city’s fate over the last few decades, the executive summary isn’t good. Detroit finds itself in the unenviable position of being a city created for 2 million people, containing only 700,000 (possibly less) inhabitants.

This places a disproportionate load on the remaining citizens to pay taxes on a city that is essentially too big, too spread out, and doesn’t need 9 lane highways when 5 or 6 would suffice.

It struggles to control crime and keep school standards high. Those who can, leave, and leave as quick as possible - the recent population map below shows the city’s population by ethnicity and the white (in this case green) 'flight’ out of the city.

Architects and Urban Planners are watching Detroit very carefully, since there are many cities all over the world that could suffer similar ‘shrinkage’, or find themselves high and dry in industrial terms as the global market swiftly moves production around the world to the lowest bidders.

Meanwhile, the city has become a bizarre ‘poster-boy’ for the decline of the American dream as teams of photographers assiduously capture what appear to some to be its death throes. These amazing pictures by the photography duo Merchand and Meffre are pretty typical, often referred to by the disconcerting shorthand of ‘ruin porn’. (There’s more and an entire slideshow here).

Apparently, a subtle and very health-and-safety-unfriendly tourist trade has developed of visitors coming to see some of these amazing sites before they are bulldozed away.

The housing situation is so bizarre and oversupplied that it’s relatively easy to find houses for sale for next to nothing. Even in a good area, this 10 bedroom mansion is still only on sale for $2.5 million (the equivalent price for an analogous pile in London would be about $20 million).

Away from the inner city, one of the oddest sights are the plots of suburban houses with many neighbouring dwellings demolished, leaving isolated buildings almost stranded in the midst of scrubland.

Out of adversity, there are some signs of life – representatives of the Detroit Mayor’s office attending the workshop showed persuasive slides that suggested that ‘loft-style’ apartments and inner-city buildings were of interest to graduates who wanted to stay in the city and make the most of the affordable housing.

Around 400 urban farms have sprouted up to turn those suburban wastelands into valuable sources of basic food, turning desperate housewives into happy farmers, whilst art projects such as The Heidelberg Project (that we showcased 2 years ago) show other ways to reclaim the derelict plots.

The city isn’t giving up without a fight. During the recent Superbowl this Eminem-starring Chrysler spot advertised his Detroit credentials, and an on-line campaign to build a statue of the Robocop (itself set in a Detroit of the future) gathers pace.

Over the course of the day, organised by Buro Happold (who are themselves helping Detroit with its future planning), an impressive collection of thinker, designers, architects and town planners debated, argued and brainstormed before presenting a persuasive potpourri of ideas to help turn the city’s fate around.

The ideas ranged from the truly outlandish (reclaiming half of the land to ‘just add water’ by digging canals), to ideas on creating the first Urban National Park by intentionally allowing some of the unused space to become truly green again.

The group I was involved in wanted to get on with re-positioning the city but kept hitting some serious and basic ‘stoppers’, such as crime, health and education. If you’re wondering how branding could get Detroit out of this mess, well, you’re right, it’s probably a little early (although ‘Made it in Detroit’ as a 21st century call for an entrepreneurial spin on ‘Made in Detroit’ struck us an interesting start). We all agreed the Detroit mayor needs to find a persuasive narrative (and an apolitical one that could be taken on by his successor, rather than dumped in the pursuit of easy election point-scoring).

Looking back at the day I was struck by the general willingness to roll up sleeves and get stuck in - that a group of great thinkers cleverly collected together by Buro Happold could really gather some interesting ideas in just one day.

I left confident that, with the right advice, and careful planning, cities could adapt to this kind of change and re-invent themselves – a kind of rebranding, but one concerned with the basic needs, ideals, aims and truths of a city first. Branding from the ground up, from bricks and mortar, and in Detroit’s case urban gardens onwards. Not the branding of logos and typefaces (well, not yet).

By Michael Johnson

The WAN Think Tank was supported by Buro Happold and arranged in conjunction with the Mayor’s Office in Detroit and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and featured representatives of World Architecture News, Heatherwick Studio, The Tate, The Architecture Foundation, the LSE, Land Securities, Foster and Partners, Marks Barfield and the LDA, amongst others.

The photo featured at the top of this post was the winner of Buro Happold’s ‘Spirit of Detroit’ photography project - you can find out more on this project here. Buro Happold hosted the event and their consulting team are currently working on the Detroit Works Project. For further information please contact Tom Foulkes’ twitter page @TomFoulkes

There’s a full write up of the day on the World Architecture News site here

Just as a reminder, you can finally follow johnson banks on Twitter, @johnsonbanks

Just a few days ago, the johnson banks studio was caught in a heated debate. The cause of it? An appropriate response to the tragedies in Japan.

As regular readers of this blog will know, we have many links to the country (including a Japanese American designer). Our main priority over the last week has been to ensure by electronic means that our many friends and some family over there are safe (including those in Sendai, one of the most devastated areas, visited as part of this project). Thankfully, they are all fine, although their emails back have often been harrowing in their detail and sadness.

The debate concerned appropriate reaction, fuelled in part by Weiden + Kennedy’s Red Cross poster at the top of this post, swiftly followed by this poster by Signalnoise.

It seems that others have made up their mind – Fast Code came off the fence with this critique, then Eye Magazine quickly followed (and has sparked off a sometimes furious debate in the process).

Essentially, both articles ask the same thing: why do graphic designers feel the need to design posters about tragic events?

Last year we were contacted by the Haiti poster project (which essentially asks for poster donations that are sold online to raise funds). We couldn’t respond, partly because of time-pressures, and partly because, in our case, visualizing the horror of the Haiti earthquake seemed somehow inappropriate and possibly too easy to lapse into glib responses. Many designers did take part, some of them are great, and money is being raised, which is all good.

Yet, sure enough, some of the posters are already starting to surface in this year’s round of design competitions and that’s where all those inappropriate/ethical alarm bells start clanging in our heads again.

If, as a profession, all we can do in response to disaster is design a nice poster (with our names at the bottom to ensure a bit of PR), offer it up online, then quietly enter it into design competitions a few months later, that doesn’t feel quite right somehow.

You could argue conversely that designers should react in the best form they know and if that response raises funds, who are we to criticise? Weiden’s poster has so far raised $30,000, Signalnoise’s, $7,000: would they have raised that without it? Good question. Together, both companies would have struggled to raise $37k on their own: by supplying an alternative route, more money has been raised. It isn’t clear yet how much the Haiti poster project has raised, but that stemmed out of a Hurricane Katrina project that aimed to raise $1,000,000 for the Red Cross.

But you can see why we're in a quandary. Perhaps the last word on this should go to the late Alan Fletcher. His response to the 9/11 tragedy? To collect postcards of the World Trade Center, then carefully burn holes in the top. He felt he had to respond, somehow. He did. But he didn’t then offer them as a limited edition poster.

The Red Cross donation page is here.
The Save the Children donation page is here.
The Oxfam donation page is here.

In case you’re wondering, the £700 or so that’s in the johnson banks Paypal account (from selling stuff from our shop) is being shared amongst these three.

There's talk of a global Pecha Kucha in aid of the disaster - keep an eye on the PK homepage for more news

We were back in Downpatrick this week for a follow-up visit to the Lowden guitar workshop in Northern Ireland. Last year we popped in at the end of a lecture/workshop trip - this time it was solely to continue a conversation with Lowden, and meet the man himself.

In case you don’t know, George Lowden and his team hand-build some of the world’s finest acoustic guitars and have buyers lining up from all over the world. We’re at the beginning of a ‘where next’ conversation with them, which meant presenting to George and his wife Flo.

Sometimes these kind of meetings can be tricky. You sometimes have to be a bit, er, blunt and you never know if you’re going to get chucked out after just half a dozen slides. (If you’ve been making guitars for 37 years you might not want some Englishman holding forth about your brand, let's face it).

Luckily everyone got on and talk moved swiftly on to how an already world-famous brand can be made even stronger. There was even some brief guitar playing, although as one sage commented there’s nothing more stressful than playing guitar whilst the man who actually made it is listening.

Later that evening we were even using the backs of menus for scribbling hypothetical guitar designs and George was explaining particularly tricky neck joints...

Part of the conversation during the day revolved around the guitars that Lowden make for famous guitarists - for years they’ve built them for Pierre Bensusan, Richard Thompson and Alex de Grassi, and they’ve just started making them for up and coming Austrian/Californian Thomas Leeb.

In case you’ve never heard or seen him, here he is in action. Amazing. Watch out Andy McKee.

Part of the challenge of building a guitar for Thomas is all that tapping, banging, thwacking and scratching. His interim solution, for years, has been to stick extra wooden ‘scratchpads’ onto the guitars which get progressively more and more destroyed (there’s a photo of one of his old ones at the top of this post).

Now he’s the proud owner of this new guitar, with a nicely cut extra plate (and presumably a handful of spares in his guitar case).

Here’s a plate for the next ‘Thomas Leeb signature model’ on the bench waiting for the next guitar.

It could be that the fact that people like Thomas buy Lowdens to play them, not cotton wool them, is a nice way forward. Could be. Anyway, updates to come later in the year. Need to go and practice before the next meeting now...

Below: George Lowden and Thomas Leeb.

Thanks to George and Flo for being patient listeners, Ricky for his hospitality and special dusk ‘tour’, Sam and Richard for the limousine service and good humour as we showed our 150th slide.

You can see how it could happen.

Tap 'London Olympics logo’ into Google images and you get a motley collection of real and made-up logos. And, yes, one which has been hastily rejigged to say, er, sh*t.

Ok, easy laugh, ha-ha, move on.

But imagine, for a moment, that you’re designing the website for the upcoming University Olympics in Shenzen. You’re almost certainly Chinese. You’ve sorted out your home page, and you want to include links at the bottom to other Olympic organisations.

You might not read English that well. You go to Google images, you pick one from the top line, you insert, job done...

Go here to see the real thing.

Thanks to our deep-throat in China for the tip...

We were recently contacted by Wieden + Kennedy London’s Creative Director, Tony Davidson about his online wood type project, Almost Extinct.

Essentially, the idea of the project is to explore the use of wood type to illustrate and symbolise animals, and highlight the dying craft of wood type in the process.

We were supposed to be sticking to the rules (as few letters as possible, supplying prints, etc etc) but decided fairly quickly that we were more interested in seeing the type in a more sculptural way.

Photographing them, then reversing the photograph became the ‘printing’, if you see what we mean.

Anyway, here are our contributions to the project.

In case you couldn’t work them out, that was Owl, Shrimp, Millipede, Fish, Alpaca, and Hedgehog, in that order. Obviously.

Go here to find out more.

Send your suggestions for more to try to our twitter account, @johnsonbanks (but bear in mind that our wood type collection isn't huge...)

Thanks for the invite Mr D.

We have broadly had a good reception to our Science Museum scheme and it was shortlisted twice at last night’s Design Week Awards. It gained a commendation in the identity category.

Not a winner this time, but hey, it’s nice to be considered.

Congratulations to the identity category winners, the Voyager Maritime Museum in New Zealand, and to the surprise best of show winner, the Apple iPad. The full list of results is here.

As a follow-up to this post, here are more weird and wonderful hairdressers’ windows we’ve been noticing on our travels.

We’re really not sure that this red-faced gent is much of an advert for a trim. (Nor are the dead leaves)

Oddly, he turns up in other windows too.

This barbers seems to specialise in either ‘boyband’ or ‘dreadful’ haircuts.

This takes us right back to the early nineties.

This chap seems to be thinking about his wetcut, or something...

The dirty window almost looks like tears.

We’ve noticed this isn’t just a UK thing - here’s a brooding window in Barcelona (and what are those loops of hair doing?).

And how about this, spotted in Marrakesh?

It has to end somewhere, so here’s our favourite price list. But whatever you do, don’t take a child there on Saturday...

...it could all end in tears.

We were lent a Samsung Wave II phone to do this, which takes a pretty useful 14 meg picture. You can find out more about the overall project here, and watch a YouTube film about the project here. Thanks to the Red Consutancy for getting us involved.

We’ve noted before the trend of long term placements giving us odd or edible ‘goodbye’ presents. 

Today the bar was raised when Anna, who has been with us for as long as any of us can remember (certainly since the beginning of time, at least), made a 3d version of the johnson banks homepage with the help of a lot of eggs, flour and some very carefully RGB-tinted icing. Tricky.

Very impressive. And very tasty.

Reminds us of this, a couple of years ago, made by James and Chelsea who were here for a summer working on the Ravensbourne rebrand. Also very tasty.

Our work for the Science Museum continues - over the last couple of months various bits of merchandise have been produced and are now on sale in the museum.

In terms of T-shirts we’ve been exploring just how far you can push the new identity, especially when you mash it up with old computer games, Tetris and geeky Pi jokes.

You may of course just want ‘logo’ t-shirts, we have those too...

These are all on sale in the revamped museum shop (image below, a collaboration between us and the Science Museum’s in-house design department)...

...where you can buy the obligatory branded stuff. We liked these key-rings and lollies especially.

When you’re all shopped out, you can take it all home in a suitably science-geek bag.

We’re working on branded chocolate. Coming soon, we hope.

For more updates and day-to-day micro-blogging us on twitter at @johnsonbanks

Included on D&AD’s revamped site is a short interview with johnson banks’ Michael Johnson, as part of a section dedicated to past presidents (Johnson was D&AD President 2003-2004)

Here’s a short sample about his earliest memories of the organisation:

"I went to the awards on an off-chance, as an employee in the late-eighties. I didn’t really understand it, I didn’t really know what made one thing pencil-worthy as opposed to another, but it obviously meant a lot to the people there. Through the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke, sitting at the back, I think I decided there and then that I wanted to try and do something good enough to win".

Go here to read the full interview, and more past-presidents are slowly being featured here.

On Thursday night we popped to the opening of Bass notes: the film posters of Saul Bass at Hoxton’s Kemistry gallery, one of London’s few spaces dedicated to exhibiting graphic design. 

The posters, storyboards and stills on show are from a retrospective of Bass’ work which toured the world’s film festivals in 1996, the year of his death. Lloyd Northover inherited the collection when they acquired Saul Bass’ former studio, Bass Yeager in 1997 and they have since donated the set to the BFI for safe keeping.

Although some Londoners may recall seeing a selection of Bass’ work at the 2004 Design Museum exhibition, it’s quite something to see all of these posters up close and in such an intimate space. (In case you’ve never been, the Kemistry gallery is quite compact - but - perfect for a show like this).

In the intro to the exhibition, Lloyd Northover’s co-founder, Jim Northover writes ‘Bass used imagery as notation, his work “shorthands” the message visually so that we take away something we store in our mind’s eye and can readily recall.’

We had a chat at the opening with Jim about his thoughts on Saul Bass’ influence on film promotion: ‘Film posters today are just very commercial. They are now very complicated and don’t do what Bass did. He created a simple, clear brand for the film. He would often just use two colours. He presented messages in such a direct and memorable way. He has also gone on to influence many title sequences, such as Mad Men'.

We asked if Jim had a favourite poster - it’s Exodus (shown above).

19 Posters are on show including: Anatomy of a Murder (1955), The Man with a Golden Arm (1955), Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Vertigo (1958), Exodus (1960), Spartacus (1960), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and a selection of storyboards and title sequences. Shown below are excerpts from the Cape Fear and Psycho storyboards.

Great stuff. The show runs until 17 March 2011. The gallery is open Mon–Sat 10.00–18.00. Definitely worth a visit. 

It’s been a love hate relationship. It was one of my first loves. It’s taught me how to communicate. It provided a glamorous and imaginary backdrop to a grey childhood in the English midlands. It probably propelled me into ‘communications’ as a career.

But now? To be honest, it can be the bane of my life. Conversations with its creatives can collapse into bizarre ‘I’m not using your typeface/oh yes you are’ stand-offs. Some of its practitioners seem just to sit in front of YouTube all day, looking for ideas to borrow.  It often seems entirely tactical, whilst my life is strategic. What am I talking about? Advertising.

Since I technically sit on the design side of the fence, I should come clean that yes, I did once (briefly) work in advertising. It was fun until they asked me to design some cigarette packs without even an ethical blink and I caught myself wondering why I was there. At this particular time and place the joint creative director had changed his name to ‘Maarcus’ (with a double ‘a’) because the other creative director’s name was Siimon. (True. I’m not making it up). I also once, decades ago, interviewed to be a planner, but my interrogator didn’t buy it and kept asking – ‘didn’t I want to be a creative?’

It’s true that I still regard the best advertising from each decade since the 60s as seminal communications that can always be learned from. Think of DDB’s Volkswagen and Avis work from the 60s, virtually anything from George Lois’s portfolio, the 70s output of CDP, 80s Saatchis, 90s Howell Henry and DDB (again). Even now advertising, in the hands of skilled and canny practitioners such as any of Wieden’s offices worldwide and the Fallons, work comes out that stops you in your tracks and makes you ‘believe’ in advertising again.
 
But later that evening you’ll skip over the ads in the evening paper, fast forward through the TV ads on your digital recorder and swap radio stations to avoid the ads on the school run. You’ll begin to see that if advertising is avoidable, that’s exactly what we’ll do.

As traditional advertising’s hold over me has gradually declined over a twenty year period, I’ve begun to discover that my greatest interest, identity and branding, has stepped up to the plate. Gradually, bit by bit, branding has become an acceptable language in the boardroom, not the odd kind of verbal Esperanto it was before. Organisations who are looking to change will now ask a brand consultant’s advice on positioning, values, often strategy. They’ll need help relaunching internally, and externally. There could be a change of name, and if that change is to be made visible, an amended or sometimes revolutionised visual identity.
 
After that, months or even years might pass before clients consider how to communicate externally, and then advertising might be considered as a channel, along with a whole raft of other methods such as web, social media and PR. This, of course comes as a great blow to an industry accustomed to a role as a key piece of communication. Being seen as just a ‘channel’ (once name, positioning and visual style has been agreed elsewhere) well, you can see why things can get a bit testy.
 
Whilst advertising has become avoidable, branding has become anything but. There’s been a sea change where logos have come out of the corner and sprung to life, often becoming the advertising itself. Countless companies have sensed that branding is way, way more than just a marque. Led by TV designers’ skills at twisting and turning identities in space, more ‘corporate’ designers are catching up and letting their own ideas free from previous restrictions. Some clients just let their designers do the advertising to keep things tangle-free. Apple realised more than a decade ago that great products could be their brand, so it’s no surprise that their ads just feature large images of their products.

As I write this, I’m aware that I may be describing a particularly British and American scenario. The concept of ‘design consultancy’ is not new on either side of the Atlantic and after 40-odd years of practice it’s not particularly surprising that a mature sector has worked out its role, and its value. This isn’t always echoed around the world – in Japan, for example, the power of the main advertising agencies (Dentsu, Hakuhodo, etc) is legendary. For years, design consultancy in Germany rested in the hands of tiny companies, not huge conglomerates that dominate the transatlantic design scene.
 
Internationally, advertising agencies, chasing those FMCG dollars, will often be early into countries, and by dint of their size and now unavoidable international networks propose compelling offers and winning smiles. But for years their two Achilles heels have been on show – on one ankle the seemingly innate desire of every agency to do thirty second ads for their clients (whether it’s strategically appropriate or not). And on the other ankle? Getting paid ‘on commission’ – not getting fees for up front work but earning a hefty mark-up on media bought and used. With this kind of billing skew it’s no surprise that traditional media (outdoor, print and TV) remain the ad agency’s products of choice – where the most mark up can be made (and hence the most ‘commission’).

In the west, design consultancy has got itself in to the boardroom, is listened to and increasingly pulls the strategic strings. Some agencies are uncomfortable with this, it’s true, but the smart ones are reacting by reinventing advertising for the next generation by taking digital channels seriously and looking hard at the ways that social media can propel a brand. Internationally, well, it’s up to designers to show that they could and should be taken seriously, not just logo jockeys putting a few ideas together over a weekend.

By Michael Johnson. This is an adaptation of an article written recently for Kyoorius Magazine in India.

Illustrations by Anna Brooks.

You can finally follow johnson banks on twitter. Visit http://twitter.com/johnsonbanks for daily thoughts or follow @johnsonbanks 

Grafik magazine has been reborn, as of last week, and there follows the transcript of an interview between Caroline Roberts and Michael Johnson on the thorny question of making money as a graphic designer.

How would you define success, in terms of being a graphic designer?

I’m fascinated by the most interesting and unusual problems that we can solve in an unusual and memorable way. As long as we attract those kind of projects and manage to stay fiscally viable, I guess that would be one definition of success.

What’s more important, success or money?

Well it’s naïve to separate the two things, in my humble opinion. Working for yourself is obviously a way to keep costs down, and a way to stay completely in control of your destiny, but if you want to do projects of any scale, you need a studio, designers, a colour printer… That means that every year you need to pay salaries, pay the gas man and ideally have a bit left over for a few bonuses, the odd new computer and a decent xmas lunch. The trick is how to achieve this whilst doing rewarding work.

Is it possible to have both?

I do think it’s possible, but you have to work at it. It took us a few years to get the hang of it, but once we had stuck our neck out several times to ensure that projects were done differently, and well, we noticed we then started to attract a particular type of client. Not clients who wanted ‘more of the same’, but appreciated our way of thinking and approached us in an open frame of mind, prepared to go on a little journey towards something more unusual.

If so, how? If not, why not?

Well, leading on from the previous question, if you’re doing good work, then that attracts likeminded clients. If you can get them to appreciate what you do, how good work affects their bottom line, and pay accordingly, then that’s good.

I think there may be a view out there that ‘creative’ work doesn’t pay, whereas ‘boring’ work does, and in some way ‘creative’ and ‘big projects’ are mutually exclusive.

I’m afraid I think that’s tosh, perpetrated by on one side by self-styled graphic ‘artists’ who have all sorts of bizarre rules about how their projects should look (but are forever moaning about low fees). Or conversely those corporate types who say things in meetings like ‘well, it’s great but the client is never going to go for it’. You’d be amazed at how often clients love a really unusual and original idea – you just have to stick your neck out and show it (even if it’s wildly off-brief).

Have your views changed on this over the years?

Not really. I’ve never been a bread-head, in the sense that we’d do projects entirely for the money, but I’ve always made sure that people pay, at least something. I wouldn't expect my lawyer or solicitor to work for free. If they did I’d be kind of suspicious. But it’s fair to say that we have developed a kind of ‘Robin Hood’ approach to fees in that we’ll insist that blue-chips pay properly whilst we work at about 50-60% for our charity clients.

There’s a law in Economics called the 80:20 rule (Pareto’s law) which originally applied to the wealth of nations being in the hands of the few (the 20%) but can equally apply to design. In quite a few studios we never see 80% of their work because it’s dull and pays the bills, and only see the last 20% - magical little made-up or not-for-profit projects designed entirely for award schemes.

My aim has always been to reverse the 80:20 rule, in that at least 80% of our work should be interesting, fulfilling and challenging, and try to ensure that no more than 20% are donkey projects. It’s tough to do, but it’s possible.

Do you see graphic design as a job, a vocation or a bit of both?

It’s just something that I’ve loved doing for 25 years now. I’m sometimes painfully aware that it never seems like a job, especially when you meet people who talk about their ‘work’ in almost derogatory tones. But not all graphic designers feel that way, I’m sure.

How much are you prepared to sacrifice your creative vision for your own and your client's commercial success?

That's a good question. I spent my twenties designing great solutions for the wrong problems, getting into arguments, storming out of meetings, all of that stuff. By my thirties I had got better at aligning good ideas with ‘commerce’, but not always successfully, it must be said. I’m a little more pragmatic now, but johnson banks is still small enough to turn down projects that don’t smell right, or projects that would tie us up for two years, pay the bills but leave us with nothing significant to show for our work.

There are occasions when a client presents you with a phenomenally good reason why they CAN’T go for the most creative idea in the room, and sometimes that’s hard to take. Luckily, we have the kind of clients who are coming for different ideas, not drudgery, so those instances are relatively rare. And we’ve gathered some good case studies along the way to prove that ‘different’ and ‘unusual’ can also be very successful too.

Are there companies you would not want to take money from (oil, tobacco, clothing brands who use sweatshops etc)?

Yes, lots, the usual suspects. As a rule we seem to be of no interest to international tobacco firms, arms manufacturers or huge oil companies, so it’s very rarely an issue.

Do you think graphic designers care too much or too little about money?

I find the true bread-heads in this business get turned to the ‘dark side’ pretty early, and never come out. Conversely, the ‘yes we’ll do if for £500’ designers are doing themselves and the industry no favours at all. If our clients can’t pay in cash, we’ll take payment in other forms. We once were paid by a restaurant with a 10k bar bill that we slowly worked through over a year. We’ve been paid in ‘guitars’ several times. We’ve discussed being paid in shares several times by start-ups who wanted proper schemes but had no cash. I guess I’m saying that you can be creative about this kind of thing.

Is there anything you would have done differently as far as finances and business goes?

The 2001/2 mini-crash was quite tough for us and taught me to have a much clearer idea of what we needed to bill each month, and whether we were achieving it. It’s dull having to think about the numbers but it keeps you afloat.

What financial advice about running a business would you give to a graphic designer who’s just starting out?

Don’t push your overheads too high too soon and be prepared to work pretty hard to get yourself established for 3-5 years. And try to produce a ‘defining’ piece of work (or two) within three years that will help clients position you in their minds differently to your previous employers, or your direct competitors. More broadly I’d advise anyone starting now to have a global perspective. I’m always amazed at how insular and UK focussed British firms are.

If you weren't a graphic designer, how would you make a living?

I’d either be an unsuccessful session guitarist, a late night DJ with very few listeners (on account of the weird music played) or maybe a writer. Maybe.

The same questions were posed to a variety of designers, including Michael C Place, Stefan Sagmeister and Lucienne Roberts. Available now from your favourite booksellers, or order online.

You can finally follow johnson banks on twitter. Visit http://twitter.com/johnsonbanks for daily thoughts or follow @johnsonbanks

Following in famous creative footsteps is a tricky challenge. Most children of designers seem to do everything they can to avoid what Mum or Dad does, or did - probably due to too many childhood memories of them slumped on the kitchen table trying to crack a project. So Marcello Minale’s son, also called Marcello, has his work cut out to fill the shoes of his illustrious father, (although I’m sure he’ll give it a good try). Children of ‘creatives’ seem to be more likely to cross categories, so actor Keith Allen’s daughter Lily went into music, Stella McCartney into fashion, and so on.
 
In music, there are a few more dynasties, but not that many. Assuming that we’re not really counting Miley Cyrus and Bill Ray, what have we got? An album rack of different Bachs stemming from Johann Sebastian onwards. I always thought that Dionnne Warwick and Whitney Houston was a bit of stretch (Warwick is Whitney’s cousin). Tim and Jeff Buckley? I never really got with the idea of Dweevil Zappa playing guitar like his dad, whilst playing his dad’s music.
 
So this week’s trip to hear the Penguin Café at the Barbican was, perhaps, a bit of a risk. In case you didn’t know, the original Penguin Café Orchestra was set up by Simon Jeffes, playing an eclectic mixture of chamber jazz, minimalist classical and rowdy folk for a couple of decades until his early death (at 48) in 1998. (The video at the head of this post is from 1989).

It’s not clear exactly how involved his son, Arthur, was in the original band, given that he was only twenty at his father’s death, but the surviving members did regroup to play a few concerts (including Arthur) in 2007, whilst hastily announcing no further plans.
 
As of last year, Arthur has decided to both revive the majority of his father’s back catalogue with a new band, now shortened to ‘Penguin Café’ and also record new songs under their own steam. Given that the core instruments for both old and new are piano, the obligatory harmonium, a myriad ukeleles, percussion and pretty much a string quartet, the mixture works well. As well as an ear for a good tune, Arthur has assimilated his father’s taste for the obscurely titled – Simon wrote about  ‘Pythagoras's Trousers’, so Arthur has written his own tune based around the Fibonacci series. Absolutely.
 
To hear these tunes played again live (something I never thought I’d ever experience) was, to a committed ‘got-every-album’ fan, a complete delight. Apologies to anyone sitting near me throughout the set as I laughed at every joke and grinned at every reference whilst simultaneously whistling the refrains. But the energy of the band even persuaded a few of the sceptics I dragged with me to re-appraise what they might have pigeonholed as background music.

In between songs, Jeffes junior told charming stories about the genesis of some of them. We learned that the famous telephone loop at the beginning of ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’ is a recording of a crossed line his father had realised cycled between G and A, and quickly recorded. (Jeffes played it back off his iPhone, neat twist). ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’ was written on an abandoned instrument found by the side of the road in Japan, claimed the day after a polite note had been left asking if it could be found a new home. The story that would have upset many was his introduction of ‘Harry Piers’ (the band’s first encore) as the piece he played at his father’s memorial service, but he played it beautifully and it seemed to strike the right balance for the evening.
 
Whilst lazy advertising and TV execs have done their best to suck the life out of the music by overusing the classics (‘Harmonium’, ‘Telephone’ and ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ seem to be on an endless loop in producers’ heads) it survives, strengthens, and lives on. I couldn’t be happier.

By Michael Johnson

Last week, we had a sneak peak at the Kinetica Art Fair 2011 in Marylebone. It involved galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes through the convergence of kinetic, robotic, sound, light, time-based, science and technology. It’s the first of its kind in the UK.

We've shown at the top of this post ‘Potato Synthesis’ by Chris Gladwin: here are some other highlights we spotted as we wandered around...

This is Jun Ga Young’s ‘Whistling Sea’: she carefully arranged hanji paper and LEDs that make the sound of the sea as the colour changes.

This is Alex Posada’s ‘Particle’: an interactive light installation that responds to its environment translating movements into colour and sound. According to the artist’s statement, it is a 'simulation of the creation of the earth’ (right on Alex).

The quadratura: an interactive screen that paints the live actions of those who stand in front of it.

Middlesex University exhibited ‘An accident waiting to happen’: a priceless vase reacts to people moving around the table by sliding and floating across the table.

This is a beautiful, interactive globe: the Seeper ‘Interactive Multi-touch sphere’ (video below).

This is Raphael Perret’s ‘Bodycloud’: sculptures made from mapping human movement.

Richard Harvey’s ‘Floating Forecaster’ is a floating display that reinterprets weather information via hovering patterns and flowing movements using an iphone interface.

An interesting show, some brilliant ideas. Some of the work was a few years old and had been shown elsewhere but there’s nothing like being able to interact with the pieces instead of watching a video in the blogosphere (if you’ll pardon the irony).

On Friday night I stood in a cold line outside a chapel in North London for an hour. This wasn’t to sample the general atmosphere of Highbury on an soggy Friday evening but to bag a seat near a stage on which stood a slightly burly yet affable American banging, knocking, tapping and strumming two acoustic guitars and something that looked a bit like a harp.

No singing. No slideshow. No backdrop. No support.

Put like that that, it sounds like the dullest gig in the world. You may well be questioning my sanity. You may be right – whilst the sales of acoustic guitars continue to rocket across the world, listening to even a good amateur play one for more than 20 minutes can be a wince-inducing experience, so difficult is a steel-stringed guitar to play well as a solo instrument. Play one at a party and some bright spark soon demands the chord to ‘American Pie’. A dinner can descend swiftly into chaos if drunken men choose to play their party piece(s), as wives and girlfriends lift eyes to the heavens and check watches (whilst texting apologies to babysitters).

But Andy McKee? Well, he’s a bona-fide phenomenon. A guitar-tapping internet meme rivalling Justin Bieber in the ‘YouTube-views’ stakes. This video of him playing one of his early compositions, Drifting, has been played 36.5 million times, as I write, and has only been online for four years.

The initial attraction, especially if you’ve not seen this video before, is downright amazement that one person can co-ordinate 8 fingers, two thumbs, two arms, one Lowden (and that beard) to make such a wonderfully rhythmic sound. Anyone who has attempted the guitar knows that co-ordinating the movement of the hand playing chords with the other playing strings takes a while to master. But McKee, having mastered this, and having trained as a pianist, then completely decoupled the two, letting each hand act completely independently. A little like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, on a guitar, for 15 years.

Like any great musician, there’s precedent. For McKee, he absorbed every note of amazing playing by Michael Hedges, Preston Reed and Don Ross. Guitarists as diverse as Eddie Van Halen, Steve Hackett and Stanley Jordan have all shown that ‘tapping’ the guitar neck can add to a guitarist’s armoury and he has borrowed that too. Even heavy metal shredders will have influenced the teenage McKee – but add all this up, practice hard for a decade and out comes a truly unique take on the acoustic guitar.

But given that this percussive style of guitar playing is currently popular, what makes a thousand people want to queue up in cold to hear him? It’s that time-honoured thing, good old-fashioned hum-in-the-shower songs. You can have the most prodigious technique in the world but without melody, you’re not remembered. It’s as simple as that. McKee, somehow, seemingly from nowhere, can play like no other and compose too – in fact he can write tunes that Pat Metheny or Michel Legrand would be very happy with.

All guitar players have to study what came before – Keith Richards and Eric Clapton analysed and absorbed their musical influences (whether it was Chuck Berry, Freddie King or Big Bill Broonzy) then ‘remixed’ them for another generation. Pat Metheny studied Wes Mongomery for almost his entire teenage life and barely went to school (nearly getting expelled in the process). Anyone wanting to make a mark on the saxophone now has to decide what to do with the legacy of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Ignore, or absorb. You decide.

Last Friday reminded me once again that to absorb, understand then remix can (in the right hands) lead to truly astonishing results.

Malcolm Gladwell recently argued that 10,000 hours practice was the minimum requirement for virtuosity, genius and/or genuine achievement and I’m sure that McKee has a similar ‘practice decade’ story to tell. Why the guitar gods-that-be chose to anoint this gentle giant from Topeka Kansas isn’t entirely clear but I’ll queue round the block next time to help me decide.

By Michael Johnson

ps a gentle reminder that you can finally follow johnson banks on twitter. Visit http://twitter.com/johnsonbanks for daily thoughts or follow @johnsonbanks

We were asked recently to contribute to a online project calling for photographs. The given theme was ‘Now’, which led to quite a lot of head-scratching until we remembered a pet project that had never seen the light of day – hairdresser’s windows.

We’ve been fascinated by these for a while, and have (slightly weirdly) been collecting shots for some time. It seems to be male barbers that sum up everything that’s surreal about this – in theory the shots they sellotape and blu-tak to their walls and windows should sum up ‘now’ but somehow end up being fantastically ‘then’.

See what we mean? Dead plant, plus odd pictures, plus ancient ‘OPEN’ sign = decidedly odd.

Once you tune your eyes to this there are hair-gelled MEN (and, er, boys) gazing and pouting at you from every corner of every high street.

You can pic up tips for how to style hair for junior members of the family...

...and if you’re lucky, some of the models almost seem to be gazing at each other.

If you can get inside some of these places, it just gets better. We’re loving that price list.

And here are glimpses of the other recurring elements: clocks and televisions.

We’ll follow with a few more next week.

We were lent a Samsung Wave II phone to do this, which takes a pretty useful 14 meg picture. You can find out more about the overall project here, and watch a YouTube film about the project here. Thanks to the Red Consutancy for getting us involved.

We’re slightly embarrassed to admit this, but, finally johnson banks is on twitter.

It’s not entirely clear why it’s taken us so long. We blame the time we spend keeping this blog up to date. Is that a valid excuse? Maybe not.

We promise, however, that we will try and exert similar levels of editorial control and a degree of humility within the constraints of 140 characters, and keep the ‘look at me’ chest beating to a minimum. Well, we’ll try...

Visit http://twitter.com/johnsonbanks for daily thoughts or follow @johnsonbanks

We've been working through the winter for a start-up guitar company, called The North American Guitar.

There are some beautiful instruments being hand-made in the USA and Canada at the moment: the company will help buyers in the UK and Europe link with these ‘luthiers’ and have guitars built to their own specific requirements. They’re going to specialise in ‘the kind of guitars that make the greatest greater, and amateurs just a little more professional’, to quote their blurb.

The visual identity bases itself around the tailor-made offer and uses a variety of different guitar shapes shown over many different woods. (Having a guitar hand-built allows you, as the buyer to effectively choose any combination of wood you desire, within reason). We built this wooden ‘sample’ board for precisely this requirement. (No jokes about cheeseboards, please).

The company was officially launched last night at an exclusive event at Mosimann’s in London in honour of one the luthiers who will be promoted through the company, Brent McElroy from Seattle.

Here are some photos of his guitars that we’ve had done...

Yes, those are wooden tuners. Very nice.

Another luthier likely to feature is California-based Jason Kostal - here’s some of his work in progress.

These are some elements of the design scheme so far, and a few details of the designs featured last night.

We also had to help demonstrate some of the guitars last night to a room full of guitarists (not hidden away in the corner of the office), which given our 'solid amateur’ status was a little stressful. But it seemed to go OK, not too many fluffed lines...

More applications to follow soon. If you're lusting after one of these guitars and would like to try one, get in touch at info(at)johnsonbanks(dot)co(dot)uk.

If, like us you’re pining a little for Japan but can’t find a particularly cohesive excuse to get over, you might like this selection of Mount Fuji images that have been kindly sent to us by Michael Tudball. We’ve put together a little slideshow above, and posted our monthly favourites below.

He spent most of 2010 taking screenshots from a webcam pointed at the mountain, often several times daily, before sending us his selection. As he says, ‘the sunrise shots I sometimes got up for especially. Other times I was working already and as Japan is 1 hour ahead, I used to then just click away more frequently as the sun started rising to get the best image’.

If you look carefully you’ll see the Lake Yamanakako sightseeing boat shaped like a swan, a summer concert, path lights on the mountain from trekkers climbing up the mountain for sunrise, and the day the mountain disappeared.

We should credit the Village Yamanakako, Kun spectacular images, and the webcam is the Mt. Fuji Webcam, online here if you want to do your own mountain watching. Thanks again to Mr T.

Ends of years and beginnings of others always bring with them obligatory 'glad to see the back of’/future-gazing pieces scattered throughout the media.

At the end of last year, we asked for comments from our readers and they were quick to suggest the (design) things they want to leave behind: ‘Upper-case condensed type (f**king centered!)’ said one reader, ‘take logo - stick image of anything behind it or within it’ said another. ‘Projects that involve the use of Lego in some way’ was actually pretty perceptive, as was wanting to an end to the now ubiquitous ‘limited edition screen prints’ which have become the hiding place for all manner of dodgy design and illustration masquerading as art.

All very good (and useful to get that kind of stuff off your chest). But what about looking forward? We were recently asked by one of the journals to write a top five, so here’s an attempt, at least.

In logo design
Perhaps Starbucks simplifying to just a symbol will herald a new era of actual, real symbols. (We like to think, of course, that this piece last year about simplifying their symbols for on-line use hit home at a perfect time). Type-only logos have ruled for well over a decade as the harsh economics of designing for the limited ‘real estate’ available online has forced a concentration on the words. Perhaps the pressure of tiny web icons, phone buttons and favicons will make us all consider ‘pictures’ again. If Shell and Apple have become synonymous with pictures, not words, maybe it’s possible. It’s been a while.

In identity and branding
We’ve done a whole series of projects in the last few years where the strategy behind the design, then the design itself, has almost glued entire (and often disparate) organisations together. As more and more clients realise that ‘identity’ means much more than just the logo and rallying flag, this side of the business can only grow. But it means that if anything there will be as much talking as there will be ‘designing’ in the forseeable future.

In graphics
The last 15 years have seen a bit of a stasis in graphics where the same grids, typefaces and photographic styles get endlessly regurgitated. You only have to watch a bookmarking site like FFFFound for a few days to see that all graphic designers collect and bookmark the same things, all the time. Which means that up and coming designers tend to design just like everyone else. We’d really like a few more people, including established designers, take a few more risks and step some way out of their comfort zones. OK, you might get criticised online, and get your work chucked out by conservative design juries, but at least you will have tried...

In general
Tight times and tight budgets mean that clients tend to err on the side of safety. So innovative design has to prove its worth and prove its contribution to the bottom line – tough to do but a pre-requisite if we’re not going to get sunk in a sea of mediocre, ‘safe’ design for two years. ‘I just preferred it like that’ is not a viable piece of boardroom rationale anymore.

This is an adaptation of comments supplied to Computers Arts Magazine